It’s so hilarious seeing them just plain state that people aren’t allowed to talk about normal-ass stuff if the government doesn’t like it, and then seeing people online who try to defend them.
Fuck Lenin for turning a philosophy of freedom and cooperation and consensus into just another tool of State/authoritarian power.
bUt It’S nOt PrAcTiCaL oThErWiSe
No, you’re just scared of what it would actually look like. Lots of supposed Communists who are scared of the whole “stateless” part meaning they can’t finagle their way into power, or who just want the revolution as a vehicle to change who is in power (i.e. them).
Lenin’s biggest mistake was thinking this whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase was going to be this magical normal period that no human would abuse ever, completely ignoring millennia of human history, human behavior, and the dynamics of power that would make that sort of thing literally impossible. Not only does absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even if a leader was immune to such corruption, dictatorships are never propped up by one single leader. They are precariously installed by groups of people who have other units of power, like the military, to keep the system in place.
One of those powerful people can simply say: “Keep this dictatorship in place or I will torture you and your entire family while spreading propaganda about detestable crimes, until eventually I’ll feed you to the angry mob and prop up a new dictator.”
And that’s it. The real communism dream never happens. Corruption quickly floods the state, and wealth disparity continues unchallenged and unabated. It’s just more hidden, under the guise of a system of equalative poverty for one class of people and gradients of power for another class of people.
Hell, this even happens with failed democracies, like Russia. Everybody gets behind the new system, but without the right kinds of checks and balances, corruption invades and, eventually, it’s a democracy in name only. But, at least democracy never had any notion of a dictatorship built into the philosophy. Democracies are still really hard to keep in place, but communism is a doomed idea from the very start.
Communism is a very doable system, the problem is that people have false expectations of it and what it should look like (largely thanks to Leninism).
Collaborative, democratic consensus, is the normal way that groups of people work. Coercion is not, but that is how majoritarian systems work, and it is how states work. People have been living under Western nation-state and administrative-state systems for so long, within defined borders that denote both behavior and identity, that it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales. The common response is, “but someone will always try to take charge/ seize power”, and that is true, but before the time of the modern state, you could walk away.
Now the state itself has become a self-perpetuating threat to its own citizens (which you can’t leave without subsuming yourself to another state), and majoritarian democracy is just used to maintain the state through the illusion of choices that hold that threat at bay. “Don’t let ‘x’ get in power, because if they do they’ll hurt those of us that are ‘y’.” You can’t fuck off and make a community that doesn’t allow ‘x’, because a state will come along and destroy or seize it.
it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales.
Because it’s already very very hard to scale. It takes only a small group of people to fuck up trust models to such a degree that the whole system falls apart.
If you are not prepared for evil, evil will hold far more power that you and decimate the entire community. Indigenous peoples from every corner of the world have been punished by that hard lesson over and over again.
Scale is half the problem. There is a reason that climate destruction, world-spanning wars, nuclear weapons, etc. all took off the same time that population exploded. You can’t separate scale from technology from destruction. I’m not arguing for de-dev, but the complex, “scalable” systems we’ve built and now rely on are literally either designed to kill us or are inadvertently killing us (emission, plastics, deforestation, PFAS, etc.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m advocating being unprepared for evil? Even in Anarchist systems, which do not have systems of authority, the use of force to counter someone hurting you is well understood.
If your argument is that state systems will scale large enough to destroy non-state systems, I agree, but then you’re just agreeing with what I said about the state setting itself up as a threat that must be participated with in order to counter (i.e. in this case arguing, “if you don’t want the state to consume you, make your own state”). That doesn’t make those other systems bad, it makes states bad. “Might makes right” is not generally considered a very modern or positive way of interacting with each other.
do u really compare the most dense city in the world to… that?
or u try to make a point that so many buildings were destroyed yet so many arabs are alive thus Israel is doing a great job not harming the population?
Gaza is not even remotely the densest city in the world. There are several cities in Israel alone that are denser.
Also, yeah, the death toll among civilians is a tiny fraction of that in these cities during WW2 despite similar levels of destruction, which does support the claim that Israel is actually warning people.
The claim he called propaganda was that every male over 18 +40% of women are seen as, and killed as, terrorists by the Israeli army, not that there wouldn’t be dead civilians. Nobody, literally nobody, claims the latter. Also YOU are funnily the one doing that by being anti-Israel? That, other than Hamas, is an actual country with civilians. Just stop the polarisation and dramatisation. One can be against wannabe autocrat Netanyahu, the war crimes the Israeli army is committing, and yet hope they kill every single Hamas member. Gaza has to be freed, from Hamas and Iran’s snd Quatar’s influence. Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.
Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Very well put. It reminds me of the quote:
If there were an Oscar for best theatrical performance by a country, Israel would win every year. It’s a country based on theater. It’s a lunatic state - completely insane.
Your conclusion is wrong from what they say. Don’t project and polarise. Killing civilians is horrible and must be stopped. But that’s different from targeting them as terrorists. And you know that! How will this mess be ever solved if even on the most basic level are these stupid dramatisation and accusations?
Yes I know, it was a facetious comment because anyone still supporting Israel appears to be in a different reality than I, and I see no point in debating this issue.
To provide context to the article: There is a proven dynamic relationship between trade openness, foreign direct investment, and industrial economic growth within economies, and this is true also for China. There is strong evidence for this (for example, see here).
A significant portion of China’s GDP depends on foreign direct investments, and the Gini coefficient, a metric for economic inequity, is 0.45 in China (for comparison, in most European countries it is between 0.3 and 0.35). It is commonly said that any Gini above 0.4 bears a high risk for social unrest.
I don’t know how whataboutism helps China or anyone else, but there are several countries with high degrees of inequality. You should also provide a source for your data. Gini coefficient for US
I didn’t mean it as whataboutism to justify China’s situation, just as a tangent about the US also having work to do. I agree, now that you said it, that it looks like whataboutism.
Hopefully the drop in the US over the past two years turns into a longer trend.
It’s going to be very difficult for China to attract money when other countries with less authoritarian practices are stepping into spaces that China previously dominated, and China really cannot afford to lose that money and those jobs.
I’m sure he just wanted to test all (all) the food first to make sure his population doesn’t get poisoned; very commendable, really. Not everyone is a villain, you know!
How I hate the lazy deflection and caping for Israel in your comments.
The Gaza Health Ministry is considered to be reliable for casualty reporting due to independent verification by groups that monitor the conflict like Human Rights Watch and the UN. They release specific casualty data including names, ages, and ID numbers.
The only argument that Israel or their allies have used against their released casualty numbers is that they’re run by Hamas (the Gaza government), but oddly those people, yourself included, never seem to dispute Israeli numbers for the same reason.
You continuously link to conspiracy sites and random parties social media posts. Your evidence is a joke.
Show me an actual source from an organization that works in Gaza, saying the numbers are falsified, not another Israel apologist cooking numbers on Twitter.
You make a claim, that the Health Ministry is including the Al-Shifa numbers in their data currently, without citation, and use that claim to extrapolate that any numbers must all be false.
And again, your only argument is, “it’s Hamas and you’re eating it up!”.
Israel has released plenty of numbers of persons killed throughout the conflict, both on their and on Hamas’ sides.
In October the Gaza Health Ministry claimed 471 people were killed by an Israeli missile strike on a hospital. Widespread credible (independent) evidence proves a small Hamas rocket missfired and hit a carpark near the hospital, causing relatively minor damage (there was a large fireball, but it was mostly rocket fuel - which is far less damaging than an explosive payload intended to kill).
None of the credible evidence was able to put a number to the deaths in that accident but it’s highly improbable that 471 people were in the carpark. And it definitely wasn’t an Israeli rocket.
In other words - Gaza’s health ministry is not a reliable source. Some of the things they report are probably accurate but they have been proven to be unreliable. Don’t trust anything they say unless it’s been backed by someone more reliable (in which case, you might as well refer to the other source instead).
At best, the ministry failed verify facts (e.g. was a large missile even fired at all?) before reporting what happened. But I think that’s being too charitable. For example where did they get the 471 number from? I think they made it up. I don’t have proof but it’s the only believable explanation.
Worse though - they haven’t retracted the claim. Mistakes are understandable… but failing to admit someone in your organisation made a mistake is unacceptable.
But it’s only transmissible via consumption like mad cow disease, is that correct? If so, at the very least it shouldn’t become an epidemic, just very bad for the environment and deer jerky enthusiasts.
Edit: Nope, nvmd, I’m dumb. They said it’s really contagious and these prions can persist a long fucking time on surfaces. I’m gonna just never go outside again, thanks, I ain’t fucking with no prion disease.
It’s tricky. So I was listening to a BSE radio doc recently which had an episode about the deer. They actually don’t know if BSE was transmitted through eating the beef, in fact there’s cases of vegetarians getting it. It’s still being studied. They’re very worried about people eating infected deer, which is quite likely being as they’re easy to kill, but also having anything to do with them because they just don’t know how it moves from animal to animal, deers rarely eat each other so it’s not super likely that’s the only way.
“You not believe Moscow Times? You free to go check, they have room for you…” /s
But seriously, I don’t even fully believe that Prigozhin is dead. The last trustworthy news I’ve heard from Russia, is from that one guy in Moscow complaining about how “rude” it is for Ukraine to launch drone attacks at night.
I don’t want to disturb the thread here about religion, islam, and the like, but the point here is that a young girl was forced into a marriage at the age of 15, then raped and beaten by her ‘husband’, and then hanged by an autocratic regime because she obviously found no other way out of the horror. The Iranian regime is in charge of that, the people responsible are to be held accountable, rather than any religion, ideology, or the like.
This is horrible and should be documented… but let’s be realistic: nobody will be held accountable as long as Iran has Oil and Nukes… and by the time it runs out of those, the people responsible will likely be long dead.
All we can do is hope for Cold Fusion to become a reality, so all the Oil based dictatorships would collapse.
It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war. It’s not a war.
This is devastating. And amidst so much debate over Israel’s right to defend itself, I feel it’s getting lost that this military campaign is only a success if measured by a set of goals even most Zionists would not recognize as productive.
Will it make Israel safer? No, undoubtedly the war has cost international standing, strained the US-Israel relationship, and will inevitably radicalize far more extremists than are killed.
Will it continue the right-ward shift of Israeli policy? Does it cut off avenues for peace and reconciliation and foster militant Israeli nationalism? Yes.
This campaign is only a success if the primary objective is the eventual capture of the entire region at the cost of Israel’s safety (and the safety of Jews around the world) and Israel’s international standing. By any more conventional aims, it is an unmitigated disaster.
Honest question, what is Israel supposed to do? Give Hamas concessions? I think history shows that appeasement only emboldens terrorism. Back out now and let Hamas come back with even more local support?
It’s a lose/lose. There is no winning for Israel. It seems that either Israel makes itself a pariah in the international community by killing countless innocent Palestinians or it lets terrorists win.
I would love for you or someone to help me see a different way Israel can get back out of this.
Part 1: I grew up a Zionist. In most versions, Zionism envisioned a peaceful, multi-ethnic state. In that sense, the zionist project is half-complete.
The first half was accomplished by people who aspired to something that everyone said was madness, totally impossible, completely unfeasible, hopelessly unworkable. And they fucking did that thing.
Now, anyone who considers themselves a Zionist needs to take on the responsibility for continuing that project with the sense of courage and insane vision that brought Israel into existence. ‘It’s too hard!’ ‘There are no good solutions!’ BULLSHIT. The whole country is founded on the idea that nothing is impossible, so let’s stop making excuses.
Part 2: The biggest problem is Jewish radicals. Itmar Ben Givir of the Jewish Power Party, Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, and Netanyahu of Likud. These are the primary leaders of a genocide, and Netanyahu’s special move for decades has been foreclosing peace. Step one is wanting peace, and step two is holding accountable the people who’ve never wanted it and always tried to keep it out of reach.
Step three, I think, is to help every Palestinian climb what I think of as “the ladder”. Israel is an apartheid state. You’ve got Ashkenazi Jews at the top, and Mizrahi/Sphardeic Jews close but just below. Then you’ve got Palestinian Israelis, then a whole bunch of tiers of West Bank / East Jeruselum Palestinians, then Gazans / foreign refugees. Each group needs a path to the rights of the group above, and there has to be a roadmap to a roadmap to peace. And that is going to require international brokers. Israeli needs a government that isn’t hostile to the UN, and the US needs to reduce its involvement and stay the fuck out of the peace process.
You should think a bit more about that “ladder” concept. In the same way that advocating for manumission doesn’t fix any of the issues with slavery a “path to the rights of the group above” doesn’t fix any of the issues with an apartheid state.
Unless you’re fine with a little genocide, any apartheid state is not a solution.
I’m saying that the apartheid state needs dismantled.
It’s just a mental exercise to get people to expand their imagination. I don’t expect the end of apartheid to literally require each group to pass through a series of stages.
This is at a scale unheard of in any other modern conflict.
Here are some ongoing wars that are more destructive:
Ethiopian Civil War: Up to 600,000 dead, up to 100,000 last year alone.
Russo-Ukrainian war: Around 200,000 dead, up to 95,000 this year.
Insurgency in the Maghreb: Up to 400,000 dead, around 14,000 this year.
Myanmar civil war: Up to 210,000 dead, at least 15,000 this year.
Yemeni civil war: More than 380,000 dead and 85,000 of those were just kids starving to death from 2015 to 2018.
Your submission is a prime example of confusing the attention a conflict is getting in the media with its actual scale. Yes, it’s a horrific war, but nobody is getting helped by hysterical hyperbole and shockingly few people care about wars when they are not in the evening news or on their favorite social media service 24/7.
It doesn’t help that your sources are just as hysterical:
In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II
The Ukrainian governments estimates 25,000 dead in that city alone. Over 31,000 people died in Aleppo and up to 500,000 or 0.6% of Germans died due to Allied bombings (which is more than the 1/200 in Gaza for those following along). Is nobody fact checking anything anymore?
Not to be the opposite of a Debbie Downer here (Debbie Upper?), but the fact that 75% of civilians in a high-intensity conflict like this one are not starving is extremely unusual and shows that aid is reaching them. You also turned 25% starving into 25% starving to death, knowingly or unknowingly, and there is actually a difference. Doesn’t bring any food to their nonexistent table, but again, hyperbole. Right now, 50% of people are starving in Syria, despite the conflict there having died down significantly, but nobody gives a damn and not even that UN buffoon seems to know, even though it’s literally his job to know that. Hell, 16.6% of Indians are starving and there’s peace in most of the country. 13% of Americans are food insecure and the only war that’s currently going on there is the “War on Christmas”, at least according to Fox News.
Netanyahu can get bent, but for all the terrible things he’s responsible for or permitting, braindead settlers included, this war is not one that his government started. They’ll end it, then they’ll get kicked out of office by a furious electorate as soon as it’s done and then Palestinians can piece their lives together and maybe tell the next people like Hamas to get just as bent as Netanyahu instead of starting yet another pointless war with the strongest nation in the Middle East in the next five to fifteen years. What did these Hamas idiots think would happen after staging the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust? Everyone else in the Middle East joining in on the murdering of Israelis with no staging time and against a nation armed with nuclear ICBMs? Ridiculous - and ordinary Palestinians and Israelis got to bear the brunt of this absurdity while uninformed people on the Internet get all high and mighty thinking they’ve got the morality of this irrational conflict figured out.
Ethiopian Civil War (ongoing): Up to 600,000 dead, up to 100,000 last year alone.
Russo-Ukrainian war: Around 200,000 dead, up to 95,000 this year.
Insurgency in the Maghreb: Up to 400,000 dead, around 14,000 this year.
Myanmar civil war: Up to 210,000 dead, at least 15,000 this year.
Yemeni civil war: More than 380,000 dead and 85,000 of those were just kids starving to death from 2015 to 2018.
Those conflicts all took place over years. The Israel war on Gaza is blowing through the roof the rate of civilian deaths, the level of indiscriminate targeting of civilians and infrastructure, and the amount of bombings of a small populated area. The conflicts you mention are largely Civil Wars and I am assuming total deaths of the conflict (as you do not share any sources). The War on Ukraine by Russia also has over the entire course of the conflict only had 10,000 civilian deaths according to the United Nations.
On average, nearly 300 people have been killed each day since the start of the conflict, excluding the seven-day ceasefire, data from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry indicates. The World Health Organization’s regional emergency director Richard Brennan says he considers these casualty figures trustworthy.
The pace of killing in this war has been “exceptionally high”, says Prof Michael Spagat, who specialises in examining death tolls in conflicts around the world, such as the 2003 Iraq war, Colombia’s civil conflict, wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as previous wars between Israel and Gaza. Within the series of Gaza wars stretching back to 2008, the current one is unprecedented both for the number of people killed and for the indiscriminateness of the killing," he adds.
Each conflict is unique in the way it is fought, but the experts the BBC has spoken to agree that the rate of killing in Gaza is significantly bigger than in others fought recently. "What we’re seeing in terms of civilian deaths has already far outpaced rates of harm from any given conflict we have documented," said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, an organisation which has monitored civilian deaths in wars and conflicts since 2014.
The former Pentagon intelligence analyst Marc Garlasco said: “To find a similar density of high explosives used in a small populated area, we might have to go back to the Vietnam war for a comparable example - like the 1972 Christmas bombing, when some 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Hanoi during Operation Linebacker II.” An estimated 1,600 Vietnamese civilians were killed in the Christmas bombings.
By contrast, US-led coalition air and artillery strikes killed fewer than 20 civilians per day, on average, during the four-month offensive to drive IS out of the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017, according to Amnesty International.
And an Associated Press investigation suggested that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians were killed in the nine-month battle between US-backed Iraqi forces and IS for the Iraqi city of Mosul which ended in 2017. This amounts to an estimated fewer-than-40 civilian deaths per day, on average. Mosul had an estimated population of less than two million people when IS captured the city in 2014.
During the almost two years of the Ukraine war, the United Nations estimates that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed.
Those conflicts all took place over years. The Israel war on Gaza is blowing through the roof the rate of civilian deaths
Yes, because this is a high-intensity conflict. Small area, lots of fighting and, unlike in most other conflicts, one side is doing everything to get the civilian death toll on “their side” as high as possible by hiding their military infrastructure behind civilians, stealing supplies and preventing people from leaving. Hamas didn’t even build any bomb shelters for ordinary people even though they knew Israel would answer their massacres with bombings.
the level of indiscriminate targeting of civilians and infrastructure
If they are targeting civilians, then why are they warning them?
Doesn’t make any sense. If they were actually out to murder civilians, they’d certainly not be doing this and they’d also not need more than one bomb to kill a single Palestinian.
And yeah, of course infrastructure gets targeted in a war, because how else would you cripple the enemy’s ability to sustain a fight, but that’s not indiscriminate, because you can’t indiscriminately target things. Either you target things, then it’s not indiscriminate, or you are just lobbing bombs indiscriminately, but then you are not targeting things. Sorry to be all pedantic, but please at least try to use the most generic buzz words in this conflict in a reasonably logically consistent manner.
The conflicts you mention are largely Civil Wars
This isn’t? If you support the whole “From the River to the Sea” nonsense, and it looks like you do, then this is one divided country in the midst of a civil war.
total deaths of the conflict (as you do not share any sources).
Probably/hopefully too high, but the truth is that nobody knows, except that the number of verified deaths are only a small fraction of the total in Ukraine. There are so many places in Ukraine that were simply wiped out - with no warnings for civilians, nor escape routes, unlike in Gaza.
Speaking of nobody knows, the fog of war in the Israeli-Hamas war is just as thick. The only numbers people are repeating all over, including most self-proclaimed experts and politicians, are those released by Hamas, who have every interest in the world to paint a picture as horrific as possible in order to put international pressure on Israel to end a war Hamas started so that Hamas can regroup and do the same thing all over again, as they have repeatedly announced.
Knowingly or unknowingly, you and so many other people are carrying water for this terror organization. What we should do is support Israel in the eradication of Hamas while also getting as much help to the civilians caught in the crossfire as possible and put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and surrender. The shorter this war is, the fewer people on both sides will suffer. For as flawed as Israel is, especially with the current government in charge, they are still the least flawed nation/group in the entire Middle East. Very low bar, I know, but that’s as good as it gets. Have you ever thought how your country, no matter where you are from, would have reacted to an event like October 7? Even some bastion of democracy and freedom like Denmark would have probably done the same if not worse as Israel in response. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep a watchful eye on this (hard not to, given the number of journalists per square meter over there) and influence Israel into fighting this war as humanely as possible, but again, let’s not get hysterical.
Do you not think that Israel has any responsibility for their targeting of civilians?
Israel is purposefully using dumb bombs (nearly half of all the thousands and thousands and thousands of explosives used on civilian population). They may be claiming to target some valid Hamas target, but the use of dumb munitions that can go hundreds of meters off course shows that is just not true. They are bombing indiscriminately with the explicit goal of the greatest destruction possible, impact on civilians, and genocide.
If they are targeting civilians, then why are they warning them?
Warning them of what exactly? And to go where exactly?
Israel has admitted to regular bombing of safe zones. The UN is investigating over 50 instances of such tactics. They are certainly not giving civilians time enough to pack up their lives with their supposed warnings.
Using on-the-ground footage, satellite imagery and mapping software, a Sky News visual investigation found that Israel’s evacuation orders have instead been chaotic and contradictory and that a neighbourhood in Deir al Balah was hit one day after the IDF said evacuees could flee there.
Our investigation comes after a separate strike in Gaza was caught on camera by a Sky News team. It too came in an area that was supposed to be safe.
In response to our investigation, the United Nations told Sky News that it is already investigating 52 similar incidents in areas where the Israeli army told civilians it was safe to evacuate to.
This is just pure evil.
This isn’t? If you support the whole “From the River to the Sea” nonsense, and it looks like you do, then this is one divided country in the midst of a civil war.
This is the most unserious statement. Get real.
Speaking of nobody knows, the fog of war in the Israeli-Hamas war is just as thick. The only numbers people are repeating all over, including most self-proclaimed experts and politicians, are those released by Hamas, who have every interest in the world to paint a picture as horrific as possible in order to put international pressure on Israel to end a war Hamas started so that Hamas can regroup and do the same thing all over again, as they have repeatedly announced.
Even the Biden administration believes the Hamas figures are accurate. So does the UN, Amnesty International, WHO, and every other international aid organization. If anything, the count is low since Israel wiped out every hospital in the region and Palestinians are now just doing mass graves wherever they can.
__
Knowingly or unknowingly, you and so many other people are carrying water for this terror organization.
Knowingly or unknowingly, you are supported a genocide.
If they are targeting civilians, then why are they warning them?
aren’t we like, three days removed from the IDF killing obviously surrendering Israeli civilians including a civilian they basically hunted down? the argument that Israel can’t possibly be targeting Palestinian civilians because they “warn” those civilians seems to stand clearly at odds with even the simplest things such as “how they treat their own, surrendering citizens–much less the citizens of a state they don’t want to exist”
What we should do is support Israel in the eradication of Hamas while also getting as much help to the civilians caught in the crossfire as possible and put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and surrender.
…or we could actually solve the issue here by demanding Israel stop indiscriminately murdering civilians (the actual root of the problem and a thing that even Joe Biden kind of thinks they’re doing now) in a misguided attempt to eradicate a terrorist group when the “shock and awe” strategy has never worked in contemporary warfare and has only guaranteed further resentment and conflict against the state doing the shock and awe!
aren’t we like, three days removed from the IDF killing obviously surrendering Israeli civilians
We are a week removed from the IDF going forward and openly admitting to their soldiers having made a mistake and acting against both standard protocol and direct orders. As inexcusable as the conduct of the soldiers responsible for this is, the transparent and honest manner in which this incident was communicated to the public is exemplary. You are right that this does raise uncomfortable questions over how normal this kind of conduct of IDF soldiers is though.
the actual root of the problem
The actual root of the problem is that the UN came up with a flawed two-state plan for Palestine in 1947, one that Israel agreed with and the Arab nations didn’t, prompting them to fight a war over it. Which they lost, against a tiny isolated nation under a weapons embargo that literally had to salvage tanks from scrap yards as the attacking Arabs were using the latest gear. Then they tried a few times more, losing again every time and in between, various Palestinian groups have tried again and again to do their worst. Each time, they lose, each time, Palestinians lose territory and power as Israel gets stronger with each military victory, because that’s how wars have always worked. Arab nations also occupied Palestinian territory for decades, oppressing Palestinians there worse than Israel ever did, but that tends to get glossed over these days.
When Israel does actually make concessions, like when they pulled all settlers out of Gaza, invited tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for several times the wages they would get in Palestinian territories, they get thanked with more violence in return, showing the Israeli public that extending the hand does nothing to calm this conflict down, so with each terrorist attack, they shift further to the right politically, electing politicians who promise strength and keeping Palestinians at bay instead of compromising. That’s how you get injustices like indefinite detention of Palestinians. Cause and effect.
Do you even know that Israel was working on finalizing a deal for the Palestinians to get access to gas fields on the coast of Gaza, which would have given them energy independence and a huge influx in cash? Talks were ongoing until literally the day of the terrorist attack, but now it’ll never happen.
When Israel does actually make concessions, like when they pulled all settlers out of Gaza, invited tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for several times the wages they would get in Palestinian territories, they get thanked with more violence in return, showing the Israeli public that extending the hand does nothing to calm this conflict down, so with each terrorist attack, they shift further to the right politically, electing politicians who promise strength and keeping Palestinians at bay instead of compromising. That’s how you get injustices like indefinite detention of Palestinians. Cause and effect.
i mean this is just cringe apologia for Israel, respectfully. “benevolently” stopping your settler colonialism in one part of the Palestinian state you don’t want to exist and almost immediately transitioning into an ongoing permanent blockade of said part of that state after you do is not actual benevolence or a “concession” in any meaningful sense of the word–that should be the baseline expected of Israel. you’re also completely ignoring, in saying this, the much more impactful apartheid under which Palestinians live and the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank that Israel aids, abets, and funds, and has for decades. in pretty much any other circumstance what Israel is doing to Palestine would be widely accepted as a casus belli for war. the implication underlying everything you’re saying here is that the root of the conflict is all Palestinian, but that’s demonstrably incorrect and actively revisionist to a point where i don’t think you’d get most Zionists to agree to it.
I wonder what happened in between those two things. Have you ever looked up what the blockade was actually blocking?
i think it is a moral imperative (or at least, unambiguously morally justifiable in all cases) to wage armed struggle against a country doing apartheid like Israel, so it’s basically irrelevant for my purposes that Israel’s justification for the blockade is “these people waged armed struggle against me”–the oxygen of that armed struggle as it currently exists is the apartheid. if anything it just demonstrates that Israel’s government so devalues Palestinian life (as is also being demonstrated by their cavalier attitude toward murdering civilians) that it’d rather continue the oppression that’s led many Palestinians to jihadism in the first place than ever reconsider whether that approach will lead to stability in the region and long-term peace
So unguided rockets vaguely aimed at cities, suicide bombers (including the use of children and mentally impaired people as suicide bombers), random stabbings, random shootings are “armed struggle” now? The mere fact that they are using children, old and handicapped people as suicide bombers, including in this current conflict, shows that if there’s one side not valuing Palestinian life at all, it’s Palestinian leadership.
How on Earth do you deal with this kind of political leadership? It’s not just Hamas, that’s how all sorts of groups and Palestinian governments have fought for many decades. How do you achieve “long-term piece” in this kind of situation? Like I said, any kind of concession gets answered with violence and any past peace deal, including the last one that would have resulted in 95% of the West Bank in Palestinian hands, gets rejected by one side and one side only. The current settler problem wouldn’t even exist had Arafat not walked away from the Camp David summit after saying no to every proposal. He lived out his days as a billionaire though, so I guess we know why he did it. I guess he feared for this power and wealth, just like Hamas’ leadership with their billions. Gotta keep that conflict going so that aid comes in that they can then steal from the people right out in the open while delusional idealists - no offense - meander on about high-level concepts like apartheid and oppression, blind to the actual reality.
So unguided rockets vaguely aimed at cities, suicide bombers (including the use of children and mentally impaired people as suicide bombers), random stabbings, random shootings are “armed struggle” now?
well yes, definitionally, that’s how armed struggle is manifesting in Palestine currently. there’s nothing you or i can do about that.
but that’s a little besides the point, which is that i think you at most selectively take issue with morally depraved military actions. almost everything you’re charging Hamas with has an established and equally immoral analogue in Israel’s strategy toward Palestine to this point. it’s conspicuous to me, for example, that you do not seem to comparably weigh Israel damaging or destroying 70% of Gaza City with Hamas’s unguided rocket attacks–especially given that both have led to large numbers of civilian deaths? like, do you think that 70% of Gaza City harbored Hamas militants, or, alternatively that it was militarily necessary to do that sort of damage even though it was inevitable large numbers of civilians would be caught in the crossfire? that seems like the only way for this to not boil down to vibes of who’s “good” and “bad”
and mind you, i have no issue with saying that Hamas is a depraved terrorist group who should never be in power and that it’s very, very bad for the region that they are now the primary credible opposition to Israel in Palestine. if i had my way, they would be unilaterally eradicated in favor of Fatah who at least seem willing to work toward a peaceful resolution. but i don’t have a magic wand, and Hamas does not exist in a vacuum. the Israeli state is directly complicit in making them that primary credible opposition, both through its military strategy and through selectively looking the other way when money and weapons are funneled through back-channels to the group. even Israeli outlets admit tothis sort of arrangement under Netanyahu.
that it was militarily necessary to do that sort of damage even though it was inevitable large numbers of civilians would be caught in the crossfire?
I honestly don’t know, but I can guess why they are doing it that way. I read one report that in one suburb of Gaza City, almost half of all buildings were rigged with explosives by Hamas. In another place, there were traps using speakers that played children’s cries, in yet another location, Hamas used an old man as a suicide bomber. How do you fight in such an environment? Israel is choosing a cautious approach using air power and tanks, which limits the risk to their own soldiers - and successfully so, given the low death toll on their side we’ve seen. I totally get that they are prioritizing that over protecting civilians that have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews. Should they instead choose a riskier approach that might endanger their own people? I think every nation would prioritize their soldiers over civilians from the opposing side. It’s still awful, there’s no way around it, but seriously, what choice do they have? It’s just terrible options and those in charge in Israel have to pick the least terrible one.
in favor of Fatah who at least seem willing to work toward a peaceful resolution
Fatah has a “martyr’s fund” worth hundreds of millions that they use to pay out to the families of those who die in the fight against Israel, including members of Hamas. They paid millions to the families of terrorists who died during the October 7 attack.
Abbas literally has a PhD in Holocaust denial. Fatah are really no good options either and on top of that, they have zero credibility among Palestinians due to how ineffective and corrupt their government is.
and through selectively looking the other way when money and weapons are funneled through back-channels to the group
They also did it, because they thought they could pacify the group, make them interested in governing and enriching themselves instead of waging war. It seemed to have worked for a long time, as evidenced by billions siphoned off into in off-shore accounts, but hindsight is 20/20. The thing is though, there was significant international pressure against Israel to allow these funds into Gaza, including from foreign governments and humanitarian groups, many of which are now using the fact that the Israeli government permitted the transfer of these funds against it or are even frequently distorting it into “Israel funded Hamas” or “Israel created Hamas”.
Like I said, there are only terrible options. This seemed like the least terrible one at the time and since there are no magic wands, there are rarely ideal solutions.
respectfully: if you yourself have to begin an answer to these questions with “I honestly don’t know,” and then go on to talk about how Israel might be prioritizing its own soldiers over civilian life because even the civilians “have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews,” perhaps you can understand how some of us would conclude that Israel might not care very much about Palestinian civilians and consider them both acceptable collateral damage or actual military targets based on the sheer number of them they’ve killed to this point
Seriously read this, including the full report. It explains so much about this conflict.
perhaps you can understand how some of us would conclude that Israel might not care very much about Palestinian civilians
They care less about Palestinian civilians than they do about their own soldiers, but they care enough about them to invest massive amounts of resources into warning them, into getting aid to them and into getting them out of the parts of the strip that are most dangerous to them. That’s more than can be said about anyone else in this conflict. Is it perfect? Hell no, but nothing in this world is and nobody in their right mind would expect them to be perfect.
based on the sheer number of them they’ve killed to this point
We don’t even know how many have died. Seriously, we have zero clue, only made-up numbers from Hamas - who also don’t differentiate between civilian and military deaths, by the way - and rough estimates from everyone else. All we know for certain is that thousands have died. That’s it. It took Israel weeks to come up with the total death toll on their side after the October 7 massacres and that’s in a much more controlled environment, yet everyone immediately accepts whatever the “Gaza Health Ministry” under full Hamas control pumps out. I’ve lost count of how many have sent me articles from BBC, Reuters, NYT and whoever saying that they reported on the numbers and I should take them seriously and yet every single time, these articles cite the same Hamas organization or someone who cites them.
Again, this is a terrible war and thousands have dying in it, but it’s not just a war of bullets and bombs, but also one of information being used a weapon, including misinformation, like completely nonsensical comparisons that I debunked earlier. So many educated, well-meaning people appear to lose all sight of reason, anything resembling critical thinking skills in this and for what? Do any of these people really think that it actually helps Palestinians?
You also turned 25% starving into 25% starving to death, knowingly or unknowingly, and there is actually a difference. Doesn’t bring any food to their nonexistent table, but again, hyperbole. Right now, 50% of people are starving in Syria, despite the conflict there having died down significantly, but nobody gives a damn and not even that UN buffoon seems to know, even though it’s literally his job to know that. Hell, 16.6% of Indians are starving and there’s peace in most of the country. 13% of Americans are food insecure and the only war that’s currently going on there is the “War on Christmas”, at least according to Fox News.
Again, you have no sources heres so nit sure where you are getting your figures from.
When someone is starving, you realize the literal definition is that they are DYING FROM HUNGER. This is not hyperbole.
Speaking of dying from hunger, the UN Secretary General just stated that “Four out of five of the hungriest people anywhere in the world are in Gaza.”
This latest food security analysis for Gaza, which includes data from the World Food Programme (WFP), other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations, confirmed that the entire population of Gaza – roughly 2.2 million people – are in crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity. The IPC report further highlighted that 26 percent of Gazans (576,600 people) have exhausted their food supplies and coping capacities and face catastrophic hunger (IPC Phase 5) and starvation.
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