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It baffles me how Israel-Palestine has blossomed into this defining political issue in so many countries with no real reason to have a vested interest in the matter.
I agree it seems strange, but not nearly as odd as BLM blowing up in countries with basically no black people.
This is not the first case of weird leftist obsessions crossing country boundaries in random ways.
I repeat myself, but yes, seeing BLM in a German context was baffling indeed. We didn't ship them here as slaves, they came on their own!
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In the Australian context, BLM was fascinating because we had copycat BLM marches... about a completely different issue.
BLM in the original context means 'African-American lives matter'. BLM marches in Australia were reinterpreted as 'Aboriginal lives matter', even though Australian Aboriginals have nothing whatsoever to do with African-Americans, and even by analogy, are much closer to Native Americans than they are to African-Americans. The relevant similarities are that some Aboriginals have dark skin, and that there's a perception of disproportionate police violence against them. That's it. It was strange to see the branding appropriated in real-time like that.
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Very hard to call it random when it's so consistent.
Trans hasn’t.
It very much has where I live in Scandinavia. It's barely even registers as a culture war issue. There's just 100% acceptance at every level. We even have smoother and more competent political navigators that have learned from the fires in the US with youth hormones, bathrooms, sports and such, solving those issues, to a degree, before they ever become a media thing.
It's almost embarrassing for the 'against' side, as they simply have no avenue to attack or resist. The imported 'against' narratives from America simply do not apply.
Wait, how’d they resolve those issues?
I dislike how much importance is afforded to that CW battlefront back here in the states. If there’s policy which skips over all the difficult bits, I want to know about it. We could defuse the whole awkward subject.
There's not really a resolution, just more media savviness, conflict aversion and less crazy people.
Everything is more behind the scenes. On the medical end everything is private. It's simply not made into a matter that the state is paying for breast augmentations for trans people. Most anti-trans activists can't even tell you how young the youngest person receiving HRT is.
Schools have genderless bathrooms and many public areas like pools are adding a third changing room.
At the same time there is a central LGBT organization that has a long history of 'fighting' for gay rights. So when there is a storm brewing they are very quick to get into action and quiet everything down if things don't look good for their side.
Basically, there is no big public battle. Everything that needs to happen happens behind the scenes. Everything that makes the rural townsfolk reach for their pitchforks is smothered down. That involves taking some L's, but in the long run it leaves the anti-trans side with nothing to fight against or rally around.
Yes, your(royal) solution to most of these problems was to stop looking, like explicitly not recording crime and rape stats by ethnicity, I wouldn't be surprised if gender affirmative care is not tracked/tabulated/stated up by age on purpose.
I don't know why you're blaming me. I didn't come up with this.
If you want to breach a persons medical privacy you are welcome to be the one to do that here and face the relevant legal consequences.
If you want to rail against genderless bathrooms you will just look like a lunatic. Don't want to share a changing room with a trans person? Well, we are spending money on fixing that problem for you by building a third one so you and your penis or vagina can be safe.
If you want to pick a fight with an organization of trained media handlers who have been arguing the opposition into the dirt for half a century or more, go right ahead.
I'm waiting for a real solution from America, given they brought most of this stuff over. It was American academia that pushed this forward. American media that picked it up. American public that made it into some cultural battleground where the 'against' side does nothing but lose.
I mean, in what world does the collection of crime stats matter in the US? The existence of said information seems to have no bearing at all on policy.
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What do you mean? I'm pretty sure it has, unless you're talking about Asia, Africa or the Middle East.
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Indeed. I rather suspect that high levels of foreign interest in the conflict is why it continues to be unresolved. Other countries keep intervening politically to "promote peace", but that actually leads to the underlying issues never actually being sorted out.
The west stayed uninvolved in Rwanda, and while that was a horrible and protracted conflict with a shocking death toll, in the end Kagame and the Tutsis won, and it came to an end. Sometimes one side just needs to definitively win and one side needs to definitively lose for the fighting to stop.
The current situation in Sudan is awful, much worse than what is happening in Gaza. But I'm much more optimistic about that conflict being over ten years in the future than I am about Israel/Palestine.
Yes, it’s become almost impossible to solve the conflict due to outside meddling. Probably the best example of this is the creation of UNRWA, and the special Palestinian refugee status. As opposed to the UNHCR which aims to resettle refugees, UNRWA keeps them in perpetual refugee camps and decrees descendants of refugees to be refugees themselves - thus the Palestinian refugee problem will never be solved. This is by design.
Why would we support mass ethnic cleansing and a giant refugee crisis next to Europe?
They have every right to stay and it is best for the world if we don't get millions of refugees.
This happened in 1949, and is literally the reason that Palestinian stateless refugees number in the millions. By now they would have mostly died out.
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I have bad news for you - there is already a giant refugee crisis next to Europe, hence the refugee camps.
Which is why we need to help them return and help the ones who are still there stay.
Return where? The lands they used to live in got conquered.
The nearest semi-stable company with conditions resembling the place that they took refuge from.
Or in Israel's case there's 2 million or so local Arabs who are largely prosperous compared to regional comparisons and aren't associated with Hamas. An Israeli Arab is generally healthier and wealthier than any other Arab aside from those privileged enough to have their hands in the till in Petrostates.
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I'm pretty sure he means to send them back to the lands they used to live in and send the conquerors...somewhere.
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This is not true, both France and the UN sent troops. UN troops didn't intervene militarily, but they did shelter thousands of people from the genocide.
As far as I understand, the UN (and the French peacekeepers in particular) were famously useless during the Rwandan Genocide, and their major contribution was in setting up refugee camps in DRC (then Zaire) for fleeing Hutu genocidaires after the Burundi invasion ended the genocide.
In other words, they did little to shelter people from the genocide, but mostly sheltered the people who had committed the genocide.
If that's wrong, I'd appreciate the fact-check. My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria, so I'd be delighted to find that they're not quite as contemptible as I had thought.
It's lucky that they're so ineffective.
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I don't think that's true but I'm not much of an expert. Certainly the UN sheltered many Tutsis in its mission's headquarters. Overall they did not do much though.
...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.
The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.
The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.
On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.
At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.
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They have Jewish (and now) Muslim populations, so they have reasons to care. Small numbers of dedicated people make a lot of noise.
It's also just...fun? A little geopolitical drama, a little proxy culture war to fill our days.
If you're a Westerner skeptical of Islam or the sorts of people who push for some cosmopolitan accommodation with it but are too cucked to just argue your own nationalism (or you don't have a nation) Israeli nationalism is something you can support.
If you're on the flip side you can inveigh about the brutality of Western imperialism and those who support it and believe you're like your parents opposing apartheid. And, of course, give voice to vicious instincts you're not brave enough to slake yourself.
Both sides get to pretend that they care about the world as such, and many smaller nations get to pretend they have a say in outcomes.
It's great for everyone but Israelis and Palestinians, tbh.
The role that Jews play in maintaining outside interest in the region is pretty much non-existent apart from in the US (which is the only country apart from Israel to have a large enough Jewish community to matter to anyone) and even the US is involved in the region for reasons that go far beyond AIPAC.
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