Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 3 Posts
  • 961 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • human beings with consciences

    That’s never stopped us humans before. Germans are nice people, too. And Palestinians, for that matter - and yet Oct. 7 happened. Regardless of what the Torah says, we’re not special of different from the rest.

    Look, it’s easy enough to make make wild assumptions, but at that point you’re on the same level with the one-state-solution people. I want my government to treat this like every other international ethnic conflict, because that’s what it is. Putting the Bosnians or Serbs individually in charge of the former Yugoslavia wouldn’t have been good, and neither will helping the Israelis do whatever they want.


  • Modern industrial economies are really complicated. I like trains. To make trains, you need parts, labour, equipment and power. They themselves need to be made, which uses parts, labour, equipment and power, and meanwhile you have competing uses of all those things for making, I dunno, printing presses, or for completely different things like farming or art curating. If you drew it all out as a diagram it would get super interconnected super fast.

    Meanwhile, even a simple binary choice like which of two lots a rehab center should go on can be very politically complicated. Anarchists like to handwave it away with “we’ll figure it out together”, and I really don’t find that convincing.

    Markets offer a system that’s proven to work insofar as if you need to buy a train or a hair clip or lunch someone’s always selling it. How do you guarantee that, or something similar?


  • Is that why Israel keeps telling Gazans and Lebanese people to move out of target areas?

    I agree that propaganda is bad, but both sides make it. That’s why I like hard numbers so much.

    It’s clear they want to look merciful, especially to their Western patrons. You’ll recall that the Nazis had a voluntary emigration program at first, and then blamed anyone still around for not leaving. (Israel isn’t the Nazis, but maybe Yugoslavia)

    As for your numbered plan, I feel like it makes some unrealistic assumptions. Like that step 1 is possible, and that Israel won’t keep building out settlements instead of actually helping Palestine. It’s basically Likud’s publicly announced plan, which the IDF leadership itself doesn’t buy.

    In practice, if they try that, insurgent activity will never stop, and the Israeli occupation will never turn into a strong Palestinian state. It’s just a matter of time then before Israelis get tired of it and contemplate something more extreme, as a minority already openly are.












  • Vague insofar as it’s totally left to courts and individuals to interpret what the exact threshold of disproportional is. That’s why there’s a cottage industry in dissecting the ethics of every individual thing the US did in it’s recent wars. Damage and casualties are extremely lopsided here, though, even if you argue the lopsidedness is justified somehow.

    I was trying to include the nuances to be fair to you, but apparently that was just confusing.

    Have you heard of the Geneva Conventions?

    The main mention is Article 57, called Precautions in Attack, and it has this nice little section:

    1. No provision of this Article may be construed as authorizing any attacks against the civilian population, civilians or civilian objects.

    From a Westpoint academy article I just stumbled on, on proportionality:

    The rule of proportionality requires that the anticipated incidental loss of human life and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective.

    The military objective here being a few Hamas fighters sprinkled around, and civilians and civilian objects being all of Gaza. I’m now pretty certain there isn’t a loophole based on what you’re doing or thinking at the time, like you seem to be suggesting.