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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29090 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

  • -43

I encourage you all to compare and contrast Racing Drone Footage.

You have a satellite relay and a setup with better optimized battery capacity, and it doesn't seem like any of this is beyond a nation state actor with billion dollar budgets for spy tech

I'm perfectly willing to believe that these aircraft are real and beyond publicly known technology.

That does not lead me to conclude aliens, it leads me to conclude breakaway nazi civilization living in the hollow earth. It leads me to believe black ops technology suppressed and hidden. It leads me to believe that Tesla was right about everything.

Personally I don't think we'll ever find extraterrestrial intelligence, but there exist non-human intelligences that are extradimensional in some way. Machine elves, not Grays, are the real aliens.

My point is that even by taking for granted that these events are real and happened, it doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion.

It leads me to believe that Tesla was right about everything.

Completely implausible. If there was some really "out there" science, then it'd have been used in WW2.

It wasn't. Therefore there isn't.

Machine elves, not Grays, are the real aliens.

I'm inclined to agree, from what I've been told some black people who have taken DMT report that the machine elves were rude and racist towards them, which I find completely hilarious if true.

There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

Correction: there is overwhelming evidence that Pentagon/MSM/friendly three letter organizations (or some groups/factions inside them) want us to believe that aliens are out there, observing Earth.

It is serious, even Tucker Carlson jumped on the bandwagon and went full bore into UFO/UAP issue.

Should we believe? Who wouldn't want to believe, after all?

Show me alien and I believe.

Undeniable proof

That wasn't a picture of Alf. I'm deeply disappointed.

What do I make of it? "Hey, look over there! A distraction!"

Ok, the big hole in ‘the aliens are here’ is, well, that this is one case where absense of evidence is literally evidence of absense. Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc. This is true even if you allow for a bunch of fringe physics and exotic effects- an Alcubierre drive or heim theory spaceship should leave an otherwise inexplicable signature that is readily observable by an enormous number of institutions and individuals on earth, to say nothing of an interstellar torch ship(and Annunaki from Nibiru still need a torch ship even if we ignore that a tenth planet can’t be habitable for temperature reasons).

There being aliens requires either a Truman show level conspiracy that goes beyond anything David icke and Alex Jones and the guy with the hair on the history channel could come up with if you locked them in a room full of drugs, or Star Trek level difference in the laws of physics.

Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc.

They could have sent a robot probe millions of years ago, with instructions to observe and nothing else. Basically a more sophisticated version of the Mars rover. There's no "approach" we could see, because it approached long ago. And if it's small, and moving at high speed through the atmosphere and ocean, that would still be pretty hard to spot. Look how hard it was to find that Malaysia Airlines plane that went off course, for example.

Well, it’s a good thing we aren’t just using probes. The meat of our observations come from telescopes and radio telescopes that can see trillions of miles into space, and can detect all manner of radio signals from deep space. Even if the aliens avoid detection by probes, they can’t avoid Hubble and James Webb and the radio telescopes we use on earth all day long.

There's still room for doubt, since most of our radio telescopes aren't really looking for Alien signals. They look for more "mundane" astronomical data, and radio signals fall off rapidly with the inverse square law, so unless an alien signal was beamed right at us, we could have easily missed it. This is starting to change now, but this is a recent change from billionaires like Paul Allen and Yuri Millner funding SETI-type projects that couldn't get much government funding before.

I think you’d still see megastructures and anomalies caused by engines. There’s nothing like that found yet. How do you launch a ship capable of crossing interstellar space without also constructing space stations and long distance probes and other forms of technology?

I don't think even a very advanced probe could survive millions of years in the atmosphere or ocean. In space, sure, but then UFOs have been spotted in all sorts of places. I don't think that this would explain anything.

Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?

Because there's no evidence of a previous Earth civilization, and it would raise strange questions? Whereas the Fermi Paradox is a pretty famous question of "wait, logically there probably should be aliens, somewhere..."

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

If advanced civilisation, comparable to ours, existed on Earth millions years ago - then we would likely fail to detect it.

Ok that's a bit more scientific than the "ancient aliens" stuff I expected. Still seems pretty speculative though. How is it we have fossils from the dinosaurs, but not anything from this much more recent civilization?

Definitely speculative, merely discussion how in this case lack of evidence is quite weak sign that such thing never existed - and we may still find something!

For that thing: dinosaurs are existing (and continue to exist, to be strict "non-avian dinosaurs" if often used) for about 240 000 000 years.

You can have civilisation appear and collapse in thousands of years.

We have entire species living not even single fossil. In fact, vast majority of species left not even single fossil.

I’m skeptical of a robot that lasts for millions of years but admit to it not being an obvious violation of the laws of physics- that being said, it’s a motte to the Bailey of ‘there could totally be aliens here, bro’.

After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.

Mexico did all of that and I still don’t believe.

After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner.

... and then allows scientists from all over the world, including Russia and China, unrestricted access to alien remains, materials and technology.

Grainy pictures, splotchy videos and "I am US military/CIA/journalist of record, you can trust me, bro" are not persuading me, and should not persuade you either.

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

One, I never believed we were. If there are aliens out there, as is very probable, I hope they're all doing okay
Two, we're not alone on this planet but we are the (so far) only species with our level of intelligence. Whatever about octopuses etc., they're not keeping humans in zoos, we're keeping them in aquaria and zoos
Three, I don't believe this "overwhelming evidence" even when I would very much like to think that extraterrestrials had visited. I'm waiting for the day they show up on the White House lawn in front of the assembled news outlets before I start making any plans

As for those videos - wow, white blobs, so convincing!

wow, white blobs, so convincing!

And the amazing other kind of evidence: sometimes a radar system reports that an object moves fast. Could be aliens or demons that instantly accelerate to high speeds. Could be a momentary error in a very complicated radar system.

I think the strongest evidence for the fact that they are not secretly aliens or demons or inter-dimensional travelers in contact with us is that the people who supposedly know keep on with their lives.

Allegedly members of congress know of all this, and yet they still continue seething and coping about January 6th, Ukraine, late term abortions, etc. if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?

What else would you do?

I’d spent every waking second with my wife and children, and probably spend a lot of our time together in Church, praying.

If you’re a Christian, you should probably be doing that anyway? Well, that and charity - rich people have a hard time entering heaven.

Why should the existence of aliens affect that?

I’m assuming that the aliens are actually biblical angels or demons.

You’re right, I should be doing that. I’m imperfect. I’d equate actual knowledge of the reality of aliens with Moses seeing the burning bush, Noah talking to god about a flood, or Mary being visited by an angel.

Not necessary for my point but: I actually do spend pretty much 100% of my waking time with my wife and children. We are both effectively retired and structured our life in this way on purpose. We also do go to church at least once a week and spend quite a bit of time talking about theology and our beliefs.

Edit: now that I think about this more, I think that covid was a sort of “seeing god” moment for my wife and I. Neither of us would ever even consider trading time with our children for a job. I guess my thought is that knowing the truth of alien life would have an even stronger effect, so my assumption is that because I don’t see any of the people who would know the truth of this acting like they just talked to god, that they probably haven’t met him.

I don’t know, but I find the idea that you find out about the confirmed existence of a vastly more powerful alien species that has been visiting earth and continue, with perfect poker face, with the temporal political concerns that everyone who doesn’t know cares about is unlikely.

if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?

Yeah, because unless the interdimensional imp is phasing in and out right now in front of me, the work still has to be done: chop wood, carry water, as they say.

If you were introduced to the interdimensional demons, and wanted to chop wood and carry water afterwards, what type of work would you do?

There may be fairies at the bottom of my garden, but I'm the one who has to scrub the bathroom.

If you have fairies at the bottom of your garden then you should pretty quickly realize that you never need to work again. Everything can be monetized. The fact real aliens haven’t been I’d the biggest evidence they don’t exist.

Everything can be monetized.

Yeah, they tried that back in the day and some prominent names ended up with a lot of egg on their faces 😁

"Undeniable real photographic evidence" which, to modern eyes, looks so obviously fake it's astounding how anyone believed it for five seconds. I think the UFO video is the same kind of thing.

There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

No, it is not overwhelming.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

First is likely true but of limited practicality as we are unlikely to ever interact, for second we have no strong evidence for that.

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". But software bug, visual artefact, commercial plane are all more likely than literal aliens. Widespread conspiracy is more likely than aliens.

Show me investigation(s) by say USA, China, Germany, Russia (feel free to switch Germany to UK, France or something, and Russia for Iran or similar) and then I will treat it seriously. Or at least official announcement by USA president about aliens, not mumbling by some faction. Then I can treat it seriously.

Sure, this is fairly easy – the USA has run a number of investigations, most (in)famously Project BlueBook, back in the day. See also Project Grudge, Project Sign. There is a lot of controversy/smoke over what exactly the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was doing, but it certainly seems to have involved research into UFOs.

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein, but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life" and the current and former Director of National Intelligence have suggested there is some form of advanced technology that does not have a prosaic origin being detected by US sensors. As far as Presidents go, Obama hasn't gone quite that far, but he does seem to take the issue seriously.

France has a very small official UFO group called GEIPAN.

The USSR had a UFO investigation unit during the Cold War. I think it's worth taking this with a grain of salt since from what I can tell the popular reporting on this is basely largely on hearsay, whereas in the United States there are a lot of now-declassified documents indicating at least some legitimate government interest (such as by e.g. Edgar Hoover). I believe there are also Soviet documents "smuggled out of Russia" after the Cold War ended, but I'm not sure how confident one should be in their legitimacy.

China seems to have a UFO investigation unit currently, although there is little known about it from what I have seen, and it seems plausible that it is doing it to keep up with the United States/get a handle on prosaic atmospheric clutter.

I don't think any of this makes the jump to "aliens" but it does suggest powerful and presumably rational actors take the issue of UFOs/UAP seriously, or have reasons to pretend to.

(I realize this is a very weird comment to drag one out of perpetually lurking, but, uh, in my defense it's not all that often that it's comparatively easy to make someone take anything seriously?)

To repeat:

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". I observe UFOs in that sense on basically any nigh in dark woods outside city.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein

Then I will wait. If acting president will make official announcement amount aliens then I will consider investigating why it is untrue.

but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life"

For start "might ... constitute a different form of life." is suspiciously clipped and I agree with him. But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible". And it is entirely distinct from "we fully confirmed this to be aliens".

To be clear, my position isn't "do_something should agree that aliens exist." It is "if research into UFOs by other countries is a good reason to take UFOs seriously, then do_something should take UFOs seriously." Apologies if that was unclear; I was responding to a limited portion of your post, not endorsing OP's position. I think you can make an argument for taking UFOs seriously without leaping to the assumption that they are aliens.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

Perhaps. The specific definition of UAP in US law, enacted by Congress, makes reference to "transmedium devices" which are defined as not immediately identifiable objects that are "observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water." It seems like if people in positions of power are seeing blurry dots, they are seeing them do some pretty unusual things. Or, as you allude to, there is a widespread conspiracy to make it seem that way (as has been suggested in The Motte in the past).

But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible".

It's funny you should say that – the current claims by whistleblowers like Grusch et. al. (and what seems to be the current consensus of the "UFO community," if that loose conglomeration of individuals can be said to have such a consensus) looks much closer to "angels as described in the Bible" than it does to (say) "aliens as described in War of the Worlds or Footfall."

Given that "UFO" simply means "Unidentified Flying Object" and not "alien spacecraft" it makes sense that major governments would investigate them. Not because of aliens, but because UFOs most likely mean "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about."

Yes, absolutely, although I would expect such work to be integrated into the typical air defense network or bumped into a classified program (which might dovetail into all the rumors about SECRET UFO PROGRAMS – yes probably we don't want our enemies to know what we do and don't know about their classified programs). Setting up a public-facing program like BlueBook or Geipan makes more sense as a PR effort than a secret project to spy on enemy spy craft, and I think is a more parsimonious explanation, especially considering that, despite contemporary concerns, there almost certainly weren't Soviet spy aircraft buzzing our nuclear installations in the late 1940s but there were enough UFO reports that defense officials worried they would overwhelm defense channels.

If you follow the link-trail I threw out, though, you can see DNI Ratcliffe alleging that there are objects that

  1. Don't fit the profile of "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about," and
  2. are picked up on multiple sensors, including satellites, at the same time, which is interesting in the context of long-running rumors US satellites have detected objects entering the atmosphere from outer space.

We know, from declassified NRO documents, that the NRO's satellites have detected at least one small object that "did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections" and seemed to resemble the "tic-tac" UAP (although alternative possibilities are discussed and the sighting is considered "low confidence") and that the NRO's "Sentient" image processing software may have a "UAP detection" mode.

I don't think anyone should consider that a slam dunk for extraterrestrial life but I do think it's noteworthy that the intelligence community appears to have internal conversations around things like "can we use our image analysis program to look for UAPs."

or "dammit, someone recorded out advanced aerospace tech, lets ensure they think it is aliens rather than something relevant to national security"

If I would be responsible for taking care that super-advanced-plane is secret I would prefer than anyone who managed observe it is talking about alien kidnappings. Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files. Mulder swaps bodies with a guy whose job it is to make up alien and other conspiracy theories to distract from advanced military tech.

That doesn't quite work, since in the show aliens do exist, and the advanced military tech may have very well come from them.

Well the series was never particularly consistent about it's lore/mythology, as much as I love it

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files.

That's basically recent history, declassified and documented by respectable mainstream media.

“There might be a number of reasons for a coverup,” Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men: A journey into disinformation, paranoia and UFOs, told me. “They might be covering up secret advanced aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71, and no doubt other things.”

For example, the forerunners of the U-2 high-altitude spy plane, developed for the CIA by the Air Force, caused similar confusion when they flew from Groom Lake (the celebrated Area 51) in the mid-1950s. These aircraft had a silver finish, and at 60,000 feet – far above other aircraft of the time – the U-2 looked like a bright metallic blob and was repeatedly reported as a flying saucer. A similar situation arose with the SR-71 Blackbird, which, at Mach 3, was far too fast and too high to be any known aircraft and was assumed to be Something Else. Some 50% of U.S.UFO reports at the time might have been caused by sightings of these two aircraft.

The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force

How long has this been going on?

Much of it dates to the first flights of the U2 spy plane back in the 1950s. The CIA's in-house journal had a story about 10 years ago that said that one of the functions of Project Blue Book [the official Air Force investigation into UFOs] was to monitor how visible the U2 was to people on the ground. Someone would see what they thought was a UFO and then the Air Force would send someone around to talk with them. Of course, the Air Force would have a schedule of the U2 flights and be able to tell if what the person saw was indeed a U2. By talking to all these supposed UFO witnesses, the CIA could assess how visible the U2 was.

COLD WAR UFO COVERUP SHIELDED SPY PLANES

For decades, a cottage industry of UFO buffs has thrived on the belief that the U.S. government covered up crucial information about mysterious flying objects.

Turns out that in thousands of cases the suspicions were right, a CIA historian has documented for the first time.

At the height of the Cold War, the Air Force and CIA willfully misled the public by claiming that thousands of sightings of unidentified flying objects were caused by ice crystals, temperature inversions and other tricks of nature, when in fact they were produced by the flight of high-flying, super-secret spy planes, according to historian Gerald K. Haines.

A study by Haines published this spring in the declassified version of Studies of Intelligence, a secret CIA journal, found that the government concocted the explanations both to calm fears about UFOs and to maintain secrecy about its most advanced espionage aircraft at the time, the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird.

The article concludes that "over half of all U.F.O." sightings in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s "were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights."

Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

Worth pointing out for the record that something that seems to be exactly this has in fact happened. At least twice.

Hate to pile on, but as others have said - if this is overwhelming evidence, then you simply longed to be overwhelmed.

This is a bad top level post.

Next time please add more

  1. Analysis and explanation of how it is relevant to the culture war. (maybe an analysis of how one specific group has responded to these claims, the military, the media, the conspiracy community, etc)
  2. Your own opinion or a more specific jumping off point for discussion. (something more than "what do you think?")

I'm not saying you have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs. But you have zero sentences, there should be 1-3 sentences for each of those items.

I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd. You're right, I acknowledge your feedback

I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd.

That's telling you something.

I remember when a recent whistleblower or leaker or whoever said that a crashed captured UFO was found to contain "Unknown Elements," with no further explanation of what that's supposed to mean, and it very much killed all of my interest in UFOs. We know what an element is even if we haven't seen it before. All the elements on the periodic table are known, or theoretically known. There's no room on the table for an element that isn't an rapid-decaying ultra-heavy metal. Unless we're talking about an incredibly exotic isotope of element 325 that somehow exists for more than 2 seconds and isn't hideously radioactive. Or Element Zero, in which case, I guess we should head to the Charon Relay in the outer system. Is the unknown element he describes a tiny sample in some sort of larger mechanism, like the Freon in a refrigerator? Or is the hull of this thing made of 70% Glorkium? Or did the guy mean elements as in elements of construction? Then I'd love a cursory description of the novel metamaterials that this thing is made of; whatever nanotubules or gels or frictionless fluids or super-conductors it's made of would be super-interesting to just have a cursory description of. Or is this guy just a 'tard that knows "Element" is a science word?

Also, your top-level post is bad and you should feel bad.

To not clog up top comments, I'm deleting this and and putting it in a new thread which hopefully will be of interest to somebody. Colorado Supreme Court thread

It sez it's deleted and does not show up on the front page.

Yeah, weird. Mod intervention or bug? Definitely a bug in the sense it was not “deleted by user” (me)

Posts don't appear until approved. Though apparently by linking it you did make it available for people kind of?

Anyway, I've approved the post now. It's technically culture war outside the culture war thread, but also you've framed it as a megathread and those are often allowed with culture war rules applied. On reflection I supposed this constitutes something of a loophole if we allow just anyone to post a "megathread" but so long as it doesn't get abused I, at least, am unlikely to do anything about it.

I honestly don't have any problem with people posting their own megathreads. Anything outside the CW thread usually gets significantly less engagement, and if it manages to get more then it's a good a sign as any that a megathread was necessary. It's not the kind of thing that seems susceptible to abuse.

That does raise the problem that some people don't post in megathreads, because they want more eyes on their post. When they are officially sanctioned megathreads it makes sense for the mods to encourage people to use them. But we aren't gonna do that if just anyone posts a megathread.

That was kind of my point. There's a strong enough disincentive to starting your own mega thread outside of situations where you think it's really necessary that I can't see anyone abusing the privilege.

Imagine Congress passes a law granting some benefit to Americans with disabilities, and furthermore establishes a Board to review cases and determine which people are entitled to the benefit, could a State really set up its own separate Board and establish its own criteria determining who is "disabled"?

But, the whole point of the discussion you quote is that Congress hasn't acted. The issue is whether the disqualification clause is self-executing:

Intervenors, however, look to Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “[t]he Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” to argue that congressional authorization is necessary for any enforcement of Section Three.

These are all distinctly male or male adjacent renditions of intelligence. Even within the more gender equal ones (wordcel or artist), I specifically define them to highlight a sub-group that tends to be majority male. Other than a few unicorns, the women who display these aforementioned types of intelligence are often tomboys or awkward wierdos.

There's an entire slap-fight waiting there for you, but I'm not inclined to get into it, just rather sit back and watch you get smacked about (probably not on here, it is majority guy as you say).

This gives me an opportunity to go off on a bit of a tangent and observe that in our actual world, as far as immediate politics go, poker players dominate shape rotators. Politics is mainly controlled by wielders of the word. Shape rotators make up a sort of upper middle class, but the true upper class is dominated by word wizards who employ shape rotators to do their bidding. Now, granted, it is shape rotators who contribute much more to the overall course of history than word-wizards and poker players do. It has been that way for about the last 500 years. Before that, it was the opposite, but since the dawn of the scientific revolution humanity's fate is dominated by the development of technology. But even though it is shape rotators who dominate humanity's future fate, nonetheless for now at least it is poker players who dominate actual politics at any given point in time. Very likely in some not too far-off future this relationship reverses and math-wizes will actually rise to the top of politics, perhaps even math-wizes who are made out of silicon... but we are not there at the moment. For now, word-wizes dominate math-cels. I myself am about equally good at math and words, I would say, so I do not think that I have any strong bias that would prejudice my judgment of the matter.

Now, when it comes to your particular dilemma: clearly you value intelligence very highly in a romantic partner. Unfortunately it seems that it is easier to find very intelligent men than very intelligent women, because it seems that there are simply more of them. I have met a few extremely intelligent women, including ones who are significantly more intelligent than me when it comes to rotating shapes, but it has been pretty rare (and it doesn't really take that much to be smarter than me, lol, I am a bit smarter than the average human but not by much). The average man does not suffer from this because the average man's intelligence is not high enough for him to notice the gender discrepancy in intelligence and/or because the average man is not looking for intelligence as a major factor in his choice of romantic partners.

There might be a conflating factor here, though. It is hard for me to adequately judge a woman's intelligence because when I am interacting with her, assuming that she is physically attractive, a big part of my mind is engaged in wanting to fuck her. It is quite possible that I am regularly missing out on all sorts of displays of female intelligence because when I am around women, I am blinded by my sexual desire and so I am not actually picking up on the sorts of nuances that I would observe when interacting with a guy. Statistically, sure, it is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of human geniuses in history have been male. There definitely seems to be an objective discrepancy between the genders. Men are maybe like 100 times more likely to be genius-level in almost any field than women. But I do sometimes wonder if, if I were gay or something, maybe I would perceive some women around me as being smarter than I currently do because I wouldn't be spending so much of my energy on thinking about how I could put my dick in them. Not that I would suddenly realize that some intellectually boring woman is actually a genius, but at least maybe I would have more appreciation for her mental acumen.

There might be a conflating factor here, though. It is hard for me to adequately judge a woman's intelligence because when I am interacting with her, assuming that she is physically attractive, a big part of my mind is engaged in wanting to fuck her. It is quite possible that I am regularly missing out on all sorts of displays of female intelligence because when I am around women, I am blinded by my sexual desire and so I am not actually picking up on the sorts of nuances that I would observe when interacting with a guy

It doesn't have to be that extreme, it might just be that you're interested in very different things. You're probably not that interested in things like fashion sense, cooking, cosmetics social media impressions gathering, taking the perfect selfie, interior decorating, or planning the perfect party. All things that women do much, much better than men in my experience, because most (straight) men just don't pay attention to them. But if you look closely you can see how how much effort they put into them.

And all this is just stereotypical hobbies. You can also see it in there jobs, which tend to be very different from the sort of jobs that men get.

As a musically aligned stem nerd with a penchant for public debate, I have come to recognize 4 types of intelligence. These can I can identify, rank and compare. The terms only serve to create a vivid persona, so don't focus on the terms too much.

This sounds like the 'multiple intelligences' theory that was popular decades ago.

Now, is the culture war part. These are all distinctly male or male adjacent renditions of intelligence. Even within the more gender equal ones (wordcel or artist), I specifically define them to highlight a sub-group that tends to be majority male. Other than a few unicorns, the women who display these aforementioned types of intelligence are often tomboys or awkward wierdos.

That is because you expanded the criteria of intelligence to be weighted towards creativity or interpersonal skills. Actual IQ tests show about equal mean scores for men and women, with men doing slightly better or worse at tails.

There are plenty of women with each of those types of intelligence.

Either society does not recognize them and promote them to places where you can see them, or you do not recognize them when you see them. They may certainly present with different aesthetics than the men with those types of intelligence, and may not be members of the same social clubs. They may not point out that they're women when participating in anonymous online forums. They may not use their intelligence to show off, dominate rooms, or manipulate people at the same rates or in the same ways as men do.

But yeah, women are people, things that are true of people are true of women. We just don't always notice that underneath our cultural narratives about them.

Just... add one more variable. Instead of trying to force fit your model. As in try to respect traits other than intelligence as well. I know, I know, you can't just will your mind into being, ironically. But what you are asking for is effectively along the same vein.

I think there are two levels to an answer here. The first is to take your framing and dive into the difference between intelligence and perceived intelligence. I think there are two important things here: motivation and legibility.

Plenty of genius-level people just don't spend their time in smart-seeming disciplines. One of the smartest people I knew graduated from college at the age of 18, was an international chess master, and wend to work at a FAANG. Then he left to become a baker. This outlier aside, I suspect that when a man realizes he's good a math/writing/etc, he is disproportionately likely to reorient his life to spend oodles of time on the subject. This brings me to...

Legibility. The guy in class answering all the questions may or may not be the smartest - but he definitely appears the smartest. The guy who aces the test may or may not be the best in industry or in research, but a test score is much more legible than the latter two. Intelligence related to emotions, socialization, and even words are all much less legible than intelligence related to math and coding and engineering. But it is crucial (in life, really) to avoid conflating "harder to measure" with "less important". Also, having the confidence/narcissism to state and defend your beliefs is probably only loosely related to intelligence, but probably strongly related to perceived intelligence.

As an aside intelligence is academically defined as the principle component vector of academic test scores. Do you know what one of the strongest predictors is? Vocabulary size (r=0.83), followed by similarities (r=0.80). Both are much stronger predictors than arithmetic (r=0.68). Yet, a math-smart person is typically considered by people to be obviously smart, while intelligence in other disciplines is less obvious.

The second level is psychological. Why do you care about your partner's intelligence?

Examples:

  • You worry about her ability to make money.
  • You worry about other people's opinions of your intelligence.
  • You worry that your difficulty seeing her as smart indicates a character flaw on your part.

If this were me thinking through this about myself, I would also ask myself why, on some level, I want to believe she is less intelligent. On an internet forum, such a presumptuous question is probably out of place. I will note though, that as someone widely considered a "math wiz" growing up

  1. It is psychologically comforting to believe that being math-smart is super special awesome
  2. If you spend thousands of hours doing math... you're going to end up believing that math is Important. The same is true of anything you spend time doing.

As an aside intelligence is academically defined as the principle component vector of academic test scores. Do you know what one of the strongest predictors is? Vocabulary size (r=0.83), followed by similarities (r=0.80). Both are much stronger predictors than arithmetic (r=0.68).

I think the issue here is ceiling effects. math has a much higher potential ceiling. IQ tests are restricted in the type of questions that can be asked, so you end up with simple math questions and hard vocab ones.

This is aggrandizing for intelligence. The future points to a world where high levels of male-coded intelligence are about as useful or interesting as someone who's really good at solving Sudoku or Rubik's cubes. Nifty, perhaps, but not anything anyone really values.

If humanity exists a century from now, the victors are going to be those who excel at navigating social hierarchies, entertaining others, and finding self meaning in a world devoid of heroism. Women are not going to be the ones suffering in that regime.

I will presume that your first paragraph suggests that you too expect a technologically transformative future.

Given said transformation, I see no reason to expect men to be disprivileged in that regard. Why would they be? If everyone can avail of genetic/cybernetic augmentation or has hypercompetent AI assisting them, then I fail to see how even the aspects of intelligence coded as feminine can't be enhanced in everyone, or a reason to see why men would floor out earlier.

At the end of the day, I expect it to be moot, in much the same way that the circumference of one's biceps counts for just about nothing when predicting who's going to be better at digital fighting games. Let alone when they're both kicking up their feet and letting the superhuman bots duke it out on their behalf.

• The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.

As someone who has actually played poker at a reasonably competitive level, I think this type of intelligence should be broken into two almost orthogonal components.

  • The edge-seeker: Is always tracking many possibilities, always tracking prices, and always looking for small exploitable ways that others are doing things wrong such that this person can eke out some small benefit from taking advantage of that weakness. Think "theory-heavy poker player" or "Jane Street employee" - not necessarily great at textbook math (though probably at least "pretty good"), but excellent at quickly building up very detailed models and ruthless at discarding models that don't provide an edge.
  • The politician: Always tracking the expected mental states of others, viewing things from their perspective in order to figure out what signals to send to maximize the chance that that person acts in a way beneficial to the politician. Think "used car salesman", "politician", or "con artist" (but I repeat myself)

As a note, in actual poker games we call the second type "fish", and the key to making money at poker is to ensure you're sitting at a table with a lot of people like that.

Anyway, in terms of the question at hand I'd add a couple of more feminine-coded types of this kind of thing where excellence really does make a notable difference.

  • The teacher: Like the politician, tracks the probable internal mental models of many people at once. However, instead of using this knowledge to exploit weaknesses, instead seeks to refine their mental models to be more useful to them.
  • The diplomat/organizer: Tracks the motivations of multiple possibly conflicting parties, tries to mediate communication between them to come to a mutually agreeable solution
  • The gossip: Tracks the goings and doings of a significant number of people, and also the interests and biases of those people, in order to share the juiciest news and secrets with the people who will react the most strongly to them (hey, I didn't say all of the female-coded types were going to be prosocial)

Of course instead of calling them "male-oriented" and "female-oriented" it might be more accurate to call them "systems-oriented" and "people-oriented". Systems-oriented thinking does scale much better than people-oriented thinking in the best case, although I think if you look at the median case instead of the outliers that's probably flipped.

I was always impressed by the way that my mother was able to bring someone round to her point of view, while making them feel like it was their decision. I would contrast it with rhetoric or debate, which is usually about convincing third parties rather than the person you are talking to. This was more like counsel. Men are better debators, but most of real life happens on a smaller scale where female tact is more useful.

She is also very wise. Intelligent, but intelligent in a way that was practically useful and leads to good decisions, although I'm not sure how female that is.

I would highlight something I noticed in a few conversations recently.

That is, the ability to really listen in a discussion, the humility to integrate what the other person is saying in real time, and offer thoughtful responses. Louise and Agnes are outliers in a lot of ways, but they're extremely good at this.

I've met plenty of extremely intelligent women in the tech industry. They exist, but I think their efforts are spent on things other than the sort of mental masturbation that mottizens like to participate in.

One thing that I have noticed, and should really give you pause, is the frequency with which these high-g women with similar spouses have autistic children. It's not necessarily an awesome idea to breed two shape rotators in an attempt at creating an uber-rotator.

Eugenics programs will continue until we get another Von Neumann goddammit!

One thing that I have noticed, and should really give you pause, is the frequency with which these high-g women with similar spouses have autistic children. It's not necessarily an awesome idea to breed two shape rotators in an attempt at creating an uber-rotator.

My mom was the teacher at a fairly unique private school that was essentially designed to cater to autistics, school-refusers and target a band of about 10th-20th percentile intelligence (since the ones largely below that were seen as being very difficult to create positive outcomes from). Very anecdotal, especially since the fees were quite high, but the amount of brilliant, professionally-successful (Actuaries, Surgeons, Engineers etc) parents at that school who'd seemingly benefited from being low-medium on the spectrum who'd then produce a child who was unable to function on their own, was very high.

I do think it's partly confounded by the rate with which professionally successful individuals tended to wait till later in life to actually have kids, but it was definitely a trend in the parental population.

To what extent is the elevated rate of autism among the offspring of such pairings due to the parents skewing older? Of course age at parenthood is highly correlated with rotatorhood, I would imagine, but I’ve never seen anyone try to tease out the magnitudes of each effect individually

As a counterpoint, my girlfriend is smart and loves the kind of mental masturbation mottizens like to engage in. We watched the napoleon movie the other day and ended up talking about the French for several hours.

The reason she’s not here is she doesn’t like to argue, especially if people might be hostile. But open-ended discussions are something she loves, probably as much as I do. I do wonder if that preference explains a lot of the difference in mental masturbation you see.

I think the frequency of autism diagnoses in tech couples has more to do with income than tech - as in, highly motivated wealthy parents watching for every single child learning milestone are much more likely and able to take their kid to a shrink if/when they perceive a lag in achievement. Since shrinks are motivated to find something wrong, most of them will find something wrong, and since autism covers a spectrum from "throws feces at the wall all day and is nonverbal" to "sometimes feels slightly awkward with new people" it's a nice safe diagnosis to feed the type A parents. Same with ADD.

I think a lot of normal variation in personality has been pathologized.

I didn't really mean "extra smart, quirky" autistic. Pretty much everyone here checks enough boxes that if we fought to get it, we could get that ordained title. I'm talking about serious problems functioning in society autistic. Better get a bunch of friends while your parents can negotiate your life for you autistic. This is a lot different than "I read a lot of words on the internet and feel awkward in public" autistic.

There's really only one or two forms of intelligence, spatial and verbal. The rest is personality. So how does genius display itself when a stereotypical woman burdened with it?

She identifies BS but doesn't directly confront it. Rather she works to circumvent it and cushion the negative impacts of it.

She is thrifty and knows how to make a meal out of leftovers, leaving nothing to waste.

She is able to order the day around everyone's needs and weaknesses. If a child is too cranky to do homework after school, she makes a routine in the morning.

She binds communities together and makes a society run on gift instead of transaction.

She is able to hold dozens of people's expectations, needs, wants, and histories in her head and exploit this information to accomplish her goals.

She is a good project manager. I think society has lost something when the smartest women became project managers instead of free community builders.

The Ur-example is from Proverbs 31:

A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value.
She brings him good, not harm,
all the days of her life.
She selects wool and flax
and works with eager hands.
She is like the merchant ships,
bringing her food from afar.
She gets up while it is still night;
she provides food for her family
and portions for her female servants.
She considers a field and buys it;
out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.
She sets about her work vigorously;
her arms are strong for her tasks.
She sees that her trading is profitable,
and her lamp does not go out at night.
In her hand she holds the distaff
and grasps the spindle with her fingers.
She opens her arms to the poor
and extends her hands to the needy.
When it snows, she has no fear for her household;
for all of them are clothed in scarlet.
She makes coverings for her bed;
she is clothed in fine linen and purple.
Her husband is respected at the city gate,
where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.
She makes linen garments and sells them,
and supplies the merchants with sashes.
She is clothed with strength and dignity;
she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women do noble things,
but you surpass them all.”
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Honor her for all that her hands have done,
and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

Seems to me you're reaching to justify something you want to be true. There are certainly talents and skills other than "words" and "math". Those two are actually strongly correlated anyway. There's also social skill ("leadership", "douchebaggery", "poker player", "con man", "mean girl", or your "the therapist", though I think that is flattering to actual therapists) which takes many different forms, but doesn't seem to be strongly correlated with the other two -- there's plenty of slick manipulators who ain't too bright in the conventional sense.

But there's no reason to believe these are equitably distributed, between people or between genders.

At the end of the day, it's social skill that matters most, unfortunately. Always has been, always will be. Humanity forms hierarchies and if you're smart but of low social skill, your position is "useful slave".

Men are more competitive, so many smart men try to always show off how smart they are and compete over who's the smartest in their respective areas. Women don't do that as much, in my opinions, which makes them a lot easier to get along with but you might miss that "super genius!" feeling.

They're way better at expression emotion. Or just talking, in general. Your "lawyer" might be good at spitting facts and logical arguments, but how good is he at just talking for the same of bonding?

A stereotypical example. I was at a work party once, with a bunch of male engineers. The organizer of the party (a woman) had helpfully set up games and activities for us as icebreakers. The woman of the company used them as such, playing just a little before stopping to chat. The men went through the activities as if they were work tasks, completing them all quickly and efficiently, then sitting around awkwardly with nothing to talk about.

If you have a man and a woman with equivalent competence in their jobs, you will hear far more about it from the man, on average.

There are two things people in OP's situation can do. The first is.... actually ask women about their jobs and be interested. Stimulate the conversation by asking insightful questions and letting them know you won't just dismiss it after receiving a surface-level summary. Give them an opportunity to discuss the social dynamics if it's relevant to the description. It can go just as deep as discussing work with a man.

The second bias I personally have to be aware of is coding female confidence with arrogance. To be sure, women are not immune to unearned arrogance and tend to stick out more because of their relative rarity. But, by and large, women who are excellent at something and know it tend to take a bit more of a social hit.

Men are more competitive, so many smart men try to always show off how smart they are and compete over who's the smartest in their respective areas.

I think this is a huge part of it. Men being more competitive and less interested in getting along with their peers is the underlying cause of so many observed gender differences, like the earnings gap, CEO gap etc..

The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.

The best poker players in the world are now robots, they play online, have zero idea about reading other people or how to manipulate/navigate around them.

Online casinos ban ppl who are using bots or suspected or other forms of assisted play

He's not saying they're literal robots, just that they're increasingly close to optimal/perfect play whilst 30-40 years ago there was a lot more flair in it.

Poker's a tricky one. I agree the best player as in 'the most skilled person at Poker' is an online bot kind of a thing, but the stars of yesteryear still eke out a living even with fairly mid skills by modern pro standards by mastering the greatest skill of all, which is Table Selection.

Far easier to be a medium fish who's good at finding small ponds than to be the biggest shark there ever was.

I was quite surprised when I worked at a startup that was in the process of winding down, and one of our (older, single, but pretty sharp) engineers indicated a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." I'm not a gambling man, but I was surprised that there was market space (and still is, since we're still friends) to eke out rent and bills somewhat reliably at a casino in Vegas. Apparently it works (only with certain card games -- you will lose at slots), although he's also bounced between a few engineering gigs.

a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." ... Apparently it works

It "works" but:

  • The pay is bad. You will be making something on the order of 10-20% of what an actual professional with similar skill levels makes, and on top of that you will experience massive swings in your net worth even if you do everything right. The rule of thumb is that you can calculate your maximum expected hourly earnings by considering the largest sustained loss where you would continue playing, and dividing that by 1000. So if you would keep playing through a $20,000 loss, that means you can expect to earn $20 / hour if your play is impeccable.
  • The competition is brutal. Poker serves as sort of a "job of last resort" to people who, for whatever reason, cannot function in a "real job". This may be because they lack executive function, or because they don't do well in situations where the rules are ambiguous, or because they can't stand the idea of working for someone else but also can't or won't start their own business. The things that all these groups have in common, though, is that they're generally frighteningly intelligent, that they're functional enough to do deliberate practice (those who don't lose their bankroll and stop playing), and that they've generally been at this for years. At 1/2 you can expect to make about $10 / hour, and it goes up from there in a way that is slower than linear as the stakes increase, because the players get better. At 50/100, an amazing player with a $500k bankroll might make about $50 / hour. I do hear that this stops being true at extremely high stakes, like $4000/$8000, where compulsive gamblers become more frequent again (relative to 50/100, the players are still far better than you'd see at a 1/2 or even a 10/20 table). But if you want to play 4000/8000 games you need a bankroll in the ballpark of $10-20M, and also there aren't that many such games. For reference, I capped out playing 2/5 NL, where I made an average of about $12 / hour. Every time I tried to move up to 5/10 I got eaten alive.
  • The hours are weird. Say goodbye to leisure time on your evening, weekends, and holidays. Expect pretty regular all-nighters, because most of your profit will come from those times when you manage to find a good table and just extract money from it for 16 hours straight.
  • It's bad for your mental health. When I was getting started, I imagined that it would be a lifestyle of pitting my mind against others, of earning money by being objectively better at poker than the other professional players. It is in fact nothing like that at all. Your money does not come from other professional players, and in fact if there are more than about 3 professional players at a table of 10, you should leave and find another table, because even if you are quite good, the professional players just don't make frequent enough or large enough mistakes that exploiting their mistakes will make you much money. No, you make your money by identifying which tables contain (in the best case) drunk tourists or (in a more typical case) compulsive gamblers pissing away money that they managed to beg, borrow, or steal in a desperate attempt to "make back their losses". It is absolutely soul sucking to realize that your lifestyle is funded by exploiting gambling addicts, and that if you find yourself at a table without any people destroying their lives it means you're at the wrong table.

In summary, -2/10 do not recommend.

For the record, this isn't out of line with the rest of the attached stories. Thanks for sharing!

Great post.

I played poker semi-seriously for a while (mostly competitive bar poker leagues, but a little bit at the casino). I became good enough that I could probably be a winning player at 1/2, but I realized I'd have to study a lot more than I wanted to for a hobby to win at higher tables. And yeah, everything I heard and saw from actual professional poker players made it obvious that this was a "job" of last resort and would kill any actual enjoyment I got out of the game.

How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes? Grind for 200,000 hours? Or do they just have to get lucky and get it all from a few super whales?

Anyway I appreciate the numbers. I also dabbled in poker for a while, and while I didn't know the exact numbers, I came to the same conclusion. It's just not worth it, making low amounts of money in exchange for such wild swings and very long grinding sessions. It also kind of made me feel like a parasite taking advantage of gambling addicts. I understand it was a lot better in the early days though, when online Texas Hold'em first became popular and lots of people were playing without much knowledge.

Staking is a pretty frequent phenomenon where people will essentially commit a bankroll to a great player in exchange for a cut of winnings, though even that circles back to 'the hourly is pretty terrible' since even if you're winning 2k an hour, if you've committed 90% of your profits to the person who's staked you you end up in the same hole.

I've mostly seen that in the context of tournaments, though. Someone buys your entry fee, in return for a cut of your winnings. It's sort of an insurance system, to spread out the variance. Giving someone $20 million to play online at a higher stakes than they normally play is... I don't know, that sounds insane.

$20 million would be a bit insane but I definitely know of staking arrangements for Online balances.

How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes?

They don't. The people playing those games are not professional poker players choosing that particular game because they've done the math and established that playing that game is Kelly optimal. They're compulsive gamblers who are good at poker and like high-stakes bets. Making things more complicated is that you have people like Phil Ivey who are both very good poker players that have a massive edge in terms of skill, and are also compulsive gamblers.

As a side note, if you look at the most successful poker players you're going to see cases where luck played a substantial part in their success (i.e. they made Kelly overbets, and got lucky and won those bets). Asking how to be successful at that level is like asking how to be successful at playing the lottery.

Also the amount of truly great Poker Players who died broke and/or are in large amounts of debt due to their general degeneracy is a pretty large number. Tom Dwan one of the best to ever do it, but in huge debt etcetera.

First and foremost, the world simply isn't fair and doesn't allot ability points to people like they are D&D characters. We all see this clearly with individuals, some people didn't get strength, wisdom, intelligence, charisma, dexterity, or constitution. Others are blessed with all of the above. The same is true with groups, where there simply is no guarantee of equality, and certainly no guarantee that groups with similar averages will have identical distributions. While the greater male variability hypothesis is hard to prove to a certain standard, it's also just obvious in the world around you to a lower standard; there are more male chess champions or more male hobos. If you perceive the right-tail of excellence to be dominated by men, the simplest, most obvious answer is that there are simply more men that are truly excellent than women. If you generally perceive men to be more intelligent, the simplest answer is that you don't interact with or think about the left side of the curve much, so it doesn't impact your perception much; within the group that's good enough to hold respectable PMC jobs, it's entirely plausible that the average man is just more competent.

That said, if you don't encounter any women that stack up, yeah, this might be a bias thing creeping in. When I think of my smart female friends, I don't actually have to make any adjustments to a mental model where I think that they must be good at something else, they're just plain smart. They comprehend things quickly, are capable at math, chemistry, and immunology, perform well in roles that demand highly technical expertise, and so on. They may have different interests and are certainly less inclined towards the male-typical cataloguing/collecting approach to knowledge, but they're plenty smart conceptually and have different styles of insight into problems. There isn't some obvious, generalizable horsepower difference between the sexes, just different shaped, mostly overlapping curves.

Have you ever read Madeline L'Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time)?

There's a woman I know who went to MIT, worked on Science for a national laboratory, raised five children, sings in a delightful acapella choir, is choir director at a Byzantine style church, and runs things like pierogi baking events and Ukranian egg decorating. Her children are all interesting people I also enjoy. She's smart, sure enough, but what really stands out about her is that she's warm, kind, and generally a delight to be around. She wouldn't be better or smarter if she had done slightly more math or science at the expense of everything else.

I'm not sure what to call this archetype. (edit: I think the old term was "pillar of the community") That's the kind of person Mrs. Murry in L'Engle's novels is. It's one of the archetypal roles upholding our current civilization.

The future will run out of niches for all but a very small handful of math wizzes and wordcels long before it runs out of room for the smart, warm, sciency mother.

There’s a long discussion downthread on the possibility/desirability of a truce between Ukraine and Russia. Moral considerations aside, a large number of commentators thought that it would be foolish to sue for peace under pretty much any circumstances because Putin wouldn’t keep to it.

It seems to me that refocusing efforts towards fortifying at/near the current de facto borders would change the calculus by making it much more painful to break a peace. I’m thinking especially wide-ranging minefields. As I understand it, this has made it quite difficult for Ukrainians to advance, could the same be made to work in reverse? And if so, how practical would it be to build up such defences in the current climate with current levels of international assistance?

WTF are the Ukrainians fighting for? To speak a very slightly different language and pay in funny money rather than funny money? This whole thing is like the Canadians (the actual ones) resisting the Americans...why?

  • -16

Because Ukraine wants to prop up its economy at the expense of German taxpayers, not prop up the Moscow economy at its expense.

Why would the Americans resist the Canadians if the situation was reversed?

...what?

You seem to present an argument that Ukrainians do not have a good reason to fight, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of Russia is not meaningfully different from their current existence. Ignoring for the moment the accuracy of that, you compare this to Canadians resisting Americans, this seems to imply you think such a Canadian resistance is similarly wanting for a reason, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of America would not be meaningfully different. Of course, if this is true, then in theory if the role was reversed, and Canada was to attack America, since the same conditions must necessarily be reciprocal with regards to culture/governance, it would seem America would also lack a good reason to fight.

That is, your argument, as best as I can tell, seems fully reversable for any two nations to which it was applicable. Russians would be similarly foolish for fighting against Ukrainian rule, etc.

What? I thought it was a simple question. If Canada decided it wanted the state Maine or Michigan for itself, would you be asking "WTF are Americans fighting for?"?

Michigan could take Canada 10/10

If you want to burn down the District of Criminals, do it yourselves this time. No need to involve the Canadians. Plus an all-American DC fire would probably have better music.

That's not what I'm asking about.

The problem is with the current Canadian regime it’s basically wtf would be different? Maine might actually do better as Canadian it would probably become more developed since Americans like to move to warm weather and Canadians can’t. Politically the US/Canada are very similar. The only big difference is Canada is more socialists largely because they don’t have large non-European low IQ populations.

Many wouldn't, and this number is only going to continue going down the more self-hating colonizer ideology sweeps the nation.

As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country? A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country. Republicans say 68 - 25 percent and independents say 57 - 36 percent they would stay and fight, while Democrats say 52 - 40 percent they would leave the country.

They're fighting to not be genocided

Because it's far more appealing to join the western sphere of influence than to remain in Russia's. NATO and the EU offer Ukraine a powerful security guarantee, prosperity and liberty.

A very specific sort of globohomo prosperity and liberty.

I'll bite - in what sense exactly can Russia can considered to be more prosperous than the United States? Please, something more specific and measurable than 'globohomo'.

Paid vacation time and holidays also maternity leave.

Fair enough, though the EU minimum for maternity leave is higher than Russia's.

Asking for US examples and then pointing to the EU is moving the goalpost.

The US is stupidly rich by any metric. Ukraine would gladly accept being US rich.

What does Russia have to offer in return? Dominance by Moscow?

Say what you will about globohomo, you're probably gonna have a fatter wallet by joining it over not.

As opposed to dominance by DC / EU? Isn't that what the money is for, to distract from the globohomo?

Would you prefer to be dominated by Russia or DC?

To be Poland versus being Belarus.

To be Poland is part of the plan. Putin has said there's no objection to Galicia & Volyn returning to Poland.

Poland is on current trajectory expected to be richer than the UK by 2030. Sort of something a lot of Ukraine would like to be.

If he had the chance he’d take it all. Obviously he’d be willing to concede on Galicia but I don’t think there’s a hard brake on his territorial ambitions at a specific point, he does appear to be an ideological imperialist at least to some extent.

Would he also concede on Transcarpathia returning to Hungary and Bukovina back to Romania?

I read it as Putin would like to take Galicia and subjugate the Ukrainian Greek Catholics like Chechen Muslims, but he’s not willing to fight for it in any way.

One way to solve this without mine fields would be if NATO would accept Ukraine as a member conditional on them signing a peace deal. I think from a humanitarian point of view, this would be a much better outcome than continue the slaughter for some more few years if one side runs out of soldiers.

I still have yet to see a better proposal than my piss take on how prince Harry should become grand duke of Kiev in order to bring peace.

Fortifications still need men to guard them, they can compliment troops only to a certain extent. The young men are dead, deployed or gone. If the average age of your soldiers is 43 and you have Ukrainian demographics, you're not winning any wars in future because you won't have the soldiers left to fight them.

Furthermore, the Russians aren't stopping until they get the territories they want along with some kind of Finlandization/demilitarization/puppet state (the whole 'Denazification' angle is pretty silly considering Zelensky is Jewish but the meaning shines through). That has been Russia's proclaimed war goal the whole time. Why would they stop and leave the Ukrainians time to recover? The Ukrainians have been fortifying since 2014. They put great effort into fortifying Donbass, which the Russians have slowly been grinding through. Why would the Russians take substantial casualties on these fortifications, push to the point where the Ukrainians are exhausted and even Western media begins to admit that Ukraine is losing the war... and then stop? I suppose Putin might have a moment of weakness and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory but this is a very slim hope.

Ultimately, there's no cheat code to win in war. If you have considerably less manpower, considerably less firepower and the enemy is a highly determined nuclear superpower, then you just lose. It's possible albeit difficult to breach fortifications if you have long-range fires, air superiority, specialized demining equipment... in short if you have an advanced, comprehensive military-industrial base. There's no way to win without being comprehensively stronger. Mines are not a secret superweapon, it's just that the Russians have more of them just like they have more of nearly everything - artillery, tanks, helicopters, aircraft, long-range missiles, drones and men.

All Ukraine had and all they have is a bunch of choices about how they lose.

Every military effort the Ukrainian government has exerted since 2014 had the justification that no land is to be surrendered to the Moskal under any condition. Constructing elaborate defenses, while cheaper than preparing for offense, still costs money, and every dollar and euro spent on such is one not spent on preparing another counteroffensive which is totally going to succeed, unlike the latest one, and thus sends the rather obvious political message that the government is prepared to de facto surrender land to the Moskal. Obviously the government is reluctant to send such signals, as continued Western aid is dependent on their overt willingness to bleed the Moskal in a protracted war, no matter the cost in lives to their citizenry, if it can even be called such.

I'm sure this isn't without precedent, for example, when the South Korean regime started building defenses in the DMZ after the war, I'm sure there were at least some hardliners openly grumbling about it and promoting an offensive war instead to smoke out the Red menace for good, to the extent a free press even existed, which I imagine was rather limited. And I'm also sure the construction of the Maginot Line wasn't universally popular in France either.

One of the issues would be you can’t spend to rebuild Ukraine until you have a permement war ending. That has very real costs. Why spend $300 billion in infrastructure if a lot of it is destroyed when Russia builds up missile supplies. It’s possible Ukraine could harden up some and make defending easier.

If we have a war thread the Houthi Red Sea stuff has a few interesting considerations https://twitter.com/aristos_revenge/status/1736991083471454681?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

  1. The US Navy is using million dollar missiles to shoot down cheap drones. As the world changes this will not be affordable in a bigger war. The Ukraine war etc seems to be giving the US military a chance to figure out the technologies of the next war. I am sure out attack drones will be fine but how we defend drones needs to be learned.

  2. The thread above indicates that Suez revenue is 30% of Egypts revenue of $10 billion. I guess the west could write them a check but Egypt has a few stressors going on right now and this is a lot of money to them.

  3. No one has talked about this that I know of but I’ve always been like wtf are we supporting the Saudis doing their stuff in Yemen. I now support them. The Houthi’s probably have some issues doing Irans bidding here because western support against them is no doubt going to increase.

The missile costs thing is irrelevant and not even worth discussing since in an existential scenario they could glass Yemen and be done with it. The many-million-dollar missiles are an act of mercy by a rich country, not a necessity.

It’s not worth discussing in terms of the Houthis. It is an issue in a wider war where our weapon systems now seem to have a big vulnerability.

The US still has pretty extensive domestic manufacturing capability that could be, in extreme circumstances, retooled to build huge volumes of ‘dumb’ weapons. The pentagon’s big supply chain issues with armaments now are that unlike WW2 you can’t just convert a normal car or industrial material or widget factory to make highly complex smart weapons overnight.

Moral considerations aside, a large number of commentators thought that it would be foolish to sue for peace under pretty much any circumstances because Putin wouldn’t keep to it.

People believe what they want to believe - warmongers like to believe war is inevitable because it relieves them from having to seek peace. So now any number of Ukrainians and Russians can be fed into meatgrinders because there's no alternative.

Are you saying that people who distrust Putin are the real warmongers?

Distrust is not what is at issue here. Distrusting Putin is rational. Claiming to be able to read his mind and predict what he might do in five years is not rational.

You can't predict what he'll do, but you can be pretty sure that any promise he makes is not worth the paper it's written on.

Oh, so the war must continue until either every Ukrainian or every Russian is dead. That's what I'm getting here, unless you want to take the opportunity to elaborate.

Not what I've said at all. I haven't commented on the war. The consequence of making any peace deal with a sociopath like Putin is that you have to prepare with strong defenses for his next attack.

So you're saying that even if a peace deal is reached, Putin is definitely, 100% going to attack again? Excuse me, but that sounds a lot like assuming that this war is inevitable.

You seem very determined to read what you want to read, instead of what I've actually written. That's not how things are supposed to go on The Motte.

More comments

Since you say "people", doesn't that mean that it's equally true that peaceniks like to believe the enemy is reasonable because it relieves them from having to continue war?

Yes, I think it's true that peaceniks don't like war and seek to end wars.

It’s not a bad idea, but it isn’t great either. Putting aside whether or not Ukraine would be willing to permanently lose that land that Russia has taken, The problem is that in modern warfare the offence is a lot more powerful than the defence. Fortifications, such as minefields, create delays and induce costs on the attacker, but they can’t really stop a concentrated, coordinated, and well planned attack. A truce would also allow Russia to restart the conflict at a time and place of their choosing. Fortifying a 600 mile front is far more difficult than breaking through that front on a ten mile frontage.

A truce would also give Ukraine time to lick its wounds and prepare, but the same is true of Russia - and Russia’s army has a lot more low hanging fruit to grasp than Ukraine’s, so a pause would be more valuable for them.

What all this amounts to is that IMO resumption of hostilities is highly likely, minefields or no, but at a great disadvantage to Ukraine compared to the current situation.

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for, I hadn’t considered offence vs defence asymmetries in this way. Only question is why the Russian defences seem to have held up so well against the Ukrainians given that it’s the same problem in reverse. Ukrainian assault wasn’t sufficiently concentrated, coordinated, and well planned? Or the power disparity is just too big?

A bit of everything I'd say. Concentration of force is probably the most difficult thing for Ukraine right now; They don't have access to the quantity of troops that Russia has. They make up for the disparity with better morale, leadership, and training (in that order) but they are close to fully committed, and if they concentrate for an attack they risk a counterattack on a weaker part of the line. Planning isn't something that Ukraine is bad at by any means, but creating and executing a complex plan is far more difficult when you are actively maneuvering against an enemy which is continuously disrupting your plans and demanding of your resources to stop their plans. Ukraine also doesn't have access to all the combined arms tools that you would ideally want to launch a successful offensive - air cover, precision missiles, massive weight of artillery fire - tools which are not really as important to the defense.

This is why it's so advantageous to choose the time and the place of hostilities. If there is a truce, Russia can take it's sweet time rebuilding it's stockpiles, rebuilding a professional army (the sort you would need to push an offensive), making complex plans and organizing them and drilling their soldiers, and then restart the war when they are good and ready. Ideally with a spot of deception to prevent Ukraine from knowing when and where they will strike. Russia is currently incapable of mounting complex offensive operations, and I'm sure the Ukrainians would like to keep it that way.

People frequently bring up “peace in our time” as if it was the only lesson learned from history when it comes to aggressive policy.

Alfred the Great fought the Danes roughly to a draw and paid them in part to leave. He then fortified Wessex so that when the Danes broke the peace Wessex was in a much better situation to repel the Danes.

That is, suing for peace can be the right play if it permits you to change the calculus of war. If you can delay war to a time when you are relatively better prepared, then do so. Perhaps it encourages more aggression (the lesson of Chamberlain) but if the time is used well it also increases the odds of success (the lesson of Alfred).

The UK was not ready for war in 1938 either. Those who bring up the example are simply bloodthirsty warmongers.

Those who bring up the example are simply bloodthirsty warmongers.

Too antagonistic, don't post like this please.

Is it rational for a person with tight resources and bottom-tier executive function to pursue tertiary education before employment? If not, is it appropriate to try to nudge them to reconsider? Is What Bad Students Know that Good Economists Don't a good summary of the issue to share; or is there a better, more up-to-date one? Or would trying to meta-educate them just be toxic “other-optimizing”, and it's better to just support their decision and encourage them to study hard?

What is the future of Israel?

Progressive leftists these days are Anti-Israel, and this sentiment is only likely more to spread. With the South Africa apartheid comparison looming, Im guessing that Israel will eventually be sanctioned by the United States and that this is an unavoidable outcome. Dont believe me? The Anti-Israel sentiment on the internet has been astounding, and even once the Gaza war flares down, there will always possibility be a flare up in violence in the West Bank. If I had to guess, in 20 years, a progressive candidate will be either talking or enacting sanctions against Israel.

So lets go into how Israel will change in the future, and what it might possibly do.

Israeli demographics are interesting. Some background. Israel is principally divided into two groups of Jews. Ashkenazi(European) and Mizrachi(Middle Eastern). About half of Israeli Jews are of Ashkenazi descent, while the other half is Mizarahi. There is significant intermarriage, so the lines are now blurred. Israel is also split along religious lines, with around 13% of israeli Jews being Ultra Orthodox, with the remainder being either secular or traditional. Israel birthrates are high. The average birthrate per woman is 3 in Israel, and its trending upwards. Thats the highest in the Western world. Its trending upwards in all demographics, except the Ultra-Orthodox, whose birthrate has trended downwards to 6.8-6.6 kids per woman.

By 2050, a third of Israeli Jews will be Ultra-Orthodox, up from the 13% they are now. By some estimates, by 2060 they will make up half of Israeli Jews.

Israeli Ultra-Orthodox primarily vote for United Torah Judaism, a union of Haredi Degel HaTorah and Hasidic Agudat Israel. A majority of Israeli ultra orthodox are Ashkenazi, but there is a minority that is Mizrahi. The Mizrahi minority votes for Shas. Shas usually gets more seats than United Torah Judaism, why? Because many Shas voters arent ultra orthodox, but rather traditional and religious Mizrahi Jews. Shas functions as a Mizrahi Jew interest party. Mizrahi Jews have tended to be more religious on average than Ashkenazi. Saying all this, there is actually a third group of "Ultra Orthodox" who are growing rapidly.

They are called Chardal. Chardal are ultra orthodox who are religious zionist. Religious Zionism is the ideology that believes all of the West Bank should be under Israeli control, they are big in the Israeli settler movement. Traditionally, Ultra Orthodox Jews are Non Zionist, not believing in a Jewish state or being maximalist in regards to territory. While this is still true for United Torah Judaism, it is no longer true for Shas, which is now Zionist.

Chardal are the most right wing. Shas is firmly right wing. United Torah judaism is middle of the road, and is open to siding with the left and center, depending on the Rabbis who lead them opinion.

The reason I make such a big point about Ultra Orthodox, is that they are the future of Israel. Israel will only get more religious, and more right wing. Even normal non ultra orthodox right wing voters, have more children then secular leftists.

Lets say the Israel Palestinian conflict remains unsolved in 20 years. Israel is likely to face economic sanctions, in the vein of either South Africa or Russia. Based off demographics, Im skeptical that sanctions will convince a religious and right population to change course. Israel is a populist ethnic democracy, its govt is responsive to its voter base, and I dont think that will change.

In 20 years, we can expect a multitude of geopolitical changes. First, oil's importance in the world economy will decline. The power of Gulf Arab states will be lessened. Two, I think the US and China will decouple even more so economically, in an effort to prevent Chinas rise. I do not think it will work. China has a decreasing population, but the unknown factor is AI. Advances in AI are likely to hit the upper middle technological class hardest and reduce amount of jobs. I believe China will whether the shrinkage of its population, decently in my opinion. There will be pain, but not instability. Three, Russia is unlikely to get unsanctioned by the West. Russia invading Ukraine was a no go for Europe and America. Conquering territory has made Russia a pariah for a generation, unless they give it back, which they wont, the economic sanctions on Russia will likely not dissipate. Russia will also, not collapse. The Russian economy had mostly survived fine under sanctions with some pain, and most corporations that were stationed there left their infrastructure there. That infrastructure is being run, and it seems most Russian citizens(or at least in Moscow and St petersburg) have access to most of the same goods that they had before, with only some shortages.

My bet is, that if Israel is sanctioned in 20 years, it will reorient to China and Russia as major trade partners and allies. China is already one of Israels biggest trade partners. They mostly dont care about human rights, and domestic political considerations for humanitarian foreign policy are basically non existent. Russia will be similar. Both economies will likely be decoupled from America in 20 years, to some degree or another.

Israel is an entirely export and manufacturing driven economy, with little raw resources. The Ultra-Orthodox and Right wing sentiment(as in Anti-Two state solution sentiment) is growing. If israel is sanctioned by the West, it is likely Israel would expropriate the infrastructure that globalized trade and companies have left in it to survive. Israel will also likely start to receive most of its raw materials from Russia, and subsidiary and secondary materials for manufacturing from China or India.

The middle east with the decline of oil, will be a poor and war torn place...more so than it is already. Climate change will only make things worse and more unlivable. What does this mean for Israel?

Lets look at the middle east. Egypt is apparently, not doing well economic wise even though its indicators say its growing. Dictator El Sisi has favored military owned businesses to push out private industry. There is increased spending on inefficient infrastructure projects like the new capital. Industrial and agricultural capacities in Egypt are inefficient relative to population. With the construction of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance dam, Egypt's nile river is threatened with significantly decreased water flow. This will impact industrial and agricultural capacity further and could lead to war with Ethiopia, which would weaken Egypt.

Lebanon is suffering from chronic brain drain and corruption. The Lebanese Syrian and Palestinian populations of refugees makes up almost 2 million people out of 5.6 million. That is a third of the country. Syria is a failed state that will not be able to attract industry in the future, as it will take some time to recover from the Civil War. Jordan is the only economy of the Levant Arab states doing somewhat well. And it is having a hard time managing its Syrian refugee population, which is numerous

Here is their relevance to Israel's future.

If Israel is sanctioned by the West, I believe Israel will expel the Palestinians in Areas A and B into Jordan. Thats currently 3 million people, and it will expand into more.

None of Israels neighbors are doing well economically. Corruption, climate change, internal strife and refugees make them more prone to inefficient war machines and economies.

If Israel expels the Palestinians, there will be a regional war. Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, the countries bordering Israel, will likely attack in some capacity. Israel will likely win, for a variety of reasons. It is a major arms manufacturer, being number 9 in the world and mostly self sufficient in terms of arms and missiles and tanks and drones, with it mainly being reliant on United States for aircraft parts.

The Levant Arab states will not commit to many troops to try to attack Israel for fear of nuclear weapons that Israel has. There will be mostly token forces to fight Israel to not risk Israel using a nuclear bomb.

I cant help but feel while my analysis is detailed and somewhat knowledgeable, that it is lacking somehow. Could anyone offer their insight?

oh it's this guy again

Don't make these kind of comments.

While the SJWs are generally very vocal in taking the side of Palestine, they are not representative of the overall US voters. In a decade, that cause might not be en vogue any more.

As others have pointed out, being Ultra-Orthodox is not inherited at 100%.

Finally, you can't expel people unless there is a country willing to take them, which Israel's neighbors clearly are not.

I find it unlikely the US, or even other NATO countries, would ever actually sanction Israel. However, for the sake of argument, lets say something does happen that reduced economic and political ties between the West and Israel. While this may lead to increased ties with Russia or China, the more likely result would be significant growth in Israel's already substantial relationship with India.

As of 2022, India is Israel's largest client for military equipment sales, and Israel is India's second-largest supplier of military equipment after Russia;[5] approximately 42.1% of all Israeli arms exports are received by India.[6] From 1999 to 2009, military business between the two countries was worth around US$9 billion,[7] and their strategic ties extend to joint military training as well as intelligence-sharing on the activity of various terrorist groups.[8][9]

As of 2019, India is Israel's third-largest Asian trade partner and tenth-largest overall trade partner — bilateral trade, excluding military sales, stands at around US$6.3 billion.[10] Relations were further expanded under Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, with India abstaining from voting against Israel in several United Nations resolutions.[11] As of 2015, both countries are negotiating an extensive bilateral free-trade agreement, focusing on areas such as information technology, biotechnology, and agriculture.

Russia has at least lukewarm relationships with Hamas, so I wouldn't be so sure about a russo-israeli alliance. Putin makes mouth noises about supporting Israel but it could really go either way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Hamas_relations

The way I see it, the Russians pay lip service to the Palestinians but dont really care. The Israelis are the strongest power in the Levant, and Russia is hungry for allies and influence. Its why they cozy up to Iran.

Russia also lacks high tech and educated human capital. I could see the Israelis eventually becoming major aid to the Russians in terms of upgrading military tech, and high tech

I think you’re leaving out a very important factor when discussing the rise of the ultra-orthodox- they don’t work. Having a third and then half of your population on welfare is a very bad thing and Israel will hit economic problems that way fast. And Russia and China might be happy to sell them things, but they’re not going to issue gigantic loans or big cash handouts.

While I am not sure about the main body of your argument, I think that you are incredibly wrong on the China AI prediction and drastically wrong on the oil prediction. I've got skin in the game and am quite long on oil futures, specifically exploration and drilling. Whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are currently the lifeblood of civilization and we do not have any appreciable replacements - even if it could conceivably replace energy needs, which it won't, especially given the modernization, buildout and investment in Mexico, India, and a growing second world, hydrocarbons are used to make goddamn everything from aspirin to solar panels. The current dip in oil prices and subsequent resurgence of unsteadiness in the ME is caused more by US fracking than anything else, making them energy-independent and less interested in ME politics as a result. The smarter players in the ME know this and have tried their best to diversify their economies with mixed results, or alternatively are looking to allow countries to purchase oil in currencies other than USD (it was barely covered in the news but the UAE agreed to let China purchase oil with RMB recently).

China is already suffering because of a massive deficit in professional or service jobs. AI will make that worse. It's not an instability problem - the Party can levy pretty much everything under the sun to make sure they stay in power - but their internal governance, domestic market and stock market is quite weak and will take at least six to eight years to recover, let alone supercede their growth for the last decade. Their foreign policy is the wild card: it depends entirely on BRICS and how that shakes out. BRICS is considered a joke or a threat depending on who you talk to, the truth is probably somewhere in between. None of the BRICS nation really trust or like each other, they just want to form an alternative non-American power bloc in case America decides they don't like them all that much one day after a change in presidency.

I also think that progressive/liberal blue America is an opposition based party. They are anti-Israel because team Red is nominally pro-Israel and support for Israel has been the unstated government line for decades. Given that Team Blue is more about stomping Team Red into the dirt and laughing as they die of opioids and despair than it is about anything else, I think that their care-o-meter about Israel is entirely limited to the extent that Team Red is for it.

Thank you for this. Economics is not my forte, I should have done more research before I spoke.

So oil will remain important in the middle east? What do you see as the benefit or demerit to China and Russia allying with the Israelis? The Israelis are the strongest power in the Levant.

I think you've got this very wrong. US foreign policy towards Israel won't change at all. Not one bit. Anti-Israel sentiment periodically rises, the pro-Hamas/pr-Palestinian protest cycle is very old indeed - decades and decades old. Did the previous protest cycles change US foreign policy towards Israel? No.

US Pro-Israel sentiment has usually been very strong. When has it been ever as weak as it currently is?

Plus the US is not currently reliant on foreign sources of oil. There isnt much reason for the US to support Israel

I could be convinced if you could show me 40 years of polling results on Israel WRT youth sentiment, it'd be better by far if you could dive into how those numbers changed during times of conflict.

The US has never been Israel's ally because of oil, Israel is important because it's part of our containment strategy towards Iran (among other things).

This is like suggesting birth control won't change sex patterns, the genie is out baby. Re-check the affinity to Israel by age group

It doesn't matter, though. Young people don't vote. Who knows what their opinions will be when they're settled and married with kids and regularly voting.

Even if public opinion was vastly anti-Israel, that still wouldn't change anything - during the Iraq war the public was massively anti-war, that changed absolutely nothing. The Senate and the Executive are where foreign policy outcomes live, and those gears take a long, long time to turn. US foreign policy is remarkably stable from administration to administration, and this is partly by design. The people in charge know that in a few more months there'll be something else for young people to march around yelling about, perhaps a white cop will kill a black guy again or something...but something will take its place, and the youth will be bored of screaming about a country they can't point to on a map once The New Thing catches their eye. It just doesn't matter.

Well no, sometimes some things do matter.

Sure, I just don't see it in this case. Support for Palestinian terrorism has been a perennial hobby among young leftists - this most recent outpouring of support is nothing new. In the '60s and '70s many leftist groups had much stronger ties to Palestinian terrorism - Baader Meinhof gang even went down to train with them. In the end it all fizzled out, and I see no reason a lesser wave that doesn't involve the material commitment seen in prior decades won't also fizzle out.

Israel is an incredibly important ally of the US, they could glass Gaza and we'd still support them - perhaps with a wrap on the knuckles, but no more than that.

If we are following demographics that closely ... once they have shifted in Israel won't the US will be a predominantly Mormon and Quaker country?

I have strong doubts about demographics as destiny. I don't think these religious communities with high birth rates are always all that great about holding onto all their kids.

There is also probably an effect over time that as these wayward kids bleedoff into the mainstream they create enclaves of ex-[minority religions], and it becomes even easier for future wayward kids to leave.

Mormon TFR is already dropping. Amish TFR is huge and seems more stable, but from such a low starting point it'll still be a couple centuries before they overtake the rest of the US even if outconversion is negligible and nothing changes.

What's the Malthusian limit on arable land owned by Amish communities? How often do they buy more?

I've wondered this myself! The 19th and much of the 20th century was marked by everybody and their uncle fleeing the job of "farmer", as productivity increases caused food prices (relative to labor and land) to plummet faster than the increase. If you're Amish and you can't even take advantage of the mechanization component of that productivity increase, how do you keep up? They're apparently opted out of the Social Security system, and they've opted out of a lot of the costs and luxuries of modernity, but they still pay property taxes.

Probably the Hanania argument. Which I think I’ve put out there too but he put it together better.

Jews are 17% of US billionaires, 33% of Nobels, 15/20 of the largest donors in the 2020 election, 7.5% of Senate/House, current POTUS (joking about Blinken), the vice first-man, 2/7 of the Supreme Court.

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-great-jewish-realignment-of-2023

Quoting GOT is a bit midtwit but “Power is Power”. Jews got it. Bunch of Ivy League kids not necessarily power - maybe some day.

The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.

Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.

I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.

Charitably, the media isn't supposed to be giving advice on how best to end international conflicts, and should restrict itself to reporting the facts of the situation. If no discussion of unconditional surrender has occurred between Israel and Hamas, then there's no reason to bring it up.

But you, me, and my neighbor's 4-year-old daughter know the real reason the media is funneling footage of "humanitarian disasters" into American homes. Israel is the neocon darling and American Middle Eastern foothold oppressing the religion of peace, and Israel (and, by proxy, the American military) must be made to suffer for its transgressions. It's the same playbook that Walter Cronkite and his ilk used to make the Vietnam War lose all popular support. The military is one of the few institutions that the left has never completely captured, and so it seeks to undermine and rally public opinion against Israel.

The left loses if Hamas is publicly humiliated by Israel, which is what an "unconditional surrender" amounts to. Israel losing also weakens the United States military significantly, and while I doubt anyone in the media seriously thinks Israel will lose to Hamas, they still stand to gain if Israel loses in the court of public opinion.

And if they did surrender, then what? Likud is dedicated to preventing a Palestinian state and certainly accept one state solution with full voting rights for all palestinians. Palestinians were fighting with Israel back before Hamas even existed.

There is evidence that Israel is “punishing” the civilian population, which is a war crime. The party that is morally responsible for the misconduct is the only party that should be asked to stop. The US has influence over Israel, but has zero influence over Hamas. It’s brought up that Hamas has tunnels under buildings, and this is to explain Israeli actions, but saying “Hamas should surrender” because of potential Israeli war crimes would be a bad precedent for human rights. Consider a Russian and Ukrainian war where Russia targets civilian homes in Kyiv because they could be housing reserve troops. Would you expect the media to bring up the option that “the Kyiv Regime can surrender to avoid being war crime’d”?

(Just in the past couple weeks we saw Israeli snipers shoot women outside of a Catholic church (leading the Pope to condemn the attack as terrorism) and Israel killing their own hostages, who were walking outside waving a white flag without a shirt. This last one is the strongest evidence we have of Israeli misconduct / war crimes. What is the probability that they accidentally shot these men, versus that they shoot men in most situations where they come across young men?)

who were walking outside waving a white flag without a shirt.

Wasn't this just recently part of an ambush in the area? Mentioning it makes me think you are uniformed or trolling.

That’s interesting, because you mentioning that makes me think you are either uninformed or shilling. It’s a densely populated city, you don’t get to spray and pray because on a different day in a nearby area your soldiers were allegedly fired upon. That justifies killing every male in every location where you have been shot. And there are a lot of locations like this, all over Gaza.

We are talking about a specific false flag tactic though. When you're country's military consistently uses underhanded tactics its going to set the opposing military on edge, which will lead to such things.

People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.

In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.

Bad metaphor. In this case you're not saving the 'patient' getting the chemo, you're saving their neighbor.

If your cancer could be cured by giving your neighbor chemotherapy, maybe you could ask for their consent to undergo it to help you, or maybe you could pay them.

If you broke into their house with a gun and abducted them to get chemo tied down in a basement until you were healthy again, that's not exactly an unalloyed good that everyone should grudgingly endorse as necessary.

Palestinians are also suffering from Hamas, who prefer to divert aid into missiles rather than development.

As is their revealed preference.

You understand this comment reads exactly like something Hitler would say in a speech about Jews, right? I suppose he would use the term parasite, or diseased vermin. Just like not every Jew was a Bolshevik extremist (see: Winston Churchill’s comments), not every Palestinian is a Hamas extremist. Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible. And incidentally, were Britain to treat the Jewish colonizers like this in the 30s and 40s (punishing the collective for hiding terrorists), it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running. Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?

Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible

The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing. If on my way to work I step on some ants and crush them to death I'm not punishing them, they are just collective damage that I don't care about in pursuit of my goal (for me getting to work, for Israel the eradication of Hamas).

it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running

Zionism has a long and storied history going back to Theodor Herzl since the time of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. The British promised the Jewish community a home in Palestine in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration (even ignoring the fact that simultaneously they had promised the land to Hussein bin Ali, king of Hejaz, an Arab leader, for his support vs the Ottomans as well as secretly dividing the exact same land between themselves and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but Perfidious Albion is like that; and of course after WWI when it came time to make good on their contradictory promises the Sykes-Picot Agreement won out and the British kept the land for themselves, giving it to neither Jew nor Arab), not just the 30s and 40s.

Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?

Not initially no, you start light and ramp up until the terrorism stops. They should have been as severe as needed to stop the violence and no more. Same with Hamas, Israel has already tried all sorts of lighter punishments to improve Hamas's behaviour but so far they haven't worked.

The idea that it's ok to kill thousands of innocent people so long as you were indifferent to killing them instead of wanting to kill them, is exactly why everyone needs to get the fuck away from virtue ethics before it does any more harm.

This is bog-standard international law that's been around for ages. One cannot intentionally kill civilians but attacks that incidentally kill civilians are permissible so long as the attack is intended to achieve a significant military goal.

Perhaps it's wrong, but if it is wrong, the problem is much deeper than virtue ethics.

Sure, but I think we were talking about morality and what we think Israel should do, morally speaking. Not what the law allows or doesn't. There are good reasons for those to be different things.

A subset of X attacks Y. Y responds in part to deter future attacks by X. Y kills some of X accidentally (including those uninvolved in the attack). Z claims “that’s collective punishment.” Y responds I am not trying to collective punish X; the only way to eliminate the capacity of X to attack Y is this attack. Otherwise, you effectively give X a deadly analog to the heckler’s veto.

Not sure why virtue ethics requires this. Seems like you can also get there using utilitarian reasoning.

That's an ok argument for why Israels actions are ok. It's just not the argument I was responding to:

The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing.

I think that’s the exact argument.

This reasoning essentially amounts to "Hitler treated Jews like enemies. So we should never treat anyone like enemies."

Whether a comparison to disease is appropriate is true or false on the object level; a blanket condemnation makes no sense. You're also glossing over the difference between comparing an ethnic group to a disease, and comparing a military/terrorist oprganization to a disease.

If Israel wanted to punish Palestinians ‘as a collective’, they’d have killed many more of them. Gaza is very small, a few targeted strikes could kill 50,000 civilians a week, maybe even in a night. We know the kind of casualty counts real indiscriminate bombing attacks on civilian targets produce, and they’re simply not evident in this conflict.

It’s hard not to think the Palestinians are making the right choice given their political/tribal framework.

After all, is Razib not always telling us that almost all of us modern humans are the result of a thousand-person population bottleneck 100,000 years ago or whatever? From the perspective of tribal survival, a few highly fecund people surviving while preserving their identity is preferable to the whole population assimilating into global homogenization. Jews ourselves did this, it would have been easier at many points to assimilate, but it took until the 18th century for most of us to start (and even then, the future of the Jewish people is reliant on those who refused to do so), so one can only be so angry at the Arabs for doing the same.

The issue is more that the Palestinians know that Israel cannot fully eradicate them for political reasons, and therefore that from a game theoretical perspective, they only need to refuse to surrender for long enough that the ‘international community’ ie United States tells the Israelis to knock it off. Arguably nobody has done more to make actual genocide less internationally acceptable than Jews, so again this is largely a problem of our own making.

The final issue is that unlike in other tribal post-colonial populations, there is no group of ‘moderates’ who can be trusted to police the Palestinian population. Sure, Israel supported the Islamists against the ‘secular’ Arab-nationalists-with-socialist-characteristics, but the PLO was also a terrorist organization that had no problem killing Israeli civilians and had maximalist aims, so as distasteful as Islamism may be it’s not actually ‘worse’ than the alternative and, crucially, makes Palestinians less sympathetic for Western publics themselves dealing with Islamist terror.

The longstanding goal of Likud has been to find some other Arab nation to govern Palestinian Arabs in areas A and B and in Gaza. But while Israel’s Arab neighbors in Jordan and Egypt have no great fondness for Palestinian militants, they (smartly) choose to blanket refuse to govern the Palestinians, preferring to leave the problem in Israel’s hands.

The Kushner-MBS plan seems to have been (reading between the lines) for the Saudis to take on that duty, granting them the privilege of governing all three primary Islamic holy sites (the Kaaba in Mecca, Mohammed’s tomb in Medina and now Al Aqsa in Jerusalem) in exchange for policing the Palestinians. But that’s delayed now, a big success for Iran, so there are no good options for Israel.

As someone of gentile European descent, I'm descended from assimilated Celts and Germans, who were in turn descended from assimilated Bell Beaker people, who were descended from assimilated early European farmers and so on. Why do you need to keep your identity to survive? The Palestinians themselves were not always Arabs or Muslims.

Of course they could become another people and still reproduce, their lineages would still continue (albeit likely with far lower birthrates). But their identity would arguably be lost, which they seem to care about.

So far you’ve been getting a lot of replies saying that the US can only pressure Israel, but not Hamas. This is false. Hamas is not a leaderless organization, it’s actually very well organized and its leadership is known to all.

The heads of Hamas, those that are parallel to its government rather than military leadership, are situated in Qatar. Their locations are known. They frequently fly out of Qatar, to any place they wish, such as Egypt just recently. They are, of course, war criminals. However, there is literally no effort or any calls to bring any of these men to justice, or any sanctions on Qatar. This is despite providing direct monetary aid to Hamas, as well as the aforementioned sheltering of Hamas leadership.

Qatar is a US ally in the region, the US even has bases there (unlike Israel), the US is one of (if not the) largest importer to Qatar. In other words, the US has a lot of leverage on Qatar, if only anyone wished to use it.

Keep all this in mind when reading all these other replies.

This is false. Hamas is not a leaderless organization, it’s actually very well organized and its leadership is known to all.

Oh surely. I think the interesting factor here is that Hamas doesn't have a monopoly on violence in Gaza. Possibly even by design, Islamic Jihad and other groups have the ability to independently throw a wrench in things. As I recall, those groups (broadly non-Hamas militants) had a decent fraction of the hostages taken.

So even if you did turn the screws on Hamas (via Qatar or otherwise) it doesn't solve Israel's problem. Everyone in the West dreams of some Palestinian leader that has a monopoly on force and hence can negotiate for an end to armed resistance in return for whatever is on offer. In reality, if they tried they might quickly lose their position or their limbs.

Yes, Jihad is the biggest and most well-known not-Hamas in Gaza. There’s also several hamullahs (extended family? Not sure how to translate) with their own militias, and some AQ aligned organization. Other than Jihad, they exist only due to Hamas tolerance - and in any case, they’re all quite killable.

If no Palestinian leader is capable of ruling his people for the better, then I’m quite OK with sending them to a far off land that’s willing to take them for enough money - I don’t think we tried Angola or DRC yet.

I think it depends on context. If Hamas tried to kill/suppress them all as part of a deal with Israel or the US in which they were viewed (rightly/wrongly) as giving up the cause, I strongly suspect they might not fare well.

Could be. Hard to tell. They might have a problem of internal rebellion, anyway, making it mostly a moot exercise.

The US allows and even encourages Qatari relationships with the Taliban, Iran, Hamas and other anti-US groups because it makes for a good meeting place, offers near-unlimited access for US intelligence for wiretaps etc, and is trusted enough by most of those groups. Both Hamas and Qatar are well aware that the former is in the latter because the US tolerates it, and this arrangement works for all three parties. Qatar is a core part of the GCC, but being less hostile to the Iranian axis suits almost everyone, and both the Saudis and the US know that Qatar depends upon Iran not extending its natural gas claim in the main Persian Gulf (which Qatar would be unable to defend itself against) into Qatar’s larger field, which many in Iran would like to claim.

Even granting all of that, it still stands in contradiction to the majority of replies here re: America not being able to influence Hamas, or at least the perception thereof in the protestors’ minds.

It seems we only know how to hand our allies the rope with which to hang us, under the pretense of allowing us to see from a higher vantage point. See also: Pakistan with Osama. Perhaps we do gain from these relationships in some way, but it would seem we are getting the worse end of the bargain, and the relationships will end unfavorably to us in all cases.

People just correctly identify total surrender by any side as impossible and correctly don't consider impossible options.

Also, the US has leverage on Israel and no leverage on a Hamas that's already maximally sanctionned. So only the former's conduct is even up for debate from their point of view.

And those Arab countries that are in the converse situation really don't want to draw any attention to the fact that they're looking the other way.

it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.

Nonsense. The Taliban didn't surrender to overwhelming American might. This isn't how asymmetric warfare works, the lack of a definite end to conflict is the main weapon of the weaker force.

So far Hamasniks have been surrendering just fine. They’re also perfectly capable of dying en-mass. Only their leadership in Qatar remains untouchable to us (Israelis) for now, but hopefully that will change once the hostages are out, or at least accounted for.

Also, the US has leverage on Israel and no leverage on a Hamas that's already maximally sanctionned.

Not at all, Hamas is fully dependent on NGO aid to maintain its rule. There is almost no government in the world that would be easier to smoke out with a US led coalition that does the easy thing of "doing nothing."

This isn't how asymmetric warfare works, the lack of a definite end to conflict is the main weapon of the weaker force.

And hence at second-level, the absence of a power structure that can end the conflict is itself a weapon of asymmetric warfare.

We have diplomatic relations that we could use to pressure Israel into stopping the assault. Israel has a recognized and legitimate power structure with leaders who we can negotiate with and who could change their policy if we convinced them to.

There things are not true of Hamas. It would be nice if they surrendered, but there's no singular leader or group who could command that to happen and be obeyed, and we wouldn't have meaningful diplomatic relations with them if they would.

Speech is usually a consequentialist act designed to achieve a specific outcome.

Remember the story of the madman, who wants to hide his madness and decides to say only true things; after he has stopped 50 people on the street to emphatically tell them that the sky is blue, everyone knows he is mad for sure.

People don't just go around saying every true thing they know just because they're true; they say the things they think will accomplish what they want in the saying.

Saying that you wish Israel would stop is not very likely to end the violence at this point, but there's at least a clear and straightforward causal mechanism by which it might minorly contribute to something like that happening in the future.

Saying that you wish Hamas would surrender (as an American at least) has no clear path by which it could have any effect on the ongoing conflict. If anything, the most likely outcome of people saying such things en masse is that it splits the conversation into 'teams' (arguments as soldiers) over which side should be responsible for ending the conflict, thus taking responsibility away from Israel and weakening the international pressure on them to stop.

Thus, it is reasonably interpreted as a wish for Israel to continue its attacks, since that would be the most straightforward strategic outcome accomplished by insistently pushing that narrative into the public conversation.

That's why people aren't saying it.

I am not American, so cant comment on the exact tone of US media. But perhaps they bought in to the whole "only democracy in the Middle-East" and "most moral army in the would" slogans. After all, Hamas is roundly condemned as a terrorist organization by both sides of the political establishment in the US (and nearly the whole of Europe), so perhaps it doesnt really make sense to make moral appeals to them?

I think the really interesting question here is if Hamas would have anything to gain by an unconditional surrender. While I agree that Israel is likely to win a decisive military victory, I think Hamas so far is winning a slight PR victory and a perhaps even bigger political victory. I dont have any illusions about how Hamas value the sanctity of life, either Palestinian or Israeli, so I think the chance of a political victory is much more important for them in the long term.

It would be an understatement to say that the pre October 7th status quo was dire for the Palestinians. With between 700 000 - 800 000 settlers on the West Bank gradually encroaching on more and more Palestinian land, and talk of annexation of the West Bank becoming mainstream in Israel (Netanyahu had this a campaign promise in 2019 and won the subsequent election). This was all happening with the tacit approval of the US (and probably also most Arab countries), the dream of a two state solution was more or less dead. With this as a back drop Palestinians were witnessing Arab countries pursuing a politic of normalization with Israel, while giving lip service to the Palestinian cause. From the ground in Palestine the status quo probably looked a lot like a slow moving ethnic cleansing. Palestinians gradually getting more sympathy in the US and Europe did not seem to help their case at all, and as we saw earlier this year, having the sympathy of western populations did nothing to help the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh against being ethnically cleansed by a western ally.

Now fast forward a couple of months to today, the plight of Gaza is front and centre again. The US is finding itself increasingly isolated on the global stage as Israels guardian angel. Arab countries had to distance themselves at least optically from anything Israel does. Behind closed doors many of them are probably wondering if a normalization will be possible at all with the current Israeli political scene. We are also in a situation where there is a real chance that Bidens reelection might be in jeopardy due to his support of Israel. Just the perception that this is a possibility is an unprecedented win for the Palestinian cause, and we now have Blinked take some symbolic steps to be seen addressing Palestinian concerns, such as sanctioning violent settlers.

If we assume that there are countries pulling the strings of Hamas, perhaps Qatar, Iran and even Russia, the case for a political win becomes even stronger. Did anyone even notice or care that a female Iranian dissident won the nobel price just now? Does the liberation of Iranian women even register to people when 50 000 pregnant women in Gaza are being bombed daily? However no country has had a bigger PR win over the war in Gaza than Russia. Not only is the attention towards Ukraine diminished, the passion in the "slava Ukraini" camp has been decimated. Many people who thought they where "on the right side of history" and supporting the little guy Ukraine against the bigger aggressor, are having second thoughts about the morals of their side, which is cheering on the Israeli offensive in Gaza. I clearly see this among my normie friends in Norway. People are seeing the Ukraine conflict more in term of realist politics and not absolute morality, and if you are being a realist, perhaps it makes sense to let Russia keep the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine for a ceasefire.

In this scenario the death of many thousands more Palestinian children seems like a small price to pay for what Hamas has achieved.

I think the really interesting question here is if Hamas would have anything to gain by an unconditional surrender.

One would have to look at this both from a foreign-policy and a domestic-policy perspective as well. Domestically, Hamas loses ground to Islamic Jihad or the Al Aqsa Brigade if they are seen as conciliatory to Israel. This is one reason Hamas remains competitive with the PNA.

Or from a second-order game theoretic perspective, the Palestinian power structure incentives this kind of distributed authority. In a game of chicken, they've dismantled the steering wheel and dispersed it into a dozen little pieces.

Why should Gaza accept being locked in a small open air prison in which they are under a blockade? Why should they accept continuously expanding Israeli settlements that slowly ethnically cleanse Palestinians? Why should they accept being second class citizens on their ancestor's land compared to recent arrivals from Eastern Europe? The option of cooperating with being ethnically cleansed because it will be nicer doesn't really make sense.

The best comparison to Palestine is the French in Algeria. France entered Algeria in 1830 and stayed for 132 years. That is 57 years longer than Israel has existed. There were 1.6 million ethnic French in Algeria. Many had lived there for generations when they moved home.

There are 2.3 million people in Gaza, making it a large city, 3.2 million on the west bank and 2.1 million arab citizens of Israel. Furthermore, there is also Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have a young population and a growing population. Their best bet is to do what the Algerians did in the 50s and 60s, simply make occupying them unsustainable. The French shot lots of Algerians, jailed lots of Algerians and won almost every battle. The Palestinians are not going to run out of people. Even with 20 000 dead in Gaza over the past 2.5 months, 15 000 have been born during the same time. The Palestinians are fighting an existential threat and have to push back continuously.

The Iraq war was a massive drain on the US. Israel has about 5.7 million jews not counting Haredis who don't pull their weight. They are not going to be able to fight an equivalent to the Iraq war. The Palestinians have a genuine chance of making Israel unsustainable. They can force Israel to have a huge prison population, to have a continuously mobilized army and to be in a constant state of turmoil.

Why should Gaza accept being locked in a small open air prison in which they are under a blockade?

They shouldn't. They should become a normal nation like the rest of us. The only reason they are under a weak blockade (its almost insulting to call it that TBH) is because they keep making war with their neighbor.

The Iraq war was a massive drain on the US.

The Iraq War wasn’t even the tiniest drain on the US’ resources. The US military had 1.4 million personnel in 2003, only 130,000 were required to totally destroy the Iraqi state.

So a tiny fraction of 2% of GDP was being spent on Iraq. Some pro-US analysts estimate Russia might spend 10% of GDP on the Ukraine war in 2023 all-in.

This is before considering that the Israeli advantage actually increases with drone warfare and automated defense tech, which has to be smuggled into Gaza but which can be publicly bought or even produced in huge quantities in Israel, which is also a country where the biggest constraint on offensive warfare is an extremely low casualty tolerance.

It pains me to read these tired talking points on the Motte of all places. This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off their usual combination of strings handed down to them from the hivemind.

Why should Gaza accept being locked in a small open air prison in which they are under a blockade?

They created that situation for themselves by not chilling down with the suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket fire. It's like yeah their situation sucks, but no one asks why are they in the situation to begin with.

Why should they accept being second class citizens on their ancestor's land compared to recent arrivals from Eastern Europe?

Because they launched 3 wars with help of their coreligionists and lost all of them. Starting a war hands you down the downsides of losing it.

The option of cooperating with being ethnically cleansed because it will be nicer doesn't really make sense.

20% of Israel is Arab. Ethnically no different than Palestinians. They got work visas and got entires into Israel, maybbe after a decade or two with no constant rocket fire and terrorist attacks, that work visa program could have turned into a permanent residency program.

As for the rest of your comment. You are right. Israels location is deeply deeply unfortunate.

It pains me to read these tired talking points on the Motte of all places. This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off their usual combination of strings handed down to them from the hivemind.

This adds heat to your post, but no light. It's totally unnecessary. Please don't.

This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off

While opposing the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants? The hivemind on this subject is the neo-con war machine and the media dominated by AIPAC and the ADL pushing for more war in the middle east and more refugees to Europe.

They created that situation for themselves by not chilling down with the suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket fire.

Why would they accept being put in Gaza with their country split into two pieces? Why would they accept not being able to live where they or their parents grew up? If the Israelis could stop the occupying, they wouldn't get hit with rockets.

Because they launched 3 wars with help of their coreligionists and lost all of them

Again, why would they accept becoming refugees and not fight back? They have seen how Israeli zoomer soldiers hide in the bathroom and cry while trying to defend a strong point from an attack from a lightly armed militia. There is nothing that says they can't fight back and win. Fighting a large tank battle might not have been the best option. Fighting with FPV-drones, rockets and ambushes might work. Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of how globalists were removed from a country by continuous small attacks. The Palestinian population has grown extensively since then. The Irish lost a bunch of armed conflicts against the British before most of Ireland became independent.

that work visa program could have turned into a permanent residency program.

Clearly, the Likud was instead creating a refugee crisis on Europe's boarder by expanding settlements and slowly growing Israel. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, his population is increasingly consisting of a woke people, haredi fundamentalists and muslims.

the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants

This makes me like Israel even more. Europe deserves another 50 million poor migrants from the third world as punishment for their historical actions as well as for the reification of "consequences" for their idiotic policies of subsidising bad behaviour.

While opposing the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants?

Are you talking about Syria or the US? I’m honestly having trouble parsing this line.

Israel is flooding Europe with migrants. Israel has been economically blockading Syria, regularly bombing Syria and has armed all sorts of jihadist groups in Syria. Meanwhile, IsraAID is standing on the beaches of Greece and helping the migrants get into Europe.

Syria had a civil war which sent millions of refugees to Europe. It has nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with its own regime and sectarian strife.

Israel is not capable of blockading Syria. It makes no geographical sense anyway. Here’s a map.

I haven’t heard of IsraAID until now, so I can’t comment on who they are. I do know that most Israelis would rather Europe not accept any Muslims, as it makes Europe less welcoming to Jews. What Europe chooses to do, however, is their own choice even if I think it’s a dumb choice.

Pro-Israel lobby says 250 activists will meet with their senators and representatives in Washington in a bid to win support Congressional support for military action in Syria.

https://www.haaretz.com/2013-09-07/ty-article/aipac-pushing-hard-for-syria-action/0000017f-f82d-d887-a7ff-f8eddf280000

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-gives-secret-aid-to-syrian-rebels-1497813430

Not to mention regular bombing and missile campaigns against syria.

I do know that most Israelis would rather Europe not accept any Muslims, as it makes Europe less welcoming to Jews

Not the view of ADL, AIPAC, jewish internet defence league or any other mainstream jewish organisation.

None of those are Israelis. Are you replacing “Israeli” with “Jewish” in your mind?

Also, again Syrian refugees are the result of sectarian violence, not US action. Israel is not the US, in any case, even if it were Jewish influence somehow forcing the US to act.

Israel will bomb Syria if needed, especially now with the civil war chaos, but those don’t send refugees to Europe.

Do you concede that Israel did not blockade Syria? Can you explain what made you think it did?

Why would they accept being put in Gaza with their country split into two pieces? Why would they accept not being able to live where they or their parents grew up?

Uh, because they lost the war(s)? They lost the political battle and the actual battle. Where are the Germans firing rockets at Czechoslovakia and demanding an absolutely extraordinary right of return? Why would you ever grant a right of return to a people supporting homicidal maniacs? There's three generations of people born in Gaza now.

If the Israelis could stop the occupying, they wouldn't get hit with rockets.

Gaza was not occupied by Israel until the tanks rolled in a month ago. In fact, Israeli settlements were removed from Gaza in the interest of peace. It's clear how that worked out.

Germans can move to modern day countries that came from Czechoslovakia. There is no reason for them to accept ethnic cleansing. There is no reason for the rest of us to accept an Israeli caused refugee crisis.

Gaza was not occupied by Israel until the tanks rolled in a month ago

It was under a blockade which was an act of war. Hundreds of the attackers who enforced this illegal blockade got what was coming to them. If Gaza is under blockade there is no reason for the people of Gaza not to break it.

Palestinians can also move to any country that will let them in. There aren't very many of those because, unlike the Germans, they have burned their bridges in every nearby Arab state.

There is no reason for them to accept ethnic cleansing.

Lol, okay, hope they are enjoying not accepting it and getting their shit kicked in.

It was under a blockade which was an act of war.

It was under blockade because they literally started shooting rockets at Israel. If they hadn't elected a genocidal party and started a war with the preeminent military power in the region, gaza could have been the Singapore of the Levant at this point.

Palestinians can also move to any country that will let them in.

Why would they move to another country? Why would the rest of the world want an arabic refugee crisis. The best option is not to have millions of Arab refugees, the best option is for millions of Arabs to stay put.

Lol, okay, hope they are enjoying not accepting it and getting their shit kicked in.

The Algerians experienced that, now they have a free state.

It was under blockade because they literally started shooting rockets at Israel

Wonder why people who were shoved into a tiny open air prison while their country was cut in two and is continuously shrinking due to settlements don't fight back. If Israel hadn't been an expansionist aggresor they wouldn't have a rocket problem.

Losers of history get killed, that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’s always going to be. Do you have a unique issue with this? Nothing that’s happened to the Palestinians hasn’t happened a thousand times to million different tribes through history.

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Why would they move to another country?

You tell me - you brought up Germans moving to modern day czechoslovakia.

The Algerians experienced that, now they have a free state.

Pacifying the algerians was not an existential issue for France. The existence of Hamas is an existential issue for Israel.

Wonder why people who were shoved into a tiny open air prison while their country was cut in two and is continuously shrinking due to settlements don't fight back. If Israel hadn't been an expansionist aggresor they wouldn't have a rocket problem.

Daily reminder that:

  • gaza and the West Bank were not Israeli territory until the arabs started and lost the six day war

  • Israel occupied the entire Sinai and returned it to Egypt

  • Egypt did not want Gaza back

  • Jordan stripped West Bank residents of citizenship

  • it wasn't an open air prison until Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and Hamas started to fire rockets at Israel

Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of how globalists were removed from a country by continuous small attacks. The Palestinian population has grown extensively since then. The Irish lost a bunch of armed conflicts against the British before most of Ireland became independent.

Both the IRA (and general Irish independence) and the Taliban could easily have been crushed if the relevant armies were willing to be brutal enough. The US could leave Afghanistan a couple thousand lives lighter and a trillion dollars poorer, but otherwise unscathed. The Israelis know it’s a fight for their survival, there is no backstop. The same applies to Vietnam, too. It was never a question of capability, only of will and to some extent geopolitical trade offs.

Peace in Ireland also, of course, involved the British government very overtly constraining unionist militants who were very well armed and who would have made any military attempt by Irish nationalists to take Ulster extremely painful, bloody and quite possibly unsuccessful. The best example of successful terrorist tactics is actually Algeria, except that even in that case the French could have won, De Gaulle just decided that enforcing permanent apartheid status on Algerian Muslims for the sake of the pieds noir was inefficient and risked the socialists, if they ever came to power in France, giving all Algerians French citizenship. Israel doesn’t have a France to return to, and the socialists aren’t going to come to power there any time soon, so again the same logic doesn’t apply.

What do you propose happens to the 61% Israelis who are Jews ethnically cleansed from other Middle Eastern nations in the past 100 years? Where do they go back to?

French Algeria is not a good comparison, because the French have a France.

French Algeria is not a good comparison, because the French have a France.

Eventually the French will not have a France in the current trajectory and unlike the Israelis they are politically not pro French today in the way Israelis are pro Jewish.

We don't live in a world that the argument in favor of respecting a people's right to exist as a majority in their own homeland is taken for granted. Or to continue to exist in general without demographic replacement and threat of persecution in their own homeland. Especially not by the pro Jewish lobby in western countries which has an isolated sensitivity to the possibility of Jews being oppressed that it doesn't apply to various other groups such as Palestinians, or indeed the French. Do you support France remaining French and the homeland of the French people?

In accordance to the person you are responding to, Israel's occupation makes it unsustainable, especially as Palestinian demographics increase. So the Jews living in Israel have the option to remain to Israel but abandon settlements and the occupation and still have a homeland. Stopping the settlements doesn't stop Israel from existing.

There is also the option of a transformation of Israel into a civic state that is multi-ethnic that grants equal rights to Palestinians even if eventually the Jews become a minority. Jews can have equal rights and live there. Another alternative is a state that is even suspicious of Jewish nationalism in the manner western societies are more anti their own ethnic group's nationalism than those of minorities and is pro mass migration. This wouldn't be a genuinely equal and just society but it would fit with the template of what mainstream liberalism and most influential Jewish ngos support in western countries and under their definition would be anti-racist.

Either scenarios can be be opposed to legitimately, if one consistently oppose such experiments by having reasonable worries in other cases, but not if they aren't. But the first scenario especially does exist in the table as an alternative.

The important issue is that Israel as a Jewish majority state can coexist with respecting the rights of non Jewish minorities in Israel and in Palestine. So it is a false argument to claim that Israel's current course is about its existence, when it is about an extreme nationalist agenda to dominate non Jewish Palestinians, ensure demographic dominance in the future as well and get control and land. Religion and the idea that all of that land and more is God promised land is also not irrelevant to this conflict. It would also be nice if Israel tried to police some of the religious intolerance towards the Christian community living in Israel and punish those spitting on them.

It's also worth mentioning that Christians have been ethnically cleansed from most countries in the Middle East post WWI.

Lebanon was a majority Christian country until quite recently.

I wonder why the mainstream press in the West almost never covers those atrocities? Just this year, an enclave of Armenians had their homeland stolen from them and had to flee.

The outrage over Gaza is not a principled objection to violence or to ethnic cleansing.

Lebanese Christians aren’t primarily a minority because of ethnic cleansing but because they have lower birth rates than Muslims. In addition it’s likely that colonial censuses undercounted the Muslim population, so the Christians never had the demographic advantage they (and the French) thought they did.

Christians in Lebanon are mostly anti-Israel, and a majority of them supported the October 7th attacks. I'm not sure they blame Muslims for their diminishing numbers in Lebanon.

Israel is a strong ally and the main weapon exporter to Azerbaijan.

So the big question is, why are christians in the west so eager to support the country responsible for bombing christian churches in Gaza and help a muslim country ethnically cleanse one of the oldest christian communities in the world? The whole thing has a "chickens for KFC" feeling about it.

I think you missed my point.

I'm not trying to assign blame. I'm showing that few people actually care about ethnic cleansing. Or, at a minimum, they don't care enough to learn a basic amount of history or geography.

They care about tribalism.

This seems like an isolated demand of rigor. Would you say people can't show outrage over the October 7th attack unless they read up and condemn every atrocity that was committed in the region leading up to that date?

Would you say people can't show outrage over the October 7th attack unless they read up and condemn every atrocity that was committed in the region leading up to that date?

Yes. More specifically, I think the scope of caring should be scaled to the level of the atrocity.

Christians in Lebanon aren’t big fans of Israel, but I’m pretty sure most of them do not like their Muslim neighbors much either- as in ‘had a brutal civil war with them in living memory’.

Christians in the West are also major weapons exporters to Azerbaijan and primary clients of its oil industry. Meanwhile, the Armenians were staunchly allied with the Russians until Putin inevitably screwed them over. Meanwhile Iran allies with Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan for fear that a corridor with also Muslim Turkey would compromise it strategically. It is what it is.

Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.

They probably would argue that Israel has obligations to support humanitarian aid into the area, both legally (international law) and morally, as the formal state with a much stronger military and large amounts of US backing. It's worth noting that this was exactly what deBoer's position was (is?), and he's hardly as bad-faith as some actors.

There's presumably very little outside of direct massive intervention (of the sort that Israel hasn't asked for and almost certainly doesn't want) that US could do to make Hamas surrender, whereas there's a large amount of levers US can use to affect Israeli policy, including making it stop assault Gaza.

I've often seen these demands of "why condemn country/instance X (a Western country, or an ally/vassal of the West) but not country/instance Y (hostile to the West)" from various instances (media, "the left", whatever), and I cannot help to think that, insofar as the country Y is indeed the kind of a country/instance whose policy the West can do very little to affect outside of direct violence, this is a demand for a literal virtue signal. There's no perceivable point beyond "you should do this, because I'd consider you doing this a positive demonstration from you".

That just incentivizes countries to be anti-USA and irrationally belligerent in the future. You have to think about this from a time consistent perspective.

Not really, considering that being anti-USA and irrationally belligerent, unless there are special conditions like here, create an increasing risk of the said direct massive intervention.

The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.

The comment is about what the comment is about, regardless of prefatory statements.

I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it?

They think it's ridiculous to consider that to be a possibility. Either they're pro-Hamas, or they consider Hamas to be like a force of nature that they cannot affect, unlike Israel.

Would that lead to peace? Or would it just lead to different terrorist attacks on some later timetable? It's not clear at all that it would.

What peace offer is on the table for Hamas from Israel? Really, what is it? Unconditional surrender doesn't even really have a meaning here: when Japan surrendered it was assumed that Japan would still exist as an entity and Japanese people would live there. Is that the deal for Gaza, or will they be expelled? Murdered? Never allowed to leave or to prosper?

r would it just lead to different terrorist attacks on some later timetable?

One does not expect terrorist attacks to end, but at least you could hope for the end of State-Sponsored terror attacks if Hamas surrendered, then the Gazans elected responsible leadership, or a coup by an Attaturk-like dictator remade the State of Gaza into a more normal country than it was on 10/6, because their government wishes to be at war with Israel forever.

Gazans already had Gaza on 10.6, they didn’t need any offers. Now they might have occupation back.

Intellectual honesty is a well-defined and commonly used term. I think "intellectual bravery" should be part of that arsenal as well.

In simple terms, the willingness to think about the unthinkable and speak about the unspeakable. To actually "go there". And by this I don't mean to think about killing all Palestinians, but more so to ask "So what happens if Israel stops now?". You, me and the talking heads and the people in the halls of power all know the answer to that question. The answer being that Palestinians will forever continue to launch terrorist attacks for Israel doing anything short of just packing up and leaving the Middle East altogether.

The intellectual cowardice here, is the Elite (media/journalist/public) class not having the balls to tell this to the masses. The media is a mirror for the masses and the masses just want bad things to stop happening NOW. They don't have the intellectual faculties to simulate the potential outcomes of doing so.

They know it, they think about it, just like you and me. The masses don't.

They know the outcome, and they are acting on it. The international community has been doing everything in its power to prolong the Arab-Israeli conflict as much as possible. There’s the very existence of UNRWA as one clear example, and this current iteration is just one more example - albeit one with an alibi.

I can’t quite find the motive, other than just Jew-hatred, but action speaks clear enough.

Intellectual honesty is a well-defined and commonly used term. I think "intellectual bravery" should be part of that arsenal as well.

There's already a word for that. We call it autism.

I kid, but only kind of. Usually when someone is being 'brave' in this sense, what they're really doing is not understanding that speech is a consequentialist act designed to accomplish specific goals on the world. They don't understand what other people are trying to accomplish with the things they say, or what the consequences or their own 'brave' speech will be.

As I and others already pointed out, the reason people talk about Israel stopping instead of Hamas stopping is that we have diplomatic levers on Israel such that saying they should stop might actually get them to be careful about collateral damage and ratchet down the civilian body count, whereas us saying that about Hamas has no way to affect them and will instead muddy the waters in ways that give Israel more leeway to commit atrocity.

Someone who had no understanding of that might notice everyone saying one true thing while not saying another true thing, make up some half-assed sinister explanation for why, and then be 'brave' enough to say the thing everyone else isn't saying, really loudly and stridently and all the time.

Without realizing that they're the one who doesn't understand what people are actually doing in this conversation at all, and that they're a bull in a china shop causing damage they probably wouldn't endorse if they understood it.

Which is not to say contrarian speech is always bad! It's not at all uncommon for the public perception of an issue to get fixated on an incorrect or misguided model, where people are manipulating their speech in ways that are unnecessary and harmful, and it is useful for someone who recognizes that happening to push back.

But that should be a considered and sober decision by someone who understands the stakes and intentions of everyone involved and what effects they intend to have with their contrarian speech. Not someone blindly trying to be 'brave' by saying the thing no one else is, as if everyone else couldn't possibly have any kind of good reason for all arriving at that decision at the same time.

The phrase 'Would you jump off a bridge just because nobody else is' comes to mind. That's certainly a type of bravery, but one that we want to be careful about encouraging.

(and, although I don't know that this board is very concerned with ableism in general: I've taken the assessment tests on my own, I would probably be diagnosed low-level autistic if I wanted to get a diagnosis. I'm not just sneering at outsiders here, I'm sharing faults I've found in my own thinking and spent decades trying to learn to compensate for, which I recognize in others at times)

Yeah, even after three decades I still sometimes fall into that same old trap of taking what people say at face value, and of expecting the same of them, as if we spoke to each other in order to exchange epistemically sound information. Which is practically never what regular people actually intend to do in conversation.

I understand and might even agree to your insinuation, but that doesn't apply here.

I know why they are doing as much, for optics and consequentialist reasons. However, they are still cowards because they are choosing the consequences of short-term peace instead of putting an end to the problem. And no I don't think there are any mechanistic barriers to Israel doing the unthinkable, the Arab/Muslim world already hates Israel as much as a human can hate anything ever, they launched 3 holy wars against them with a much shorter laundry list of grievances. Just nuke Gaza and get done with it, or at the every least let it be known that it's on the table, carrots don't work on Arabs. What are the Arabs gonna do? Get more mad?

"So what happens if Israel stops now?". You, me and the talking heads and the people in the halls of power all know the answer to that question. The answer being that Palestinians will forever continue to launch terrorist attacks for Israel doing anything short of just packing up and leaving the Middle East altogether.

I dont see how potential future terrorist attacks are worse than the carnage we are seeing in Gaza today, unless you value Israeli lives much higher than Palestinians. Which I totally can understand that Israel does, but why is it a given that the US population values the safety of Israelis to that extent where the current situation in Gaza is an acceptable trade-off? We are after all talking about the safety of a nuclear armed country with the near unconditional backing of the worlds most powerful state, against a terrorist group that according to Israelis themselves consists of 40 000 men controlling a piece of land under naval blockade and without an airport.

but why is it a given that the US population values the safety of Israelis to that extent where the current situation in Gaza is an acceptable trade-off? We

Because it is in our interest for it to come to a different equilibrium than what it was at on 10/6. Having a terrorist state on the Mediterranean is not good, see, e.g. the Houthi pirate problem on the other side of the canal.

Palestinians or whatever terrorist group they have in power at any given time, probably isn't going to be an existential threat for Israel in any meaningful sense the medium term for the reasons you said. And I am also not really looking into the moral calculus of any of this either.

Game theory, real politik, just plain old politics, the code, whatever you want to call it: Most entities have an implicit assumption that other entities won't get in their face, and if they do, they will be hit for it. Palestine in whatever shape it exits, continues to get in Israel's face.

And I also don't really feel too bad for entities that hit other entities and then get hit back, even if they get hit back really disproportionately hard. That includes Palestinian civilians.

It's not like the poor people of Gaza are held hostage by Hamas. Well they are practically if things like a good economy and future is of concern, but I don't think Gazans want all that more than they want the destruction of Israel. They want Hamas, they still think Oct 7 was a good idea given Israels retaliation, they spit on dead bodies of abductees. Palestinians are maxed out in their antisemitism. In a sane world they would have been eveporated yesterday. They are practically a death cult that is a ticking timebomb and a stain on the middle east.

Palestine in whatever shape it exits, continues to get in Israel's face.

Hamas does, yes.

But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.

This is along the same lines as 'men need to police other men' and 'men need to teach boys not to rape'. It's along the same line as holding all Christians accountable for the Westboro Baptist Church and the evangelicals who got Roe repealed. It's along the same lines as making all white people pay for reparations or take a back seat in hiring until racial inequities have been repaired. And etc.

Which are not things I'm necessarily against! To me, the main difference between these cases is consequentialist, in that on one hand people are maybe being shamed a little and maybe receiving mild financial penalties, and on the other hand thousands of innocents are being killed.

But, people who argue this type of logic in the case of Palestine and Hamas, should realize how the logic applies to other cases where they might be on the other side of the issue.

This is along the same lines as 'men need to police other men' and 'men need to teach boys not to rape'.

What is wrong with those sentiments? Women are physically weaker than men, and most men listen more to male authority figures than female ones. Men are held in check by other men. Even on the most literal level, rape is investigated and rapists arrested by the police and convicted felons incarcerated in prison, both those institutions are largely run by men.

I need to find a poet to immortalise this sequence of events. Brava!

? It’s not an opinion I haven’t expressed before.

Aww, well it's still great even though it wasn't on purpose. Basically guess posted a common (in my experience) progressive misunderstanding of a popular argument here (the actual argument being not that men shouldn't teach boys not to rape but that we already do, and rapists are defectors) and you cut through it by holding them to their word, a rebuttal technique they've used often in the past. Throw in the fact that in isolation someone reading these posts might conclude that guess is right wing and you are left and it's chef's kiss chaotic beauty.

I didn't even advocate for that sentiment!

If Hamas didn't have popular support, I wouldn't make it. If Palestinians have any issue with Hamas at all, its because they aren't gung ho about wiping Jews off the face of the earth enough. Polling data from the West bank shows this.

Doesn't apply because the Palestinians aren't in a position to police hamas, they WANT hamas to do what Hamas does.

But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.

Correct. If Germans don't think about the consequences of electing a radical party to control the Reichstag, and the Nazis get control of the country and start annexing and invading the neighbors, the result is that other countries declare war on the entire country of Germany and not just on the individuals controlling policy. This is because the basic assumption of the modern nation-state system is that the nation is the sovereign unit, and has the right, ability, and duty to ensure it is governed in the manner it prefers.

If the Palestinians can't even ensure their representatives to the rest of the world match their preferences, then it's hard to call them a "nation" in any meaningful sense.

Hamas is indeed not recognized as the governing body of a nation.

Not for any logical reason. Gaza, from the mid 2000s to 10/7/23 was a sovereign state that was not occupied by any foreign power. The sole reason for them not being recognized internationally was so NGOs and the like could justify sending them lots of money and aid (which they knew would fund terrorism).

De facto, it was.

It's not like the poor people of Gaza are held hostage by Hamas. Well they are practically if things like a good economy and future is of concern, but I don't think Gazans want all that more than they want the destruction of Israel. They want Hamas, they still think Oct 7 was a good idea given Israels retaliation, they spit on dead bodies of abductees. Palestinians are maxed out in their antisemitism. In a sane world they would have been eveporated yesterday. They are practically a death cult that is a ticking timebomb and a stain on the middle east.

You are calling for an eradication of a people and yet you are attacking them for their extremism. Clearly you demonstrate an extremism of far worse proportions here and by going that far are demonstrating the wrongness of your position. I highly doubt when you have such a pro mass murder position today, with so little to excuse it you would be more sympathetic to Israelis if you were in the Palestinians position.

This is why most of the world and majority of American youth is against Israel's attrocities and support's ceasefire.

To address what you mention just bellow about the woke.

The problem with the woke is that they are unjust, are racist extremists, have no sense of proportion, have a never ending grievances, explore ethnic issues in the most ridiculously one sided propagandistic manner, don't respect their hated ethnic groups rights and so on and so forth. Actually the zionist ADL types are an important part of it, but granted there can exist those who are more negative of the Jews who also can be part of it. It is your logic here that follows that template whining about Palestinian antisemitism being maxed out while you support their eradication when you say they should had been evaporated yesterday. And of course, like the woke you make no effort to understand any nuance, as if Israel has not been just minding their own business respecting the Palestinians rights, while you are painting it as if Palestinians launch terrorist attacks just cause they are evil.

What is going to happen since you respect power so much, is that this kind of extremism that is indecent will come with a backslash and people losing respect and opposing those having such positions. And this is an understated way to put it.

Personally, I can't but be affected when I see the destroyed homes and the footage of the dead children. To trivialize genuine disgust at civilians being destroyed in one of the worst 21st century atrocities by comparing them to the woke, is promoting a manipulative and false argument. Sympathy over the nonsense promoted by the woke is not warranted. However, precisely because people like you promote their destruction the Palestinians deserve our sympathy in opposition of this agenda and in support of Israel stopping the war.

People are not going to be convinced by this kind of rhetoric which appears unhinged. A picture says a thousand words and the world is going to be increasingly angry at those who commit and support these atrocities.

I don’t think they’re saying that. I think they’re saying that, whatever one’s personal opinions on the conflict, it’s become clear that it’s ‘us’ or ‘them’. Two state solution is dead. Either there will be an Arab Muslim state of Palestine or a Jewish state of Israel. Both sides are clearly aware of this, neither is happy with a compromise position. So the only remaining questions are firstly whether to fight or surrender, and secondly what must be done to win.

I don’t think they’re saying that. I think they’re saying that, whatever one’s personal opinions on the conflict, it’s become clear that it’s ‘us’ or ‘them’. Two state solution is dead. Either there will be an Arab Muslim state of Palestine or a Jewish state of Israel. Both sides are clearly aware of this, neither is happy with a compromise position. So the only remaining questions are firstly whether to fight or surrender, and secondly what must be done to win.

No, the above poster was pretty clear with what they were saying and you shouldn't be sanewashing them. This motte and bailey with the kind of genocidal language and the more vague "its about what must be done to win" is tiresome.

A Jewish Israel already exists. They have won at expense of Palestinians plenty already. Maybe tomorrow you will be calling for them to win some more and promoting the dilemma of Syria, or Lebanon vs Israel. Why expect that the Likudist great Israel project will stop at Gaza?

The question in practice isn't whether it will become an Arab Palestine, but whether it will continue with illegal settlements, mass destruction in gaza that has lead to some of the highest casualties per capita for time of conflict in modern history, blockade, shutting down electricity and food supplies. While many of Israeli elites use the most extreme language about how they support warcrimes, of how they are dealing with animals, how they are to destroy Amalek. Really the question is whether Israel will seize more land and succeed in a second Nakba.

Obviously, almost the entire world agrees that ceasefire is a better move and compromise than Israel continuing this course. You are promoting the fallacy of a false dichotomy here. If people support Israel commiting ethnic cleansing through a very murderous conduct against the Palestinians, they should say this outright. And should stop framing their extreme nationalist and racist preference at expense of Palestinians and in favor of Jews as being about having no alternatives which is false.

Incidentally, lets assume for the sake of discussion that both Palestinian leaders (in Gaza) and Israeli leaders are fanatics and many of their people have been fanaticized in turn in said direction and their dream is the destruction of the other party. In that scenario, we don't really have to adopt fully their perspective and preference. In terms of what pressure has to be enacted, it shouldn't actually respect and allow the desires of Likudists or of Hamas to be realized.

If we are to assume they are both fanatics then let us support the side that doesn't attack neutral ships. Seems like an easy compromise.

Israel didn’t make the choice to value Gazan lives less than Israelis. Gaza did when it launched a terrorist attack.

Just like if some breaks into my house, then me killing them isn’t saying anything about how I value life but instead is making a statement about how the criminal values life.

I simply believe peoples are allowed to make war. It's the last argument of kings, and when rulers decide to make it, it's their right by God. Palestinians have consented to rule by Hamas, both by in democratic elections and by failing to remove them. Israelis have consented to rule by Likud, both by democratically electing them and failing to remove them. I have no desire to force some sort optimization where people with different religions, values, cultures, languages, and histories from me have to adopt my values and solve problems as I would prefer that they solve them. They have the right to their own way of life and that includes going to war with their neighbors and the resulting devastation that war my cause in the short term and a hopeful peace in the long term when one side extracts the necessary concessions from the other. Forcing people who hate each other to live as peaceful neighbors is cruel, humiliating, and dehumanizing. They will commit escalating aggressions against each that slowly escalate the hate they hold for each other, which is corrosive to their souls. If they have to settle the matter through war, well that may be painful, but at least their grandchildren may grow up in a world where the matter is resolved.

If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.

Not at all. History is full of hopeless last stands in which the outmatched party refused to sue for peace. And unlike some of the warriors of hopeless last stands from times long ago, Hamas at least can count on more friendly media to inflate their last stand into the stuff of legend than a bunch of the last stand warriors of older times could have counted on.

Running like a rat out of a flooded tunnel is rarely a stuff of legends. Hamas are hypocritical, where ISIS were at least sincere - Hamas are willing other Palestinians to die for their cause, but not themselves.

Read Thucydides. He describes some people who were probably some of the bravest of all time, and yet even they surrendered sometimes. The Plataeans in their home city, the Spartans at Sphacteria. And all of them were willing to let some civilians die for their cause. Hamas has not surrendered yet after over a month of fighting at extremely outmatched odds. Whether you support them or not, clearly it is not true that they are willing other Palestinians to die for their cause, but not themselves. Hamas themselves are dying in large numbers.

So far the tales of Hamas valor and bravery are slim even from the official Hamas propaganda wing. No last stands, no deeds beyond the call of duty. Not even organized pockets of resistance.

They are like the SS divisions - good at dishing om civilians, totally shitting themselves and inadequate when faced with proper adversaries.

Hamas leaders don't seem to lead from the frontline.


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