domain:alexepstein.substack.com
johnfabian
11hr ago
This is a funny kind of idiocy, in the sense that not only is it objectively and very obviously false, but that it also obscures a more interesting controversial element. It would be like if someone's main criticism of Trump (being otherwise a generic liberal) was that he was not an American, but actually Burmese. (edit: on further reflection, what is actually quite similar is the claim I see pop up on reddit that the attempted assassination where Trump was grazed by a bullet was entirely faked, and he was not shot, or shot at, at all)
I only tangentially know who Owens is but I strongly suspect, like in many many other cases, this is another instance of social media-induced psychosis
aldomilyar
11hr ago
Yeah. Having lived up in Darwin for a year I'd love to see how the Israelis would have approached certain local issues compared to the Australians, plus that's genuinely a super high potential piece of land that could have led to a prosperous and strong state.
aldomilyar
11hr ago
The lives of peaceful Israeli Arabs are on average some of the best in the region (especially if you take out all of the 'oh we have oil and support a 10%-citizen population with infinite money cheat'), peace deals have been offered previously, the best case scenario for independent Palestine is Lebanon 2: Electric Boogaloo. Any semi-rational person is surrendering.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11hr ago
There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years
What is that reason?
aldomilyar
11hr ago
I don't have a particularly strong view on the conflict but I do feel that the Israelis have a far greater chance of establishing and running a functional state than the other side.
It doesn't matter because they don't actually believe a lack of support alone would suffice.
That's why they call for South Africa style sanctions and boycotts.
The aid point is just the first step, and a way to deflect the charge that they care disproportionately about Israel due to antisemitism. And fair point on that I guess. But it is just the thin end of the wedge.
aldomilyar
11hr ago
Israels behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what jewish mindset is and that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Palestinian strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like
Doesn't this go immediately in reverse if there's any meaningful Muslim success. Like at the moment it's just very child-level oppressor/oppressed stuff from the majority of Western audiences, but if the boot was on the proverbial other foot it would be even uglier.
aldomilyar
11hr ago
I feel like within 24 hours of the first meaningful strike against Israel by a local belligerent the whole artifice would just spin up in reverse at which point Israelis were the oppressed not the oppressors and the current Western Palestinian Aficionados would just reverse their judgements.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
11hr ago
They could find some plot of land in Africa or Latin America with a far lower population to resettle to.
Should've sold them Gascoyne, seriously.
Botond173
11hr ago
It’s just the reality of living in modernity. Let’s suppose you’re a Midwestern middle-class or precariat normie and you have female cousins. One of them lives in a different town and you’re on good terms; she’s known as an average decent young woman. However, in reality she has engaged in sugarbabying and escorting on multiple occasions while in community college. She’s also a serial monogamist / is in an open relationship with some cuck and has one-night stands. Maybe she’s also camwhoring from time to time. You don’t know about any of this because she’s discrete about it and your social circles are overlapping only partially. You’re ignorant about these activities as a whole because you’re a normie. The only way you’re realistically ever going to learn about her antics is if someone tells you about it. But who would? Your other female cousins or your mother definitely won’t reveal it to you even if they know about it. Her long-term cuck boyfriend if she has one isn’t going to talk about it to you either. What gives?
Botond173
11hr ago
What you described are factors eroding men's incentives to to fulfill their traditional masculine roles as initiators, providers, husbands etc. The factors I described do the same but in a different aspect. Potential rewards are decreasing while potential costs are increasing.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
Look at it from the perspective of Hamas. Their victory condition is to destroy Israel and build an Islamic theocracy in its place. They might be fanatics, but they are not stupid to the point that they realize they have no chance to defeat Israel on the battlefield.
Before the Oct-7 attacks, Israel was in the process of normalizing its relationship with Arab neighbors. An entrenched peaceful coexistence would be the death knell to Hamas ambitions. While killing Jews is always seen as a good thing by Hamas, I think the real objective was to provoke Israel into destroying Gaza.
I think that on a grand strategy level, everything is going according to plan for Hamas. Gazan kids are getting killed through bombs or starvation, but that it just their purpose in this war, they become martyrs (which is a pretty great outcome for them, if you believe the nutjobs) and while Israel has certainly killed a lot of Hamas fighters (again, not a bad outcome for the nutjobs), they have barely made a dent in the population of Gaza. Now Israel is in charge of the caring for a civilian population which hate them and can not feed itself. This is a pretty sweet trap to place your opponent in. Sure, the IDF can start genociding in earnest, but likely even Trump's MAGA base will have enough before they are half-way done. Meanwhile, their support in the rest of the West is evaporating.
If the IDF wanted to enact an Endloesung to their Gaza problem, the best thing way to accomplish it would have been nuking Gaza directly in response to Oct-7. Most of the Western world (apart from the glider-button minority) was still in shock. People are generally scope insensitive, their reaction to "the IDF killed 2M in a day" will not be that different to them killing merely a few k. It would have been a PR disaster (nukes!) and likely cost them most of their Western support, but any way they try to genocide their way out of the Gaza mess now (starvation? targeted bombing of civilians?) would cost them a lot more support. Not that I think that genocide is the answer here, obviously.
I think that the two responses which would have been reasonable by Israel would have been to either not do much (drone strike a few Hamas commanders, rescue a few hostages) or to go into Gaza with the goal of occupying it for a few decades (in the knowledge that they will get a lot of their soldiers killed in the process).
2rafa
11hr ago
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal…that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset.
The “West” has done the kind of thing Israel is doing within living memory. One could easily argue Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more directly targeted at civilians than any major Israeli action in Gaza. (And the motive was the same, to force an unconditional surrender.) Personally I don’t believe Western civilization started in 1970, but I suppose if you do then you can make that argument.
Israel is a small country stuck in the same quagmire as South Vietnam, French Algeria or Rhodesia.
All three of those conflicts were winnable. South Vietnam was too corrupt, the other two had settler populations with homelands to return to. Most Israelis don’t have that, and while Israel has plenty of corruption it isn’t yet close to South Vietnam tier.
massacring starving Christians
0.13% of the Gazan population pre-war was Christian. You might indeed ask why the vast majority of Christians have been driven out of the Middle East since 1913, from Egypt to Iraq.
FtttG
12hr ago
That's all true, but doesn't change the fact that routine acts of military aggression against your neighbours or your own people have been the norm in pretty much the entirety of the Middle East for the last century. It's also plainly obvious that many of the acts of aggression you cite were defensive in nature.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted between states. The loser gives concessions to the winner, with the assumption that even a bad peace is better than a bad war, that ending hostilities - even for the moment - is the best way to bring about revanchist policy.
Modest nitpick, but not quite. In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted by states, but between nations, with the distinction being the degree of political support for the state that allows the state to engage in broder, 'more total,' war.
The state is the conductor, and the negotiator, but the state's capacity is more than the state itself. The state's capacity also derives from outsiders willingness to support the state, and that derived from people, both subjects and outsiders. This was because Clausewitz was speaking from the the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was a revolution in military affairs in and of itself that was so disruptive that it was part of what pushed Clausewitz to his efforts.
This distinction matters because the political will/political support that matters, particularly in a democractic context, can vary by policy by policy. The political support that may allow a great deal of acceptance of costs in Policy A, will not necessarily extent to Policy B, even if Policy B offers larger [gains] at lower [costs].
Seventy-five years later and the Arabs might as well be Ewoks against the Empire.
Fated to win decisively with the assistance of telegenic Western-coded young adult protagonists designed to encourage self-projection fantasies?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12hr ago
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think it's worth noting how you can reproduce this entire comment with Israel and Palestine swapped and change... nothing.
For example:
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal. Palestinian behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what the Muslim mindset is and that the Muslim view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Israeli strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like.
I wish it were normal to expect enemies not to commit war crimes. Someone ought to have told the Palestinians about that before 10/7.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
But Poland, like most of Europe, is a predominately old country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal. Israels behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what jewish mindset is and that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Palestinian strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like. There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years and having them quoting biblical genocides while massacring starving Christians is an excellent way to bring back the west to our historical view of them.
In large measure the Western response has created this mindset. It did so by casting Israel as always the perpetrator no matter what anyone else did, or how restrained they were in response. Eventually they understood that restraint doesn’t help them at all, and that it quite often emboldens those who attack them. Eventually the threat of UN and international condemnation holds no weight because it’s not like they weren’t going to be condemned anyway, so who cares.
And the key / general point remains wrong. How other people want to take something is an appeal not even to subjectivity, but second or even third-party subjectivity, which is a fools errand in attributing agency. There are indeed contexts where the appearance of impropriety matter, but they are contexts of where the agent making the decision and why they are taking those decisions are related to the impropriety.
It also runs into historically inconvenient facts in Ukraine.
The responsibility for disruption of elections lies with Russia- whose invasion was intended to entirely replace the state that would conduct elections, and came with planned target lists of the sort of pro-democracy activists who were seen as categorical enemies. The Russian plan was intended to impose a state that would also not provide for free of fair elections or any sort of democrat legitimacy, for the sake of forcing through policy changes that did not survive electoral cycles years ago.
This invasion, in turn, met the conditional for which the Ukrainians had already considered and designed a policy at a government constitutional level. You may not feel 'don't have elections in the middle of an invasion' is a bad policy decision, but that is why it is not your policy decision any more than it was an American policy decision. This Ukrainian policy decision, in turn, was not made as a result of American patronage, which only began well after the Ukrainians made the policy decision which set conditions that the Russians later met.
You can try to re-allocate responsibility for others peoples actions and decisions from those people on whatever grounds you want, including funding. You can even ignore time and space and argue that patronage after a fact can be taken as responsibility for the facts of the past. This is considered poor practice since it is a position with no limiting principle, but plenty of people make poor arguments. It is still the hyperagent failure mode if those decisions are not, in fact, driven by funding.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12hr ago
I took the liberty of copying the entirety of this particular conversation and dumping it into Gemini 2.5 Pro. No additional instructions or leading suggestions. It interpreted this as a request to summarize the debate
I think its summary is quite illuminating:
functor
12hr ago
Israel has engaged in acts of aggression against six countries in the past coupleof months. Note that many of the conflicts cited above are related to Israel or the fallout of Isreali caused issues, for example Lebanon. Iraq has had wars caused by AIPAC funded politicians.
FtttG
12hr ago
created a functioning society in which many protestants live
The way this is framed suggests to me that you didn't realise the Protestants were the ones holding the whip at the outset of the insurgency.
Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept.
On at least three occasions, the Palestinians have been offered deals significantly more generous than that offered to Northern Irish Catholics in 1998. They have refused all of them because they refuse to compromise, to their own detriment more than to that of the Israelis.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12hr ago
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention.
I assume the hope they are holding out is not for external intervention on their side, but an end of external intervention on Israel's. If governments in the US and Europe were compelled by popular pressure to stop supporting Israel with materiel, money and intelligence, could it really keep going against the weight of its neighbours as it is going now?
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
The Israelis have been holding the wolf by the ears for 77 years and it looks like they are shifting the hands to the neck. I understand their position: they sincerely believe than any bargain with the Palestinians will only be a stepping point to the final item on the list:
The real problem is that no one is willing to step up and threaten to glass the country that will violate the peace terms first. This means both Israel and Palestine are completely free to defect, unlike Yugoslavs in B&H.
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