Honestly, that's why I doubt it's going to be any experienced left-ist protestor: Those people actually understand op-sec.
The right are complete and utter dumbasses about it, as evidenced by how many took their actual personal cell phones to do a coup, which they planned out on social media. They do not understand how to actually treat law enforcement as a _threat_, because, because a huge chunk of the time when right-wing actors are acting lawlessly, the cops are right there as part of the lawless crowd.
So when they cross the point that the authorities do indeed act against them, they have no idea what to do, they didn't bother to plan or prep at all, they just assumed law enforcement would just very carefully avert their eyes and mutter about free speech.
Now, it's also possible it's some pro-Palestinian protestor who is incredibly new at this, I won't say it couldn't be them, but it's not anyone with experience doing protests that could actually result in arrest...and the right, even the lunatic neo-N.azi right, is usually operating with at least tactic understanding that the cops will not go after them. (They're the Right Sort of people even if they have not good ideas.)
But if you instead ask them what effective tax rate (including state taxes) the wealthiest 1% (or whatever) should pay, many, perhaps most, of the people who said that they should be “higher” are going to specify a rate that’s lower than what the group in question actually pays.
This is because 'effective tax rate' is utter gibberish.
How about we ask people what the total amount that Jeff Bezos should have paid in taxes as his net worth went to $191 billion, over his lifetime?
Or let's phrase it the other direction. Here's a poll question for you, one that they never will run:
If you, taking this poll, were already in the highest income bracket, you would had to earn $16 dollar to become wealthier by $10 more dollars last year. How much do you think that Bezos should have had to earn if he became wealthier by $10 billion last year?
If the respondent does not answer 'About $10.01 billion', they want taxes to be higher. Because that's what they currently are.
Because he literally didn't have to pay any taxes on 99.99% of that money, because it's not classified as income, it is merely increase in stock price. It will only become income when he turns in into cash, which he will not have to do, because he can just use it as collateral for interest-free loans instead. He can keep that money until he dies, at which point he now has to pay taxes on his exact expenses over his life, before inflation, a very fun cheat compared to normal Americans having to pay taxes before they get the money.
The American people do not understand that, you are correct. You can tell because we have not all decided to murder the wealthy.
To address the border specifically: Voters on both sides want the thing that normal people would describe as border security, aka, stopping people both from going over the border illegally and from having an incentive to do so. Republican voters also want to crack down on refugees and asylum seekers and, like, people who look kinda foreign and why does this phone keep asking me to if I want to use Spanish, I'm in America dammit.
The thing is, both political parties are already promising to do that thing that voters on both sides want to do.
The problem, of course, that actually securing the border isn't done by building giant walls, it is done by doing what Harris was actually supposed to be doing as VP: Trying to make it where we didn't have constant failures of governments to the south of us, which is, in a very real way, mostly our fault. Both because we like to constantly overthrow governments that seem slightly not conservative enough or not willing to let Dole do bananas enough or mine lithium or borite or whatever US businesses are trying to do in South American this week, or just because our giant-ass drug problem sends so much money to drug cartels that the government cannot function.
The only way to fix the southern border is to fix the countries to the south of us, and thus we need to do that, I say, pretending we don't have a moral obligation to do that _anyway_ because we are the people who repeatedly broke them.
You can't fight smuggling by putting up walls, and you especially can't do that when the thing people are smuggling are themselves, because people are very smart compared to other contraband. You can reduce demand, aka, do what has been done a bit to reduce hiring people who are in the US illegally, but that's already been done and has merely resulted in all corporations hiring 'contractors' who they 'don't know' are hiring illegal workers. And it is, in fact, literally impossible to hold corporations responsible for the criminal activity they are engaging in beyond small fines, because politicians have been bribed to make sure of that.
So there's no way to ever fix that.
So we're not making any more advances there, and the only other solution is to reduce the demand, aka, reduce the amount of extremely desperate people who think their best chance is to sneak into the US...and I remind people that is basically impossible to stop crime by threatening people with punishment, that's literally not how human brains work. The way to stop crime is make it where people no longer think they need to commit crime, which is mostly done by fixing whatever actual problems they face that they think crime will solve.
Not everything, of course, and not even a bipartisan consensus as much as an _apartisan_ consensus of issues that haven’t been meaningfully addressed due to the circumstances of the political balance of power.
I’m thinking in particular of things like opposition to terrorism in the Middle East and in favor of diplomatic solutions there. There’s also opposition to transgenderism, improved border security, reorientation of foreign policy to oppose China (along with Russia/Iran/North Korea), and YIMBY policies for domestic land use.
I feel it's worth pointing out how wrong some of this list is. First of all, 'opposition to transgenderism' is indeed a bipartisan consensus to voters in both parties, in that neither party's voters thinks it is slightly important all.
Likewise, 'opposition to terrorism' is pretty much nonsense. Sure, it's something voters oppose but 'What level of terrorism should there be in the middle east?' is not, in fact, a US policy. What is that even supposed to mean as a policy position? 'I promise, once elected, to vote against Middle Eastern terrorism!'.
Meanwhile, 'improved border security' is not only not something that people are demanding, it is something that both parties have _signed on to_. Harris is running around pointing out how Trump failed to build his wall and she promising better border security! I don't know what the American people think about that(I'll break this out into another comment), but pretending the American people are demanding border security and politicians are not 'addressing' that is nonsense.
And 'reorientation of foreign policy to oppose China' is, flatly, just silliness. The American people have, somewhat slowly, continued dislike China more and more over the past two decades, but do not really have any changed _policies_ they want. (Whereas the American people did want a different foreign policy towards Russia when it became clear how warmonging Putin was, and...we got it. So, I guess, chalk one up for the actual will of the voters.)
This one, though: 'YIMBY policies for domestic land use'...I feel is more wishful thinking. I would love it to be true, but I think it's only true if you mean 'land owners and land lords do not want it, but that group of people has shrunk so much in America that the people opposing NIMBYism have become larger'...which I'm not sure is wrong. But it is, indeed, wealthy land owners who set US land use policy.
And I find it really weird you've stopped there, but I guess conservativism means you can't notice a bunch of _other_ stuff there actually is a voter bipartisan consensus on that the parties will not address. Like various specific sorts of gun control, or increased taxes on the wealthy.
I think the fact there's a bunch of random (probably paid) misinformation on Twitter about how the Helena disaster recovery is going horribly is an indication that the Republican are getting somewhat worried about how, by all actual accounts, the Biden administration is pretty much on the ball there.
So much so that Governor Kemp had to issue a correction and point out that the White House was, in fact, providing disaster relief. (I think I've made this point before, but there's something interesting about Georgia Republicans because, being the sole party in power, they sorta understand how they actually have to govern, and that they don't have to to Trumpism, because they're staying on power regardless.)
It's a huge disaster, and it's still in 'cleanup' and hasn't gotten to 'recovery' yet, but it really is amazing how Republicans seem to think and hope that every natural disaster will be that administration's Katrina, when in reality Katrina requires absurd levels of hyperincompetence and moronic meddling with the very competent organizations we have for disasters, and doesn't just happen. So they just sorta resort to lying.
Anyway, here in Georgia, Trump decided to go to Valdosta for a 'briefing', and pull Governor Kemp there too. A city that is, uh, in ruins. It does not need a presidential candidate visit. It didn't even need the governor visiting!
I'm on Facebook with a bunch of people in Georgia (Generally not in the effected areas, but everyone sorta knows what is going on.), and even the conservatives are...not particularly happy about some of this. They're not happy about Trump lying that Biden isn't sending emergency assistant, they're not happy with idiots going into a disaster zone for photo ops, they're just generally not happy.
I mean, they show it by demanding that Biden give people in the disaster zone more money, but I've read Facebook long enough to know 'Making weird complaints about Biden is what they do when they're not happy about Trump's behavior and want to think about something else'.
Netanyahu calls the the idea of resettling Gaza "unrealistic". Not wrong, or a immoral, or a massive mistake, but 'It's not possible'.
But here's even more of the government:
On November 20, when asked by reporters at a Religious Zionism faction Knesset meeting about reinstating settlements in Gaza, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “It’s not the time to deal with this,” and “What we do afterward on the civilian side, we’ll argue about it later.”
Well, that is a...not denial.
Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli went a little further in a November 19 interview with Kol Chai, a radio station catering to the religious public, after being asked about the future of Gaza.
“It could be that you and I, who belong to the nationalist camp, have very clear ideas on what should unfold there after the war. But now is not the time to articulate these ideas,” Chikli said.
That is...even less of a denial. That's outright basically saying 'Yes, we're doing that, but don't say it.'
He added, however, that it is still too early to plan for Israeli settlements in Gaza.
So, at this point, we have, drumroll please: Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, and National Security Minister Ben Gvir all either saying 'We should annex or at least continue to control and put settlers in Gaza', or winking at that being the plan while trying to get people to stop talking about it.
Those are just the actual top-ranking government officials. It's also something that 32% of the population wants.
..why are you doing asking an AI? You are aware that a lot of misinformation about the situation is out there, right? All using an AI does is repeat that.
Maybe we should actually just quote the current leadership of Israel:
In an interview with ultra-Orthodox news site Kikar Hashabat, Ben Gvir said that he would like to see the war prosecuted until the end in the southern city of Rafah, followed by a full-on Israeli military rule in which Jerusalem would control the coastal territory “unequivocally.”
This would entail the reestablishment of Jewish settlement, “but that’s not enough,” he continued, reiterating his call to encourage the “voluntary emigration” of Gazans — although he stipulated that he was “not saying everyone” should leave.
Israelis should return to the settlements evacuated during the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza, Ben Gvir added, stating that if “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians leave the Strip, “we will be able to bring in more and more people.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/backing-settlement-ben-gvir-says-hed-be-very-happy-to-live-in-gaza-after-the-war/
In case you're not aware who Ben Gvir is, he is the convicted racism inciter and convicted terrorism supporter who is currently the Minister of National Security of Israel.
Don;t get him confused with Amihai Eliyahu, the current Minister of Heritage, who also wants to to reestablish settlements in Gaza, but thinks it's not the time to do that. He has, however suggested using nukes on Gaza, and is currently living, in violation for international law, in a West Bank settlement, and he wishes to entirely annex, aka, steal, the West Bank.
These is, again, the actual Israeli government, and I remind people that Israeli held an election in 2022, unlike Gaza who last held one a two decades ago. This is the government that Israel wants, these are positions that people they elect hold.
Israel has a bunch of competing visions of the Day After. The number of Israelis that believe in the Two-State solution aren’t that great anymore. The most liberal probably see some type of independent Palestine with hard borders maintained by Israel rather than co-prosperity. Others want Israel to annex the West Bank without the Palestinians somehow. There might be a few genocidal Israelis but I think most of them just want the issue to go away or for the Palestinians to admit defeat and live quietly as they are now. Obviously neither of these things are going to happen.
It sure is weird how you bend over backwards to include what Israeli _citizens_ might want, and even there are forced to admit that most of them do not believe in the thing actually required under international law, but on the other side you only talk about _Hamas_.
Hey, what does the _current Israeli government_ want? What do they outright say they want? What actions do they take WRT achieving that goal?
It starts getting a lot less ambigious at that point, once you start listing what the people in the Israeli government want...the government, I should add, that the Israeli have voted into power and kept in power _despite_ patently obviously corruption. Corruption that isn't actually relevant here except to point out _just how much_ Israelis like what the government is doing in Palestine, so much they are willing to ignore that corruption.
Meanwhile, Hamas is literally in power because they _won a civil war_ in Gaza. Apparently, enough Palestinians disagreed with them that they literally fought a civil war.
Also, since we're talking about governments, it also is odd how you see to think there's only one Palestinian government, and have completely missed that the PA exists. What do _they_ say about Israel? And how do they feel about Hamas...should I point out they were on the other side of that civil war?
It turns out, if you cherry pick Hamas as the representative of 'Palestinian views', and meanwhile desperately try to track down the most reasonable random Israeli with no power, you end up with Israelis sounding almost like the reasonable ones (Despite the fact you're still sorta forced to admit they won't even meet their obligations under international law and are, at best, willing to keep Palestine as some sort of semi-independent client state that has no actual sovereignty.)
In fact, it's somewhat amazing how people can, with a straight face, pretend that Palestinians will never turn away from Hamas's mode of thinking when _a large amount of Palestinians do not have Hamas as a government_ and in fact have a government that is largely seen as an Israeli puppet. Weird.
I read the paper, it gives absolutely no indication of why it's using a heatmap or how the hell we're supposed to understand the thing.
You claim to understand, tell, what does the blue mean that is _outside_ the all the circles mean? Hell, what does the blue that extents past the center _into the bottom left_ mean?
How are there questions 'down there'? Why are all the questions on one line like that?
Why is there only one axis, which for some reason goes in all directions as a label (because it's a circle), but all the data goes in one direction?
I downloaded the supposedly raw data, and it has absolutely no information at all on any of this
So maybe both conservatives and liberals are lying and just answering the way their peer groups probably would want them to?
I feel 'lying' is a strong word there.
As we are well aware here, people often answer vague political questions differently then they do when faced with actual questions about policy.
The same is true of any philosophy. In fact, those often overlap...it's pretty much the standard gotcha to point out that pro-life people, when actually asked 'Would you save two IVF embryos that are going to be implanted tomorrow, or a single adult human', will pause and usually admit 'the single adult human'.
People have all sorts of broad ideas that they _think_ they believe, and will assert they believe, and then will fall apart completely in hypotheticals. (You don't even have to go all the way to real life! Just directed hypotheticals.)
Which is why it is nearly utterly useless to just vaguely ask people 'What do you value?'. It's why you have to ask comparison questions.
Hell, it's why we invented the trolley problem, which technically about a different moral question (Is it ethical to purposefully do something that kills someone if it save more other people), but that one people _also_ tend to answer one way in the abstract and one way when at the hypothetical. (Specifically, they say it's morally okay to sacrifice one person in the abstract if it saves multiple others, but become _incredibly_ reluctant to say they will would pull the switch and directly kill someone.)
You can't just say 'Hey, answer this abstract moral question' and expect any answers.
...although it really is interesting how readily conservatives will just say they will throw people they know, but are not good friends with, under the bus, a thing which is probably not actually true (1), but their constructed moral outlooks says it should be.
1) As evidenced by the trolley problem, empathy makes it pretty hard for people to directly allow people they are interacting with to suffer unless they can come up with some justification that the person should suffer, _even if_ their moral code says it is best. It's why the trolley problem exists, it's why the absolute best way of getting through to people about LGBTQ issues is for them to know an LGBTQ person, etc, etc.
the same pattern replicated such that liberals distribute empathy toward broader circles and conservatives distribute empathy toward smaller circles.
I don't disagree with what is stated as the results, but the study does not show this, because what they have measured is not empathy. What they have measured is _what level of the abstract concept of empathy people think they should show_.
Now, all studies are going to be abstract in some level, but it's just insane to think you're going to get real answers by just asking for the result. A proper study would ask a bunch of questions about situations designed to cause respondent to weight moral concerns against each other. 'Would you encourage your brother to donate a kidney to an acquaintance of yours that he does not know?', questions like that.
The study also would not pretend that anyone is actually concerned about non-Earth life, or bacterial life, which frankly is an idiotic absurdity that makes this entire thing even dumber.
So reading that, it's pretty clear just how bad that heatmap is at conveying the meaning of anything.
Moreover, it demonstrates exactly how bad just asking people to just _define_ their moral concern works...or, at least, with liberals.
You can't just _ask_ people to assign moral weight tokens to things. People will answer exactly how they think they are supposed to answer. (And it get really horrible when you realize conservatives thinks they are supposed to do the sociopathic answer of 'My entire moral concern is my close friends, everyone else can FOAD'.)
You have to ask them _hypothetical questions_.
The almost definitive example of this is animal testing. A huge chunk of people disapprove of it in the abstract, but if you ask them 'Would you be okay with a thousand monkeys getting sick and dying if it cures a human disease that kills thousands a year?', almost everyone will say yes. Liberals and conservatives.
Of course liberals are going to pick the correct answer of 'all life in the entire universe is of moral concern' if you just vaguely ask them to assign moral weight. Try asking them about smallpox, a living thing that literally no human being on the face of the planet has an opposition to wiping out. Turn out that that the wellbeing of smallpox is absolutely no moral concern to them at all!
This is utter nonsense as any sort of serious study...except showing, very clearly, what the various political ideologies think they _should_ be answering.
Incidentally, if I was just looking at the conservative one, I would suspect the reason they did it as a nearly-unreadable heatmap is to disguise the fact that conservatives appear to stop caring about people as soon as they hit 'distant friends', which actually makes them sound a little sociopathic and self-centered.
However, considering how completely bugnuts the _liberal_ side is, with liberal moral thought supposedly mostly focused on _aliens_ (A thing that literally no actual humans include in their moral calculus, for obvious reasons.) I suspect this entire thing is nonsense.
Why is it a heatmap instead of just a line graph? It's a one-dimensional set of values of 16 linear points! Heatmaps are for two dimensions sets of values, not one!
Why does the 'heatmap' go to the top right? Does that mean something? Is it just to make it less obvious that this should been a linear graph, which we could have noticed if it went straight left or right?
Why is it surrounded in blue? What does that blue mean...for example, what does the blue _outside all the circles_ at the top right mean? That both liberals and conservatives care some somewhat about a hypothetical multiverse?
Also, if I'm looking at circle four, what point in that circle should I look at? The highest one? But if it's a heatmap, it's averaging things, right, it could be getting heat from the point next to it, that's why the points fade to nothing on the sides.
What the hell is even going on here? Is this even a proper heatmap? I don't actually think it is!
On top of all that nonsense, why is the heatmap scaled differently for conservatives and liberals? That seems a little sneaky, mostly because if it wasn't like that, conservatives and liberals would appear to care the same amount about the center stuff, and liberals would just care _more_ about the outside stuff.
And last of all: There is no way this heatmap is correct. It argues that liberals care more about aliens trees than all humans. Which, and I know a lot of people have different political views and some people don't think higher of liberals, but I think I can pretty solidly claim that absolutely _no one_ here believes liberals think that. Not just that no liberals do think that, but no one here even thinks they possibly could.
Jaybird, you do understand that plenty of speech is prohibited in England, right?
Here in the US we have something called the first amendment, which applies unless the speech is something Republicans don't like, at which point they will happily pass lately unconstitutional laws against it and hope they get Republican judges.
Yeah, it's worth emphasizing that Georgia's proposed changes don't make any sense at all, except as a way to slow things down.
There are several numbers in voting:
1) The number of voters that came through the line
2) The total counted ballots that a machine printed off (Note this can technically be slightly smaller than the others, as nothing is stopping people from doing their voting, printing off a ballot, and walking off with it.)
3) The amount of counted ballots deposited into the ballot box.
4) The total counted ballots that were taken from the ballot box and ran through the machine.
What they want to do is count #3 immediately, instead of later when it gets counted anyway.
The premise appears to be that ballots might be printed off and deposited between the ballot boxes being sealed at the end of the day, and cracked open to count them, but...like, their solution is crack them open and count them. Which is...the thing that happens anyway.
All they've actually done is move that before the electronic counting.
Meanwhile, and this worth pointing out: Literally all actual ballot stuffing happens with the knowledge of voting staff, and would require printing ballots and inflating the number of voters. Which you would, uh, do earlier. And put in the ballot box. Earlier. Or right after closing, but before counting.
Which is why we have procedures to make that a lot harder. For a very long time. We know how to handle paper ballots and ballot boxes securely. It's why we make sure we know how many ballots exist, where they are, we put the box where it can be observed, we seal it up, etc. We've had 100 years of hacking those elections.
A lot of Republican nonsense about elections is, indeed, utter nonsense, and seem to think ballots can appear out of thin air at certain points, and only at those points.
But what they want to do in Georgia is delaying counting, because they know Democrats are much more likely to vote both in larger (And thus later reporting) precinct and by mail (Who they refuse to even start counting in advance), so they can crow about their early lead and then cast aspirations on how the Democrats mysteriously and probably criminally then have all these 'late votes' comes in. Oooh, confusing, it must be the evil Democrats adding votes, instead of just it being a function of where and how Democrats voters voted.
Russia is pretty determined to troll leftist spaces with purity concern-trolling, but everyone seems pretty determined to call them out.
Everyone understands there's absolutely no way to Trump would be better on Palestine, and in fact the disaster of Trump and everyone uniting to fight him would almost certainly put that entire situation completely out of mind of everyone, and we'd just keep supply Israel forever. (In fact, if he was elected, uniting to fight Trump and ditching Palestine might, arguable, be the only possible thing anyone could do, no matter how much they care about that issue. When fascism is burning your own house down with you inside, you sorta need to stop caring about how you're supplying gasoline to other arsonists.)
With regard to Palestine, I think the left is standing there, waiting, to hit her hard the second she wins, with the hope that she is (unlike Biden) is conceivable on the topic. I suspect this is going to be a huge issue of the start of her presidency.
As for other stuff...the left has the same issue there as it does with the rest of the utterly-apathetic-to-actual-problems liberal agenda, and Harris at least isn't a billion years old and might actually be willing to do interesting things.
Problem #2 is a lot of these examples of bad Israeli behavior are responses to their civilians being terrorized.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After Hamas was elected, they were offered the chance to renounce terrorism and become a political party. They refused.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Honestly, that's why I doubt it's going to be any experienced left-ist protestor: Those people actually understand op-sec.
The right are complete and utter dumbasses about it, as evidenced by how many took their actual personal cell phones to do a coup, which they planned out on social media. They do not understand how to actually treat law enforcement as a _threat_, because, because a huge chunk of the time when right-wing actors are acting lawlessly, the cops are right there as part of the lawless crowd.
So when they cross the point that the authorities do indeed act against them, they have no idea what to do, they didn't bother to plan or prep at all, they just assumed law enforcement would just very carefully avert their eyes and mutter about free speech.
Now, it's also possible it's some pro-Palestinian protestor who is incredibly new at this, I won't say it couldn't be them, but it's not anyone with experience doing protests that could actually result in arrest...and the right, even the lunatic neo-N.azi right, is usually operating with at least tactic understanding that the cops will not go after them. (They're the Right Sort of people even if they have not good ideas.)
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
This is because 'effective tax rate' is utter gibberish.
How about we ask people what the total amount that Jeff Bezos should have paid in taxes as his net worth went to $191 billion, over his lifetime?
Or let's phrase it the other direction. Here's a poll question for you, one that they never will run:
If you, taking this poll, were already in the highest income bracket, you would had to earn $16 dollar to become wealthier by $10 more dollars last year. How much do you think that Bezos should have had to earn if he became wealthier by $10 billion last year?
If the respondent does not answer 'About $10.01 billion', they want taxes to be higher. Because that's what they currently are.
Because he literally didn't have to pay any taxes on 99.99% of that money, because it's not classified as income, it is merely increase in stock price. It will only become income when he turns in into cash, which he will not have to do, because he can just use it as collateral for interest-free loans instead. He can keep that money until he dies, at which point he now has to pay taxes on his exact expenses over his life, before inflation, a very fun cheat compared to normal Americans having to pay taxes before they get the money.
The American people do not understand that, you are correct. You can tell because we have not all decided to murder the wealthy.
"
To address the border specifically: Voters on both sides want the thing that normal people would describe as border security, aka, stopping people both from going over the border illegally and from having an incentive to do so. Republican voters also want to crack down on refugees and asylum seekers and, like, people who look kinda foreign and why does this phone keep asking me to if I want to use Spanish, I'm in America dammit.
The thing is, both political parties are already promising to do that thing that voters on both sides want to do.
The problem, of course, that actually securing the border isn't done by building giant walls, it is done by doing what Harris was actually supposed to be doing as VP: Trying to make it where we didn't have constant failures of governments to the south of us, which is, in a very real way, mostly our fault. Both because we like to constantly overthrow governments that seem slightly not conservative enough or not willing to let Dole do bananas enough or mine lithium or borite or whatever US businesses are trying to do in South American this week, or just because our giant-ass drug problem sends so much money to drug cartels that the government cannot function.
The only way to fix the southern border is to fix the countries to the south of us, and thus we need to do that, I say, pretending we don't have a moral obligation to do that _anyway_ because we are the people who repeatedly broke them.
You can't fight smuggling by putting up walls, and you especially can't do that when the thing people are smuggling are themselves, because people are very smart compared to other contraband. You can reduce demand, aka, do what has been done a bit to reduce hiring people who are in the US illegally, but that's already been done and has merely resulted in all corporations hiring 'contractors' who they 'don't know' are hiring illegal workers. And it is, in fact, literally impossible to hold corporations responsible for the criminal activity they are engaging in beyond small fines, because politicians have been bribed to make sure of that.
So there's no way to ever fix that.
So we're not making any more advances there, and the only other solution is to reduce the demand, aka, reduce the amount of extremely desperate people who think their best chance is to sneak into the US...and I remind people that is basically impossible to stop crime by threatening people with punishment, that's literally not how human brains work. The way to stop crime is make it where people no longer think they need to commit crime, which is mostly done by fixing whatever actual problems they face that they think crime will solve.
"
I feel it's worth pointing out how wrong some of this list is. First of all, 'opposition to transgenderism' is indeed a bipartisan consensus to voters in both parties, in that neither party's voters thinks it is slightly important all.
Likewise, 'opposition to terrorism' is pretty much nonsense. Sure, it's something voters oppose but 'What level of terrorism should there be in the middle east?' is not, in fact, a US policy. What is that even supposed to mean as a policy position? 'I promise, once elected, to vote against Middle Eastern terrorism!'.
Meanwhile, 'improved border security' is not only not something that people are demanding, it is something that both parties have _signed on to_. Harris is running around pointing out how Trump failed to build his wall and she promising better border security! I don't know what the American people think about that(I'll break this out into another comment), but pretending the American people are demanding border security and politicians are not 'addressing' that is nonsense.
And 'reorientation of foreign policy to oppose China' is, flatly, just silliness. The American people have, somewhat slowly, continued dislike China more and more over the past two decades, but do not really have any changed _policies_ they want. (Whereas the American people did want a different foreign policy towards Russia when it became clear how warmonging Putin was, and...we got it. So, I guess, chalk one up for the actual will of the voters.)
This one, though: 'YIMBY policies for domestic land use'...I feel is more wishful thinking. I would love it to be true, but I think it's only true if you mean 'land owners and land lords do not want it, but that group of people has shrunk so much in America that the people opposing NIMBYism have become larger'...which I'm not sure is wrong. But it is, indeed, wealthy land owners who set US land use policy.
And I find it really weird you've stopped there, but I guess conservativism means you can't notice a bunch of _other_ stuff there actually is a voter bipartisan consensus on that the parties will not address. Like various specific sorts of gun control, or increased taxes on the wealthy.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The 2024 Presidential Election”
I think the fact there's a bunch of random (probably paid) misinformation on Twitter about how the Helena disaster recovery is going horribly is an indication that the Republican are getting somewhat worried about how, by all actual accounts, the Biden administration is pretty much on the ball there.
So much so that Governor Kemp had to issue a correction and point out that the White House was, in fact, providing disaster relief. (I think I've made this point before, but there's something interesting about Georgia Republicans because, being the sole party in power, they sorta understand how they actually have to govern, and that they don't have to to Trumpism, because they're staying on power regardless.)
It's a huge disaster, and it's still in 'cleanup' and hasn't gotten to 'recovery' yet, but it really is amazing how Republicans seem to think and hope that every natural disaster will be that administration's Katrina, when in reality Katrina requires absurd levels of hyperincompetence and moronic meddling with the very competent organizations we have for disasters, and doesn't just happen. So they just sorta resort to lying.
Anyway, here in Georgia, Trump decided to go to Valdosta for a 'briefing', and pull Governor Kemp there too. A city that is, uh, in ruins. It does not need a presidential candidate visit. It didn't even need the governor visiting!
I'm on Facebook with a bunch of people in Georgia (Generally not in the effected areas, but everyone sorta knows what is going on.), and even the conservatives are...not particularly happy about some of this. They're not happy about Trump lying that Biden isn't sending emergency assistant, they're not happy with idiots going into a disaster zone for photo ops, they're just generally not happy.
I mean, they show it by demanding that Biden give people in the disaster zone more money, but I've read Facebook long enough to know 'Making weird complaints about Biden is what they do when they're not happy about Trump's behavior and want to think about something else'.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024”
In fact, maybe just rad this entire article:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/return-to-gush-katif-determined-movement-emerges-to-resettle-israelis-in-gaza/
Some interesting fact:
Netanyahu calls the the idea of resettling Gaza "unrealistic". Not wrong, or a immoral, or a massive mistake, but 'It's not possible'.
But here's even more of the government:
Well, that is a...not denial.
That is...even less of a denial. That's outright basically saying 'Yes, we're doing that, but don't say it.'
He added, however, that it is still too early to plan for Israeli settlements in Gaza.
So, at this point, we have, drumroll please: Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, and National Security Minister Ben Gvir all either saying 'We should annex or at least continue to control and put settlers in Gaza', or winking at that being the plan while trying to get people to stop talking about it.
Those are just the actual top-ranking government officials. It's also something that 32% of the population wants.
"
..why are you doing asking an AI? You are aware that a lot of misinformation about the situation is out there, right? All using an AI does is repeat that.
Maybe we should actually just quote the current leadership of Israel:
In case you're not aware who Ben Gvir is, he is the convicted racism inciter and convicted terrorism supporter who is currently the Minister of National Security of Israel.
Don;t get him confused with Amihai Eliyahu, the current Minister of Heritage, who also wants to to reestablish settlements in Gaza, but thinks it's not the time to do that. He has, however suggested using nukes on Gaza, and is currently living, in violation for international law, in a West Bank settlement, and he wishes to entirely annex, aka, steal, the West Bank.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-calls-for-israel-to-fully-occupy-gaza-reestablish-settlements/
These is, again, the actual Israeli government, and I remind people that Israeli held an election in 2022, unlike Gaza who last held one a two decades ago. This is the government that Israel wants, these are positions that people they elect hold.
"
It sure is weird how you bend over backwards to include what Israeli _citizens_ might want, and even there are forced to admit that most of them do not believe in the thing actually required under international law, but on the other side you only talk about _Hamas_.
Hey, what does the _current Israeli government_ want? What do they outright say they want? What actions do they take WRT achieving that goal?
It starts getting a lot less ambigious at that point, once you start listing what the people in the Israeli government want...the government, I should add, that the Israeli have voted into power and kept in power _despite_ patently obviously corruption. Corruption that isn't actually relevant here except to point out _just how much_ Israelis like what the government is doing in Palestine, so much they are willing to ignore that corruption.
Meanwhile, Hamas is literally in power because they _won a civil war_ in Gaza. Apparently, enough Palestinians disagreed with them that they literally fought a civil war.
Also, since we're talking about governments, it also is odd how you see to think there's only one Palestinian government, and have completely missed that the PA exists. What do _they_ say about Israel? And how do they feel about Hamas...should I point out they were on the other side of that civil war?
It turns out, if you cherry pick Hamas as the representative of 'Palestinian views', and meanwhile desperately try to track down the most reasonable random Israeli with no power, you end up with Israelis sounding almost like the reasonable ones (Despite the fact you're still sorta forced to admit they won't even meet their obligations under international law and are, at best, willing to keep Palestine as some sort of semi-independent client state that has no actual sovereignty.)
In fact, it's somewhat amazing how people can, with a straight face, pretend that Palestinians will never turn away from Hamas's mode of thinking when _a large amount of Palestinians do not have Hamas as a government_ and in fact have a government that is largely seen as an Israeli puppet. Weird.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
I read the paper, it gives absolutely no indication of why it's using a heatmap or how the hell we're supposed to understand the thing.
You claim to understand, tell, what does the blue mean that is _outside_ the all the circles mean? Hell, what does the blue that extents past the center _into the bottom left_ mean?
How are there questions 'down there'? Why are all the questions on one line like that?
Why is there only one axis, which for some reason goes in all directions as a label (because it's a circle), but all the data goes in one direction?
I downloaded the supposedly raw data, and it has absolutely no information at all on any of this
"
I feel 'lying' is a strong word there.
As we are well aware here, people often answer vague political questions differently then they do when faced with actual questions about policy.
The same is true of any philosophy. In fact, those often overlap...it's pretty much the standard gotcha to point out that pro-life people, when actually asked 'Would you save two IVF embryos that are going to be implanted tomorrow, or a single adult human', will pause and usually admit 'the single adult human'.
People have all sorts of broad ideas that they _think_ they believe, and will assert they believe, and then will fall apart completely in hypotheticals. (You don't even have to go all the way to real life! Just directed hypotheticals.)
Which is why it is nearly utterly useless to just vaguely ask people 'What do you value?'. It's why you have to ask comparison questions.
Hell, it's why we invented the trolley problem, which technically about a different moral question (Is it ethical to purposefully do something that kills someone if it save more other people), but that one people _also_ tend to answer one way in the abstract and one way when at the hypothetical. (Specifically, they say it's morally okay to sacrifice one person in the abstract if it saves multiple others, but become _incredibly_ reluctant to say they will would pull the switch and directly kill someone.)
You can't just say 'Hey, answer this abstract moral question' and expect any answers.
...although it really is interesting how readily conservatives will just say they will throw people they know, but are not good friends with, under the bus, a thing which is probably not actually true (1), but their constructed moral outlooks says it should be.
1) As evidenced by the trolley problem, empathy makes it pretty hard for people to directly allow people they are interacting with to suffer unless they can come up with some justification that the person should suffer, _even if_ their moral code says it is best. It's why the trolley problem exists, it's why the absolute best way of getting through to people about LGBTQ issues is for them to know an LGBTQ person, etc, etc.
"
See, I have to flatly disagree with this:
I don't disagree with what is stated as the results, but the study does not show this, because what they have measured is not empathy. What they have measured is _what level of the abstract concept of empathy people think they should show_.
Now, all studies are going to be abstract in some level, but it's just insane to think you're going to get real answers by just asking for the result. A proper study would ask a bunch of questions about situations designed to cause respondent to weight moral concerns against each other. 'Would you encourage your brother to donate a kidney to an acquaintance of yours that he does not know?', questions like that.
The study also would not pretend that anyone is actually concerned about non-Earth life, or bacterial life, which frankly is an idiotic absurdity that makes this entire thing even dumber.
"
So reading that, it's pretty clear just how bad that heatmap is at conveying the meaning of anything.
Moreover, it demonstrates exactly how bad just asking people to just _define_ their moral concern works...or, at least, with liberals.
You can't just _ask_ people to assign moral weight tokens to things. People will answer exactly how they think they are supposed to answer. (And it get really horrible when you realize conservatives thinks they are supposed to do the sociopathic answer of 'My entire moral concern is my close friends, everyone else can FOAD'.)
You have to ask them _hypothetical questions_.
The almost definitive example of this is animal testing. A huge chunk of people disapprove of it in the abstract, but if you ask them 'Would you be okay with a thousand monkeys getting sick and dying if it cures a human disease that kills thousands a year?', almost everyone will say yes. Liberals and conservatives.
Of course liberals are going to pick the correct answer of 'all life in the entire universe is of moral concern' if you just vaguely ask them to assign moral weight. Try asking them about smallpox, a living thing that literally no human being on the face of the planet has an opposition to wiping out. Turn out that that the wellbeing of smallpox is absolutely no moral concern to them at all!
This is utter nonsense as any sort of serious study...except showing, very clearly, what the various political ideologies think they _should_ be answering.
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Incidentally, if I was just looking at the conservative one, I would suspect the reason they did it as a nearly-unreadable heatmap is to disguise the fact that conservatives appear to stop caring about people as soon as they hit 'distant friends', which actually makes them sound a little sociopathic and self-centered.
However, considering how completely bugnuts the _liberal_ side is, with liberal moral thought supposedly mostly focused on _aliens_ (A thing that literally no actual humans include in their moral calculus, for obvious reasons.) I suspect this entire thing is nonsense.
"
That is almost an unfathomably bad chart.
Why is it a heatmap instead of just a line graph? It's a one-dimensional set of values of 16 linear points! Heatmaps are for two dimensions sets of values, not one!
Why does the 'heatmap' go to the top right? Does that mean something? Is it just to make it less obvious that this should been a linear graph, which we could have noticed if it went straight left or right?
Why is it surrounded in blue? What does that blue mean...for example, what does the blue _outside all the circles_ at the top right mean? That both liberals and conservatives care some somewhat about a hypothetical multiverse?
Also, if I'm looking at circle four, what point in that circle should I look at? The highest one? But if it's a heatmap, it's averaging things, right, it could be getting heat from the point next to it, that's why the points fade to nothing on the sides.
What the hell is even going on here? Is this even a proper heatmap? I don't actually think it is!
On top of all that nonsense, why is the heatmap scaled differently for conservatives and liberals? That seems a little sneaky, mostly because if it wasn't like that, conservatives and liberals would appear to care the same amount about the center stuff, and liberals would just care _more_ about the outside stuff.
And last of all: There is no way this heatmap is correct. It argues that liberals care more about aliens trees than all humans. Which, and I know a lot of people have different political views and some people don't think higher of liberals, but I think I can pretty solidly claim that absolutely _no one_ here believes liberals think that. Not just that no liberals do think that, but no one here even thinks they possibly could.
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What are you talking about? There is a large gulf between the stated positions of both parties.
It's just both those positions are pretty far to the right of where you are pretending them to be.
It's weird how you don't say those things.
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Jaybird, you do understand that plenty of speech is prohibited in England, right?
Here in the US we have something called the first amendment, which applies unless the speech is something Republicans don't like, at which point they will happily pass lately unconstitutional laws against it and hope they get Republican judges.
On “The Election Year Changeups”
Yeah, it's worth emphasizing that Georgia's proposed changes don't make any sense at all, except as a way to slow things down.
There are several numbers in voting:
1) The number of voters that came through the line
2) The total counted ballots that a machine printed off (Note this can technically be slightly smaller than the others, as nothing is stopping people from doing their voting, printing off a ballot, and walking off with it.)
3) The amount of counted ballots deposited into the ballot box.
4) The total counted ballots that were taken from the ballot box and ran through the machine.
What they want to do is count #3 immediately, instead of later when it gets counted anyway.
The premise appears to be that ballots might be printed off and deposited between the ballot boxes being sealed at the end of the day, and cracked open to count them, but...like, their solution is crack them open and count them. Which is...the thing that happens anyway.
All they've actually done is move that before the electronic counting.
Meanwhile, and this worth pointing out: Literally all actual ballot stuffing happens with the knowledge of voting staff, and would require printing ballots and inflating the number of voters. Which you would, uh, do earlier. And put in the ballot box. Earlier. Or right after closing, but before counting.
Which is why we have procedures to make that a lot harder. For a very long time. We know how to handle paper ballots and ballot boxes securely. It's why we make sure we know how many ballots exist, where they are, we put the box where it can be observed, we seal it up, etc. We've had 100 years of hacking those elections.
A lot of Republican nonsense about elections is, indeed, utter nonsense, and seem to think ballots can appear out of thin air at certain points, and only at those points.
But what they want to do in Georgia is delaying counting, because they know Democrats are much more likely to vote both in larger (And thus later reporting) precinct and by mail (Who they refuse to even start counting in advance), so they can crow about their early lead and then cast aspirations on how the Democrats mysteriously and probably criminally then have all these 'late votes' comes in. Oooh, confusing, it must be the evil Democrats adding votes, instead of just it being a function of where and how Democrats voters voted.
On “History Will Be Made: Harris VS Trump”
I want to second that.
Russia is pretty determined to troll leftist spaces with purity concern-trolling, but everyone seems pretty determined to call them out.
Everyone understands there's absolutely no way to Trump would be better on Palestine, and in fact the disaster of Trump and everyone uniting to fight him would almost certainly put that entire situation completely out of mind of everyone, and we'd just keep supply Israel forever. (In fact, if he was elected, uniting to fight Trump and ditching Palestine might, arguable, be the only possible thing anyone could do, no matter how much they care about that issue. When fascism is burning your own house down with you inside, you sorta need to stop caring about how you're supplying gasoline to other arsonists.)
With regard to Palestine, I think the left is standing there, waiting, to hit her hard the second she wins, with the hope that she is (unlike Biden) is conceivable on the topic. I suspect this is going to be a huge issue of the start of her presidency.
As for other stuff...the left has the same issue there as it does with the rest of the utterly-apathetic-to-actual-problems liberal agenda, and Harris at least isn't a billion years old and might actually be willing to do interesting things.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hey, why do you think Gaza, a thing Israel is insisting is a sovereign country, doesn't get to have weapons?
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