Well, Hamas specifically has rejected a 2 state solution twice in recent history. Their official stance is to not negotiate for it and instead kill all jews and end the state of Israel. There’s no chance at peace til Hamas is gone, rightwing Israeli government is gone, and Iran’s nutjob religious class no longer control the state and export its cancer around the world.

So you agree with the IDF in that targeting civilians is self defense?

Or are we playing pedantic games again where we try to rationalize bad things by wearing victimized status one moment while murdering children the next? Maybe the IDF and Hamas are both responsible. Hamas aren’t freedom fighters like my fellow lefties are making them out to be. They want a theonomic system. And they have one.

I’m going to guess they wouldn’t kill the men and then rape, murder, and dismember the women and children on video to post it in celebration.

But maybe I’m wrong. With reductionism, anything is justifiable.

Citi Bank took my parents’ home and thus any inheritance the family had coming. So one can theoretically go murder those executives’ children as compensation and be morally right, yes? Or is putting in more identifiable terms highlighting how insane that logic actually is?

Native Americans can invade American preschools and cut the throats of all the toddlers similar to what Hamas has uploaded to the internet with Israeli kids, yes?

Don’t you see the slippery slope and immoral position you hold here?

Bad people love to wear the mantle of victim because it justifies all the evil shit they do.

Exactly. I’m a far-leftist, and I’m as disgusted with leftist hot takes the same way I was when poor old defenseless Russia invaded Ukraine and started murdering their children.

I’ve blocked and purged so many leftist creators in 24 hours it is unreal. Spreading legit anti-Semitic (really anti-Jew) conspiracy theories (“curious how nobody stopped it” and the like). Reframing these terrorists as freedom fighters like you said. Blaming this on the U.S. somehow (because we made Iran do this via Hamas as proxy; but Iran has clean hands don’t worry they are just another oppressed peoples).

Far too many leftists, like their right wing nut counterparts, are contrarians at heart. This is what happens when political ideology becomes a personality trait; it becomes akin to a religion.

So thoroughly disgusted by it all. Bad enough what’s happening over there in Israel and Palestine right now; bad enough with all the innocent lives being lost; but then to justify industrial grade rape and murder of men, women, and children? And cheer Palestinians on as they record, edit, and upload their barbarity?

I’d like to believe that a lot of it are disinformation ops, but the sad reality is probably that a fair number of people have nothing left to live for because their lives are shit so the world burning down for others isn’t such a big deal for them.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

Interesting to see if this reverses the beginning stages of some EU countries pushing back against supporting Ukraine (specifically Poland, which was a shocker for me). I’m sure that bit was all very real Politik what with their elections coming up and domestic issues to handle… but still. The U.S. is one bad election away from permitting expansive war in Europe. And some European countries are seemingly tiring of Ukraine taking the hits for them?