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| Author | Topic: Israel Declares War For The First Time Since 1973. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Rahvin Member  Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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American foreign policy has always been pretty monstrous. Our military and economic power allows us to act effectively without consequence - we appeal to "international law" when it suits us without ever being bound to the same rules.
Foreign policy isnt about ethics or morality. Its about *power.* Nations don't have friends, they have interests. The Biden admin sees support for Israel as securing American interests in the middle-east. The US wants to turn its focus away from the region, but to do so our leaders believe that they need effective proxies in the region: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately those are really really bad if you care about ethics, morality, and democracy. Building on that, in the midst of a crisis it appears that our leaders are trying to maintain influence through support - if you tell Israel to stop too harshly, they tell us to go fuck ourselves and then we lose our influence, or so the story goes. I dont think I buy that reasoning myself in a situation like this one. It's easy when Israel is constantly painted by the media and every US official as the "good guys," an innocent victim of a terror attack. And the US had a very similar response to 9/11 - we lost 3000 people that day, and launched two wars spanning decades in a massive response. We killed a *lot* more than 3000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. "You hit me, so Im going to hit you back harder to teach you a lesson," or "you have made yourself my enemy, and I will kill all of my enemies." These are popular ideas. Modern technology is letting us look more directly at the results, and as it turns out, most Americans don't actually like what they see when presented with the reality. We've known about some of the consequences of American foreign policy, but we often don't see it in this much detail or when the actual crisis is happening. Now we have social media posts where an Israeli soldier literally talks about how he wants to kill Palestinian babies, but there are no babies left alive so he killed a 12 year old girl. Even the most hawkish supporters of Israel would find that video unsettling, I would imagine. Foreign policy isnt about ethics or morality. It's about power. Maybe it's time for that to change.“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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quote: That would be a start. Interestingly we have literal textbooks on exactly what causes terrorism, how it works, and how to combat it. The US response to 9/11 was exactly the wrong thing to do, and Israel is speedrunning the US 9/11 playbook with extra steps. We know how to deal with this. We choose to do the emotional response that terrorists literally want us to do. Hamas has almost certainly gained far more active personnel than they've lost in this massacre, and they've successfully baited Israel into drastically reducing international support. Enemies become neutral, neutrals become supporters, supporters turn active. Support for Hamas has dramatically increased in the West Bank and internationally. You could summarize the most effective way to deal with terrorism in a single sentence: "Stop giving them recruitment events." Asymmetric warfare acknowledges that you cannot possibly win a military victory - you might not have an army, for example. Your goals are outside of the combat zone - a definitional aspect of terrorism. You want to degrade the enemy's ability to fight, by draining their resources and, critically, reducing support at home and internationally. The entire point of attacks like Oct 7 are to provoke an unbalanced heavy-handed response. We might have fewer incidents of allies going bad if we actually listened to the military experts when they tell us how this will go. The US knew before Iraq, before Afghanistan. Israel knew before Oct 7. From what I understand, we specifically sent military advisors to Israel specifically to warn them not to make the same mistakes we made in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we were politely told to fuck right off. Advisers might carry a little more weight if failing to listen to our advice and moving forward with a plan we don't agree with carries the consequence of losing any and all military aid, as well as the loss of Security Council cover in the UN. Now because we continue to support them so strongly, Israel might drag us into a regional conflict if they continue operations outside of Israel and Palestine - it's not confirmed that the Iran attack was Israel, but if it was and if attacks like that continue, we could be looking at a very major conflict.
quote: This one is a lot harder. The US is able to do what it does because we have cartoonishly immense military power. US military doctrine stipulates maintaining the capability to fight two superpowers at the same time. Traditionally that's been considered China and Russia, at the same time. Turns out Russia was a lot weaker than we thought. One of the things that scares me the most is the thought of Trump or someone like him gaining power again, and deciding to follow the rest of the fascist playbook and start invading and annexing territory while implementing the natural conclusion of all the hateful rhetoric. I'm not sure who could stop us. Nuclear powers might be safe. How would our allies have stopped us from invading Afghanistan? Economic sanctions? I don't think words alone would have worked, we had lots of resistance protesters here at home telling us how bad an idea it was. Economic sanctions are a lot harder against a country that actually represents a big part of your trade base. I'm sure I have US-centric bias here - when the US sanctions an adversary like Russia or Iran, I feel no consequences at all, they just arent a significant trade partner. When Germany participates in sanctions against Russia, they feel it more because of the energy market in the region. Im not sure what the cost looks like for sanctions against the US, especially among traditional allies. Edited by Rahvin, : EDIT - I'm too used to using markdown lately instead of html tags. “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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Right now both Gaza and Ukraine are local conflicts.
Ukraine is extremely unlikely to scale out. Russia literally does not have the resources, and most of the countries they could try to rope into a regional conflict are NATO allies. Russia loses to NATO, very very badly, and they know that. Russia would have lost to NATO at the level that NATO evaluated Russia before the Ukrainian invasion. Now their forces are seriously depleted in both material and manpower - they are no longer a "near-peer" with the US. Putin's evil but he's not that crazy. The whole point of the Ukraine invasion was to seize the entire country and prevent it from joining NATO, and use that to also shake confidence in NATO and prevent other countries from joining. They've already spectacularly failed that goal, as more countries are joining NATO, and Ukraine wants to join as well - they just can't until the current conflict is resolved, and the conflict has stagnated to a degree. Neither side can push with a significant advantage in the short term. Russia can keep this up a while longer, probably a couple more years at least, possibly longer but not actually indefinitely. Ukraine can keep up the fight as long as they keep getting support. But the conflict has stagnated enough that more mundane politics-related things are happening. Both sides are likely reconsidering victory conditions and what they would accept in order to end the fighting. Gaza is more risky. The US ally in this case is the aggressor, not the defender, and Israel has a heavy-handed history. On top of that, there are more actors at play - the Houthi rebels in Yemen, for example. There are a lot of nations and non-state actors, Israel has shelled and bombed locations in Lebanon, Hezbollah in Lebanon has been in the news (im not sure they've actually done anything yet, they may have, I just dont know) there have been assassinations at least one of which is highly likely to have been done by Israel... If Israel goes "too far" (referring to actions outside of Gaza here; Gaza is already way past "too far"), or if one or more of those other groups or countries decides to retaliate, or if the US decides to intervene more directly, there is a threat of escalation to a regional conflict. And because Israel is a US ally, a mistake from Israel can pull the US into a war it doesnt want to be part of. A regional conflict is still not WW3. It is very very bad, so it's something we very much want to avoid. Especially since Israel is nuclear-armed, and Iran had a nuclear program. The best thing for literally everyone, including Israel, would be for Israel to not just "de-escalate" but to immediately stop all military actions in Gaza, drop the blockade, and for the international community to dumb boatloads of aid as fast as possible to reduce the suffering and loss of life there. That would still only be the beginning, but continuing the slaughter will continue to motivate other actors to try to intercede (like the Houthis with shipping), and this all just risks escalation. Not to mention, obviously it's always best to stop committing genocide. Edited by Rahvin, : Lebanon, not Libya, thanks DrJones “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
YouTube contains a vast array of information. How could ALL of it be false? That's not at all what is being said. The problem, Phat, is that you don't understand what is being said in the videos you watch. You dont apply any critical analysis. Apparently, you hear things that "sound right" and just go with it. You cannot explain the ideas presented in videos yourself. You don't understand them. You don't seem to understand how to differentiate experts and their fields of expertise - you posted a YouTube link to a discussion about the destruction of an underwater pipeline, but the expert was a petrochem guy by your own statements. He might know a little about pipelines, but how on Earth would such a person be an expert on foreign policy, intelligence agencies, sabotage, terrorism, or anything else remotely relevant? Even he seemed to realize that - the video posted didn't actually make any claims, they just speculated and asked questions and admitted they didn't have any real idea! YouTube has a ton of good, useful, true information. It also has a lot of false info, misleading commentary, and conspiracy theories. You have to do more than just look at what "feels right," Phat. You have to critically analyze what is being presented! If you can't understand the reasoning for the views expressed, then the video wasn't a useful source of information! The evidence and reasoning are what is important! Not appeals to (often misattributed) authority, not views that align with the inconsistent half-formed general "vibe" that you seem to use to understand the world. Evidence and reasoning! Videos with sources, commentators who explain why evidence X leads to conclusion Y in a cogent, logically consistent manner, preferably with additional sources referenced to confirm that the line of reasoning is generally accepted by experts in the field!
Thus the standoff has been framed. The authoritarian fascist P.M. vs the helpless children of Gaza. The sides are loosely defined. It's Israel(and the US) vs "the rational world. But is this the only possible narrative? Its the only one based on facts and a valuation of human life. And you can see mountains of additional photographic and video evidence beyond what the BBC shows. Note that the only reason the BBC (and other news outlets) is finally starting to take this stance is because the evidence has become too great to ignore! Netanyahu is fascist. he is authoritarian. He has a significant track record. Look into his "judicial reforms" and other recent policy actions.The people of Gaza, a huge number of whom are children, have been displaced from their homes. Their homes have been destroyed. You can see it in satellite imagery - even back in early December I remember seeing images showing the northern half of the city was nothing but rubble! They already relied on Israel for water, because Israel used military force to ensure they could not get water through other means. Israel has annihilated every hospital and school in Gaza. They shoot women and children with snipers who can clearly see that they are not combatants. They tell the people of Gaza to move to a "safe area" and then they bomb it. Have you even tried to look into any claims? You seem to just have a reflexive contrarian view to whatever you think is the "mainstream" with literally zero critical thought!“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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One reason that they do not seek a two state solution is because they do not want a nation of people who hate them right next door I wonder why there is so much hatred....
any more than the US would accept such behavior from one of its neighbors Phat, please explain, in your own words and without looking it up, the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict. I won't hold you to tight details. What is it that you think has happened, and is happening, specifically?
Hamas is so woven into the consciousness of the people that it becomes hard to separate Palestinians from Hamas. I am not excusing Israel but simply pointing out their rationale as I see it. That's certainly what they're saying, sure. But consider it objectively. Lets imagine that in my neighborhood there is a militia group. This militia group really, really hates the government - sometimes they launch improvised rockets. They do some really bad things. They may or may not be angry for legitimate reasons, but basically everyone agrees that dropping explosives in civilian areas is bad. So the government decides to just start indiscriminately dropping 2000lb bombs on my entire city. All of it. The government says that there are militia tunnels everywhere, and apparently the best idea they have is to just...drop explosives in civilian areas. And the government is way, way better at it than the militia. The militia sometimes kills people, and in the absolute worst attack soemthing like 1200 people died. But because the government is air-striking my city, they have killed around 30,000 people. It's reasonable to think that a few were probably militia members, but more than half of the dead are literally women and children - definitely not militia members. Do I deserve to have my neighborhood and entire city demolished, all my neighbors and friends and familiy killed, my house destroyed? Do I deserve to be left literally starving to death with the survivors? I wasnt a militia member. I might have sympathized with them a bit, maybe I shared their anger, but I never dropped any bombs. I never kidnapped anybody. I never had anything to do with the militia. Do my kids deserve to die? If your response is that collateral damage happens in war, at what point is the collateral damage the objective? Have you looked at the satellite images of Gaza? How much has been obliterated, reduced to rubble? Do you believe these are precision strikes intended to kill Hamas members? If so, how would you differentiate precision strikes from total annihilation? Around 30,000 civilians are already dead. The remainder have no food. No water. Children are literally starting to starve to death. Aid is ready to come in...but Israel specifically will not allow the aid. They block it. They have the power to stem the tide of starvation (it's too late to stop it, it's already underway, but they could let people slow it down, save thousands), all they have to do is let the aid in and stop bombing. They're choosing to let these people starve. They've bombed all of the infrastructure and guaranteed this situation. You literally couldn't plan it to happen more efficiently. At what point does it become genocide, Phat, by your definition? Do bombs and bullets and intentional starvation not count? Does it require literal crematoriums and gas showers? Is it a raw number? Do you just need the death toll to top a million before it "counts?" My first request about the history of the conflict is genuine, Phat. Please do provide a summary of what you think appears to be happening and its causes. I won't hold you to details like specific years, or the specific terms of previous agreements or whatever. Just broad-strokes, without looking it up, tell me how you think the situation got here, starting wherever you think it started.“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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Sorry, work is keeping me busy.
You did better than I expected, so kudos.
No, I am not Pro Palestinian. They let Hamas in to their lives and now have a cancer. Until they renounce Hamas, Israel will continue to try and kill all of them. So, by that reasoning, genocide is justified in cases where there is a terrorist group involved. As in, the US would have been justified in wiping out all of Afghanistan because Al Qaeda existed. Or, to put a finer point on it, by your logic the Nazis were justified in trying to wipe out all Jewish people because there were some violent Jewish resistance cells. Do you see how racist and vile that sounds? What is it with this insistence that everyone "renounce Hamas" as a condition for acknowledging basic human rights? It's maddening. You acknowledged that Israel has been oppressing Palestinians for decades. What do you think is the inevitable result of that oppression? The oppressed people fight back, however they can. Oppression breeds animosity breeds hatred. It's possible to acknowledge that Hamas does really awful things, and also acknowledge that Israel is directly giving Hamas a reason to exist, and is in fact recruiting for them. This is how terrorism works. It's PR with violence - I've described this before. It's also possible to acknowledge that Palestinians are not Hamas, and this is in fact propaganda from Israel. A Palestinian child is not Hamas. They cannot possibly be - they are a child. Why does the existence of Hamas justify dropping a bomb on a school filled with children? How can you not be "pro civilians not being murdered?" I want Israeli civilians to not be murdered. I also want Palestinian civilians to not be murdered. Right now, a lot more Palestinians are being murdered. What specifically do you think would happen regarding Hamas is Israel right now stopped all military action in Gaza, pulled back from all illegally-occupied territories, recognized the existence of a Palestinian state, and immediately allowed and assisted in massive aid distribution through a newly-formed Palestinian government, while setting the conditions for Palestinian independence from Israel (meaning - allow Palestinians to maintain their own water sources, mange their own trade, generate their own electricity, etc.)? Do you think Hamas would gain support or lose support, if their reason for existing was no longer necessary? Here's a hint - Palestinian support for Hamas increased with the Gaza invasion from Israel. Violent oppression breeds support for Hamas. Peace is what weakens and dismantles Hamas!
Maybe Israel is guilty of war crimes, but Israel is stubborn. And defiant. Now what? "Maybe Nazi Germany is guilty of war crimes. But Germany is stubborn. And defiant. Now what?"“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Nihil supernum
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
So what is Israel supposed to do? Just let thousands of their citizens be slaughtered every few months from Hamas raids? I'm not going to get into the ways in which those premises are misleading, because it frankly doesnt matter. "Terrorism" is Public Relations with violence. Hamas wants and needs the support of the Palestiniam people, and more than that, they want and need the sympathy of people abroad to provide political pressure for material support from sympathetic nations (read this more as: countries who would like to see the Israeli state destabilized; people sympathize, nations only care about position and power). Military action in civilian locations are a terrible idea. The actual military targets just fade away into the populace. What you wind up doing is just killing and oppressing civilians...justifying every word that your opposition uses as recruitment. Hamas gains recruitment when Israel oppresses Palestinians. This should be easy to imagine. The solution therefore is to....not oppress Palestinians. You literally cannot win a "war" against terrorism. Al Qaeda still exists. ISIS still exists. The Taliban still exists and may be stronger than before. We learned the lessons of neighborhood-fighting and anti-terrorism the hard way. Remember all the "hearts and minds" stuff from Afghanistan? It was true, and the problem is that it's not an issue that the military could solve. What Israel should be doing is seeking reconciliation, not genocide. Palestinians have absolutely legitimate grievances against Israel, stemming all the way before the Israeli state was formed from their literal backyards. Stop the checkpoints. Stop the settlements (which are already in violation of multiple international agreements). Either recognize a Palestinian state according to the pre-1960s borders, or grant Palestinians full recognition and citizenship under Israeli law along with the "right of return." Severely punish Israeli citizens and military personnel who abuse and murder Palestinians. Investigate such actions in good faith. Stop indefinitely imprisoning Palestinians without charges. No more bombings. Convince the Palestinian people to turn against Hamas themselves; if you treat others as friends, they will be friendly to you. If you murder their children in airstrikes and try to literally kill everyone through famine...the outcome should be obvious. Stop being the bad guys in the view of the Palestinians. If you have the power, you have the responsibility. The Palestinian people have no power. Both figuratively and mostly literally. The Israelis have all of the power. They take territory and murder and rape and imprison with impunity. They have a full modern military, nuclear weapons, the Iron Dome for defense against those rockets, and are under precisely zero existential threat from Palestinians. Occasionally Hamas gets some rockets through. Rarely they carry out a successful "real" attack like Oct 7. They cannot hurt Israel, the state. This doesnt make them good guys. It makes them oppressed people reacting with violence to stop the oppression and violence directed at their own people.
This isn't some underground terrorist organization within Gaza. This is the government of Gaza doing this. Hamas is more complicated than that. I'm going to make the assumption that you've watched Star Trek: Deeps Space Nine. Most of us are nerds here of the appropriate generations, I dont think it's an unsafe assumption. Major Kira was a terrorist against Cardassian occupation. She did evil, very bad things. Murdered people, including their families. She did those things because she didnt have a lot of choices - the Cardassians were massacring her people and using them for slave labor and worse. Her own mother was a "comfort woman" for the Cardassian equivalent of Hitler, and while the specifics were complicated, she wasn't consenting. The government of Bajor after the Cardassian withdrawal was made up in large part by resistance fighters. The terrorists. People who did evil things out of a desperate struggle against a larger-scale evil. Just like in real life, the Bajoran and Cardassian legitimate animosity became generalized and deepened into racist hatred (the Cardassians were pretty racist from the start). You start to see violence that isn't just about resistance - it's about the hate that decades of resistance and oppression have caused. Just like in real life, racism and racially-motivated violence are increased by oppression. Back to real life - if you want to see an example of what to actually do...look to Ireland. The Troubles - Wikipedia Decades of terrorism, fueled by religious, political, and nationalistic differences. Just like with Israel and Palestine, "ceasefires" declared and broken. Finally, the Good Friday Agreement. Good Friday Agreement - Wikipedia Not a military action to wipe out all paramilitary fighters. Not a mass bombing campaign. Not famine. Recognition, legitimacy, compromise, and peace. It will still be generations before the bad blood from The Troubles is truly gone. They can do it, if they hold to the peace. That means that many will never find justice. Killers walk free. Old grudges and pain cant be erased, but they chose peace instead of acting on them, to give those wounds time to heal with new generations who won't have suffered that pain. The leading political party in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, was a terrorist organization. Thanks to the peace process, they're legitimate political leaders now. The vice-president of Sinn Fein is now the First minister of Northern Ireland. We know what works. We know what doesnt work. We also know what happens when people are oppressed - even our fiction tells us truths about conflicts like these, even if we have to dress them up in silly prosthetic makeup and exaggerate characters. What Israel is doing doesnt work. It just creates more loss. Their response to Oct 7, and the complicity of Israel's allies (especially the US), will in future decades be regarded as a source of great shame and a tragic, avoidable loss of human lives.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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In the same way, do the Hamas attacks justify what Israel is doing? Are the Hamas attacks bringing more recruits to Israel's side? The justification is in the eyes of the populace, not external observers. When Israel bombs a neighborhood, the people who survive in the rubble are now more sympathetic to any opposition to Israel, including Hamas, regardless of whether Hamas poked the bear. The second part is a little complicated - probably not in this case, actually, since Israel already has compulsory military service. But in general, yes absolutely it does increase recruitment for the other side. Look at the US back after 9/11 - US military recruitment grew significantly. But the value of recruitment is just as asymmetrical as the forces involved, and it's not only about direct fighter recruitment. Remember, terrorism (also called "asymmetric warfare") is a PR campaign with violence. The smaller force needs recruitment more than the larger force. The smaller force needs increasing sympathy and support from allies more than the larger force. The smaller force hopes to gain international support in the form of sanctions, possible military intervention, etc. The larger force is already the larger force.
How was Israel oppressing Gaza before the attack that killed thousands of Israeli's? "Thousands" is misleading.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths: Just over 1000. "Thousands" is is a weasel-word that implies more "balance" in loss between the Hamas attack vs Israel's military action. ~1100 is not the same as 34000+. It's not remotely the same. And let's be very clear - when you ask "what was Israel to do?", the answer is most emphatically not to kill 30000+ civilians, mostly women and children, by indiscriminately bombing civilian residences, constantly attacking and rendering inoperative all hospitals, destroying schools, using snipers to shoot clear noncombatants like women and children, etc. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/gaza-death-toll-passes-34000-israel-iran: But as for the oppression of Gaza, that depends on where you want to start. Israel has been oppressing specifically Gaza and the West Bank since the 60s.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/: quote: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip: Israel also has a practice of arresting Palestinians and holding them, typically in brutal conditions, without charges indefinitely. Often Palestinians die in custody...with no investigations or consequences. That was all before Oct 7 2023. It's far worse now. Sure, it's a "war," but lets just focus on the war crimes. I've seen videos of Israeli soldiers laughing as they demolish residential structures.I've seen videos of Israeli soldiers bragging about raping underaged Gazan girls. I've seen Israeli's using captured Gazans as literal human shields, tying them to their vehicles. I've seen videos obviously staged by Israelis where they force Gazans to strip to underwear but for some reason still have them hold IDs and firearms and then parade them around to "surrender" their weapons. I've seen Gazans forced to kneel in their underwear and then be executed by bullets to the head. Reminded me of Schindler's List. I've seen Israeli bulldozers drive over living injured Gazans who were camped outside a hospital, waiting for or recovering from treatment. I've seen Israeli propaganda claim that a dry-erase board contained some organizational Hamas information....and it was just a literal calendar in Arabic, a schedule for some hospital personnel. The full ICJ genocide application/report is well worth the read. The factual section starts on page 9. Remember that this was filed months ago, the situation is worse now.
quote: quote: quote: quote: quote: quote: I cant even raise all the highlights. It would be too long. Read the report, seriously. A lot of the actions do not get reported with prominence or at all in common Western media.
So why aren't you as adamant for Palestinians to seek reconciliation? I am, actually, but the Palestinians right now have zero power. They have no negotiation leverage outside of pointing out war crimes and death tolls, they have no significant military power, they cannot offer a significant threat to Israel. Meanwhile Israel has effective impunity when it comes to enforcing any amount of control or force over Gaza. Only Israel can stop attacking so that the prelude for reconciliation can even start. I brought up Ireland for a lot of reasons. Among them is that the peace is not a happy one. If peace is ever reached between Israel and Palestine, it will be in a way that makes neither side happy, but that both sides can live with. And it will likely require international forces to help hold it together (forces that cannot contain Americans or several other nations) because of the extreme justified distrust on both sides of the conflict. A peace that everybody hates but hates less than dead babies, and that sets the stage for gradually reduced tensions and eventual reconciliation decades and generations from now. There is no signature on a piece of paper that will undo generations of violence and fear and hate.
None of this was happening in Gaza. Gaza was under 100% Palestinian rule. In fact, it was against the law in Gaza for an Israeli to even walk the streets in Gaza. Fiction is not a direct analog to reality. The situations are similar, not identical. The similarities are around the complexities and nuance around asymmetric warfare, terrorism, freedom fighting, and what comes after. Not the specifics of the crimes (there was no forced dilithium mining; Hamas doesn't set bombs in Israeli officials' homes, etc...). But it's not uncommon, as I referenced with Sinn Fein in Ireland, for yesterday's terrorist/freedom fighter to be tomorrow's political leader. There are reasons that Hamas won elections in Gaza. Those reasons don't excuse war crimes. There is a major difference between a reason and an excuse. There are reasons Israeli sentiments toward Palestinians are so hateful - some of those reasons are racist, others colonialist, but others are simply the result of decades and generations of mutual violence and fear and propaganda. Reasons are not justifications.
3 out of 4 Palestinians support the Oct. 7 attack that killed thousands of Israeli's. Sure. Just like the vast majority of Israelis support the intentional war crimes being committed by the Israeli military. Their most popular news station just days ago had a commenter rant about how the Gazans all, down to the children, deserve "hard deaths" and there should be "rivers of blood." This is what hate does. It makes people support bloody vengeance. It's a natural reaction that affects everyone involved. It's also an instinct that needs to be resisted.
How does Israel reconcile with a group where 75% support the slaughter of your people? The same way Palestinians reconcile with a group who support the extermination of theirs. With difficulty. And mostly with atrocity exhaustion. Things can sometimes get so unbearably bad that there can be a narrow window for enduring peace. That's what happened in Ireland.
So what more was Israel to do? There were no settlements in Gaza. They offered a two state solution multiple times. Israel only retaliated when fired upon. Israel tried it your way, from all appearances. Israel was not to commit war crimes. Israel was not to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure.Israel had a lot of alternatives available. The best ones would have been alternative actions before Oct 7. Afterward, they should have focused on hostage retrieval and offered a path to peace. It doesnt matter if Israel would have "looked weak" or whatever. It doesnt matter if "the terrorists would have won." Peace would have meant that everyone could win. Peace meaning a recognition of an actual Palestinian state and good-faith efforts to set the stage for long-term reconciliation. And if Hamas refused, you still have special forces and other routes to follow that aren't dropping unguided 2000 pound bombs on civilians. You now have more leverage in the international community and have denied Hamas their real victory - Hamas looks like the unequivocal "bad guys," because at that moment they were even if the reasons for their crimes are more complex. When peace offers are rejected, the answer is not to just give up, ramp up rhetoric and get more violent. The answer is to keep going and work in good faith until an agreement is actually reached. The answer, and this is key, is never to commit war crimes, never to kill 30,000+ civilians. You might as well say "yeah they committed rape, what else could they do?" Their actual actions are on the same unjustifiable, reprehensible level. And YES Hamas does things that are just as bad on the scale they're capable of, but the scale is due to the amount of relative power each side has, and you'll note that Hamas has very little. Israel is holding all the cards, and they choose to make Hamas, who are also in large part bad guys (not all of Hamas are fighters), sympathetic internationally and to the Palestinian people.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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You ignored the vast majority of my post, including the most important parts.
You seem to be replying to your personal view of people who support Palestinians, and not my actual words and expressed views. I did not apologize for Hamas. I explicitly called them bad guys. The thing is, in a conflict like this, there are only bad guys and their victims.
Do you think some sort of military incursion was justified? You cannot fight terrorism with military actions. There are literal textbooks on this. You can use military defenses like teh Iron Dome to protect against specific types of attacks, and you can use special forces/drones/other very targeted attacks to "reform" the leadership of a smaller force to make it less radical. But mass bombing and invasion do not and cannot work. Hamas was sending suicide bombers across the border, so Israel closed the border. There were no Israeli's in Gaza. What happened in Gaza is the responsibility of Palestinians. They had aid money coming in, but what did they do? Instead of using the money for infrastructure and improving Gaza they used it for terrorism, and to line the pockets of Hamas leaders. Israel didn't do that. Read the ICJ report, it contains source-cited factual details about the oppression of Gaza. You are misinformed.
What I find frustrating is that Israel is expected to do what no one expects the Palestinians to do. Hamas has sworn to rid all of Israel of Jews, the infamous "From the river to the sea" chant. This is part of Hamas' charter, plainly written out. People think that's fine. However, Israel is supposed to take it on the chin and absorb any and all terrorism. It just seems like there is a real asymmetry in expectations. I find it frustrating when people defend an ongoing genocide. I've explicitly answered the concerns you're raising, and you have ignored my points in their entirety, you simple repeat "but Hamas." That's not productive. Please read the ICJ report and tell me which specific facts of Gazan oppression you dispute and why. Please explain why you believe any action from any faction justifies the violence, intentional starvation, and other war crimes being actively committed right thi moment by Israel. I'm 100% fine with sayimg Hamas are bad guys. I've said effectively that from the start - reality isnt black and white, the reasons are complicated, but they're doing unjustifiable bad things.
That does not and cannot justify even greater larger-scale crimes by Israel. The Palestinian civilians, just like the Israeli citizens, do not deserve bombs or rape or imprisonment or hostage-taking. They're people. No voting choice or any possible action at all justifies this. Why is it that Israel-apologists think that it's necessary to condemn Hamas with every utterance of an Israeli war crime? Why is it so hard to simply agree that killing civilians, NO MATTER WHAT, is unjustified and evil and should be stopped? Isn't that enough "both sides?" The numbers add up over 30x more evil for one side, with more to come from pending famine, but isn't the core idea that we have fucking empathy for other human beings and don't want to see them hurt/starve/die? The civilians on Oct 7 didnt deserve to die or be captured.The people of Gaza don't deserve what is currently happening to them. The difference, other than scale, is that one is still happening and can be stopped, and only one side has the power to stop it. -->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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Is anything I've said moral, rational, logical, or ethical? No, I know it's wrong. However, I suspect the same things are going through the heads of a lot of Americans.
I doubt most Americans are even considering it. Our media doesnt show us the war crimes consistently. And it's deeply, deeply indoctrinated in Americans that "we are the good guys." It takes a lot of work and looking to understand that we've only ever been the "good guys" by chance. We're a broken clock - right twice a day when the "right thing" just happens to coincide with American "interests." Like Ukraine. It's right and good to provide weapons to help a country defend itself against invasion. But America isn;t doing this because we're the good guys. We're doing it because it's the easiest, cheapest possible way to completely fuck over what was once a major adversary on the global stage - Russia. Russia will take *decades and maybe centuries* to recover from their horrendous blunder in Ukraine, and they've shown that their military is an absolute joke. The Russian army is the second-best army *in Russia* right now. And thats why the US is helping...not because we're doing the right thing. That's not even a real consideration. it just makes it easier to sell to the American people. With Israel...we're just complicit in horrific crimes against humanity. Again. Every time we recognize that we did something wrong, the American people convince ourselves that we're better now, we've learned, we've improved. We *should.* We could. But we don't. The international game of influence is still about furthering "interests," resources, trade deals, proxies, and blocking adversary nations from gaining their own influence or power.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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Im wondering why Kamala is so unpopular over there. I figure that Trump and Netanyahu are birds of a feather, but the fact that so many Israelis support Trump is of concern.
Just look back at Trump's time in the White House, and how he treated Israel. Look at trumps recent comments since Oct 7 last year about Israel and Palestinians. It's hard for a lot of people to imagine that the current genocide in Gaza could get *worse* than it already is. It could. The Biden administration has tried (not hard enough, not very successfully) to broker peace. The Biden administration is *somewhat* receptive to public outrage over American support for Israeli atrocities. Biden is also a die-hard Zionist. More so than Harris. Harris is unlikely to fundamentally change American policy toward Israel. There is some hope that she might be a little more assertive than Biden has been. But *Trump?* He won't oppose anything. he won't moderate anything. He'll eagerly push to give even more weapons to Israel. He won't speak about the plight of Palestinians, how they deserve peace. He won't even bother ti distinguish Palestinians from Hamas. He'd go *even farther* to support Israel wiping out all of the Palestinians, not just in Gaza but also the West bank. He approves of and idolizes "strong men," dictators like Putin, Kim, etc. How do you think Trump would treat the Netanyahu government and their "strong" stance against "terrorism?" Trump almost went to war with Iran in his first presidency. He'd help Netanyaho achieve "greater Israel," conquering additional territory just like the "lebensraum" of the Nazis. He wouldn't use diplomacy to try to de-escalate tensions with Iran when israel provokes them - Trump would double down, support Israel being "even tougher," and waltz happily into full scale war. Which is exactly what the Netanyahu government wants. Why *wouldn't* Netanyahu support and prefer Trump? Antisemitism? Netanyahu only cares about that insomuch as he can use it for political power and discredit opponents.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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You mean any investigations or accusations of war crimes, along with any further calls for ceasefire or humanitarian relief.
The war crimes will increase. As hard as it is to imagine the situation getting worse, I think we're going to discover that this is due to limits on our imaginations, not on the brutality and evil of the Netanyahu-led genocide of Palestinians. And American complicity will grow.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4067 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
It's also worth observing which side violates the terms first and, more importantly, NEXT! One main difference between GAZA and Lebanon is that the Palestinians have no army.
reuters.com Well that didnt take long. And (surprise!) Israel shot first, and "justifies" firing based on unsupported accusations.-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995... "Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." -->Nihil supernum --> -->
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