Aapje58
10mo ago
The dishonesty I'm referring to is the denial in the article that there is a political element to it and that it is the same as the kids on milk cartons. It is simply a lie to claim that they expect Californians to assist in the recovery efforts by helping a kidnapped Israeli that they encounter in SF or such.
And I do believe that a lot of what people communicate about 'issues' is biased and is intended to advance an agenda, even if they do not consciously see it as propaganda, but just believe (or 'believe'*) that their very biased views are just correct.
* Lots of people seem to suddenly believe different things than what they initially say, or put on posters, if you question them a little.
Aapje58
10mo ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender
If he actually was a great leader, he first of all wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place, but he would have sacrificed his reputation and his political career for the benefit of Israel once he did end up in this situation.
Aapje58
10mo ago
The default conclusion of this conflict has always been that the Arabs eventually win.
This is exactly why I consider Israel's continuous move towards an ever Greater Israel to be very short sighted. It may strengthen them in the short term by getting them a bit more land and resources, but they have been squandering the chance to create acceptance for Israel from the Arab civilians around them from a position of strength.
If a large number of those Arab civilians come to believe that it's fine or even beneficial to them for Israel to exist, then even if Israel loses its immense position of power (in large part due to having the US back them), they will still be safe, like France is safe from Germany now.
Aapje58
10mo ago
Changing the internal policy or training that led to actively killing those trying to surrender to you (whether Jews or Hamas)
I want to point out that Palestinians who are not part of Hamas but do end up in the war zone may also want to surrender.
To be honest, I'm getting a bit tired of the frequent implications that all Palestinians are part of Hamas. Even if it is not intended, the lack of distinction that is being made so often does speak volumes to me about how people frame the issue in their mind.
Aapje58
10mo ago
"Punching Richard Spencer will only create a thousand Richard Spencers ready to rise up behind him" is never advanced by leftists as a reason not to punch Richard Spencer.
Of course not, because they have the delusion that their own side is near perfect and won't cause a ton of collateral damage. For example, by having extremists going around punching everyone to the left of Stalin, for being a fascist.
On the right you have people with the same delusions, who think that Israel is surgically hitting Hamas, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Aapje58
10mo ago
bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger,
This statement completely ignores the actual debate at the time, which was the choice between bombing military targets or attacking civilians. Both types of bombings happened during WW II. The available evidence does strongly suggest that attacking civilians creates desires of revenge and thus support for politicians who advocate for the war, rather than making people surrender.
In actual reality, the civilian population of Germany never forced their government to surrender to make the bombings stop, and neither did the people of England, despite the V1 and V2 attacks. And even the Japanese surrender after the nukes didn't result from a lack of support from the people, but the leaders deciding themselves that dying to a nuke was not a sufficiently heroic death for their populace unlike running into a machine gun fire with a bamboo spear in your hands.
So do you want to argue that Hamas can be persuaded to surrender by bombing civilians? My judgment of their ideology, which is different from that of the WW II Japanese, is that this will not happen.
Note that one famous case where the populace did force an end to the war, which is Russia during WW I, didn't involve attacks of the Russian population.
Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated
I do, so I guess that you are just in a bubble where you don't read these things?
if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them?
Well, if you believe that every bomb is hitting Hamas and no civilians are being killed, then it makes perfect sense that you would disbelieve that the bombings can turn neutral civilians into supporters of Hamas, because they want revenge.
I prefer the facts over falsehood, though.
Aapje58
10mo ago
Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage.
They are utterly dishonest war propaganda, pretending not to be. For instance, in the link you posted, one such campaign is said to have the name 'Let the World Know.' But who doesn't know about the kidnapped people? It is utterly disingenuous to pretend that this is just to inform people. Your link furthermore claims:
"There is no Israeli flag on these posters. There is no mention of politics. They are as anodyne as the missing children that used to appear on the side of American milk cartons."
This is again utterly dishonest. The choice to put these people on posters, rather than the people put in prison without trial by Israel, which to me is kidnapping as well, is a political choice. The choice to not put pictures of killed Palestinian civilians on the posters (as well) is a political choice. The choice to put these posters up in Western nations across the world is a political choice, just like it would be a different political choice to put these posters up in front of the Knesset, or in front of a Hamas building in Qatar.
As another poster said, the milk carton kids are intended to allow people to recognize these kids in the streets or whatever, but there is no plausible way that a person will run into a kidnapped Israeli in SF and will then be able to help them by running to the police.
Unless you are willing to seriously discuss the real goal of these posters, and the dishonesty behind the refusal to openly state those goals, I don't see how you can get to a correct analysis.
Aapje58
10mo ago
They have literally never noticed that most of the best sprinters are ethnically African.
They obviously notice. A sprinter like Dafne Schippers got a lot more attention because she won despite being 'different.'
Aapje58
11mo ago
If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.
I think that the progressive stack is not so much about who wins, but how strong certain arguments are considered to be and in what situations they can be used. For example, a black person can use "I'm being discriminated against" even in some situations where they themselves messed up and are simply held accountable, while a white person who is actually being discriminated against, can't use that same argument unless the discrimination is very extreme indeed.
In social combat between woke people, you can expect them to use arguments that work for their identity in the situation. But that still doesn't mean that a black person can always just defeat a white person in social combat. The former just has more options.
Aapje58
11mo ago
No, they sent out 6,000–8,500 knights and mercenaries to suppress the peasants
Yet check out the comments under the latest army recruitment videos that stopped targeting liberals, but went back to targeting the traditional red regions. Many parents from military families state that don't want their children to join the army anymore.
The current elite is not Prussian. They don't see honor in soldiering and their culture rejects guns and law & order. They can't hire mercenaries anymore like in the olden days. So who is going to suppress the peasants, when police and the soldiers are peasants? Why would be elite be able to count on them when the peasants truly lose faith in the system?
Aapje58
11mo ago
then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion.
This would be a far stronger argument if a different religion would take its place, rather than atheism.
My theory for the demise of religion in the west is that we've succeeded too well at reigning in chaos and spreading knowledge for religion to be seen as valuable by most people. For a substantial part, that is because we have become so good at producing a good society to live in. If this is the goal of Christianity, then it made itself obsolete.
Aapje58
11mo ago
Nonsense, they only started to support Hamas after the deradicalized PLO was unable to offer meaningful improvement to their lives, which was in no small part due to Israel losing even a modest will to find a real solution after the killing of Rabin.
Aapje58
11mo ago
this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel
And that is exactly why this resonates. Here we have a person who ostensibly was responsible for an equitable peace between the Palestinians and Israel, but whose response clearly shows an extreme bias to one nation, more like being a citizen of that one nation.
Aapje58
11mo ago
The US could propose making Palestine a UN protectorate that will gradually democratize (taking many decades), similar to how Palestine was a League of Nations protectorate in the past or how Kosovo was a UN protectorate. Then poor in lots of money, open up the borders to Egypt, give them a sea harbor, etc.
Then the support for Hamas and other radicals should dry up as the Palestinians can then get (real) jobs and are mostly safe from IDF and colonist attacks.
Aapje58
11mo ago
Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.
How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.
Aapje58
11mo ago
When they lose trust in the US as a protector, while faced with a stronger and aggressive China, the willpower will be there.
Aapje58
1yr ago
'Good portion' is a vague word that doesn't mean plurality and it definitely doesn't mean large number (you cannot interpret a proportional claim as a claim of absolute size).
In my experience, mainstream publications who write about this stuff tend to not link to the crazy abusers on their own side that they paint as victims, but instead 'summarize' the situation, which are often actually lies. Which makes sense, because if you actually send people to the Twitter of the crazies, they can see that the person is quite crazy, which undermines the narrative. So low like counts are not necessarily inconsistent with being held up as a hero and having influence.
So you can have extremists who are followed by relatively few people, but journalists are among them and they turn them into martyrs for their side. The complaint is actually about the media and other signal boosters doing this. No one would care one bit about Nyberg or Alexander if they weren't held up as heroes in places with a decent amount of reach, while being anything but heroes.
Anyway, I did a quick google search and found that even the Washington Post lied about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/
The writer is the infamous Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist who was hired as part of the editorial board of the NYT, until the truth came out, which is itself evidence of how good that side of the aisle is at criticizing their own.
I also found the QZ article mentioned above. I didn't find any mainstream media articles telling the truth. So in my completely unscientific half-assed 'study,' I found that 100% of mainstream media sources had lied.
That said, Nyberg seems to be very obscure overall. But I do find it illustrative that the media can't even be honest when it costs them so little. Simply switching up the narrative to explain that this person is bad, but wasn't at all central to anti-GG would have cost them nothing but a loss of one opportunity to bash the other side.
Aapje58
1yr ago
I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?
There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.
At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.
Aapje58
1yr ago
I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.
That's a pretty poor argument when the main argument by prominent anti-GG'ers was that gamers are smelly neckbeards that harass people, evidenced by cherry picked random tweets by unknowns or fabricated evidence. If they genuinely had a problem with ad hominems, then they had every opportunity to reign in that behavior from their own side, but they didn't.
Aapje58
1yr ago
Leigh Alexander was a key player, who wrote off existing gamers with her nasty "gamers are over" piece. This, together with the support this hateful piece got from the gaming and regular press, who dismissed criticism of her piece as sexism, really energized the GamerGate side. Leigh really was one of the most prominent people on the anti-side, so her support of Nyberg cannot be dismissed as being from a niche player.
Aapje58
1yr ago
In pre-Napoleonic militaries, mercenaries were often foreigners, in particularly the Swiss (poor region and neutral, so it was unlikely that they would stab you in the back). The US can just hire South Americans or such. Perhaps with citizenship as a reward.
Both Intifada's were long after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that happened during the Arab–Israeli Wars. You can't retroactively justify ethnic cleansing by arguing that revolt against that cleansing and the subsequent oppression, justified the ethnic cleansing and oppression.
I've never heard anyone argue that a person who fights back after getting sucker punched, retroactively deserved that sucker punch because they fought back. So I have a hard time believing that your argument reflects a principle you hold in general.
The chance that he's seen Hamas propaganda seems negligible. There are many far more likely explanations, such that he's ignorant of news in general and is concerned with charming the ladies, or is part of a bubble that doesn't signal boost these things (which doesn't mean that it signal boosts Hamas' propaganda).
I consider it rather extremist and leaning towards false or at least unproven conspiracy beliefs to simply assume that beliefs like this are caused by Hamas' propaganda. It also completely denies people any agency. Using the same logic you can explain all kinds of things as being caused directly by propaganda, like your beliefs about Israel being caused by propaganda from Israel, people who have doubt about the elections because controlled by Putin, conservative Catholics being controlled by the Pope, etc.
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