naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
6mo ago
I'll abuse the "related geopolitics" rule and ask:
Let's imagine you're Vladimir Putin and you learn that the US and the EU will stop sending arms to Ukraine and concentrate on Israel for the next few years. Zelensky knows that as well and starts testing the idea of peace negotiations. How much do you demand?
On the one hand, any agreement that is not enforced by boots on the ground is worthless, so asking for no NATO, no anti-Russian censorship, no rehabilitation of WWII collaborators is useless. On the other hand, if you ask for additional territorial concessions, you'll get to pacify many more people that hate your guts, plus the ZSU can go molon lave while they still have materiel and force you to actually come and take it.
Israel has gotten a lot of egg on its face, but I do not think it has in any way been meaningfully "weakened" by the Hamas attack. If anything it is more likely it has been strengthened through greater public unity
Define ‘doing badly’. Israel will almost certainly win and it will definitely take casualties. And this isn’t on the other side of the world, and they have loose rules of engagement, so they can stick out casualties.
Israel is not a partisan issue in the US. Both parties give it unqualified support.
In theory, support for Ukraine is bipartisan as well. In practice, not so much. Ever since 2016, the Democrats have pushed the narrative that Russia is uniquely evil and must be punished. And lately, Republican support has wavered on the the wisdom of dumping hundreds of billions into the Ukraine meat grinder.
The Democrats have made warmongering in Ukraine their thing. It will be humiliating to Biden if the war ends with Russian gaining territory.
In some ways, political support for the Ukraine war feels, to me at least, like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was clear that the Democrats were against them, loudly even, by 2006 or so. But after Obama was elected we didn't really pull out quickly either, culminating with the Taliban recapturing Kabul during the Biden administration after a withdrawal IIRC mostly negotiated under Trump.
It feels slimy, but like many issues in American politics, it seems like blind polarization to oppose every action of one's opponents regardless of principles. If the Republicans had been in the driver's seat, I'm sure they'd be all in on arming Ukraine and Democrats would be calling them warmongers. But the 2016 Russia stuff does somewhat complicate things as you pointed out.
I’ve made a similar argument before. There was probably a window for the Republicans to adopt this particular cause. Once Biden backed it, though, there was more political advantage in playing the heel.
Assuming that scenario, you take as much territory as you can while still getting an agreement, and then you implement a campaign of soft ethnic cleansing and population transfer. Make it shitty and annoying to be a Ukrainian in what is now going to be Southwest Russia. Make it terrifically easy and trivial to get a bus, train, or plane out of there. Make it impossible to return. Build a defensive line in the most defensible terrain, being prepared to sacrifice indefensible portions of your new territory if/when there is another round of fighting.
Would that really be necessary? There's millions of Ukrainians who already lived within Russia's pre-2014 borders, and unless I'm very much mistaken I've not heard of much repression or resistance from them.
Maybe i'm a bit naive here but what exactly are they going to be repressing? Both sides speak the same language, have roughly the same genetic makeup, eat the same foods, have the same religion. What are they going to be repressing? Waving the flag? Wearing blue jeans?
Too much blood has been spilled. Anything short of full liberation of Ukraine will mean the end of Zelensky (and I don't mean only political). And Putin has to deliver substantial victory to justify the economic pain.
For Zelensky to sit on the table means he has to be losing and hard. But in that case why bother for Putin?
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in. From a liberal standpoint, we see one new consensual transaction being conducted and one formerly consensual transaction being canceled when no longer consensual. Completely legit and just.
That this happened to result in a large enough number of people in a short enough time getting evicted and not knowing what to do with themselves and becoming ghettoized in shantytowns (prior to the initial civil wars in that region), is exactly the sort of thing that leftists say is wrong with liberalism.
The fundamental leftist argument is that purely voluntary transactions can force some people into conditions sufficiently intolerable that it constitutes a real injustice, even if all contracts are upheld and everything is consensual.
So you have on one hand: "we purchased the land in Mandatory Palestine fair and square, we toiled and saved and spent hard earned money on it, and moved in, and now people want to kill us"
And on the other hand: "100 years ago we were spread out over this whole land, we had a system going, we had our own society. Now we are impoverished, crammed into this little ghetto while you rub your possession of our land in our face."
In the first case: voluntary, uncoerced transactions between consenting parties, aka liberalism
In the second case: those purely voluntary transactions result in injustice, aka leftism
That's why the left is pro-Palestinian. Pointing out how Muslims are anti-LGBTQ or whatever falls on deaf ears because it's not really about that with them.
I don't even think it's that dynamic that leads the American left to be so sympathetic towards Palestinians. Instead, I think it's the old Arnold Kling Three Languages of Politics thesis that includes progressives thinking primarily in terms of the oppressed-oppressor axis and conservatives thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis. You can see echos of this all over the language that people use to talk about it, with the emphasis on how utterly savage the Hamas attacks are and how Israel has backed Palestinians into a corner. Who conservatives and progressives sympathize with can almost always be neatly predicted by applying that framework; even when it looks to me like the progressives are siding with power, they still usually believe themselves to be siding with the oppressed.
This actually feels pretty close to my thinking on it. Every time I start to think along the lines of, those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them, they go and do something so freaking savage that it's hard to think anything but that the only thing they deserve is the same savagery pointed right back at them.
The left / blue team tries to excuse it with "that's how the oppressed naturally behave", to which I would reply that plenty of groups have managed to rebel against oppression without resorting to the laundry list of awful things the Palestinians have been known for.
those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them
I agree with that. Then, of course - like an awful lot of oppressed people whose way of relating to each other is the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed - they turned around and engaged in savagery. Like, I feel for the Palestinians, but the guys who decided to open a war by attacking a music festival and then parading the corpses around seem to have erred badly. Even leaving morality aside, this looks like it might just be a ploy to goad Israel and perhaps the West into an equally savage response. What is the ultimate purpose of this kind of thing for Hamas? Who benefits? What does "victory" look like? Even if we're being uncharitable and it's "Drive the Israelis out of Israel, kill those that won't leave, and control the territory there", deliberately attacking civilians hardens resolve and makes you look like a bunch of savages to Westerners...the ones with the boatloads of guns and ammo and bombs.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in
I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
The LGBT-thing doesnt make the least bit of sense to me. I am probably to the left of the majority of the people here on gay and trans right, but I never use that as a measuring stick for who is morally in the right in a given geopolitical situation. Nor have I ever met another person IRL who does the same. For example, I have no idea who is more socially liberal of Armenia or Azerbaijan, but I dont need to know that to decide that the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was wrong.
I feel like this is the right-wing version of tankies who cant understand why anyone who is liberal would support Ukraine when they obviously have a massive problem with far-right elements in their country. Ukraine can love and revere Stephen Bandera and the Azov Batallion, while still being in the right in resisting the Russian invasion, and this is no different.
Both of those narratives you presented are both wrong historically and non-existent in popular conception.
While it’s true that “Jewish land” pre 1948 was mostly fairly purchased, it’s a small part of what eventually became the state of Israel. Those borders were decided by war, but the initial purchases did set the starting point for the war.
Conversely, Palestinians aren’t Bedouin. They weren’t so much spread out etc., as much as they just lived in other places than they currently do. A lot of their assets were taken from them by Israel after the war, including private property. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a Palestinian state if some kind, it’s more of a personal grievance on a national scale.
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square
Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The registration process itself was open to manipulation. Land collectively owned by village residents was registered in the name of a single landowner, with merchants and local Ottoman administrators registering large stretches of land in their own name. The result was land that became the legal property of people who may have never lived there, while locals, even those who had lived on the land for generations, became tenants of absentee owners.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 "brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers"....
In the 1930s, most of the land was bought from landowners. Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.
Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).
If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.
Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.
No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.
I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people
Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is yeschad.jpg with the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.
If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]?
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory?
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Because I disagree strongly
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
Have the responsibility to resist
Must prepare for the consequences of their actions being ascribed to you
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
The Romans wanted to make sure that they were fighting wars that were not driven by greed for gain, but were just. In fact they managed to make such claims for every single war of expansion they fought, and when they won, it confirmed their belief that they were in the right: after all, if the gods hadn’t supported them, they would have lost. But how were the Romans so sure that their wars were just before they saw divine support via victory? Part of the answer sounds strange to us; the other half, perhaps, does not. First, the Romans observed specific religious rituals to ensure divine favor, such as looking for omens in the entrails of sacrificed animals before declaring war. Through these omens they would know if the gods supported their proposed course of action. And if they had to account for a defeat, there were often explanations that the unfavorable omens had been ignored. For example, when the Romans lost the naval battle of Drepana in 249 BC it was clear why they had lost, at least in retrospect. It seems that when the admiral Publius Claudius Pulcher asked whether the sacred chickens on board the ship were eating their grain (even chicken antics could be an indicator of divine favor), he learned that on that particular morning they had refused their breakfast, a very bad sign. After trying to coax them into a few nibbles, Pulcher lost his temper and threw them into the sea, shouting “If they don't want to eat, then let them drink.” The Romans lost that naval battle, and Pulcher was tried for incompetence and impiety and fined a large sum by the court.
[T]he Romans were pretty sure they were the good guys even without these rituals telling them when to go to war. It helped that they believed their civilization and their political system were better than those of the peoples they invaded, and that they were doing these subject nations a favor. As the historian Livy wrote, “There was one nation in the world which would fight for the liberties of others at its own cost, with its own labor, and at its own danger. It was even ready to cross the sea to make sure there was no unjust rule anywhere and that everywhere justice, right, and law would prevail.” In his Republic, Cicero claims that the Romans got their empire almost by accident through helping out their allies. “Our people, through repeatedly defending their allies, have ended up as master of the world.” And in the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome’s rise written in the first century BC, it is made clear that Rome’s military expansion is actually its divine destiny: The god Jupiter proclaims, “On the Romans I impose no boundaries of time or place: I have granted them empire without end.” The epic hero Anchises says as much to his son. “You, Roman, remember to rule the nations with power --this will be your skill. Impose the custom of peace, spare the vanquished and defeat the proud.”
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence.
If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. - Lucifer, Paradise Lost.
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether
be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say.
Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God.
Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do?
Not following, here.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic.
I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
"An ethnically homogeneous society isn't a utopia, it'll still have problems, so why even bother?"
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better
I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be. The means to achieving these objectives might change, but the objectives themselves would not.
The term value-rational does not, of course, mean that the values expressed by such behavior are necessarily laudable. Indeed, the values in question may range from pure pride or prejudice (vis-à-vis some groups or belief systems) to goals such as dignity, self-respect, and commitment to a group or a set of ideals. Likewise, value-rational acts can range from long-run sacrifices for distant goals to violent expressions of prejudice or status.
I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playingprosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens of Israel suddenly disappeared
They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
In a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Moscow's help in achieving a political solution to the Gaza crisis, the Kremlin says.
Putin "expressed sincere condolences to the families and friends of the deceased Israelis, emphasizing his strong rejection and condemnation of any actions that victimize the civilian population, including women and children," according to a Kremlin readout of the call.
from Reuters
But Putin briefed Netanyahu on conversations with the leaders of Iran, Egypt, Syria and the Palestinian Authority in which the Kremlin said earlier that this had been discussed.
"A unanimous opinion was expressed on the need for an early ceasefire and the establishment of a humanitarian truce in order to urgently provide assistance to all those in need," it said of those conversations.
Iranian state media said President Ebrahim Raisi told Putin in their conversation that supporting the Palestinians was Iran's foreign policy priority but "resistance" groups made their own independent decisions.
They quoted Raisi as saying: "There is a possibility of the conflict between Israel and Palestinians expanding to other fronts."
Iran is distancing and hard. Seems that everyone is worried, but not so worried as to help the palestinians or putting a leash on them.
Unfortunately with the shock of the attack passing by the time is moving against Israel. On the other hand Putin really really wants a regional war in the middle east - Europe flooded with refugees and everyone preoccupied will give him some breathing space.
Out of all Iran’s close friends and proxies (Assad, Houthis, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia groups…) Hamas has the most strained relationship with the mothership. Hamas is the only non-Shia group in the above, was on the opposite side in the Syrian civil war etc. Hamas are fair-weather friends for Iran.
Also, the situation is pretty good for Iran now, their allies control most of Iraq, Assad is firmly in power in Syria, relations with India and China are fine, the hijab protests were seemingly totally suppressed, and even the Saudis are close to suing for peace in Yemen. They’re on the way to accomplishing almost everything they want geopolitically.
Meanwhile Palestine is this dog chasing car situation, the regime only supported it because of Khomeini’s longstanding anti-Zionism going back to the ‘60s and because it was good propaganda against the Shah back in the day, and then it kind of snowballed into the present situation.
It’s unclear that even a generous settlement for the Palestinians would be good for Iran at all. It’s mainly a way for them to project a kind of moral and religious purity to the rest of the Ummah.
NEW: The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell [The Times of Israel]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle have indicated to their Biden counterparts that Israel has not yet come up with such a strategy and instead are more focused on the immediate goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza, the US official says. (2/4)
But the US official cautions against this approach, saying that devoid a strategy for who will control the Strip if and when Hamas is removed, IDF is more likely to get bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, despite Israel insisting that it does not want to re-occupy the enclave (3/4)
[] National Unity chair Benny Gantz and fellow faction member Gadi Eisenkot demanded the creation of a Gaza exit strategy a upon their entry into the government and that they have tasked a committee with drawing one up. (4/4)
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
I recall quite a few claims that the wire services in Palestinian areas depend on stringers who are more or less propagandists for the terrorist group in charge.
I knew this shit would happen. The IDF took too long to put boots on the ground, and now the "international community" wants them to back off from destroying the open-air terrorist base within walking distance of Israeli population centers. Why on Earth is, "Hamas gets to keep launching rockets, stockpiling munitions, and planning the next ground assault," even on the table? Any sane country would give Palestine an ultimatum. They can choose between:
Total and complete disarmament, or
Total and complete annihilation.
If you let them chose "3. Build your military headquarters under a hospital and use your own populace as hostages," of course they're going to pick that.
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
Insert joke remark about the US having an invasion plan for Canada. Like, sure, it probably existed. Some planners probably wanted to just have reps at moving through the process.
...but if you're Israel, kind of how do you not have a plan on the shelf for invading Gaza? Probably two or three plans with a few different spec'd out scenarios for your goals and other factors. Sure, none are going to exactly match your exact situation, and you'll need a little time to gather the requisite intel in one place (like, e.g., the disposition of other nations in the region) in order to make the necessary adjustments. But I've gotta think you've got an 80% good plan just sitting there, ready to go. Probably updated at least once a year, if not every six months.
I have no position on whether any of these things are good ideas or good plans... just that ISTM that they should have a ready-to-go plan, no less than China almost certainly has one for invading Taiwan whenever the time is right... or Taiwan has one for defending... or South Korea has one for... and so on and so forth. As you trickle out toward less and less likely scenarios, it's less likely to have one that's been updated recently. But Israel with Gaza?
You're missing the point. Obviously, Israel has existing plans on the shelf for invading Gaza. Just as I am sure they have existing plans on the shelf for invading the West Bank. And I am sure they have wargamed both many times.
The point is that step one of the plan is certainly calling up reserves, massing troops, pre-invasion aerial attacks to degrade Hamas capacity to defend itself, etc, etc. It isn't "chase Hamas into Gaza at a time dictated by Hamas, using only the troops that happen to be available at that time ," which was OP's proposal.
Fair enough. "Preparation" vs. "Planning", with a lot in one word. Sagan knows that even the US has been writhing a bit with its own planning bureaucracy to get it out of a mindset of, "First, we're going to take three months to call up troops and materiel, then we're going to take six months to ship it all to somewhere near theater (and magically not have to fight to get it there), then we'll like hang out and bomb 'em for a month before anything kicks off." Perhaps this will be an object lesson that helps a variety of countries get that out of their system in the same way that it seems to have kicked up their concern with sUAS into overdrive (even above what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing in Ukraine). If you don't have legit ass-kicking plans that can be put into significant motion on a short fuse, you might pay a significant price.
How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups? There are serious ethical problems associated with just genociding the Palestinians and murdering all their women, children and elderly in cold blood. International Law might not really mean anything, but if the Israelis just dash all the muslim children against the rocks they'd invite far worse problems for themselves. Holocaust 2: Electric Boogaloo is just not a viable option in the modern day, and even suggesting it is usually enough to make non-partisan observers recoil in disgust and horror.
Of course, this also explains why they can't make the offer of total and complete disarmament - the Palestinians pay attention to the Israelis when they present funny maps at the UN and what those maps would imply for them. There's no way you'd be able to convince them that total disarmament was actually a step towards reconciliation rather than just an attempt to make their extermination easier.
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FirmWeird 6mo ago
How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups?
They have enough Haredim that can quote the required passages by heart:
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
Or, more generously:
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Cynically, this is the Biden administration setting a trap for Netanyahu, such that if Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes. This won't help the situation per see, beyond maybe allowing a new leader change to stop furthering a terrible disaster.
Hopefully, the US sees the situation as a real risk for a moral event horizon and strategic cliff that Israel wouldn't be able to walk back from, and is trying to protect it from itself, and in the process save many Palestinians who would otherwise die.
Practically, the Americans are trying to work through the emotionally-driven reaction phase, and shape the Israeli action such that 'do something' doesn't mean 'do anything,' by pushing the Israelis to confront that many-an-anything can, in fact, be worse than no action at all. Whether this forestalls any action, or shapes it into a more productive action, the objective is to re-introduce long-term thinking back into what has been a major emotional shock reaction.
Since the Americans are uniquely positioned to engage the Israelis from a position of understanding the nature of the culture-shock, but also being able to acknowledge the costs of over-reaction and lack of foresight, here's hoping it works.
Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes.
Do you see the slighest chance Netanyahu survives this, politically? Safety has been the third rail in Israeli politics for its entire existence, this attack seems like a repudiation of the entire Likud philosophy for Gaza and the West Bank, and there's really not many spaces left to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The extent he's still in power is less a rally-around-the-flag unity and more just the procedural timeline.
The flip side is that there's not many of his domestic critics that claim any alternative to intervention, here. There's not really any vision for how to stop this from happening again without a ton of boots on the ground.
Sure, he could survive politicially. Everyone eventually falls from politics, but the key for political power actors remaining in place isn't their innate popularity, but the viability of alternatives. Even failed states continue to survive as long as no one else comes around to actually overthrow them. In Netanyahu's case, the question isn't 'was safety always delivered,' but whether 'was safety delivered more than the alternative,' which is still open for debate. Netanyahu can absolutely point at 'his' failure, and make the case that the alternative politicians would have had worse and more often. It's not like the attack has suddenly made the former left's 'let's make concessions for peace' more viable.
This reminds me of the Afghanistan War, which I've long thought was big mistake, by which I don't just mean we shouldn't have tried to overthrow the Taliban and turn the country into a modern liberal democracy. I mean we shouldn't have invaded at all. The US have just accepted that the occasional terrorist attack of that magnitude is actually not that big a deal.
Hamas' attack was proportionally far worse, but still, even if they could remove Hamas, even if it didn't get replaced with something worse, and even if they didn't inspire more terrorism from other Arabs, it's hard to see how the amount of destruction is worth it. Why not just improve security so that it doesn't happen again? It sounds cliché but I think it's true: the reaction is what they wanted.
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
They don't seem to have a plan and this war may turn out to be much difficult than Afghanistan. I think they're acting irrationally out of anger, just like Americans did immediately after the September 11th attacks. I'm surprised how little weight has been given to what I thought were the lessons of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
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Glassnoser 6mo ago
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
To the modal Israeli, the death of Palestinians is an acceptable cost. To the modal Palestinian, the death of Israelis is a cause for celebration.
The risk is that if they do nothing and keep beefing up defenses, eventually Hamas comes up with something the defenses can’t stand and commits a colossal attack (bigger than last saturday’s) or even threatens Israel’s existence in some way.
Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was probably the right move for the US.
How, exactly, are they supposed to destroy Israel? This is not a very organized group and it really looked like the Saturday attack was basically everything they can muster.
Unless they get their hands on a nuke or something, I just don’t see it(and even then, they can’t build a reliable delivery mechanism, and Iran is probably not willing to give them one because they’re crazy).
The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell
Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
If a full scale invasion results in rescuing any significant percentage of hostages, I'll be shocked. As distinct from some kind of commando lightning strike rescue deal. Hostage deaths once discovered will simply goose the throttle on that meat grinder.
There is no amount of pain they can be inflicted to convince Hamas to return them.
Yes, to be very clear I don't expect the IDF has a good plan to rescue the hostages alive, or that such a good plan exists or is even possible. They just have a plan to release time pressure. Gush Etzion was 2014.
To be charitable, again we're talking a lot of babies or the elderly, a few chronically ill or recently-injured, and a lot of women. There's worse things than death, and years of negotiations give a lot of time for those worse things to happen and then death, followed by the disappearance of the bodies. To be less charitable, part of wartime leadership is not giving orders you know won't be followed.
There's no amount of pain that they can inflict that will get Hamas to return them, and there is no plausible ransom Hamas could demand that Israel will be willing to pay.
I mean is Israel particularly good at hostage rescue to begin with? I suspect not, that the US are the main power that is actually decent at solving that particular military problem, and this particular situation is probably too difficult even for us, let alone a force with looser rules of engagement(which Israel seems to have).
Again, I don't expect them to succeed, at least at the sort of scales required to avoid "Pyrrhic" from being the go-to term. I just don't see anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Qatar.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
I think there are two possible US concerns that they’re discussing.
Attacking in the tunnels will be catastrophic for the IDF and casualty numbers will be extremely high. Maybe Blinken has some CIA or Pentagon messaging about the nature of the entrenchment in Gaza and how difficult that will be to break.
The US has direct intelligence (or Blinken wants to suggest, for the US’ own interests, that they do) that Hezbollah will invade if and when Israel enters Gaza.
I have to wonder—are our official statements framing it as a lesson learned from Afghanistan, or is that just editors aware of the irony? Because “trust us; we’re experts on going balls deep in Islamic terrorists” has a certain credibility.
I've always gotten the impression that Israeli leaders are unusually frank in their statements rather than circumlocutory in the manner of the Chinese. So I picture that, in the room, Blinken is absolutely looking Netanyahu right in the eye and saying "We got the Goys to try this twice and it didn't work for them."
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netstack 6mo ago
Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas. Gaza Strip is the size of New York City. Lessons learned from invading the former don't really apply to the latter.
Right, and Israel has a population comparable to NYC, while there are about a fifth as many Palestinians in the strip. Does that mean they have an edge over Afghanistan?
When the situation is so confused and entrenched, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution. Going in with an exit strategy is always a better idea than rawdogging it.
There is zero evidence that any substantial portion of Gen Z is becoming more socially conservative / rightist in the US. The vast majority of polling suggests zoomers are the most progressive, most socially liberal generation ever. Less than half are (non-hispanic) white.
What is happening is that a small minority of young white men are being radicalized online into far right politics. This isn’t even close ‘most’ young white men, and actually even if look at regular republicans support is closer than for white men of any other age group (from 2022):
“Even young white men, who had been the subgroup most likely to vote GOP, this time preferred Democrats by a slim margin (49% voted for a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, compared to 45% who voted for a Republican candidate).”
Most young white male republicans are just from conservative states or regular evangelical Christians, not (anything close to) ‘dissident right’. And young white men are like 25% of Gen Z, by the way, and by far the most conservative demographic in that grouping.
If Gen Z is turning against Israel and Zionism, it’s because of generic progressivism and anti-colonialist education / critical race theory / Chris Rufo reasons, not because they follow Keith Woods on Twitter.
If Israel were to give citizenship to Palestinians, all that would change is that it would become a civil war.
The Palestinians do not want to share the land with the Jews. Whether one state or two states or three states doesn't matter. Rights and citizenship don't matter. They don't want to share the land with the Jews and they don't want to compromise. Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Or capitulation -- that is, removing all the Jews without killing them all. But that's obviously unacceptable to Israeli Jews and is terrible game theory as well.
The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state
Does Gaza not already count as a Palestinian state? Ignoring the blockade, they have sovereignty.
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Israel imposes curfews on Palestinians, Palestinians don't have freedom of movement, and Israel apparently has the power to turn off their electricity and water at will. How can Gaza be said to have sovereignty?
I didn't know about the curfews, or the freedom of movement. Could you tell me more about the freedom of movement? Are they not allowed to move throughout Gaza, or do you just mean that they can't leave Gaza? Because the latter is just sensible border policy.
Believe me, I'd read about this if I knew where to find reliable information.
Freedom of movement refers to Palestinians within Gaza not being allowed to get to the West Bank (and vice verse), and within the West Bank being forced to go through Israeli military check points. That also is how the curfew is imposed, mostly within the West Bank since 2005.
Even so, just the blockade and the fact that Israel can cut off electricity and water are enough to call the de facto "sovereignty" of Gaza into question.
I think the military checkpoints are more meaningful examples: being vulnerable to blockade and international electricity/water shipments describes a lot of places everyone considers states with sovereignty.
If they only do it when the government isn't cooperating with them to uncover the identities of mass murderers, then it doesn't seem like a problem to me, but you're right that it does call their sovereignty into question.
YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
Fair, the typical Harvard going brown person is pretty woke.
I might be in a bubble. My circles are first gen immigrants, STEM-school MIT/GATech types or fans of geopolitics who have a less rosy view of conflict resolution than the average starry-eyed liberal. We're past our 18-25 angry-youth phase.
Anecdotes as just anecdotes...But,
Even at their worst, my Muslim friends had "We can condemn the attacks by Hamas, while still caring for Palestine" style takes. Their response to the Gaza invasion is despair, but I have yet to see the "Israel is evil" style takes that I'm seeing from the left and middle-eastern protestors. One of my Muslim friends was humble enough to acknowledge that their biases on the Palestine issue were wrong.
The liberal Hindus around me are smart enough to not outright say it, but they have coloring their speech with a Israel-sympathetic bias.
Your point still holds though. I steer clear of the Ivy-league types, so I might just be insulated from the worst of them.
How have the ADL been faring lately - right now they have enormous quantities of pure bio organic grass fed antisemithism to work with that is flooding the internet and the media, so in theory they should be all over the place and yet it seems that they are not - at least in my bubble?
Is it just a fluke - but no matter if I read old media, new media or twitter there is barely mention of the ADL.
Maybe they're afraid to let their hypocrisy on Israel's border vs. America's border be too obvious, especially in light of Tucker Carlson bringing it to the attention of boomers.
And yet it seems to not be too active on pro palestine rallies in the west, harvard and other universities students and students group that support palestine and so on. Or even twitter and facebook where the real antisemitism has gone up thousandfold in the last week.
My google news search for adl showed quite slim pickings from top news organizations compared to the expected. Also you both linked stuff from 5 days and 7 days ago which could be interpreted as bare minimum.
There is informaton and pr war going on and the ADL looks like not pulling their weight.
I don’t think we can know whether they are active regarding the Harvard debacle. If they have learned anything at all in recent years it’s that their more controversial actions should be concealed and not publicized. Did they have a role to play in getting Wall Street Jews like Ackman to speak out and threaten their job security? Were they responsible for the doxxing-mobiles we saw? Are they phoning faculty and directors? This is not information we will ever be privy to.
Meanwhile, one of the 'sidelined' anchors has been reporting on Gaza with Al Sharpton in the last couple days. Which says a lot of things. I guess for a silver lining, they do have an expert and professional pogrom leader on NBC?
When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” he said.
All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men. It is this group that lies behind most terrorism, ISIS, inceldom, much of the dissident right, most challenges with policing and crime. Rich countries have more options than poorer ones, as do countries with lower birthrates compared to higher ones (due to reductions in the proportion of violent, dispossessed young men as a percentage of the total population).
as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
I'm pretty sure Al Qaeda and ISIS were mostly knocked down by consistent application of violence, not any of that stuff. How many times did the US kill the "#2" person in Al Qaeda?
IIRC one of the interesting things about the ISIS conflict was that it relied on a prophesy of declaring a caliphate and then winning global domination via victory in traditional battle, not guerilla terrorist tactics. This is, to put it kindly, an offer the West found acceptable, to the tune of tons of JDAMs and eventual victory of non-ISIS ground forces.
I remember someone in these parts observing that, although there is no evidence it was planned as such, it was certainly an effective honeypot at drawing in Muslims prone to violent extremism from around the world to a scenario where they became legitimate military targets.
Dump hormone blockers into the water provided to Gaza. Science says they're 100% harmless, and they'd prevent development of aggressive masculine traits.
Just open free Halal McDonalds and Pizza Hut, free supermarkets packed full of goods with high fructose corn syrup and give out free Steamdecks and Starlink access and flat screen tvs. Free cellphones with TikTok and Insta and Tinder baked in. Free condoms, free birth control pills. Start up the Real Housewives of the Gaza Strip and make a whole bunch of tv shows ostensibly set in the Islamic Middle East but pushing Western sexual mores. Open free pharmacies giving out opiates and antidepressants. We can do so much better than blue jeans and rock music nowadays.
Bring the full force of Western Decadence against them, and see who the strong horse really is.
I think we could say, they already have most of those things, even in the US welfare will take you a long way towards most of them. Subsidized internet access is available in my state at least. In the Gaza case we're just not allowing them to pick what they spend the money on, so it doesn't end up buying AK's and so on.
As much as I expect the occupation of Gaza to be a disaster in every way, if Israel went this route for a decade or so, it might have a fighting chance of withering Hamas on the vine. High speed internet, porn, drugs, and obesity for all. Build an indigenous class of entrepreneurs and bureaucrats of decadence who'll act as an organic counterweight to Hamas.
none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all
Looking outside Muslim communities, Tamil terror in Sri Lanka was successfully eradicated through incredible violence. Unfortunately, this article might be right. Because the Sinhalese killed all the next-of-kin of the LTTE leadership. Left no room for revenge.
alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
This is why the rapid liberalization of Saudi society is so important. Iran can try as much as it likes, but Sunnis will always bear resentment towards them as Shias. If Mecca/Medina becomes westernized, then these men will finally have internal leaders with legitimacy who can steer these young men away.
humiliated young men
El salvador has managed to lock up 100k men almost overnight. So it can be done. It seems like the most achievable peaceful resolution to this war. Kill the terrorists and imprison all young and likely suspects. Let the absolute gravy-train of aid flow into restoring society for women and young children. Employ all older men with families in hard labor towards rebuilding Gaza on the south side of the strip. Ideally on a patch of land in west bank, but that's unlikely to work.
You can release the once angry youth back into society once peace has been restored over 20 years or so. Once stable society exists and the majority has known an improving life for the last couple of decades, the residents lose the appetite for violence. Most non-murderous Tamil, Sikh and Naga insurgents in India were happy to integrate into India when it became clear that they can still wield local power in a democracy without violence. But maybe Islam draws out a different kind of anger.
An ugly solution, but somehow still sounds better than all the other alternatives.
El salvador has managed to lock up 100k men almost overnight. So it can be done.
El Salvador was still (somehow) a democracy dealing with an internal problem of gangsters that honestly seem to have just gotten too big for their britches. They still had enough of a military advantage to handle it, feckless leadership apparently just had to learn to stop trying to pay them off because they were emboldened to keep escalating. Once they took action they actually had some legitimacy with the rest of the populace to enforce their rule.
I'm unsure if Mexico could honestly do the same now, with its more powerful cartels.
Let alone Israel which is not facing gangsters who were slowly transitioning into terrorism encouraged by governments paying the Danegeld but an active and prepared pseudo-sovereign terrorist group (who're opposed to identifying tattoos on principle, unlike LatAm sociopaths) holding sway over an entire region with in-built religious and historical reasons to hate Israelis. Hard to see where the legitimacy will come from here.
I don't think the limiting factor is the strength of Mexico's Military (watch cartel vs Army footage, the cartels get massacred every time, that one time CJNG took down a helicopter has been mythologized). In Mexico's case the real problem is just how bloody corrupt the government is on aggregate. If Mexico had someone unshakeable with a one-track mind like Bukeles, I'm sure they could probably achieve the same outcome.
The first time I became aware someone was corrupt was watching a general in the Mexican army being interviewed by Nightline or Newshour or some show. I was maybe 13 and I recall him telling the interviewer about how he had this many men and they were covering that many kilometers searching for the other cartel smugglers...
"Sir," the reporter interrupted, "How many have you caught?"
Ten seconds of dead silence, and the look on the general's face that made it clear catching people was not part of his plans--and that's the day I realized how the world worked.
I heard the same rant from every American General in command of the Afghanistan invasion and occupation for decades, though usually before a congress tame enough not to ask any awkward questions.
Kill the terrorists and imprison all young and likely suspects. … Employ all older men with families in hard labor towards rebuilding Gaza on the south side of the strip.
You understand that this “peaceful resolution” is just isomorphic to war, right?
If you want to put all the young men in prison, then someone has to go round them up. By force.
Obviously, Hamas wouldn’t agree to this voluntarily.
A peaceful resolution is more so the "least violent" resolution than one that has no deaths. Mine is a fairly violent suggestion .... but still less violent than all the other options on the table. A temporary ceasefire might delay the violence, but it can't be called a resolution.
What should Israel do to ensure that an attack like the one launched by Hamas never happens again? I don’t know right now.
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather, they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
The only difference seems to be who the "how we got here" padding blames.
* Somehow, when you're dealing with terrorists that will literally steal infrastructure for weapons and brag about it.
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather: they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
I basically go up to everyone condemning Israel and say "zap! you're now the PM of Israel. what's your next move?" and I generally get a range from "Israel should follow international law" (hand wavehand wave) with no specifics on how they protect their security and sovereignty doing that, all the way to something the Heath Ledger version of The Joker would say.
The Roman Empire. Christians went from being eaten by lions in the Colloseum to being the official religion of the empire without ever raising an insurrection or fighting a civil war. It only took about 300 years of non-violent acceptance of persecution.
Sure. Just be Romans. Then you can see your enemies driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women and love them and be redeemed by Christ.
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men.
Give them more money and power and respect. Speaking personally, I felt I had very little incentive to contribute to society for a long time. I would do the right thing and not get much in return, or I would do the wrong thing and at least get the satisfaction of doing what I wanted. Once people in my family died and I was given greater respect and means to change my position in life I began to respect my family and the society that I lived in more. The fact that people live very long lives now is leading to fewer young people with wealth, and old people don't have the energy or interest to improve the world around them in the same way that young people do. A wealth transfer to people with energy and a longer time horizon would really help keep them from eating each other alive.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2rafa 6mo ago
All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
This, of course, fails to reflect the situation of Islamist terrorists that have lived in the West. The men (and woman) that did 9/11, the Bataclan, San Bernadino, Pulse, the Boston Bombing, and so on weren't desperately poor and humiliated men. They did have something in common, and it certainly does reflect deep cultural, social, religious, and political roots, but that doesn't really do the work of generating sympathy for their desire to slay infidels.
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men.
Ya know, surplus Mormons don't seem to be causing all that much trouble in Utah, or fanning out to murder people that aren't that into Kolob. I know that it's considered a downright Philistine position to take, but I think the actual, specific tenets of religion have something to do with the behavior of their practitioners.
Surplus Mormons don't do this because Utah is a highly prosperous and functioning society, even by American standards. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to bring those societies to most of the world, so the problem of surplus violent young men is more salient elsewhere.
I genuinely don't understand the Western insistence that Islamists aren't telling the truth when they say that they kill infidels for Allah. Even if you can solve the prosperity problem, if you have a bunch of Islamists, you're still going to wind up with dead infidels. They're probably not great for prosperity either, which tends to be a related problem.
I genuinely don't understand the Western insistence that Islamists aren't telling the truth when they say that they kill infidels for Allah.
That can be true, and it still be true, that it is harder to find people willing to kill when the population is wealthier. I believe the IRA were killing in the name of Irish nationalism, but they still struggled to find recruits once Catholics in Northern Ireland became richer. You might still believe in the cause, but once you have a comfortable life, risking your life for it looks like a worse deal. You'll probably still get some, of course.
Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to bring those societies to most of the world
But strangely we could a few decades ago at gunpoint. Desperately poor pre-industrialization mostly-farmers South Koreans could be administrated by the US Army and then a local dictator selected by the US Army and uplifted into a different sort of society. Not without negative consequences, birthrates etc. But it was done.
Lebanon was at one point a highly prosperous and functioning society, emphasis on ‘was’, and yet it broke out into a civil war when the Christians lost their majority by importing Muslim refugees.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2rafa 6mo ago
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men.
This is the lazy man's politics. It is saving the furniture once the house is already on fire.
The greatest political challenge is not being able to spread the social and political tools we've developed to avoid a surplus of disenfranchisement. I.e. good economic policy. We know capitalism works. We know free trade works. We know universal western or Turkish, or Korean or hell even Russian culture is better than Jihadi culture.
Capitalism can work. Not so sure on the free trade. A level of protectionism is needed because people aren't just fungible objects that will emigrate on the dime to "better work environments". Some would. But on the whole that's a destructive state of affairs.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2rafa 6mo ago
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men.
One massive benefit of artificial wombs when we get them is that we'll just be able to not conceive the surplus men in the first place by simply changing the gender ratio. It will improve the world so so much.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
AshLael 6mo ago
Oh, I expect modernity to continue cratering birth rates, to the point where countries have to gestate a significant proportion of their future children in artificial wombs to maintain the population. When push comes to shove and the choice is between doing this or letting in millions more low IQ/fundamentally different culture people from the third world I expect governments to grudgingly fund this. Also, even if say 80% of all children are born as normal, you can still affect the net gender ratio by a lot by e.g. only gestating female embryos in artificial wombs (this will change the M:F ratio from 1.07:1 to 0.70:1).
It so definitely wouldn't. If it ever becomes a viable technology be ready for HUNKY GRADE-A BEEF Jarheads, coming of an assembly line, roided up naturally and ready to fight in endless wars.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
FistfullOfCrows 6mo ago
Eh, I expect drones to take over the physical portion of warfare by that point, at best they would be operated by someone sitting thousands of km away, and you don't need roided up humans for that (one underrated benefit of drones is that even if the physical object is destroyed, all the combat experience is not lost, the drone operator keeps on getting better and better at waging war and can learn from his mistakes, while soldiers fighting in the flesh can find those same mistakes to be fatal, losing their army all the accumulated experience when they die).
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Notes -
I'll abuse the "related geopolitics" rule and ask:
Let's imagine you're Vladimir Putin and you learn that the US and the EU will stop sending arms to Ukraine and concentrate on Israel for the next few years. Zelensky knows that as well and starts testing the idea of peace negotiations. How much do you demand?
On the one hand, any agreement that is not enforced by boots on the ground is worthless, so asking for no NATO, no anti-Russian censorship, no rehabilitation of WWII collaborators is useless. On the other hand, if you ask for additional territorial concessions, you'll get to pacify many more people that hate your guts, plus the ZSU can go molon lave while they still have materiel and force you to actually come and take it.
So, how much is not too much?
But politically Biden loses a lot more if Israel is weakened than if Russia keeps larges parts of Ukraine.
Israel has gotten a lot of egg on its face, but I do not think it has in any way been meaningfully "weakened" by the Hamas attack. If anything it is more likely it has been strengthened through greater public unity
Agreed, but it will be weakened if it does badly in its future invasion of Gaza, and to avoid that outcome it might need US help.
Define ‘doing badly’. Israel will almost certainly win and it will definitely take casualties. And this isn’t on the other side of the world, and they have loose rules of engagement, so they can stick out casualties.
We don't know this. It could be that the small country of Israel takes enough casualties that they give up trying to control all of Gaza.
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Israel is not a partisan issue in the US. Both parties give it unqualified support.
In theory, support for Ukraine is bipartisan as well. In practice, not so much. Ever since 2016, the Democrats have pushed the narrative that Russia is uniquely evil and must be punished. And lately, Republican support has wavered on the the wisdom of dumping hundreds of billions into the Ukraine meat grinder.
The Democrats have made warmongering in Ukraine their thing. It will be humiliating to Biden if the war ends with Russian gaining territory.
In some ways, political support for the Ukraine war feels, to me at least, like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was clear that the Democrats were against them, loudly even, by 2006 or so. But after Obama was elected we didn't really pull out quickly either, culminating with the Taliban recapturing Kabul during the Biden administration after a withdrawal IIRC mostly negotiated under Trump.
It feels slimy, but like many issues in American politics, it seems like blind polarization to oppose every action of one's opponents regardless of principles. If the Republicans had been in the driver's seat, I'm sure they'd be all in on arming Ukraine and Democrats would be calling them warmongers. But the 2016 Russia stuff does somewhat complicate things as you pointed out.
I’ve made a similar argument before. There was probably a window for the Republicans to adopt this particular cause. Once Biden backed it, though, there was more political advantage in playing the heel.
Jeroboam made some good points, though.
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Assuming that scenario, you take as much territory as you can while still getting an agreement, and then you implement a campaign of soft ethnic cleansing and population transfer. Make it shitty and annoying to be a Ukrainian in what is now going to be Southwest Russia. Make it terrifically easy and trivial to get a bus, train, or plane out of there. Make it impossible to return. Build a defensive line in the most defensible terrain, being prepared to sacrifice indefensible portions of your new territory if/when there is another round of fighting.
Would that really be necessary? There's millions of Ukrainians who already lived within Russia's pre-2014 borders, and unless I'm very much mistaken I've not heard of much repression or resistance from them.
These are the ones who were not just forcibly depatriated.
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Well I don’t know for sure. But if you are worried about guerrilla warfare then you’re going to need some level of repression.
Maybe i'm a bit naive here but what exactly are they going to be repressing? Both sides speak the same language, have roughly the same genetic makeup, eat the same foods, have the same religion. What are they going to be repressing? Waving the flag? Wearing blue jeans?
Loyalty to the Ukraine regime? Obviously?
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Too much blood has been spilled. Anything short of full liberation of Ukraine will mean the end of Zelensky (and I don't mean only political). And Putin has to deliver substantial victory to justify the economic pain.
For Zelensky to sit on the table means he has to be losing and hard. But in that case why bother for Putin?
So, the whole Ukraine, all the way to Poland? Not even a puppet rump state?
There will be a puppet state ofc. More like - if Zelensky is ready to sit on the table for negotiations the unconditional surrender is not far away.
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In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square, whose tenants were evicted when the new buyers wanted to move in. From a liberal standpoint, we see one new consensual transaction being conducted and one formerly consensual transaction being canceled when no longer consensual. Completely legit and just.
That this happened to result in a large enough number of people in a short enough time getting evicted and not knowing what to do with themselves and becoming ghettoized in shantytowns (prior to the initial civil wars in that region), is exactly the sort of thing that leftists say is wrong with liberalism.
The fundamental leftist argument is that purely voluntary transactions can force some people into conditions sufficiently intolerable that it constitutes a real injustice, even if all contracts are upheld and everything is consensual.
So you have on one hand: "we purchased the land in Mandatory Palestine fair and square, we toiled and saved and spent hard earned money on it, and moved in, and now people want to kill us"
And on the other hand: "100 years ago we were spread out over this whole land, we had a system going, we had our own society. Now we are impoverished, crammed into this little ghetto while you rub your possession of our land in our face."
In the first case: voluntary, uncoerced transactions between consenting parties, aka liberalism
In the second case: those purely voluntary transactions result in injustice, aka leftism
That's why the left is pro-Palestinian. Pointing out how Muslims are anti-LGBTQ or whatever falls on deaf ears because it's not really about that with them.
I don't even think it's that dynamic that leads the American left to be so sympathetic towards Palestinians. Instead, I think it's the old Arnold Kling Three Languages of Politics thesis that includes progressives thinking primarily in terms of the oppressed-oppressor axis and conservatives thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis. You can see echos of this all over the language that people use to talk about it, with the emphasis on how utterly savage the Hamas attacks are and how Israel has backed Palestinians into a corner. Who conservatives and progressives sympathize with can almost always be neatly predicted by applying that framework; even when it looks to me like the progressives are siding with power, they still usually believe themselves to be siding with the oppressed.
This actually feels pretty close to my thinking on it. Every time I start to think along the lines of, those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them, they go and do something so freaking savage that it's hard to think anything but that the only thing they deserve is the same savagery pointed right back at them.
The left / blue team tries to excuse it with "that's how the oppressed naturally behave", to which I would reply that plenty of groups have managed to rebel against oppression without resorting to the laundry list of awful things the Palestinians have been known for.
I agree with that. Then, of course - like an awful lot of oppressed people whose way of relating to each other is the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed - they turned around and engaged in savagery. Like, I feel for the Palestinians, but the guys who decided to open a war by attacking a music festival and then parading the corpses around seem to have erred badly. Even leaving morality aside, this looks like it might just be a ploy to goad Israel and perhaps the West into an equally savage response. What is the ultimate purpose of this kind of thing for Hamas? Who benefits? What does "victory" look like? Even if we're being uncharitable and it's "Drive the Israelis out of Israel, kill those that won't leave, and control the territory there", deliberately attacking civilians hardens resolve and makes you look like a bunch of savages to Westerners...the ones with the boatloads of guns and ammo and bombs.
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That seems a bit over-simplified, to say the least.
The left has generally been pro-"national liberation" for decades, so there is no need for some sort of special explanation re Palestinians.
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Not all of it. Just some of it.
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I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
Whose current territory? The Ottomans? They were apparently cool with it.
And the left very much supports forming ethnic enclaves within other countries, so long as they are western and (mostly) white.
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
What counts as an ethnicity deserving of a homeland with a claim on territory and the right to exclude people of other ethnicities?
Turkey wasn't always Turkish.
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
I think you miss the point?
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
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The LGBT-thing doesnt make the least bit of sense to me. I am probably to the left of the majority of the people here on gay and trans right, but I never use that as a measuring stick for who is morally in the right in a given geopolitical situation. Nor have I ever met another person IRL who does the same. For example, I have no idea who is more socially liberal of Armenia or Azerbaijan, but I dont need to know that to decide that the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was wrong.
I feel like this is the right-wing version of tankies who cant understand why anyone who is liberal would support Ukraine when they obviously have a massive problem with far-right elements in their country. Ukraine can love and revere Stephen Bandera and the Azov Batallion, while still being in the right in resisting the Russian invasion, and this is no different.
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Both of those narratives you presented are both wrong historically and non-existent in popular conception.
While it’s true that “Jewish land” pre 1948 was mostly fairly purchased, it’s a small part of what eventually became the state of Israel. Those borders were decided by war, but the initial purchases did set the starting point for the war.
Conversely, Palestinians aren’t Bedouin. They weren’t so much spread out etc., as much as they just lived in other places than they currently do. A lot of their assets were taken from them by Israel after the war, including private property. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a Palestinian state if some kind, it’s more of a personal grievance on a national scale.
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Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
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Overthinking it.
Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.
Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).
If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.
Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.
No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.
I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.
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A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
First prior: states are actors in anarchy, there is no "right" or "wrong".
The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.
We may criticize, but without a more powerful state to enforce it, everything is permitted. This is descriptive, not normative.
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Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is
yeschad.jpgwith the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
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I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
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Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
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I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
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What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
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It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
That's not actually a requirement.
I have no idea what this is a reference to.
Sure. In practice, we have yet to see anyone make a weapon that is so colossal, dangerous, and widespread as to justify nuking a city.
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I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
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I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
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You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
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I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
"I will apply your morality interpreted by me upon you for you-defined-by-me" is one of the most tribalistic things out there. Don't fall for it.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
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I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
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If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
At some point the people become the equivalent of draftees. You're permitted to kill the enemy's draftees.
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Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
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The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
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Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
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It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
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Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
This doesn't even seem that good even if you are just trying to maximize the number of dead infidels!
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Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
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A self-inflicted problem from head to Ghostly toe if I've ever heard of one.
Yes: That's what's necessary for God to be with us, and He loves us enough to do it.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
Not following, here.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
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Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
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Well…yeah. That is indeed the crux of the matter.
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I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
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It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
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I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
+1
Here is where again I reference value rationality:
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I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
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There are two big issues underlying Hamas.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
Polygamy isn’t particularly common in Gaza.
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Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playing prosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
Jude 1:9.
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They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
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Posting mostly for comedic value
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Ukraine-war/Ukraine-war-Free-to-read/Ukraine-latest-Putin-and-Netanyahu-discuss-Gaza-crisis
from Reuters
Iran is distancing and hard. Seems that everyone is worried, but not so worried as to help the palestinians or putting a leash on them.
Unfortunately with the shock of the attack passing by the time is moving against Israel. On the other hand Putin really really wants a regional war in the middle east - Europe flooded with refugees and everyone preoccupied will give him some breathing space.
Out of all Iran’s close friends and proxies (Assad, Houthis, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia groups…) Hamas has the most strained relationship with the mothership. Hamas is the only non-Shia group in the above, was on the opposite side in the Syrian civil war etc. Hamas are fair-weather friends for Iran.
Also, the situation is pretty good for Iran now, their allies control most of Iraq, Assad is firmly in power in Syria, relations with India and China are fine, the hijab protests were seemingly totally suppressed, and even the Saudis are close to suing for peace in Yemen. They’re on the way to accomplishing almost everything they want geopolitically.
Meanwhile Palestine is this dog chasing car situation, the regime only supported it because of Khomeini’s longstanding anti-Zionism going back to the ‘60s and because it was good propaganda against the Shah back in the day, and then it kind of snowballed into the present situation.
It’s unclear that even a generous settlement for the Palestinians would be good for Iran at all. It’s mainly a way for them to project a kind of moral and religious purity to the rest of the Ummah.
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Reports emerging that the USA is "pressuring" Israel to have a fully developed exit plan before invading Gaza to which Netanyahu presumably replied "Leeeeeroooooy Jeeeeenkiiiiiiins."
Meanwhile Blinken has reportedly been meeting with the Israelis for 8 hours.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
I recall quite a few claims that the wire services in Palestinian areas depend on stringers who are more or less propagandists for the terrorist group in charge.
Gaza does not have robust freedom of speech or press. You'd just get your head bashed in for criticizing Hamas.
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I knew this shit would happen. The IDF took too long to put boots on the ground, and now the "international community" wants them to back off from destroying the open-air terrorist base within walking distance of Israeli population centers. Why on Earth is, "Hamas gets to keep launching rockets, stockpiling munitions, and planning the next ground assault," even on the table? Any sane country would give Palestine an ultimatum. They can choose between:
If you let them chose "3. Build your military headquarters under a hospital and use your own populace as hostages," of course they're going to pick that.
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
This is a good quote. I'm gonna use it.
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I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
It is my understanding that a successful invasion requires a great deal of preparation.
Insert joke remark about the US having an invasion plan for Canada. Like, sure, it probably existed. Some planners probably wanted to just have reps at moving through the process.
...but if you're Israel, kind of how do you not have a plan on the shelf for invading Gaza? Probably two or three plans with a few different spec'd out scenarios for your goals and other factors. Sure, none are going to exactly match your exact situation, and you'll need a little time to gather the requisite intel in one place (like, e.g., the disposition of other nations in the region) in order to make the necessary adjustments. But I've gotta think you've got an 80% good plan just sitting there, ready to go. Probably updated at least once a year, if not every six months.
I have no position on whether any of these things are good ideas or good plans... just that ISTM that they should have a ready-to-go plan, no less than China almost certainly has one for invading Taiwan whenever the time is right... or Taiwan has one for defending... or South Korea has one for... and so on and so forth. As you trickle out toward less and less likely scenarios, it's less likely to have one that's been updated recently. But Israel with Gaza?
You're missing the point. Obviously, Israel has existing plans on the shelf for invading Gaza. Just as I am sure they have existing plans on the shelf for invading the West Bank. And I am sure they have wargamed both many times.
The point is that step one of the plan is certainly calling up reserves, massing troops, pre-invasion aerial attacks to degrade Hamas capacity to defend itself, etc, etc. It isn't "chase Hamas into Gaza at a time dictated by Hamas, using only the troops that happen to be available at that time ," which was OP's proposal.
Fair enough. "Preparation" vs. "Planning", with a lot in one word. Sagan knows that even the US has been writhing a bit with its own planning bureaucracy to get it out of a mindset of, "First, we're going to take three months to call up troops and materiel, then we're going to take six months to ship it all to somewhere near theater (and magically not have to fight to get it there), then we'll like hang out and bomb 'em for a month before anything kicks off." Perhaps this will be an object lesson that helps a variety of countries get that out of their system in the same way that it seems to have kicked up their concern with sUAS into overdrive (even above what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing in Ukraine). If you don't have legit ass-kicking plans that can be put into significant motion on a short fuse, you might pay a significant price.
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There's a difference between having a plan and being ready to execute a plan with zero preparations or forewarning.
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How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups? There are serious ethical problems associated with just genociding the Palestinians and murdering all their women, children and elderly in cold blood. International Law might not really mean anything, but if the Israelis just dash all the muslim children against the rocks they'd invite far worse problems for themselves. Holocaust 2: Electric Boogaloo is just not a viable option in the modern day, and even suggesting it is usually enough to make non-partisan observers recoil in disgust and horror.
Of course, this also explains why they can't make the offer of total and complete disarmament - the Palestinians pay attention to the Israelis when they present funny maps at the UN and what those maps would imply for them. There's no way you'd be able to convince them that total disarmament was actually a step towards reconciliation rather than just an attempt to make their extermination easier.
They have enough Haredim that can quote the required passages by heart:
Or, more generously:
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I think you mean Holocaust 2: The Jews strike back...
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Cynically, hopefully, or practically?
Cynically, this is the Biden administration setting a trap for Netanyahu, such that if Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes. This won't help the situation per see, beyond maybe allowing a new leader change to stop furthering a terrible disaster.
Hopefully, the US sees the situation as a real risk for a moral event horizon and strategic cliff that Israel wouldn't be able to walk back from, and is trying to protect it from itself, and in the process save many Palestinians who would otherwise die.
Practically, the Americans are trying to work through the emotionally-driven reaction phase, and shape the Israeli action such that 'do something' doesn't mean 'do anything,' by pushing the Israelis to confront that many-an-anything can, in fact, be worse than no action at all. Whether this forestalls any action, or shapes it into a more productive action, the objective is to re-introduce long-term thinking back into what has been a major emotional shock reaction.
Since the Americans are uniquely positioned to engage the Israelis from a position of understanding the nature of the culture-shock, but also being able to acknowledge the costs of over-reaction and lack of foresight, here's hoping it works.
(I'm not very hopeful.)
Do you see the slighest chance Netanyahu survives this, politically? Safety has been the third rail in Israeli politics for its entire existence, this attack seems like a repudiation of the entire Likud philosophy for Gaza and the West Bank, and there's really not many spaces left to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The extent he's still in power is less a rally-around-the-flag unity and more just the procedural timeline.
The flip side is that there's not many of his domestic critics that claim any alternative to intervention, here. There's not really any vision for how to stop this from happening again without a ton of boots on the ground.
Sure, he could survive politicially. Everyone eventually falls from politics, but the key for political power actors remaining in place isn't their innate popularity, but the viability of alternatives. Even failed states continue to survive as long as no one else comes around to actually overthrow them. In Netanyahu's case, the question isn't 'was safety always delivered,' but whether 'was safety delivered more than the alternative,' which is still open for debate. Netanyahu can absolutely point at 'his' failure, and make the case that the alternative politicians would have had worse and more often. It's not like the attack has suddenly made the former left's 'let's make concessions for peace' more viable.
Wasn't Benny Gantz's pitch basically "I'll maintain the hardline vs Palestine but have less corruption"?
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This reminds me of the Afghanistan War, which I've long thought was big mistake, by which I don't just mean we shouldn't have tried to overthrow the Taliban and turn the country into a modern liberal democracy. I mean we shouldn't have invaded at all. The US have just accepted that the occasional terrorist attack of that magnitude is actually not that big a deal.
Hamas' attack was proportionally far worse, but still, even if they could remove Hamas, even if it didn't get replaced with something worse, and even if they didn't inspire more terrorism from other Arabs, it's hard to see how the amount of destruction is worth it. Why not just improve security so that it doesn't happen again? It sounds cliché but I think it's true: the reaction is what they wanted.
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
They don't seem to have a plan and this war may turn out to be much difficult than Afghanistan. I think they're acting irrationally out of anger, just like Americans did immediately after the September 11th attacks. I'm surprised how little weight has been given to what I thought were the lessons of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
To the modal Israeli, the death of Palestinians is an acceptable cost. To the modal Palestinian, the death of Israelis is a cause for celebration.
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The risk is that if they do nothing and keep beefing up defenses, eventually Hamas comes up with something the defenses can’t stand and commits a colossal attack (bigger than last saturday’s) or even threatens Israel’s existence in some way.
Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was probably the right move for the US.
How, exactly, are they supposed to destroy Israel? This is not a very organized group and it really looked like the Saturday attack was basically everything they can muster.
Unless they get their hands on a nuke or something, I just don’t see it(and even then, they can’t build a reliable delivery mechanism, and Iran is probably not willing to give them one because they’re crazy).
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Chances of a lesson learned?
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Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
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If a full scale invasion results in rescuing any significant percentage of hostages, I'll be shocked. As distinct from some kind of commando lightning strike rescue deal. Hostage deaths once discovered will simply goose the throttle on that meat grinder.
There is no amount of pain they can be inflicted to convince Hamas to return them.
Yes, to be very clear I don't expect the IDF has a good plan to rescue the hostages alive, or that such a good plan exists or is even possible. They just have a plan to release time pressure. Gush Etzion was 2014.
To be charitable, again we're talking a lot of babies or the elderly, a few chronically ill or recently-injured, and a lot of women. There's worse things than death, and years of negotiations give a lot of time for those worse things to happen and then death, followed by the disappearance of the bodies. To be less charitable, part of wartime leadership is not giving orders you know won't be followed.
There's no amount of pain that they can inflict that will get Hamas to return them, and there is no plausible ransom Hamas could demand that Israel will be willing to pay.
I mean is Israel particularly good at hostage rescue to begin with? I suspect not, that the US are the main power that is actually decent at solving that particular military problem, and this particular situation is probably too difficult even for us, let alone a force with looser rules of engagement(which Israel seems to have).
They're better at it than the Germans, as the morbid joke goes, but that's damning with faint praise and Hamas has put a lot of effort into making past hostages very hard to recover at all and especially recover alive. (Cfe Shalit's 400-meter claymore zone.
Again, I don't expect them to succeed, at least at the sort of scales required to avoid "Pyrrhic" from being the go-to term. I just don't see anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Qatar.
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The raid on Entebbe was extremely impressive but that was 50 years ago now, and Hamas will be better prepared.
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I think there are two possible US concerns that they’re discussing.
Attacking in the tunnels will be catastrophic for the IDF and casualty numbers will be extremely high. Maybe Blinken has some CIA or Pentagon messaging about the nature of the entrenchment in Gaza and how difficult that will be to break.
The US has direct intelligence (or Blinken wants to suggest, for the US’ own interests, that they do) that Hezbollah will invade if and when Israel enters Gaza.
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I keep giggling at the idea of Netanyahu saying "Leeroy Jenkins". Thank you.
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I have to wonder—are our official statements framing it as a lesson learned from Afghanistan, or is that just editors aware of the irony? Because “trust us; we’re experts on going balls deep in Islamic terrorists” has a certain credibility.
I've always gotten the impression that Israeli leaders are unusually frank in their statements rather than circumlocutory in the manner of the Chinese. So I picture that, in the room, Blinken is absolutely looking Netanyahu right in the eye and saying "We got the Goys to try this twice and it didn't work for them."
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Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas. Gaza Strip is the size of New York City. Lessons learned from invading the former don't really apply to the latter.
Right, and Israel has a population comparable to NYC, while there are about a fifth as many Palestinians in the strip. Does that mean they have an edge over Afghanistan?
When the situation is so confused and entrenched, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution. Going in with an exit strategy is always a better idea than rawdogging it.
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There is zero evidence that any substantial portion of Gen Z is becoming more socially conservative / rightist in the US. The vast majority of polling suggests zoomers are the most progressive, most socially liberal generation ever. Less than half are (non-hispanic) white.
What is happening is that a small minority of young white men are being radicalized online into far right politics. This isn’t even close ‘most’ young white men, and actually even if look at regular republicans support is closer than for white men of any other age group (from 2022):
Most young white male republicans are just from conservative states or regular evangelical Christians, not (anything close to) ‘dissident right’. And young white men are like 25% of Gen Z, by the way, and by far the most conservative demographic in that grouping.
If Gen Z is turning against Israel and Zionism, it’s because of generic progressivism and anti-colonialist education / critical race theory / Chris Rufo reasons, not because they follow Keith Woods on Twitter.
I don't think it's weirder than anything he's said previously.
For reference: when Kanye West went on his show and said "I admire Hitler," Jones was absolutely flummoxed.
Granted, the face sock that completely concealed Kanye's head probably wasn't helping Jones keep a straight face, but still.
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If Israel were to give citizenship to Palestinians, all that would change is that it would become a civil war.
The Palestinians do not want to share the land with the Jews. Whether one state or two states or three states doesn't matter. Rights and citizenship don't matter. They don't want to share the land with the Jews and they don't want to compromise. Until that reality changes, the only path to permanent peace is genocide.
Or capitulation -- that is, removing all the Jews without killing them all. But that's obviously unacceptable to Israeli Jews and is terrible game theory as well.
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Does Gaza not already count as a Palestinian state? Ignoring the blockade, they have sovereignty.
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Israel imposes curfews on Palestinians, Palestinians don't have freedom of movement, and Israel apparently has the power to turn off their electricity and water at will. How can Gaza be said to have sovereignty?
I didn't know about the curfews, or the freedom of movement. Could you tell me more about the freedom of movement? Are they not allowed to move throughout Gaza, or do you just mean that they can't leave Gaza? Because the latter is just sensible border policy.
Believe me, I'd read about this if I knew where to find reliable information.
Freedom of movement refers to Palestinians within Gaza not being allowed to get to the West Bank (and vice verse), and within the West Bank being forced to go through Israeli military check points. That also is how the curfew is imposed, mostly within the West Bank since 2005.
Even so, just the blockade and the fact that Israel can cut off electricity and water are enough to call the de facto "sovereignty" of Gaza into question.
I think the military checkpoints are more meaningful examples: being vulnerable to blockade and international electricity/water shipments describes a lot of places everyone considers states with sovereignty.
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If they only do it when the government isn't cooperating with them to uncover the identities of mass murderers, then it doesn't seem like a problem to me, but you're right that it does call their sovereignty into question.
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YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
That tells you all you need to know.
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It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
I mean that raises the question of why Harvard Indians are relatively anti-Israel- it’s definitely not the elite consensus.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
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Fair, the typical Harvard going brown person is pretty woke.
I might be in a bubble. My circles are first gen immigrants, STEM-school MIT/GATech types or fans of geopolitics who have a less rosy view of conflict resolution than the average starry-eyed liberal. We're past our 18-25 angry-youth phase.
Anecdotes as just anecdotes...But, Even at their worst, my Muslim friends had "We can condemn the attacks by Hamas, while still caring for Palestine" style takes. Their response to the Gaza invasion is despair, but I have yet to see the "Israel is evil" style takes that I'm seeing from the left and middle-eastern protestors. One of my Muslim friends was humble enough to acknowledge that their biases on the Palestine issue were wrong.
The liberal Hindus around me are smart enough to not outright say it, but they have coloring their speech with a Israel-sympathetic bias.
Your point still holds though. I steer clear of the Ivy-league types, so I might just be insulated from the worst of them.
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How have the ADL been faring lately - right now they have enormous quantities of pure bio organic grass fed antisemithism to work with that is flooding the internet and the media, so in theory they should be all over the place and yet it seems that they are not - at least in my bubble?
Is it just a fluke - but no matter if I read old media, new media or twitter there is barely mention of the ADL.
Maybe they're afraid to let their hypocrisy on Israel's border vs. America's border be too obvious, especially in light of Tucker Carlson bringing it to the attention of boomers.
Seems unlikely, given that the two border issues are not remotely analogous to one another, a fact which is no doubt quite obvious to them.
It's not obvious to me.
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Telling corporations they need to respond harder to antisemitism in light of the recent Israeli / Palestinian escalation, like they did during BLM, encouraging their CEO's to sign workplace pledges against antisemitism. Telling the media - on air - to refer to Hamas as terrorists or barbarians, not fighters or militants.
And yet it seems to not be too active on pro palestine rallies in the west, harvard and other universities students and students group that support palestine and so on. Or even twitter and facebook where the real antisemitism has gone up thousandfold in the last week.
My google news search for adl showed quite slim pickings from top news organizations compared to the expected. Also you both linked stuff from 5 days and 7 days ago which could be interpreted as bare minimum.
There is informaton and pr war going on and the ADL looks like not pulling their weight.
I don’t think we can know whether they are active regarding the Harvard debacle. If they have learned anything at all in recent years it’s that their more controversial actions should be concealed and not publicized. Did they have a role to play in getting Wall Street Jews like Ackman to speak out and threaten their job security? Were they responsible for the doxxing-mobiles we saw? Are they phoning faculty and directors? This is not information we will ever be privy to.
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Jonathan Greenblatt went on MSNBC and criticized them for their coverage and, not too long after, it's being reported (though disputed by MSNBC) that their Muslim anchors and staff (including some who have experience in the region) are being sidelined
So potentially very well?
Meanwhile, one of the 'sidelined' anchors has been reporting on Gaza with Al Sharpton in the last couple days. Which says a lot of things. I guess for a silver lining, they do have an expert and professional pogrom leader on NBC?
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[NYTimes, Friedman] Why a Gaza Invasion and ‘Once and for All’ Thinking Are Wrong for Israel
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men. It is this group that lies behind most terrorism, ISIS, inceldom, much of the dissident right, most challenges with policing and crime. Rich countries have more options than poorer ones, as do countries with lower birthrates compared to higher ones (due to reductions in the proportion of violent, dispossessed young men as a percentage of the total population).
I'm pretty sure Al Qaeda and ISIS were mostly knocked down by consistent application of violence, not any of that stuff. How many times did the US kill the "#2" person in Al Qaeda?
They aren't mutually exclusive. IIRC the US first defeat of AQI (which became ISIS) involved mobilizing local militias to fight them as well.
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IIRC one of the interesting things about the ISIS conflict was that it relied on a prophesy of declaring a caliphate and then winning global domination via victory in traditional battle, not guerilla terrorist tactics. This is, to put it kindly, an offer the West found acceptable, to the tune of tons of JDAMs and eventual victory of non-ISIS ground forces.
I remember someone in these parts observing that, although there is no evidence it was planned as such, it was certainly an effective honeypot at drawing in Muslims prone to violent extremism from around the world to a scenario where they became legitimate military targets.
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Dump hormone blockers into the water provided to Gaza. Science says they're 100% harmless, and they'd prevent development of aggressive masculine traits.
Maybe toss in some gender studies professors.
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Just open free Halal McDonalds and Pizza Hut, free supermarkets packed full of goods with high fructose corn syrup and give out free Steamdecks and Starlink access and flat screen tvs. Free cellphones with TikTok and Insta and Tinder baked in. Free condoms, free birth control pills. Start up the Real Housewives of the Gaza Strip and make a whole bunch of tv shows ostensibly set in the Islamic Middle East but pushing Western sexual mores. Open free pharmacies giving out opiates and antidepressants. We can do so much better than blue jeans and rock music nowadays.
Bring the full force of Western Decadence against them, and see who the strong horse really is.
Sounds like an incentive for western NEETs to go full pepewar on society so they can have all that appeasement too.
I think we could say, they already have most of those things, even in the US welfare will take you a long way towards most of them. Subsidized internet access is available in my state at least. In the Gaza case we're just not allowing them to pick what they spend the money on, so it doesn't end up buying AK's and so on.
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As much as I expect the occupation of Gaza to be a disaster in every way, if Israel went this route for a decade or so, it might have a fighting chance of withering Hamas on the vine. High speed internet, porn, drugs, and obesity for all. Build an indigenous class of entrepreneurs and bureaucrats of decadence who'll act as an organic counterweight to Hamas.
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Er, no, hormone blockers are not harmless at all.
I read that as @ThenElection having his tongue firmly in his cheek, but sarcasm is notoriously hard to read over the internet.
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Looking outside Muslim communities, Tamil terror in Sri Lanka was successfully eradicated through incredible violence. Unfortunately, this article might be right. Because the Sinhalese killed all the next-of-kin of the LTTE leadership. Left no room for revenge.
This is why the rapid liberalization of Saudi society is so important. Iran can try as much as it likes, but Sunnis will always bear resentment towards them as Shias. If Mecca/Medina becomes westernized, then these men will finally have internal leaders with legitimacy who can steer these young men away.
El salvador has managed to lock up 100k men almost overnight. So it can be done. It seems like the most achievable peaceful resolution to this war. Kill the terrorists and imprison all young and likely suspects. Let the absolute gravy-train of aid flow into restoring society for women and young children. Employ all older men with families in hard labor towards rebuilding Gaza on the south side of the strip. Ideally on a patch of land in west bank, but that's unlikely to work.
You can release the once angry youth back into society once peace has been restored over 20 years or so. Once stable society exists and the majority has known an improving life for the last couple of decades, the residents lose the appetite for violence. Most non-murderous Tamil, Sikh and Naga insurgents in India were happy to integrate into India when it became clear that they can still wield local power in a democracy without violence. But maybe Islam draws out a different kind of anger.
An ugly solution, but somehow still sounds better than all the other alternatives.
El Salvador was still (somehow) a democracy dealing with an internal problem of gangsters that honestly seem to have just gotten too big for their britches. They still had enough of a military advantage to handle it, feckless leadership apparently just had to learn to stop trying to pay them off because they were emboldened to keep escalating. Once they took action they actually had some legitimacy with the rest of the populace to enforce their rule.
I'm unsure if Mexico could honestly do the same now, with its more powerful cartels.
Let alone Israel which is not facing gangsters who were slowly transitioning into terrorism encouraged by governments paying the Danegeld but an active and prepared pseudo-sovereign terrorist group (who're opposed to identifying tattoos on principle, unlike LatAm sociopaths) holding sway over an entire region with in-built religious and historical reasons to hate Israelis. Hard to see where the legitimacy will come from here.
I don't think the limiting factor is the strength of Mexico's Military (watch cartel vs Army footage, the cartels get massacred every time, that one time CJNG took down a helicopter has been mythologized). In Mexico's case the real problem is just how bloody corrupt the government is on aggregate. If Mexico had someone unshakeable with a one-track mind like Bukeles, I'm sure they could probably achieve the same outcome.
The first time I became aware someone was corrupt was watching a general in the Mexican army being interviewed by Nightline or Newshour or some show. I was maybe 13 and I recall him telling the interviewer about how he had this many men and they were covering that many kilometers searching for the other cartel smugglers...
"Sir," the reporter interrupted, "How many have you caught?"
Ten seconds of dead silence, and the look on the general's face that made it clear catching people was not part of his plans--and that's the day I realized how the world worked.
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You understand that this “peaceful resolution” is just isomorphic to war, right?
If you want to put all the young men in prison, then someone has to go round them up. By force.
Obviously, Hamas wouldn’t agree to this voluntarily.
Yep, fully agree.
A peaceful resolution is more so the "least violent" resolution than one that has no deaths. Mine is a fairly violent suggestion .... but still less violent than all the other options on the table. A temporary ceasefire might delay the violence, but it can't be called a resolution.
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Also, how the British managed to stamp out the Mau Mau in Kenya.
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This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather, they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
The only difference seems to be who the "how we got here" padding blames.
* Somehow, when you're dealing with terrorists that will literally steal infrastructure for weapons and brag about it.
I basically go up to everyone condemning Israel and say "zap! you're now the PM of Israel. what's your next move?" and I generally get a range from "Israel should follow international law" (hand wave hand wave) with no specifics on how they protect their security and sovereignty doing that, all the way to something the Heath Ledger version of The Joker would say.
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Convert to Christianity and learn to love your enemies.
Taking this seriously, has this ever worked?
The Roman Empire. Christians went from being eaten by lions in the Colloseum to being the official religion of the empire without ever raising an insurrection or fighting a civil war. It only took about 300 years of non-violent acceptance of persecution.
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Sure. Just be Romans. Then you can see your enemies driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women and love them and be redeemed by Christ.
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Seemed to work in the Northlands - bloodthirsty Vikings becoming orderly, peaceful Scandinavians.
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I don’t think that playing into the “Jews poison the wells” trope so literally is a good idea.
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That…that would be a textbook example of genocide.
Maybe it’s technologically possible, but I’d like to believe it’s several moral event horizons away.
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Give them more money and power and respect. Speaking personally, I felt I had very little incentive to contribute to society for a long time. I would do the right thing and not get much in return, or I would do the wrong thing and at least get the satisfaction of doing what I wanted. Once people in my family died and I was given greater respect and means to change my position in life I began to respect my family and the society that I lived in more. The fact that people live very long lives now is leading to fewer young people with wealth, and old people don't have the energy or interest to improve the world around them in the same way that young people do. A wealth transfer to people with energy and a longer time horizon would really help keep them from eating each other alive.
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This, of course, fails to reflect the situation of Islamist terrorists that have lived in the West. The men (and woman) that did 9/11, the Bataclan, San Bernadino, Pulse, the Boston Bombing, and so on weren't desperately poor and humiliated men. They did have something in common, and it certainly does reflect deep cultural, social, religious, and political roots, but that doesn't really do the work of generating sympathy for their desire to slay infidels.
Ya know, surplus Mormons don't seem to be causing all that much trouble in Utah, or fanning out to murder people that aren't that into Kolob. I know that it's considered a downright Philistine position to take, but I think the actual, specific tenets of religion have something to do with the behavior of their practitioners.
Surplus Mormons don't do this because Utah is a highly prosperous and functioning society, even by American standards. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to bring those societies to most of the world, so the problem of surplus violent young men is more salient elsewhere.
These guys were actually doing fine in San Bernadino.
I genuinely don't understand the Western insistence that Islamists aren't telling the truth when they say that they kill infidels for Allah. Even if you can solve the prosperity problem, if you have a bunch of Islamists, you're still going to wind up with dead infidels. They're probably not great for prosperity either, which tends to be a related problem.
That can be true, and it still be true, that it is harder to find people willing to kill when the population is wealthier. I believe the IRA were killing in the name of Irish nationalism, but they still struggled to find recruits once Catholics in Northern Ireland became richer. You might still believe in the cause, but once you have a comfortable life, risking your life for it looks like a worse deal. You'll probably still get some, of course.
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But strangely we could a few decades ago at gunpoint. Desperately poor pre-industrialization mostly-farmers South Koreans could be administrated by the US Army and then a local dictator selected by the US Army and uplifted into a different sort of society. Not without negative consequences, birthrates etc. But it was done.
Not until after a coup. Syngman Rhee wasn't interested in raising the standard of living of the peasants.
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Lebanon was at one point a highly prosperous and functioning society, emphasis on ‘was’, and yet it broke out into a civil war when the Christians lost their majority by importing Muslim refugees.
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This is the lazy man's politics. It is saving the furniture once the house is already on fire.
The greatest political challenge is not being able to spread the social and political tools we've developed to avoid a surplus of disenfranchisement. I.e. good economic policy. We know capitalism works. We know free trade works. We know universal western or Turkish, or Korean or hell even Russian culture is better than Jihadi culture.
Imposing Korean culture on Palestine by the sword is heterodox policy suggestion, but I'm here for it.
Rule by the ones with the highest StarCraft MMR?
School from 7 am to midnight?
Hamas hagwon?
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I endorse this plan.
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Capitalism can work. Not so sure on the free trade. A level of protectionism is needed because people aren't just fungible objects that will emigrate on the dime to "better work environments". Some would. But on the whole that's a destructive state of affairs.
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One massive benefit of artificial wombs when we get them is that we'll just be able to not conceive the surplus men in the first place by simply changing the gender ratio. It will improve the world so so much.
Getting artificial wombs does not imply natural wombs stop working. The vast majority of babies will continue to be born the old fashioned way.
Oh, I expect modernity to continue cratering birth rates, to the point where countries have to gestate a significant proportion of their future children in artificial wombs to maintain the population. When push comes to shove and the choice is between doing this or letting in millions more low IQ/fundamentally different culture people from the third world I expect governments to grudgingly fund this. Also, even if say 80% of all children are born as normal, you can still affect the net gender ratio by a lot by e.g. only gestating female embryos in artificial wombs (this will change the M:F ratio from 1.07:1 to 0.70:1).
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Artificial wombs won’t change very much. There is no scenario in which the vast majority of babies aren’t carried to term inside of a woman.
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A rather separate issue from very poor 3rd worlders having way too many kids with no prospects.
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It so definitely wouldn't. If it ever becomes a viable technology be ready for HUNKY GRADE-A BEEF Jarheads, coming of an assembly line, roided up naturally and ready to fight in endless wars.
Eh, I expect drones to take over the physical portion of warfare by that point, at best they would be operated by someone sitting thousands of km away, and you don't need roided up humans for that (one underrated benefit of drones is that even if the physical object is destroyed, all the combat experience is not lost, the drone operator keeps on getting better and better at waging war and can learn from his mistakes, while soldiers fighting in the flesh can find those same mistakes to be fatal, losing their army all the accumulated experience when they die).
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