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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

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I was reading Javiér Bardem's Wikipedia page and found this little quote:

During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Bardem and Cruz signed an open letter denouncing Israel's actions as genocide.

Weird that you could change the "1" to a "2" and the sentence would still make perfect sense. Are we in the "tragedy" or "farce" stage of history repeating?

Noam Chomsky gives a lot of talks, he schedules them years in advance. The people booking wanted to know the topic far in advance.

He discovered that he could reliably use "The Current Crisis in the Middle East".

It will be true for 3,4,5 and so on. This is a mighty shitstorm of a conflict if there ever was one.

People have been protesting Israel and calling them genocidal basically every year since 1947, with only small breaks during the periods of hours to days when the Arabs start a military offense and briefly look like they have the upper hand before getting their asses handed to them.

The insistence on referring to the conflict as "genocide" stands out as one of the best examples of how everything needs to be ramped up to 11 at all times. It's not enough for people to declare that they think Israel is being too aggressive and should have a more proportionate response, or even that Israel has a long-run goal of conquering Gaza and the West Bank, they need to believe that there is a plot to literally eradicate Palestinian people. With each new issue that comes up, I increasingly find myself struggling to treat my opponents like they've even trying to engage in a good-faith analysis of the world.

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