They are fucking terrorists, who cares what their “reason” is? Anyone who can convince someone to put on a suicide vest and blow up children is crazy and you don’t try and reason with crazy people.
I’m not sure I understand the point you’re making. Mine was that bin laden used nearly identical arguments to support his group attacking civilians as IDF and their apologists are using to justify shit like bombing refugee camps and besieging hospitals.
they’re telling the people south to evacuate where? They are corralling them into a tight group to exterminate them, it’s so obvious. If the military doesn’t do it, starvation, illness, exposure and thirst will.
Keep in mind this is already a batshit small area to have 2+ million people in even when it’s not under an ongoing genocidal campaign. It has to be horrific conditions.
It’s really weird to me the lines that this conflict seems to divide people between. like, to me, it’s fairly clear that insane war crimes are being committed, and almost certainly crimes against humanity, and my only real sentiment is that you can probably achieve the aims of whatever “war” must be fought here without like, killing thousands of children. that seems like the most sane take in the world to me. I guess people that disagree with this will have to decide if 1) they think these are crimes (trivially easy to prove, the law is clear as is the evidence so far) or 2) if these crimes are actually acceptable under the circumstances or 3) nahnahnahnahnah this isn’t actually happening and hamas is doing it all.
1 is just wrong, 2 I can’t really argue with other than to probably think less of you for it and maybe to ask you what we should do about the geneva convention, and 3 is just crazytalk.
I am mostly confused about the split among democrats. Fetterman’s take on this shocked me and honestly turned me way off of him, and I would have probably gone to a war for that guy. Biden’s take was actually surprising, even for me, a known biden hater, especially given his vote against the Iraq war. republicans are not really that surprising - any conflict that results in middle-eastern deaths at least a plurality are gonna support, and of course many of them still think iraq/afghanistan were a good idea.
I can’t really figure out what the line is. Like, for sure the “pro palestine” side (which I would not categorize myself as) definitely has a fair share of anti semites and thoughtless simpletons that will just knee jerk react against any act of a govt power. People on both aisles seem to be in this group. The “hey let’s kill fewer children” side seems to have members on both aisles as well.
what the fuck is going on here? people wishing each other’s houses getting bombed. friendships dissolving. I had a long time chat break up over it.
Anyway this is now hitting closer to home because there’s been a lot of violence near me and people killed.
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My point is, I’m not interested in the reasoning of crazy people. And since all of the sides in the current conflict are crazy I’m just hoping it ends as quickly as possible without getting any worse than it already is.
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that’s a pretty fair take, sorry if my tone sounded hostile
not really trying to give his reasoning any validity, but just commenting that it’s interesting to see it catching fire right now (and then censored)
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This should, but maybe isnt?, be something on which all people can agree. Even if one takes the position that Israel is morally justified in bombing a hospital without making any effort to save the innocent children within (I do not take this position, but I think I can see how someone could get there), it’s obviously better in the big picture to at least try to look like you care about not killing babies.
This was a good episode:
The interviewee is a Jew of mixed (European/Arab, both parents Jewish) descent, born in America but now living in the West Bank, married to a Palestinian Muslim. As you might guess of someone who works for human rights organizations, she mostly takes the Palestinian side.
Hayes makes a good/interesting point towards the end though:
On internet forums, I think the topics that get the most contentious aren’t necessarily the ones that are the most controversial or objectionable, but just the ones that happen to cut across whatever narrow divisions a given group has to cause disagreement. Maybe the issue here is that, like, we can look at Armenia or Xinjiang or wherever and be like “yes, ethnic cleansing is bad” and so there’s not much more to really say about it (no one is arguing the “actually Uyghurs deserve it” side on the English-speaking internet), and with no one arguing the other side there’s not really much conversation to have. But suggest that Israel is an apartheid state and wooo boy do a bunch of people want to chime in like “well, actually”.
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People aren’t great at taking positions in situations that are extremely complex, especially those with layers upon layers of unfathomable brutality mixed in. X bad, Y good doesn’t always cleanly apply, and when it doesn’t, it breaks brains, especially those of always-online folks.
I disagree with you here, because what China is doing to the Uighurs and the recent ethnic cleansing of the Armenians are both unambiguously bad. Relaying even a smidgen of history and news about these events would convince just about anyone outside of the perpetrators. And I disagree with Goofy that these get less coverage because they are just plain bad. I think both atrocities have different explanations.
The Chinese and the Uighurs is the easiest. China is an immensely powerful country, both militarily and economically, and it’s strongly authoritarian with little to no freedom of the press. Any Western media outlet or other business that were to take a stand on the issue figures to be kicked out of the country and lose out on an immense market. You think, like, Disney is going to send ABC News correspondents and risk its entire Chinese market in the name of doing the right thing? Of course not. It has obligations to its shareholders that supersede doing the right thing.
There is some of that at play with Armenia, too. Turkey is seen as a valuable NATO ally, and it’s generally been US policy to not piss off NATO allies in the name of doing the right thing. “Who was president when the US officially acknowledged the Armenian genocide?” is a pretty good trivia stumper, imo: TRUMP! But also, there’s just a bunch of plain old ignorance. While the ethnicity is ancient and there are records dating back to ancient times, in modern history, Armenia was a free state only briefly between WWI and WWII before being annexed by the USSR, and it wasn’t a free state again until 1991. I’m not sure more Americans could find it on an unlabeled map vs. how many incorrectly point to Albania or Azerbaijan instead. Sure, a ton of Americans know of a person with Armenian heritage, but I’m not sure how many know that fact about her. Armenia is barely in our history books, let alone our novels or movies, and it’s certainly not the Bible, so it’s very much out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Uighurs suffer from American ignorance, too. I don’t think most Americans would answer “What’s a Uighur” with “A Muslim minority in China” instead of “maybe, like, a rude name for a white person trying to dress, talk, and act like a Black person?”
Also hurting the coverage of both atrocities is the question of US agency. When it comes to Israel, most everyone knows that we give money and weapons to Israel, so we can debate if we should give more or less. With China, what should the USA do? I don’t think a lot of serious people would choose to go to war with a nuclear power and the second most powerful nation on earth over the Uighurs, and I don’t think even a lot of people would be willing to tank the global economy by cutting of trade relations with China over this (and that would be pretty unlikely to work, anyway), so what’s the plan then? Armenia and Azerbaijan both have both imports and exports from the US under $200 million per year, both under 1% of GDP. I guess we could slap some sanctions on, but it probably won’t do much if anything. Are we going to send in troops? Is arming the Armenians and starting a shooting war preferable to what is indeed ethnic cleansing but isn’t wholesale slaughter in territory that is internationally-recognized to belong to Azerbaijan? I don’t really think so. If you’re going to commit ethnic cleansing, it’s a whole lot more palatable to the international community to put people on buses and send them over the border into a state where their ethnic group is in the majority compared with bombing hospitals and neighborhoods. So, for these two atrocities, not only is there little debate about which side is bad, there’s little debate that what should be done is, basically, nothing. When that’s the answer of what to do, then interest in the story is going to plummet.
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Like I said up thread you don’t need to literally solve an 80 year conflict to take the position that you shouldnt commit genocide
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https://x.com/JoeKassabian/status/1725597759632195825?t=3tU8Kt-P1F17wr2hcm2JyQ&s=09
Well, not everything in my post was true, but this is a good action by the US government.
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well, they support hamas anyway, so.
are we even sure hamas didn’t just use ai to generate that clip? can’t trust anything coming from them
what’s biden’s offramp here? Bibi is absolutely not going to back down, at some point this is going to be too much. How’s Joey B gonna get off this train? Some sort of triangulated “we will always support israel but not bibi”? Can’t really do that because that’s “getting involved in politics” over there (we only do that covertly with CIA ops, duh).
losing the 2024 election
At which point Trump will be looking for the on-ramp to participate in the genocide.
Biden op-ed in WaPo: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas | non-paywall link
The word “settlements” does not appear in this piece. Is this a remotely serious proposal? A lot of the podcast episodes I’ve listened to recently have expressed extreme skepticism about the two-state solution in the modern era of Israeli settlements, because the whole point is that they never want to let Palestinians control the West Bank.
He says while supporting Israel as it… forcibly displaces Palestinians who are under siege and blockade, and appears to be well on the way to reducing territory if not flat out genociding.
Well… we’re waiting.