Quote (fender @ Oct 19 2023 02:53am)
you mean exactly like you guys dismissing the staggering count of dead palestinian civilians as product of hamas' terrorism, and not as a the result of the actions of the IDF?
funny how your not caring about reasons and explanations is so selective.
your double-think is showing again, goon.
No, because unlike nu-liberals I'm actually capable of reading a basic logic flow chart and identifying causality. The ones who think the non-aggression principle is a white supremacist talking point. The same folks who said "Kyle Rittenhouse murdered three black men", people who can't comprehend that self-defense can actually be justified upon proximate necessity. Israel has a legitimate justification to strike targets in the Gaza Strip to defend itself from Hamas, the aggressor. By attacking strategic military targets and taking measures to mitigate collateral damage. Hamas does not have a justification to slaughter Israeli civilians, taking measures to maximize the number of innocent people who die and the brutality of the carnage. The terrorists aren't justified, their actions aren't excused, my understanding of their circumstances and motives don't make me judge them any less guilty.
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what you once again fail to see (or, if we generously assume that you're not just a complete moron, deliberately misrepresent) is that my argument is NOT "this is the explanation, and therefore nothing should be done about the terrorists / therefore we shouldn't condemn their choices and actions" or anything along those lines. i'm all for eliminating everyone slaughtering innocent people (unlike you, i apply that to both sides though, because i actually have principles, not just partisan positions).
i just want to take it one step FURTHER by addressing the conditions and circumstances, which lead to people radicalising (that's how terrorists are created, it's not just in their "nature" like your dumb analogy suggests) in the first place.
your "pragmatism" only addresses the symptoms for a very short time, and completely neglects the root causes - even though literal decades of precedent would tell you that just 'retaliating' by killing ten, twenty, or thirty times as many of theirs as they have killed, will inevitably lead to more hate, resentment, and radicalisation, more dead israeli and palestinian babies down the road.
just dismissing the root causes, and outright refusing to even address them, while exclusively focusing on killing as many palestinians as the world is willing to accept before telling israel they've spilled enough innocent blood for a while, accomplishes nothing.
only creating a fundamentally new situation (either through genocide, ethnic cleansing, OR finally ending the illegal and brutal occupation) can change that dynamic, which existed throughout all our lifetimes, in a meaningful manner.
your only concern is vengeance, mine is long term peace.
There are no feasible proposals for "long term peace", but there's plenty of proposals for short term catastrophe.
Here's a fun premise: Nothing in liberal coddling of extremists pacifies them, it just strengthens them. On good days, such proposals are ineffective, like the camp david accords. On bad days, they lead to slaughter, like Israel's soft touch border.
Israel could massacre a bunch of Gazans in an impotent half-measure that just leads them back to the status quo ante except with even more hate, resentment and radicalization, sure. And that would be an obvious mistake. But its just as much a mistake to think that just because some heavy handed measures are self-defeating, the only solution is the limp dick approach. Israel identified a proximate danger posed by Hamas being able to cross their border as a marauding army. Israel has an obvious path to counter that threat without needing to commit a genocide- by creating a defense in depth, a DMZ and buffer strip around Gaza that would stop future large scale invasions again. And putting that into action would require the exact level of heavy handed war strategy we've seen so far: Driving Palestinians out of north Gaza, flattening the city they abandon and eventually occupying and annexing that territory to build a buffer.
That's a realistic, pragmatic solution.
Let me give you a closer to home anecdote and see if you understand the parallel. My city just raised the sales tax by a full 1.00%, one of the biggest hikes ever. And its all earmarked to pay for subsidized housing and public transportation and other services aimed at the lowest welfare class, right in the middle of a crime wave. The liberal theorists would say that by addressing the root cause of poverty and lack of opportunity, we can lift up people so they won't want to commit crime. The realists, who have paid attention to any of the actual policy outcomes of the past 50 years, would says that all we're doing is enabling a criminal underclass and importing even more of them, flooding previously peaceful neighborhoods by forcing subsidized housing into their suburbs. In effect, we're paying a huge amount of money to make the problem worse. If we had instead stepped up law enforcement and instituted more draconian measures to be tough on crime, we'd probably have the counterintuitive result of actually incarcerating less people overall because we'd bring down crime so severely. Because right now, the obvious issue is that criminals know they have no punishment, no accountability.
Maybe the most humanitarian option requires us to get our hands dirty. Its not about taking an eye for an eye, its not about vengeance or punishment, its about having the basic damn sense to recognize that the same strategy that's failed every single time its tried, won't work the next time we try it.