Jewish Tunnels

[woolfe9998]

There is nothing aspirational about enlightenment as you put it. My experience was only made possible by the death of all hope, all aspirations if you will Neither by blood, nationality, religion am I anything. They all failed to save me from Nothing, the existential no exit that haunts us were you but aware of that feeling. All proved empty of value or meaning, all a wasted misplacement identity.

So it has nothing to do really as to what I desire because in the real world you claim to represent your way will lead to extinction and mine to the joy of being. That is just how it is. It only happens that I know it. The same will always become obvious who any who seek to know why they suffer.

May your needs to defend your position break on the rocks you face.

I am happy not to feel any need to defend a political system that bombs women and children in sufficiently small numbers that the term genocide can be argued not to apply. Hope some day you will join me. I still remember what hope was like.

I'm not defending a "political system." I explained the reality of that system to you, to wit, that no leader of a democracy is going to do nothing after an attack of that magnitude. Which is quite obviously an accurate description of the real world of politics.

The bolded is rank straw mannery, and it's pretty offensive even as straw mannery goes. Nowhere have I espoused some weird binary view where anything not genocide is A-OK. Yet you're the second person now who has tried to get away with pinning that fictional argument on me.

To be clear, this started with you and several others repeatedly using this word "genocide" in relationship to Israel. I then asked for proof of the accusation. I made several arguments. Now you claim I'm using genocide as a semantic trick to hide lesser crimes? Really? Yet I'm not the one who repeatedly used the word to begin with. I just wanted to discuss whether it was really accurate. Because, in addition to its formal definition, it also has a particularly nasty connotation, like worse than calling someone a racist or child molester. That sort of language is a form of aggression, be it deserved or not. I just thought that since this kind of language tends to blacken the accused, maybe the allegation should be made with a little more care than people just throwing it around because of their politics and their feels.

Anyway, I'll cut from this thread as I did the other. There's no further value I an add here beyond whatever I have said maybe getting through to someone sometime.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'm not defending a "political system." I explained the reality of that system to you, to wit, that no leader of a democracy is going to do nothing after an attack of that magnitude. Which is quite obviously an accurate description of the real world of politics.

The bolded is rank straw mannery, and it's pretty offensive even as straw mannery goes. Nowhere have I espoused some weird binary view where anything not genocide is A-OK. Yet you're the second person now who has tried to get away with pinning that fictional argument on me.

To be clear, this started with you and several others repeatedly using this word "genocide" in relationship to Israel. I then asked for proof of the accusation. I made several arguments. Now you claim I'm using genocide as a semantic trick to hide lesser crimes? Really? Yet I'm not the one who repeatedly used the word to begin with. I just wanted to discuss whether it was really accurate. Because, in addition to its formal definition, it also has a particularly nasty connotation, like worse than calling someone a racist or child molester. That sort of language is a form of aggression, be it deserved or not. I just thought that since this kind of language tends to blacken the accused, maybe the allegation should be made with a little more care than people just throwing it around because of their politics and their feels.

Anyway, I'll cut from this thread as I did the other. There's no further value I an add here beyond whatever I have said maybe getting through to someone sometime.

How is it not equivalent to defending a political system by saying it's reality that democratic systems will always act that way. What does right and wrong have to do with what political systems do? If you just say that's how it is and comfort yourself that what Israel is doing isn't genocide shouldn't you be protesting the fact that the government there is bombing innocent women and children? I really think what you are doing is siege mentality, reflexively defending Israel out of personal sympathy for what has happened in the historical past. I think a significant proportion of the antipathy that we are seeing in the news today comes not from antisemitism, but because they don't have a bias. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians sucks and that imbecile Biden helped them to do it. Hamas fanatics committed heinous terrorists acts, a fanaticism produced in good part by they way Israel has caged them up like animals and the US gets involved via a Democratic Party President that now I can no longer morally support with my vote.

And as far as personal attacks. My bet is that you have as I suggested, a siege mental condition whereby automatically feel that everything is an attack. In my opinion we have far more in common than how we differ. You are the one who lives in reality, remember. You can't see what I call reality. I see what I see purely by accident or certainly for reasons that are beyond me. How could I possible blame you for not seeing what I do. I can tell you what I think you don't see but it's nobody's fault if you don't see it. I described the conditions I needed to deal with to see what I see, what I call real.

 

[Greenman]

I'm not defending a "political system." I explained the reality of that system to you, to wit, that no leader of a democracy is going to do nothing after an attack of that magnitude. Which is quite obviously an accurate description of the real world of politics.

The bolded is rank straw mannery, and it's pretty offensive even as straw mannery goes. Nowhere have I espoused some weird binary view where anything not genocide is A-OK. Yet you're the second person now who has tried to get away with pinning that fictional argument on me.

To be clear, this started with you and several others repeatedly using this word "genocide" in relationship to Israel. I then asked for proof of the accusation. I made several arguments. Now you claim I'm using genocide as a semantic trick to hide lesser crimes? Really? Yet I'm not the one who repeatedly used the word to begin with. I just wanted to discuss whether it was really accurate. Because, in addition to its formal definition, it also has a particularly nasty connotation, like worse than calling someone a racist or child molester. That sort of language is a form of aggression, be it deserved or not. I just thought that since this kind of language tends to blacken the accused, maybe the allegation should be made with a little more care than people just throwing it around because of their politics and their feels.

Anyway, I'll cut from this thread as I did the other. There's no further value I an add here beyond whatever I have said maybe getting through to someone sometime.

I'm a little surprised by this response. You've been around long enough to understand that P&N is binary, you're a herd member or an outcast.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

More than fuck ups. Our government literally lied as justification for going to war in Iraq, and there's probably a million dead there who would be alive now had we not started a war under completely false pretenses.

You're right, number of deaths doesn't determine if something is a genocide. Intent does. So far as whether Israel has the intent that you are inferring here, I would point out that based on Palestinian population growth of 2.5% consistently since the early 90's, they added about 1.5 million population since the hot conflict started with Israel in 2000. Israel at his point has killed about 45,000 Palestinians during that 23 year period. That is less the one 30th of the number added by birthrate alone during that time, and even this year, which is by far the most Israel has killed, is about one-sixth of their expected pop growth. One would think that anyone having the intent you suggest would actually try to make a demographic dent in the targeted population. Or maybe they're just responding to attacks, in the same disproportionate manner that we've always responded to them.

It's not just that you have to reply on circumstantial evidence. It's that you also have to ignore facts on the ground which contradict the inference.

Just because they're bad at it doesn't mean it wasn't genocide, or at minimum extreme repression. The intent was still there.

Ask yourself, what would they have done if international pressure didn't exist?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I'm a little surprised by this response. You've been around long enough to understand that P&N is binary, you're a herd member or an outcast.

No, when you say fucked up shit that you know people don't agree with, that makes you an outcast. You don't get to snigger in the corner at how much of a rebel you are when you squatted yourself over there.

 

[Greenman]

No, when you say fucked up shit that you know people don't agree with, that makes you an outcast. You don't get to snigger in the corner at how much of a rebel you are when you squatted yourself over there.

"Fucked up shit" in the context of P&N means I disagree with the herd. I don't have any idea what anything in the second sentence means.

 

[IronWing]

Meanwhile, back to the topic of this thread, the tunnel thing is still funny and I still have every intention of making fun of the nutjobs who dug it.

 

[kage69]

I kind of get it though, to an extent. Antisemitism, like a lot of bad things, has spiked ever since 2016. I suppose I can't blame any Jewish community for wanting a secret avenue of emergency egress, not after a magat murdered 11 people in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

This would be an example of how not to go about doing that though. Well designed safe rooms, exits, some effective front door security measures - would all have been far more legal (and safer), certainly nothing to scrap with cops about.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

You really "don't understand" the point I was making? You know, where you argued that Israel had an intent to commit genocide based on reasons you gave, and I argued in response that a country wanting to commit genocide isn't going to be so bad at it that the target population is growing fast, faster in fact than the populations of most countries in this world. That argument is confusing you?

Well, I guess that was better than not replying at all, which is the typical response when I make any argument on this topic.

Regarding your link, I'll wait to see how the UN court rules on it, since the matter is pending. I will mention, however, that the UN has already rejected the accusation that our treatment of African Americans over hundreds of years of slavery and lynching was a genocide under that same standard.

-I don't. Someone being bad or constrained from doing something doesn't mean they're not trying to do it. If I try to murder someone and am just so spectacularly bad at it, I am still culpable for my actions. If I try to overthrow the government and fail, I am still a traitor and insurectionist.

It's not a perpetual accusation either. Israel has definitely tried in the past to work toward a Palestinian homeland while limiting displacement and casualties in their retaliatory strikes. But those were different governments with different leaders who publicly said very different things.

Israel under the leadership of Likud has definitely gone much further, while having ministers and other officials say some very questionable things, than prior Israeli admins.

 

[brycejones]

"Fucked up shit" in the context of P&N means I disagree with the herd. I don't have any idea what anything in the second sentence means.

Actually in your case, it has more to do with you repeatedly posting factually incorrect "information" or being willfully ignorant and unwilling to learn.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'm a little surprised by this response. You've been around long enough to understand that P&N is binary, you're a herd member or an outcast.

What you express here in my opinion is the result of the same thing I was trying to suggest may be operating with woolfe, siege mentality, a kind of hyper sensitivity to being marked out as different that becomes a fixed reflex of one’s character, a persecution complex that evokes atypical and defensive reactions among others who do not have such hot buttons that can be pressed. wolfe, for example, left the thread, I think, because of the sense that others don’t understand him and that all differences are always hated by those lacking a minority groups understanding.

But I think we can see in Israel proper what happens when the majority of voters or a minority of authoritarians hold military power seeing the world through that paranoid view.

Conservatives think the same about liberals. They are out to use logic to destroy conservative’s paranoid state. Liberals are seen by conservatives to be dangerously naive, and unaware just how evil people who are not kept under strict discipline can be.
That is all the result of being made to conform to the local version of insane morality they grew up under as children.

You are not the enemy to me and neither is he. The enemy is that in me that wants to see you that way, to find something different about you to justify hate. The evil is in me and I want to justify feeling it rather than feel the pain I suffered by being warned what it would be like to be different.

Everybody is different any yet all the same. Which do you choose to emphasize?

 

[Paratus]

You really "don't understand" the point I was making? You know, where you argued that Israel had an intent to commit genocide based on reasons you gave, and I argued in response that a country wanting to commit genocide isn't going to be so bad at it that the target population is growing fast, faster in fact than the populations of most countries in this world. That argument is confusing you?

Well, I guess that was better than not replying at all, which is the typical response when I make any argument on this topic.

Regarding your link, I'll wait to see how the UN court rules on it, since the matter is pending. I will mention, however, that the UN has already rejected the accusation that our treatment of African Americans over hundreds of years of slavery and lynching was a genocide under that same standard.

I find this an exceptionally poor argument. Nazi Germany took several years to ramp up their genocide. In the first few years population growth would have outstripped their genocide of the “undesirables “ until the camps were in full swing.

Arguing it’s a not a genocide because they aren’t killing enough civilians is really poor justification. The appropriate number of civilians killed is as few as possible or zero.

 

[feralkid]

I thought this was a thread about tunnels.

 

[crashtech]

I used to think people that were sympathetic to the people of Gaza and the West Bank were just kind-hearted and ignorant of history.
I used to think the vitriol directed at Israel for defending their people against constant violence was similarly misguided.
I used to think that Jews who talked a lot about antisemitism were either mistaken, or paranoid.
I longer think any of these things.
What a shocking eye-opener the last few months have been.

 

[IronWing]

I used to think people that were sympathetic to the people of Gaza and the West Bank were just kind-hearted and ignorant of history.
I used to think the vitriol directed at Israel for defending their people against constant violence was similarly misguided.
I used to think that Jews who talked a lot about antisemitism were either mistaken, or paranoid.
I longer think any of these things.
What a shocking eye-opener the last few months have been.

Glad to read that you've disabused yourself of all three of those ridiculous notions.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'm shocked at how casual people have been of the displacement and mass killing of tens of thousands of civilians.

Oh well.

"The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic"

 

[Moonbeam]

I used to think people that were sympathetic to the people of Gaza and the West Bank were just kind-hearted and ignorant of history.
I used to think the vitriol directed at Israel for defending their people against constant violence was similarly misguided.
I used to think that Jews who talked a lot about antisemitism were either mistaken, or paranoid.
I longer think any of these things.
What a shocking eye-opener the last few months have been.

Are you shocked by no longer believing those things or by what you now believe instead? A lot of times, it seems to me that when people make statements like yours they arre implying that what they believe now is the opposite, but if so I am having trouble deciding what the opposite would be. For example I read the opposite as:

I think people are sympathetic to Gaza and the West Bank because they are cruel-hearted and know history, or unsympathetic for those reasons etc.

If you have changed your mind and now have new opinions perhaps you could just say what they are

 

[crashtech]

In short, since asked, I would say that I now believe that antisemitism is a pernicious mind virus that infects even those who were considered the enlightened among us. What not long ago appeared to be a fringe belief turns out to have fully infected the institutions we used to rely on for sense-making. What this means is that many of the people we used to look to for guidance on the question of Israel's existence not only can't be trusted now, but that they should never have been trusted. It also has become apparent that the groups with the strongest hatred of the West also seem to be the ones that hate Israel the most.

 

[cytg111]

I'm a little surprised by this response. You've been around long enough to understand that P&N is binary, you're a herd member or an outcast.

That is obviously not true. Well obvious to anyone else.
Your problem is that you identify your pronouns as independent/centrist while you're in fact far *far* more to the right than you like to believe... and from over there this coalition of peeps left of center just looks like a blob to you.

 

[cytg111]

In short, since asked, I would say that I now believe that antisemitism is a pernicious mind virus that infects even those who were considered the enlightened among us. What not long ago appeared to be a fringe belief turns out to have fully infected the institutions we used to rely on for sense-making. What this means is that many of the people we used to look to for guidance on the question of Israel's existence not only can't be trusted now, but that they should never have been trusted. It also has become apparent that the groups with the strongest hatred of the West also seem to be the ones that hate Israel the most.

Well, all that OR maybe people are having human reactions to videos of baby seal clubbing and exercising freedom of speech to express that. Or is freedom of speech only applicable to Elon Musk's White Supremacy twitz?

 

[Xcobra]

The whole 'they haven't killed enough Palestinians, yet, seeee?!!' argument is laughable at best. But no point in engaging with such crazy, biased views.

Back on topic, it's funny they actually got into a fistfight with the NYPD over this illegality 😂

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm a little surprised by this response. You've been around long enough to understand that P&N is binary, you're a herd member or an outcast.

I wonder if you have to apply all your concentration to not learning obvious lessons from your interactions with this forum.

 

[IronWing]

In short, since asked, I would say that I now believe that antisemitism is a pernicious mind virus that infects even those who were considered the enlightened among us. What not long ago appeared to be a fringe belief turns out to have fully infected the institutions we used to rely on for sense-making. What this means is that many of the people we used to look to for guidance on the question of Israel's existence not only can't be trusted now, but that they should never have been trusted. It also has become apparent that the groups with the strongest hatred of the West also seem to be the ones that hate Israel the most.

So you decided to double down on your own biases and called it a day. You do you.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Underground Deli?


(Subway ... sandwich ... get it?)




Never mind.

 

[dank69]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're leaving out the incident that started this, just like all the people calling it a genocide are. People are extremely angry right now in Israel. And while some comments to the media are intemperate or even horrible, Israel's conduct here is consistent with a mission to destroy the organization who perpetrated the act and has recently vowed to continue doing so, and I haven't seen anyone calling this genocide offer a better solution. They seem to want Israel to do nothing at all, or even suddenly grant the Palestinians a state as a reward for killing 1200 people.

Bear in mind, many of these same people have been accusing Israel of genocide for 20+ years, ever since their first military responses to the suicide bombings that started in 2000. For them, any response of Israel to terrorism is too much. Any death is a "genocide."

Looking back on how the US handled 9/11, plenty of people criticized the administration for telling lies to justify the Iraq war. We were criticized also for being incompetent, and for Abu Graib. Strangely enough, civilian deaths have never been high on the list of points of interest relative to either that war or Afghanistan. Apparently people just assumed that in war there are going to he lots of civilian deaths. And while some activists and organizations took an interest in civilian casualties, it was never at the forefront of discussion or debate, at least not to my knowledge as someone who has been involved in such debates on 4 discussions boards for over 20 years. I can't honestly recall a single person making the proportionality argument, that we lost 3000 people on 9/11 and killed 270,000 civilians in response. And that BTW is only the number of people we killed directly. Some estimates put the number at 600,000+ in Iraq as consequential deaths, i.e. deaths from ISIS, etc.

I think there are people here who have, let's say, an inconsistent world view, where they think to apply the most strident labels to one country and never even think to do so for others, including their own. That inconsistency is a product of bias.

I think the difference is how often the US deliberately targeted dense civilian areas vs how often Israel does. Maybe I am way off. Maybe the US military routinely attacks densely populated civilian areas because "that's the only way." If they do, I condemn that activity equally. If they don't, your equations don't balance. Adding secondary effects like deaths resulting from destabilization seems to me that you recognize your argument needs to be shored up. I suspect your 270,000 figure is not all direct action casualties. A brief scan of Wikipedia says ~3500 civilian direct action deaths in 20 months from 2001 to 2003. How many is Israel on target to accomplish if this goes on for 20 months? How about if it goes on for 20 years?