511–520 of 629 posts
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A tiny fraction of the US budget which is almost entirely earmarked to be spent buying from US suppliers but sure, the Jews are the reason you have a malfunctioning health system.
Conflating the state of Israel with "the Jews" is antisemitic. Many Jews do not support the state of Israel whatsoever.
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Data says it’s the Palestinians that need defenses, not the ones doing 95% of the killing. https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
The defenses they need are against Hamas. Nobody else comes close to Israel in protecting civilians in combat zones. And let's take a critical eye to that data you linked. I'm having a hard time with the filters but we can see enough without: The fatalities are nearly 90% male. That implies that probably 80% are in some fashion combatants or combatant-adjacent. And note that the death toll for the recent war includes…
That’s some newspeak right there.
Tell me, given all adult, non-ultra-orthodox, Jewish Israelis, regardless of gender, must mandatorily serve in the military and remain reservists for decades, does this mean most Jewish adults are “combatant adjacent”?
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Gaza's "air defense" is hundreds of miles of tunnels, civilians just aren't allowed to shelter in them. Hamas having better technology wouldn't change the fact that they're not interested in protecting civilians.
I’m not going to defend hamas’ choices, but i think it’s disingenuous to say that they have the ability to protect the people of gaza. A few thousand fighters in tunnels is possible, but millions of civilians? And wouldn’t that be more of this “using human shields” stuff people like to point out so often?
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> can the right to kill coexist with the victim's right to defense? Yes it can, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Russia believes it has the natural right to reclaim what it considers to be Russian territory. Ukraine believes it has the right to be free. So everyone should just put down their weapons and come to an agreement based on these rights? The fallacy at the heart of your argument is that there is some…
> The US bombing "drug" boats in the Caribbean, are those civilians? Yes. > How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)? You're doing a great job of writing my policy! To be fair and to show…
And I also think that most people would disagree with you that the correct first sanction is on a country's banks, the consequences of which fall disproportionately on the innocent civilians of your disfavored country; the disproportionality of which is contrary to international law.
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Conflating the state of Israel with "the Jews" is antisemitic. Many Jews do not support the state of Israel whatsoever.
just a random poll in canada: 94 per cent of the jewish community said they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state . Pretty sure you will get similar outcome anywhere else https://thecjn.ca/news/canadian-jews-overwhelmingly-support-...
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You'd be amazed at the amount of radicalization Israeli society gets if you'd bother to look with unbiased eyes. Attacking aid trucks? Spitting at Christians, even tourists? Stealing houses of West Bank people? (Oh must be for that Lebensraum) Maybe that's one goal you should add to your 2026 list...
Radicalization?? No. Yes, there were a few attacks on aid trucks. People who saw aid going to those who were holding Israeli hostages. You realize Israel was under no legal obligation to permit the aid? Don't chant "Geneva", it only requires allowing aid to non-combatants. When there is even a reasonable threat of diversion to military purpose the obligation goes away--and there was not only a reasonable threat, but…
Ok, case closed, let them rot to death! Next problem?
How about next we argue why it was perfectly acceptable to crash 2 planes into 2 civilian buildings. Seems to be in the same ballpark!
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> Palestinian society is deeply propagandized and radicalized What definition are you using that trips for Palestinians but not Israelis (or practically any other group in the Middle East outside e.g. cosmopolitan Gulf cities)?
It's normally easy to tell apart war and terrorism. Look at the person who selects the target. What do they believe is at that point? Civilian--it's terrorism. Military/government, it's war or insurgency. Look at the pattern--taking out a guard post to get to the civilians behind does not make it legitimate. Note that you need to look at the person who selects the target--a soldier in the field often knows little of…
We rarely have access to or even knowledge of who this person is, let alone their mens rea.
Any metric based solely on intent is (a) impossible to objectively adjudicate and (b) corrupted by the crazy, who will legitimately believe in fantasies if it serves their ends.
I don’t think you’re wrong. Just that this metric is inadequate. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a good alternative. My takeaways from the last couple years is that the civilian-military boundary has been irretrievably blurred by hybrid war and non-state actors; the term genocide irreversibly blurred by activists; and the term warm crime rendered irrelevant by the world’s great and regions powers—without exception— explicitly rejecting it as a constraint on themselves. All of this means that the vocabulary we once relied on to make sense of the moral aspect of geopolitics no longer works, which makes discussion a bit confusing.
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More Germans died in WW2 than Brits. Guess the Allies were the bad guys.
Are you fine with the mass killings of civilian populations in Gaza, yes or no? War is ugly, I'm not trying to make the Palestinians into saints, but the other guy is advocating the insane position that Israel can do no wrong, and that them using excessive force is completely justified. I feel like I'm losing my mind, why is it so hard to say "killing tens of thousands of civilians is barbaric"??
Because it’s not true unless we’re just saying war is barbaric. Which I agree with. But it’s not useful when trying to delineate justified versus excessive force.
I agree Israel is using excessive force in Gaza. I also think Hamas is a terrorist organisation that seems committed to continuing to do terrorism. I genuinely haven’t figured out how to balance thsr equation, though I think discussing it without calling someone engaging in good faith a monster/genocider/anti-Semite is a good start.
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> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945. I would still say "what about a missile shield?". If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors. If some…
> If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, th…
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> Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces Isn’t it the other way? With a lot of medicine’s modern advances being rooted in combat medicine?
I think they mean communicable diseases, not combat injuries. For example, around 2/3rds of the military deaths in the American civil war were from disease, not combat. I don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine.
Triage and ambulances come from battle medicine [1]. (Not sure about communicable-disease prevention.)