Nobody is justified in targeting civilians, either overtly (Hamas) or covertly (Israel). — Baden

I said show me the "rather" in that sentence. See that one, the one I just quoted above.

Let's start with that and slowly make progress.

Yes, "Rather not" in any use in the English language is pretty damn wishy washy. — schopenhauer1

Nobody is justified in targeting civilians, either overtly (Hamas) — Baden

Show me the "rather" in that sentence. The one I keep repeating to you. The other sentence is a different sentence refering to something different. The sentence above refers to Hamas targeting civilians. The other sentence refers to violence as a response to occupation in general. The two sentences are distinct. The first sentence clearly refutes the idea that I support "exactly" what Hamas has been doing for the past 30 years, seeing as that, by definition, includes targeting civilians. The other sentence as it came after the first one is contextualized by the first one.

So what part is justified, exactly what we are seeing from Hamas/fighters over the last 30 years? — schopenhauer1

What are you trying to say? If you are trying to say:

"What part of what we are seeing from Hamas/fighters over the past 30 years is justified?" then you need to rephrase your question. The way it's phrased currently means "Is exactly what we are seeing from Hamas/fighters over the last 30 years justified?". The former (which you didn't ask) is an information question and the latter (which you did ask) a yes/no question, the answer to which, as I mentioned, can directly be inferred from my previous posts, i.e., no.

So the precise scenario is the actions of Hamas/Palestinian fighters over the last 30 years. — schopenhauer1

That's not precise.

are you willing to say that the Palestinians should use other options than violence or would you similarly use the defense "But this is justified for X". — schopenhauer1

I'm going to answer this. This time, please listen. A) The labels do not matter. Whatever I say applies equally to any party in a similar context. B) Violence is sometimes justified and sometimes not justified C) Options other than violence should always be considered first. D) If you want to know whether in a certain scenario, I think violence would be justified, give me the precise scenario.

Me: Nobody, including Hamas, is justified in targeting civilians
Small distracted fish: So, you are justifying Hamas targeting civilians
Me: Read what I wrote.
Small distracted fish: Sounds like you are OK with Hamas targeting civilians.

Again, kind of wishy washy. — schopenhauer1

No, it's as clear and unequivocal as day.

Nobody is justified in targeting civilians either overtly (Hamas) or covertly (Israel).. — Baden

Look, if you don't understand English, you don't belong in this conversation.

Make that a goldfish. This is the part that answers your question re me not justifying "exactly" what Hamas has done.

Nobody is justified in targeting civilians either overtly (Hamas)... — Baden

JFC, at least read the post that replied to you. You have the attention span of a fucking budgie.

Covered that already. Nobody is justified in targeting civilians, either overtly (Hamas) or covertly (Israel). But any nation that's occupied is justified in fighting against said occupation. I'd rather see non-violent resistance, not because I have any sympathy for occupying military forces but because civilians, including children, on both sides, usually bear the brunt of these kinds of conflicts.

I'm just curious the thought process and reasoning here as I think it would reveal a lot of the beginning positions of the participants. — schopenhauer1

Maybe just read more of the thread.

Why? Haven’t you ever thought something unlikely without recourse to scientific method?

Anyway, this thread seems to have veered off course. Let's see if Amen comes up with the goods in the appropriate location.

Sorry, dude, more than likely

this is just showboating. — Baden

I have no interest in moderating the debate. You can choose your mod. Now, just go post the proposal in the debate forum and stop babbling about it.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/29/debate-proposals

Unless, of course, you have no intention of debating and this is just showboating.

Foiled again.

Upon the basis of what information would you consider it unlikely, rather than likely? — Janus

What I've read concerning the genetic make-up of the disease. I could look it up but tbh, I'm not so interested in debating this aspect of it in the absence of further evidence because a) We have, as yet, no reliable or scientific way of apportioning probability here b) it doesn't particularly matter to me, and c) it's not as if I would put anything past the Chinese government.

thanks. compliments make me choke, though. — frank

Allow me to reiterate Tiff's words of appreciation. :hearts:

So, bad wokeness is bad and good wokeness is good. Thanks for your contribution.

Ah, oh no, test said I'm totally woke, this whole time I didn't realise. — Judaka

Damn, starting to feel us non-woke folk are an endangered minority here... :monkey:

I think you should name names here — Benkei

They can't name names because the charge is bullshit. No-one here called for the expulsion of Jews from the Middle East or anything remotely like it.

And therein lies the essence of bigotry. I take the side of my group against the other, whatever the injustice against the other. It's "us" against "them". I agree it doesn't really matter that the "them" are Muslims in this case. As I also emphasized, Bitconnect's type are just as common among anti-semites. Same approach, just different labels.

For others who are less disengenouous, getting away from rhetorical hypotheticals and focusing on facts on the ground, a report from the Israeli rights group, B'Tselem*.

"This report deals with one of the primary, albeit lesser known, components of Israel’s policy of restricting Palestinian movement in the Occupied Territories: restrictions and prohibitions on Palestinian travel along certain roads in the West Bank. This phenomenon is referred to in the report as the “Forbidden Roads Regime.” The regime, based on the principle of separation through discrimination, bears striking similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa until 1994."

https://www.btselem.org/download/200408_forbidden_roads_eng.pdf

(*B'Tselem
"Historian Mordechai Bar-On writes that B'Tselem's reports "frequently included ugly accounts of the behavior of Israeli security officials" and that Israelis "were often disturbed by these reports." At the same time, the Israeli media viewed the organization as "a reliable source of information" and their reports were in most cases proven to be accurate. Israeli military authorities also frequently turned to B'tselem to confirm the IDF's own information. It has also been called the best neutral source for incidents in the Palestinian territories.")

Now the game is to pretend he doesn't understand what a hypothetical is. :lol: Thing about these guys is they're actually just vanilla bigots. The fact that their bigotry is directed towards Arabs, who they think shouldn't be afforded the rights they take for granted for themselves, is kind of incidental. They'd be bigots if they were Arabs too, and probably anti-semites.

I simply gave you an example of hypothetical anti-semitism, which you squirmed around and refused to condemn because you thought you couldn't without twisting yourself into an ethical doughnut. Funny to watch. Carry on.

Dude, you can't even unequivocally say that Jews should be allowed to use roads there, so everything you say now is coated in the absurd.



Answer the question:

"would you consider it anti-semitic for roads to be built that Jews were not allowed to travel on but Arabs were"? — Baden

Yes or no.

What's funny here is watching @BitconnectCarlos squirm and try to avoid condemning obvious anti-semitism. @Andrew4Handel, you're next. If you can't condemn roads being built that Jews would not be allowed to travel on but Arabs would, you're an anti-semite. Period.

Absolutely, just want to put forward a very simple proposition based on a very simple fact that puts defenders of Israel in the position of having to defend hypothetical anti-semitism or condemn Israeli apartheid. There is no other consistent ethical position.

"would you consider it anti-semitic for roads to be built that Jews were not allowed to travel on but Arabs were"? — Baden

Stop squirming and answer the question above. Anti-semitic or not?

The West Bank is a Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation. So, would you consider it acceptable for an Arab state occupying Israeli territory to build roads Arabs but not Jews were allowed to travel on? Or to build settlements there exclusively for Arabs? And if you object to any of that, you can reduce it to, "would you consider it anti-semitic for roads to be built that Jews were not allowed to travel on but Arabs were"?

"This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel US, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel the US belong only to the Jewish people white people. That is the founding principle on which the state was established."

Why would anyone object to this type of thing? Perfectly fine. Absolutely not apartheid. Just like Italy, really.

Would you consider it acceptable for an Arab state to build roads in Israel that Arabs but not Jews were allowed to travel on? Or to build settlements there exclusively for Arabs?

n any case if we started actually applying attention to muslim on muslim oppression the range of topics covered would be much much broader and israel would proportionally receive less attention. — BitconnectCarlos

This is not the topic of the thread. If you want to start a new thread about that, go ahead. Thing is, you won't find anyone defending that oppression, so the debate is likely to be short lived.

Fact is you don't have an ethicial leg to stand on. If Arabs instituted a state that kept Jews in an open air prison/ghetto that they regularly bombed and built roads especially for Arabs that Jews weren't allowed travel on, you, us, and the rest of the world would be rightly outraged. That you think this should be fine when it's done to Arabs/Muslims makes you, at the very least, a bigot, if not an outright racist.

i was talking about muslim on muslim oppression which is considered so pervasive in the west (and not without reason) that we just don't talk about it because we just don't care. it's not nearly as exciting as an ethnic struggle! :starstruck: — BitconnectCarlos

There's a degree of truth to the idea that ethnic struggles, black vs white, Jewish vs Muslim, Catholic vs. Protestant etc more immediately grab our attention on a human level than internacine conflicts. Possibly because the very idea of oppression, from slavery to the holocaust, has strong historical resonances with racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination. So, our oppression "radar" tends to perk up when clear ethnic differences are at play. However, the obvious lesson from this is that we should heighten our awareness of all types of oppression rather than downplay our awareness of the ethnic form. Any argument to the contrary is perverse, self-defeating, and just more silly whataboutism.

:up: The real anti-semitism here is from those who would claim being Jewish somehow deprives you of individual political sovereignty. That it makes you a de facto supporter of apartheid. Anyway, in the absence of any evidence, we shouldn't give this any oxygen. It's a tired diversionary tactic.

you — Andrew4Handel

Who is "you"? Who argued that Jews should be expelled from the middle east?

If it helps you understand where some of us are coming from: as well as being against Israeli apartheid, I am also for the boycotting of the upcoming World Cup in Qatar due to their use of bonded labour and I'd have some very strong words about the government of that country and their horribly fucked-up culture re foreign labour if it came up for debate. Does that make me Islamaphobic? No; you can be Muslim without supporting that, just as you can be Jewish without supporting Israel's abuse of the Palestinians. For the vast majority of critics of Israel, I'd wager, these are issues of human rights and the religion or ethnicity of the human rights abuser is irrelevant.

What’s as interesting as whether or not this narrative is true (unlikely but possible) is considering who desperately wants it to be true and why.

I’m clearly a dinosaur. Though it would be disingenuous of me to pretend I didn’t know what the woke answers were or when such an orientation is appropriate to enforce.

Could it be these accusations of mass wokeness are but figments of feeble-minded fascist fantasists?? :chin:

I’m beginning to doubt its scientific credentials. :lol:

Are the Chyneez trying to kill the good ol’ boys of Stoopid, USA again? Tricky buggers never give up, do they?

I expect few on the mod team would qualify for the woke brigade. We are likely just boringly representative of the clever and the charming.

https://quizly.co/how-woke-are-you/

:cry:

The general argument concerning free speech of course has nothing to do with the argument concerning moderation on any particular forum any more than an argument for free food choices obliges an Italian restaurant to serve hamburgers. And yet posters consistently conflate these debates. There’s no inconsistency whatsoever between supporting free speech and running a moderated forum.

I'm not in favour of just allowing people to post garbage because "censorship is bad". — Judaka

:up:

have little patience to listen to shit from fascists or racists. And it's not simply a matter of me tuning them out or changing the channel. I want to see them shunned, banned, marginalized, pushed back under the fridge and into the darkness where they belong. They will always be with us, but we don't have to give them time or a platform. — James Riley

:cheer:

Let's take an inflammatory/racist claim such as "Chinese people are inferior to Europeans" — Andrew4Handel

We don't faciliatate debate on issues we consider unworthy of debate. We consider that a poor use of our space. There are plenty of other forums less concerned about quality who do. Just go there. That's to emphasize, this is a popular philosophy forum with an academic bias. That's what we do here. It's our niche. Any subject that has zero chance of being considered worthy of academic debate probably has zero chance of being accepted here. It's not even really a question of what should or should not be debated. It's like going into an Italian restaraunt and wondering why they don't serve hamburgers. Just go to a McDonald's, man. That's not what we do here. Simple.