mozz

NAB: proudly bipartisan

DeNiro: Cool. Here's where I am on the political spectrum.

NAB: Well I didn't mean like bipartisan. I meant more like, the-acceptable-viewpoint-or-else-silence bipartisan.

Let the problem fester for 70 years until Israel gets tired of their shit and "solves" the problem their own way. Which is how we got here.

See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the "stronger" party in the situation, when their "solution" is some kind of rampant injustice.

Like if the US lost patience with Israel's current government, and got a coalition together, landed UN troops in the West Bank with the support of the whole rest of the world to deport all the settlers back inside the 1993 borders (summarily executing any of them that tried to resist the deportation, and just leaving them dead in the street), and hauled away Netanyahu and half his cabinet to the Hague to stand trial (alongside, yes, Hamas leadership who's guilty of much more numerically minor atrocities), you would never accept that that's justified because they're "solving the problem." Even though that's a lot milder and more measured than what Israel is currently doing to "solve" -- i.e. just carpet-bombing the country and causing a man-made catastrophe of famine destruction that's killing innocent people on an industrial scale.

Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.

Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.

This is a really good question. Here's a comparison showing injuries alongside deaths, here's a comprehensive breakdown of deaths up until the beginning of the current "war," and here's a breakdown for the current conflict itself.

But, hey, I've already acknowledged that it's a shitty solution, and we're a couple of intelligent people, so instead of "finding some people" for this solution, which is what we've been doing for the past 70 years, let's just talk about what the solution should be. What's really the solution here?

Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I've lost count.

Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn't Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It's been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?

What else? You've been talking about this "realistic path for peace", right? What's that path look like?

Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don't think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide -- so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn't just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then -- sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop, and then two, we have to try to address the root causes that are leading to the killing, and come up with something that is livable.

Ben-Gurion actually touched on this exact point, as far as root causes:

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.

"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"

I don't know the percentage.

You sounded like you were saying that Palestinian grievances were reaching back 70 years ago. My point was that there are large numbers of Palestinians who have much more recent grievances than 70 years -- like dead relatives of all ages, or lost homes, within their lifetime. What percent of them have that, I have no idea, and I'm genuinely curious what you think the percentage is. But honestly the point wasn't needing to dig up an exact number, 4% or 20% or 50% or whatever. Any of those is too many, and you seem to define Palestinian retribution for it as "terrorism" while Israeli retribution is defined as "defense."

Oh no! How will his career survive, he'll never be taken seriously as an actor without the opportunity to win this prestigious award I've never heard of.

What percentage of Palestinians currently don't live in the family home they were born / grew up in, because the place they grew up in has been destroyed or taken by the Israelis during their lifetime? I mean obviously for Gaza, the percentage is pretty near 100% at this point, but I'm curious what you think the number is for all Palestinians put together.

You gotta wear a helmet though in some places, and depending on where you are you may have to do much more than that

Gotta keep one hand on the handlebars

Gotta have a light

CAN'T RIDE WITH TWO PEOPLE ON THE SAME SEAT

YOU HAVE TO USE FUCKING HAND SIGNALS I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA NOT JUST AMERICA BUT TEXAS FOR GOD'S SAKE

(Fun fact, I actually met someone who got deported after getting stopped by the cops, originally, for riding a bike at night without a light 🙁)

(Edit: Also... banning someone from the libertarian subreddit because they said something you feel like they shouldn't be allowed to say, so you have to use your administrative controls to silence them, is frickin hilarious. Not that I am surprised.)

And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country

I... what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn't be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.

So... getting away from the back and forth, I have a feeling that the underlying thing you're saying, that Hamas is a violent terroristic organization and they shouldn't have killed or raped all those people at the music festival, I agree with completely. Where it breaks down for me is:

1. Likud has been helping Hamas defeat their less-violent domestic opposition, and elevating the most violent and unreasonable element in Palestinian politics, for years now. Which kinda makes it weird for them to all of a sudden get upset that the Palestinians are acting violent and unreasonable. It's like picking the worst and most dangerous dog to take home to your family, then torturing it on purpose because it's a "bad dog," and then blaming someone else when it mauls one of your children, and saying everyone needs to put you in charge and never question you so you can protect everyone against these dogs and keep torturing the dogs. To me, that shit means you should never be in charge of anything again and should maybe be brought up on charges both for what happened to the dog and what happened to your kid.
2. Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.

To me, no one should get raped at the music festival and no one should watch their children starve. Both of those seem like straightforward things to believe. Anyone on either side who's for a realistic path for peace is the the ally, and anyone on either side who's justifying atrocities is the enemy (as you seemed to do for deliberately starving children -- saying that it happens by accident sometimes, as a way of excusing Israel doing it on purpose, is deliberately missing the point of what I was saying I think.)

I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges, and find some people whose solution to "they did an atrocity to us" is something other than "Let's do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it'll show them not to do that again."

(* "them" being very loosely defined and including a whole bunch of innocent people)

More like, regressive policies mean a quick death, centrist policies mean a quick death, reforms like Biden’s mean a slightly slower death but still swift and certain, radical policies according to the most extreme of the “extreme” end of the spectrum mean quite a lot of suffering but maybe some survivability.

Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself.

Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?

Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?

Who the fuck knows

(Not me 😕)

"Slow Music" by James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon is another very very good story that's exactly like that. Very liminal you could say; lots of going around alone in a world that's all empty but still all well maintained and functional.

700 million dogs x 17 kg per dog = 12 Mt of dog

59 million horses x 700 kg per horse = 41 Mt of horse

If horses are 2%, then dogs are 0.5%, less than 1% just like they said

35 million camels x 500 kg per camel = 17 Mt of camel, a little less than 1%

I think the key thing is they're measuring biomass, not just the number of animals, otherwise it would all be stuff like mice and rats (not to say that wouldn't be a valid thing to look at also)