I think it’s fair to criticize Israeli tactics and overall strategy, but most of the blanket condemnation you see on Lemmy is indicative of pure moral confusion and/or an unfamiliarity with historical and contemporary facts. That the outrage is so selective --it’s never applied to other similar and even unprovoked civilian massacres-- tells us everything we need to know about how well-thought-out it is.
I miss the niche content. Lemmy isn’t big enough yet to have sorted into big “stupid” subs vs smaller niche subs that tend to attract smarter and more well-informed users. The result is that the signal-to-noise ratio on Lemmy still kind of sucks and any comment thread is likely to consist of three quarters banal gibberish and condescending idiocy and maybe one quarter actually intelligent, thoughtful and informed opinion.
I rarely make a comment on Lemmy without pissing off people on all sides of any given issue, which tells me that Lemmy’s users aren’t really good at nuance or complexity.
Good plate armor was nowhere near as ungainly as many people imagine. A knight wearing a well-made suit would actually retain a surprising amount of agility and speed. The downside was that they obviously had to be custom made and were so expensive that only the wealthiest nobles could afford them.
The selective outrage is also very telling. Palestinian civilians killed by indiscriminate bombing? Apoplectic red-faced spittle-flying fury!
Ukrainian civilians or even Syrian civilians killed by the same? Relative silence even though in both cases it was even less provoked. What’s really going on here? And I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question either; I honestly don’t know. I have a theory, but I’m not entirely confident in it just yet.
Terrorism is a tactic, so no, not all “freedom fighters” are terrorists. There are and have been throughout history many guerrilla groups that don’t use terrorism tactics but that could still be called “freedom fighters.”
They did a little more than simply “fight back.” They also engaged in widespread and utterly gratuitous acts of violence and torture in ways that can only have been calculated to trigger an overreaction on the part of Israel. They knew exactly what they were doing and what would happen. They obviously don’t give a fuck about their own people.
It’s also because Hamas has its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood which for obvious reasons means that Egypt is very leery of accepting Palestinians from Gaza.
I’m not defending their position, just explaining it; Egypt is basically a military dictatorship at this point and the Muslim Brotherhood is enemy number one for them.
Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it’s impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s why we still haven’t figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.
That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.
I would argue the opposite; that semi-agricultural societies --pre-columbian California is a good example-- had no way of knowing where an increasing reliance on predictable harvests would eventually take them.