As the resident rosy-eyed optimist, I confidently predict that Agranat 2.0 will bury Bibi.
I am not enjoying the refreshing of everybody's longtime diagnoses, prognostications and La Pasionaria improv about Israel.
Love that our leadership is supporting the new Generalplan Süd.
The whole thing is so sad and such a mess.
Despite all the noise and wacky opinions, Israel/Palestine is something where learning new things changed my views in substantial ways not once but twice. One is learning that most Israeli Jews are from the Middle East and not Europe. The other is reading about the history of Hebron (the largest city in the West Bank) and the settlers there (seriously evil people).
One is learning that most Israeli Jews are from the Middle East and not Europe.
I had no idea. You mean they come from families that, pre-WWII, were in the middle east? Which countries, mostly?
Now that I pause and think about it, it makes sense, but I hadn't paused before.
There used to be huge Jewish communities in most major Middle Eastern cities. All of them are now gone. The resulting refugees went to Israel. So that's Alexandria, Beirut, Baghdad, etc.
changed my views in substantial ways not once but twice. One is learning that most Israeli Jews are from the Middle East
I would appreciate elaboration on the change part.
Lolling still among the roses, I think the coming bloodbath in Gaza makes it distinctly less likely that Biden will give MBS nukes while fumbling for a Nobel.
The following is recent migration rather than overall ancestry, but of those born abroad (26% of the 2008 census population), country (group) of birth:
* Europe unspecified: 29%
* Morocco: 8%
* Ukraine: 7%
* Russian Federation: 6%
* Romania: 5%
* Ethiopia: 4%
* USA: 4%
* Iraq: 3.4%
* Poland: 3.0%
* Algeria and Tunisia: 2.3%
* France: 2.1%
I wonder if they coded "Soviet Union" or the SSRs to "Europe unspecified" or something. That's a big lacuna.
By continent - Europe 60%, Africa 17%, Asia 15%, Americas 8%.
(Not meant as counterpoint. I can certainly believe ancestry before 1990 was more from the Middle East; we know Russia and Eastern Europe became the big source more recently.)
Assorted:
1. It's interesting Hamas (and Hezbollah) display a degree of cohesion, discipline, tenacity, institutional learning, so signalling lacking in the Arab states (and PLO). A peculiar statebuilding.
2. Unlike Sadat in 1973, Hamas doesn't AFAIK have limited objectives potentially achievable by negotiation.
I was going to propose a big "where does everyone get their news?" thread, and that could still happen, but I'm curious where you've all been doomscrolling this weekend. I have no remaining useful social media accounts (by design) and haven't gone on a newsletter subscription binge (yet?). It feels weird and silent.
Also interesting the Lions' Den chose the M4 for its logo.
15: I still use nitter* to view specific accounts every now and then. Except for journalists and academics, lots of people have stopped posting though, or taken accounts private.
*I don't understand how they've kept nitter working but it now provides a much better interface than twitter itself for people who are not logged in.
Right, other than Morocco where there was substantially less persecution of Jews than elsewhere, more recent immigration is Ashkenazim because all the Mizrahim already moved to Israel or were killed.
(Side note, despite a Mizrahi majority there's never been even one Mizrahi PM.)
For example in 1951-1952 120k+ Jews were airlifted out of Iraq, and between 1949-1950 50k Jews were airlifted out of Yemen. In the latter case, 10% of Yemenite Jews had already emigrated to mandatory Palestine before 1920.
Delurking to share a list of sources curated by Josh Marshall on Xitter: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1174056726187958272
14.1 Maybe it's the religious conviction?
14.2 I know less than nothing, and am not even doom-scrolling, but my first guess on the questions 'why this, why now' is Hamas is trying to provoke a genocide that could derail the momentum towards normalization. That's a very cynical play.
Josh Marshall has also had some good, thoughtful coverage at TPM. Here's one example.
19 As I mentioned here at the time, when I was in Yemen, men selling silver jewelry in old Sana'a's main souk stressed that their goods had been made by Jews.
It's interesting Hamas (and Hezbollah) display a degree of cohesion, discipline, tenacity, institutional learning, so signalling lacking in the Arab states (and PLO). A peculiar statebuilding.
This has been a longstanding pattern/contrast, and is one of the reasons Hamas is more popular than Fatah and won the election that resulted in the current political arrangement.
Side note, despite a Mizrahi majority there's never been even one Mizrahi PM.
Yes, the complexity of the relationship between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim/Sephardim within Israeli society can get obscured from the outside by the overwhelming Ashkenazi dominance of the political (and economic, cultural, etc.) elite.
It's really striking how useless Twitter is now for getting quick, accurate information on an unfolding crisis. Lists like the one in 20 are still helpful but without that kind of curation it's just a mess.
Whoa, here's a surprising thing I just learned. The guy who was Hamas's PM has sisters who are Israeli citizens and has nephews who served in IDF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh
27: There's been an increasing trend of Palestinians marrying Bedouins, with complicated results for both communities (which have traditionally been very distinct).
They probably don't give the nephew of the Hamas guy a very high security clearance.
Though maybe it's time to update my priors on the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence services.
The Egyptians allegedly tried to warn Netanyahu and he blew them off. So, yeah, maybe not as well-oiled a machine as previously thought.
We're going to learn something interesting about Israeli politics. It's my best guess that Netanyahu pays no political price no matter how badly he is shown to have fucked this up. But is this just my America-centric view of politics? Will Netanyahu follow the GWB model? JMM seems to disagree with me, and I certainly take his view on this more seriously than my own.
I think Netanyahu has been a ruthless, canny geopolitical player. People long ago stopped saying, "Netanyahu's suppression of Palestinian rights is going to backfire when Israel becomes an international pariah." Netanyahu has long played into the hands of Hamas, because he has known that Hamas was always going to return the favor. Even now, it seems to me that an international consensus is building in favor of looking the other way as Netanyahu does whatever he wants in Gaza -- though one imponderable variable here is the question of how this plays on the Arab Street.
The link in 20 seems to be trying and failing to send me to a login page. Looks like it's in some reload loop.
But I can view the list with this link.
32 is very close to my own views, including the uncertainty. Mossy, if you're serving the optimism, do Iran!
Netanyahu has long played into the hands of Hamas, because he has known that Hamas was always going to return the favor.
Goes back further than Netanyahu.
The JMM stuff is worth reading. I agree with his framing that this is basically a suicide attack by the entire military/political leadership of Hamas.
8 is something that I also only just learned amidst all this. It really does undermine some of the more simplistic rhetoric.
Anyway, it's all awful, there will be no good outcomes. Even if Netanyahu fails, the Israeli electorate is so dominated by hateful people that I don't think it will substantially matter.
But is this just my America-centric view of politics?
No, Erdogan should have been toast after the earthquake and the scandal of endemic corruption undermining earthquake resistant building codes. It's a consequence of the hollowing out and corruption of democracy and it's a world-wide phenomenon, America is just a part.
36 if that's JMM's read I think that's way off base.
I'm with 9: I'm not sure what beliefs and opinions people had that were undermined by learning more about Mizrahi history. You may need to spell it out, sorry.
56: that isn't quite what he said. He said "It's difficult to see how the Hamas military apparatus, as currently constituted, survives the retaliation for these attacks".
The political leadership isn't even in Gaza. They're safe elsewhere.
The relevant JMM quote:
A friend rightly described this as an organization-scale suicide operation.
Before learning more about Mizrahim, I was more open to the idea that Israel's existence was a mistake and a bad colonialist endeavor, this made me realize it was much more complicated.
Conversely, before reading about Hebron, I thought that Barak has made a serious peace proposal that Arafat obviously should have taken. Now I think it's more complicated.
And Marshall himself says he's baffled by this:
The Hamas decision makers who planned this operation had to know all of this. So they mounted this operation knowing this was where it would lead. Individual self-sacrifice is intrinsic to the culture of these organizations. Organization self-destruction is not. And yet here we are. Again, that's a pretty big mystery and I haven't seen any clear answer to it.
Before learning more about Mizrahim, I was more open to the idea that Israel's existence was a mistake and a bad colonialist endeavor, this made me realize it was much more complicated.
It is more complicated than it's often made out to be, but note that most of the Mizrahim came after the creation of the state in response to oppression in their home countries that was itself a reaction to the creation of Israel. The original Zionist project was very much an Ashkenazi-oriented movement inspired by other European nationalist movements, and the pre-independence yishuv was primarily Ashkenazi in background.
Nobody puts Ashkenazi in the background.
And there are a lot of Israelis (or were at one point) who wanted right to return to their previous countries, which was one of the bargaining issues back when they bargained, no?
Hm, I don't actually know. It's hard to imagine many Israelis would want to go back to other Middle Eastern countries today but that could well have been the case earlier.
Anyway, I guess my point is that the Mizrahi population complicates the picture of Israel as a settler colonial outpost today, but it doesn't necessarily challenge that characterization of its origins.
Right, agree with both 47 and 48. It didn't totally change my viewpoints, but it made me realizing I was missing some very important parts of the issue.
I would add to 48, that the last century of history is not very kind to the idea that Jews would have just carried on peacefully as minorities in cities in the Middle East were it not for tensions around Israel. Probably at some point things would have gotten bad regardless. The disintegration of the big multi-ethnic empires has been pretty awful for minorities everywhere, especially minority religions.
When I lived in Morocco I knew a grad student in anthropology doing his field work among the remaining Jewish population in Morocco and Moroccan Jews in Israel. He said the wish to return to Morocco was a very common sentiment he heard from the ones in Israel.
I would add to 48, that the last century of history is not very kind to the idea that Jews would have just carried on peacefully as minorities in cities in the Middle East were it not for tensions around Israel. Probably at some point things would have gotten bad regardless. The disintegration of the big multi-ethnic empires has been pretty awful for minorities everywhere, especially minority religions.
Yeah, agreed. It's quite possible that rising nationalism in a post-colonial Middle East would have led to oppression of Jews anyway (cf. the Kurds).
But I would have to assume that most of the key people in Hamas's military chain of command will be dead in the next few weeks. The same likely applies to much of its political leadership and not just in Gaza.
JMM
Ajay, what do you think: why this, why now?
I'd be interested to hear Barry's take as well.
The only thing I can come up with that sorta makes sense is just accelerationism. Go for maximum shock value to trigger a maximalist response that would obviously be an absolute bloodbath to set off the big final conflict.
That's supposed to start on "the plain of Megiddo", which is well North of Gaza.
I don't think anyone in Hamas could qualify as the Anti-Christ, but there's always a chance Trump is.
36 et seq: I don't think it is suicidal. As pointed out, there's the exile leadership, which might retain relevance for decades (see the PLO, among many others).
Hamas in Gaza itself is dug in one of the densest urban environments in the world, which they have ample experience defending. That doesn't mean the Israelis can't dig them out, but doing so could take months, certainly with massive collateral damage and attendant reverasal of international support.
And all this without even considering the ~100 hostages, presumably concealed in as many ~100 locations, maybe a few even smuggled out of country, maybe a few of them foreign (likely western) citizens.
I think Israel (and Netyanhu himself even more so) is in a tarpit.
i'm confused by this:
"the Mizrahi population complicates the picture of Israel as a settler colonial outpost today, but it doesn't necessarily challenge that characterization of its origins."
could you explain more???
I think Hamas could see that Palestinian concerns were losing relevance fast, as countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been lining up to make nice with Israel. There was some pretty horrible settler violence earlier this year that was basically shrugged off by everyone who should care. Given their deteriorating situation, I can see why they saw a need to shake up the chessboard.
Narrowly: now, because of the 50-year anniversary; this, to set off all the dynamics in 58.
Widely: now, to derail normalization; this, to retain and regain political relevance. They had their fiefdom, and they could extract their rents from the Israelis, and they could keep that racket going for a long time; but if that's all they did they would turn into the PLO, and that isn't what they want to be.
59: I'll try, but I'm not sure exactly what's confusing about it.
Basically, the original Zionist movement started by Herzl was explicitly modeled after European nationalist movements of the nineteenth century and its supporters were pretty much all Ashkenazim from Europe (and to a lesser extent North America). Their focus was on creating a territorial homeland for the Jews somewhere, not necessarily in Palestine, although that is where they ended up going. (At one point Britain offered them Uganda and they almost took it. That would have been weird!)
The initial Zionist settlement, the Yishuv, consisted primarily of these European Ashkenazim who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine and bought land from the locals. The eventual creation of the State of Israel descends from this movement and its leaders, and the elite of the independent state, have been drawn from this same Ashkenazi background. They became more "Middle-eastern" culturally over time, in part for ideological reasons (e.g. the use of Hebrew), in part just because that was their milieu. But they still retained their Ashkenazi identity and ties to Europe and the US. This community is plausibly, though not indisputably or uncontroversially, described as a settler colonial society comparable to those in the Americas and Africa, with all the baggage that entails.
After independence, with the influx of Mizrahi Jews, it becomes a bit more arguable. The Ashkenazim are still the elite and still retain their "settler" characteristics (and indeed look at how the term "settlement" is still used), but now there's a large primarily working-class segment of the population with more direct ties to the surrounding region and without necessarily having a close connection to the ideological basis of Zionism. Most of the Mizrahim were effectively "pushed" out of their home countries rather than "pulled" into Israel, as it were. And now they and their descendants are the majority of the population!
So it becomes a little trickier to decide how to interpret this society now, and the "settler colonialism" frame doesn't fit as well (which is not to say it doesn't fit at all). But its origins and the ideological basis of the state are still the same, and fit that frame to the same extent they ever did.
Should have taken the Uganda option.
thanks - i better understand the argument. to the extent it rests on distinguishing between jews from poland vs jews from morocco/egypt/iraq/iran displacing palestinians, not sure it is particularly compelling, at the very least from the perspective of the palestinians. & re the pull vs push element, the last couple of days have made excruciatingly heartbreakingly clear, being oppressed doesn't grant can't-be-an-oppressor status.
Yeah, I don't actually buy the argument myself, and it sounds like UPETGI doesn't either. It complicates some overly-glib talking points about Zionism but it doesn't really change the underlying picture.
Yes to 61.1 but the other "why now?" is to take advantage of serious political chaos in Israel that I suspect did actually spill over into military preparedness. And whatever happens to Bibi, I hope his scum of the earth coalition partners pay some political price for that. No idea of the odds.
66: Comity. Chaos which has been building for years.
fumbling for a Nobel
Is that what's going on? I was assuming Jarad had given them enough leverage over the US that they could demand it or enough information that they basically already have it.
The idea that a Jew from Morocco, two thousand miles away, has "ties to the region" of Palestine that a Jew from Hungary, one thousand miles away, doesn't is extremely dubious and based on some fairly unsavoury assumptions. Nor should your judgement of a settler colony's merits be linked to the cultural closeness of the settlers to the locals. It would not be OK to expel beer drinking, dumpling eating, Christian Poles so that their land could be taken by beer drinking, dumpling eating, Christian Germans.
(Also, of course, Israel probably would have been majority Ashkenazim, but then half of them got murdered.)
||
In the wider tarpit:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/03/france-agrees-to-deliver-military-equipment-to-armenia_6145986_4.html
Which, of a piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Greek_defence_agreement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EastMed_pipeline#Route
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/exclusive-looped-line-by-line-hezbollah-shows-pragmatic-side-lebanon-israel-deal-2022-10-18/
OP presumably can only further sour Turkey's relations with the west.
|>
I agree with 58 and I think the quote in 52 is just wrong. Organisations don't commit suicide. It's possible that 52 happens but that will be because Hamas leadership has made, in traditional Arab style, a colossal strategic miscalculation that will lead to a disastrous defeat. It won't happen because Hamas leadership actually wants to die. If they wanted to die, their organisation is set up to oblige people who want to die, and they would simply take that opportunity. (I remember making the same point regarding Ahmedinejad. No, he doesn't want to commit suicide. He was a student in Iran when students in Iran were volunteering for martyrdom by charging across minefields. He didn't volunteer then, so he won't now.)
69.1 is bullshit. Mizrahim come Arabic-speaking formerly-Ottoman countries. Of course they have closer relationships to the region.
Nor should your judgement of a settler colony's merits be linked to the cultural closeness of the settlers to the locals.
Is correct, but I don't think anyone upthread said otherwise.
I wouldn't be criticising anyone else's regional knowledge if I was dumb enough to think Morocco used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, mc.
(Meanwhile Hungary, of course, *was* part of the Ottoman Empire!)
Classy, Ajay. We'll make a Tory of you yet.
It was you, not I, who conflated Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in general (the topic of a productive and civil subthread) with, in particular, Jews from Hungary and Morocco (who, you'll note, I took care not to mention in 72).
Inasmuch as you actually have a point: I am well aware that Morocco was only ever nominally Ottoman. I am also well aware (as are you) that Hungary ceased to be Ottoman (more accurately, a continually contested Ottoman frontier) over 300 years ago, whereas many, if not most, Mizrahim Israelis come from countries which not only were core Ottoman provinces but which ceased (like Palestine) to be Ottoman only 100 years ago.
31 (belatedly) and 66: That common mode of intelligence failures -- leadership doesn't want to hear it.
No one here is claiming that cultural proximity justifies settler colonialism. That said, geographical proximity isn't very useful as an index of cultural proximity and Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jews are obviously closer culturally to Arabic-speaking residents of Palestine of any religion than are Yiddish-speaking Hungarian Jews, even if they decide to speak Hebrew instead.
This would be easier if we stick to the standard taxonomy where they are all just Mexican.
71: I think that's an excessively literal reading of JMM. How about this instead: There's an old business cliche: "Don't bet the company." That's what Hamas is doing here, and it looks like an exceedingly bad bet. And I think Hamas entered into that gamble understanding the odds and acting with informed intention.
I agree with (my reading of) Marshall, but even as I've described it here, I think we still disagree. You think of the Hamas leadership as strategic idiots, and you think its leaders lack physical courage. I think the leadership of Hamas correctly sees itself as having its back against a wall. Hamas made a rational, desperate decision knowing that it would probably end badly for them -- as individuals and as an organization. But (from the Hamas point of view) what choice did they have?
That isn't to say that I share the Hamas point of view, but I think I understand where they're coming from.
We'll see. Maybe Hamas has misjudged how deep an IDF quagmire either internal Israeli politics or the opinion of Israel's supporters can tolerate.
Yeah, I maybe overstated how much this changed my mind. I try not to actually have any strong opinions about Israel in the first place (as a wise person once told me "never talk to mathematicians about Israel"), so didn't have a strong opinion on this point either before or after learning this fact. Still I thought it was interesting, because it's weirdly not so common for learning things to shift ones viewpoint.
Roughly what I mean is that a lot of discussion of Israel is working off a model that's roughly "Israel is like the early United States, a bunch of Europeans showed up, took the land from the native people and are in the process of genociding everyone who lives there." (I know this is an analogy, I'm not making it as an argument, I'm saying that a lot of discussion pre-supposes this analogy.) And I do think it's important to this argument that we're specifically talking about Europeans, who did this to a lot of the world. But there's other models for example, "Israel is like Yugoslavia, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed eventually a lot of bad shit went down as people rearranged along national and religious lines, and a lot of local genocides happened as that sorting happens." As always all analogies are bad and wrong, so I'm not saying the latter model is good or better, just that it made me question some of the more simplistic rhetoric along the former lines.
At any rate, sure comparing Ottoman and non-Ottoman might in some ways make more sense than "European," but since those aren't really the categories used by people to describe themselves it's also a little weird to use those categories.
"Classy, Ajay. We'll make a Tory of you yet."
If you go around using insults like "bullshit" to people, they'll tend to respond in kind. Chat shit, get hit.
"You think of the Hamas leadership as strategic idiots, and you think its leaders lack physical courage."
Well, not quite. I think they're either strategic idiots, or they are following a strategy that won't involve Hamas being destroyed. I certainly don't think they intend to destroy it.
I don't actually think this business will lead to Hamas being destroyed, though it might do.
Nor do I think its leaders lack physical courage. I don't think they're willing to kill themselves for their cause, but that's different.
82 IMO, that depends in substantial part on what 'destroyed' means. I don't think the IDF will succeed in obliterating the idea of Hamas. I do think there's a high likelihood that the capability of executing large scale attacks can and probably will be destroyed. And a substantial likelihood that Hamas as an organization that can win elections and govern territory can be destroyed.
Who is going to govern Gaza after this? What's the alternative?
The only ones I've heard proposed are ethnic cleansing and genocide.
As an American small-d democrat, I think a lot about failure and defeat. I'm unclear on the best strategy to avoid bad outcomes, but I am clear on how I want to lose: I want to lose after bringing Trump to court for his crimes, and I want to lose with the Democrats making a direct pro-democracy case to the electorate. I want our people to go down fighting, and I'm pretty satisfied with how that's going -- despite the legitimate arguments that there are better tactical choices.
And I tend to apply that sort of thinking to Hamas. If they are going to be crushed, they want to make a mark; to take a lot of Israelis with them. Netanyahu gets this. Both sides are thinking about history and posterity. Says Netanyahu: "What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations."
I have no idea what Hamas leaders are thinking. But they have to get a bunch of guys on the ground to fight with those odds and to do so standing next to their families. My guess at the thinking is "We can't win but we can't live, so the best we can do is force Israel to kill us openly so the world sees it."
They wanted to change the entire calculus of the situation and that they have done. I do think enough elements will survive the current Israeli assault that they will continue in some form or another. This was a meticulously planned operation, they absolutely must have prepared many bunkers, tunnels, communication lines, emplacements, all over Gaza (a la Hezbollah in 2006); they're not hanging out in those apartment buildings currently being struck.
88.1 a lot like 9/11 in that respect
Whatever else happens, I think the options of most Arab governments are going to be more constrained than before.
Yeah, the primary audience for this is obviously Israel itself but a secondary one is the Arab states that have been cozying up to Israel lately and it makes it much harder for them to keep doing that. It's not clear whether and to what extent Iran was involved in planning the operation, but the recent talks on Saudi-Israeli normalization are clearly threatening to Iranian interests and as an Iranian client Hamas would presumably feel threatened as well.
88 How relevant today is what is (or was) called the Arab Street?
92: IDK, but but calorie inflation implies it's more relevant than it was three years ago. And it was pretty relevant three years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Egyptian_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_October_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932021_Iraqi_protests
I should rephrase my question. The optics for that big 3 way Isr/US/SA deal might be bad for a bit, but are the underlying fundamentals changed?
Are protests in failed/failing states really relevant to the calculus in SA?
92 my impression on the ground here is not very much but it may take awhile to have any important effect. Of course as civilian casualties mount in Gaza that may change. We'll see.
It was you, not I, who conflated Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in general (the topic of a productive and civil subthread) with, in particular, Jews from Hungary and Morocco (who, you'll note, I took care not to mention in 72).
Inasmuch as you actually have a point: I am well aware that Morocco was only ever nominally Ottoman. I am also well aware (as are you) that Hungary ceased to be Ottoman (more accurately, a continually contested Ottoman frontier) over 300 years ago, whereas many, if not most, Mizrahim Israelis come from countries which not only were core Ottoman provinces but which ceased (like Palestine) to be Ottoman only 100 years ago.
Alex, I'll take "Arguments which I will never ever ever wade into" for $100.
95.1 I can't see it happening in the near term but anything can happen now.
$90 and that's my final offer.
Perhaps more relevant than Hungary or Morocco is that there was a large Ottoman Jewish population in Greece, which is "Europe" but also much more a core part of the Ottoman Empire than Hungary ever was. Thessaloniki in particular was majority or plurality Jewish for a long time, and there was a somewhat serious proposal in 1912 for it to be an independent Jewish city (and hence neither Greek nor Turkish). Not many Greek Jews survived the holocaust, but the ones who did mostly moved to Israel.
83: I think we agree on what "destroyed" means but disagree slightly on how likely it is to happen. Fair enough. But are you suggesting that being destroyed, in that sense, is what Hamas *means* to happen? I honestly think that's unlikely to be the case. They'd be sacrificing their power base, their recruiting pool and their leaders' income stream, and for what? A few dead children and a vague hope of changing Arab politics. I don't see that reasoning making sense to Hamas leadership.
a lot of discussion of Israel is working off a model that's roughly "Israel is like the early United States, a bunch of Europeans showed up, took the land from the native people and are in the process of genociding everyone who lives there." (I know this is an analogy, I'm not making it as an argument, I'm saying that a lot of discussion pre-supposes this analogy.) And I do think it's important to this argument that we're specifically talking about Europeans, who did this to a lot of the world.
I just want to reiterate that this is 100% the more or less explicit basis of a lot of USian lefty discussion of the matter. Not the sole basis, and while of course lots of people have more sophisticated thoughts about it, lots of people also find it a useful fig leaf for much more insidious thoughts about it. But it's a framework that enables dozens of DSA groups nationwide to hold rallies and issue statements that amounted to "they had it coming".
And yes, the Mizrahim do meaningfully complicate it, partly because vulgar anti-colonialist discourse relies heavily on white Europeans vs. everyone else (which is why it mostly can't handle RUS/UKR). "Settler-colonialism" is a framework that drains any possible nuance from discussion, and one of the ways it does that is by pretending that it's something only white Europeans have ever been guilty of (again, vulgar anti-colonialists also have zero useful thoughts on Japanese imperialism). It's not that the Mizrahim are a get-out-of-colonialism card for Zionists, it's that their story significantly complicates a simplistic just-so story that justifies murdering 1000 civilians.
I generally agree with that, but that approach isn't uniform on the left. Not that AOC is queen of the DSA, but she did come out with a statement disavowing the bigotry and antisemitism exhibited at this weekend's DSA rally: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4247787-ocasio-cortez-calls-out-bigotry-at-pro-palestine-rally-in-nyc/amp/
They're betting on their infrastructure safeguarding their capabilities long enough for Israel to lose interest in continuing the fight? That seems like a pretty long shot. This isn't like Hezbollah, with depth to move about in Lebanon, and proximity to allies in Syria and Iran. Gaza is a small area, subject to good blockade, no allies close by, and Israel has now learned just how dangerous for it even the status quo October 1, 2023 was. Tolerance for IDF casualties may well be higher than before. Because of US internal politics, the IDF can kill a whole lot of Palestinians without endangering US support.
We'll see.
106: Yes, what JRoth describes is very much A Thing on the left, but the higher-profile elected officials have generally been more nuanced and responsible.
Their recruiting base is going to grow exponentially after the Israeli response
109: their recruiting base is the military aged male population of Gaza. It's going to shrink, possibly substantially, though I grant that it'll perhaps be easier to recruit from the survivors.
Half the population of Gaza is under 18. Just give it 5 to 10 years.
111 Right, that's why imo the Israeli policy is bound to fail. In the long term.
Bibi is totally absent from the situation and it's enraging the Israeli public.
The Israeli media has been absolutely killing it lately and not just Haaretz.
The contrast between the Western response and the response within Israel is really striking.
I find the entire discourse around colonial settler origins, Ashkenazi or Mizrahim, completely unhelpful and unenlightening. Yes, it had traction 40 and plus years ago when Menachem Begin and his generation were Eastern European colonizers with no ties to the region beyond the Biblical but they're almost all dead now and entirely irrelevant to the current situation*. The vast majority of Israelis existing now were born and raised there as were their parents. They belong there too and those who support a just settlement of the Palestinian issue need to come to terms with that. But unfortunately there are fantasists on all sides of this issue.
*Though it is worth noting that the atrocities that Hamas committed last Saturday in Israel are very similar to those committed by Begin and his cohort at Israel's foundation. Of course this does not excuse, justify, or absolve Hamas. It should be possible to condemn such atrocities against civilians no matter who the culprit or what the hell are we doing here anyway.
115 They are placing the blame squarely on Netanyahu's and to a slightly lesser extent Likud's, shoulders (where IMHO it belongs).
If we were morally bound to abandon the Philippines, we were also morally bound to abandon Arizona to the Apaches.
113: this is dead right. Ha'aretz, Times of Israel, even the J-Post (which was an appalling grunting nationalist hatesheet in 2002) have had excellent coverage and have shown a truly impressive determination to crown Bibi with the whole bucket of shit.
118: After we've made it too hot to be liveable.
Moroccan monarchy has made a concerted effort to conflate the conflict between Israel, Iran, and Hamas with its conflict in Western Sahara. "There is this idea that the Moroccans have been promoting that the Polisario Front has ties with Iran. That Algeria has ties with Iran and therefore Morocco's fight in Western Sahara is akin or similar to Israel's fight against Iran, and this is obviously completely imaginary," he told Foreign Policy. [...] The linkage between normalization and Western Sahara has made it difficult for many Moroccans to openly oppose Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. "There are still these voices which are dissenting, but it's becoming increasingly hard for them to express themselves ... the public spaces have really shrunk," Fabiani said. In turn, Morocco's stance has served to further solidify Algeria's support for the Palestinian cause.
Are protests in failed/failing states really relevant to the calculus in SA?
I think so. They sink a lot of money into propping up their favorites, especially Egypt.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/get-out-of-there-now
"They reject the amnesiac narrative that their grievances began in 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their homeland rather than its entirety"
Ah, right.
"One journalist I work with in Gaza, minutes after submitting an article, texted to say he had to rush his family out of the house because the Israeli army had warned they were about to start firing on the neighbourhood."
No Israeli civilian will ever know what this feels like.
"They are tired of apologising for the use of violence, however ugly, as if violence were not an inherent part of all anti-colonial struggles"
Can't make an omelette without raping a few eggs!
"They reject the amnesiac narrative that their grievances began in 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their homeland rather than its entirety"
Ah, right.
"One journalist I work with in Gaza, minutes after submitting an article, texted to say he had to rush his family out of the house because the Israeli army had warned they were about to start firing on the neighbourhood."
No Israeli civilian will ever know what this feels like.
"They are tired of apologising for the use of violence, however ugly, as if violence were not an inherent part of all anti-colonial struggles"
Can't make an omelette without raping a few eggs!
Bernie's good https://x.com/sensanders/status/1712123827273019648?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Are there other situations where you have long-term occupations without annexation and granting citizenship? It's striking that Gaza has had this situation both with Israel and before that with Egypt. By contrast Israel annexed the land it conquered in 1948 and granted citizenship to the residents, and the same thing happened with Jordan and the West Bank after 1948, which seems like a more common situation.
I can't even imagine how this ever gets solved. Israeli friends, normally pretty lefty, are angered like I've never seen them. I have to imagine the median Israeli is not too concerned about proportionality after the terror. Their response will ensure his generation of Palestinian kids are going to be easy recruits in a decade.
The ghoulish takes I've seen on Twitter from all too many on the left has been distressing.
Ulrichsen is always worth reading, especially on Gulf matters https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/saudi-israeli-normalization-and-the-hamas-attack/
Maybe I have a goulish take, but I'm not going to get particularly upset about dead Israeli civilians after witnessing a steady clip of dead Palestinians for my entire lifetime. I feel like Israels representatives are demanding that we make a performance of feeling their pain, while refusing to acknowledge the vast ocean of pain that Israel itself has created.
I'm not here for it. Fuck Israel.
I guess I default to "war crimes are war crimes no matter who commits them" and general dismay at pretty much everything about the situation.
My sympathy and hostility vary from moment to moment. Sitting in the comfort of my own US home (or office), with no familial, genetic or political connection to either side, it's easy to find both sides despicable and both sides sympathetic.
Genocide is bad! On the other hand, extreme actions taken against a genocidal opponent are pretty understandable.
I guess I default to "war crimes are war crimes no matter who commits them" and general dismay at pretty much everything about the situation.
100% agree. I mean, this is just basic "I am a functioning human being with a consistent liberal moral belief system".
139 the realization that this is a minority view has been one of the most personally dismaying and disturbing things about all this.
I feel an urge to make a both-sides joke, but I can't put my finger on one worth making.
Am finding it to be a massive exercise in exploring the narcissism of small differences along with family and friend groups even among those who area basically subscribing to 135. Causing some stresses*
For instance differences in degree to which one has queried ones visceral reactions to the clear barbarism inherent in someone inflicting gruesome death and injury on civilians in person versus the more abstract barbarism in doing so via missiles, bombs, and drones.
*Basically my favorite quote from Adam Bede manifesting in relationships rather than people. (I find it to be quite apt when applied to either.)
"Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which sometimes make terribly evident some flaw in their construction that would never have been discoverable in smooth water; and many a "good fellow," through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal."
Let's all list our SAT scores and circumstances under which we feel conflicted about killing Jewish people.
"Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which sometimes make terribly evident some flaw in their construction that would never have been discoverable in smooth water; and many a "good fellow," through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal."
My mental version of this is A Little Princess reflecting that she only seems to be a good person because she's never had any trials. That has stuck with me since childhood. Yours is more poetic, though.
143: Probably too small a sample to get a reliable r^2. Everybody should also ask 5-10 of their coworkers.
I've been thinking a lot of one of John Brown's raids, where the freed slaves slaughtered a white family, left, realized they'd forgotten to kill a baby, and went back and did it. Are slave rebellions terrorism? I guess the slaveowners thought so.
Israel had slowly become one of the more evil regime's on the planet, but even so, there's fighting back, and there's the slaughter of civilians. Co-sign 135. Even so, I recoil at the fulsome condemnation of Hamas, because it feels like it's a little bit of morality, and the rest is lubricant for the bloody vengeance machine. It's an opportunity to raze Gaza once and for all, and I'm afraid no one is going to stop Israel from taking it.
Asking on Facebook is better for sample size.
140 -- Well, one can agree entirely with that view and also say that the path Israel has chosen for the past 20 years or so has been doomed to fail, for obvious reasons.
I'm unsure how I feel about Israel. It's been a tough few decades for Zionism, especially socialist/labor Zionism, because I've had to watch a utopian, pluralist dream crumble into a ethno-nationalist nightmare. I've wondered for the past few years if it was always going to turn out this way. Maybe. But I still remain committed to the idea that contingency is a powerful historical force--the Russian aliyah, which completely tipped the balance of power in Israeli politics, couldn't have been predicted--and so I resist thinking any one outcome is inevitable. Maybe there's still hope? It sure doesn't feel like it, but maybe?
Regardless, if anyone is "not going to get particularly upset about dead Israeli civilians" for whatever reason, including "witnessing a steady clip of dead Palestinians for [their] entire lifetime, I understand. But I also think such people have lost a piece of their humanity and their ability to reason. The death of Israeli civilians doesn't just leave Israeli families shattered: mothers weeping for lost children, children sobbing themselves to sleep because a parent will never return, spouses wondering how their future suddenly became shapeless, siblings and cousins and friends forever mourning lost parts of their identity, etc. It also seems always to mean more dead Palestinians: more weeping mothers, fathers, spouses, siblings, cousins, friends. Those left behind on both sides grope for a sense of purpose in a haze of sorrow and anger. It seems like they tend to become more militant and less likely to seek peace. And so the conflict continues, costing more lives. It's a terrible cycle, isn't it?
I don't know. Get upset. Don't get upset. That's your prerogative; it's something you have to work out for yourself. But maybe take a moment to ponder the horror of lost lives: civilian, military, Israeli, Palestinian, and, in this case, others as well. All of them were human beings. All of them are gone. They won't come back to the people who loved them. I can't imagine not finding that terribly sad.
The real war crime is forgetting a close quote.
145: One of the enduring benefits of retirement has been my ability to exercise my freedom of non-association with some of those rancid motherfuckers. It also limited my participation in any "retirement club" activities.
I retired in summer 2017* ("early" by a year and a half) and in addition to pretty good financial inducements** to do so that was an explicit factor in my decision to do so.
*Fuck; I'm fucking old.
**Stormcrow's dictum on making the Peter Principle work for you the twilight of your career: Endeavor to rise up the ladder until you reach the point where you are worth far more gone than present.
It's also vexing that on the one hand we have Ukraine, where the US is forthright about needing to ward off the humanitarian catastrophes, crimes against self-determination, and international destabilization that Russia would do, and on the other hand Israel, where we're cheering the same on. Fucking nation-states.
152: Yes, quite a bit (maybe I'm being Standpiped with this).
Older white upper middle class people of an active bent, what could possibly be problematic about their political beliefs.
Fortunately a much more limited encounter, although it can leak at times into actual engagement as human beings.
My other pursuits of hiking, birding, rowing, environmental education, voter registration and education have in fact yielded much more like-minded co-participants.
Birding is basically just voyeuristic beastiality and I refuse to support it.
Let's all disclose our support of voyeuristic beastiality.
I find it telling that Taylor Swift has yet to issue a statement on birdwatching.
155, 156: I was on a guided walk where the leader snapped a pic of Broad-winged Hawks having a go. Assume you can see it without an account but not sure.
149 I agree with as well.
I kind of don't think the current situation was inevitable, and have to think about my own country's complicity in that. Our diplomats may have spent the last 20 years saying, mostly behind closed doors, 'c'mon, man, this isn't going to work' but for our own reasons -- purely our own, imo -- we've not said 'look, we really can't walk this road with you, and when the shitstorm comes, you're going to have to find your own way out of it.' That need not have been a 100% commitment to have worked some change in how Israeli policy/politics worked itself out over the decades. At the margins, maybe.
Once the West Bank settlements started in earnest it's hard for me to see how things could have ended well. You're never going to have peace and Kiryat Arba, and no Israeli leader is going to do what it would take to remove large extremist settlements, and if they did they'd get assassinated anyway.
Gaza there's maybe never been a good outcome on the table, before it was occupied by Israel it was occupied by Egypt which was its own disaster.
158: yes, the steamy cloaca action is visible for us all, thanks.
I'm at work, so I didn't check yet.
161: Broad-winged calls are pretty weak sauce to begin with, and the male uttered a particularly wimpy one upon what I assume was completion.
157: she has a clear conflict of interest.
The central question about which I uneasily circle is: in the absence of justice, what actions by the victims of crimes against humanity are ethical?
Even setting aside the most lurid, as yet unsubstantiated claims of crimes against ostensible civilians by Hamas, the apparently indiscriminate slaughter at a music festival shocks the conscience, and seems disproportionate to the level of suffering of the Gazan civilian population, but then I read accounts of the aftermath of IDF bombings and sniper attacks, and I feel less certain. Is the pretense of an intended "valid" target a reasonable defense of the latter, or is it just that certain kinds of violence, by certain actors, coded as acceptable and valorous?
When the Haitian revolution kicked off, the enslaved population massacred some of their torturers and their families, including children. There seems a level at which this was disproportionate, but you read up on the brutal, depraved tortures inflicted on members of the enslaved population and it's hard for me to sit in moral judgment.
Even so, I recoil at the fulsome condemnation of Hamas, because it feels like it's a little bit of morality, and the rest is lubricant for the bloody vengeance machine.
That nails what I'm feeling.
Enslaved people killing all members of households that kept them in bondage might be viewed as proportionate in a sense, but when you run a government and an army there is a lot more expectation to act like it, and not to commit reprisals and collective punishment.
I mean, "no justice, no peace" leads in a pretty obvious direction once justice is foreclosed, and taking the time to articulate deep thoughts about that seems truly pointless. The pursuit of justice becomes an article of faith, like all the other articles of faith in this picture, and there you have your 75-year conflict with no end in sight. I appreciate both 149 and the second comment in this thread.
The argument in 165 not only justifies the Hiroshima bombing, but even justifies it if Truman had known it would have no effect on the war but just ordered it anyway for laughs. That should be a clue that it isn't a great argument ethically.
Actually von wafer, if you're still reading, can I drop you a personal note? I have a question, email address included here.
"Enslaved people killing all members of households that kept them in bondage might be viewed as proportionate in a sense"
That's not what "proportionate" means in this context though. It's not another way of saying "tit for tat".
what's the difference between proportionate and tit-for-tat, aside from a mathematical scaling factor?
A proportionate response is supposed to accomplish something besides revenge?
Depends on if the scaling factor is less than 1.
172 is right. It's not proportional to the provocation, it's proportional to the legitimate military objective.
Proportionality to the prior injury is hard not to think about, but it's not a concept in the law of war, as far as I know.
That's not what "proportionate" means in this context though. It's not another way of saying "tit for tat".
Yes, I explicitly meant it in a homegrown moral-ish sense, rather than the laws-of-war sense, since again these are not state combatants.
Non-state combatants are still subject to the laws of armed conflict! (This is a pretty fundamental point!)
168: I made no argument in 165, so that absurd straw construction is yours alone.
Further: I used disproportionate in the general sense. I don't find the "just war" analysis or definitions to be very useful to the question with which I'm wrestling. Indeed, there's a certain extent to which the "just war" theories can be seen as not much more than post hoc rationalizations for the actions of powerful actors who want to lay some claim to being the good guys.
Had Hamas showed restraint and unit discipline, and limited itself to attacking military units, killing or capturing soldiers, only harming civilians incidentally in their assault, does anyone truly believe they'd have any more defenders than they do now? I'd like to believe they would, but I don't.
I think the Biden administration would have put more pressure on Israel to show restraint.
Came to Unfogged to see if it'd be a refuge from the moral idiocy you see on social media. Apparently not.
I would say to Spike and gensym that you're doing tremendous moral harm to yourself and should work on being better people.
I haven't commented on Unfogged for years and have never used "Dave" as a handle.
My memory doesn't go back as far as some.
Good to see you, David, even though it's under these difficult circumstances.
176: Yes, I also put more moral onus on an organized funded armed group than on people just escaped from slavery.
(Individual plantation uprisings? Not going to dwell on it. The massacres of Dessalines? Bad.)
153: A silver lining possibly emerging from this mess would be a reversal of American recognition of Morocco's conquest of Western Sahara.
Separately, but in the same vein (rimshot) Musk's behavior* might just draw sufficient scrutiny to break up his conglomerate.
*re antisemitism, and Ukraine, and Tesla's PRC exposure.
I grew up on the same street as people who had been liberated from slavery and I seriously doubt they would have regarded suggestions like 166 with anything but utter horror. "Hey, you know, you really could have beheaded the guys who kept you as slaves, and their children, and their parents too, and it would have been fine!" Yeah they wouldn't have entertained that for a second.
They actually were good people, though.
The parents of the people who enslaved them were probably the people who enslaved them when they were younger.
I also think such people have lost a piece of their humanity and their ability to reason.
Splitting hairs, I'll cop to lost humanity, but not lost reason. Reduced ability to apprehend and predict certain evidence (other people's reactions), sure, but not reduced ability to reason. And the loss I think well offset by reduced outrage.
That said, I broadly agree. I wouldn't want to live in a society where most people didn't get upset.
I think there are cases where amnesty for past crimes can be justified on legal and political grounds without extending that amnesty to also mean moral approval.
General question: is there a general understanding here that you can *understand* why someone did something, and empathise and even *sympathise* with them, but still *condemn* whatt they did? Like, I can understand why most criminals do crimes and empathise with a lot of them but it doesn't stop me from thinking that they shouldn't have done it, it's right that what they did is against the law, and it's right that they're going to be punished for it.
Or is the general sense here that you can't condemn someone if you understand and sympathise with why they did what they did? I'm getting a sense of the latter from a lot of the non-psycho comments here.
So I understand why a freed slave might want to kill children and I sympathise with him because he's been in a horrible situation, but it's still murder and he still needs to go to prison.
I think this sort of discussion of guilt and provocation is incoherent if it's imprecise, but really difficult to have precisely. The individual members of Hamas who killed and planned the killings of civilians committed
crimes and should be condemned for it, and the same for any killing of civilians going on in response by the Israeli government. But when you get even a little more removed in terms of causality -- are all Palestinians in Gaza responsible for the acts of Hamas because it's on some level an elected government, and the same with all Israelis for the same reason -- you get into much harder questions about who has to be condemned or deserve punishment for what level of secondhand complicity, and to what extent different levels of secondhand complicity are understandable and excusable.
The median Gazan was born right around the time of the last election they had there.
Right -- there's a continuum all the way from a child who's responsible for nothing; through adults who in some general political sense support the goals and values and general existence of organizations that commit crimes but have no real power to change those organizations and who didn't individually commit crimes; to people with real participation in and power over the organizations who commit crimes but who have not themselves individually actually committed crimes; to the people who committed the crimes.
When you talk about what can be excused on the basis of prior crimes that provoked or led to current crimes, you can't make any moral sense unless you're talking about who you're excusing for what on a specific level.
I mean, I am really not saying anything deep or intelligent here, just that it's natural to sloppily construe moral responsibility broadly against the side of any conflict you're out of sympathy with, and very narrowly for the side you are in sympathy with, and that leads to inconsistency and saying things that strictly don't make sense.
143 was a joke. I feel like I need to mention that.
From the tenor the Blob commentary I feel there's a real risk Israel and/or US hawks uses this to get the US to attack Iran. Which I think would be a very serious error.
Biden isn't attacking Iran. Israel is probably too busy for a while.
I thought that there was some good strong pushback from multiple institutions against the WSJ attempt to fix responsibility on Iran, but I'd have to search to remember specifics.
I remember reading arguments that all citizens of a democracy bear some responsibility for the crimes of the nation. But I don't think they were arguing that this meant that anyone could decide that they deserve the death penalty.
Hamas also won with a sub-50% plurality, then never held another election.
203: The Times got second-hand named quotes and off-the-record quotes from a number of current intelligence officials saying that as far as they can tell Iran was surprised by the attack (or at least that multiple Iranian officials were).
General question: is there a general understanding here that you can *understand* why someone did something, and empathise and even *sympathise* with them, but still *condemn* whatt they did?
Yes, I feel this way about specific colleagues who seem driven to create more work for us all to do.
204: Right, but something very close to that argument is what anyone who genuinely supports (as opposed to "fails to sufficiently condemn" or "is saying thoughtlessly aggressive things about") the killing of civilians (which is itself an oversimplified way of putting it) on either side is relying on.
"From the tenor the Blob commentary I feel there's a real risk Israel and/or US hawks uses this to get the US to attack Iran"
I know this would normally be a cue for me to link back to my previous comments saying "no the US is not going to attack Iran" from 2006, 2008, 2012 and 2019. But I'm going to wait a bit before doing it this time
I just want to drop this in here from gnoled: "...But just because you think you need to be doing something, and being stupid and immoral is doing something, does not mean you should be stupid and immoral."
The whole (short) thing is good.
193: yes, but I think it's not the right model here. There's a tendency, through empathy, to imagine what one would do to someone who starved your child/filmed your son's execution and posted it to his own Facebook page, and an unwillingness to criticize whatever vengeful thing the victims will do in response to the bad guy.
But it's the wrong question. The person doing the revenge here is a quasi-state actor (Hamas)/state actor (Israel), the targeted "bad guy" some Gazan shopkeeper/some Israeli festival goer who wasn't any more guilty than the next person. So we're back at "war crimes are awful" and I find empathy is a bad guide to whether a military response is justified.
Frankly it's deminding me a bit of the torture debate.... all those people digging into obscure bits of history and weird quasi-academics and unlikely counterfactual to prove that yes, there really are some cases where you have to admit it would be OK to torture prisoners/murder Jewish civilians, and in the end you find yourself thinking "you're very very keen to find some justification for doing this and I'm starting to realise that ... maybe it's something you just really want to do."
There's another factor, which doesn't justify any actual actions at all, but I think plays strongly into rhetorical positions that end up offending people. Regardless of the actual primary moral arguments, even reasonable decent people are going to be stiffnecked about demands that they acknowledge the inexcusable immorality of the actions of people on the side they're aligned with, if they perceive that the other side is reluctant to acknowledge its own wrongdoing.
And this is a huge, huge factor, I think. Many supporters of Israel are consistently incredibly offended by any attempt to condemn Israeli crimes against Palestinians, given the undeniable fact of Palestinian crimes against Israelis, and supporters of Palestinians get unreasonable about claiming that Palestinian crimes against Israelis are justified, for parallel reasons. I think lots of people who sound bloodthirsty in argument would be a lot more reasonable if they were specifically thinking about what actions they thought were justified, in a context where they felt safe from worrying about giving up rhetorical ground.
The Euro-American colony in the Levant is a genocidal terror state. It's a scam founded by gangster terrorists, and that's all it's ever going to be.
Just war theories classically struggle to explain what an oppressed, much weaker group (especially a non-state actor) ought to do. One of the "rules" as gnoled notes is that a just war is one that has a reasonable chance of improving the situation, which rather tips the scale in favor of the group with the bigger army because the likelihood that "freedom fighters" achieve objectives is nil. But then one has to conclude , e.g., that any kind of resistance against a stronger colonial power is wrong. This is a known shortcoming. I don't see it being helpful here beyond "atrocities bad", which one can say without just war theory. The hell with Hamas and let's hope Israel manages some restraint is the best I can say.
So I have to admit I keep looking at the page title "Unfogged: Comment on Israel" and instinctively recoiling: no no no! NEVER comment on Israel! Are you insane? Why would you even have this tab open? But I appreciated 208.
80.1 to 219.
217: well kind of in theory. But not in practice because the recent record of "freedom fighters" against much larger state militaries is actually pretty good. There are plenty of recent cases you can point to to argue that in fact your insurgency does have a realistic chance of success. So I'd disagree in fact that this is a shortcoming of just war theory.
210 Attacking Iran now, or at any of those past points, is and would have been insane. I wish I could confidently predict sanity at all times.
The architects of the Iraq war hoped to attack Iran after their quick and decisive victory in Iraq, being greeted as liberators everywhere our soldiers went. I'm with you, though, that after 2005, even the most unhinged of supporters had to have seen that it wasn't going to happen.
Anyway, we here in the US have put deeply unserious people in charge before, and tens of millions of us want to do it again. I think MC is way off base thinking that a Biden Administration is going to go for such a thing, but God* alone knows what the next crew is going to think they can get away with.
*If there was a God, he, she, or it would know.
You don't need near-certainty of success, just a reasonable chance, after all. And a reasonable chabce of achieving your aim, which needn't be "total immediate victory".
And why is it necessarily a problem for just war theory that it prohibits hopeless resistance? Why would you want a theoretical justification for hopeless resistance anyway?
Rogue One was the best Star Wars moving since the first for a reason.
This situation is a bit different than a typical "freedom fighter" scenario, because of the way settlements work, and the lack of a significant insurgency within Israel proper. Maybe many insurgencies do have a chance of success, but in this case it does seem vanishingly unlikely that they'll achieve any of their goals.
225: It was much better than the first, though the first hit me at a time that was absolutely perfect, and I'll never stop being grateful for that.
Star Wars was the first live action movie I ever saw. I've mostly been disappointed since, not just by Star Wars.
Oh, I was talking about Andor. Forget it.
No Spoilers. I'm saving Andor for winter.
Wait, I forgot this is a thread about I/P. Let me try again:
That you would consider even consider the first one, which, in retrospect, any right-thinking person must agree is little more than putrescence extruded by a Hollywood insider and agent of Zionism--I repeated myself--or Rogue One, which was a crude of example of a degraded consumer culture, a product made only to be repackaged as Happy Meals and action figures, as being remotely comparable to a post-colonial masterpiece like Andor bespeaks the depth of your moral rot. Spend some time considering the impact of your aesthetic preferences and consumer choices before you embarrass yourself again, please, you lickspittle of corporate greed and American empire.
Andor is so good.
If you think my taste in movies is bad, you should know that I still listen to music almost exclusively on FM radio or my wife playing Taylor Swift.
231 You've left out the role New Hope played in preparing the ground for the Reagan "revolution."
Plus, it had light incest. Still, it was great.
224: it seems wrong to describe the French resistance as *immoral*, or more broadly, that just war theory shouldn't have anything to say about the permissibility of guerilla actions. (Whatever they are, they're not states.)
DeGaulle was big on establishing his political legitimacy as a French leader in exile and that French Resistance was thing he should control.
Sure -- but do they have uniforms? A command structure? Are they just civilians who murdered people, or do they count as soldiers? I just thought gnoled was too quick.
They had a command structure, but the Germans always treated them as civilians who murdered people. But the Germans weren't very fair.
If you think Moby's taste in radio is bad, you should know that I listen almost exclusively to MSNBC on satellite radio when I'm in the car.
Where are the sneers and jeers that they loudly let us hear when Shireen Abu Akleh was executed?
Ok, part 1 of probably 2 but maybe 3 if I am really on a roll:
Circled here for the first time in forever to take temperature here on this with no particular intention of diving in. But the spirit has moved me.
Personal context, most of my dad's family is Israeli, I lived in Jerusalem for my early childhood. My remaining personal connections there are mostly left, the older ones kibbutzniks, the younger ones near Tel-Aviv. Rationally I have never had much to say defense of Israel generally & that little has consistently dwindled. Emotional landscape more complicated.
Rn pretty much any Israeli I talk to knows someone who was killed, in a couple of instances, families that were killed. Atm, a lot of their rage is reserved for Bibi's complicity. This was not unavoidable. This was not inevitable even a few weeks ago.
And also yes I get that in *some ways* it was. It is very easy to see how the sustained atrocities in Gaza could lead to Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians.
And it's very easy to see how atrocities against Israeli citizens lead to childish performative snits by leftists who ostensibly support Palestinians, go on & get those yayas out. I'm used to it. Gazans are used to it. Everyone in or from the Middle East, whatever faith or race is very used to being the reflexive object of random Americans' sickest impulses. Yaaalllllaaaa, already.
Yes, and...
Everyone in or from the Middle East, whatever faith or race is very used to being the reflexive object of random Americans' sickest impulses.
That's probably worse than the "rude tourist" thing.
Hi folks!
2/2, I thought I had more energy on this than I do. A friend said "this whole thing might be what turns me into one of the old ladies who used to stand on the corner in Amherst holding 'War is not good for children and other living things' signs." Sounds right.
1) Hamas is not like, just a scrappy bunch of homies just trying to decol. If all of a sudden Israel vanished & Hamas were in charge of the state that appeared in its place that state would not be a free Palestine for long. Hamas wanted to do something to elicit the Israeli response of leveling Gaza.
2) Idk man. Even without conceding the above. The politics & tactics of a resistance seed the nature of the political structures that emerge if that resistance is successful. Maybe you think the ends justify any means but the means also shape the end.
Anyway now here we are in a world where somehow Tom Friedman is the only person WITHOUT an uninformed & unhelpful take? ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/israel-hamas-.html ). Evidence it's possible for almost anyone to write something thoughtful when they have more than absolutely zero background information.
237 is a bit puzzling because I didn't describe the French resistance as "immoral". They had a reasonable chance of success. (They did, after all, succeed!) And just war theory concerns itself not with states, but with wars, hence the name...
"citizens" in 243 s/b "civilians"
248: When I stop and pause, "trying to bring about Rapture" is really mixed at best as foreign policy.
It's usually the least harmful policy of those who push it.
Stabby!
To clarify: I don't think it's likely this administration will attack Iran, but I think a lot of actors will push it do so, and they have a much higher chance of success than normal.
Oh wait! I forgot to share my favorite deranged detail: Americans in Israel who reached out to the U.S. embassy about leaving earlier this week got an email that was, in effect "hey so, no U.S. flights out of Israel right now, but we googled it and looks like there's a land crossing into the West Bank? Maybe you can check that out?"
Inspiring!
"Hamas wanted to do something to elicit the Israeli response of leveling Gaza."
This is true, but maybe Israel should not just do exactly what Hamas wants? Israel has a choice here, and they seem to be making a choice that's both strategically stupid and morally horrific and then just pretending they have no choice and that somehow Hamas controls them.
257 of course it shouldn't! They absolutely shouldn't do the worst possible thing! But Israel is fucked up & bibi & coalition of psychos very interested in stoking the worst so Israelis' attention turns away from the internal catastrophe. "Israel will do the worst possible thing" was a safe bet.
Idk if there is insight amongst yins on this but word on the Israeli lefty street is Hamas is blocking passage from north to south Gaza. I put odds that that is actually happening at 55% and the odds that it's Israeli disinformation at 45%?
257: What, exactly, is your alternative?* This is not intended to be a hostile question; 257 is easy to say but not easy to do. I can think of some things, but but they just level Gaza less quickly, and IDK how realistic they are.
*Apart from the current not-very-discriminating airstrikes.
Ok revision I am only seeming 258.2 reported in extremely disreputable news sources atm. So instinct is FAKE NEWS until further notice.
258.2: IDK anything, but my guess is well above 55%. For Hamas that would make (almost) total military, political, and (AFAIUI) ideological sense.
258.1: Israel isn't (yet) doing the worst possible thing, which would be straight-up genocide, and I don't believe for a second that will happen, or even be considered in the unity cabinet. (In the prewar cabinet, maybe).
dark jokes coming my way about high precision long running ground operations conducted entirely by conscripted haredi with exemptions indicate this is the Israeli left's fantasy alternative
I don't see how Bibi survives this, but idk how that works out practically.
I have a hat they could use for the Haredi battle forces that want to look like Canadian hunters.
The alternative would be not doing war crimes. Denying access to water is particularly egregious. The plan, insofar as they have a plan and aren't making it up as they go along, seems to be ethnic cleansing.
This from the Economist is a nice bit of context:
Hamas may be counting on a relatively cautious assault. The group assumes that Israel will not have the stomach for the high casualties a ground invasion would entail. "We know that they are cowards," says Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar...
I'll be sure to pass on my regards next time I see him down the pub.
"What's your alternative" is also a common refrain among hamas apologists. You do not in fact have to come up with strategies for how to fix the middle east from your armchair to condemn war crimes.
[Seven] Palestinians interviewed across Gaza said they drink no more than half a liter of water a day. They said they urinate once a day or every other day.
"It tastes bad, it smells bad," said 25-year-old Mohammed Bashir about the tap water in western Gaza City, which is mixed with untreated wastewater and seawater. "But we have no choice. My kids are crying because they're thirsty."
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-water-4cc305b209437eec7235e975cf4c47d6
265 A pretty transparent PR move, don't you think?
You may have heard that water has been turned on again in sothern Gaza, but it doesn't seem to be true as of seven hours ago. Can't find anything more current. Water's no good without electricity, and short of an organized evacuation effort, I don't see how a million people in Gaza City can get to the south in time? Only a fraction of the population has relocated so far. People can only survive three days without water,
Reuters reports:
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday that Israeli officials told him they had turned the water back on in southern Gaza. But the spokesman for Israel's energy and water ministry, Adir Dahan, said it was only flowing at a single location in southern Gaza. Aid workers in Gaza said they had not yet seen evidence the water was back and a Gaza government spokesperson said it was not flowing.
Throughout the day, Gazans lined up for hours outside bakeries and jostled to buy bread, as fears of food shortages loomed. Umm Abdullah Abu Rizq had come at 7am hoping to buy food to feed her family and the others sheltering in her home.
"Is this enough for seven families and their children?" she asked, holding a small plastic bag with bread. She was not able to buy more.
In Khan Younis, residents rushed to mosques where clean water supplies were still available, for now. Eyad Aqel, a resident, said widespread electricity outages meant water could not be pumped up to replenish his tank. He held a small plastic water container he said would be his family's supply for washing and cooking.
It's coming on 4 am in Gaza right now, so 7 hours ago is kind of the latest news you'd expect. Check back in 2-3 hours.
270: I read ajay as being ironic here, but reading again, maybe not. "You are too cowardly to kill us" -- coming from the masterminds of mass murder at a particularly sensitive moment -- is pretty obviously NOT a de-escalation strategy.
I haven't felt such an intense need to take action in a while. I don't know what I, as a random U.S. voter, can do that would be most immediately helpful to civilians in Gaza. Some people are organizing a protest at the White House tomorrow, and I would get on a plane right now if I thought it would have any actual effects, but I remember the futility of "getting on a plane" in 2003 all too well. Call Congresspeople and scream at them to veto military aid? Does that work? Does anything work?
I think calling one's representative is the right thing to do, because they probably log the calls and should know they have constituents who find their actions repugnant. But nothing is going to stop this train, because there are WAY more votes in giving aid to Israel right now than there are votes in not giving aid. In the end, I don't care. It's worth making my voice heard, because I don't know what else to do and because Israel's plan is ethnic cleansing (not genocide; man, do I wish people would stop using that word willy-nilly).
Sorry, that was unclear. I don't care whether my call is going to have an immediate impact. I'm calling anyway. I care very deeply that Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing. I'm completely unmoored and have been since the massacre.
I feel the same way. I'm sorry.
You could always donate to MSF (formerly known as Doctors without borders). They're on the ground in Gaza. Along with everything else you can do.
I'm wondering if Iran is going to make a run at its nuclear breakout while Israel is otherwise occupied. That would be a second massive failure of the Bibi security state.
278: yes definitely.
270, 273: should have put it in bold; the key bit is the last three words. The decisions here are being taken by people who are a thousand miles away.
I had a dream where I was trapped at the bottom of the ocean with Keanu Reeves and he rescued us by grabbing some kind of deep-sea creature with its eyes on stalks and making it carry us to the surface under the threat of having its eye stalks tied together if it failed. So, that's probably a portent that things will get better this week.
The John Wick/Avatar crossover we all need
It was more of a "Ted" vintage Reeves.
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At least two orders of magnitude more important tha anything above, possibly very good news from Poland.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-election-tusk-opposition-29eb9108f6e9c242e9bb3a2f803b5a63
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More important than Israel, obviously. Less important than Keanu.
What the fuck is Ipsos doing in Poland?
Anyway, wait until the final numbers are in to celebrate.
287 exactly what a Polish friend texted me when I asked her if she was happy about the election
Lots of people have worked with Ipsos.
I have a factual question. Is Hamas continuing to attack Israel, or has it become mostly one-sided from Israel towards Gaza. since the original attacks last weekend?
They just launched a lot of rockets into Israel
Shouldn't it be harder for them to have so many rockets?
Apparently they get them from Iran smuggled via Sudan and Egypt and then by tunnels into Gaza?
Israel's missile defense system is very good and so the rockets tend not to much. The initial invasion where Hamas was killing lots of people is long over, I think?
I said POSSIBLY good! But clearly Keanu has entered the fray, so I'm feeling strong.
295: And IIRC a lot of the smaller ones manufactured locally. But presumably they still need to smuggle most of propellant and explosives (or precusrsors) for those.
Yeah. I'm not surprised that they have rockets, just that they have so many rockets and other weapons. I thought the bandwidth was constrained.
298 me.
295: Iron Dome is good, but still got swamped, at least on the first day.AIUI scores of missiles got through, and Israel getting interceptors resupplied from the US.
Worth listening:
https://warontherocks.com/2023/10/tech-ethics-and-the-city-in-israels-looming-urban-battlefield/
2-3k rockets in the first ~20 minutes, vs a previous peak of 400 in 24 hours.
287-288: An article I read pointed out that Slovakia's recent election did not turn out the way exit polls suggested.
Anyway, I was thinking about proposing a thread on recent election results around the world. I was also curious about what the right's win will mean in New Zealand, and I've probably forgotten a few more elections amidst [gestures towards everything].
Rockets every day and also near daily reports of small scale infiltration.
(There is an Intel chip fab, Fab 38, 23km north-east of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, well in range of nearly all the arsenal, and frankly I am astonished it's still standing and indeed operating.)
This is true, but maybe Israel should not just do exactly what Hamas wants? Israel has a choice here, and they seem to be making a choice that's both strategically stupid and morally horrific and then just pretending they have no choice and that somehow Hamas controls them.
I'm happy to be educated on this. (I think you are one of many people who know more about this than I do.) But this seems misguided in a couple of different ways. I think Hamas and the Israeli Right are aligned in ways that people are reluctant to acknowledge. And people are likewise often unwilling to talk about the significant public support that motivates the leaders on each side.
Let's try your comment another way:
they [Hamas] seem to be making a choice that's both strategically stupid and morally horrific and then just pretending they have no choice and that somehow [Likud] controls them.
This is equally true on both ends, isn't it? Except neither side is really pretending when they say they have no choice. Each side has set itself on a path that forces the hand of the other side -- Likud by insisting there is no path for the Palestinians but violence, and Hamas by doing the same to Likud. It's a feedback loop.
That said, the thing that really interests me is "strategically stupid." I think this fails to reckon with what Israeli policy is meant to accomplish. Ethnic cleansing is pretty much official government policy, isn't it? People use a lot of harsh language to describe the Israeli position regarding the West Bank, but what other language is there?
Yes, the ongoing destruction of Gaza will only create a new generation of terrorists, but that's not some error or mistake. It's an acknowledged cost of a logical strategy. Each time the grass is mowed, the blade comes down a little lower. That's the strategy. It has been highly effective and (I predict) will continue to be. In the long run -- over a period of decades -- we've seen the Palestinian position become increasingly untenable in what is -- let's face it -- a zero-sum game.
("Morally horrific" is, of course, not a phrase I am objecting to here.)
I'm not disagreeing with any of that, Hamas is very bad! All I'm saying is that Israel doesn't have to start a land war with no clear goals that will kill tens of thousands of children (and perhaps hundreds of thousands), they could instead just not do that.
The important context here is that both sides are led by genocidal terrorists who want and benefit from increasing chaos and violence. The vast majority of the population on both sides doesn't want that but they're not in charge.
I get that Bibi can't win a majority, but "vast" seems to be an overstatement.
Via Josh Marshall's twitter, This thread on (pre-October) Palestinian opinion polls is pretty dispiriting* and also not something I'd seen before. I would hope that there would be more favorable views towards some kind of political resolution if someone in a leadership position (maybe two someones, even) could provide a credible path towards one.
*Acknowledging that there's lots of reasons to discount opinion polls in places that don't do things like have elections.
"Vast" may be an overstatement, but the point is that both Hamas and the Kahanists are actively in favor of continued violence as such, which is not actually a popular position among the public at large, even those who nominally support those leaders.
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Speaking of elections.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/14/australia/australia-referendum-results-intl-hnk/index.html
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314: This is a side note but it came to mind because it's close to what I'm working on: indigenous people in Scotland also have a significantly lower life expectancy than non-indigenous, though the difference isn't quite as stark.
Indigenous Australian male: 71.6
Indigenous Scottish male: 74.7
Non-indigenous Australian male: 80.2
Non-indigenous Scottish male: 79.0-80.9, depending on group.
This is causing me to think very hard about whether another lot of Highland Clearances might be a good idea.
West Virginia males aren't far from the indigenous Australian number and will drop below it if trends continue.
West Virginia probably employs people to try to raise that number, but I doubt they get much by the way of resources.
I've long thought we should be treating "Appalachian" as an underrepresented minority group. The core Appalachian area just has awful outcomes on almost all measures.
The weird thing in Scotland is that although the history of highland Scots absolutely has a lot in common with indigenous people elsewhere, since they're not minoritized (I think that's the concept I want?) you can't even track what's happening if you move. That is, an Aboriginal Australian whose parents moved to Sydney is still Aboriginal, and the kid of a Gaelic speaking islander who moved to the central belt is just White Scots and doesn't show up in statistics.
Same with white Appalachian, of course. Half a generation away with some education and a reasonable job, there's no residual stigma. Which is what I think makes it kind of nuts to treat it as an underrepresented minority group. Social services based on current hardship, absolutely, but there's no permanent stigma. JD Vance isn't negatively impacted by his "Appalachian" status, but a Black man with his educational and vocational background still is.
Vance barely even has to live in Ohio.
Vance isn't Appalachian though, he's just lying. (Which I guess is a real problem here.) You do have a point though.
You could say the same thing about white hispanics though, but we do it there.
"another lot of Highland Clearances"
I thought there could be only one.
My ex came from generational rural poverty and dysfunction -- not exactly Appalachian because too far North, but very much that sort of thing. And pulling himself out was a serious accomplishment, without meaningful help beyond how much cheaper state universities were in the eighties. But he's been a high-earning well educated white guy for decades now, and calling him stigmatized for it would just be loopy.
(The white Hispanic thing also gets incoherent at the edges, but there are historical reasons for it that don't, I think, translate well.)
Ohio will probably be able to fix itself, but I do wonder about West Virginia in the long run. It has no cities over 50,000 people, is hacking its state university, and its actual economic engine (tourism) is constrained by its emotional economic engine polluting the things tourists want to see.
I had a post up, but I just took it down because I remembered people want to talk about elections. Hang on.
Anyway, West Virginia tried to get people to move there for remote work. In theory, something like that would work for me very well and I would like to live in some scenery in a house with an attached forest. But in practice, the politics of the place make me too frightened to make that kind of investment.
330 is interesting, there's so much of that in the west right now. Though somehow skiing results in the towns that people want to move to being a little less wacko than the rest of the states that they're in. Lots of people did move (at least part time) to the Adirondacks for remote work, and I'd expect upper New England was also popular. Adirondacks are pretty scary politics-wise, but I suppose nowhere near WV. From WV to DC is totally comparable to Adirondacks to NYC, so it would make a lot of sense. Not sure Morgantown is beautiful enough though, that'd be the sensible place for people to move in terms of culture and interest. (Too bad their president is destroying their university though.)
I should have yelled at Gee when I had the chance. But 1995 was maybe too soon.
People do commute from West Virginia to Pittsburgh every day. Pittsburgh salaries are low, but still much better than West Virginia.
Even Manchin's daughter had to move to Pittsburgh to get a job.
318: Sometimes paperwork here just outside the area's boundary will have you check whether or not you have Appalachian ethnicity just like it does with Hispanic. I think that's more for tracking than providing services.
331. Harpers Ferry, I know people who make that work with office jobs in MD; there's a train connection. Moving to Delaware is more common I think, and greater Baltimore is a lot cheaper than DC. WV is not at all the only direction that's either cheap or has nice scenery.
t is a beautiful country.
I would still need to be within an hour or so of Pittsburgh.
335: I don't think Ohio provided any services either.
Harpers Ferry has such cool geography. A fundamental feature of the Eastern US that I only learned about a few years ago (and which you really can't follow much of the Civil War without understanding) is that there's a single continuous long valley running from Harrisburg PA to Chatanooga TN between the first bit of Appalachian mountains and the rest of them, which is easy to travel up and down. The problem is getting into and out of this valley, for example you can get out going west at the Cumberland Gap (though only by foot not by wagon). At Harpers Ferry there's a "water gap" (i.e. a break in the mountains but with a river filling the break), but that means if you put a ferry there you can get into the valley without going over any mountains. And some guy named Harper figured that out, and it became a main route in from the east.
Oh, right, meant to link. The most famous portion of this valley is the Shenandoah, and the most famous part of the ridge east of the valley is the Blue Ridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Appalachian_Valley
Like many of the old wagon routes it's now one of our biggest highways: I-81.
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What is the rationale for introducing a pharmacology course at Heebie U?
Based on research conducted by the Sub-Committee it was determined that there was a need for a Pharmacology, it found that an increasing number of students felt that this was an important course lacking in their curriculum through student evaluations and ATI Testing statistics showed there was a significant gap between knowledge and implementation of skills in pharmacology content and drug-dosage calculations among nursing students that could lead to more serious issues once they left academia and enter into practice which could lead to serious adverse medications errors endangering safe patient centered care.
Rarely is the question asked, is our faculty learning?
|>
I'm being a little short-tempered because they submitted a number of forms to a committee I'm on, and they are riddled with typos and dropped articles and general weirdness, and I happened to select that sentence to mock. Out of context, it just looks a little rambly.
It's not as grave a sin as invading Gaza, but it's not without its own culpability.
That pullquote alone has to be at least .2 Gaza.
The weird thing in Scotland is that although the history of highland Scots absolutely has a lot in common with indigenous people elsewhere, since they're not minoritized (I think that's the concept I want?) you can't even track what's happening if you move. That is, an Aboriginal Australian whose parents moved to Sydney is still Aboriginal, and the kid of a Gaelic speaking islander who moved to the central belt is just White Scots and doesn't show up in statistics.
I feel this is a misleading lens to look at the situation through, not least because the Highlands and the island regions have the best health outcomes in the entire country, and the central belt has the worst. Same (to a smaller extent) in education. There are also no native-born islanders who do not speak English at a native-language level. It's just that some of them speak Gaelic as well.
I would be amazed if there were a systematic difference in, well, anything, between kids born in Glasgow to Glaswegian parents and kids born in Glasgow to Highland/islander parents.
Sometimes paperwork here just outside the area's boundary will have you check whether or not you have Appalachian ethnicity just like it does with Hispanic.
It's an appalachian controlee.
Right? Thank you.
We had a guy in Information Systems who was an atrociously bad writer and would make the rounds trying to get each of us to proofread/substantially revise and improve the thing any time he had to submit something written. He switched to the business department, and sent our department a farewell email, and I took about a split second to look at this and think, "AI wrote this." Which is really not a bad thing at all. No Gazas.
The most famous portion of this valley is the Shenandoah, and the most famous part of the ridge east of the valley is the Blue Ridge.
And the best-named part of the ridge is unquestionably the Reading Prong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Prong
I think this is the colloquial term for that fancy silver pointer thing that rabbis use to keep track of which line they're on in the Torah. "No, Aaron! Don't trail your finger all over the page, you'll leave marks! Use your reading prong!"
347.last: Cassandane is a bit of a wine snob, and I appreciate the fact that Appalachian wines are getting more respect, or at least are convenient for us to take day trips to visit the wineries of, because it gives me an excuse to use the phrase "Appalachian appellation".
348:
He switched to the business department, and sent our department a farewell email, and I took about a split second to look at this and think, "AI wrote this." Which is really not a bad thing at all. No Gazas.
I'm in the middle of editing a badly written white paper right now, and I actually ran it through an AI checker. No dice. In hindsight I'm not surprised, this is the kind of thing they'd be bad for, but I would have loved to be able to blame this writing on laziness instead of well-meaning incompetence.
Wait, so what did indigenous in 315 mean? Lowland Scots are absolutely not indigenous in any sense.
Does the Reading Prong meet the Allegheny Front Section anywhere near the Great Valley?
West Virginia's problem is the brain drain: over three quarters of a million have left since the early 80s, and those that stayed aren't the ones who had options. Pittsburgh's recovery ate the region. I love the landscape and the climate but where would I live or work? Remote, sure, but when the next recession hits it's better to be somewhere with an actual city and not in a place that gutted the university for no reason except grift.
Pittsburgh's recovery ate the region.
I think it saved the region. Just not all of it.
352: I ask out of purest ignorance, but if Lowland Scots are not indigenous, where are they ancestrally from and when? Or if that's the wrong question, what's the right question?
Lowland Scots are from West Virginia.
356: hard to say. Saved the Greater Pittsburgh metro area, but as you note, no one is staying in Morgantown.
I think they would have just gone further away from Morgantown.
I associate the Reading Prong with radon. I guess we were close enough that we had to put those little test boxes in our basement.
Our HS junior is a terrible writer. He just never read enough throughout his teen years and now it's coming back to bite him. Hopefully his test taking instinct is enough to get him through the verbal SAT.
To quote from Wikipedia:
"Indigenous peoples are the earliest known inhabitants of an area and their descendants, especially one that has been colonized by a now-dominant group of settlers. However, the term lacks a single, authoritative definition and can be used to describe a variety of peoples and cultures."
I understand "indigenous" only to refer to people who have been colonized or otherwise oppressed. It never refers to English or French, or for that matter Han Chinese or Japanese people (certainly could refer to indigenous Taiwanese people, or Ainu, or maybe Ryukyuans). Though I suppose as Wikipedia says some people use it differently, but that seems really misleading to me. Sami are indigenous, Norwegians aren't.
If I'm reading the NYT correctly, it looks like Jordan has lost on the first ballot.
Truly shocking that the moderates did something, we'll see how long they stick with it.
363: Yeah, this is why I've been arguing for a while that "indigenous" isn't really a useful concept in situations like Scotland. There needs to be some sort of colonial dynamic and sharp cultural distinction or it ends up in endless bickering over which migrations or acculturations "count" and which don't.
Yeah, this is why I've been arguing for a while that "indigenous" isn't really a useful concept in situations like Scotland.
I love that this is such a perennial debate in your life that it's grown tired.
Me too. Because today is the first time I ever considered it.
"For a while" in the sense that this came up once before on Unfogged a while back and that's what I argued then.
And now I do remember this coming up before. I guess I don't have a clear enough sense of Scottish history to have an opinion one way or the other as to whether there's a clear distinction between how oppressed highlanders and lowlanders were.
I think I just saw the least helpful meme on Israel and Gaza that I've seen to date, which was drawing a tortured analogy to Rome and England, and how would you like it if you were just going about life in England, and now it belongs to the Romans because they were here 2000 years ago. Or basically, comment 2 at the top of this thread.
The "reading prong" is called a "yad," which means "hand" in modern Hebrew.
365: 20 no votes. I think the "moderates" probably felt a need to show a bit of resistance before getting steamrolled.
On the other hand, Josh Marshall, who had been sure that Jordan had it in the bag, is wavering a bit, but still thinks Jordan is likely to get it.
Someone remind me of the last time Republican moderates showed any real spine.
The argument is basically the Highland Clearances and potato famine, combined with some related things like laws against Highland Dress and the decline of the Gaelic language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances
A simpler case that brings up many of the same issues is Irish people vis-a-vis British colonization.
Fucking hell they hit a hospital, hundreds dead, possibly over a thousand.
On the other hand, Josh Marshall, who had been sure that Jordan had it in the bag, is wavering a bit, but still thinks Jordan is likely to get it.
He's generally a sharp observer but has been pretty inaccurate on this mess so far.
A simpler case that brings up many of the same issues is Irish people vis-a-vis British colonization.
Yes, Ireland is a more straightforward example of colonial dynamics. I'm not intimately familiar with the Scottish situation but my impression is that the landlords who were behind the Clearances were not culturally distinct from the tenants, which is just a very different context.
376: And now Hamas is offering to release hostages immediately if the bombardment stops? WTF is going on?
A senior Hamas official told NBC News that the group is willing to release all civilian hostages immediately -- within an hour -- if Israel stops its bombing campaign of Gaza.
The hospital bombing gives them the moral high ground for the moment and they're trying to take advantage of it.
what did indigenous in 315 mean?
There's no answer to that question, haven't you ever heard of "No true indigenous Scotsman?"
I guess the moral of the story is that bombing hospitals leads to peace.
330: just today I saw on the other place someone wanting to sell his property in (I think) WV (it was billed as 30 minutes from 5+ different class V whitewater runs, most of which were in WV). Property, big mobile home, hooked up to water, high speed internet, move right in. $52 for the whole package.
Even though I haven't been in a whitewater boat in 5 years I could see snapping that up. $52K!! Probably a small piece of property, but I didn't see that detailed. I could see trees though.
Someone remind me of the last time Republican moderates showed any real spine.
It isn't a lack of spine. It's a lack of honesty. There are no Republican moderates, just a few who have to play one on TV for their district. The Susan Collins Kabuki.
380: okay, so the cynical answer is the real one.
376: that is horrifying. I wondered why I got an e-mail blast about the availability of employee assistance programs today.
378: Right, I think it largely comes down to whether being Gaelic-speaking counts as "culturally distinct." I could be wrong, but I think most of the landowners of that time were either English, or English or Scots speaking people who mostly lived in the lowlands. Often they were at least in part descended from Highland clan chiefs, but usually had assimilated long before the clearances. To take the most infamous example, this woman was one of the largest landowners during the clearances, and she's descended from the Chief of Clan Sutherland, but separated by generations from when they actually lived in the highlands, and her father was a peer and she married a Londoner.
But this kind of absorption of the ruling class into the colonizers is hardly unheard of, compare with Hawaii.
Right, I think it largely comes down to whether being Gaelic-speaking counts as "culturally distinct." I could be wrong, but I think most of the landowners of that time were either English, or English or Scots speaking people who mostly lived in the lowlands. Often they were at least in part descended from Highland clan chiefs, but usually had assimilated long before the clearances. To take the most infamous example, this woman was one of the largest landowners during the clearances, and she's descended from the Chief of Clan Sutherland, but separated by generations from when they actually lived in the highlands, and her father was a peer and she married a Londoner.
Sure, but there's no colonization or settlers in this scenario! Lowlanders weren't moving into the Highlands in response to the Clearances; the tenants were being replaced by sheep. The co-optation and acculturation of Highland elites were taking place outside of the Highlands themselves.
Definitely the actions of a country that should get more JDAMs.
You're saying the sheep are the colonizers?
Fair enough. Though isn't it often the case that indigenous people are displaced primarily for agriculture and not people? Lanai? South Island of New Zealand? Banana Republics? I suppose the relevant difference here is that the shepherds weren't outside people.
So I was just paging through the list in 33 (20) and... this is where Josh Marshall is getting his Israel news? It seems tremendously one-sided to me; I'm surprised. Sources are very much all in on the "misfired rocket" account. (I don't know who fired the rocket. I totally checked Bellingcat but clearly these things take time. I guess I'm fairly willing to assume that the IDF is lying, but I also feel like I should know more about how much division there typically is within the IDF, or any national military, over war crimes: who gives authorization, who doesn't know, how power gets abused, all that intellectually interesting meaningless stuff. Sorry to over-comment; chattering is how I process things.)
Today is an exceptionally bad day to rely on Israeli media for accurate information.
I too am waiting for someone serious like Bellingcat (or their alums like Aric Toler, now at the NYT) to come up with a definitive answer on the hospital. I'm inclined to believe the IDF bombed it absent solid evidence otherwise.
Yeah this is the latest from Toler, as I'm sure you've seen. I definitely do not have the skills to pull anything useful out of the Al-Jazeera video.
"I understand "indigenous" only to refer to people who have been colonized or otherwise oppressed. It never refers to English or French, or for that matter Han Chinese or Japanese people"
This is not only a demented definition of "indigenous" (i guess that makes the Lowlanders "rootless cosmopolitans" or something?) ɓut I challenge you to go to China and tell the locals there that they have never been colonised or otherwise oppressed. If you do it in Nanjing, please livestream it. Or better yet, do it in THE FORMER CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG!
No, I don't think that the indigenous/coloniser split makes much sense in Scots history, but that will never stop outsiders from trying to use it, so go ahead.
"Yes, Ireland is a more straightforward example"
There's a sentence you don't hear very often!
(Also it isn't. It has been retconned into one. The truth as always is far more convoluted.)
Obviously I don't really trust reporting either side, but at the end of the day I think Israel has more expensive guidance systems than Islamic Jihad by many orders of magnitude, so I'm inclined to think the IJ rocket scenario is more likely.
IDF blamed Hamas and posted some videos and then people pointed out the time stamps didn't match the explosion time so they edited the tweet to remove the videos but otherwise kept the accusation.
Of course the IDF would pay for Blue or X plus or whatever it's called this week.
Assuming Israeli airstrike (which I do for now, prob will until proven otherwise), what would be rationale for Israel blaming IJ rockets, not Hamas? Chat GPT isn't helping me here.
There's some (weak) evidence that IJ fires more rockets than Hamas or any other group.
And all this science,
I don't understand.
It's just my job five days a week,
A rocket man,
A rocket man.
Note that most of these rockets are basically just lengths of steel pipe filled with fertilizer-based explosives. To blow up a hospital with one it would have to have hit a big stockpile of ammunition or something. Which is possible and certainly not outside the range of possibilities given that this is Hamas, but just on the face of it an IDF airstrike seems a lot more plausible.
406 implies the existence of "detached Islamic Jihad"
Even with advanced targeting technology or whatever they're calling it these days, it still seems like there's considerable risk of hitting the wrong thing, like when the US hit that Chinese Embassy. Assuming this wasn't intentional, obviously.
407: the hospital is run by anglicans & has been for 40 odd years - i suppose this doesn't rule out an ammunition store being at the hospital, but i believe lessens the probability a lot. the explosion could have been a gazan origin rocket or shrapnel from that or something else igniting a fuel store (for generators). or - it was the idf.
A lot of Hamas'/allies' weaponry has been upgraded recently, though, right? That's been part of the story?
401: to be explicit, I think this was likely an intentional strike, or at least as intentional as Kunduz.
The US military initially conceded only that their airstrike might have caused "collateral damage" to the hospital. The top commander in Afghanistan, John F Campbell, later admitted - in the fourth attempt at explaining the devastating attack - that the hospital was "mistakenly struck".
Since then, a former intelligence official has told the Associated Press that American special operations forces who planned the attack knew it was a hospital because they had been gathering intelligence on it for days. They believed it was being used to coordinate Taliban activity, and considered the strike justified. The report said it was not clear whether the commanders in the gunship firing on the site knew it was a hospital or the details of the allegations.
Barack Obama has apologised to MSF, admitting the strike was a mistake, and at least three separate investigations have been launched. The Pentagon has announced it will pay compensation to families of those killed and to the injured.
Basically, someone or some group of people made a very terrible decision, all hell is now about to break loose (see also: Putin calling an emergency UNSC meeting, possibly while literally saying "I am shocked, shocked that hospitals are being bombed"), the official story will change a few times, and the social media story will keep changing in perpetuity. I really find it hard to believe that anyone hit a hospital by poor-aim accident in 2023, I'm sorry. I wish it still seemed shocking.
A lot of Hamas'/allies' weaponry has been upgraded recently, though, right? That's been part of the story?
I haven't heard that, but maybe. I haven't been tracking every aspect of the story.
I really find it hard to believe that anyone hit a hospital by poor-aim accident in 2023, I'm sorry. I wish it still seemed shocking.
Agreed. I think the most likely scenario here is that the IDF deliberately targeted a hospital. Anyone who can't imagine they would do that must not have been paying much attention to the trajectory of Israeli internal politics in recent years.
Hamas has routinely based itself in hospitals for years. That doesn't necessarily excuse anyone involved, but it does explain, and is consistent with both a deliberate strike and an ammunition accident (and the Gazans have been handling their munitions at far higher intensity than ever before).
It sounds like an air strike, and hitting an ammo dump would have caused secondary explosions which we don't hear on the video though I don't recall if it's long enough to tell.
Contra 407, yes, most of the rockets Hamas and PIJ use are small Qassam rockets which have about the same explosive content as an artillery shell. But some are much larger - Fajr-5 , holding 200lb of high explosive.
Second point: Bellingcat now has daylight photos of the impact site in the hospital car park (the hospital buildings themselves weren't struck directly) https://nitter.net/eliothiggins
There's a small crater in the centre left of the picture with the remains of a car in it. Other cars parked around it appear lightly damaged - paint scorching, windows broken by debris - and a few tiles are missing from the porch roof.
A JDAM will normally leave a crater 25-50 feet across and 8-16 feet deep. https://comw.org/pda/precision-warfare-a-2000-lb-scalpel/
But I'm not an expert on crater analysis or BDA - the Bellingcat guys are so I am simply going to wait to hear their conclusions.
I saw in the Elections thread that NZ has afforded indigenous status to the Ngāti Mutunga Māori in the Chatham Islands by, as JP Stormcrow put it, "right of around 160 years of occupation."
Which is now about 40 years less than European settlement of New Zealand.
Yes, now that there's more evidence the picture may be different. Interesting thread from Nathan Ruser (not affiliated with Bellingcat but a serious analyst without a particular dog in this fight).
421 is excellent news - obviously still waiting to hear more but from that it now seems very unlikely that 500 people died.
420: solidarity with the oppressed indigenous people of the Falkland Islands (by right of around 190 years of occupation).
Whoever turns out to be responsible the IDF is certainly not helping their case by releasing a purported audio intercept by two Hamas members talking about the strike who speak like intermediate level non-native Arabic speakers and without Palestinian accents.
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In another northern New Mexico village I had lived in the year before this pilgrimage, someone once tartly remarked of a neighbor, "They're not from here. We remember when their great-grandfather moved here." The Spanish spoken here is old-fashioned, and it is often noted that the culture derives from pre-Enlightenment Spain. In its strong agricultural and local ties and traditions, its widespread poverty, its conservative social views, and its devout, magical Catholicism, this culture often seems like a last outpost of the Middle Ages.Howsay you?
424: Right. This is one of those maddening situations where you can't tell anything at all by looking at which side of the factual disagreement is probably lying, because both sides are untrustworthy. It wouldn't be even a little surprising to me if the released conversation you're talking about is a complete fake, but the explosion nonetheless wasn't from an Israeli bomb.
To be honest I think that's probably the way to bet.
I think the dinky crater definitely rules out a big, unitary weapon that bursts on the ground or after penetrating the ground. That leaves a lot of other weapons. I also wonder about the casualty numbers whether there might have been a crush accident after the explosion.
There are two guards, and they will both lie when it's in their interest to make the other guard look like a liar, but sometimes that involves telling the truth so they seem more trustworthy than their lying opponent. What question do you ask each of them to determine the truth?
Trick question, you should measure the size of the missile reflected in their sunglasses using a handy lamppost as a scale reference.
And of course I looked at all the crater analysis and figured it was going to be a couple of hours before someone else weighed in, truly or falsely, with "that's not where the primary impact was. Now look at these pictures." Hasn't happened yet, but I won't be surprised if it does, and if it does I won't know any better what to think about it.
I also wonder about the casualty numbers whether there might have been a crush accident after the explosion.
Or, alternatively (and more optimistically) whether the casualty numbers might be completely wrong.
424, 426: so strongly agree. listening to bbc the last week & a half (hello, insomnia!) the convergence in deranged motivated "reasoning" in statements/interviews by both hamas & israeli government spokespeople is striking.
my impression is that there is still a difference in person-on-the-street interviews but alas it generally breaks down as resignation to total resignation to mortal peril without hope on one side & outraged demands for restoration of a perceived sense of near certain physical security on the other - an unsustainable equilibrium.
hilzoy on bsky said the following that seemed a small piece of correct to me (small bc large, complex situation): https://bsky.app/profile/hilzoy.bsky.social/post/3kbumgphx4n27
425: That's a common trope. There's some truth to it, but also a lot of mythologizing of the more complex actual history.
Does everyone here have an appetite for a continued Israel thread on the front page? Or do we need a break?
We should wait for the ground invasion on Sunday.
I think a break would be good. If people really want to keep talking about it they can use this thread.
I am good taking a break as long as events allow me to think about something else for like 5 minutes. As Moby implies, it won't last.
Sounds good to me. Got that hot lightbulb content coming in fresh for everyone else.
434: Thanks, teo! I figured that Mossy posted too early in the Alaskan day (or too late in the Alaskan night), and am glad you saw it and weighed in.
Thanks Doug! To expand a little, it's definitely true that New Mexico, especially northern NM, was very isolated and impoverished for centuries in a way that took it out of the mainstream of developments in much of the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, and the dialect of Spanish and some cultural practices are distinctive in ways that could be considered archaic or "medieval" compared to more cosmopolitan areas. It was never completely isolated, though, and was very much a part of the Spanish empire until Mexican independence, then a part of Mexico until the US conquered it. In the decades after the US conquest, as racial ideas were developing in American culture overall, the idea that NM Hispanics were "purely" Spanish and had no admixture of indigenous heritage either in Mexico or locally became an increasingly prominent part of local identity, in part because it defined them as "white" by US standards at a time when that category was increasingly being defined to exclude "Mexicans." The mythology of an isolated community of medieval Castilians cut off from the miscegenation and degeneration of the rest of the empire played into this construction quite nicely.
Here's Bellingcat's initial analysis. They say there is a crater which is too small to have been created by an Israeli strike, and that the IDF is wrong in its claim that there is no crater at all.
441: Do the people actually look visibly distinct from the general population of Mexican-Americans?
443: I would say no, but then Mexican-Americans are a quite diverse group to start with. It would be hard to systematically distinguish New Mexicans from (other) populations of northern Mexico.
What if you looked at their passports?
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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/qatar-return-three-ukrainian-children-russia-after-repatriation-talks-2023-10-16/
Russia has released four (4) of the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children it has abducted.
This has been your occasional ill-tempered reminder of non-hypothetical actually-occurring-right-now genocides.
|>
Do the people actually look visibly distinct from the general population of Mexican-Americans?
They look newer, duh. On older Mexicans you'll often see a network of fine lines on the surface (called craquelure), and maybe some foxing and discoloration if they've been left in direct sunlight. Obviously a lot of the details of the ageing process depend on what kind of barrel they've been in.
447: ah, but MC, that's the boring one that we don't really bother discussing very often, remember.
Texas is putting concertina wire along the border with New Mexico, so it's probably hard to tell one Mexico from the other.
The linked article looks interesting if not surprising https://x.com/shashj/status/1714965674345337334?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Definitely worth reading, as are the linked articles relating to the argument - this is a complex issue and a thinktank summary, far less a tweet excerpting one sentence from a thinktank summary, is not where you should stop.
Cox, for example, raises a rather disturbing prospect: recently there was a case where a Hamas military unit in an office block also used by various civilian organisations left in a hurry when the IDF warned it was about to strike the building. Everyone else in the building left too and the strike, as a result, killed no one, though it may have destroyed some Hamas equipment.
Since the Hamas members had left, some lawyers argue, the building was no longer a military target and the strike was illegal. But if the IDF hadn't issued a warning, the Hamas unit would still have been there. The strike would have killed a lot of civilians, but would also have killed a lot of Hamas, and that might well qualify as legal under the criteria of military necessity and proportionality.
I'm glad there's a law of armed conflict, and it's good that people debate its details and application. But when it comes to Israel and Hamas, is LOAC anything other than a PR issue? *
* This is not meant to downplay the importance of PR. **
** I am willing to consider the possibility that, given the circumstances we are discussing, I am sliding over the boundary of ordinary cynicism into offensive trolling.
Remind me where this idea came from that people here don't care about Ukraine? I still think I must be missing something.
But when it comes to Israel and Hamas, is LOAC anything other than a PR issue?
A realist would say: when it comes to any armed conflict at all, LOAC is nothing more than an issue of cynical PR and pragmatism. There is, after all, no global policeman. States will follow LOAC as far as it is in their interest to do so - breaking LOAC may obstruct them in pursuing their interests, in which case they won't do it, but there's no reason to follow it otherwise.
454 is right. Pushing for more support for Ukraine is a very active policy area right now.
I agree with 455. States aren't monoliths, though, and you'll always have disagreements about the extent that LOAC should be observed or not. The fact that it exists as a thing gives the faction that wants to refrain from the worst kind of abuses some little leverage in internal debates. Sometimes it's going to be enough to carry the day in ongoing internal discussions, sometimes it will not be.
The author if this article is employed by the US government. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-united-states-faces-a-test-on-guant%C3%A1namo-bay-in-geneva
Texas is putting concertina wire along the border with New Mexico, so it's probably hard to tell one Mexico from the other.
Yes, but this one is supposed to keep the abortion providers out.
I mean, is the whole corpus of international law just an issue of cynical PR and pragmatism by states? Maybe! If you're a FP realist, you definitely think so. This is not really an issue amenable to final decision one way or the other.
454: Maybe it was that the band of agreement on Ukraine was so broad here that discussing it wasn't very interesting?
458, 460: Antiabtreibungsanbieterschutzmauer
But even to realists, LOAC's still valuable as the codification of "things that civilised states have decided to agree are unacceptable in war" for reasons like 457.
There are going to be some people who take the radically different anti-LOAC view - we have some of them here - that jus ad bellum actually supersedes jus in bello. If you're fighting a righteous war (anticolonial or slave-rebellion or whatever) then you can't be condemned whatever you do. You can literally strangle babies if you like. If you aren't fighting a righteous war, or you're on the wrong side of a righteous one, you should be condemned regardless of whether you're following LOAC or not because the sheer immorality of your casus belli outweighs whatever you do or don't do in following it.
But that view is a moral obscenity, and, fortunately, most people don't hold it. LOAC is a useful guide for them.
Yeah, I think of it as Dred Scott logic. We see this pop up in all sorts of places.
Here's some text. It reads more like an indictment than a justification today, imo.
In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.
It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
And in no nation was this opinion more firmly fixed or more uniformly acted upon than by the English Government and English people. They not only seized them on the coast of Africa, and sold them or held them in slavery for their own use; but they took them as ordinary articles of merchandise to every country where they could make a profit on them, and were far more extensively engaged in this commerce than any other nation in the world.
The opinion thus entertained and acted upon in England was naturally impressed upon the colonies they founded on this side of the Atlantic. And, accordingly, a negro of the African race was regarded by them as an article of property, and held, and bought and sold as such, in every one of the thirteen colonies which united in the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards formed the Constitution of the United States.
252 giving Hamas exactly what they want, a lot of civilian deaths and casualties. This is fighting stupid but it's the IDF so 🤷♂️
252 giving Hamas exactly what they want, a lot of civilian deaths and casualties. This is fighting stupid but it's the IDF so 🤷♂️
Poisoning the food and water of one's enemy is still okay, right? A time-honored, customary tactic.
I assume 465/6 is to 452, but 252 may also be relevant context.
Use of chemical weapons is banned but that hasn't stopped Russia https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/have-chemical-weapons-been-used-ukraine
and the Geneva Protocol is, according to the expressed reservations of some signatories (including Ukraine), a NFU agreement rather than an outright ban.
Oh, did you think that was a gotcha? I am sorry.
Well, whether it's a mistake or not is a different discussion...
464: That's really a remarkable thing. I hadn't seen that before.
47q. Yeah, Dred Scott is a perfect indictment of originalism. Ok, he's ignoring Quakers, and others, but his history does fairly capture the ptb on both sides of the Atlantic.
And yet the case was wrongly decided, because we grow into the language of our constitution.
As I wonder if kids in Gaza are getting water or dying of thirst, it may interest some of you to know that I think of the kids who died of thirst in the siege of Mariupol on a more or less weekly basis. I don't know if 461 is right, but "wtf do you even say?" does seem like the only response to that. I will post a link about water in Gaza from my laptop.
Possibly functional gift link: Amira Hass in Haaretz. If not:
Annual water consumption in Gaza is about 110 million cubic meters. According to Gisha, the human rights center that focuses on the situation in Gaza and is in constant contact with the water departments in Gazan towns, this is about 85 percent of the quantity required for human needs.
This water stems from three sources. The first is the coastal aquifer, from which about 85 million cubic meters are pumped annually through about 300 drillings and wells. This is the only water reservoir in the Strip and has been over-pumped for decades, because of population growth. This aquifer is being contaminated by seawater and sewage intrusion, hence its water is not potable and must be purified. In many places it isn't even safe for washing. Very few people can afford to wash themselves in purchased purified water.
A second source is three seawater desalination stations established thanks to donations from the international community and in collaboration with the Palestinian Authority. They produce about 8 million cubic meters of water a year and during ordinary times, supply about 300,000 people in the Strip.
The third source is water from the national Israeli water company Mekorot. The PA pays for it (by means of automatic deduction from the customs fees that Israel charges for imported goods destined for the Palestinian area). About two years ago, the quantity that was purchased was 15 million cubic meters per day, and according to Gisha, on the eve of the war the quantity increased to about 18 million cubic meters annually.
But the use of all three water sources depends on a regular supply of electricity and stockpiled fuel to operate generators. Therefore even during "ordinary" times the water supply is irregular and is not a daily occurrence, because the electricity supply doesn't meet the needs in the Strip either.
The fact that the war began on (more or less) Shemini Atzeret is a particularly bitter irony in light of all this.
If anyone wants to do a rundown of terrible drinking water situations worldwide, nothing should hold you back.
When a people have been displaced and traumatized by another for generations, squeezed into an open air prison, regularly subjected to the brutality of airstrikes and general occupation by an overwhelming power that routinely flouts its own obligations to international law, I think its disingenuous to expect its radicalized resistance movement to adhere to the LOAC when striking against their tormentors. Maybe those are the rules of war that "civilized states" have come to agree on, but the civilized states have long since deserted Palestine to its fate.
If Palestinians don't feel they've been protected by the LOAC, why should they feel an obligation to observe it?
quantity that was purchased was 15 million cubic meters per day, and according to Gisha, on the eve of the war the quantity increased to about 18 million cubic meters annually.
I wonder if Hamas was stocking up?
Not intended as a gotcha, just rage at the entire situation. Cutting off water in particular is truly beyond the pale and comparisons to Russia's actions in Ukraine are telling.
When they rewrite the book on "blowback" October 7 should be at the top of the list.
I thought the water supply had been reopened? Didn't Biden come to some agreement with the Israelis to reopen it?
Anyway, as the article says, it isn't so much that Gaza depends on Israel for water - Gaza supplies most of its own water, but it needs fuel and electricity to purify it. It gets electricity from Israel (not any more) and from its own power station (now apparently out of action for lack of fuel).
One pump opened last I saw and as you point out, no fuel to run it. I've seen a lot of reports of people still not having water.
475: the real problem with this argument - essentially a doctrine that the more justified you feel, the more you can get away with - is that the easiest person in the world to kid is yourself. Everyone thinks they're justified. Eichmann thought he was justified! It would be weird to wake up in the morning and think "I have no possible justification for this, so I will do it!" Not only will people convince themselves they're justified, they'll come up with any amount of sophistry to justify themselves after the event when the damage is done, so this is a license for any amount of violence by literally anyone.
[As an exercise, consider applying this to private life and then never think about this horrific nightmare ever again.]
Presumably the idea is that you could plead in your defence that your cause was really nice but the problem is by then, the damage is done. I am also concerned that you seem to assume that greater cruelty leads monotonically to greater success, so the only obstacle to victory is one's saintly self-restraint in not doing too many war crimes - not least because the latter half of that sentence is literally a long-standing talking point for the IDF official spokesman.
480: The other point is that the logical follow-on from 475.last is "Well, how much protection do you reckon the Israelis think they've been getting from LOAC recently? With the hostage-taking, and the mass killings of civilians, and the targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure, and the indiscriminate bombing, and the torture of POWs, and so on? And what implication does that have, under your argument, for how they should feel able to behave?"
And what implication does that have, under your argument, for how they should feel able to behave?"
I think they have demonstrated how they feel they should be able to behave. Monstrously. What they are upset about is that the Palestinians have come to a similar conclusion.
I am also concerned that you seem to assume that greater cruelty leads monotonically to greater success, so the only obstacle to victory is one's saintly self-restraint in not doing too many war crimes
What I am saying is that the Palestinians are a traumatized people and are operating under a morality that is different from the western values we are trying to project upon them. Blaming them for not fighting a just war - when they have long been victims of a war the entire western sphere claims to be just - is not actually constructive toward building peace.
Amanda Marcotte nailed this one, I think. https://www.salon.com/2023/10/19/jim-jordans-curious-rise-a-tale-of-how-christian-nationalism-consumed-the/
I think history shows that both institutions and individuals who will commit atrocities under traumatic circumstances will generally also commit them in not so traumatic circumstances.
And vice versa. Algonquin indians didn't start massacring settlers when the settlers started massacring them, for example.
Hamas are what they are, likudniks are what they are.
Hamas are what they are, likudniks are what they are.
Right, but the US has a policy of condemning Hamas while supporting likudniks. I think that's way off base.
Jordan loses on his third try. (Vote count in progress, but already 10 votes against.)
It's all very disgraceful, of course, but it's nice to see the Dems have some fun. The NYT reports:
After Chavez-Deremer's vote, a member on the Democratic side of the chamber loudly says, "We can stop right here if you want."
He's losing by more than last time.
His opponents said they planned that, holding back some opposition in earlier rounds, to drive the narrative that his position was only getting worse. Good thing being speaker doesn't involve skills like knowing who in your caucus is going to vote for things.
What I am saying is that the Palestinians are a traumatized people and are operating under a morality that is different from the western values we are trying to project upon them
Congratulations on being incredibly racist in two different ways in the same sentence!
(Way one: ascribing attributes of a small number of people within a racial group to the group as a whole. "All Blacks are criminals", "Tibetans are so spiritual", "Japanese are all short-sighted" etc. HAMAS is not the same as "Palestinians" and most Palestinians abhor HAMAS.)
(Way two: dehumanising a racial group by exaggerating or inventing fundamental differences. "Natives don't feel pain in the same way as white people." "The black mind just isn't rational." Morality is not fundamentally different in Palestine than elsewhere.)
I don't think it's true that most Palestinians abhor Hamas, for example they recently had a 57% positive rating in Gaza (52% West Bank, 64% East Jerusalem).
Many Palestinians are opposed to Hamas, and even more have ambiguous opinions about Hamas, but they're not particularly unpopular as far as major political parties go.
Oops, link:
Another domino falls. Per the WaPo:
Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty to a single felony count of conspiracy to file false documents, and faces a prison sentence of one to five years. He also agreed to truthfully testify in the case against others.
483: Do you have, like, a scale of how much indignation frees you from which provisions in the Geneva Conventions? If I'm really butthurt about a World Cup qualifier, can I have prisoners of war of officer rank work in a nonsupervisory capacity, or should I restrict myself to causing slightly more material damage to cultural monuments than is proportionate to the concrete and direct military advantage so obtained?
I stand corrected. HAMAS is acting with the support and approval of most Palestinians. How nice.
Yeah, and Likud is operating with the approval of most Israelis. And of the two, Likud has far more agency, which gives them the lions share of responsibility for the situation.
Thanks for skipping past my previous point to call me a racist.
That is... not what that poll says. Like, at all.
498 to 496. The poll says a majority approves of Hamas in general but a larger majority disapproves of them taking violent action against Israel. (In the abstract; the poll was conducted this summer before all this stuff happened.)
496 that's not what it says, it's worth reading the whole thing (although how they did polling under current conditions is unclear)
"According to the latest Washington Institute polling, conducted in July 2023, Hamas's decision to break the ceasefire was not a popular move. While the majority of Gazans (65%) did think it likely that there would be "a large military conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza" this year, a similar percentage (62%) supported Hamas maintaining a ceasefire with Israel. Moreover, half (50%) agreed with the following proposal: "Hamas should stop calling for Israel's destruction, and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders." Moreover, across the region, Hamas has lost popularity over time among many Arab publics. This decline in popularity may have been one of the motivating factors behind the group's decision to attack."
Do you have, like, a scale of how much indignation frees you from which provisions in the Geneva Conventions?
Hamas is not actually a signatory to the Geneva Convetions. The State of Palestine is, but Israel doesn't recognize the State of Palestine.
Sure, but you've got to operationalize this somehow.
I would add that, in general, the Geneva Conventions do a really shitty job of protecting the rights of national liberation movements. That is by design. So its a bit much to expect the national liberation movements to go along.
Sure, but you've got to operationalize this somehow.
I have a hard time saying that Hamas should be bound by a treaty it has never signed on to. Israel never signed on to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Should they be bound to it?
So what was it you particularly wanted to do, in any case?
An interesting subplot here is that the Saudis are pushing back hard against Hamas. (Note that the Hamas guy's response when she asks about targeting civilians is to say they don't do that, not that it's justified.)
So what was it you particularly wanted to do, in any case?
I want for Israel to negotiate directly and in good faith with Hamas and the Palestinian people, to admit and atone for their own atrocities, and not to use countervailing Palestinian atrocities as an excuse for turning away from the hard work of peace building.
499, 500: that is a relief. Thank you!
It was depressing to see anyone arguing that most Palestinians support mass murder because their brains work in a fundamentally different way from ours and they don't have any moral sense of the kind we are familiar with. It was rather weird to see the argument coming from a *supporter* of Palestine.
I'm fine with cutting out Hamas and not negotiating with them, it just means you have to let Marwan Barghouti out of jail and negotiate with him.
Anyway, sorry if i introduced confusion above, absolutely agree with 499, 500, that Hamas although Hamas is reasonably popular for a ruling party, breaking the ceasefire was unpopular. I have no insight into whether that's made Hamas less popular or whether it's led to a "rally around the flag" making them more popular despite people disagreeing with their attack.
It's trivial, but to 476: I'm actually not sure how to read that sentence, i.e. whether it's claiming a sudden surge in water use right before the war or if it's more generally making a 2021 vs. 2023 comparison. (That and the "a day" vs. "annually" error makes me think not a lot of care was taken in phrasing, which is clearly a war crime in itself.)
510 preventing such negotiations with a popular and credible leader is exactly why he's been imprisoned these many years
This bit of the poll was less reassuring:
But it is organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Lion's Den that receive the most widespread popular support in Gaza. About three quarters of Gazans express support for both groups, including 40% who see the Lion's Den in a "very positive" light, an attitude shared by a similar percentage of West Bank residents. Moreover, when it comes to Iran, which has strongly supported and potentially helped coordinate the attack, about half of Gazans view Tehran as either a "friend of the country" (29%) or security partner (28%), compared to less than a third of West Bankers who would say the same.
I took a second look at comment 16 and now I too am curious.
(Note that the Hamas guy's response when she asks about targeting civilians is to say they don't do that, not that it's justified.)
Hamas and Israel routinely violate the LOAC, but both understand they are bound by the LOPR.
Historically, in its violent attacks, Hamas has generally targeted adults, whom the group sees as legitimate targets. Though it has also indiscriminately targeted civilians through rocket attacks or suicide bombings, the group views these civilian casualties as collateral damage. This time, however, was different. The group's decision to explicitly target vulnerable groups like children and the elderly last weekend seemingly represents a major pivot in Hamas' strategy.(I saw some Washington Institute polling a while ago and went back and forth before not posting because I can't evaluate whether their politics contaminates the polls they commission.)
183: i really appreciate that, Teo.
516: "A woman can go out to fight the enemy without her husband's permission, and so does the slave: without his master's permission."
Brought up short by this; I wonder if Hamas is the last surviving government in the world whose constitution endorses slavery? Even Mali amended its constitution a few years ago.
It was more the murderous trees that got me.
Sheikh Yassin did look very like Christopher Lee playing Saruman. Clearly they had similar views on the menace of the international Entish conspiracy.
And yet it's Israel which typically uproots Palestinian olive groves.
Hence the murderousness. And yes, Ajay, olive trees do have fundamentally different brains than people do.
Quick interruption of daily threads: I suddenly remembered an organization I basically trust doing work on the ground in Gaza. Donate if you like, or not; either way, this is what it's like right now: https://www.mecaforpeace.org/gaza-diaries-who-can-live-like-this-wafaas-updates-by-phone/