I wonder why this isn't being covered in western news outlets. Every politician who is in AIPAC's pocket needs to be shown these headlines and be held accountable.
Israel won't get sainthood anytime soon, but Hezbollah is Iran-backed, based in Lebanon, and breaking ceasefires with Israel without direct provocation. Israel has killed over a thousand Hezbollah militants since March 2.
What would you do if you were Israel?
FTA:
> Over 1,500 people have been killed in Lebanon and about a million displaced since March 2, according to Lebanese authorities. The IDF says it has killed some 1,100 Hezbollah operatives, including hundreds of members of the terror group’s elite Radwan Force, in that period.
I get your point. I don't think it's effective here.
What do you have to say to Hezbollah confirming 400 combatant losses? The Lebanese health ministry also confirmed 1500, of which only 300 were women, children, and health workers.
Stop pretending like collective punishment produces results? It obviously doesn't, Israel's strikes on Lebanon have gotten to the point that it feels like another illegal expansion project.
You're right, they should just let indiscriminate rockets hit their civilians.
If it was not for the iron some, there would be 100k dead Israelis.
It's disgusting how westerners think their high and mighty approach works in the middle east.
Blowback. Israel is responsible for being an impossible neighbor.
A better question to ask: what do you do when an ethnosupremacist state sets up shop near you and immediately begins territory expansion and meddling in your local politics while funding militant groups to destabilize your government? That's the question all of Israel's neighbors have had to answer for the last 60 years.
The entire neighborhood was already there, and then Israel showed up as a settler-colonialist state.
I don't really sympathize with any State's desire for self preservation (especially since, like Israel, most states will happily sacrifice their citizenry to do so).
The radicalization necessary to feed recruitment to Hamas and Hezbollah is only possible because of the incredible violence Israel subjects the region to. Without Israel, Hamas would almost certainly not even exist, or at least would be some minor radical group with no political power.
Your argument isn't principled because starting in the 20th century is arbitrary. Why not go back in time to the 15-1600s when the Ottoman Empire went "colonial" on Jews?
We don't have a time machine.
In the present, Israel could go full pacifist, and Hezbollah doesn't go away.
> Your argument isn't principled because starting in the 20th century is arbitrary.
No it isn't, we were alive in the 20th century, it's recent and we are fully capable of, and responsible for, handling fallout from decisions made during it. Your argument justifies any imperialism. "Last year Israel occupied more Palestinian territory - it's the same as ancient history, demanding they give it back is like demanding Greece re-establishes the sovereignty of Athens."
> In the present, Israel could go full pacifist, and Hezbollah doesn't go away.
Pretty speculative. An Israel that gives back sovereignty and autonomy as well as stolen land back to Palestine (and now Lebanon), releases prisoners, and regime changes out the ethnosupremacist government takes basically all the wind out of the sails of groups resisting it as the evil it currently is.
Actually negotiating and following through is something current Israel can't swallow because it's deeply racist against the people with whom it's meant to be negotiating.
"we"? Your point's either literal (false) or figurative (arbitrary).
Why would you say something so misleading? You'd be 100 years old for the pre-Israel British-colonial period or almost 80 for the instantiation of Israel. It seems you're unclear when Israel showed up as colonialists.
> Your argument justifies any imperialism.
Fallacy: Israel's actions and Hezbollah's actions can both be bad.
> Pretty speculative.
No, you made my point! LOL!
Now, observe your list of conditions needed (return land, release prisoners, regime change). Isn't it ironic that you laid out a bunch of actions that are far more aggressive than what I proposed? You're basically saying that a more extreme compromise is needed than what I proposed!
> it's deeply racist against the people with whom it's meant to be negotiating.
Let's accept this is true (which is terrible). The flaw is that you're blindly dismissing Hezbollah/Hamas as moderates and their stated goals to eradicate Israelis. You can't leave them out of the picture and to do so is arbitrary.
Is your proposal to "just stop doing war?" There's a reason it's happening - Israel has engaged in imperialism and genocide, and there are people alive today from whom Israel and its settlers have taken land. There's still a lot of Palestinians who can't return to their homes. Of the three entities, Israel is the one with the most (literal) ground it needs to give back to "even the scales."
Undoubtedly Hezbollah and Hamas have antisemitic members that are very interested in killing Jewish people, just as there's clear evidence for the same in the IDF, however of the two, only one has engaged in actualized genocide (the IDF), so the dissolution of the State that promoted this is a moral good. It doesn't require "the eradication of Israelis" as you say, and again, Hamas only exists because of Israel, whereas the elimination of Hamas obviously is doing nothing to stop Israel's genocide against the Palestinians (and it's clear interest in expanding this genocide and imperialism against anyone it can describe as "Arab").
You seem to be accusing me of being arbitrary because you're claiming Hezbollah/Hamas is equal to Israel in terms of evil behavior, when that isn't true: Israel is the far more evil entity, and the goal of Hezbollah and Hamas to resist and dissolve the Israeli state - there's a reason Hamas revised their charter to remove all the obviously anti-semitic stuff and focus instead on resistance ethno-supremacy movement that underlies every aspect of Israel's existence as a State.
Why not simply make all of Israel ruled by the PA? Can you make an argument against that that isn't Islamophobic? Because the reality is that Hamas and Hezbollah are moderates when compared to the actions of Israel over the past few decades, and in any case the PA was absolutely moderate and liberal compared to Israel.
> I encourage you to put this in an LLM and ask if you're being fair.
Or, I could engage in a conversation with a human, like you. LLMs only tell you what you want to hear. This is disappointing that you suggested this to me, it leads me to believe you're doing this, which means your beliefs aren't backed by evidence, they're just things you thought of and then had an LLM validate.
> Don't believe me?
Nope. I am correct, objective, and historically accurate, and you're failing to demonstrate otherwise.
> E.g., calling an Iran backed Shia militant group "moderate" compared to Israel is hyperbolical.
You're just throwing around scare terms now. Nothing about "Iran" or "Shia" makes me think they're inherently more evil than "Israel." It smells like Islamophobia to me to suggest otherwise.
Israel is continually committing war crimes, every day, including today. Every Israeli strike against Iran civilians constitutes an war of aggression and violates the UN charter and is a war crime. It has engaged in collective punishment of Palestinians, blockade, denial of water and destruction of wells, forced relocation, has admitted to using white phosphorous (including in residential areas and against Unifil peacekeepers), attacked schools, refugee camps, churches, mosques, and civilians seeking food, and has shot and killed children.
Now convince me that the IDF as a radical ethno-supremacist militant group led by a terrorist country is less evil than "an Iran backed Shia militant group."
I challenge you to find a third party, credible news source that calls Hezbollah "moderate" as you framed them.
Until then, you really can't defend your fundamental claims. I suspect you're intentionally avoiding uncomfortable truths about your core beliefs.
>is less evil than "an Iran backed Shia militant group.
See. Examples like this demonstrate you can't keep your thoughts consistent. Is it a scare term or as you just acknowledged, a proxy terrorist group funded by a foreign entity?
I was a skeptic after all the hype around Blockchain, Virtual Reality, and other technologies over the last few years. However, I have to say I find AI impressive. Compared to the other things I mentioned, I see cool new products and solutions popping up every week that add real value to my personal and professional life. ChatGPT alone saves me at least 10 hours of work every week, with more savings all the time.
I think this is true, but the real question is where to position yourself on emphasizing the true current value and future potential of AI, vs. tamping down on excess hype. My peer group tends to poo poo AI (I think they email me every single Ed Zitron post), so I end up aggressively pro-AI in most social interactions despite having no specific expectations around AGI or even continued near linear improvement. Even if we are six months from hitting the asymptote on LLMs, they will be powering incredible innovation and value for the next decade.
In reality they aren't KKK members though. Instead they are disproportionately black and other minorities.
Regardless of whether or not you think incarceration of minorities is systemized disenfranchisement, I think any loophole that hypothetically allows the system to chose who may vote is a bigger threat to democracy than an incentive to appeal to criminals.
Totally agree with your point that incentivizing "pandering to criminals" can be a bad thing though, just the lesser of the two imo.
> Instead they are disproportionately black and other minorities.
Disproportionate to what? Their share of the population, or their share of homicides committed? (Using homicide because, unlike other crimes, it's hard to bias the numbers by over-policing. You'll catch more jay-walkers if you assign more police to an area, but you'll get roughly the same number of dead bodies.)
> Totally agree with your point that incentivizing "pandering to criminals" can be a bad thing though
If so many people are considered criminals that pandering to them is required to win elections, then perhaps it's the legal system that's in the wrong.
> In reality they aren't KKK members though. Instead they are disproportionately black and other minorities.
They are overwhelmingly felons. The disenfranchisement rate is highest among blacks at 7.8%, so 92.2% of blacks, so the overwhelming majority, is not affected by this at all. What makes you think the majority of blacks would welcome the enfranchisement of criminals that happen to share their skin color? After all, the victims of these criminals are overwhelmingly black themselves.
Also, black voter turnout has been consistently 5-10% lower than white voter turnout except for the election of Barack Obama, where it was the opposite. That means the impact of felony disenfranchisement at most is about as high as non-participation has been in the past.
> Regardless of whether or not you think incarceration of minorities is systemized disenfranchisement...
Indeed I don't think so.
>... I think any loophole that hypothetically allows the system to chose who may vote is a bigger threat to democracy than an incentive to appeal to criminals.
I don't consider it a loophole, becoming a felon is a fairly high bar to getting disenfranchised and the constitution sets some boundaries as to what can be considered a felony. If anything, I would argue that locking someone up for years for selling an ounce of weed is unconstitutional.
Given: 1) a system in which either party A or party B win by small margins, and 2) a group of people who votes overwhelmingly for party B.
Let's think of options to increase election win probabilities for party A.
One option: legislate laws and bring about a justice system in which that group of people are disproportionately imprisoned/fined/etc and made to lose voting rights.
Unsurprising result: party A has higher chance of winning elections.
Problem: current system incentivizes politicians in party A to enact this option.
How to stop this option: give voting rights to everyone including felons.
What's systematic in the justice system that disproportionately imprison a specific group of people?
As a black person who has been stopped more often than my white peers because I look like an immigrant (in Europe though), systemic racism is just marketing, there's no systemic racism enshrined in law in any Western society.
Sure, some individual may be racist, even if it's hard to say whether someone is racist or he's just afraid of the statistics, which prove some groups indeed harm police officers and other citizens in disproportionately high numbers.
Things would be definitely better for everyone (minus the cartels, I guess) if it wasn't for the war on drugs, which makes poor people into criminals.
And things would be much better if some groups weren't specifically targeted in the 60s and given benefits that incentivised fatherlessness and broke the family structure.
It's a huge topic, so you can look up Thomas Sowell on this.
