Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024
On this day in 1620, the Mayflower departed England.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Another day, another Trump assassination attempt.
This one would be even less notable than the first one except for the fact that this guy was *ALSO* in a propaganda video a few months back.Report
It’s also notable in that he was captured alive and he’s apparently a very Pro-Ukraine guy.
I suppose its too soon to talk about how a permissive gun culture and a dismissive mental health culture don’t respond well to rhetoric about political violence being necessary?Report
Hey, I’m just saying that nobody tries to assassinate *GOOD* people.Report
Actually they do. Unless you happen to think MLK doesn’t qualify . . . or Lincoln …Report
Also: Jesus.Report
and Galileo!Report
Galileo’s assassin’s we subtle, you’ve gotta give them that.
“Make it look like a heart attack.”
And they did.Report
I agree. We need to halt all this permissive gun culture that’s killing all the inner city youths who only want to sell their product on the street corner without being harassed by rival groups, most a lot of big city administrations seem ok with not prosecuting them. Wadda ya gonna do?Report
I want to do the unsexy thing of taxing appropriately to fund education for those youths, and making sure they have jobs to go to when they are done. I also want to make it harder to buy guns in the US, including spending money to both enforce current laws and actually study violence patterns with firearms. And finally I want to tax for and then fund quality mental health services that could reduce the number of people who try to commit suicide, so that gun deaths actually drop.Report
“unsexy thing of taxing appropriately to fund education for those youths” The residents of those cities are ALREADY taxed for this…Report
This is why I bring up Baltimore in these education discussions, Phil. By some measures, it’s the 4th most funded school district in the country, spending more than $22k/student.
Recently, they found that 65% of the schools in Baltimore got the lowest possible scores for student testing.
Unless there’s a way to get a handle on the obvious graft and corruption stealing money out of the system in Baltimore, I don’t know that more taxation will help.
The problem is not “how much money are we taxing”.Report
In fairness, that spending was the result of a massive increase in funding 2 years ago (so we’re at the beginning of the 3rd school year). So the interesting question is whether performance has gone up over the last two school years. Unfortunately, we only have the first year (2022-2023) data, and there was some improvement over the previous year, but as pretty much anyone from that district will tell you, a big part of what they need is capital improvements, so that’ll take even longer.
I’m not saying that the school district doesn’t have a problem with misuse of funds, but I am saying we don’t have enough data after the large increase in funding to say whether the funding is helping.Report
I’ve got a story from 2019 talking about how it was the third most funded school system 5 years ago.
A paragraph from the story:
The problem isn’t whether we’re taxing people enough.
The problem is the graft and corruption.Report
Idly curious, I wondered about inflation.
According to the government’s own inflation calculator, 16,184.00 in August 2019 would be worth 19,857.73 in August 2024.
So we can’t say that the spending might be technically higher but inflation took an equivalent bite out of it.
Spending exceeds inflation .Report
$15,000 is around the national average per student in FY22. I’m skeptical that it was in the top 3 3 years earlier. It certainly wouldn’t have been in FY22, when the top large school districts were spending well over $20k per student. This article looking at 2021 spending doesn;t put them in the top 25. I find a bunch of sources that put Baltimore slightly above average before the 2022-2023 school year (a year in which they're still not in the top 3), but I can't find anything that puts them in the top 3. Not saying it's not possible; I'm just deeply skeptical, and your link doesn't link to any source.Report
I think it’s the whole “among the 100 largest” thing.
I remember reading an article where the Baltimore Mayor was saying “that’s not fair, it’s not the 4th most funded in the country! It’s just the 4th most funded out of the largest 100 in the country!”Report
The 2022 link discusses the top 100. Again, no Baltimore near the top. Perhaps they’re using other criteria to determine the top, or just looking at a particular kind of school?
I do believe the extra hundred plus million that Baltimore got at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year (so FY23) would have put them closer to the top, but they’re still outspent by the real big guns (NY, LA, Boston, DC, etc.). I can’t imagine there’s been any time in the last century in which Baltimore has beat out NY, LA, and Boston.Report
I went to the interactive visualization and it said that Maryland was in the 4th Quartile of spending…
Consistently more than $2k above the average for the country.Report
Finding the actual numbers, it looks like Baltimore was in fact 11th among the largest 100 in 2019. Still pretty highly ranked, but not top 4, or top 10.
This per-student spending unfortunately does not make up for what looks like hundreds of millions of dollars in underspending on capital projects (building schools, renovating schools, etc.), and spending on students can’t solve the biggest issue in Baltimore: poverty (75% served with Title 1 funds, almost all students eligible for free or reduced lunch).
Obviously, throwing money at schools isn’t the only solution: if you want to make schools better, you need a lot of money in the schools both for regular school functions and for capital projects, but you also need to seriously address poverty and its symptoms in a district. Throwing money at schools without addressing poverty is easier, though.Report
So it was only the 11th highest of the largest 100 in 2019.
I’m pretty sure that bumping it up to 4th would not, in fact, have helped a whole lot. Even at the time.
Making sure that people are paying more in taxes ain’t gonna fix this.
As for the underspending on capital projects… well, I suppose that that’s where graft and corruption comes into play.
Throwing money at schools without addressing poverty is easier, though.
It seems to be the preferred solution to the point where people will argue for it not matter the circumstances of the current funding.
Even in the face of 2 out of 3 schools receiving the lowest possible score.
For what it’s worth, I can give you the lowest possible score for those schools for a lot lower than 4th Quartile in funding.
I can do it for 3rd Quartile.Report
Is the reason you keep using Baltimore because it is the only talking point you have that matches your priors? Like the one classic grim inner city school district that still exists and you are milking it for all it’s worth? Because if Baltimore is literally the only example of this in a country our size than we are doing a pretty damn good job.Report
No, I keep using Baltimore because it is one of the highest funded school districts in the country.
The argument “we need to increase funding!” is an argument that falls apart when you show a school district with 2 out of 3 schools with the LOWEST POSSIBLE SCORES despite having some of the highest funding in the country.
“Let’s do something else” is the conversation that I continually try to introduce.
And the counter-argument is always “increase funding! Increase funding!”
It’s not a funding problem.Report
The flaw in this logic becomes apparent when you apply it to policing, or national defense.Report
It does? Because I’m pretty sure that the whole “we need to get rid of the corruption and graft” is a pretty easy thing to apply to both policing and national defense.
I mean, if you want an article talking about reforming how policing is done that does not talk about funding levels, I’m pretty sure I can find you one that was written on this very site.Report
OK so we should eliminate the corruption in Baltimore schools while not talking about funding levels.Report
I’d be happy if we could talk about education in Baltimore without someone talking about the need to tax people more. But it always comes up anyway.Report
Its funding is fine. It’s heavily subsidized by the rest of the state which is very, very wealthy. The problem is the students and the problems that they have are not something a school can fix.Report
We’re not prepared for that conversation.
Let’s have the graft/corruption one instead.Report
Heh, fair enough.Report
You realize that violent crime, especially the type leading to great injury and death, is way down from the mid to late 20th century peak, right? Things have changed immensely.Report
There’s more:
“According to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, somebody with Routh’s same full name and date of birth racked up more than a dozen criminal charges in 2001 and 2002, including for carrying a concealed weapon and hit and run.
He also picked up a particularly alarming felony in April 2002 for “possessing a weapon of mass destruction,” records show.”
https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/shooting-reported-at-donald-trumps-golf-club-while-ex-president-was-on-grounds/Report
The guy seems like an obvious nutter without a clear political motive.
But lets assume he had one.
1. Assume for the moment that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to give citizens the ability to overthrow a dictator and water the tree of liberty;
2. Trump has declared his intention to be a dictator;
3. An armed citizen uses his gun to try to overthrow the dictator.
Can an argument be made justifying this?
The strongest argument against assassinating Trump rests on the idea that all the other options have not yet been exhausted, and this is the argument I would make.
Which makes Roberts’ immunity decision all the more ominous because it removes one of the main options for preventing exactly the dictatorship faced by the drafters of the 2nd Amendment.Report
“give citizens the ability to overthrow a dictator”
Assumes said individual is ALREADY in a place of power/been elected so that he could become a dictator, not state that he WOULD be a dictator. This means that the public choice/vote has not yet been exercised and determined, nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.Report
“nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.”
You were asleep on Jan 6, I guess.Report
Many people see legitimately elected Democratic politicians exercising their mandate as dictatorship because reasons. Republicans who try to prevent Democratic action are not dictatorial because they believe Republicans stand for freedom. Naturally, I don’t believe this myself but more than a few Americans see it this way.Report
You and I seem to have wide differences in the definition of “violent gov’t overthrow”. In no was was Jan 6 near a violent attempt. Riot, yes. Hell, there was more violence in Baltimore several years ago when “all that stuff happened”.Report
Really? SO you don’t think the folks who put the gallows up actually intended to hang the VP? Or the ones who forced their way into the Capitol weren’t trying to stop government processes?
Fascinating.Report
I’m not sure what they intended, but the violence well a hell of a lot less than 2015.
“During that 16-day period of rioting and peaceful protests at least 113 police officers were injured and two civilians were shot, 486 people were arrested, and 350 businesses were damaged.”
So, yeah, I’m saying the “freddie grey” riots in bmore were a hell of a lot more violent, and lasted longer, than the Jan 6 riot.Report
A violent, armed mob storms the US capitol on the day they are certifying the election results that make their guy the loser, and you don’t know what they intended?
You live in an interesting reality man.Report
“and you don’t know what they intended”
No, I don’t KNOW what they intended.
Did they intend to hang people or did they intend to intimidate / threaten people, or something else?
You and I can make conclusions, but we can’t KNOW unless you’ve got transcripts from the culprits there stating what they planned to do. Cite?Report
You know how people say don’t point a gun unless you intend to shoot? I imagine the same goes for a gallows.Report
To me the only defense for them is that they were too stupid to understand the ramifications of what they were doing. I don’t buy that for all of them, and it’s also no defense as far as the law is concerned.Report
Actually, I believe the phrase don’t point a gun at someone unless you intend to kill them. At least that’s how I’ve always approached it. YMMV. Regardless, my comments to Phillip was more in the legal aspects, as in what can be proved in a court of law.Report
Since nearly a thousand of them have been convicted of various crimes – including sedition – I actually believe we know the motives.Report
There is a ton of evidence that they intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power. That evidence includes a lot of social media and we have had trials on this subject.
The most troubling part is they were doing this because of Trump’s instigation and as part of a plan to overturn the election.
It is correct to say that there was more violence in Baltimore (etc) than there was at the capital. It’s also correct to point out that attempting to overturn an election is a bigger deal.Report
” This means that the public choice/vote has not yet been exercised and determined, nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.”
buddy, the election had happened and Biden was the winner; that the transfer-of-power ceremony had not yet been held did not mean that Trump wasn’t hoping the normal mechanisms of government would be subverted.Report
Let’s look at who is getting starbursts from Rich Lowry and ignored hot mic moments: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/jd-vances-racist-pogrom-gives-rich-lowry-starburstsReport
For those of us unfamiliar with the lingo of the cesspit that is LG&M, what is a “starburst?”Report
I think that that’s when your pager blows up?Report
The term is taken directly from Rich Lowry’s embarassing masturbatory references to Sarah Palin back in 2008.Report
how dare he start to say the word “migrants”, get confused for a second and think he should have said “immigrants”, then change his mind and keep going with the original word!
clearly racist.Report
SO the price of “safety” in NYC these days is four people shot over a $2.90 subway fair. Gotta love modern policing!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/16/new-york-fare-evasion-shooting/Report
yeah it really does suck how police just randomly pull out their pistols and gun some dude down without warning or notice or even a really good reason, right? like i didn’t read the article or anything but im sure it went down exactly like the people on twitter said it did, it’s only those icky racist Republicans who would leave relevant details out of a story because they want people to think by bellyfeel right?Report
The man jumped a fair gate in the NYC subway. So to start he’s getting hassled over $2.90. And he ended up not being shot when the cops drew their service weapons.Report
Raise the taxes on Wall Street and make the subways free!Report
I seem to recall that the relationship between the state, the city, and the MTA is quite twisted, to the point where implementing something like this becomes next thing to impossible.
I recall times when I worked for the Colorado state legislature on the budget staff and having closed-door discussions with some member of the General Assembly that included things like, “Yes, ma’am. I understand that what you want to do sounds simple. But there are several statutes and a couple of things in the state constitution that are intended to make that sort of flow of funds impossible.”Report
Let’s look at more not so subtle rhetoric from JD Vance: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/jd-vance-laura-loomer-racist-comments-immigration-conspiracyReport
I guess if it takes a Republican doing it for you to learn about “spin”, well, at least now you’ve learned it.Report
lying about immigrants isn’t spin. Its lying that foments real threats to real people living in the US.
Try again.Report
We knew it was coming, I guess. The Wikipedia edit war on “Zionism“.
Report
They haven not managed to do much to the rest of the very long article but the problem with a lack of gate keepers is that Wikipedia is frequently used to fight ideological battles. Generally, I find that Pro-Palestinian activists like direct confrontation in places that have to do with Zionism or Israel or any Pro-Israel memes and posts on social media than Pro-Israel people do. They are relentless. Many of them also get money for doing this.Report
Like many ideological wars against Jewish self-determination, the edited opening manages to make the emergence of Zionism without context. No mention of the anti-Semitism in Europe and exclusion of the Jews where we lived. It is just something that we decided to get up and do on our own because of reasons. These anti-Zionist activists can explain to you at great length why Jewish self-determination is evil but get immensely dense with not understanding why Jews do not like being second class citizens under officially Muslim polities. Even if you assume that Jews are a mere religious group, it should be a no brainer that we don’t want to live as second class citizens of another religious polity.Report
Best of luck with that. Diversity is a strength you should be more willing to embrace.Report
Now if only this diversity was more than a one way street where Jews have to listen to anti-Zionists but anti-Zionists don’t have to listen to Jews.Report
Ah, glad they’re making it more accurate.Report
Your daily dose of GOP voter intimidation, by a county sheriff whose conduct wouldn’t be constrained by ditching qualified immunity:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/16/ohio-harris-walz-political-sign/Report
Ghislaine Maxwell’s convictions and sentence for her Jeffrey Epstein-related sex trafficking and other crimes were affirmed on appeal. The decision itself is entirely about procedural minutiae that only a lawyer could love, so I’ll spare you a link.Report
Hezbollah vows revenge against Israel after a series of pagers used by Hezbollah for communication explodes. This reminds me a lot of the accusations about Israel training dolphins to harm Egypt from several years ago. The amount of conspiracy theorizing in the Muslim world, mainly aimed at Jews, is amazing. It never occurs to them that they might be the messed up ones. Everything that goes wrong for them is the fault of Israel and Jews.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-members-wounded-lebanon-when-pagers-exploded-sources-witnesses-2024-09-17/Report
Seems like a logical operation carried off by Mosad to me. I mean they planted a bomb in Iran months before it killed a terrorist leader so I don’t see why this is such a stretch.Report
It was most likely done by Israel but I find it really difficult to be sympathetic with Hezbollah in this. Hezbollah did not have to enter the Israel-Hamas War on the side of Hamas but they elected to. They are then shocked that Israel retaliates back including after Hezbollah kills a dozen, checks notes, Arab Israeli children with their rockets.
There is a a lot of arrogance that the Islamists and their Further Left sympathizers in the rest have with Jews in general and Israel in particular. They seem genuinely shocked that Israel isn’t just rolling over after the latest glorious push or that Israel strikes back after getting attacked. Even more moderate Muslims seem genuinely confused why Jews don’t want to be subsidiary citizens of an officially Muslim state connected to other officially Muslim states and want a place of our own, which so obviously annoys Muslims to know end and we should really just listen to them.Report
You are the first person I’ve encountered who doesn’t believe that Israel is behind it.Report
The main questions that I have all involve the various logistics.
Okay. So it’s a pager, right? So all of them blew up at the same time (or within a few short minutes of each other… before warnings could have been sent out).
For pagers, this shouldn’t be so tough to do. It’s easy to set it up so that 1000 phone numbers all get called within a minute of each other.
What I’m wondering is if it was a deliberately triggered battery malfunction or whether there were explosives in each of these things.
I’d think that if it were a deliberately triggered battery malfunction that it’d require a handful of things. I imagine that a battery would get really hot before it blew up with that amount of force. So you’d have a minute or so of the pager heating up first. If there is a way to make it happen without getting hot first, I’d think that you’d need some sort of firmware update installed first. Even so, what would the failure rate of inducing this sort of chemical reaction be? How many pager owners fail to fully charge the batteries nightly? Can it blow up a 50% charged battery? 33%?
Does my phone suffers from the same vulnerability?
Now, if it were explosives, then I’d have a handful more questions (but be much more relieved about the possibility that my phone could be similarly targeted)… like, what model of pager was this? At what point would the explosives have to be added to the pager? Could you do it, for example, with a finished pager? Take it apart, put it in there, put it together? Would it be better to put it in there as part of the manufacturing process?
What’s the make and model of the pager?Report
I’m just shocked Hezbollah is carrying pagers. What are they weed dealers in the 90s?Report
Both Google and Twitter are useless for this right now but there was an article a few months back that talked about how low-tech like pagers was a way to circumvent a handful of communication vulnerabilities that cellphones have.
Welp.Report
Found the article. It’s from July 9th of this year.
How Hezbollah used pagers and couriers to counter Israel’s high tech surveillance
I understand that anyone who has ever used the two words “operations” and “security” next to each other unironically has opinions about this story.Report
The IDF is apparently good at hacking and tracking cellphones. Pagers are harder to deal with.Report
Yashar Ali reports:
(He goes on to talk about how PETN was what Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) was using and about a 2010 plot to blow up some planes.)
So, in conclusion, it’s some added explosive. The added explosive was The Good Stuff. You don’t need a whole lot of The Good Stuff.
The Good Stuff can be ignited by a battery heating up enough.
1200 pagers were sufficiently heated within a few short minutes of each other igniting The Good Stuff.
Take Home Message: Your cellphone is probably okay.
Now I just wonder at what point in the process that the pagers got adulterated. Was it in the factory or was there a handful of techs with jewelers’ screwdrivers and some PETN applicators in a lab between the factory and the point of sale?Report
Did a little more research and found a handful of folks showing what a lithium battery blowing up looks like and compared it to the explosions caught on camera aaaaaand…
those aren’t lithium battery explosions.Report
How do you make a phone or pager blow up?Report
It’s a second level spell in D&D.Report
*Fizban mutters under breadth*
“What is that spell again, Firepall, Firehall, Firecandal, Fire…”Report
Trump vows to arrest all who oppose him:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/trump-when-i-win-the-people-who-tried-to-defeat-me-are-going-to-prisonReport
just Trump being Trump. Nothing to see here – move along sheep.Report
Hezbollah seems really shocked about the pager incident. They don’t seem to realize that actually firing rockets into Israel is going to have consequences. There is an arrogance that Muslims possess when it comes to Israel and Jews that they can’t seem to get out of. Like they really don’t understand why Jews want a place of our own and don’t want to be second class citizens in officially Muslim countries and non-trivially Muslim at that. These leads credence to my theory is that a big reason why the I/P conflict has continued for so long is that Muslims can’t admit that they lost to Jews of all people. Losing to the Christians and Hindus might be one thing but the Jews is something else.Report
I’ll never get used to seeing ghoulish Americans celebrating a terrorist attack that killed an 8-year old.Report
As attacks go, I cannot imagine one more precise than one that targets holders of particular beepers.
Compare, for example, to missiles.Report
Then you should probably imagine harder.Report
It’s difficult to find good numbers on this, I’ve seen arguments that there were 9 deaths and 8 were Hezbollah but good reporting is hard to find. You willing to accept a news source from Turkey? At least 9 killed, thousands injured after mass pager explosion in Lebanon reports that Hezbollah says that 2 were Hezbollah members.
The “both sides do it” paragraph at the end of the article, for your convenience:
It’s a war. War sucks.Report
I mean, in one case it’s genocide (in Gaza), and in the other terrorism (Mossad in Lebanon). Or rather, this is what we would call these two things were anyone else doing it. When Israel or the U.S. does it, it’s “war,” and “bad things happen in war.”Report
The argument that violence that targets belligerents is terrorism doesn’t exactly move me much.
Non-belligerents? Absolutely.
But “collateral damage” has long been a thing (even when “we” did it).
Assuming the targets were primarily Hezbollah (not necessarily a fair assumption, mind, but one that seems to not be contradicted by Hezbollah’s own announcements), means that this is a lot closer to a fairly complex series of targeted assassinations.
Which strikes me as being vaguely more moral than the whole “missile” thing (that is ongoing).Report
How many of your friends cheered the act of resistance when Hamas killed Jewish babies and children on October 7th or took children as hostages?
How many accused Jews of lying when they brought this up?
https://www.ajc.org/news/meet-the-brave-israeli-children-who-survived-hamas-imprisonmentReport
My theory and it is mine is that the anti-Semitic Left thinks that the Jews take up way too much oxygen based on our numbers and they want us to be more like the Zoroastrians or Assyrians, one of those small groups that just meekly accept our subordination in the world.Report
When the first info was that Hamas had broken out of Gaza, some. When the concert info came out, none.
But if you’re still cheering at the murder of children at this point, over some people you don’t even know cheering on October 7, then you’re at least as sick as the sickest of them.Report
Baby. There was exactly one Jewish baby killed Oct 7th. Her name was Mila Cohen. She was shot while her mother was holding her, probably by accident while attempting to kill her mother.Report
“In the warmest of hearts, there is always a cold-spot reserved for Jews”-Ben HechtReport
Luckily, we Jews couldn’t care less what the International Caring Community and Chattering Classes think about us. These are people who demand our support for their causes because of our history but also conspire to destroy all forms of culture and identity. They look at decades, centuries, or millennia old Jewish communities being destroyed in a blink of an instant and say it doesn’t matter because of anti-colonialism and the Jews have a portable culture so it really isn’t that bad anyway. Damn them to hell.Report
John Updike had a famous quote about a true New Yorker being somebody who upon hearing believes that a person who lives somewhere else is in a sense just kidding. The true anti-Semite is the same. They believe that when they hear about Jews like being Jews, they believe that we are just kidding.Report
You mean like the people who were out and about on October 8th celebrating the death of Jewish kids? Or maybe there is no such thing as a Jewish baby or kid in your cosmology and we are all old people who need to die or at least accept our second class citizenship stnadard under the banner of Islam?
Hezbollah’s rockets killed Israeli kids and those kids weren’t even Jews. They were Israeli Arabs. Nobody on the Left seemed to care about that.Report
Killing Israeli children is wrong. If only you recognized that was true in reverse. That you don’t, and clearly never have, should greatly disturb you, and watching you do mental gymnastics in order to not face that fact, in this thread and any thread on the subject, is nausea-inducing.Report
The death of a child is a tragedy. Whether it’s a war crime depends on whether or not that child was targeted. It is heinous to target them. It’s beyond heinous for military forces to hide behind them.Report
When it comes to the beepers blowing up, the military forces weren’t hiding behind the children.
They merely happened to be standing nearby.
Given the circumstances of the explosions that made it to twitter, I’d say that it was reasonable for these guys to be doing stuff like “shopping for groceries”.
If you want to criticize Israel for putting bombs on people that might have blown up while they were driving a car or grocery shopping or holding a baby or something like that, there are some criticisms to be made there.
Personally, I think that they pale in comparison to the criticisms of the whole “shooting rockets at each other” thing but if you want to focus like a laser pointer at something, there is a criticism to be made there.
And, in this case, the military forces weren’t using human shields. They were just, you know, buying bananas.Report
Like Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Western fan boys and girls ever cared about Israeli citizens just going about their business when they attacked them? Instead they dance, laugh, and sing when Israelis get slaughtered.
I am utterly tired of the people who think that they have unlimited right to wage war against Israel and Jews world wide have us respond like both our hands are tied around our backs. They demand that we respect and love them while going to the bathroom on us behind our backs.
Western liberals are so tied up in knots about not saying anything racist or Islamophobic that they have no way of dealing with the vast amounts of Jew hatred that exists among Muslim’s world wide. Instead, we Jews are expected to deal with all of this with a stiff upper lip and wait patient centuries for it to change but nothing can be done or said to hasten the change. Meanwhile, our enemies get to wage unlimited war.Report
It’s a war and wars suck and the quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
And I understand why “your side should lose!” is not a particularly persuasive argument.
When I keep iterating the various possibilities out in my head, I’d say that 90% of them (or more) end up in bad places. Like, *BAD* places.
The ones that don’t are the ones that rely rather heavily on turning down the heat.
Which brings us to how persuasive “your side should turn down the heat!” arguments are.Report
It is more than wanting my side to lose. It is wanting Jews to embrace second-class citizenship status that liberals and leftists would find intolerable for anybody else while pretending we are living in a secular multicultural democracy.Report
Second-class citizenship?
In America?
Be careful that you’re not confusing equality under a secular multicultural democracy with second-class citizenship.Report
What on earth are you 2 going on about?Report
Lee believes that western liberals want Israel to give up being its own country that’s majority Jewish, and become second class citizens in an Arab run country.Report
“You guys shouldn’t have a religious ethnostate in the current year!” is an interesting argument.
It’s fair to ask why it’s yelled at Israel but not the other religious ethnostates in the region.
If it’s only yelled at Israel but not Saud-occupied Arabia or the Arabian peninsula referred to as “Qatar”, it’s fair to ask “why?”Report
Right. Muslim countries, famous for not being sneered at for their backwards theocratic governments.Report
If the criticisms of Israel were limited to sneering, I think we’d all be better off.Report
They are sneered at by some but others defend them. Nobody does anything about it.Report
Nearly Muslim majority country on this planet declares itself to be an officially Muslim country and in non-trival ways. They have enforced blasphemy and apostacy laws and Muslim state symbolism everywhere. Many political parties that declare themselves to be Muslim political parties. The Palestinians themselves say that they see Palestine as a Muslim country connected to other Muslims countries with any non-Muslim just kind of being there like a piece of furniture. The Muslim countries have an entire international organization where they go and chest thump about being Muslim. Why should Jews want to live in countries like this?
They say this openly and in English. On my social media feed, since the algorithm gives me Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian propaganda, I’ve seen numerous posts trying to pass what is clearly Tel Aviv, both now and pre-state, as a “Palestinian beach city.” A few years ago, the Pro-Palestinian propagandists tried to present the Zionist and all Jewish mandate football team as a Palestinian football team and evidence that Palestine was a real country destroyed by the vile “Zionists”. The Palestinians and their Muslim allies aren’t being exactly subtle about this.
The Western liberals and leftists just refuse to believe that they might actually be serious about this. “Muslim Palestine” and Islamist rhetoric goes in one ear and gets scrambled in the brains into ANC, multicultural rainbow Palestine with no evidence.
Even in contexts not related to the I/P conflict, we see that the entire burden of good Jewish-Muslim relations is placed on Jews. The Algerians kicked out their Jews to France than when they immigrate to France themselves continued to terrorize the Jews their. It is the Jews that are supposed to reach out and deal with this patiently while the Muslim responsibility to confront their own crazies is zero.Report
JayBird: Which brings us to how persuasive “your side should turn down the heat!” arguments are.
Most “turn down the heat” arguments come down to “don’t target people attacking civilians if you might kill civilians”.
Or to put it differently, “don’t go to war over terrorism”.
JayBird: the military forces weren’t using human shields. They were just, you know, buying bananas.
The beepers are military communication gear. Boobie trapping and/or blowing up military gear is fair play.Report
Only silly people are complaining about Hezbollah members being targeted.
The complaint is that some of the pagers might have found their way into the pockets of doctors, lawyers, and taxi drivers.
Calling the pagers “Hezbollah Pagers” is a textbook example of well-formed question-begging.
I’m not opposed to blowing up Hezbollah Pagers, after all.
If these were consumer electronics that found their way into the pockets of anybody who plopped down twenty bucks at the Apollo store, I’m much less sanguine about it.
But the information that I’ve seen so far is that Hezbollah specifically switched to pagers recently (and two-way radios!) in an effort to not get blowed up.
And this well-publicized fact got capitalized on.
And part of what followed is a guy having his pager blow up in the produce section when children were standing nearby.
And this is one of those things that happens in war.
I suppose it’s all the more terrible that we’re seeing the video of people as individuals doing normal stuff like shopping rather than belligerents and collatoral damage as numbers on an excel worksheet.Report
Jay: When it comes to the beepers blowing up, the military forces weren’t hiding behind the children.
True that. However they’re supporting Hamas who is famous for it and they’re insisting that their conflict with Israel will go on until the Gaza war stops.Report
What Hezbollah is doing is slightly different, though I’m not sure any less of an invitation to this kind of thing. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon almost 25 years ago. There’s no fight over territory there anymore and Hezbollah itself is a player in what passes for legitimate politics within Lebanon.
However they’re also an Iranian proxy and accept Iranian funding and weapons for the purpose of attacking Israel with them. On the one hand, this kind of thing raises all the questions Jaybird brings up about Israel’s tactics, and whether they really are intended to de-escalate. On the other Hezbollah is not Hamas, is not an interested party in the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, and could always stop firing rockets into Israel and focus it’s efforts on its other goals in Lebanon. If they did that then would Israel did here would be impossible to excuse. But they don’t, and so their agents make themselves targets for asymmetrical attacks, of the same sort that they carry out at the behest of Iran.Report
Have you ever considered that a lot of them are being very serious with their metaphysical understanding of the conflict and they really see Israel’s existence as a blot on all of Islam?Report
Sure. They probably take the aid for help with something they want to do anyway.
But that’s kind of my point. If I put myself in the position of a Palestinian in occupied and/or strangled territroy I can’t completely dismiss violence against Israel as illegitimate, by Hamas or whatever other militia. Hezbollah has no similar excuse. They’re in a state and enfranchised to the extent anyone in that state is.Report
A reminder: A good chunk of Israel’s problems in Lebanon are Israel’s problem, mostly because Israel feels free to invade south Lebanon whenever it wants.
They also choose to ally, in the civil war that they should not have been involved in, with ‘Lebanese Christian Militia’, a group that, unequivalently, committed a massacre of civilians, while the IDF, uh, stoppped those civilians from leaving the massacre zone. This is actually what forced Ariel Sharon to resign.
That withdrawal 25 years ago, in 2000? It was ordered by the UN in 1978. Which is when the PLO left. Meanwhile, Israel just continued to be there, long after the PLO had left.
It could have just left in 1978. Instead, it tried to install its own Lebanese government and, quite rightly, caused a lot of resentment. Both of Israel and the US.
Which allowed the creation of Hezbollah, in 1982, by Lebanese clerics. (Later hijacked by Iran.) It also resulted in a lot of attacks on American embassies and bases by various groups.
All of that, literally all of that, could have been averted by Israel just leaving Lebanon after the PLO was gone, which was the supposed reason they were there.
But Israel thinks it can put ‘buffer zones’ inside of _other countries_, instead of, you know, how it actually works: You put buffers at the border inside _your own_ country. You don’t get to steal, in this specific example, 10% of Lebanon!Report
All you’re doing with this is making Lee’s point for him, that even when Israel does what it should it will never be enough.Report
Does what it should? Ignoring the UN – when Palestinians complied for 22 years is doing what it should? Routinely invading Lebanon is doing what it should?
Really?Report
Philip: Routinely invading Lebanon is doing what it should?
And why is that happening?
The Lebanese government is so weak it doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force.
When Lebanese groups try to drive all the Jews from the Middle East by terrorizing Israeli civilians, that is inviting Israel to step in and deal with the problem.Report
This is because it has had other countries destabilize it for 70+ years, INCLUDING ISRAEL. Both Israel itself, and the fact Israel drove a hell of a lot of Palestine refugees into Lebanon in the Nakba.
Who did all that, it must be pointed out, BEFORE IRAN. Hezbollah was created (again, without Iran support, that came a few years later) to _oppose Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon_, created to fill that vacuum after the PLO left.
If Israel hadn’t been there, Hezbollah never would have existed in the first place for Iran to take over. In fact, Lebanon was pretty pissed at refugee Palestinians and the PLO at that point! (They never even wanted them there to start with. They just weren’t willing to shoot them as they were forced over the border.)
If Israel had left, the entire situation was over!
They did not leave.
In fact, Israel shouldn’t have even been there to start with. Because, as I mentioned, they screwed around in a civil war and picked some absolutely horrible ‘allies’ to committed atrocities that Israel has at least an indirect level of culpability in. Hell, they gave our weapons to those people! Just straight up fanatic murderers. (But they were Christian fanatics who murdered Muslims, so that barely counts.)Report
DavidTC: If Israel hadn’t been there, Hezbollah never would have existed in the first place for Iran to take over.
And why was Israel there? Various armed groups were attacking Israel from Lebanon. The PLO in ’68 and them or others after that.
Israel didn’t want the land for itself, it just didn’t want it used as a base of terror operations against it’s citizens.
That’s a reasonable request, especially when the alternative is war. We’re seeing that same dynamic played out now.
If you engage in terrorism against a democracy, then you will end up at war with the country. Hezbollah is currently in the process of dragging Israel into war with Lebanon if they aren’t there yet.Report
They don’t fight Hezbollah for internal political reasons.Report
Hezbollah is stronger than their army. Whatever the politics, they literally can’t make them disarm. Ergo the gov doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force.Report
@Philip H, now do this with the Israeli government doesn’t fight the Settlers because of internal political reasons and see how reasonable it sounds to you.Report
Yes, really. At some point you have to take yes for an answer.Report
Those continued violations hardly constitute a yes.Report
No, what you’re proposing is that Israel has to leave the territory, which it did, but tolerate continued pot shots from that same territory despite being fully under the control of in theory Lebanon, in actuality, Hezbollah, with no retaliation ever.
That’s stupid. Hezbollah isn’t Hamas or the Palestinians and that land isn’t part of any possible future Palestinian state. It’s part of Lebanon. Hezbollah no longer has any legitimate grievance with Israel.Report
Hezbollah no longer has any legitimate grievance with Israel.
Except, you know, them committing genocide, which should be a grievance we all have with Israel.
If I sound like a broken record, it’s because I’m just blown away at the extent to which people either dance around this, or in many cases, outright deny it, or even worse still, as we’ve seen on this blog, support it.Report
Yea, and what Hezbollah is doing contributes absolutely nothing to stopping Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. In fact it only makes it worse by conflating Iran’s efforts at Shi’ite hegemony in the region with the localized conflict over land between Israelis and Palestinians.
As I said above, I find it impossible to dismiss Palestinian (including Hamas) violence against Israel because it is Palestinians who are being displaced and killed. They have a right to defend themselves and whether it makes sense or not the West Bank and Gaza are now inseparable as people and political entities. I would even say their right includes freedom to take the fight to Israeli civilians, the way Israel takes the fight to Palestinian civilians. But none of this ever ends if Israel’s reward for attempting to pull out of occupied territory is more provocations from those people who got the W yet continue on in the name of larger, more abstract, and unattainable goals.Report
When I look at the numbers, I see a brutal war but not genocide.
The average number of people dying per day is going down, not up. That is the opposite of how starvation (etc) works. We don’t know what percentage of the dead are military.
Note “not genocide” doesn’t mean there are no war crimes going on.
The numbers not backing up genocide suggests the rhetoric is pearl clutching. Rather than a reasonable evaluation of what is going on, this seems “all urban war is genocide”, or “civilians should not die in war”, or even “there should be no war”.Report
Source for my claim that the average number of deaths doesn’t support genocide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#/media/File:Gaza_death_graph.pngReport
I have yet to hear anybody defending Hezbollah articulate a believable reason for Hezbollah to be allowed to continue rockets into Israel. Rockets that killed, check notes, 12 Druze children. My basic theory is that people who consider Israel and ipso facto illegitimate state just believe that Israel needs to endure this with a stiff upper lip or that they believe the following approach should be taken but will not say it:
1. Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state.
2. Israel endures the dead enders and Islamists with grace and a stiff upper lip.
3. Israel and the Jews world wide wait patiently for centuries as the Muslims get modernity through their systems.
The best of them just want to change the dynamic and believe that basically only Israel can do this for whatever reason they won’t say. I generally assume it is because they aren’t that sympathetic to Israel and also believe that Israel/Jewish population is small enough to be more easily pressured.Report
‘Hezbollah no longer has any legitimate grievance with Israel.’
Incorrect. Israel hasn’t left the territory. Shebaa Farms is recognized internationally as part of Lebanon, and Israel is still there. Israel justifies this weirdly under the logic that that area is actually part of Syria, which last I checked wasn’t part of Israel either. (Syria, weirdly, agrees with Lebanon, that the area is Lebanon.)
It’s literally the stated issue that Hezbollah has with Israel, and wow is it weird how we can have huge detailed discussions about how an entity is ‘evil Jew-hating’ without once actually mentioning their _stated_ problem with Israel? The word ‘Shebaa’ does not even appear on this entire page before right now. I get not believing stated motives, but it sure is odd how the actual stated problem is not even _known_ to most people discussing things? It’s almost as if the discussion is almost irrevocably tilted toward Israel in some weird way.
In fact, people don’t actually seem to understand how bad Israel is at actually leaving anywhere. They like to claim they have left, but repeatedly fail to actually fully do so. They will just…keep border territories under completely nonsense justification or claim they need a ‘buffer’. (Which, as I remind people every time, no country has a right to build a buffer zone _inside another country_, a thing which should be obvious but somehow isn’t.)
Please note that these buffers also, very quickly, get annexed by Israel and Israel rapidly moves to needing a buffer for _those_ areas.
An actual sane country ‘under attack form all sides’ like Israel claims to be would withdraw to its actual borders and then build a couple of miles of buffer _inside_ those borders, not constantly run around annexing part of Syria and Lebanon and Palestine for ‘security’.Report
DavidTC: without once actually mentioning their _stated_ problem with Israel?
Their current “stated problem” with Israel is the war in Gaza. I guess that’s fine, but “joining the war” means “joining the war”.
Instead we have this weird situation where Hezbollah thinks it should be able to terrorize Israeli civilians without actually going to war.Report
DavidTC doesn’t see Israeli civilians as civilians apparently. All the people yelping about what happened in Lebanon just proves my theory that they want Israel to take a certain amount of terrorism but won’t come out and say it.Report
Hezbollah has literally been at war with Israel since it was created to get Israel out of Lebanon.
Joining with someone who is also at war with Israel does not magically make their _their_ purpose for the war.Report
DavidTC: Joining with someone who is also at war with Israel does not magically make their _their_ purpose for the war.
Just a few posts ago you were claiming we should listen to what the group is claiming.
Hezbollah is threatening to go to war with Israel (meaning before by their standards they weren’t at war). They’re also claiming their terrorism against Northern Israeli civilians is because of the war in Gaza.Report
Palestinians complied with what they were supposed to do? Really? Arafat was playing a double game for the entire Oslo Process and Hamas ignored Oslo entirely and started their terrorist campaign right away. After they actually got some territory, they turned it into an armed camp.Report
You can hallucinate the PLO didn’t leave Lebanon in 1982, but they in fact, did. It’s not really debatable.
Israel did not.Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War#Further_conflict_and_Israeli_withdrawal
Following the departure of the PLO and international peacekeepers, Islamist militants began launching guerrilla attacks against Israeli forces…. In a vacuum left with eradication of PLO, the disorganized Islamic militants in South Lebanon began to consolidate. The emerging Hezbollah, soon to become the preeminent Islamic militia, evolved during this period.Report
DavidTC and Chris believe they can cleverly move the goal posts all the time so that Israel has always done something wrong. This is because deep in their hearts they really want the answer to be “No Israel, No Jews” too.Report
Hey LeeEqg, why does Israel think it has a right to Shebaa Farms?
And the usual justification of ‘Israel gets to keep it because they seized it in the Six-Day War’ (which is not how internationl law works) doesn’t even work here, because _Lebanon_ wasn’t part of that war.
Do you want to know Israel’s position on this?
“Israel says the land was Syrian when it was captured during the Six-Day War, and the dispute is being used by Hezbollah to continue its attacks on Israel.”
That is their actual statement, and I urge people to read that sentence a few times just to see how absurd it is.
To clarify the history of the area and what Israel is talking about: Syria used to administer it, but Lebanon sorta felt they had a claim to it. And Syria agreed! Those two countries discussed that in the 50s/60s and decided that Lebanon _should_ own it, and were going to transfer it over, but before they could redraw the borders, the Six-Day War happened.
So, in a way, Israel can make a legal claim that they have stolen the territory (Yes, they have outright annexed it, not just occupied it) from Syria, not Lebanon. In another way, that’s obviously stupid, because Israel has no right to annex _Syria_, either.
But a sane person would be asking, at that moment, “Wait, ‘the dispute is being used’…so Israel can just call their bluff, give this incredibly unimportant and trivial territory to Lebanon, and…Hezbollah would end up with no excuse to keep fighting?”
But that isn’t how Israel thinks, because Israel never gives up stolen territory, even when it, very very obviously, is not theirs. It’s why it took a UN resolution and 24 years for them to get out of the rest of Lebanon, and why they are standing there arguing that reslution doesn’t say they have to give back a completely unimportant section of land that cannot possibly theirs…because, they argue, they have actually stolen it from Syria, not from Lebanon!
This is territory that, again, Israel has no claim to whatsoever. This isn’t even a strategic military location, it is, rather obviously, between Syria and Lebanon, and doesn’t touch Israel…in fact, that part of Syria is the Golan Heights and occupied by Israel! If someone in Lebanon wants to attack Israel they’d do it across their shared border instead of firing through Syria!Report
You know there’s a joke about half the countries in the world have been at wart with England?
Anyone want to make a guess as to how many countries Israel has occupied for over a decade?
Four. All of which they have built settlements in and illegally annexed portions of.
The only one it’s really given up completely is Egypt’s Sinai, which they eventually gave back. That was only only 15 years occupation! It did try to to illegal build settlements in the Sinai, but for some reason just gave up. I suspect Israelregretted that.
Of course, it is entirely possible that what Israel is saying about Sheeba Farms is true, that the Sheeba Farms things is just a pretext by Hezbollah. Complaints about it being part of Lebanon do seem a little late in the process of withdrawal.
Of course, one questions _why_ exactly, Israel is so determine to own this 8.2 square miles of Syria that is almost entirely sheep farms and does not border Israel that they are unwilling to just say ‘Here you go, Hezballoh. Now what? That was your issue, right? That’s what you said you were fighting over? Well, now what?’Report
DavidTC: The only one it’s really given up completely is Egypt’s Sinai, which they eventually gave back. …I suspect Israel regretted that.
Given the degree to which that part of land has been used to bring in weapons to Gaza? Yeah, they probably do regret handing all of it back.
Unfortunately “Israel handing land back” tends to become “Israel seeing that land used to support terrorism against it’s civilians”.Report
It’s really astounding that people can’t comprehend the last part and maybe understand why Israelis in the green line including those who couldn’t care less about Hebron might be reluctant to leave the West Bank at this point. The West Bank potentially becoming a launch pad against Israel isn’t speculation. It is something that has a good chance of happening based on past experience with Gaza and South Lebanon. Like I don’t think that Israelis expect everything to be warm fuzzies after a final deal but they might want a cold peace at least.Report
You know, this justification of ‘reluctance to leave’ might be a lot more believable if a) Israel had left _literally anywhere else_ in a reasonable amount of time, and b) were not annexing and building settlements in those territories, which makes absolutely no sense if the reason Israel needs those is for security.
There is some hypothetical version of reality where Israel takes surrounding territory and forced people out and leaves it as a no-go zone for security reasons, and we can perhaps believe them in that version.
In this reality, 25,000 Israeli live in settlements in the Golan Heights. In fact, attacking the Golan Heights is a favorite pastime of Hezballoh! (Hilariously, Hezbollah attacks ‘Syria’ as much as Israel, it’s just the parts of Syria they attack are controlled by Israel.) None of those people are secure! There is no possible way to make those people secure.
Well, I guess, Israel could seize even _more_ territory, but they’re soon be putting people there, and those people need security and thus Israel has to seize more…
Same thing with settlements in the West Bank. You can stand there and argue ‘Israel should continue to occupy the West Back for the security of Israel’, but there’s absolutely no way that building settlements there results in ‘security’…in fact, almost all attacks by Palestinians living in the West Bank on Israeli civilians are _in_ these areas. To stop those attack, all they’d have to do is not have civilians there, a place they absolutely should not be under international law.Report
Hey, why do you think Gaza, a thing Israel is insisting is a sovereign country, doesn’t get to have weapons?Report
DavidTC: Hey, why do you think Gaza, a thing Israel is insisting is a sovereign country, doesn’t get to have weapons?
Gaza is run by Hamas, which is an openly genocidal terror group that openly and consistently targets civilians.
The trade interdiction was imposed after Hamas took charge. The economic and trade problems that Gaza has are a result of Hamas.
Legally, yes, Israel imposing a blockade is an act of war… however Hamas has always made it clear that it is at war with Israel so that’s fine.Report
No, it’s Israel that has made it clear it’s always at war with Hamas.
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Gaza_cross-border_raid
Just the background information, not the raid itself. Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in 2005. Before the elections.
They continued it even after they won. They continued it even after Israel imposed a blockade and sanctions on Gaza.
They even offered a long-term ceasefire if Israel if would withdraw to 1967 boundaries. Is that the same as a full acceptance and peace? Not exactly, but pretty close.
Want to guess who broke the ceasefire?
Israel bombed Jamal Abu Samhadana and three other Palestinians, breaking the ceasefire.
In retaliation, some random Palestinians, not Hamas, shot two crappy rockets toward Israel, hitting an empty building and causing no casualties.
In response, Israel shell the beach they claim those rockets were launched from, _the next day_, killing a family. It’s worth pointing out that this cannot have been a military objective, because a) it happened a day later, against b) the location where, at best, there might still be some flimsy steel supports (Assuming they didn’t just put those back in the pickup truck or whatever), because that’s how those rockets are launched.
And from there, Hamas got involved.
Israel broke the ceasefire, arguable broke it twice. Because they really, really wanted to kill someone in Hamas, who, again, they had a ceasefire with, I cannot stress that enough.Report
DavidTC: Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in 2005.
After Hamas was elected, they were offered the chance to renounce terrorism and become a political party. They refused.
It was hugely to their benefit to keep things quiet to take advantage of running a (micro)state. The question was what they were going to do with it.
It is very fair for Israel to think that a terror group that has refused to renounce being a terror group should be treated as a terror group.
When you say that Israel should have treated them differently, you’re saying that Israel should have believed Hamas was lying when Hamas was claiming they were going to continue to kill civilians and so on.
DavidTC: They even offered a long-term ceasefire if Israel if would withdraw to 1967 boundaries. Is that the same as a full acceptance and peace? Not exactly, but pretty close.
Facts on the ground make the 1967 boundaries impossible. This offer meant they weren’t interested in a “long-term ceasefire”.Report
The thing they were actually asked to agree to was not asking them to ‘renounce terrorism’.
The thing they were asked to agree to was accepting certain agreements and timelines made with Israel in the past by the Fatah and the PLO that they did not agree with.
Those are not even vaguely the same thing. Political parties, when elected, sometimes do not accept agreements of prior political parties…and Hamas didn’t even _reject_ thing, or do anything to oppose them, they just refused to sign a statement asserting they accepted them exactly as they were.
Imagine if Republicans were called terrorists for refusing to sign a statement, presented by France, saying they agreed with the US’s climate change initiatives when elected. Not doing anything to undo those, just…not signing France’s statement. That’s essentially what you’re doing here. It’s utter nonsense. Hamas had no obligation to sign anything.
Hamas ‘renounced terrorism’ by ) _signing the ceasefire_ and _no longer doing any ‘terrorism’_. For over a year. With a ceasefire in place.
Until, and let me repeat this this, Israel broke the ceasefire by killing a Hamas leader and three others. While in a ceasefire.
At which point…Hamas did not, in fact, break the peace. They did nothing. Some other militant organization fired some rockets at Israel.
At which point Israel bombed the beach that was launched from (For no military purpose, purely retribution.) and killed a Palestinian family.
And at _that_ point, Hamas reacted.Report
Besides what Dark Matter pointed out, Israel has withdrawn from South Lebanon. The Sheba Farms are in the Golan Heights, which was part of Syria before the Six Day War. Like the entire argument was land for peace not land for Israel enduring rocket barrages and terrorist attack until everybody gets tired.
You simply hate Israel and are unsympathetic to the needs of the Jewish people. Whatever Israel does will simply never ever be good enough for the likes of you and Chris and you will always find a way to move the goal posts to justify further violence against Israel. Israel withdraws from South Lebanon, what about Sheba Farms? Israel withdraws from Gaza and takes all the Settlers there away. Well, Israel didn’t really withdraw because it maintains a hard land border with Gaza rather than letting Gazans come and go as they please.Report
Yes, after 20 years of not doing that.
Would you like to explain how Israel gets to control part of Syria?
Are we just ignoring the fact that Israel shouldn’t be there _regardless_ of what country it is, because it sure as hell isn’t Israel.
Oh, but Israel has, in fact, annexed it illegally.
Literally no one asserts that. Israel can control their own borders, although I remind them they have to control their own borders on _their_ side and not the _other_ side, and a military shooting across international borders is generally considered an act of war.
The reason that people assert that Israel did not withdraw because they fully controlled Gaza’s other borders. You know, the ones that weren’t with Israel.
If we want to pretend that Gaza is a sovereign country, you realize that Israel instantly and immediately committed an act of war by doing that, right? Blockading a country’s ocean traffic is an act of war. Just, straight up an act of war.
Those are your two choices: Gaza is a country that Israel started a deliberate war with immediately after it existed, or it was not a sovereign country and was always under Israeli occupation.Report
DavidTC: a military shooting across international borders is generally considered an act of war.
Yes. Exactly that. Every rocket attack by Hamas and Hezbollah is an act of war.
So in theory, every rocket attack gives Israel permission to come in and level the place if that’s what it needs to do to make it stop.
BTW that’s why Israel didn’t pull out of Lebanon after the PLO pulled out. The PLO was the biggest problem but not the only problem.Report
I still think that a lot of people but won’t say the following to happen:
1. Israel agrees to the creation of the Palestinian state.
2. Ignores the terrorism.
3. Waits patiently for things to get better even if that takes decades.
They won’t say this because they know at least 2 or 3 sound ridiculous on their face and all violate the liberal imperative not to be racist. 2 or 3 sounds like racism and Islamophobia because it suggest that at least many Palestinians and others in the area are fanatical enough never to give up the ghost and incompetent enough not to be able to handle their bad actors by themselves. So they just don’t come out and say it.Report
If you believe that the settlements and Israel’s other bad behaviors are the cause of the Arab’s bad behaviors, then Israel creates a Palestinian state and everything is happy.
Problem #2 is a lot of these examples of bad Israeli behavior are responses to their civilians being terrorized.
Problem #1 is the Palestinians have been very clear that “the Palestinian state” needs to cover all of Israel.
So we’re still fighting over whether or not the Jews get a state.
To be fair, that region probably doesn’t have enough land/resources to make two functional countries. At best we get one functional country and one sawed off rump.Report
These are the issues. For problem #2, a lot of the actions are aimed at Israel proper rather than the settlements, which Israel destroyed in the West Bank.
Western liberals and leftists deal with Problem #1 by just pretending that the Palestinians are saying things differently than what they say in plain English in major media publications. I have seen at least two propaganda posts trying to depict places in Israel proper as places on the “Palestine” coast. I really have no idea how presenting Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian” beach city or Caesarea as a ruin on the “Palestinian” coast does anything to end the I/P conflict but people are doing it.
The imperatives of liberalism prevent people from dealing with this though. I suspect that many people find the Jewish peoples a global inconvenience for their ideology. They want a neat little system of white vs. people of color and oppressor vs. oppressed and we Jews complicate things considerably for that. So they despise us because we get in the way of their neat system.Report
When presented with facts that disprove theories, the facts are right and the theories are wrong.
Most people have problems with that.Report
That is insane to list as a ‘problem’.
Even if you can somehow justify harming civilians as part of a military objective, and justify it even more because the other side is doing the same thing, so you’re just trying to make your own civilians safe…
Israel behaving like complete sociopathic loons by removing Arab civilians from the West Bank (And, yes, Syria) and replacing them with their own civilians, a thing that does not, in any manner at all, make Israelis safer. In fact, it makes them demonstrably less safer, almost every attack against Israeli civilians is _because_ those Israeli civilians are somewhere they should not be.
Now, not Oct 7, but…the reason Hamas managed to do that is that the IDF was so over-extended in the West Bank defending those illegal settlements! This entire situation would be much easier to deal with if Israel would actually withdraw civilians to their own borders.
We’re not talking about ‘Things Israel is doing to make themselves safe’, we are, in fact, talking about things that patently obviously making Israel _less_ safe.
But they are doing them because they are, and this is actually kinda clear if you look at their behavior, a rather large percentage of the population, including those who have had political control essentially the entire history of Israel, insane sociopaths who think they have some sort of divine right to everywhere they can reach.
…as for problem #1, Israeli politicians have been saying exactly the same thing. Straight up arguing that Israel should cover the entire area. Somehow that is not treated the same as when Hamas says the opposite.
Despite the fact that what Israeli politicians are talking about _objectively_ requires ethnic cleansing and/or genocide (Because otherwise it’s not a Jewish state), whereas it doesn’t the other way. And that Israel _has literally done this before_, ethnically cleansed an area to seize it, and Palestine hasn’t.Report
It sure is amazing how the first step is this vague ‘agree to the creation of a Palestine state’ (Which they are required to do under international law.) and not ‘Withdraw and stop the currently illegal settlements they are doing’.
That discussion was, _literally_, what started this post.
In fact, it wasn’t even about Palestine! We were talking about illegal settlements in either Lebanon, or possible those settlements are merely in Syria! (In addition to the ones we know are in Syria)
Please explain what that has to do with Palestine? Please explain what removing Syrians from Syria, replacing them with Israeli civilians, and asserting that part of Syria should be under Israeli law(1) is related to ‘terrorism’?
Oh, don’t worry, they’ve recently started talking about occupying south Lebanon again, too.
1) I phrased that in such an odd way because Israel claims that they have not annexed part of Syria, despite doing the actual things that annexing is.Report
It sure is weird how that only applies to Israel’s rights.
Do you know that, right after Israel ‘withdrew’ from Gaza, there was an IDF helicopter flying around Gaza, and, it is alleged, one of them blew up a Hamas withdrawal celebration party/parade and killed 19 people, including civilians.
As a reminder, this _did not get a response form Hamas_, who honored the ceasefire. (Other militants did fire some rockets, which resulted in Israel bombing back, which, did kill some Hamas members. Hamas, to be clear, _still_ did not respond to this.)
Israel asserts they did not blow it up and claims that Hamas somehow accidentally blew up their own parade, but let’s take a step back form that and look at the actual, undeniable fact there was a military helicopter (One they got from American in fact, an Apache.), of Israel flying around in Gaza airspace in September 23, 2005.
To remind people, Israel officially declared the Gaza Strip to be an extraterritorial jurisdiction and no longer part of Israel on September 21. This aircraft was not part an evacuation or anything that could be excused, that had finished way back on Sept 11, when the Israeli flag was lowered for the last time, or Sept 12 when the last gate was finally closed. The evacuation was a very long process that had finished at least a week before.
And then Israel sent a military aircraft into their airspace two days after officially saying ‘They are sovereign nation that we are no longer occupying’.
Do you know what _that_ is? Flying a military aircraft into someone else’s airspace? Just by itself, even if we pretend it didn’t fire on a celebration and kill 19 Palestinians?
That is an act of war. Happening _literally_ two days after Gaza supposedly became a free country. In fact, it was before Hamas took over…they had been elected, but not yet taken office.
There you go, right there, the official ‘Who started the war after Gaza was freed?’ It’s officially Israel, who committed the first act of war against the supposedly sovereign nation of Gaza, before any missiles or terrorism.Report
Hezbollah has been sending rockets into Israel on a nearly daily basis. They have killed civilians. This is an act of war/aggression. If Israel is responsible for the pager attack, it was designed to go after known Hezbollah operatives, not civilians.
But hey, dead Israeli civilians are okay because they are icky Israelis even if they aren’t Jewish but the civilians deaths in Lebanon should be used as an attack against Israel because everything should be an attack against Israel especially if they are icky eews.Report
This sort of very targeted response is what people wanted Israel to do after October 7th. But when Israel actually does this very targeted response, it is “no, no, not like that.”Report
Again, who is saying this?Report
Chris for one thing on this blog. Lots of people on LGM are crying that this is terrorism while others are defending it as basically the best possible way to deal with terrorism because it hurts less than bombing Hizbollah areas in Lebanon. Lots of the very online.Report
It’s less “they can’t understand” and more “you’re supposed to lose”.Report
As mentioned previously, one of my theories on why the Israel-Palestinian/Jewish-Muslim conflict has gone on for so long is that losing to the Jews of all people, and after the Holocaust at that, was too much of a psychological impossibility to Palestinians, other Arabs, and Muslims. Sure they could lose to the Christians and the Hindus but those are warrior peoples like them. The Jews? Jews haven’t won any battles in nearly two thousand years. We were crushed since antiquity. To lose to them is like a young muscular guy in his twenties losing to a middle aged, pudgy accountant with a receding hair line and a mustache. Who loses to them?Report
Okay. This may be crazy.
The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies has a thread in which they claim that the pagers were:
Apollo Gold pagers
Modified at the factory
With the knowledge of the factory
I don’t know if any of this is true (or how the Somali Institute of Chinese Studies (seriously, what the heck?) would get their hands on this information first) but…
It answers the questions of “what kind of pagers?” and “how did the explosives get in there?” and if, in the days to come, it turns out that they weren’t Apollo?
You know that the rest of the assertions are also wishcasting.Report
Why is this a valid source of information?
I can only find they have a twitter page. That hardly seems to make their info trustworthy.
You posted it. Why is it trustworthy?Report
I don’t know whether it’s trustworthy. I do know that I wanted to know the answer to two questions:
1. What kind of pagers were they?
2. At what point were the pagers modified with explosives.
This thread answers those two questions which is why I found it notable.Report
That is weak tea from which to assert we need to pay attention to it. Though I suppose it is consistent that you would choose it since it gives you what you believe are answers.Report
Do you have answers to those two questions from any source?
I would be interested in reading it, if you do!
If you don’t, I will continue to look for answers to those questions and if I find any, I’ll do my best to share them.Report
NPR and CNN both have the what kind of pagers are they story on their landing pages … I’m sure others do as well. Unless the Budapest licensee they reference comes clean, anyone purporting to know when they were modified is dealing in pure speculation.Report
NPR is reporting that they were Apollo pagers.
I couldn’t find anything on CNN except for this:
Thanks for telling me about NPR.
So far, their news gels with The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies.Report
Modifying them at the factory seems unlikely and unneeded. You’re one soldering iron away from killing random factory workers and you’re also running the risk of factory workers posting this on youtube.
My guess is they bought a batch of them, modified them, then swapped them. That swap might be in the warehouse but it might also be on the ship going to the middle east.
In terms of “spook” infrastructure I’d think it more useful to have guys on ships that service the Middle East than some warehouse.Report
Modifying them at the factory might not require a soldering iron if, as theorized, the ignition is the sudden heat of the battery.
We don’t know where they were modified… the warehouse people are praying that it wasn’t them, the port people are praying that it didn’t happen when a shipping container was compromises when it was in their particular ports, the ship owners are praying it didn’t happen in transit, and BAC Consulting isn’t returning phone calls.Report
RE: the ignition is the sudden heat of the battery.
They don’t go off every time they’re used. They need a message sent to them saying “boom now”.
Thus they need to open the case, add/remove stuff, move wires around, add wires, reprogram chips, and/or so on. Setting it up might have involved a soldering iron. It certainly involves a high level of skill.
If we’re doing this to 1000 units then it means we have 1000 units of explosives around.
It involves testing them to make sure that they work. That testing includes putting them in a bomb proof container so if they go off accidently the developer doesn’t get killed.
At this scale you will break some of the pagers that you’re trying to alter and thus bomb disposal.
This requires a high degree of control over the surroundings. Ideally it happened at the lab/machine shop which developed this technology.Report
No, they don’t go off every time they’re used. There has to be some sort of internal trigger to ignite what is theorized to be PETN.
So, like, there has to be a signal sent that tells the battery to heat up above a certain point.
This strikes me as something likely to require, at the very least, a firmware update but if you’ve got access to the factory, you can just add a secondary trigger for when a particular text message is a received.Report
Its very early after the incident.
The route of the pagers from manufacture in Taiwan to the end user in Lebanon is long and tangled and absolutely no one who knows that route has come forward.
So any source that confidently tells us how the explosives got into the pagers is lying, and anyone who believes them is stupid and can be ignored.Report
CNN and NPR have confidently informed us that the pagers weren’t manufactured in Taiwan, Chip.Report
Its very early after the incident.
The route of the pagers from manufacture to the end user in Lebanon is long and tangled and absolutely no one who knows that route has come forward.
So any source that confidently tells us how the explosives got into the pagers is lying, and anyone who believes them is stupid and can be ignored.Report
Yeah, that’s why we’re stuck doing stuff like looking at investigative reporters investigating and giving their preliminary findings.
There’s only a handful of people who confidently know what happened and they’re deleting tweets.Report
“We” aren’t looking at anything, or stuck doing anything.
Smart people are keeping silent until they get reliable information.
Stupid people are chattering.Report
As one of the stupid, I’ll keep posting the stuff that I find.
And you can keep complaining that you’re getting new information that hasn’t been vetted for you yet.Report
It would be awfully quiet around the internet if people waited until they knew what they were talking about before they talked.Report
In my day, stupid people bloviated and spread rumors from a barstool at Cheers, like God intended.Report
You weren’t looking hard enough. This was on the landing page on the left about 5 headline down.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/business/gold-apollo-taiwan-lebanon-exploding-pagers-hnk-intl/index.htmlReport
Oh! Thank you for linking it!
Yep. So far it gels with what The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies said too.Report
Sounds like Muslim doing conspiracy theories about the Jews again.Report
I’m pretty sure that the conspiracy theory, in this case, is about Taiwan.
The part about “Jews are blowing up beepers!” is the part that is *NOT* a conspiracy theory anymore.Report
The plagiarism case against Robin D’Angelo has been dismissed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/books/robin-diangelo-plagiarism-charge-dismissed.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk4.vRgP.MdqCyIjOKyQo&smid=url-sharReport
White Privilege.Report
Okay, from the twitters: BREAKING IN LEBANON: Israel just blew up thousands of two-way radios which were used by Hezbollah terrorists in a second wave of its intelligence operation which started on Tuesday with the explosions of Hezbollah pager devices.
If you can get past the editorializing, the main message underneath seems to be “two-way radios blew up today”.
“Guys, guys… we can’t trust the pagers anymore… Switch to the two-way radios!”Report
Hezbollah is getting off lightly if Israel is only making it harder for them to communicate with each other. After October 7th, these types of old school Mossad actions are how many people wanted Israel to respond to it. Now that Israel is doing these old school Mossad actions, everybody is like “no, no. not like that.”Report
Who, exactly, is “everybody?”Report
Well, part of the eternal problem is the “when we do it, it’s okay” thing.
If Hezbollah sends a dozen rockets into Israel, hey. It’s a war.
If Israel sends a dozen rockets into Lebanon, OH MY GOSH THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED.
The pagers thing strikes me as a fairly precise way to target fairly precise people.
The July article talked about how Hezbollah folks were abandoning smartphones following some panjandrum getting blowed up due to his GPS coordinates being used and they made a big deal about switching to pagers and WRITING ABOUT IT AND BRAGGING ABOUT IT.
So of course pagers get targeted. And, in a plot too dumb to make it past even a Marvel Movie scriptwriter, they waited a day and then started blowing up the walkie-talkies.
Anyway, in this morning’s Cybersecurity meeting, they mentioned the importance of Secure Supply Chain Management.
I digress.
Yeah, it’s a war and using a technique that might get a handful of people to yell “That’s not fair!” will result in people yelling “That’s not fair!”
It’s just the stuff that happens next week and next month and the month after that that might inspire you, yes you, to yell “that’s not fair!” will have to realize now: the claim is likely to fall on deaf ears.Report
“ If Hezbollah sends a dozen rockets into Israel, hey. It’s a war.
If Israel sends a dozen rockets into Lebanon, OH MY GOSH THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED.”
Cite?Report
Eh, the best I got is an example of a rocket blowing up in a hospital parking lot.
But that was in Gaza.
(I have an example of responses to targeted assassinations in Lebanon, though.)Report
I have to ask the same question as Philip H: Who, exactly, is “everybody”?
Netanyahu is a schlemiel and the sledgehammer with which his government is pounding the Gaza Strip is an atrocity. The pagers and radios sabotage operation, though? Inspired. Just brilliant.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/politics/justice-department-francis-scott-key-bridge/index.htmlReport
Too lazy to look right now, but do you know if any criminal charges were brought to bear? A half-dozen people lost their lives.Report
The death toll from the pagers is now up to 12, I’ve seen, including one child.
I also saw this report of Hezbollah’s reports that 10 of their soldiers were killed:
If accurate, this is one hell of a targeted operation.Report
Yes it was. Makes you wonder why Mosad couldn’t do something like this for Hamas . . . .Report
I think it is more likely that Israel wishes it could take the approach to Hezbollah that it does to Hamas. I would further speculate that the difference is that Israel has at least some respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty and/or is concerned it can’t violate that sovereignty with the same level of impunity it gets away with in Gaza.Report
Hamas leadership is in Qatar, so there’s probably a different supply chain there.
If you’re talking about Gaza itself and the mid-level Hamas management, it’d probably involve them having reason to switch to new tech rather than their old tech (and I’m not sure how much access they have to smartphones currently, let along pagers).
Does everybody in Gaza have access to the internet? I admit that my assumption is that they don’t. There’s too many things that could go wrong for too many people if there were something even vaguely adjacent to Freedom of Speech over there.Report
Different comms networks technique and the existence of hostages.Report
given recent revelations, I think the hostages thing is becoming more and more an excuse. And before Israel went scorched earth, I suspect the network in Gaza may well have looked like the one in Lebanon.Report
Several hostages have been found recently. I find the idea that Israel should just give up the ghost about hostages very disturbing. I don’t think you understand how much 10/7 was the straw that broke the camel’s back not just for Jews in Israel regarding Hamas and Hezbollah but with Diaspora Jews and Further Left determined to go more and more into open anti-Semitism. Like there are many people who seem to believe and not say the following:
1. Israel should agree to the creation of a Palestinian state with maximum generosity and zero suspicion.
2. Deal with Palestinian dead enders and Islamist terrorists with grace and a stiff upper lip.
3. Jews should control our crazies but the Muslim responsibility to control their crazies is zero.
4. Wait for things to be better.
There is a lot of arrogance and anti-Semitism towards the Jews in that part of the World and Western liberals seem utterly unable to deal with it. The imperative not to sound Islamophobic is so strong that they simply can’t comment about all the anti-Semitism among Muslims. Jews are just given the entire burden of doing everything to create peace in the I/P conflict and good Jewish-Muslim relations.Report
Yes, welcome to be treated of being a first world nation with responsibilities means you don’t get to strike back as hard and tough as you want to and yes, it means you’ll be held to higher standards.
Now, I think it’d be better off for the US if we treated the I/P conflict for what it is – an intercine religious conflict between two groups of reactionaries where we shouldn’t really step in.Report
Jesse: being a first world nation with responsibilities means you don’t get to strike back as hard and tough as you want to
We lost 3k people in 911. We killed about 2 million people in the Afghan conflict.
Our gov has a responsibility to our people. Theirs doesn’t.
Ergo it takes lopsided causality ratios to make it clear that attacking us is a bad idea even by their standards.
Israel has only killed about 40 people for every civilian they lost in 10-7. They probably aren’t there yet.Report
Our misadventure in Afghanistan should be no one’s guide to proportional or appropriate response. Once we switched form hunting Bin Laden – who was the attacker – to “nation building” in yet another nation that didn’t really want us, we ceased to be trying to achieve atonement for anything.Report
Our misadventure in Afghanistan should be no one’s guide to proportional or appropriate response.
Our body count ratio was something like 1000:1. Exclude 90% of that (from us failing to stand up their gov) and we’d still have something like 100:1.
As a general rule of thumb, democracies over react to this sort of thing.
“Proportional” means “enough force to make them stop even if that means putting their host country through a wood chipper”. If making them stop isn’t possible, then see the part about the “wood chipper”.
On day one I figured Israel would end up killing 100 for every 1 that died. By that metric the war isn’t even half way done.
Israel’s reaction is normal and even expected by democratic standards.Report
It’s not about body count and that’s the wrong way to look at any conflict. History is full of battles and campaigns with lots of casualties that accomplished nothing. The question is always what your goal is and whether what you are doing is helping to achieve it.Report
October 7th was the straw that broke the camel’s back among Israeli Jews. The basically believed, rightly or wrongly, that they have been putting up with a lot of nonsense from Hamas and Hezbollah for a long time even after their withdrawal form Gaza and two attempts at a negotiated end to the I/P conflict. Now they want Hamas and Hezbollah gone for good or at least neutarized.
I think to a lesser extent, October 7th was the straw that broke the camel’s back among Diaspora Jews as well. Seeing these activists out and about celebrating the death of Jews on a mass level was deeply vile. The antics of the Pro-Palestinian protestors and the sheer amount of anit-Semitism coming from them was deeply enraging. So we want them to shut up.Report
InMD: The question is always what your goal is and whether what you are doing is helping to achieve it.
That’s the sane, non-emotional reaction. Voters telling their elected representatives to “do something” isn’t that.
IMHO there is no way prevent anti-Jewish terrorism from Gaza short of ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.
That doesn’t change that Israel has the right to go to war. Nor does it change that a serious war will be brutal and nasty for the Palestinian civilians.
What Israel is trying to do won’t work. Since they answer to their civilians they have to try.
And I get that this logic and ethics is seriously brutal and nasty. The ethical way to resolve all this is for Hamas to surrender. If they don’t that then their people will suffer, but that seems to be the plan.Report
Nobody has any idea about what to do with Hamas. They are entrenched and aren’t the type of group that will willingly give up power even if the people under control no longer want them. Eliminating them physically requires physical violence that very few people have the stomach for. The creation of a Palestinian state won’t remove them from power or change who they are. Telling Israel just to endure them sounds ludicrous but might be the best solution but nobody wants to say that out loud because it sounds bad and might involve saying something can be construed as racist against the Palestinians and Islamophobic, violating a liberal imperative. So nobody says it.Report
See Dark Matter’s point above that this won’t end if Israel withdrawal from territory only leads to more violence against it. This has happened in both Lebanon and Gaza. Even if you assume that Netanyahu is a bastard, I think the average Israeli has enough experience to believe that a withdrawal from the West Bank won’t end the violence against them but increase it. That really isn’t conductive to even a cold peace if the Palestinian and Islamist dead enders are going to be allowed to be violent in perpetuity with no retaliation forever.Report
Theoretically if Israel withdraws from the West Bank and even the Golan Heights and they because launch pads against Israel like Gaza and Lebanon did, than what? How much is Israel supposed to deal with?Report
You have no idea how utterly vile I and many Jews find it that the people who were out and about celebrating 10/7 as an act of “kinetic decolonization” are wailing and wailing about the Palestinians in Gaza or the people in Lebanon. They have agency as well. They can actually try a different approach than “Israel is just one more glorious push to the sea.” Instead they have not done that. I have seen Pro-Palestinian propaganda in my feed that tries to present what is clearly Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian city.” I’ve seen this for pre-state Tel Aviv and 21st century Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians and other Muslims have been saying “No Israel, No Jews” and that the entire thing is an Arab Muslim state connected to other Arab Muslim states for decades before I was born. People in the West seem not to be willing to believe that they might be serious about this and really, really mean it. Instead the burden is always placed on Israel and the Jews to reach out and make peace.Report
The other approaches involve “them losing”.
Lots of people have dedicated their lives to this and/or have had their lives on hold. Worse, lots of jobs and job networks are connected to keeping the “resistance” going.
The Palestinians have gotten their resistance on the cheap, or even made a profit with it. They’re internationally funded, even by the UN, and also have serious ideological & religious backing.
This issue reminds me of the whole “why did the South resist dropping slavery” debate. Huge parts of their GDP and thus jobs depend on the current setup.
There’s also the problem that the true believers have a habit of killing anyone who proclaims they’re reasonable and willing to make peace.Report
I definitely agree with the hidden economics thesis to as part of the endless inability for the Palestinians and other to decide on another source of action. The UN agencies and International Caring Community have been subsidizing the defiance of the Palestinians for decades but pointing out the best thing for the Palestinians would be to cut of their money supply to make them reach a decision seems cruel. Chances are that other Muslims will rush in to fill the avoid anyway.
The true believer issue is antoher problem becasue very few people seem interested in a direct confrontation with them besides Israel and Diaspora Jews. This goes beyond making peace. We Jews aren’t really that much into evangelizing and making others follow our way but you have tens or hundreds of millions of people who can’t stand Jews doing Jewish things world wide even when we spend our own money on them. It is simply too much for them to bear. The anti-Semites of all stripes are aware that they outnumber Jews by a considerable margin and nobody else wants to grab them firmly by the arm, tell them that they are ridiculous, and break their bones to get them to stop. Therefore, the Jew haters never stop by they white or of color or Christian or Muslim or anything else.Report
It doesn’t help that white liberals and leftists seem incapacitated when dealing with anti-Semitism from non-Whites or people who code non-White because of the imperative not to seem racist ever. You saw this when the issue of anti-Semitism in the Women’s March or with Kayne West came along. Having to write about it seemed physically painful with the Vox set. They are even worse with Muslim anti-Semitism for the same reason. They just can’t do it.Report
That is one of the burdens of being a nation. Another is not violating borders when and where the exist. A third is not oppressing minorities within your borders. Israel has chosen to fail at all three.
So have the Palestinians – and without the having actual borders or recognition as a nation state.Report
What “borders” have they been violating? They don’t have set borders with the Palestinians because they don’t have a peace agreement after the war when the borders moved.
“No set borders” and “no peace” created a power and legal vacuum that the settlers have exploited.
That’s toxic, but “no peace/borders” predates the settlers by decades.
We have “no set borders” because of the Palestinian insistence on a Right to Return. A serious RoR means all of Israel is a settlement that should be undone.Report
Western liberals and leftist still refuse to deal with the fact that even the allegedly moderate factions of the Palestinians are insisting on an absolute right of return. The more hardline factions of the Palestinians and their Muslim allies insist on all Jews must go. Now the hardcore further Left agrees with them but they are politically powerless.
The mainstream liberals and leftists are stumped by this though. Various imperatives in liberalism and diplomacy prevent them from calling the Palestinians out on this and telling them to stop being ridiculous but they know they can’t force Israel to accept a right of return without invading Israel either. So everybody goes about like this isn’t a problem despite it very much being a problem.Report
Some of those guys look rather pasty.Report
Here’s a joke you can tell the next time you’re in a safe place:
“I guess the Jews *ARE* responsible for multiple gender reassignment surgeries.”
But don’t tell it in front of most of the folks I’m imagining San Francisco is full of.Report
Death toll is now 32 (google robot), with 3200 people injured.
Thousands of pages. Sounds like they didn’t use much explosives.
Probably supposed to go off in your hand and just cripple you.Report
Here is a thing that I really don’t understand. The Palestinians along with many other Muslim majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia and from Kazakhstan down to whatever the southern most Muslim majority country in sub-Sahara Africa has have made it clear that close connections between Islam and state are important to them even if the non-Muslim population is very substantial like it was in Sudan before South Sudanese independence, Nigeria, and Malaysia. They aren’t exactly shy about their overwhelmingly Islamic orientation in those places complete with laws against blasphemy and apostacy. Most state symbols are Muslim and Islam appears in the official wording somewhere.
There are a lot of well meaning Westerners that simply seem to refuse to get this. All the clear statements from the Palestinians and other Muslims of “we want Muslim Palestine” gets scrambled in the heads into “we want multicultural rainbow Palestine” despite a lot of easy to find statements that show the exact opposite. As mentioned previously, there is Pro-Palestinian propaganda on social media that depicts Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian” city. But whenever this gets pointed out, and no matter how much evidence is presented, it gets dismissed as Islamophobia. It is like certain imperatives in liberalism just prevent Westerners from dealing with all the extremely obvious to Jews anti-Semitism among Muslims or how utterly dominate Islam is.Report
To take this more broadly, there seem to be certain liberal imperatives that prevent the small broad small-l coalition from realizing that different types of illiberals might be serious about what they believe no matter how much they say it or what actions they take. The usual response whether it is from a fascist in the West or an Islamist or a Hinduvata nationalist or whatever else is “oh, nobody can really believe something that ridiculous” and “these things are just ways for so and so to maintain power by fear and terror” or if sympathetic to the illiberal, “poverty and oppression are driving these beliefs and once those go away they will become eusocial liberals.” The idea that people can really believe in ridiculous things and in large numbers is just treated as an impossibility.Report
Everyone is like me and my circle of friends/family.Report
That is a big part of it but not all of it. The problem with liberals or liberalish people is that the alternative to the secular developed democracy liberalish lifestyle seems so utterly bonkers and unpleasant that they can’t imagine anybody rejecting it for any reason. It doesn’t make sense with TradCath converts like Vance does it or if the the Taliban does it. Nor can these people be sincere in their beliefs and have to be doing it for some other reason.
I think a lot of my fellow Jews are going to get hurt a lot because of this and much of what we have built will be destroyed. Many liberals are useless enough when dealing with white anti-Semites from the right because they can’t quite get Jews as an oppressed people or really being in danger in their head space. The imperatives of liberalism make them worse than useless when dealing with other anti-Semites.Report
The debates on LGM over the I/P conflict seem to revolve around the people who take what the Palestinians and Muslims at least slightly serious and those that go “oh, nobody can believe that” and all this theocratic talk is about their oppression.Report
Springfield, Ohio is in Clark County. In 2020, Clark County voters supported Trump by a 60-36 margin. One thing I’ll be watching in November is how that margin has shifted. Does Trump’s demagoguery bolster his support? Or does the chaos and hassle he is causing push away voters?Report
I think its darkly amusing how for years conservatives were all telling us “Oh, no, we don’t hate immigrants, its just the ILLEGAL ones we don’t want, we’re totally cool with legal immigrants” then after all that hard work of lying, along comes JD Vance and says, “Nah, we hate the legal ones too.”Report
There’s a big elephant no one’s talking about in this very dark room.Report
Many people did not want to take the Vance types seriously for a long time. Even during Trump’s first impression, there was a minor version of the “oh, nobody can be that bad or believe in this ridiculous stuff” that I noted exists above when it comes to Islamic theocratic beliefs.Report
Welp Robinson might be in trouble again: https://www.rawstory.com/mark-robinson-north-carolina-2669238732/Report
“activity on adult websites in the 2000’s.” there’s only two ways that could get him out of the race . . . One ought to be no one’s business and one is, well, … a felony. Or multiple felonies.
Only the best people. SMDH.Report
FWIW, I don’t think he is the kind that backs down even if it is the well, the felony.Report
Why should he? TFG certainly hasn’t.Report
He could own several adult websites.Report
Who doesn’t these days?Report
It’s rather quaint that a politician is under scrutiny for a very old fashioned sex scandal in this day and age. Like maybe in the aughts and earlier, I can see a politician’s porn habits sinking them. But today? With porn as widespread as it is? That seems weird even in a red-leaning state like North Carolina.Report
You are kind of sweet for assuming this is a normal, old-fashioned sex scandal.Report
Isn’t this the guy who waved his hand in front of his groin and said that women need to “get this under control”?Report
The very same. Everything we know about this guy so far as not produced this reaction from Trump’s team or the National GOP (unless they maintained more discipline than I thought possible of them). So I am imagining this story has to contain behavior which is illegal but for which the statute of limitations may have expired.Report
Just more confirmation that the more people talk about controlling other people’s naughty bits, the higher the likelihood of them having a deeply weird and disturbed sex life.Report
Newly in: Mark Robinson apparently called himself a Black N@@i and made comments against MLK and Jews: https://businessnc.com/upcoming-cnn-story-has-robinson-on-defense/
I am not sure whether this is something Trump would worry about though.Report
The Trump campaign is probably worried that having him associated with them in a purple state means they loose it and maybe a House seat or two as well.
I will say dude is on brand though.Report
Yeah, I think that basically they decided he is an anchor on their chances and needs to go so now they are just looking for stuff.Report
This is what happens when there is only one path to victory in the GOPReport
The CNN story is now out – his BlackNa.zi comments were made on adult porn sites.Report
At least it was an adult porn site.Report
He likes transgender stuff apparently.Report
It just keeps getting better. I mean a transgender loving Anti-Semitic Black Na.zi seems so on brand as a GOP candidate these days. And highlights how badly they vet candidates.Report
If y’all are looking for something interesting to listen to that is outside your wheelhouse (I feel confident saying that for every single person who might possibly read this on this site), this episode of Return the Key on Simone Weil is really interesting.Report
Here are Mark Robinson’s little dolls of “N@@is” He is not a well man:
https://www.ultimatesoldier.net/photosccc/photo2748.htmReport
I am getting very tired of Jews being used as a prop:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bbfdf3b5daed11df808c96d89a4236507f13dd99b608b8cb439be2a0b3b50d99.pngReport
Olivia Nuzzi suspended by New York because she failed to disclose romantic relationship with RFK Jr while covering him. Also she wrote stories about Biden’s alleged senility while RFK Jr. was making those allegations: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-rfk-olivia-nuzzi-b2615997.htmlReport
She tweeted this out in 2015.
In her defense, she was only about 22 when she tweeted that so she didn’t yet understand.Report
Modern pop feminism is dedicated to the radical notion that women are not people, but flawless beings devoid of all humanity, all of whose deeds are good actually and completely justified by the circumstances.Report
Rooney Mara’s and Robin Wright’s characters in House of Cards were not that! And not just because of their sexual choices, either.Report
Eye witnesses saw Matt Gaetz at a drug fueled high school sex party in 2017:
https://www.notus.org/florida/new-court-filings-matt-gaetz-dorworth-sex-partyReport
He is no one’s friend or ally.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/19/trump-blames-jews-election-loss/Report
I already posted this. I will have a longer rant about my feelings about this latter.Report
Only the most upstanding individuals, Rufo had an Ashley Madison account apparently: https://bsky.app/profile/thielman.bsky.social/post/3l4kk5zbftk2rReport
I used to think that the image of the puritanical censor as being a closeted libertine was too pat, a just-so story to avoid engaging the censors on their terms.
But as time goes on I see how much truth there is to it.
it isn’t to say that there is anything wrong with traditional mores so much as anyone who spends a lot of time policing other people’s sex lives is almost always themselves damaged and unhealthy.Report
I think there are two basic approaches to the issue. One is a healthy, ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I..’ mentality. This generally encourages humility, openness to forgiveness, and hesitancy to be too judgmental or mean spirited to those who fall short. The other approach is neurotic obsession. This leads to projection, cruelty, and of course self hatred as the person is unable to control his or her own escalating worst impulses.Report
Having seen the numbers for Ashley Madison released (something like 95% of the users were men), I’m guessing that the website was responsible for saving more users from adultery than facilitating it.
You know the Nietzsche quotation “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”?
Now I’m not saying that it’s *VIRTUOUS*. Heaven forbid!
But it strikes me as being a tool to relieve fantasies rather than facilitate them. As such, a strange social good. Comparatively, anyway.Report
I could certainly see the case for that. My wife on the other hand? I have grave doubts.Report
OH I’M NOT SAYING IT’S AN INDIVIDUAL GOOD!Report
That may be true for porn websites generally, but I think your hypothesis is deeply flawed when applied to a website designed to facilitate IRL sexual encounters.
What would be an unalloyed societal good would be for us to all learn how to live peacefully with whatever sexual and or relationship pattern works best for each person. Its a spectrum, not a binary, just like gender. Sadly too many people refuse to accept this framing.Report
If 95% of the website’s users are male, I’m guessing that the website was designed to do something else entirely while, on the surface level, bragging that it was designed to facilitate IRL sexual encounters.
What would be an unalloyed societal good would be for us to all learn how to live peacefully with whatever sexual and or relationship pattern works best for each person.
Gigglesnort.Report
Gigglesnort.
I’m glad you said this so I didn’t have to.Report
Judgemental are we?Report
“Baby, you just need to learn how to live peacefully with whatever sexual and/or relationship pattern works best for me!”
“I am, that’s why I’m dumping you.”
“That’s pretty selfish.”Report
No, quite the opposite actually. Just a realist.Report
“What would be an unalloyed societal good would be for us to all learn how to live peacefully with whatever sexual and or relationship pattern works best for each person”
So you’re totally ok with paid sex work? Cool.Report
So you’re totally ok with paid sex work?
I think it’s a bad idea, just like tattoos and body piercings are a bad idea. You can put nicotine, alcohol and drug abuse in there too.
Having said that, I think it’s a bad idea to outlaw any of those. My morality, lifestyle, and common sense aren’t for everyone.Report
I’m more warry of substances, but sex? Hell, it it were legal, and I had the cash, I just pay for casual sex with a few attractive women. What’s the saying, you don’t pay for the sex, you pay for them to leave. 🙂Report
I’ve always been in favor of legal paid sex work. Solves a certain number of societal problems if its a regulated business like any other.
Sadly the US is far too prudish to get there yet.Report
There are a lot of sites and apps that are basically trying to be prostitution apps but with plausible deniability.Report
also true.Report
There is a tension for the apps. Sure, you sign up on eHarmony but then you meet The One and get hitched and both of you have your account lapse and after you finish up the Joshua and TanyaLee commercials… well, eHarmony is not only out of one but *TWO* subscriptions.
What you want is an app that constantly makes you feel like The One is just a swipe away. Maybe this next chick. Maybe this next dude. Maybe this next one. Ugh. Okay, maybe the one after that.
Here’s another twenty bucks. Swipe left, swipe left, swipe left.
You can get away with that for *YEARS*.Report
Ashley Madison is still a thing?Report
Its easier to claim the system is rigged and the results should be tossed when you create chaos in how the election is administered.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/georgia-republican-election-rules-hand-count/index.htmlReport
Eric Hovde, Republican Senate candidate for WIsconsin, may have received a lot of money from a Mexican drug cartel:
https://www.wispolitics.com/2024/wisdems-bombshell-banco-azteca-mexican-bank-long-reported-to-be-used-by-drug-cartels-flew-26m-in-cash-over-us-mexico-border-directly-to-eric-hovdes-bank/Report
Grifters gonna grift apparentlyReport
Banco Azteca sounds like the name of bank working with drug cartels in Chuck Norris action movie from the 1980s.Report
Like you do.Report
I mean large amounts of money are mysteriously transferred all the time. Some people are just lucky.Report
The voter suppression gene apparently runs strong in the GOP:
https://www.wispolitics.com/2024/dodge-county-sheriff-encouraged-clerks-not-to-use-drop-boxes-this-fall/Report
The weird all-powerful sheriff think on the right is something to behold.
“Let me be clear, it is my intent to ensure every legitimate vote is counted and everyone who is legally permitted by law to vote has the opportunity to vote one time.”
This guy has absolutely nothing at all to do with the counting of votes.Report
He also probably believes he gets to define who is legally allowed and who isn’t. I’m sure he believes Democrats aren’t legally allowed to vote, what with not being Real Americans and all.Report
Guess who married an undocumented immigrant but she was one of the good ones: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/adventures-in-wilhoits-lawReport
WE FILED ALL OF THE PAPERWORK PROPERLY!
I WROTE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT!!!Report
Israel’s operation in Lebanon seems to have basically gutted Hezbollah. Good. I really can’t believe Israel’s critics on this one. Nobody doubts that Hezbollah was firing rockets into Israel because they decided to side with Hamas in the Israel-Hamas War. Normally doing this opens a country or armed group to attack. This is a lot less lethal in terms of collateral damage than a conventional bombing or invasion would be. It is also how many people thought that Israel should respond to October 7th.Report
IDF is doing targeted bombing of Hezbollah rocket launches in South Lebanon:
https://x.com/manniefabian/status/1837499443454591072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837499443454591072%7Ctwgr%5Ed7e72170c4b3cef40bc4102cb1602250031a9e59%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D14471620https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D144716t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20242F092Fhollowing-outt_e%3DHollowing20Outt_d%3DHollowing20Out20-20Lawyers2C20Guns202620Moneyt_t%3DHollowing20Outs_o%3Ddescversion%3D4ef1b4e67a51bc2b38fed77fda108743Report
“Guys, when we switched from beepers to two-way radios, our radios started blowing up. Maybe we should all meet together in the same physical room.”Report
Meeting physical was one way that Hamas was able to plan October 7th.Report
This should be to the surprise of nobody but Hamas has been stealing and hoarding all the humanitarian aid intended for Gazans. People know that Hamas is cartoonishly evil organization but can’t quite come out and say it. They want Israel to do double duty and care for their own population along with the Gazans because of the cartoonish evil of Hamas and can’t come out and say it:
https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-820030Report
The Party Of Life, y’all:
A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban
Exclusive analysis finds the rate of maternal deaths in Texas increased 56% from 2019 to 2022, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631Report
Report
In more Covid-19 news, The Atlantic has a fun article titled: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time.
Apparently, New York City’s former COVID czar organized sex parties in 2020. Like, the 2nd half of 2020.
“The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then.”
Man, I hear ya! I went for months without hugging my mom.Report
Article is paywalled but I googled and the guy’s response is pathetic.Report
“My circumstances are extraordinary!”, the rule-setter explained.Report
It’s more the inability to take responsibility. Was it really so impossible to just do that, without turning the whole thing into a tirade about being targeted by right wing extremists? I don’t have any soft spots for conservative media provacateurs. I find them annoying and insufferable. But they are not the ones who scheduled the sex parties for him, and I am certain they didn’t put a gun to his head to force him to attend.Report
Rules are for the little people.Report
I’m kind of surprised there weren’t more COVID speakeasies.Report
There was at least one- It was called “Florida”.Report
Very funny. I meant like real speakeasies.Report
I was being serious.
Most of MAGA-land never had or enforced any sort of social distancing or masking and fought tooth and nail against vaccination requirements.
And they are still butthurt over the rules they imagine they followed.Report
Eh, it’s not a big deal. You know that you were supposed to follow them, right?Report
This, but unsarcastically.Report
Then why do you care?Report
I don’t. Which is why I didn’t post it.
Because its not a big deal.Report
So it’s not a big deal that MAGA-land never had or enforced any sort of social distancing or masking and fought tooth and nail against vaccination requirements.Report
Yes, I know. I was talking about in places like New York and California though where such things were prohibited.Report
In all seriousness, I bet there were some places where people quietly violated masking and distancing protocols.
But (IMO) it wasn’t widespread because the protocols were so trifling and the legitimate fear of dying from Covid was enough of a deterrent.
America never had European style lockdowns or curfews.Report
There were other places where they loudly did it! Like, and posted it to instagram! It was covered on the local news as well!
“America never had European style lockdowns or curfews.”
I can find you examples of public parks being shut down, of restaurants closing off outdoor eating, of people being arrested for going to the beach, if you’d like.
I don’t know what you get out of pretending that these things did not happen and, besides, it didn’t matter if it did because other people didn’t follow the rules without getting punished.Report
You should look into how strict the European lockdowns were.
We never experienced anything on that level. Your own examples prove that.
And the butthurt over officials violating the protocols is really just grievance mongering.
The death toll from that is precisely zero, while the death toll from Trump and DeSantis f*ckery is in the hundreds of thousands.Report
“And the butthurt over officials violating the protocols is really just grievance mongering.”
Nah, I expect public officials of any flavor to comply with the policies published/etc. and to lead by example. That they didn’t only speaks volumes about their character, how they view their positions, and their overall duchebaggery.Report
I experienced stuff close to that, though. I cancelled a trip to Florida to visit my uncles (one of whom died before I could get out there again).
I was pretty much housebound with the exception of jogging. I got my groceries delivered.
Friends that I was used to seeing daily or weekly became words on a screen. It was a big deal to visit them and yell at them from the driveway as they shouted down to me from their upstairs bedroom window.
As previously mentioned, this is stuff that I did voluntarily.
This is all stuff that I did to help protect myself, my family, and my community.
Seeing the rule-setters go on to be rule-breakers was disheartening. But what’s maddening was seeing people defending the rule-setters because, hey, we aren’t Europe.Report
Who here is defending the rule setters?
I’m just saying that their offenses were trivial infractions, compared to the felonies of Trump and DeSantis.
I would think that as a cynical guy who rejects the moral authority of scolds, you would be more understanding.Report
Who here is defending the rule setters?
The people saying that it doesn’t particularly matter that they broke rules.
The ones pointing out that we didn’t have an official policy of welding people into their apartments like they did in China.
The ones who, when presented with evidence of rule-setters breaking the rules that they set, change the subject to why other people might care… and not just to people who refused to mask and kept going to the McDonald’s in the Wal-Mart. The ones who did follow the rules. The ones who did stay home to slow the spread.Report
I’m not seeing why this should matter.
No one died, no one was harmed.Report
I think we can cheerfully admit that it was a bad look and a bad example, but if your basic approach to politics is a branch of applied aesthetics, it matters a great deal more than that.Report
My uncle died.
I mentioned this earlier.
We were going to visit him and then we cancelled because we were doing our best to slow the spread.
And he died while we were waiting for the whole lockdown thing to be lifted.
Is your argument that the lockdowns were too harsh and we shouldn’t have had the non-European ones we had?
Is your argument that it was okay for people to be free riders on the good deeds of others because no-harm-done?Report
I’m saying that no one was harmed by the actions of the rule setters’ hypocrisy.Report
“Nobody is harmed by free riders!”
Chip: This is not true. It is erroneous at best and a lie at worst. It is false. It is not true.Report
I never said that.
I just said that this case of free riding didn’t result in any harm.Report
That’s the weird thing about free riding.
You can point to any individual act of free riding and say “no harm done!”
For each and every individual instance of free riding.Report
This is where your use of the term “free rider” falls apart.
A free rider is someone who enjoys a benefit without a contribution.
Like an unvaccinated person enjoying the benefit of herd immunity for example.
Here, the people weren’t enjoying any unearned benefit.
The case is more similar to a conservative rabbi caught not keeping kosher.
Hypocritical yes, but not any actual harm done.Report
I didn’t hang out with my mother for months. There were no gatherings with people who were not Maribou.
I kept to my bubble.
It seems like we’re in a weird space where me not seing my mom for months (apart from the occasional yelling to her on the porch from the sidewalk) was seen as me being a good citizen but guys who set up (multiple!) orgies get a “no harm done”.
And you’re either in error or you’re lying.Report
It wasn’t you being a good citizen, it was you protecting your mom from accidental transmittal of a virus. Both of you benefitted.
If someone went to the sex party and got covid or the clap, yeah they were harmed.Report
If we’re going to claim that social isolation and not traveling are a public good because of Covid, then this was absolutely a case of free riding.
It’s impossible for everyone to isolate so the rest of us are supposed to in order to prevent (or just lower) the spread of Covid.Report
If we are going to condemn the person that went into the gas station without NPI I don’t see how we can let the attendees of a sex party off the hook.Report
Who?
Whom?
That’s how you let the attendees of a sex party off the hook.Report
Would it surprise you to learn that the sort of people who attend sex parties are already predisposed to reject your moral authority?Report
I’m well aware that Free Riders aren’t big on the moral authority of others, Chip.
The data worth exploring is how you’re so willing to defend them.Report
Off the hook? What does that even mean? Is there, or was there, anyone in a position to do anything about Gavin Newsom or the sex party bureaucrats who didn’t do something about them that they had the power to do? Have they escaped public scorn for being powerful, entitled hypocrites? Has anyone of any consequence said they were right to do what they did? Has anyone suffered any tangible harm from what they did that they would not have suffered otherwise? Or are they merely, if rightly, offended?
Some people may feel more strongly about this than others and may maintain their resentment longer than seems healthy, but that’s their business unless they insist on harping about it to others. Then the question of why they’re bothering the rest of us will naturally be more interesting than the dessicated merits.Report
And even then,was Gavin Newsom or Sex Party guy out there telling people that masks don’t work? Or that people shouldn’t get vaccinated? Or refusing to enforce masking protocols, and passing laws to forbid others from enforcing them? Or suggesting that covid can be cured with horsepaste and bleach?
Those actions all resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
How much public scorn should we heap upon those who did that?Report
“Off the hook? What does that even mean?”
You probably meant to ask that of the person who introduced the phrase into the conversation.
For what it’s worth, I agree with the definition he’s likely to give you.
I will ask you these questions that I asked Chip, though:
Is your argument that the lockdowns were too harsh and we shouldn’t have had the non-European ones we had?
Is your argument that it was okay for people to be free riders on the good deeds of others because no-harm-done?
(And, for the record, I’m amused by their hypocrisy. I’m offended by the fact that they were free riders on my, and others’, good behavior.)Report
I saw the head of the Highway Safety Commission driving along not wearing a seat belt.
Man, I hate free riders, while I wear my seatbelt like a good citizen.Report
Imagine if you were driving without a seat belt and got a ticket (“Click it or ticket!”).
Now imagine the head of the Highway Safety Commission getting pulled over and just handing the cop a “Courtesy Card” and going back to driving.
If you can do that, you might be closer to understanding.Report
I would consider that a minor irritation, the way I do when a regulator breaks his own rules.
And I would be grateful for the reminder to fasten my own seatbelt.Report
Well, get this, the cop who gave the regulator a ticket for not wearing his seatbelt got fired for ignoring the “Courtesy Card”.
Sued the department, even.
Apparently his leadership considered it a worse transgression to ignore the Courtesy Card than whatever the holder of the cards was doing in the first place.
Wacky.Report
No, I meant to ask you. Though if InMD wants to weigh in, I’m cool with that. If that clears things up, I’ll await your answer with bated, but not held, breath.
As for your questions, no and no.Report
I’m generally happy to use the phrases that others introduce.
(Sometimes I find myself in a weird situation where someone says something to the effect of “they know what they’re doing” and my response is something like “they don’t know what they’re doing” and someone asks “*WHO ARE THEY*?” and, like, seriously… it’s the same “they” as in the comment you ignored in order to respond to mine. Oh, yeah. That’s this situation too.)
Follow-up: Do you have an argument?Report
You first. Or second, since I answered your questions.
Or are you saying you don’t know what you meant?Report
I’m saying that there are a half-dozen meanings that it could be and I am comfortable with each of them and, as such, which precise meaning he was using was immaterial given that I am pleased to be in agreement on his fundamental point.
Would you like me to explain what the phrase means colloquially, as if you’ve never heard it before?
I wouldn’t mind.Report
You used it. If you don’t want to say what you meant when you used it, that’s your prerogative. Doesn’t advance conversation, but maybe that’s a feature, not a bug.Report
In this case “off the hook?” is a truncation of “let (them) off the hook”.
Mirriam-Webster tells us that “let (someone) off the hook” is an idiom that means “to allow (someone who has been caught doing something wrong or illegal) to go without being punished”.
Do you understand the idiom now?Report
This is obtuse even for you. I’m perfectly well aware of most of the common meanings of the term, and have even seen formal definitions. That doesn’t answer the question of which YOU mean. But if you are adopting the definition you quote, then you can use it to answer my questions. There were four of them.Report
This is obtuse even for you.
I’m not the one who made a big production out of not knowing what “off the hook” meant in the context of the conversation that I was having with InMD.
Is there, or was there, anyone in a position to do anything about Gavin Newsom or the sex party bureaucrats who didn’t do something about them that they had the power to do?
The power to do? I suppose if we limited it to “The Power Of Kvetching About It”, we could do comparisons between the people who used this power and those who used the ever-popular “Why do you care?” response to people complaining about powerful people defecting in the iterated game.
Have they escaped public scorn for being powerful, entitled hypocrites?
From whom? Team members? I’d have to say “Yeah, looks like it.”
Even you seem to care more that I care about it than you’ve communicated irritation at the defection.
Has anyone of any consequence said they were right to do what they did?
As far as I can tell, it’s mostly inconsequential people asking “why do you care?” at the people who are pissed off about it.
Has anyone suffered any tangible harm from what they did that they would not have suffered otherwise? Or are they merely, if rightly, offended?
Tangible harm? How would you measure that? Whether numbers went up after they did it?
Or are we stuck acknowledging that all they did was defect and are on the horns of a dilemma:
See it as worth attacking?
See it as worth defending by counter-attacking attackers?
Do you mind if I assume which of the horns you’ve chosen to sit upon?Report
That wasn’t so hard, was it? As for what you can assume, you know the old saying.Report
“Revealed Preference Something Something”?Report
Not everyone was let off the hook:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/dr-jay-varma-sex-parties-during-covid-pandemic/Report
Wow. My mood is *DRAMATICALLY* improved.
And the story is an hour old!
This is good stuff!Report
There were: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/nyregion/new-york-city-covid-speakeasies.htmlReport
I think America never had any European style lockdowns or curfews, let alone what they did in East Asian democracies, because American politicians knew that most Americans would end up as scofflaws. Even if the Republicans took COVID seriously as an entire party, there would be strong limits on what could be imposed.Report
As best as I can tell, as long as you were outside of New York City, the initiatives operated mostly on the honor system, and most people tried to do what was asked.
The exception is if you own and/or work in retail or restaurants, and the exception wasn’t that cops were going around checking to see if there were any visitors from outside of the household in your home. It was that you couldn’t earn a living because those places were closed. Sort of. Sometimes. And then there was the school situation.Report
SF-Bay Area was as locked down as these things go but I don’t know if it was on the honor system or not.Report
Kinda:
Report
I think there might have been a party or two in Los Angeles that were closed. Most businesses that weren’t essential in the Bay Area were also closed for months and then only allowed limited reopening in the summer or so with strict capacity limits. A few of my friends did July 4th on a beach and a cop did some peering into us but eventually decided to let it be. It took until at least 2022 for things to be really normal again.Report
I recall a few reports in the earliest days of people being arrested for huge house parties out in the further flung DC suburbs. By summer things weren’t ‘normal’ exactly but various systems and exceptions made it hard to understand what, if any, coherent line was being drawn. The big exception was the public schools, which to be clear was a line, but not really a coherent one.
My point is more that I think you did have a lot of people making sacrifices in their personal lives, even where they knew that there probably would not be serious consequences for doing otherwise.Report
I spent 2 weeks in Florida in November 2020 (with family, who’d just moved out there the week before, so we were part of each other’s bubble, or whatever we were calling it by that point). Soon after arriving, I walked to a gas station near their home, and it was the first time I’d been to any public place in months in which absolutely no one (but me) was wearing a mask. And I live in Texas. I don’t think I saw more than a handful of people in masks in that 2 week period. It was surreal.Report
Chat GPT is becoming useful for helping me sort near-recent memories. For example, when I ask about Covid Policies in VA and FL it serves up solid summaries and references to policy docs (I checked to make sure they weren’t hallucinations!).
Basically, both states took dramatic public measures to curtail business and gatherings starting on or around April 1, 2020.
Florida’s executive order was April 1, and takes as it’s model the Miami-Dade order which starts:
1. All non-essential retail and commercial establishments are ordered closed. [Miami-Dade]
DeSantis then continues:
I hereby order Miami-Dade County, Broward County, Palm Beach County
and Monroe County to restrict public access to businesses and facilities deemed non-essential
pursuant to the guidelines established by Miami-Dade County pursuant to its March 19, 2020
Emergency Order 07-20… etc. etc.
Now, of course, the interesting thing are the list of ‘exceptions’ for what is considered essential, but that’s a sociological commentary for another time.
But, the one thing none of us should argue is that nation-wide businesses, schools, livelihoods and social interactions were in fact curtailed by government orders, including fines. It’s weird to contend otherwise.
What’s also interesting is following the path of VA and FL for their re-opening policies…
Both states kicked-off their ‘Re-Opening’ processes in May 2020 (FL was more restrictive)
Phase 2 in VA *and* FL started in June. However, in FL Miami-Dade was not authorized to enter Phase 2 until SEPT.
Meanwhile, Phase 3 started in VA in JUL, but Phase 3 started in FL in SEPT (except in Miami-Dade, which entered Phase 2)… and Phase 3a (removal of fines) commenced NOV 24th in FL. Whereas VA pulled back in NOV with another surge.
Basically, the country did impose strict economic and social restrictions that were far more macro and significant than mico issues of masking… and those restrictions were very severe indeed for approx 6-weeks starting April 2020 … thereafter Re-Opening policies more or less tracked a general trends – your state/locality mmv – with major outliers in Education.
After vaccines rolled out in MAR 2021, I’d say that’s when the *real* stupidity and political polarization kicks in.
But 2020 — when the Regulator Sex Parties(TM) were happening — that was the time of collective sacrifice when people lost their jobs, their businesses, and social lives via regulations. In the UK it cost Boris his government; in the US it doesn’t seem to have cost anyone anything.Report
Regulator Sex Parties sounds like a good name for a German industrial band.Report
If Kraftwerk and Joy Division had a baby.Report
Forgot the link to a FL document:
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/orders/2020/EO_20-89.pdf
(Note for JB: this link is to a .pdf… whatever you do, please be advised that a pdf will open in your browser… please take all necessary actions for this internet event)Report
Man, on dial-up, this would have wrecked my session for an hour!Report
A minor flashback to April 2020. I suited up for driving a small delivery of groceries to a friend. We didn’t interact at all. I left them on his porch and texted him telling him to look out on his porch.
It seems like a dream.Report
That’s a heck of a reminder and good context. We had the 16 month old of a couple we are friends with staying with us that weekend while the wife delivered because (i) their parents were afraid to come down from the NY/NJ area and risk and/or spread covid, and (ii) the hospitals were legit throwing post partum women out right away to make room and avoid spread, so there was no real recovery time. It was nuts.Report