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No source that unironically refers to the situation in Gaza as a genocide deserves to be taken seriously
(so that throws Pasha's entire contribution in the bin)ETA: I didn't realise at first @Pasha was talking about a hypothetical future scenario, so despite disagreements we clearly have I should acknowledge I misread his original comments .It was eminently achievable. Stop insisting on sending aid that Hamas will hoard. A starving population will turn on it's leaders pretty quick. Allow Israel to bomb Hamas targets even if that means more of their meat-shields die etc. Too many people who matter in the west however didn't want Hamas to be eliminated.
As for what all this means for the future, from my limited understanding of Israeli domestic politics it sounds like the two-state-solution is well and truly dead. Which may well be a good thing for Israel's security, as an independent Palestine would most likely mean having another another lebanon on their border (only less functional and more Jihadist). Best chance now for peace is for Trump to succeed in getting Egypt to resettle all the Palestinians, which unfortunately probably won't happen.
Sorry for discrediting myself by describing killing a couple hundred thousand people out of a population of 2 million as genocide.
Eager to hear more of your genocide-free strategy of starving them instead and bombing those “meat shields”. Oh and the final option forcefully cleansing the land of them.
Making up numbers in order to describe something as a genocide is indeed discrediting.Feel free to look at any war in history fought against a nation like Gaza that has declared total war on you (and insists it will never stop). To consider it unsporting - whoops, I meant genocidal - of a nation to not want to send thousands of trucks of supplies to its enemy demonstrates a lack of understanding of how war works or a very particular grudge against Israel.
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023 and describes a future hypothetical based on the statements of Israeli politicians at the time. That hypothetical turned out to be more correct than not.
Stop masturbating with words. If you want to mass murder people have the courage to actually say so.
Pointing out words have meanings and that the ones you used don't match reality is not "masturbating" with words (curious expression).Mass murder? That type of language is more masturbatory than anything I've said, and seems like an example of the non-central fallacy as it relates to Hamas members. For the avoidance of doubt, I think the murder of Hamas members is a noble goal (unless they surrender), despite the unfortunate reality of collateral civilian deaths. If you have an issue with that, then your issue might be with the nature of war itself.
“You mass murder, I pursue the goal of destroying the enemy despite collateral civilian deaths” must be the most perfect Russell conjugation I’ve ever seen. You’re both describing the same thing, it’s just a question of the spin you’re putting on it.
We're not. The difference between an intended and an unintended negative outcome, like harm to a civilian, is something reasonably young children can already intuit. There's a reason most people judge someone who accidentally runs another person over less harshly than someone who actively seeks pedestrians to drive into.
Maybe you think there's some conversion factor i.e. a single deliberately caused death is as bad as 2/5/10 unintended ones, but I'd be very surprised if you think it's 1:1.
Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.
In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal. Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.
This would more closely mirror the reality of the Israel-Palestine situation if the driver needed to be somewhere as a matter of life and death (disarming a missile aimed at their house/rescuing a kidnapped relative/make up your own), there was only a single route there, they'd loudly announced beforehand they would be taking this road, and yet Hamas members were hiding behind blind corners throwing children in front of the car as it approached.
This is true of anything.
Why are the civilian deaths in Gaza closer to the bombing of Dresden in your view than the rest of the civilian deaths caused by the Allied powers in WW2? And returning to your first point:
The implication of which seems to be some version of "this is close to as bad as intending to kill them" (otherwise I'm not sure what point you were making), why would accepting the deaths of German civilians in WW2 be meaningfully less deliberate than the bombing of Dresden? What would even morally distinguish the Allied and Axis forces?
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What about the standard implicit definition of “it’s mass murder if you kill them after they surrender, otherwise it’s combat”?
Bit different, as it implies they're all combatants. We're talking about 'napalm the forest' / 'kill them all, God will know his own' situations where it's unclear who is a combatant and who is a civilian in the wrong place, and the civilians are being kept between you and the combatants, and the line is blurry in the first place.
I have greater than 0 sympathy for those who have to make such choices, such as in my comment on George Macdonald Fraser but the gung-ho attitude of 'can't be helped, just kill them' attitude you see in certain quarters does put me off.
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Where is the evidence they’ve killed 200,000 civilians?
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023. In the last year Israel has murdered about 50k. I am not IDF high command but it’s clear they would gladly work up this number if they weren’t under tremendous international pressure.
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"Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." and "Be charitable." are both rules for a reason, taking seriously the things people who disagree with you say is necessary for the kind of discussion we want here.
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