functor
1mo ago
I have no idea how you can analyze this conflict and not see immense Israeli competenc
They fought a small town that doesn't have any weapons and still haven't really been able to win in a year. The only thing they manage to do is get weapons as welfare checks and blast large numbers of civilians.
This is just... bizarre. This isn't a math test, this is war.
And they have a population that is physically and academically weak.
functor
1mo ago
Why wouldn't Iran defend its allies when they are under attack? Why would they let Sunni jihadists with American and Israeli weapons wreck Syria? Why wouldn't they back people who are really similar to them in a neighbouring country when they get invaded?
Another big advantage is that the proxies are a cheap way to drain resources from the enemies.
functor
1mo ago
Like their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, their entire goal is to lose spectacularly and hope American and European leftists get extra mad at Israel for being competent at warfare
Their strategy is simple. Israel has the non ultra orthodox population of Wisconsin and the area of El Salvador. It is a tiny country with abysmal natural resources that is deeply fractured. Israel needs to be kept in a permanent state of crisis as this will effectively make the country infeasible. Israel is going to be in a permanent state of chaos.
Europe has nothing to gain by Israel creating another refugee crisis. The support for Israel is low in Europe.
Isreal is a country of neurotic people with abysmal school results. They aren't competent at war, they are just exceptionally brutal while fighting people who barely have weapons.
functor
1mo ago
My take on it is that punishment should more be based on what is best for the rest of us. Do we want to live next to this person? Is this person a massive risk for the rest of us and a drag on society? My main argument for the death penalty is that we are far better off without these people. They high risk.
To commit such extreme crimes they most likely have an outlier awful personality with high levels of psychopathy, poor impulse control and low IQ. They are pretty much the extreme left tail of the bell curve. We are simply better off without them. Also getting rid of these people is a eugenic measure that is highly effective as we would be removing the people with the worst possible traits.
functor
2mo ago
I find it bewildering that they call it a conspiracy. Is Antonio Gramscii a conspiracy?
Is critical race theory supposed to be a conspiracy?
The believers in the conspiracy have even made a long wiki page about cultural marxism in the soviet union.
The left is deeply involved in cultural issues so calling it a conspiracy is just the least sensible way of waving it off. They can't actually debate the issue so they have to use slander. Left wing movements use gossip, shaming and rallying to much higher degrees than right wing movements.
functor
2mo ago
Why on Earth would they facilitate massive ethnic cleansing Palestinians? Even if Palestinians were amazing refugees they would absolutely refuse to assist ethnic cleansing.
functor
2mo ago
And yet still exist, and were not facing existential risk from invading armies.
Israel could probably get a peacedeal with Hamas under the conditions the Boer were forced to accept. A large portion of white south africans were forced to leave.
States don't face existential threat from a thousand cuts.
Yes, that is what happened to Rhodesia and South Africa. It simply becomes impossible to have a functioning country in a constant state of war. Israel has a larger portion of its population mobilized than Ukraine, is deeply politically divided and is in a deep economic crisis.
Supported by states that would have been vulnerable to nuclear weapons.
Again, Israel isn't going to go nuclear for giving weapons. See Russia's response to Ukraine aid for example.
The ethnic Arab citizens of Israel are neither Palestinians in the political sense of the Palestinian movement, nor are they an occupied or suppressed majority population.
They are second class citizens in their own home.
Being 10s of kms outside the state is still outside the state, which continues to invalidate your attempted analogies to African majority-suppression states contexts.
Having two million people in the state and having the rest next door doesn't help more than gated communities in South Africa.
Why not, if the alternative is existential end?
Moving somewhere else. They are effectively a nomadic homeless people anyway. It is a far better end than having this endless conflict.
functor
2mo ago
Fundamentally the solution to this war can't be from an Israeli perspective. We have hundreds of millions of middle easterners and then we have Europe close by. The solution needs to be one that benefits arabs and Europeans.
They have been kicked out of countries 109 times and seem to be a fairly nomadic people. If they want to settle somewhere it has to be on land that is available and doesn't cause a constant headache for the rest of us. The jewish autonomous oblast is bigger than Israel and available to jews.
functor
2mo ago
Lebanon has been bombed regularly for decades, has had large groups of Palestinians pushed into its territory and Israel is fighting wars in both Syria and Palestine. They have every reason to militarize against Israel
functor
2mo ago
South Africa was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
The Boer who have lived there for 400 years are effectively second class citizens.
France was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
They lost a part of France with a million ethnic French people that had been French for over a century.
Israel doesn't need (or use) nukes to subjugate a population. It can use nukes to mitigate existential threat from invading armies.
There won't be any, it will be death by a thousand cuts.
Unlike Rhodesia, the Israelis have nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
There was no vast army of tanks that rolled into Rhodesia. Rhodesia fell because it was being hit constantly by endless insurgency.
Israel is not an apartheid state in which a minority is attempting to rule over a much larger majority that dominates the demographics of the interior of the state
Over two million Palestinian citizens. Also much of Israel is within range of being engaged by Palestine. Even Houthis have hit Israel twice from 2000 km away. Thinking that Israel can just ignore a large group of people 10s of km away is naive.
sufficient strategic depth
West bank to the sea is 20+ km. That is minimal strategic depth.
which were not MAD contexts.
Israel isn't going to nuclearly destroy the west bank.
functor
2mo ago
you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.
How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?
Why should they not fight back when getting occupied? Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world? The neo con/globalists wars have caused massive waves of refugees to Europe. There is no critical race theory and gender studies in Iraq. They fought back and kicked the globalists out.
These wars have given us nothing but a surveillance state, migrants, and debt. It is a good thing that the locals manage to resist.
functor
2mo ago
Why aren't people in the middle east ever allowed to engage in armed resistance when they are occupied? When Iraq was under a brutal occupation they were still labled terrorists despite having every reason and right to defend their country from occupation.
The same goes for the Lebanese. They are under attack and should be expected to fight back.
functor
2mo ago
increasingly distributed through the Arab world
Why would the rest of the world accept a massive refugee exodus from Palestine?
functor
2mo ago
South Africa's nukes didn't help much. France lost Algeria despite having been there longer than israel has existed despite France having nukes. Turns out nukes aren't that great at subjugating a population, especially when your country is tiny and the people you subjugate are your neighbours. The Palestinians don't have to defeat Israel in a big war, they just have to put Israel in the same position as Rhodesians were in. There aren't even six million non ultra orthodox Israeli jews. Populationwise Israel is roughly equal to Slovakia. In terms of land, they are smaller than Belize. The Palestinian population is now a quarter of the size of the population of Iraq when the US, Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands invaded. They left because it turned into a hopeless quagmire. Palestinians are more united against an enemy than the Iraqis were.
functor
2mo ago
The establishment lied wildly about Vietnam. The lies about Iraq were next level inventing WMD in Iraq. They lied about Jessica Lynch, abu ghraib, the UN weapons inspectors and long list of other things.
In Afghanistan they claimed that the 120 000 000 000 dollars wasted on the Afghan national army created an army of 300 000. After a decade of claiming this they changed the narrative in a week admitting that they had basically fabricated this military. Unfortunately, they hadn't fabricated all the spent money.
The Ukraine war has to be the war in modern history with the least investigative journalism. There is basically only narrative and press releases from think tanks being published in the media. In 2003 Bagdhad Bob was interviewed on American TV. In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.
It is going to be interesting to see the reaction when the lies start falling apart and the true believers find out their war was roughly as fake all the previous ones.
functor
2mo ago
The me too moverment didn't understand statstics.
Most men don't hit on many women, some men sometimes hit on woman. Some men hit on thousands of women each year. Those guys have a personality disorder. Women's experiences with men are skewed by a small group of men who are highly overrepresented. I have met feminists who think that there are lots of hidden rapists becasue "everyone knows a victim but nobody knows a rapist". What they are forgetting is that there are far more rape victims than rapists. The left likes broad measures that don't really work but are implemented against an entire population instead of identifying the culprits and dealing with them. Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people. If the 1% of the population that does the most drunk driving was stopped, drunk driving rates would fall substantially.
The me too movement made it hard for ordinary non and well meaning guys to talk to a girl at the gym, at the office or in the grocery store. It will not stop the guys with the personality disorders. This worsens the relations between the genders as women's experiences of men become increasingly skewed to psychopaths and bipolar men.
On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.
functor
2mo ago
The death of the liberal media.
When the newspapers were laying off large numbers of journalists when the internet was rising I was optimistic thinking that tens of thousands of leftist propagandists losing their job would be a positive thing.
In the end the media that replaced the legacy media wasn't less woke. Instead they just publish press releases from the rand corporation as news instead of doing actual journalism. The death of the liberal media wasn't the death of liberalism in popular culture, it was a shift from the media being critical of power to the media re-printing press releases.
functor
2mo ago
The right needs female voters.
The western world created the most mentally ill women of all time. We have the most stressed women that sleep the least and have the most mental problems of any society. Women are having far fewer children than they say they want, are obeser than ever and more addicted to psychiatric medication than ever.
The sexual revolution was a disaster for women and defending it in order to be pro women isn't a viable strategy. Hookup culture, hyper sexualization and the breakdown of family is not something that will help women.
Rather than pushing issues that are hurting women the right should focus on how the left is terrible to women. Defund the police saved criminal black men by throwing women under the bus.
functor
2mo ago
Cultural marxism is effectively Antonio Gramsci. He absolutely wanted to influence culture and was pushing marxism.
The cultural revolution clearly shows that the communists wanted to influence culture.
Especially the early soviet union wanted to greatly impact culture.
This isn't more of a conspiracy theory than that right wingers want to change culture. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy that people with similar political views want the same thing. That christians tend to be pro life isn't a conspiracy. They are not all congregating in a central lodge. Many of them aren't really taking orders from above and those who are such as catholics are entirely open about the church's stance.
functor
2mo ago
So basically listing reasons why a policy is damaging is not a valid argument against it? I am not seeing the point.
I see now reason to support Israel because Israel is damaging for Europe. I support Baathist parties in the middle east as they support policies that benefit Europe.
functor
2mo ago
You see how calling convicted terrorists "hostages" makes people suspicious of your point of view right?
Palestinians have every right to engage in armed resistance. Israel is taking more than combatants prisoner and not providing trials.
Why aren't there trade controls on Israel then? They are bombing and occupying Israel? Fundamentally what the region needs is a situation in which Palestinians are in control of the situation and have a stable arrangement that they are satisfied with. The needs of the Israelis can't take higher priority than those that represent the bigger population. Security in the arab world is needed both for them but also since it benefits Europe. The interests of an insignificant tiny state with no natural resources has to be way down the priority list.
functor
2mo ago
Again why are they not saying death to Brazil? Death to China or death to Iceland? Why specifically the US?
Yes, it is abolutely tiny and they haven't been able to properly take it in a year despite exceptional brutality.
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