Apathy - the human constant

Maybe the Afghanis didn’t want to be a vassal state to the country that was invading them for 20 fucking years.

Luckily, as every good campist knows, the holsum Taliban, definitely not an imperialist catspaw of Pakistan which has been invading them for 30 fucking years, is widely beloved by comparison.

I mean, the Progressive Politics comm is run by campists who will accept any argument as long as it can loop back around to some form of critique of The West™. In that same thread is a commenter saying that violence is the only language those damn woman-educators understand.

Not sure why you expect them to remove this critique of the Western-backed Afghan government, regardless that it’s built on a racist premise. It’s against Bad Camp, after all!

The purpose of a legal system is to provide consistent and coherent methods of conflict resolution that are superior for the functioning of general society than means outside of a system of centralized coercion for certain, sufficiently disruptive acts.

By this extremely broad definition, the legal system in my country, the USA, fulfills its purpose. But so would the legal system of fucking Napoleonic France.

More narrowly, a legal system should be oriented towards a standardized means of punishment and reform of those who disrupt the basic functioning of civil society.

By this narrower definition, my country only succeeds on ‘standardized means of punishment’, and even there arguably only partially. It largely fails at reform, and the punishments are both visited on those who do not disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (minor drug offenses, immigration crackdowns, anti-homeless legislation), and failed to be visited on many of those who do disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (gestures broadly at corporate America and the current coterie of fascists in power in government).

Do you think internal disorder is unlikely? There’s broad disinterest in helping the Palestinians in any way, but Israeli society disagrees about nearly everything else.

I think disagreements in Israeli society are relatively weak insofar as they all adhere to a common vision of Israel as a Jewish apartheid state. As long as there’s that to unite them - and make no mistake, at BEST 37/120 Knesset seats are held by non-Zionist parties, and more realistically, 14/120 - any crisis will bring together Israeli society in defense of that core existential concern.

Political disputes will continue, to very strong degrees. But there isn’t going to be some mass defection from the core existential idea of Israel or Israeli sovereignty, including over its hypermilitarized state.

My point isn’t that they’d glass the Middle East, my point is that the threat of even small-scale nuclear warfare is enough to ensure that Israel might be pushed back from imperialist projects, but never existentially threatened without massive internal disorder.

I would argue that the Levant is the least likely region of the Middle East to change with the coming decline in oil.

Uh, many occupations have done so, simply by genociding everyone of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity in the area.

‘Good’ doesn’t always win. The world is not inherently just.

We might not fully invade enemies often, but the Arabs definitely have.

The days of massive Pan-Arab socialist coalitions are over, and even back when they were still a threat, Israel beat them off pretty handily without significant US support.

Threats to Israel at this point are largely not existential, and if they were changed to existential threats, further radicalization seems more likely than redress and reconciliation. Especially considering Israel’s nuclear program.

What is your threshold for often?

When was the last time a country with a functioning military was overthrown by outside intervention?

I guess we can count Iraq, though that requires connecting the First Gulf War and the Second, since the First Gulf War is when the Iraqi military was last seriously functioning.

The best way to punish them is to give Isreali left wingers and “out” which allows them a path back to normalcy so they can take political power and condition that with punishment of high ranking war criminals and a two state solution. But this cant really happen due to the current US admin.

I think you overestimate the appetite of the Israeli left-wing for normalcy, a serious two-state solution, or punishing war criminals. Like I said, at best, you’ll get a handful of offenders from internal politiking. But the chance of there being some punishment for any significant percentage of the very large number of very active and intentional orchestrators of this genocide is… small. Zionism is unlikely to be meaningfully repulsed by anything but time, and that’s assuming a best-case-scenario that the problem doesn’t intensify.

People will fight to the death if they’re backed into a corner but they will throw a few people under the bus if given a path out.

Again, I consider that covered under my “Slobodan Milošević” scenario. Don’t get me wrong, seeing Bibi die in a prison cell would be based and hilarious. But even that would only be a drop of water in the ocean of blood.

But if by Zionists you mean anyone who wants isreal to exists then you are backing isrealis in to corner and guaranteeing the conflict continue to be played out.

By Zionists, I presumed it was meant those who see Israel’s existence as an explicitly Jewish apartheid state as core to its continuation. And as long as Israel remains Zionist in that sense, this shit will keep happening. Ethnostates are notoriously amiable to the whole lebensraum idea, regardless of whether it’s currently-occupied territory they’re looking at, or potentially occupied territory - or both.

Israel is one of the worlds most powerful militaries, if they wanted to get things over as quickly as possible they could have polished Gaza off on October the 8th.

Considering that the brutality of this war has only been matched by its incompetence, not so sure that’s correct.

Without that, they wouldn’t constantly be attacking other countries.

I don’t know that I agree. At this point, I think between the instability of their neighbors and the built-up siege-state of Israel itself, it would continue acting like a rogue state even if the US cut off funding.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t cut off funding - we absolutely should. And extend that ‘umbrella’ of protection to Israel’s neighbors, not Israel, which might at least reduce blatant incursions.

But I suspect that the response of Israel to reduced or eliminated US support would be to become even more militarized, not less.

We can’t. At least while the USA is a thing.

Even if the US wasn’t a thing, punishing Zionists wouldn’t be possible without subduing Israel through a literal war. Something which is not often attempted.

At best, we’d have the half-ass ‘punishment’ levied on states like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Djibouti, and North Korea, wherein the primary punishment is “It’s slightly harder and more expensive for the elite to get their precious foreign luxuries.”

Don’t get me wrong, that’s better than nothing. It’s just…

Prevention is generally a more fruitful avenue than punishment, when it comes to international polities and ideologies even with just regional majorities.

The chance of seeing genocidal cunts swing, or even acknowledge their wrongdoing, are generally small. Even the worst genocide of modernity, the Holocaust, had only a relatively small number of Nazis punished, despite literally every major extant power agreeing on how horrific their behavior was, and quite literally destroying all military capacity for the Nazis to resist and occupying every inch of their territory.

At most, you might get a handful of them in international courts by internal politiking, like Slobodan Milošević, but even then we’re unlikely to see the fully ‘cathartic’ end we want. “My dad is a war criminal” will still be sung proudly.

Man, if being ineffective stopped Dem policy, we’d have a lot less Dem policy.

Take the deal, institute a 99% wealth tax on billionaires anyway.

God, I wish the Dems had the balls for that.

I once cut the inside of my thigh as a kid by bicycle jousting with my friends at night-time along the streets and sidewalks. Slammed into one of my friends’ tires head-on, and got thrown forward into the crossbar. I was lucky I was slightly off-center, but I came away with a nasty bruise, a laceration, and a rip in my shorts.

Username came first.

I liked the avatar. That’s about it.

I prefer posters with avatars, personally.

Allied leadership was very wary of running into the issue they did in WW1 - where the exaggeration of German war crimes discredited the propaganda apparatus of Britain. As they became more aware of the nature and extent of the death camps, Allied leadership opted to document evidence for the postwar tribunals rather than engage in a war of accusation and denial against Nazi Germany which could have seriously damaged the short-term credibility of their propaganda efforts.

Whether this was the right choice is another question entirely.

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

Religious fanatics rarely deserve the adulation their beliefs receive.

That’s been the internet since at least the mid-2000s.