site banner
Hour Day Week Month Year
Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 352621 results for

domain:natesilver.net

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

From what I understand, Mussolini's fascism wasn't particularly racist by the standards of the time, at least not until his Italy had become utterly dependent on Nazi Germany during the war and he gave Hitler some racist policies as a concession.

I'm very far from an expert on Italian fascism, but to the extent that I know anything about it, to me it seems characterized by being a strongly collectivist nationalist ideology that is both a response to and a rejection of both capitalism and communism. This is reflected in Mussolini's own path of having been a socialist when younger, then turning away from mainstream socialism because he disliked its internationalism and was more interested in making Italy great again.

Perhaps the core concept of Italian fascism was the idea of using an extremely powerful nationalist state to overcome the conflict between capitalists and workers and forge both together into dynamic collaboration that could revitalize the nation without the total class upheaval or internationalism pursued by mainstream socialism.

Hitler pursued the same concept, and in that sense Nazi Germany was a fascist state. Both Mussolini's and Hitler's ideal was that the fascist party would become completely dominant over society and subordinate all other power groups - churches, capitalists, labor movements, intellectuals, etc. - to its own will. There could still be churches, capitalists, labor movements, and intellectuals, but they would be ruled by the party/the government (one and the same thing, in the fascist ideal). Any disagreements between those groups would be mediated by the government for the greater good of the nation, and the individual interests of the groups would not be allowed to interfere with the greater goal of making the nation strong.

The key ideological difference between fascism and Bolshevism was that fascism did not seek to do away with capitalism, only to utterly subordinate it to the government, and that fascism was explicitly nationalistic in a way that Bolshevism (while it often pursued nationalistic goals in practice) rejected thoroughly on the level of ideology.

Unlike traditionalist conservatism, fascism was also profoundly revolutionary in its ethos. It did not seek to conserve existing mentalities except to the degree that they would be pragmatically useful, it did not seek to return to a pre-modern way of being, it had little use for religion other than for pragmatic reasons, and it had no issues with technological progress. Like communism, it sought to create a new kind of man. It had totalizing ambitions. In the ideal fascist future, there would be no distinction between individuals, the party, and the state. In this perhaps it was influenced by the recent experience of total military mobilization during World War One. The fascist state perhaps sought a similar, but perpetual mobilization of all society in the service of the one goal of national strength, even in peacetime.

Another key characteristic of fascism was that it explicitly glorified struggle and conflict as a means of both spiritual and material renewal. Fascism considered peace to be a lower state of being and believed that man could only fully fulfill his potential in combat, whether literal or metaphorical. This is another key difference between fascism and communism. The professed ideal of communism was to bring about a new society in which class warfare had been overcome for the people's benefit. Communism glorified being a warrior for the sake of the cause, but the image of the ideal society that communism sold to people as its ultimate goal was a peaceful one. Fascism, on the other hand, considered war in itself to be a good thing, something that elevated and spiritually purified human beings. Communism, on the ideological level, claimed to seek to overcome social Darwinism. Fascism, on the other hand, considered social Darwinism to be inherently good - it just sought to reduce or at least master social Darwinism within the nation, in order to become better at social Darwinism in competition between nations.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Freud was a much bigger influence. But, a quote from him, to highlight the issues with the genealogical approach:

The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature... psychologically [communism] is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings.

Freud was a classical liberal in his politics. But we can draw a very clear line from his thought to the Frankfurt School. Can we then conclude that the Frankfurt School was anti-socialist? No; the existence of a genealogical relationship is interesting and often a useful lens to view things through, but to stop there without looking into the content of the theories can lead to very wrong conclusions.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

GameMaker was good enough for Hotline Miami, so you could try it. If you're married to Python, you're stuck, as there aren't that many Python game engines that have enough plugins for you to skip the boring stuff.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

I have to second this. Godot, for all that it infuriates me because it doesn't suit my very specific use-case, is actually a really good starter game-engine. It's lightweight, easy to use, and contains all the essential bits and bobs.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

Assuming you've been starting from absolute scratch, i.e. only the standard library, there are game engines that solve the question of "having a framework to click buttons in and have objects that move around". The problem might be that learning a game engine might be just as hard if not harder than learning a programming language.

Godot is one of the engines that people make 2D games with today.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Deir Yassin massacre

April 9, 1948

Someone born during the Deir Yassin massacre would be in their late seventies today. You are literally talking about acts committed by people who have since died of old age.

I actually don't think it's reasonable to retaliate against an entire ethnic group for acts committed multiple generations ago. I think there's a statute of limitations on these things. For instance, I wouldn't consider it justified for England to invade France to take revenge for 1066. At some point you have to let history go.

I see that we are again entering a disagreement about what it means to 'attack' someone. You seem to take a symbolic view. When you say the Israelis attacked the Palestinians, you mean some Israelis attacked some Palestinians roughly eighty years ago. There is a symbolic crime and a symbolic guilt born by the innocent people who had the symbolic misfortune to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Therefore, it is okay to murder them. Symbols are taken to justify real violence.

I take a more practical view. When I say the Palestinians attacked the Israelis, I mean the current regime in Gaza attacked Israel last year. They are still alive, and they are still in power.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

I am struggling to maintain motivation on the game I'm making (previously mentioned here ). I've spent too much time making stupid placeholder GUI stuff and it's taking too long to get to the cool gameplay features that I actually care about. I am reconsidering my stance on doing everything from scratch. Does anyone know of any useful libraries or stuff that I can import and/or copy/paste that would be useful? For context, it's a turn based grid dungeon crawling roguelite thing, so I don't need any 3D graphics or physics or anything. Just an easier way to have a bunch of menus and buttons that I can stick my game functions onto instead of wasting time re-inventing them all myself. I've never done proper game dev before, I don't have a CS degree, I'm a math dude who self-taught programming to do math research, so I have no idea what exists or is useful, and figured I'd ask here for recommendations before delving into google hell.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

That sounds like, well, everything. Those are exactly the same things that, for instance, conservatives seek to obtain. Does that make conservatism a form of Marxism?

There is a sense in which feminism, among other priorities, seeks to redistribute various goods in society towards women, on the premise that the current distribution favours men in a way that is both unequal and unjust. But to say that that shows some connection to Marxism obviously proves too much. Any movement advocating any action whatsoever is going to demand some kind of redistribution, because action is inherently redistributive - action requires resources, and resources need to be distributed from somewhere.

So I don't think I understand ThisIsSin's point. Feminists advocate certain things, yes, and doing those things would involve some level of redistribution. But that is true of every movement. Pointing this out establishes absolutely nothing about feminism, either as a neutral claim about ideological lineage, or about its desirability or undesirability.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

The British, French and Americans didn't actually adopt and implement social Darwinism, they had 'the white man's burden' and 'the civilizing mission'. Kipling wrote it to encourage America to colonize even though he makes it out to be a thankless, exhausting burden.

Take up the White Man's burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

That's critically different from actual fascists who would say 'wtf is this, we're here to extract as much as we can and couldn't care less about the welfare of these subhumans'. The Nazis wouldn't have had any problems with Ghandi, they'd just keep shooting until the Indians were under control.

The native Americans weren't subjugated to eliminate them or permanently other them, they were subjugated to integrate them as Americans, they got treaties and reservations. The Australians went around massacring Aboriginals in an ad-hoc bottom-up way because it was easy but there was never any actual policy to get rid of them, the closest they got is 'the arc of history bends towards us, no big deal if they wither away but we won't actually make it happen, we'll do weird things like them away from their parents and raise them as our own'.

Not social-darwinist, full-bore racism, it was wishy-washy 'civilizing' racism.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

When I use the word 'attacked,' I do not refer to the crime of existing while being Jewish. I use the word 'attacked' to refer to that thing where you use guns and bombs to kill people.

Do you know what Irgun and Lehi actually did? I'm incredibly surprised that you would describe the actions of those groups as "the crime of existing while being Jewish" - I don't think many antisemites would be willing to go that far. For context, are you familiar with the Deir Yassin massacre? What you're describing as "the crime of being Jewish" was actually a paramilitary organisation going door to door in a Palestinian village and murdering everyone they found there, women and children included.

By logical extension, the Israelis are not 'attacking' the Palestinians by existing in their vicinity.

If I break into your home and lock you in the basement, occasionally throwing a grenade down there or going in and killing some children, would you consider yourself attacked? After all, I'm just existing in your vicinity and not directly hitting you, so if you tried to fight back against this state of affairs it would actually be YOU who is the violent one.

That argument wouldn't convince me, and if it would convince you then please let me know where you live and whether or not you have a basement.

On the other hand, last year the Palestinians launched a literal attack on Israel. Lots of people died. It started a war. Ring any bells?

Started a war? STARTED a war? It was the most successful attack by the Palestinians in some time, but it was in no way the start of the conflict.

Then why are you so concerned that the Palestinians will be 'wiped out'?

I mean, basic human decency and empathy for one. But more specifically, it is because I have read numerous statements by high-ranking Israeli officials and politicians regarding their plans for the Palestinians.

Since you've just explained why it can't possibly happen regardless of what the Palestinians do,

No? I didn't explain why it can't possibly happen, but why I believe that actually going through with it will be a terrible, suicidal decision that permanently stains the Jewish people and renders Israel non-viable. Hell, I think they have already gone far enough that Israel will face far more significant future challenges than another October 7. Saying that a decision would be suicidal doesn't mean that somebody else might make that choice anyway.

I see. When you say 'wiped out' you don't actually mean anyone will be killed.

Israel has already racked up a very high bodycount. I'm honestly not sure how you came to the conclusion that that was what I meant by wiped out - I legitimately cannot follow your logic.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

That’s an AI ad / promo more than a summary. Kind of like the difference between a blurb and a summary.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

P-zombies don't exist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I think the media isn't suggesting the Russians did it for the simple reason that there's no cause to think that they did. This is a tiny factory in a rural area. Even if it had a tremendous amount of automation, those sixteen people weren't supplying even one percent of the military's ordinance. It simply makes no sense to target it for sabotage.

Also worth noting is that industrial accidents of this type aren't exactly unheard of. In fact, there was a smaller explosion at this same site around a decade ago.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Stuff can always go wrong. Nothing is certain until the occupancy permits are issued, and even then, who knows? Condo defect reform might be the next big fight, or single-stairway rules.

But the compromises were mainly horizontal, not vertical, in that they made the law apply in fewer places rather than making it less useful where it does apply; it's going to mean the most exactly where it needs to.

Of course it's possible that we could see a backlash, but the mechanism would have to be something like a ballot proposition, and the organized forces of stasis weren't even able to get enough signatures for that last time.

And more to the point, the legislature that passed SB 79 is way more YIMBY than the legislature that didn't let SB 827 make it out of committee. I'd like to think that five years from now, this will seem like an obvious good idea that everyone was, in retrospect, in favor of, and now we're arguing about the thing where all apartment buildings have to buy a useless million-dollar thing because "fire safety".

So, put the revolver down, if not away. This isn't the end, but it sure is a big step forward. There remains the implementation, of course, which is a lot more in-the-weeds stuff. Enjoy!

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

All [...] is violence

This is such a bizarre argument, particularly for one I've seen repeated again and again in different variations with negligible pushback. When they say "This movie may contain scenes of violence", they aren't talking about a parliamentary committee crafting legislation. When the FBI gathers events for inclusion in their "violent crime" statistics, they don't count voter fraud. People with a commitment to "nonviolence" have no problem voting, and they aren't regarded as hypocrites for doing so.

People have no problem with recognizing violence (or the lack of it) when they see it, but this novel expansive definition of violence keeps popping up.

... or at least the threat of violence. We've put a nice facade over it

A facade, and a wall, and armor plating, and a maze beyond that. Stalin had a facade of nonviolence as he was genociding Ukrainians, but we (practically) have the real thing. People don't think about the "facade" because there are genuine, strong social barriers to using (normally-defined) violence.

...I figured I'd pierce the facade and instead of people giving up violence for petty thing got more "Fine, I'm OK killing you".

One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.

  1. Issuing a parking ticket and murdering someone are both X
  2. You should treat all X consistently
  3. Therefore...?
Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Fascism is the political movement that Mussolini built to win control of Italy. If I'm being generous, you can lump in the Nazis and maybe Franco (though the Spanish Falange is really a cadet branch at best).

Even your definition is too broad. Was the 19th century US fascist? Australia? Imperial Britain or France? There needs to be some kind of mass mobilization of society to apply. And, probably, intentional mass murder of political opponents and demographics labeled the Enemy, since that's what people most strongly object to and mean to apply when labelling a contemporary a fascist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Social status?

Yes. Also jobs, influential positions in institutions, government contracts, and public resources.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

There's a bunch of nonsense right here.

"The cult of action for action's sake,"

Of course, our guys only topple statues, set fire to district courts, attack the police, smash windows of the stores, burn down gas stations and loot supermarkets only after deep intellectual reflection. While their fascist goons are taking actions just out of base animalistic instincts, because they are uncapable of deep thought - otherwise they'd already be agreeing with us, as any reasonable person who is not a fascist does.

How can one take something like this seriously as a "definition" of anything? Of course exposing the vacuous nature of such intellectual pretense can be called "anti-intellectualism", but this is bullshit - these people have no right to usurp the mantle of "intellect" and use it to cover their vapid nonsense.

"Appeal to a frustrated middle class,"

So you're saying, taking into consideration the interests of a group of voters who are about 3/4 of the voters, is something that "fascists" do? Congratulations, every single politician is a fascist now. This can't be serious, of course every political movement in a democratic country would consider interests of the middle class, and in every welfare state a lot of middle class is frustrated because they bear the bulk of the burden of maintaining the welfare state, while not deriving a lot of benefit from it. The only movements that would not are the ones like communists which would rather see the democratic regime overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat installed - there would be no stinking "middle class" there!

Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual

This is literally THE leftist slogan. "People united" and so on. When I was in Soviet school (long time ago), I had to memorize a ton of poems about how an individual is nothing and the collective is everything. And it's the opponents of MAGA that had been consistently trying to suppress individualism and unapproved viewpoints for decades now.

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak."

This can be applied to any anti-establishment movement. People say the elites oppress them? "too strong!" People say the elites are morally corrupt and decadent? "too weak!" Here, every movement attacking the establishment - even obviously oppressive, corrupt and decadent one - is now "fascist". That's not a definition, that's a smear.

"Disagreement is treason"

This is especially poignant now, when the Left actually just murdered a person whose only life's business was publicly disagreeing with them, and massively agreed this is a good thing to do and needs to be done more. I mean, without that I could spend some time on explaining how the left had been repressing dissent for the last decade, but I no longer need to. They are literally, as a movement, enthusiastic about murdering people for disagreement.

"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat.

That's another nonsense - who defines what's "hyping up"? You take your enemies actions seriously? You are "obsessed" and therefore a fascist. You are passionate about human rights and injustice? "Obsessed" again. This is literally how late Soviets suppressed the dissidents - they just declared them mentally ill, because obviously only a mentally ill person can be obsessed with proving USSR is an oppressive dictatorship with no freedoms or human rights.

This of course is especially great when we know now that there are organized networks and institutions working to achieve exactly the goals the "conspiracy theorists" said they want to achieve - a fundamental transformation of Western society and imbuing it with values radically different from the ones it used to have. If you notice any of that, you are obviously a fascist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

What, specifically, can they not make?

Anything with significant quantities of rare earths - which describes a lot of modern military technology. Israel has plenty of deposits, but they don't have the infrastructure required to refine and process them into usable material. To the best of my knowledge Israel doesn't actually have any mines at all (plenty of quarries, but good luck turning stone into hypersonic missiles or drones), which will make resupplying the metal used for modern military technologies a bit difficult.

And if they can't make something, why couldn't they source it from a non-patron power?

Who?

China's not going to help - China wants to make sure the Israeli security situation is as miserable as possible, because that means US resources and attention will be diverted there and away from Taiwan. Additionally, the comments made by Chinese officials regarding the current conflict are very much not indicative of future support for Israel - they have explicitly supported the right of Palestine to full statehood and development. France? I wouldn't pin my hopes on France coming to the rescue given their own large internal problems. They can't even supply the Ukrainians with enough materiel to fight off Russia. As for Russia itself? Russia supplies the air-defence systems used by Iran and has been accepting a lot of help from them with regards to drone technology and drone warfare. Russia is the largest military partner of Israel's biggest regional threat - I don't think they're going to be much help.

Who's left? What other nation can both supply advanced modern military materiel, has plenty of said materiel to spare and the capacity to open a secure land route to get that technology to Israel? Without the US guaranteeing global shipping and commercial trade, or paying Egypt to stay friendly to Israel, how exactly does this mysterious nation even get their technology to Israel? Furthermore, how's Israel going to pay for it? Right now they've duped the Americans into paying them to receive free weapons, but that isn't going to work on China. In the same future where the US has abandoned them, there's no doubt going to be a cessation of remittances and other support from American jews to Israel - so the budget is going to be taking a significant hit already.

Presumably the answer to these questions is "the same way all other nations do."

Historically, the way all other nations solved the problem of having an unsustainably large population, 95% reduction in available energy and an economy unable to support their military is by collapsing or experiencing massive famines and starvation.

Who, specifically, is going to cut off their imports? And how?

The nations surrounding them, and by simply closing their borders to land/air traffic. Iran is more than capable of shutting down their shipping infrastructure, even if they have to send the weaponry to the Houthis to do it.

Perhaps you tacitly assume that all surrounding countries will attempt to attack Israel again as soon as the US withdraws its security umbrella?

I assume that when the US stops paying them to be nice to Israel, they will stop being nice to Israel. I don't think they'll necessarily attack them, but charging obscene fees to render those imports uneconomical when they don't just sabotage or block them is well within the bounds of what they could do.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

What is feminism redistributing? Reproduction? Family? Male attention? Social status?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Nobody even seems that interested in what fascism actually is.

Is Miller really a fascist because he wants to enforce immigration laws? Surely not, otherwise we would have to define Eisenhower of Operation Wetback fame as a fascist.

IMO, fascism is a combination of militarism, imperialism and racism within a social darwinist worldview. Not merely 'I don't like these backwater savages' but 'it's our job to subjugate them in the short term and maybe get rid of them outright, we need to tile the world with us and ours'. Nazism is fascism + anti-semitism.

Also, all violence is political to some extent. If a thief (poor) robs someone (rich) then there's a political angle to it. Some leftists would say it's justified, especially if its a big corporation. The whole point of the police is administering violence to baddies, how much violence and who is a baddy, that's a political question. Politics is about power and violence is the most important kind of power. Challenging the sovereignty and values of the state is very political violence.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I'll take a stab at it, because I like the spectacular boldness of the claim:

The human brain can host an extraordinary variety of mental structures. Only a minority of them give rise to consciousness. Those that do, however, are better at navigating complex environments than others (maybe some concept of the self and self narratives are the simplest way to get agency, conferring advantage, and those happen to be the ones that host qualia). But environmental drift toward increasing bureaucratized environments make agency less useful: navigating them is difficult for most people, and so the concept and resultant consciousness are abandoned. It's not so much that consciousness gives an advantage in itself, but that the simplest structures that enable taking advantage are conscious. You could have brains that are equivalently capable without being conscious, but they take too much compute to be realized.

I don't have a clue where consciousness and qualia come from, though, so I don't have a sense of whether Homo erectus or Homo bureaucratus would lack them.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I think they're basically all free squares; the list is just a toolkit for anytime you want to coordinate the masses into some kind of political action.

If you tried to form a political project that was the exact inverse of what the list describes, you get a kind of bloodless, nebbish classical liberalism. Which is nice, but it's not something a movement has ever been made from.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Having weak and marginal Jews in your community that paid the dhimmi tax and that you could coerce the beautiful daughters into Islam is nothing like brotherhood,

How much do you know about Jewish life in Palestine or the muslim world prior to Israel? Who was in charge of the government during the Jewish Golden Age?

The Jews don't want to be dhimmi. No one wants to be a non-Muslim subject in a Islamic country if they can help it.

Do you think the Palestinians want to be non-Jewish subjects in a Jewish country? Hell, I wouldn't want to be a non-Jewish subject in a Jewish country.

Even the most tolerant Palestinian wants the Jews to live in a box outside of the holy places and be milked for taxes by the bridge troll.

I think the last century of events has contributed rather heavily to negative attitudes towards jews amongst the Palestinians.

I'm sorry, but your historical read is just wrong. The leftist perspective is simply delusional: too focused, as it were, in the splinters in others eyes to mind the logs in theirs. Your romanticization of Muslim tolerance is historical revisionism at best.

You might want to check up on your history before you make accusations like that - there were multiple times in history when the Jews fled to Muslim countries because Christian lands persecuted them too heavily. The great antipathy between the Islamic world and the Jews in the modern world is in large part due to the establishment of the state of Israel, and there's a wide variety of historical Jewish sources talking about how Muslim rule was preferrable to Christian rule. While you're right that Muslim tolerance was a far cry from the multicultural societies of the modern west, by the standards of those historical periods that tolerance was actually real - the Christians were treating them far worse at the time, and even some of the earliest Islamic documents (see the constitution of Medina) mention this shared connection with the Jews.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

The Palestinians were there before Israel was, and we can even directly identify many of the violent terror groups that helped establish Israel like Irgun and Lehi. The Palestinians didn't start this fight any more than the Jews of Nazi Germany started the holocaust.

When I use the word 'attacked,' I do not refer to the crime of existing while being Jewish. I use the word 'attacked' to refer to that thing where you use guns and bombs to kill people.

If the Palestinians were there first (debatable), so what? The German gentiles were undeniably 'there' before the German Jews. Does that mean the German Jews were 'attacking' the German gentiles with their presence? No. By logical extension, the Israelis are not 'attacking' the Palestinians by existing in their vicinity.

On the other hand, last year the Palestinians launched a literal attack on Israel. Lots of people died. It started a war. Ring any bells?

Mass extermination of unwanted brown people to give your society a bit more lebensraum is the kind of gross crime against humanity that gets your nation completely ostracised from the rest of the world. Not only that, the actual human infrastructure of the state would likely have trouble - look at growing number of IDF suicides and imagine how much worse it would be if they were explicitly committing another holocaust without any figleaves. Just nuking them would engender such a hostile reaction from the rest of the world that Israel would simply cease to be a viable state.

Then why are you so concerned that the Palestinians will be 'wiped out'? Since you've just explained why it can't possibly happen regardless of what the Palestinians do, you yourself prove that Palestinian 'resistance' is just a waste of lives. By your own argument there will be no 'wiping out' so what are we even talking about?

In the absence of violent resistance Israel would simply do to Gaza what they are doing with the west bank and take over the land piecemeal. As I've said, they believe that a lack of resistance means they will simply be wiped out and dispossessed - and I think they're right to believe that. I do agree that this conflict is a meaningless source of misery and the world would be a better place if it didn't happen at all, but sadly I'm not in charge of the region.

wiped out and dispossessed

I see. When you say 'wiped out' you don't actually mean anyone will be killed. It's a kind of nonviolent 'wiping out' where people lose landownership in a dispute over whose ancestors stole what from whom, but continue living their lives without being bodily harmed in any way. This is one of those irregular verbs, you know, I'm buying a house, you're dispossessing the native population, he's committing genocide.

So in order to prevent the Jews from metaphorically 'wiping them out' (by existing nearby), the Palestinians must heroically resist (by massacring the Jews). I do not like this abuse of language.