DavidTC: East Jerusalem, which they have annexed back in 1980 and…for some reason don’t let Arab residents vote in national elections
You're going to have to source that. I failed to find it.
DavidTC: LOL, you think, it’s _Palestine_ that is stopping Israel from taking over Gaza and the West Bank? Do you actually think Palestinians would object?
I think the various "resistance" groups aren't fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. I also think Israel wouldn't have a fun time in Gaza (and by extension, the West Bank) dealing with terror groups.
Jaybird: they’re acting like a particularly petty settler-colonial state.
That statement means different things to different people.
To the West, that means the taking over one house at a time thing and the settlements.
To the Arabs, that means the existence of Israel. They view all of Israel, every inch of it, as a colonial project. Various official documents spell that out including both the PLO's and Hamas' charter.
This difference is why imho the settlements don't help but they also don't matter. They're going to be terrorized no matter what they do. Various groups will try to implement "No Jews".
And one of the massive problems is if the Arabs are going to be genocidally unhappy no matter what Israel does, then they might as well be unhappy with less.
My impression is Hamas is viewed as a natural extension of the Palestinians political desires. That's not wrong, but the result is Israel's efforts to eliminate Hamas is putting Palestinian society through a wood chipper.
JB: stuff like Israel destroying ultrasound machines and smashing teacups and the like.
Stuff like that happens in every war. The question is what happens after the war ends? Is there legal machinery to evaluate that soldiers did crimes and should be held accountable?
For example we ran a prison camp in Iraq where people were tortured. Soldiers did time over that and there were various other punishments.
That's a world away from the high command planning the mass death of civilians with that not only being legal but your own civilians dancing in the streets in support.
Define, "ceasefire". If that means "Hamas surrenders and let's Israel take over Gaza" then I'm all in favor.
If it means "Israel leaves and pretends Hamas won't rearm and do 10-7 again" then I foresee problems. The first problem being that Gaza currently sucks and only way to prevent Hamas from rearming will have the side effect of keeping it sucking.
Chris: supporting Israel’s war, as they carry out a genocide (as recognized by pretty much every expert on the subject by now,
What is going on is a brutal war, with Hamas claiming that everyone who dies is a targeted civilian. If Hamas is correct then yes, it's genocide.
However as far as I can tell, Israel thinks it's a defensive war with Hamas deliberately getting it's own people killed by it's use of human shields.
Chris: being on the side of genocide.
As far as I can tell, the numbers suggest brutal war but not genocide. The fog of war prevents us from knowing how many militants are being killed compared to how many civilians.
A lot of the genocidal claims seem hysteria. For example the UN claimed "hundreds of thousands" of Palestinians would die if Israel attacked Rafah. After the attack, wiki claims about a thousand. Hamas seems to be claiming about 900.
When I listen to Arabic media, they talk about "Israel's war on Gaza" as though there is no such thing as Hamas and Israel is at war with the civilian population. That mindset means the war is genocide, but it ignores Hamas is a thing.
For all the talk about how Israel is at war with Gaza, protesting amounts to supporting Hamas. College students may use fuzzy thinking to avoid that understanding but most people don't.
I would also say the liberal news doesn't want to give them a voice to try to derail Harris.
This was less a serious attempt to move everything to arbitration and more an effort to pad billable hours. The question is whether that's a deliberate effort by Disney to spend the other side into breaking.
26 years ago, I told my parents we were going to elope this weekend and with three days to work with they turned it into a hasty church wedding.
Then 6 weeks later we got married again in her church.
We had checked her visa and weren't sure if she'd be in the country legally in 6 weeks. But it was clear she was legal at the time so if we got married there would be no question about it.
I see no evidence either side is willing to have a ceasefire. Both sides want victory. For that matter both sides seem to think they're not committing war crimes.
FDR managed to keep the Great Depression going for more than a decade by doing things that we'd now recognize as wildly inappropriate. For example his 100% income tax for "the rich".
Trump shut the economy down. Biden brought it back up. With after-the-fact armchair quarter backing, mistakes were made.
I was thinking satire, hoax, nut-picking, or someone repeating something stupid... and then I remembered that we have the Temple Mount where Jews can't pray because it will hurt people's feelings.
Being VP is a mixed bag. Your primary function only happens when the President is dead. Other than that you are useful for sending to worthless high profile meetings when the President is too busy.
If you have the ear of the President then you can advise him (Biden with Obama). If you have his full trust then you can be his voice... although Dick Cheney is the only one I can think of who did this.
She managed to not cover herself with blame or glory. Her actual job is to let the President over shadow her so that means little.
The real answer is we don't know how much work she did within the Biden Whitehouse. Maybe she spent the entire time playing solitaire and maybe she's been using that time to study how to be President.
My impression leans a little towards the latter because she has occasionally said things that indicated that she was paying attention.
If it's "long before he entered politics" then he's talking scientifically and I've heard that theory before. It's supposed to explain why women live so much longer than men do.
North: And those problems, unlike the right of return, do not have any possible easy answers.
The ROR is the core of the conflict. After you handwave that away the rest is easy.
The settlers are either pulled out (like in Gaza), or the land is traded. Palestinians either become citizens in Israel or in the new Palestinian state.
The part that I'm unclear about is whether the populations are currently so mixed that it requires more (forced?) relocations to make this happen.
The new Palestinian state will brutally shut down terrorism because they don't want to go to war with Israel (witness Gaza).
The new Palestinian state will be a client of Israel and highly corrupt and unpopular. There aren't enough resources to have two highly functional states so there will be one (Israel) and a rump state-in-name-only.
I see no evidence that any of the Palestinian groups are willing to step back from a "robust" ROR.
All Palestinian political and militant groups, both Islamist and socialist, strongly support a right of return. The Palestinian National Authority views the right of return as a non-negotiable right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return#Bearing_on_the_peace_process
The closest we got to peace is Clinton's efforts with Arafat. This is where the Palestinians were at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit#Refugees_and_the_right_of_return
The ROR would have Israel take 150k people per year forever. So instead of Israel being destroyed by not being Jewish in one year it would take a few decades.
That's serious people who are not hardliners making actual proposals and in the end the two sides were too far apart.
What they're "too far apart" on is whether or not the Jews actually get to keep their state.
There are certainly examples of a few dozen or score people living in compounds protected by the army.
However, depending on definitions, Israel has more than 700k people who have been there for decades, even generations.
Israel moving more than 10% of it's population around is unrealistic even before we tack on that they also won't get peace. This is why peace proposals need to include land swaps.
If Israel does a unilateral cram down, then the Palestinians lose all that land and get nothing for it. The only thing that prevents Israel from taking everything is it doesn't want all the people.
The simplest way to describe the problem is that area has two indigenous populations who have opposite visions on what the state should be.
Having done that, there's no obvious solution.
If you describe the problem as colonial then the ethics and solution all become easy. One side is bad and they should leave. In order to do that, you need to deny that Jews are an indigenous population to that area.
Phil: hard borders so long as they include land returned to Palestinians that was taken unilaterally.
By Palestinian standards all of Israel "was taken unilaterally".
If the Palestinians aren't going to cooperate with setting the borders then, by definition, they don't get a say in those borders.
That means Israel would be keeping everything that is sensitive, holy, or disputed.
This is a very ugly solution and the Palestinians will be deeply enraged by it. At this point it's hard to see how borders could be set without another population exchange because of on the ground fragmentation.
Phil: The Israeli government – as a secular nation – is permitting, protecting and encouraging illegal land grabs masquerading as settlements in areas outside its recognized borders.
Israel does not have "recognized borders" (with the Palestinians). After a war on the scale of 1967 its pretty normal for borders to shift. Instead of a peace agreement setting borders we had "the three noes".
In theory Israel could, and maybe should, announce to the world what it thinks it's borders are and then try to enforce that. Doing that without a peace agreement instantly results in people on all sides trying to move the border and the gov will look stupid.
On “Kamala Harris DNC Speech: Watch It For Yourself”
DavidTC: East Jerusalem, which they have annexed back in 1980 and…for some reason don’t let Arab residents vote in national elections
You're going to have to source that. I failed to find it.
DavidTC: LOL, you think, it’s _Palestine_ that is stopping Israel from taking over Gaza and the West Bank? Do you actually think Palestinians would object?
I think the various "resistance" groups aren't fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. I also think Israel wouldn't have a fun time in Gaza (and by extension, the West Bank) dealing with terror groups.
"
Jaybird: they’re acting like a particularly petty settler-colonial state.
That statement means different things to different people.
To the West, that means the taking over one house at a time thing and the settlements.
To the Arabs, that means the existence of Israel. They view all of Israel, every inch of it, as a colonial project. Various official documents spell that out including both the PLO's and Hamas' charter.
This difference is why imho the settlements don't help but they also don't matter. They're going to be terrorized no matter what they do. Various groups will try to implement "No Jews".
And one of the massive problems is if the Arabs are going to be genocidally unhappy no matter what Israel does, then they might as well be unhappy with less.
"
My impression is Hamas is viewed as a natural extension of the Palestinians political desires. That's not wrong, but the result is Israel's efforts to eliminate Hamas is putting Palestinian society through a wood chipper.
"
Jaybird: "Not only did they film it, they posted it"
This is very similar to us with Iraq.
Jaybird: The whole “deliberate destruction of something beautiful” thing.
The "beauty" of Gaza is undermined by their whole "No Israel No Jews" thing and their support for murdering their way to that goal.
Since the militants aren't separate from the civilians, lots and lots of civilian stuff is being treated as being militant or potentially militant.
"
JB: stuff like Israel destroying ultrasound machines and smashing teacups and the like.
Stuff like that happens in every war. The question is what happens after the war ends? Is there legal machinery to evaluate that soldiers did crimes and should be held accountable?
For example we ran a prison camp in Iraq where people were tortured. Soldiers did time over that and there were various other punishments.
That's a world away from the high command planning the mass death of civilians with that not only being legal but your own civilians dancing in the streets in support.
"
Chris: You can support a ceasefire
Define, "ceasefire". If that means "Hamas surrenders and let's Israel take over Gaza" then I'm all in favor.
If it means "Israel leaves and pretends Hamas won't rearm and do 10-7 again" then I foresee problems. The first problem being that Gaza currently sucks and only way to prevent Hamas from rearming will have the side effect of keeping it sucking.
Chris: supporting Israel’s war, as they carry out a genocide (as recognized by pretty much every expert on the subject by now,
What is going on is a brutal war, with Hamas claiming that everyone who dies is a targeted civilian. If Hamas is correct then yes, it's genocide.
However as far as I can tell, Israel thinks it's a defensive war with Hamas deliberately getting it's own people killed by it's use of human shields.
Chris: being on the side of genocide.
As far as I can tell, the numbers suggest brutal war but not genocide. The fog of war prevents us from knowing how many militants are being killed compared to how many civilians.
A lot of the genocidal claims seem hysteria. For example the UN claimed "hundreds of thousands" of Palestinians would die if Israel attacked Rafah. After the attack, wiki claims about a thousand. Hamas seems to be claiming about 900.
When I listen to Arabic media, they talk about "Israel's war on Gaza" as though there is no such thing as Hamas and Israel is at war with the civilian population. That mindset means the war is genocide, but it ignores Hamas is a thing.
"
For all the talk about how Israel is at war with Gaza, protesting amounts to supporting Hamas. College students may use fuzzy thinking to avoid that understanding but most people don't.
I would also say the liberal news doesn't want to give them a voice to try to derail Harris.
On “Disney’s Arbitration Maneuver: A Real Mickey Mouse Operation”
This was less a serious attempt to move everything to arbitration and more an effort to pad billable hours. The question is whether that's a deliberate effort by Disney to spend the other side into breaking.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/19/2024”
26 years ago, I told my parents we were going to elope this weekend and with three days to work with they turned it into a hasty church wedding.
Then 6 weeks later we got married again in her church.
We had checked her visa and weren't sure if she'd be in the country legally in 6 weeks. But it was clear she was legal at the time so if we got married there would be no question about it.
"
I see no evidence either side is willing to have a ceasefire. Both sides want victory. For that matter both sides seem to think they're not committing war crimes.
This could easily drag on another year.
"
Hamas was an openly genocidal terror group before the siege. The siege is a result of that, not a cause.
On “Is Harris Limiting Press Access Helping Her?”
FDR managed to keep the Great Depression going for more than a decade by doing things that we'd now recognize as wildly inappropriate. For example his 100% income tax for "the rich".
Trump shut the economy down. Biden brought it back up. With after-the-fact armchair quarter backing, mistakes were made.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/12/2024”
I was thinking satire, hoax, nut-picking, or someone repeating something stupid... and then I remembered that we have the Temple Mount where Jews can't pray because it will hurt people's feelings.
"
Being VP is a mixed bag. Your primary function only happens when the President is dead. Other than that you are useful for sending to worthless high profile meetings when the President is too busy.
If you have the ear of the President then you can advise him (Biden with Obama). If you have his full trust then you can be his voice... although Dick Cheney is the only one I can think of who did this.
She managed to not cover herself with blame or glory. Her actual job is to let the President over shadow her so that means little.
The real answer is we don't know how much work she did within the Biden Whitehouse. Maybe she spent the entire time playing solitaire and maybe she's been using that time to study how to be President.
My impression leans a little towards the latter because she has occasionally said things that indicated that she was paying attention.
"
If it's "long before he entered politics" then he's talking scientifically and I've heard that theory before. It's supposed to explain why women live so much longer than men do.
"
North: And those problems, unlike the right of return, do not have any possible easy answers.
The ROR is the core of the conflict. After you handwave that away the rest is easy.
The settlers are either pulled out (like in Gaza), or the land is traded. Palestinians either become citizens in Israel or in the new Palestinian state.
The part that I'm unclear about is whether the populations are currently so mixed that it requires more (forced?) relocations to make this happen.
The new Palestinian state will brutally shut down terrorism because they don't want to go to war with Israel (witness Gaza).
The new Palestinian state will be a client of Israel and highly corrupt and unpopular. There aren't enough resources to have two highly functional states so there will be one (Israel) and a rump state-in-name-only.
"
I see no evidence that any of the Palestinian groups are willing to step back from a "robust" ROR.
All Palestinian political and militant groups, both Islamist and socialist, strongly support a right of return. The Palestinian National Authority views the right of return as a non-negotiable right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return#Bearing_on_the_peace_process
"
North: Not difficult
The closest we got to peace is Clinton's efforts with Arafat. This is where the Palestinians were at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit#Refugees_and_the_right_of_return
The ROR would have Israel take 150k people per year forever. So instead of Israel being destroyed by not being Jewish in one year it would take a few decades.
That's serious people who are not hardliners making actual proposals and in the end the two sides were too far apart.
What they're "too far apart" on is whether or not the Jews actually get to keep their state.
"
Dealing with emotional arguments is hard. As expected they're not grounded in reality.
"
Phil: This isn’t hard.
There are certainly examples of a few dozen or score people living in compounds protected by the army.
However, depending on definitions, Israel has more than 700k people who have been there for decades, even generations.
Israel moving more than 10% of it's population around is unrealistic even before we tack on that they also won't get peace. This is why peace proposals need to include land swaps.
If Israel does a unilateral cram down, then the Palestinians lose all that land and get nothing for it. The only thing that prevents Israel from taking everything is it doesn't want all the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement#Demographics
"
The simplest way to describe the problem is that area has two indigenous populations who have opposite visions on what the state should be.
Having done that, there's no obvious solution.
If you describe the problem as colonial then the ethics and solution all become easy. One side is bad and they should leave. In order to do that, you need to deny that Jews are an indigenous population to that area.
"
Phil: hard borders so long as they include land returned to Palestinians that was taken unilaterally.
By Palestinian standards all of Israel "was taken unilaterally".
If the Palestinians aren't going to cooperate with setting the borders then, by definition, they don't get a say in those borders.
That means Israel would be keeping everything that is sensitive, holy, or disputed.
This is a very ugly solution and the Palestinians will be deeply enraged by it. At this point it's hard to see how borders could be set without another population exchange because of on the ground fragmentation.
"
Far as I can tell, the bulk of "non-hardliners" don't want genocide but they do want a serious right of return which would require genocide.
"
Phil: The Israeli government – as a secular nation – is permitting, protecting and encouraging illegal land grabs masquerading as settlements in areas outside its recognized borders.
Israel does not have "recognized borders" (with the Palestinians). After a war on the scale of 1967 its pretty normal for borders to shift. Instead of a peace agreement setting borders we had "the three noes".
In theory Israel could, and maybe should, announce to the world what it thinks it's borders are and then try to enforce that. Doing that without a peace agreement instantly results in people on all sides trying to move the border and the gov will look stupid.
That's a lot of political pain without any gain.
"
Given the accusations are false and apparently being made by interested parties, this seems more self serving and not small minded.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.