domain:parrhesia.substack.com
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Are the descendents of the Sudeten Germans and other Ostdeutsch who were ethnically cleansed out of eastern europe into Germany after WWII still living in refugee camps? Of course not. Population exchange is traumatic, but people can get on with their lives afterwards. The current never-ending simmer of terrorism and oppression is just categorically worse.
You know, the more I learn about Palestinians the more I'm convinced it was a bad idea to move ethnic cleansing into the category of "never under any circumstances even thinkable actions". Palestinians are brazenly explicit about their refusal to ever accept Jews living in the region and their commitment to "resistance" under all circumstances - a state of affairs practically unique in history because just about every other society to ever exist has known full well that the rewards for being even a fraction as belligerent would be getting wiped out. If they've shown after nearly 80 years they're still not going to behave, maybe threatening to move them somewhere else is the only thing that will get them reconsider their attitude.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1d ago
The early draw of reddit for me was learning fuddlore from different communities.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
If the first post was filtered, it's likely the responses have been filtered as well. An annoying artifact from rDrama. Try to upvote them even if you disagree with their post until they break free.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2),
The very first bullet point sub-head on your second link disproves your claim: "State Department disputes findings, cites video evidence of Hamas looting"
Also, there's plenty of mainstream coverage indicating that Hamas has been heavily involved in receiving food "aid" - look at this article from November last year, which outright admits:
Hamas' efforts to take a lead in securing aid supplies point to the difficulties Israel will face in a post-war Gaza, with few obvious alternatives to a group it has been trying to destroy for over a year and which it says can have no governing role. . . .
The new anti-looting force, formed of well-equipped fighters from Hamas and allied groups, has been named "The Popular and Revolutionary Committees" and is ready to open fire on hijackers who do not surrender, one of the sources, a Hamas government official, said. The official, who declined to be named because Hamas would not authorise him to speak about it, said the group operated across central and southern Gaza and had carried out at least 15 missions so far, including killing some armed gangsters.
They'll admit that Hamas is taking the aid meant for civilians if they can use Russell conjugation to make it sound pleasant - "securing aid supplies [from hijackers]" but when someone actually carries that thought through to its obvious and logical conclusion - that a combatant organization is taking aid meant for civilians - nope, no evidence!
phailyoor
1d ago
I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with the gun. The guy died, so he certainly wasn't making excuses like "I holstered it I swear I didn't touch the trigger" and it seems likely that respondents showed up and found the gun in its holster in a way that made it clear that nobody pulled the trigger.
Considering how much the military loves to put its people in deathtraps and deny that anything is wrong, I'm pretty sure that there's some serious evidence that the gun is actually bad. And the military bureaucrats certainly don't care what gun twitter has to say about hating the gun when they decide whether or not to ban it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Are you seriously suggesting that Israel is purposely targeting babies to starve?
I think the best case scenario here is that Israel is criminally negligent when it comes to avoiding starving babies. Certainly there are starving babies.
starvation has long been a legitimate tool to bring armies to their knees.
Agreed, but again, how is starving babies going to bring an army to its knees?
But that's not really what interests me. If you think starvation is a bad tactic for dealing with Hamas, that's totally fine, and I think I probably agree with you. I just wonder what tactics would be good for dealing with Hamas. What should Israel do?
There's only three options I see here. The first is to kill the Palestinians, which would be a horror that Israel would not recover from. The second is to move them, which is impossible because nobody is foolish enough to take millions of Palestinians.
When Kahane wasn’t condemning normie Zionists for having contempt for the Arabs, he liked to call them dogs. Not the most original metaphor, but vivid enough, so let’s run with it. Imagine a dog, not a Pitbull (that’s racist), but a Belgian Shepherd or similar. We observe one person who tries to reason with the dog, discusses with him the categorical imperative, and performs random unsolicited acts of kindness to appeal to its better nature. Another, swarthier person enters, perplexed at this cringe European, and pushes him to the side. He takes a good long look at the dog, walks over and kicks it square in the nuts, returning to high-five his friends. Rinse and repeat for three decades. Who is surprised that the dog is deranged?
What you do with a dog, obviously, is you train it. You don’t respond to its barks and snarls by getting down on all fours and barking back because ‘this is the yard’ and that’s what is done here. How do you train the dog? Well, go find someone who’s good at it, and ask him.
What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
This is true, but by the same token, a lot of people wringing their hands over the poor Palestinians being ethnically cleansed, if it was another Arab nation doing it would not give one single fuck.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
Almost everyone claiming that Gazans are starving now has been claiming the very same thing since the war started.
aqouta
1d ago
I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.
Of course we have an idea of where this ends. The Palestinian aim to drive the jews, every one, out of the region and the Jews will not leave willingly. It can end with the Palestinians somehow accepting the Jews existing in the region or one side killing the other. Those are the options.
Oh, I see. Looking at Netstack's post I guess it's only been 4 hours; maybe he'll come back.
I was getting pretty tired of the AlexanderTurok inspired you people posts, with minimal drive by engagement.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Yes, my questions are relevant to what you said. You are making arguments that Jews aren't "real" citizens because they don't show loyalty to their nation, and when I point out where this is untrue or where their nation literally unpersoned them, you say that's not what you're talking about. Sorry, you don't get to talk about only the very specific Jews who fit your generalizations.
Jews are somewhat underrepresented in the armed services in the US. Blacks are greatly overrepresented. Is this because Jews are less patriotic, and therefore blacks are more patriotic? Or is it because most Jews have better options than joining the military, and many blacks do not? Or will you find a convenient way to choose one from column A and one from column B?
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Unless it is Israel's intention to starve everyone in Gaza to death how does their current strategy deal with Hamas?
They are attempting to replace an ineffective aid stream that primarily benefits Hamas via confiscation and resale (UN channels) with another ineffective aid stream that attempts to cut out Hamas and provide aid directly to civilians (GHF aid, guarded by IDF and/or contractors). The goal is denying food aid to actual combatants (Hamas) and also denying combatants the ability to monetize aid by confiscating it and reselling it to the population, providing the combatants extra income and resources with which to carry on resistance.
It's not a complicated strategy.
It is not even clear to me that would be sufficient to end the threat of Hamas, as an organization, to Israel.
You are correct; Hamas is just the Gaza branch of the broader Muslim Brotherhood, which has many other branches in many other arab/islamicate countries. However, Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and the quasi-sovereign entity which attacked Israel on 10/7, therefore Israel's effort is concentrated against them. Other areas with Muslim Brotherhood parties which have not conducted such hostilities (e.g. the West Bank) are not subject to military operations.
Is literally ever member of Hamas in Gaza?
No, a bunch of them are sitting on stolen billions and living in Qatar and other luxe gulf states.
No one to pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone?
No, but if Israel were to target "everyone who might pick up the torch if everyone in Gaza were gone" then you'd fault them for carrying on a regional rather than a local genocide; Catch-22 and bad-faith criticism.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
I agree that simply killing every Palestinian would entail eliminating Hamas, but I am not convinced that killing, say, 10% of Palestinians will do that. I am especially doubtful that starving Palestinian babies will bring an army to its knees, on account of babies not being part of the army.
NYTReader
1d ago
It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.
The post was filtered pending mod approval. I believe it's been more like 2 to 3 hours.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I don't think the Holocaust is exceptional as far as genocides go. All genocides are horrific. But the Holocaust happened and it was a genocide, and genocides aren't the same as other war displacements (even if leftists today like to call everything a genocide).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I thought criticism of Israel wasn't the same as criticism of Jews. It's interesting how they're distinct or the same group depending on the convenience for your current line of attack.
Gaashk
1d ago
I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum.
It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.
Of course there are vanishingly few self made men, everyone gets almost everything from their family, nation, ancestors, etc. That's proper, right, and necessary.
I don't believe very strongly in meritocracy. Reports of the striver rat race to get into the best colleges, of South Korean grind culture, and of elite overproduction suggest failure points. I would be alright with a world where people mostly followed their parents' professions (assuming they're competent enough for the position -- the child of a brain surgeon might be a more generalist doctor, or if they don't want to do the work, some other PMC for, for instance), aside from the obvious issues with underclass kids with no profession to look to (sure, intermittent work in a warehouse or fast food restaurant is not a good life plan), and technological obsolescence. Trying to get everyone to go to college because blue collar is just so terrible was a bad idea. America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.
Individualism is fine to the extent that it's possible to interact with people as individuals. If there were some wise judge who was actually wise reviewing all potential immigrants as individuals, and they really had the best interests of the nation in mind, over multiple generations, then sure, fine. But that's not going to happen, just like the communism of a monastery isn't going to scale to a whole country, or even city. States often can't operate at that level (cue Nikolai Rostov "they're actually trying to kill me! Me, whom everybody loves!")
Anyway, yes of course most Americans are citizens because their parents were. Just like everywhere else. There's no frontier that could absorb large numbers of stateless people who failed to earn their citizenship. I guess if the Starship Troopers plan were on the table, where people had to earn the right to vote through national service (but still retained the right to live and work through birth), that would be fine. I dislike the custom of anchor babies, but doubt that anything much will change in that respect.
What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? ... But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work... when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone.
Did Scott miss the plot here? CS Lewis has remarkably little to say about God as punisher. That's one of his signature traits as an apologist. In one brief section in The Problem of Pain, he concedes it as part of a thought experiment to defend the goodness of eternal hell in its most repugnant aspect. But everywhere else, he describe sin as self-torture, and hell as something you do to yourself.
Here lies the primary genius of Lewis as a Christian essayist. Reading him, you really feel, intuitively, that Sin, Hell, and Death are the same thing, rather than the last two being something God arbitrarily imposes on those who do the first. It's the explicit theme of his novella The Great Divorce, where God tries to draw everyone into heaven, but they flee into outer darkness because they prefer their bitter and envious ways. More theoretically, in Mere Christianity, he spends his chapters on the capital vices showing how they make you miserable even at a natural level — in my opinion, this chapter on Pride is one of the greatest ever written, and even a fourth grader can understand it.
Here is a poem in his first work of apologetics, Pilgrim's Regress, sung by an (implied) angel when seeing doomed souls on the fringes of hell:
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
That misery might be stayed,
God in His mercy made
Eternal bounds and bade
Its waves no further swell.
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
This is, on its own, counterintuitive to accept, and IMO the through line of Lewis's oeuvre after Pilgrim's Regress is showing how it's true. CS Lewis's God is a big softie.
The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.
Due to the way the import market works for alcohol, there's almost no grey market. So if the corporation doesn't want to specifically send the real stuff to you, you're not going to get it any way you go about it. I don't believe it's possible for a private citizen in the US to legally get a can of Japanese made Asahi even if he had a blank check.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly.
So you take Peroni beer. Something with a hundreds of years old recipe, from even before Italy existed, made with Italian ingredients, in an Italian factory, just like Mussolini liked it. Then you slap on the label "Asahi" and some Japanese looking characters and bam you have "Asahi." Should be an open and shut case honestly. Maybe there are other cases that are more borderline, and maybe the court can err in the favor of the company in those cases, but really there are tons of cases that are very black and white.
Maybe I'm just living in fantasy land, but trademarks are too important to trade for consumers as well as producers to simply be treated as chattel that can simply be bought and sold like buildings or cars.
I don't believe Asahi owns any breweries in the US. This whole Peroni thing seems to be part of their push to capture more value through vertical integration, as when licensing the mark the licensee gets to keep a big cut. The peroni factory was almost certainly chosen because it's probably the cheapest out of any macrobrew in their global holdings.
For Europe, I'd imagine that Italy is considered domestic for all intents and purposes. Maybe things will change after Brexit but as long as there's no tariffs I don't see it changing anytime soon.
If they acquire any factories in North America, I'm sure they'll start using those for that region's production.
phosphorus2
1d ago
"despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
Ok so the motte has anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic views, to the extent you would prefer the woke to have power. But the woke are notoriously and unambiguously anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. One would think that if those were your reasons you would prefer the motte, no?
A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
J.D. Vance does not actually say that. If your quoted paragraph was the entirety of his words on the matter then I think that your reading would be a fair one. However in literally the next paragraph, w/ emphasis mine:
So I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century. I think we’ve got to do a better job at articulating exactly what that means. And I won’t pretend that I have a comprehensive answer for you, because I don’t. But there are a few things I’d suggest off the top of my head. And given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I see Michael Anton back there. He’s the most brilliant. Given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I think this is one of the main things that we need to run with over the next few years in our country. What does it mean to be an American in 2025?
Vance goes on to list what he thinks citizenship means. They are: Sovereignty, Building, Obligations to Fellow Americans / Gratitude. Noticeably absent is ancestry.
When Vance explicitly addresses what he thinks citizenship means and you ignore it in favor of an implicit reading it comes across as dishonest.
P-Necromancer
1d ago
Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.
Hmm, OK. I read 'indiscriminately opening fire' as 'making no distinction between combatants and civilians,' and since they surely do fire on enemy combatants, they must also fire on civilians at similar rates. Which is obviously untrue, or no aid would be distributed. Is it your position that they don't discriminate on that basis at all (that is, they're just as likely to return fire at enemy combatants as to fire at random civilians), or that they do, but without sufficient care? (Which would be an opinion, not a fact, but whatever.)
Maybe that's my misread.
M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.
He explicitly says the rifles are OK. .22 LR is a different caliber which those rifles can't shoot. So far as I know, there is no widely used 5.56 munition that's less deadly than M855. (Well, there's less reliable/accurate ammo; this makes civilian casualties more likely, not less.) There are rounds which have less penetration, sure: hollow points, the use of which would actually be a war crime. If he wanted to argue 5.56 rifles were inappropriate, he could have done so. Instead he fixated on the bog-standard ammo, emphasizing its spectacular lethality, and, bizarrely, claiming its issue (not even its use!) is a war crime.
I mention NATO because as a rule it can be assumed that using the standard-issue munition of the world's premier military alliance -- the whole thing, not just America, who hasn't signed on to every treaty -- is not a war crime. It's additionally abundant and, due to economies of scale, pretty cheap for its quality. I'm only harping on this because he chose to harp on it.
Who said the rifles are intended exclusively for crowd control? He says repeatedly there's active fighting in these areas -- there's active fighting in all of Gaza, as he acknowledges elsewhere, but he claims these areas are especially bad. If there's serious risk of these sites coming under fire from enemy combatants, these rifles are suitable for engaging them. If there's not, then it sounds like it's actually not an active combat zone.
It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.
Well, the one I'm talking about was physically impossible. I recall there were a number of 'experts' who swore by it, thereby proving that either they're not experts or they're willing to flagrantly lie to propagandize against Israel. It's perfectly possible some members of the IDF have shot children for sport -- I certainly can't prove otherwise, and there might well be other, real proof -- but they weren't the ones in those pictures.
Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?
I note you didn't address the claim that issuing M855 is a war crime. Here's what he said:
Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition... That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
Can you please point me towards the treaty, the case law, anything at all, that makes carrying M855 a war crime in and of itself?
It's very late in the time zone I'm currently in and I probably won't be replying to anything in detail until tomorrow. I don't have time to write long posts every hour of every day---like waiting 24hrs is the standard for written communication.
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