In my opinion, when the Israelis point at the Egyptians they are refusing to take responsibility by asking other nations to clean up the disaster that they created.

Taking in several million traumatized refugees and possibly thousands of Muslim radicals is not something Egypt can be expected to simply take on the chin because Israeli radicals want to be enabled in their fantasy.

Egypt conquered Gaza in 1948. They took control of it, ostensibly to "protect and further the interests," of the people there. Their goal was to annex land in 1948 and they did it.

Some of the people in Gaza were refugees from within Israel's 1948 borders. But many also were already in Gaza, conquered by Egypt.

So what did Egypt do when it ruled over Gaza? It didn't set up self governance. It didn't give them citizenship. It didn't let people freely leave. They forced them into squalid camps and said "good, you helped us annex some land. No help us destroy Israel and annex more and maybe after you can have some degree of freedom."

Egypt is deeply responsible, it is also partially their mess. Before Gaza was sealed by Israel it was sealed by Egypt for decades. If anything, Egypt's position is even less supportable because they were always claiming to fight "for" the people they then treated horribly.

And how did Israel end up with Gaza? Could it be Egyptian politicians giving speech after speech about immanent war with the total destruction of Israel as its explicit aim? Could it be that Israel said a naval blockade would be considered the start of an active war and then Egypt put that blockade into effect and began announcing the immanent invasion of Israel?

So, they did to Gazans many of the same things Israel has and they were the main party that precipitated the war in which Israel ended up with Gaza. That seems pretty involved to me. One might ask, planning for immanent war, did Egypt evacuate Gaza, right on the front lines? Oh, but they did evacuate the "real Egyptians?"

And they have to be part of any peace. If Israel declared Gaza independent tomorrow, what does it fix? Gaza's borders are all with two nations that want to restrict access to their country. So what changes? That's why it can't be simple independence, because it leaves the situation unchanged, and indeed Gaza had no settlers and administers itself, so independence would have more to do with aid flows than anything else. The solution has to involve how Egypt and Israel police their border, allowing more into Gaza and more out of it. But at the same time, I get why Egypt does what it does. Who makes a move for open borders with a state whose government is openly supportive of terrorism in your land?

I think you could make that pretty absolute. Terror bombing and area bombing as a means to reduce economic efficiency has not proven very effective.

The larger question is about the use of air power, or artillery, to attack an enemy who entrenches themselves in populated urban areas. There you have the trade off of doing nothing due to the risk to hitting civilians, which only encourages the use of "human shields," and the risks of various forms of attack.

In general, the risk ratio to civilians favors air power. Special forces raids can be less damaging, but they have the potential to blow up. What happens if your forces get pinned down? Now you have to let them be overwhelmed or start using way more, less discriminate power to support them. Actual occupations don't tend to result in fewer losses unless the occupying power can flood the area with manpower and effectively police it. This is hard to do. The US and allied forces to hold half of Vietnam peaked over one million men and wasn't enough.

Then, you can consider strategic bombing designed to cripple your enemies' ability to wage war. This moves to bombing civilian infrastructure, factories, etc., but not civilians as an end.

There aren't many ways in which bombing civilians can be justified because it isn't effective. But it's also wrong to conflate "any attack once an enemy has entrenched themselves in a populated area and not evacuated it," with "bombing civilians intentionally."

This is definitely a real strategy. In the one election Hamas allowed to occur they campaigned precisely on curbing their use of "human shields," a stratagem the shields were not particularly fond of. But if insurgencies can be justified then some degree of "hiding behind the population," must also be justified, since they are pretty impossible otherwise, particularly in urbanized areas.

So, with insurgents, their justification needs to be based in their goals and how well their techniques actually can be expected to achieve those goals. In many insurgencies, control over their own populace, infighting, and attacking just for the sake of attacking become goals in themselves. I'm thinking in particular of the Lebanese civil war with its endless landscape of groups. And these groups had justifiable causes, but lost justification for their muddled "attack to attack," doctrine.

Is there justification for nuking? If so, is there justification for nuking twice? (Many say no to the second question) The answer would depend on whether the war would have ended without it or them, and if so how costly ending the war would be without using it or them.

Yes, that's generally the justification. Also the fact that it might deter a war with the Soviet Union, which seemed quite possible at the time.

But people also question if it was moral for the US to abandon half of Europe to the Soviets with their mass rape, mass brutalization of subject peoples. Particularly the abandonment of Poland, the Baltics, etc., so it goes both ways, "the wars you don't fight," become an issue as well.

Obviously, if a nuclear war had broken out with the Soviets in the 60s-80s, we would look back and say "it would have been the right thing to do to get rid of the USSR when they refused to leave Eastern Europe in the 40s," so it's something that's impossible to know for sure.

The "blockade," is sort of layered. There were indeed more restrictions put in place on what could go into Gaza after Hamas was elected, although these were phased in over time based on a number of crises.

I was referring to the catastrophic decoupling of the economies of the Occupied Territories from Israel, which took unemployment in them from 4-5% over prior decades to 23-30% since and chopped a third to a bit under a half off annual per capita earnings. This was the fruit of the consistent terror campaign of the 1990s, which wasn't all Hamas, but they were deeply involved.

Hamas was actually a good deal more rational in their messaging and better in their behavior initially, when they stopped boycotting elections. It seemed like the organization might change after getting a taste of the powers and burdens of administration, and even their attempts to purge rivals could be seen as simply suring up consolidated government, to some degree. That the 9/11 era US and EU policy towards them was so hostile is probably a missed turn in the whole process. But that only lasted so long. After the 2007 war between Hamas and Fatah, there was a shift away from this. Arguably, Fatah was planning to remove Hamas, or Fatah just had contingencies for this and Hamas used that as an excuse for a bloody coup. Hard to say.

And the whole thing is pretty fucking cynical. All those bombings and killings to disrupt the peace process just to say "ah, but now that I'm in control and get the benefits of power, perhaps a two state solution isn't so bad!" But that's part of the problem, the PA was very corrupt, and Hamas didn't change that. Being in power is a route to power and impunity. Real peace would require real reform which challenges the ability to rule like a crime lord.

This sort of dysfunction isn't unique. As soon as the US defacto partitioned Iraq and gave the Kurds quasi independence with the no fly zone in the 1990s they started an extensive civil war. It does make negotiations harder though.

Tyranny and power are not properties of individuals, they are manifestations of affects circulating though a culture , from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Subjects are produced by the way power circulates though a community

Interesting. I've been meaning to read more Deleuze. I'm not super familiar with him.

But that makes sense to me. The "lord" isn't constrained by their individual lordship over their bondsmen, but by the fact that, in their society, one is either a lord or a bondsman. If one fails to be a lord, then one ends up as a bondsman.

I see this in modern status anxiety. People might have very liberal attitudes, but they are constrained by the system.

"Yes, kids should go to economically integrated schools. Yes, we need to build housing on a massive scale. But not here. If you only do it here, we fall down the ladder into the abyss."

That's the problem of having a ladder with a few rungs in the clouds and the rest in the abyss. Those in the clouds have to cling to their rung for dear life, even if they'd prefer not to have to do so and would be willing to make sacrifices to change things.

That said, tyranny over the self can't ONLY be about culture. Some people are tyrannical in their self-discipline in service of ideas their culture rejects, e.g. the strongly and individually religious.

You seem to making a leap here from harmonization of desires to normative ethics as altruism.

It's simply the first idea I thought of. People can be disciplined in being morally dubious stock traders because they want "master of the universe, insider," to be part of their identity too.

I use the altruistic example because that's how you get to social freedom. People do take on identities and embrace positive duties that aren't in any way altruistic, but the only way society as a whole gets free is when people embrace a duty to each other's freedom.

This doesn't cut against efforts to reform society. That's where I disagree with Hegel. Hegel gets so obsessed with unity that he ignores the role that activists have in improving society. I agree with him that activists sometimes go too far and have a net corrosive effect, but that doesn't mean they aren't needed at all.

The point isn't that we become free in supporting the society we already have, or even the society we want to have, but that we become free in supporting the evolution of the society that produces the most freedom. And since individuals' freedom is deeply interrelated, this means freedom for all. This, IMO, has sort of been lost in modern philosophy. There is way too much focus on fighting conformity, cutting against the grain, etc. Sure, that's important, but it cannot be an ends in itself. In Nietzsche, it is an ends in itself and in this it becomes a self defeating ideology if applied at the social level.

But how do we progress towards more truly altruistic institutions and social norms. Well that's a whole different story about social and organizational "evolution," and the ways in which organizations become "self-aware."

But why didn't they carry out terrorist resistance?

I'd say this owes to:
-The absolutely decisive character of the allied victory.
- The strong bureaucracy and history of a centralized state with a monopoly on force to constrain would be terrorists.
- The strong threat of living under Soviet dictatorship.

In the Israel situation, only the decisive victory is there. The threat of being conquered by their neighbors DID play a role in the evolution of the PLO, but because the Arabs were never able to master the PLO with the same impunity and iron fist that the Soviets employed in Eastern Europe you didn't have the same sort of effects.

And the lack of a bureaucratic history is probably the key problem here. The entire region is full of conflicts like these, they just lack the same political salience. Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, and then Egypt is in many ways unstable. Even the immense wealthy of the Gulf States has failed to make them stable states.

The Ottomans developed a strong state within the bounds of modern Turkey. This is why it's so hard for Erdogan to subvert. But they merely projected this outwards, rather than growing it indigenously in the foreign lands they administered. It's not unlike how the quality of government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire after the state expired.

And this poses a profound challenge for settling the issue. It's not that different from the sectarian splits in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq actually, except for the religious relevance of the land, Israel's ostensible status as a "developed nation," and the relative power balance. But then there is no easy solution, and narratives that try to boil it down into "wealthy colonizers versus the oppressed," miss this. Iraq's conflicts between the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds is in many ways much more similar than people who want to frame it like the British in India would like to admit. The idea that, "if the whole world began to boycott Israel like North Korea," this would solve the issue is likely mistaken, because it isn't like France in Vietnam, but more similar to Syria or Lebanon.

That's my take anyhow.

Same here, and like I said above, the difference can't be what justifies Israel. Although, I do sort of think destroying Hamas might be needed for progress. If the Israeli right is voted out, which seems likely at least for now, and if Hamas is severely weakened, then maybe something good can come.

And that's why I say the strikes could be justified. It depends on how they are being carried out and we can't know that now. A ground invasion would almost invariably lead to more civilian deaths and I don't think it works to say "if Hamas runs back to Gaza you can't go after them there except in very focused raids," because you will never defeat them that way, and I don't think there will be progress until they are defeated.

This is a group that gets plenty of references for torture from their own people to the ICHR and brutally cracks down on any protest against them. Hamas isn't Hamas because of the blockade. Hamas being Hamas is what led to the blockade in the first place. Their past attacks were specifically aimed at derailing a promising peace process. The idea was "no to independence, it will take the incentive away to push for full victory."

If the shoe were on the other foot, I would allow that Palestine might be justified in using force to remove Israel's far right leadership as well, especially with their efforts to dismantle democracy. But they lack that capability. For now, we can only hope that they are rightly blamed for this situation, which so far, they seem to be.

The side that had murdered more innocents: Israeli.

Depends on how narrowly you define the conflict and if you consider Palestinian organizations under a single umbrella (arguably unjustifiable in recent decades since they are in violent conflict).

Broadly, since the start of the conflict, Palestinian forces have killed more civilians in their actions in Lebanon alone. But note that the IDF certainly could have inflicted higher losses if it wanted to. The PLO in many cases tried to kill as many of their rivals as possible, and that is where I believe what RougeAI is getting at.

You have plenty of events like this at the PLO's doorstep:

On January 20, under the command of Fatah and as-Sa'iqa, members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leftist Muslim Lebanese militiamen entered Damour.[12] Along with twenty Phalangist militiamen, civilians - including women, the elderly, and children, and often comprising whole families - were lined up against the walls of their homes and sprayed with machine-gun fire by Palestinians; the Palestinians then systematically dynamited and burned these homes.[13][4][12] Several of the town's young women were separated from other civilians and gang-raped.[4] Estimates of the number killed range from 100 to 582, with the overwhelming majority of these being civilians; Robert Fisk puts the number of civilians massacred at nearly 250.[4][14][15][16][2][17] Among the killed were family members of Elie Hobeika and his fiancée.[18] For several days after the massacre, 149 bodies of those executed by the Palestinians lay in the streets; this included the corpses of many women who had been raped and of babies who were shot from close range in the back of the head.[15] In the days following the massacre, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims, some of whom were high on hashish, exhumed the coffins in the town's Christian cemetery and scattered the skeletons of several generations of the town's deceased citizens in the streets.[15]

Now this is a long time ago, and Fatah has developed into a much saner organization. But could I see Hamas doing these if it was given the chance? Absolutely.

But simply asking, "who would be more brutal if they won," or "which side would lynch you if they could," isn't fair either. It's not a relevant question unless you're actually the one in danger of being lynched.

Because justification of Israel can't come simply from "Hamas would do worse." What Israel should be doing is answered by the question "what changed such that Fatah would be very unlikely to do this sort of thing routinely anymore? How did that change happen and what IDF policy supports that?" That's where Israel can't be justified. It's not a question of "being better than Hamas."

Was Stalin good if Hitler might have been in some ways worse? Was Stalin justified in his wartime actions because of how bad Hitler was? I would say absolutely not for many of them. You can't say "I am justified because of how bad the other guy is," if your actions don't lead to the defeat of the other guy and replacement with something better. Israel is to blame in that their strategy never had any shot at truly defeating Hamas, just containing them until something like this happened. You're not justified by your opponent's evil when pursuing a losing strategy, particularly not if you're doing many of the same things as them.

And this is what I mean about "winning the peace," and why attacks on Hamas might be very justifiable. Did Lebanese Shias and Christians dispossess the Palestinians of parts of Palestine? No, but once you have a group with a culture of massacre and "anything goes," it doesn't tend to stay contained.

If all the Jews in Israel vanished tomorrow how long would it be before Hamas was at war with Fatah and the Israeli Arabs? I don't think very long, and I think we could easily see the same exact sort of thing enacted on Palestinian rivals.

Exactly. What you do in the war is in part justified by what your enemy has done and what you can expect them to do in the future/if they ever get more advantage over you.

But even more key is that actions to win a war are justified by what comes after. Would the US have been justified in the bombing it engaged in during WWII if it had gotten Japan and the Germans to surrendered, simply executed some leaders to feel good, then gone home and let those countries starve and the same sorts of people take control over them again?

To my mind, the US was justified more by things like the Marshall Plan, which came after the war, then by the military value of some of their campaigns. The plans that led to lasting peace required total victory, and it's what came after that justified refusing to negotiate a truce that left the original antagonists in power.

And this is where Israel has not been justified in it's more limited military actions since 1973. The entire "mowing the grass," philosophy of counter terrorism they developed was morally bankrupt because it was counter productive in terms of long term peace. It couldn't reasonably be expected to ever lead to lasting peace. Assassinating leaders might disrupt attacks, but if you also kill anyone who can actually discipline their side then you destroy any ability to negotiate.

Israel was justified in driving settlers out of Gaza at gun point, but their disengagement plan obviously failed. Simply walking away and leaving Gaza to administer itself, shrugging and saying "well lots of countries don't allow traffic across their borders," didn't set up any sort of lasting peace.

Not that I have any great ideas on what an alternative was. If they "disengaged" more by announcing that they would recognize Gaza as an independent nation and left the Egyptian border to Egypt and simply policied their own, we'd be in a very similar situation. Gaza would still be destitute. Both countries still would restrict traffick across the border. Hamas would still have plenty of reasons to justify continued attacks. This is why I am not optimistic about the future even if Hamas is destroyed.

Egypt controlled Gaza prior to 1967 via military rule under a military governor. They refused giving Palestinians the right to manage their own affairs over the course of their rule. Of course, in 1948 Egypt had, like the other Arab countries and the Palestinian leadership itself, no plans for an "independent nation of Palestine." Such a thing wasn't on any state's radar because no real distinct "Palestinian" people existed as separate from other Levantine Arabs. There was rather a linguistic gradient across the Levant and questions of local control. The land was to be partitioned between the victorious Arab states if they had won.

The distinct "Palestinian" people of today were created by the Arab states' refusal to accept "refugees," from the lands they had actively wanted to conquer. I put "refugees," in quotation marks because a good deal of these people were in homes their families had been in for generations. Yes, there were those Palestinians who fled the 1948 fighting, but there were also those who has always lived in lands the Arabs had effectively conquered in 1948, e.g. Gaza. But they were not "welcomed into the nation," that had conquered their land, ostensibly on their behalf to give them, "Arab rule by Arabs," but were instead denied citizenship, and even the bare economic and political rights offered by those states.

Why was this done? To keep the conflict alive. "You can have citizenship and be allowed to leave the military camps when you help us destroy Israel and not before."

This initial move by the Egypt in turn made it impossible for them to ever assimilate their Palestinians. Where as Israel has gotten on ok with a third of its citizens being "Israeli Arabs," and Jordan did eventually extend rights to their Palestinians, and so in many ways subsume that identity into the "Jordanian" one, Egypt never made this opening. By 1973 the PLO was its own political entity and Palestinian its own ethnicity and Egypt, being fragile in the way of autocracies, particularly poor ones who haven't provided their citizens with economic development, no longer felt it could risk having the Palestinians in Egypt.

Egypt did not want Gaza back after 1967, but it did at least consider a "land for people trade," whereby Israel would give them land they DID want in exchange for taking Palestinians. They did not ultimately accept this.

Egypt's position on not letting Gazans into Egypt is not about their ability to house refugees. They had the same attitude when they controlled Gaza; they do not want outsiders with an independent power base who could challenge the state. And this is even more true today after Hamas has given support to insurgents within Egypt.

This is more or less why Palestinians have been thrown out of many Arab countries, time and time again, at times in the hundreds of thousands (ethnic cleansing?). In part it has been because of the PLOs machinations in their host countries' affairs, at times openly challenging and supporting or engaging in war against the host countries, at times it has been simple ethnic reprisals. Kuwait didn't expell 400,000+ Palestinians because most were involved in "subverting," the state, but simply because the PLO had sided with Saddam Hussein and they wanted collective retribution. This despite the fact that Iraqi forces also dispossessed Palestinians and brutalized them during their invasion.

This is how some Israelis support a "no Palestine" solution. The claim is that the relevant grouping is "Arabs" or "Levantine Arabs," and that they indeed do have not only one state but many. "So why wouldn't/won't the Arabs accept 'their own people.'"

"850,00 Palestinians lost their homes in 1948 and over the next few years 950,000 Jews lost their property and were driven out of the Arab states. An unfortunate trade."

But this is hardly a morally supportable argument for Israel. That the Arab regimes in the region tend to act atrocious even to their own nationals is fairly well known. Israel pointing to their neighbors and saying "if you weren't so messed up you'd have taken these people," doesn't change the fact that their neighbors didn't take the people and that Israel is now responsible for the conflict they find themselves in.

And this is the crux, what it all comes down to it. In 1967 Israel didn't think it could make the Palestinians in the WB and Gaza citizens they way they had done with the Israeli Arabs because there was already too much bad blood at that point and because it would lead to an Arab majority, or near majority in the "Jewish state." Seeing this problem, they should have withdrawn from the occupied territories.

Granted, I will allow that, had Israel simply retreated to its 1948 borders soon after the Six Day War, I don't see how that would be at all likely to have put an end to the conflict, but it would not put them in the position of being prison wardens to people they cannot accept.



Indiscriminate use of force ≠ genocide. The US used indiscriminate force against cities in WWII, but I've never seen any good case that it had any intention of commiting a genocide of either the Japanese or the Germans. The indiscriminate bombing was a means to an end, not the end itself.

There are voices in Israel that essentially do advocate genocide, but they aren't the relevant voices for their military strategy and that isn't the policy they've pursued. It's not even clear to me how "indiscriminate" the current attacks are. One would expect the death toll to be massively higher if the goal was "to exterminate the Palestinians."

Having loose rules of engagement is also not genocide. Nor is collective punishment necessarily equivalent with genocide. 9/11 for instance, was indiscriminate and collective in its aims (the planners estimated they would kill 250,000 people by having the buildings topple on impact), but it was not genocide. Nor is "attacking an enemy that has fled into a dense urban area in that area without (much) regard for collateral damage," genocide. When the US and UK destroyed a great deal of all the structures in Fallujah during the Second Siege they were not engaged in genocide. Nor was Russia engaged in genocide when it began shelling residential areas to punish resistance in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Even localized massacres are not genocide; Giap wasn't trying to genocide the South Vietnamese but things like Hue did happen.

That doesn't mean those things are justifiable or acceptable. There are things that militaries can do that are both unjustifiable and not genocide.

I don't think there is currently enough evidence to know how loose Israel has gotten with its targeting, except that it clearly isn't trying to kill as many civilians as possible. It is obviously trying to inflict collective punishment on the Strip in the short term as part of its efforts to destroy Hamas and support for Hamas.

Israel can be justified in attempting to destroy Hamas and not justified in everything they do to accomplish this. In general, I would say Israel has tended to be good about how it wages its wars but not how it settles things afterwards, which is often more important to lasting peace.

Is this control over desire or just being at the mercy of one desire over another? Since you mentioned Nietzsche, I thought I’d quote him on the issue of will and desire:

It's control over desire (as a whole) to the extent that a person is deciding as a harmonized unity. Nietzsche isn't wrong to point out the problem of one desire simply acting as a tyrant over others, although he fails to extend the nature of this problem to social relations between people far enough IMO. He sees clearly how a person, as a whole, isn't free if one desire simply lords over the others like a tyrant, but then fails to see how the human tyrant becomes unfree through his tyranny in the interpersonal sphere, how power and the role of Lord becomes a trap.

Even if we accept Nietzsche's description of the will as a "congress of souls," we can still suppose that some congresses are more harmonious than others. This is the difference between the person who does a chore they don't like because they have been forced to, because they do not want to be punished, or because they do not want to hurt the feelings of another, versus the person who does a chore they don't like because they have decided that it must be done and is "better," in a holistic sense. This second person is acting out of a positive duty thay they desire as part of their identity. This is the fire fighter who fears a burning building as much as anyone, but who wants to rush in on another level, because he wants his identity to include his duty.

Nietzsche famously described the ascetic saint as simply a person who has turned their will to dominate inwards, becoming a tyrant against the other elements of their own will. But I never got the sense that Nietzsche had put much effort into understanding the tradition he is critiquing here. Rather he attacks a sort of folk understanding of asceticism. But there is a difference between conquering and harmonizing, between a Washington and a Stalin.

The difference between mere control and harmonization is well expressed at the interpersonal level in Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel shows how institutions objectify morality by causing people's preferences to "synch up." We come to see our own benefit in others' benefit as we develop and go outside ourselves. Likewise we can see how much personal development also requires that we come to see the satisfaction of desires within in a similar way, holistically.

There is no struggle of reason against the drives; what we call “reason” is nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions,” a certain ordering of the drives.

I think Nietzsche is just wrong here. His analysis has value in that it looks at the ways in which the "will" is not unified. But it fails to look at the ways in which it is unified, the ways in n which desires feed into one another, emerge from others, combine, are shaped by experience, etc. while simultaneously taking the intellect to be more unified. This is a sort of atomistic view that I don't think it warranted by experience or the insights of cognitive science. Thought is process not a collection of objects. In it we have strong emergence, circular influence, and complexity in play. Thinking in terms of atomistic "desires to x," that are either prioritized or not is simply failing to recognize the ways in which there is unity and the extent to which there can be more or less unity.

Hegel makes a similar critique against such a definition freedom as "the proper ranking of drives and desires and application of the intellect to them." However, when he does this in PR there is more acknowledgement of the organic nature of the will and the inseparability of intellect.

What writers like Deleuze and Focault get from Nietzsche is the fundamentally social nature of drives. Because our drives are inextricably bound up within a larger community, the essential question for them is not how to harmonize individual drives to achieve social ethical norms, but how we ever manage to resist those normative chains that bind us

Exactly. But it's a mistake to have this insight and then think of freedom primarily in terms of overcoming social pressure. To do this is to ignore that man is a social animal and has social desires, to make social desires a slave to a conception of freedom that is focusing too much on "freedom from constraint," and not enough on "being able to do what one wills."

The takeaway I see here is that freedom necessarily must include a social dimension (Hegel, Honneth, etc.)

And it must include a transcendent element ala Plato, Hegel, Wallace, etc., because freedom means, in part, not to be determined by the external. But if we view society as external to ourselves, defining ourselves in terms of "what is not us," we will invariably see ourselves as unfree due to how we must be limited by "those who are outside ourselves."

Yet, clearly people can come to identify with others as an extension of themselves, the most obvious example being the family, our first example in life of "going beyond ourselves." The point is not that society is already an organic whole —as Paul says of the Church, "one body" — but that it must become so for freedom to be fully realized.

So freedom includes a sort of "being at home in the world," and being "at one with it," whereas Nietzsche ultimately seems constrained by his atomism. There can be a "communion of the Saints," who become one in being part of something higher, more self-determining, but we cannot have a "communion of overmen," because they are kept bound apart by the atomism they assume, and because one's self-determination undermines the others'.

There have barely been any diplomatic conversations between Washington and players in the Middle-East - something that would be unheard of 20 years ago.

But they have been? The media just doesn't focus on them because they are unlikely to mean anything in the current context. The problem is that all the traditional "players" in the Middle East outside of Iran are essentially enemies of Hamas, in some cases quite openly. So what fruit are these overtures supposed to bear?

Second, consider that Hamas has several EU and US prisoners, as well as prisoners from several other countries. I would imagine that rhetoric is what it is because more strident diplomatic support is being held back as a carrot to return the foreign nationals.

I honestly can't see why Hamas would want to keep EU or US nationals given the two fund like 7% of Gaza's GDP and aid payments are crucial to them. It's even less apparent why they would want to hold Russian and Chinese nationals. Unless, of course, you've already treated them so poorly that you don't want word getting out. But it might speak to a broader lack of discipline and coordination that the nationals you'd expect to be released haven't been.

Do what they must, but the honorable thing to do would be to fight street by street without heavy weapons and avoid deaths and injuries. Can the best trained army in the world do this, or are they not interested any more?

This is simply based on false assumptions. People arguing against a ground invasion are doing so specifically because a ground invasion will almost certainly mean far more civilian death. In no way would "street by street fighting," result in less damage. This has historically never been the case.

A ground fight requires much looser ROE and significantly increases the risk of a loss of discipline and massacres.

A drone operator can be far more dispassionate in picking targets. They aren't at risk. There is time for the JAG team or its equivalent to vet a strike, something that is done. You have time to select appropriate munitions, lower payloads for smaller targets or for greater risks of collateral damage.

But if you're actively being shot at? If the choice is to let mortars wipe out a squad or to fire shells into an urban area to suppress the fire? You can't just decide "the risk is to civilians is too big," if people are firing anti-tank weapons at you from a building. You're going to die unless you level the thing with a main gun round.

You're also going to get ambushes, people pretending to be civilians and attacking, all the stuff that erodes discipline and makes eroding discipline more likely.

Street by street fighting means a much higher volume of fire in the area, less time to make decisions, more barriers to flows of civilians, less access to areas by rescue and medical teams, etc.

The fact is that even massive scale strategic bombing has tended to produce less fatalities than urban battles.

Either Warsaw uprising is closer to the current situation militarily. I thought the urban bombing campaigns of WWII were more interesting in that the justification of them in terms of the balance of power eroded later in the war. Warsaw is less interesting from a moral perspective in that everyone agrees that the Nazis were wrong, and the Soviets as well. It's even more obviously that the Soviets invading Poland to aid Hitler's conquest was strategically idiotic in retrospect, so there isn't even a shred of pragmatic justification.

But the Jews didn't end up in Palestine by invading to "defend the oppressed Jews there," after a false flag attack on a radio station (how Hitler started his war). They ended up there in a mix of ways, at first through state supported migration, as the Ottomans were happy to have people move into what was a depopulated economic backwater. And the people that came were largely refugees from either genocidal pogroms or at least official state suppression.

Conflict only began later when the migrant population hit a critical mass. And in some ways the opposition began in quite self-serving ways that we certainly wouldn't accept in the context of say, Mexicans moving to the US. E.g.,

- Demands from Arabs that other, unrelated Arabs not be allowed to sell their own property to Jews because "I don't want those people in my neighborhood," but also because "Jews are bidding up the price and it should be sold at a lower price to me." Imagine this argument re San Diego housing.

-Demands that property sold to Jews be returned to Arabs, without the sale price even being returned, after the land had been significantly improved through cultivation.

-Demands that the government reflect the religious confession of the original majority in all cases and not give consideration to the new arrivals as equal citizens.

-Demands that no more people of the out group be allowed to move into the area regardless of refugee status.

But these demands emerged slowly at first. Later waves of arrivals came because of the Holocaust and later because the Arabs expelled Jews from throughout the Middle East.

Point being, this is qualitatively different from Hitler's invasion and there was no Jewish action on par with the Germans to exterminate the Arab population so that they could settle the lands. Indeed, they accepted a peace agreement that would leave them with far less land than they ended up with, with Jewish ethnic cleansing efforts largely occuring during the 1948 war, at the same time that Arab ethnic cleansing efforts (some actually quite successful) were trying to push Jews out of other areas. This is more similar to the partition of India than Hitler's invasion of Poland. That's where the Warsaw analogy falls apart, "how the Germans got control of Warsaw."

So the interesting part would be that it seems that Israel was far more justified in defending itself "to the best of its abilities," in 1948 than in 2023. And this is because the balance of military power has shifted decisively. But the relation to WWII is if the shift necessities then taking far more risks. Does the winning side in a war have an obligation to pursue different defense strategies as it starts winning?

I'm not claiming the two are perfectly analogous. A key difference is timing. WWII in Europe lasted just half a decade. The Japanese leadership during the US bombings was the same leadership that encouraged genocide in China, not one from 70 years later.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, all the original participants are long dead, even those from 1948 are dead, and half those in Gaza were born shortly before or after the economic blockade went up. I do think that changes things because Israel increasingly becomes responsible for the attitudes and governance in the areas they occupy through how they have occupied them. And Israel is responsible for Hamas to the extent they at times helped Hamas' cause in their early days, hoping to use them as a way to destabilize the PLO.

But from the Israeli perspective, since "total victory, we will genocide you out of existence as soon as God gives you over into our hands," has remained the unconditional terms of the conflict for some parties, it also seems like there is justification for destroying that leadership since it's unclear how peace can possibly come when they rule through force and are accountable to virtually no one save Iran.

Just for an example, Hamas moving their bases out of urban areas to reduce the threat to civilians was a campaign promise in the one election they allowed. It was, in fact, something people weren't happy about. Hamas won a plurality of the vote, not even a majority, then canceled elections indefinitely and purged all opposition. And in this, the argument that "they need to be removed despite the cost," is one that comes closer to the Allied position re unconditional surrender.

It's also similar in that no strong opposition movement grew up in Germany or Japan during WWII, even as the costs of the war mounted and it became increasingly obvious that they would lose. Similarly, while discontent with Hamas obviously exists, it also doesn't seem like they are likely to lose their grasp on power without having external losses inflicted on them.

And I'd argue that they are similar in questions about "what comes after?" The treaties of WWI laid the seeds of WWII. The blockade if Gaza and terms of peace with Egypt laid the seeds of this war in Israel. Will Israel strike a path more similar to the US after WWII re Germany and Japan? This required a huge investment, but it did work. And it's not like the Japanese hated the Americans any less. Being close allies today's owes to the successful reconstruction and efforts on both sides for lasting peace. But of course, US investment was heavily motivated by the threat of the Soviets, and no similar threat exists for Israel (or Palestine, it helped that West Germany and Japan feared Soviet invasion more than US occupation).

Less than you'd think. Germany almost collapsed into a war ending rout in 1944 but Western logistics just weren't quite good enough to keep the momentum going. But even as the bombing campaigns picked up it was obvious that Germany couldn't win, only delay the inevitable.

The case against the US destruction of Japanese cities is even better. The US lost hardly any bombers while demolishing hundreds of thousands of buildings and killing as many people.

But could it be justified by the higher cost of a ground invasion of Japan, maybe? That said, the comparable alternative would be to offer a conditional peace, and given what Japan had done and was likely to do again in the future, it's hard to make the case for this either.

So they're more similar than they look at first glance because the Axis was militarily defeated a long time before their cities stopped being destroyed wholesale, largely by the United States and to a lesser extent by the UK.

I'm not even saying the air war wasn't justified, although parts obviously were not. Japan likely could have been forced to terms by a full naval blockade (still forcing it to starve) rather than the incredibly destructive attacks.

In a sense, yes. But in 1948 the Israelis were very effective at ethnically cleansing the territories they annexed (Nakba). In 1967 they evidently weren't.

Yes and no. Yes, they absolutely tried to get Palestinians to flee, ethnic cleansing, but no in that a large part of the Israeli citizenry has always been Palestinian Arabs who didn't leave. That Israel granted them full citizenship and voting rights was one of the things most initially to their credit, and helped create much better prospects for peace (imagine how batshit the government would be without these voters?). But that said, that side of this has clearly soured over time, especially with the unprecedented random violence and sectarian riots lately. I can't imagine we'd be closer to peace without the effects of the Israeli Arabs on the government though, so it's really been to Israel's benefit as a state that they weren't all chased off.

Yes, generally measured from 1993-1999. And they were fairly obviously aimed at sabotaging the process. Arguably, one of the reasons Arafat rejected an opening offer that included statehood was because he feared losing control over his own side with the escalating violence, although people also chalk it up to his own ideas about his "revolutionary soldier image."

It did not help that Kuwait deported their entire Palestinian population, a not insignificant 400,000+ in the early 90s, which ratcheted up internal tensions. And then Qaddafi expelled all of Libya's Palestinians because he was upset over Oslo, asking other Arab states, where 3.5 million Palestinians lived, to follow his example and make Palestinians "camp out in the wilderness."

With allies like that...

And of course, just a generation earlier the same states had expelled and expropriated their million or so Jewish residents. So maybe Palestinians and Israeli's can both agree their neighbors are awful, given both have been expelled with "ah yes, but leave your possessions, we'll be taking those."

I bring it up because the timing of both expulsions threw gas on the fire for negotiations. In the latter, be destabilizing internal Palestinian politics, the first instance because the Jewish refugees getting expelled by the Arabs gave Israel an argument for not returning property. And the descendants of the Arab Jews ended up being far more reliable far right wing voters in Israel, so it continues to have effects.

Gaza has been under a blockade for over 15 years, and the Israelis have in other ways actively tried to prevent Gaza from developing.

Hamas didn't contribute to the prosperity of Gaza either, clearly. But there's two sides to the story.

Right, but that didn't happen in a bubble either, or without Hamas's very direct involvement. Development used to happen across the boundaries of Gaza. Through 1990, both the WB and Gaza tended to have unemployment rates around 4-5%. Since the 90s they have been more like 26-33%, consistently. Between 1/5th and 1/4th of the Gaza workforce used to go to Israel every single day for work. And at that time both Gaza and the WB were wealthier than many surrounding neighbors. The closure of crossings, particularly for Gaza, crashed the economy, causing it to contract by 30-40% during a population boom.

But that wasn't a decision that came out of nowhere. It was the result of an, in retrospect, obviously counter productive terror campaign that in hindsight, seems to have been more about jockeying for power within Palestine than concrete ideas of how this would make Palestine better off or stronger.

I'd argue that the closing off of the Occupied Territories were a mistake for Israel and the attacks that motivated them a mistake for the fragmented Palestinian leadership. But more cynically, you could argue that allowing Egypt to take the Sinai back without also making them take Gaza back was a bigger mistake.

But we can't say Hamas and their predecessors only act the way they do because of the economic blockade because their actions precipitated, fairly predictably, that blockade. And the pressure for Egypt came from actions that similarly could have been predicted to anger the Egyptians.

The key representatives of objective idealism I can think of are Hegel and Plato. Both vary from one another, but both accept that rocks, trees, chairs, etc. are plenty real in some sense. They are "mind-independent" in terms of not being causally generated by minds and their properties are not created by the mind either.

However, both have an understanding of entities as being more or less real. Things are more real when they are more self-determining and more necessary, less contingent on things outside themselves for being. So, a rock, is far less real than the idea of a triangle because an individual rock is essentially a bundle of effects. A rock isn't self generating or rationally necessary in any sense. Thus, we get an idea of a higher level of reality where ideas, which are more self-determining and necessary exist "above" individual instances of objects.

This view rejects a mechanistic view of reality. If anything, the "view of science" as a view that uses logical principles, self-determining reason, and active self-discovery, and which progresses dialectically, is more real than what that view purports itself to "be about." Which is why for both, the type of project that science is, a "going beyond of the given," is of paramount importance, even if the metaphysical claims attached to the project are denigrated.

Yeah, but the US can't do much about Iron Dome, that's the Tamir. The US co-production with Iron Dome is on Arrow 3, which is for long range missiles. The US jumped on because its need to to deal with Chinese ACBMs and to support the general anti-IRBM, ICMB, SLBM umbrella its built for itself. From what I understand, the US couldn't really support Israeli AD without deploying its own hardware there (obviously it could scramble fighters for some threats, but not the type that actually exist now).

The US has two SkyHunter batteries that are (maybe) compatible, since they are based on the Tamir, but they wouldn't be on a forward deployed carrier, so that can't be the impetus for that move. IDK if they even work together because that was a Raytheon - Rafael project and has a different "brand name." But sometimes they just name stuff differently under license, "Trophy" APS is called something different in Israel and is an Israeli system now used on the new M1 tank variant.

But rocket fire has trailed off substantially, including a 13 hour gap without any fire. Which might be:

1. Hamas trying to signal desire for a truce (I really don't think they expected their attack to be near as successful as it was or what it would mean. With a competent defense, you would have expected many of those parties to be turned back in short fire fights).

2. Hamas is unable to fire as many missiles because of the extent of the bombardment as a whole, i.e. wide spread destruction making logistics impossible.

3. Israel is being very effective in destroying launch sites, hitting Hamas targets, and destroying munitions storage.

Or some combination of the three, but we can hope less of 2.

The only good news I've seen is that Netanyahu and the far-right are getting blamed and are tanking in the polls such that they will be absolutely crushed if an election is held before a reversal. Makes sense to me. Much of the attack was not remotely sophisticated. The para-gliders could have been shredded if just a handful of people were on watch with GPMGs. It's clear that the party that campaigned on strength left the border incredibly weak, in part because of infighting over their most prominent member's corruption.

That's an interesting comparison because the Axis' military situation was about as hopeless as Hamas' well before 1945, before the strategic bombing campaigns even hit their stride really.

But there is a whole complex set of issues to unpack there. I can see though how the simple argument of "Israel has become much stronger relative to their opponent since 1948 and so they must make the concessions," does wear thin in ways here. Germany was ruined in 1945, at the mercy of Soviet and Western armies, and yet we wouldn't say they should have ceded ground back to Hitler at that point on those grounds alone.

Similarly, there is the question of: "do you immediately pull all aid from Stalin as soon as it is apparent that the Nazis won't win?" Another similar question relative to justification for intervention vis-á-vis timing.

How you answer likely depends on if you see the relevant conflict begining in 1948 or even prior, or last week, or when Hamas won a slight plurality of the vote, then axed any competition and made themselves masters of Gaza?

I think it gets to the crucial reflexive element re "freedom." A "full" freedom requires that we have control over our desires. This is where Frankfurt's distinction between first order desires "I want to x" and second order desires "I desire that I should want to x," is key. We can also have negative second order desires, i.e., "I want to not desire x," e.g., when a drug addict wants to be free from the desire of their addiction.

Then you point to the way in which desire leads to injustice. I think there is a connection, and it is one Nietzsche profoundly misses (or rather refuses to address). If we have people with reflexive and negative freedom, people who have self control, means, and freedom from constraint, they might still desire to do things that deprive others of their freedom. What is missing in Nietzsche but present in Hegel, Honneth, etc. is a conception of "social freedom," as the ways in which desires are harmonized such that they don't conflict. This requires that we want to promote others freedom, and one reason we should want this is that it shall make us more free (see Hegel's Lord-Bondsman dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit or Saint Augustine's critique of Rome as a "commonwealth" in the City of God)

So, to bring in a very influential quote on the subject:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin...

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Saint Paul of Tarsus - Epistle to the Romans

And I think Paul's larger theory of freedom is actually very close to the versions of Plato and Hegel we find in Robert Wallace's quite secular Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present. Because the idea is that we are not free when we are determined by that which is outside of ourselves. We end up being mere cause, determined by "that which comes before." To borrow from Saint Bonaventure, "effects are [mere] signs of their causes."

In the Elements of Philosophy of Right Hegel rejects the idea of freedom simply being the proper prioritization of the passions and ranking of actions, which I think you see in Aristotle and Epicurus to some extent. This is at best a partial freedom because it is still always going to be determined from without to a great extent.

Now above, Paul talks of being "dead in sin," but this is not a biological death. It's a death of personhood that is restored by Christ, the Logos. In a more symbolic reading of how the Logos quells sin and "casts out the Legion within," we approach the more rationalist formulation in Hegel, although we lose something as well.

I've read a lot of Hegel and I think Wallace is spot on in many respects. The idea is that we become free by going "inwards and upwards" ala Saint Augustine is stronger in Plato though. There is a reaching beyond proximate causes that make us their effects, towards self-determination. And to the extent that we transcend our boundaries, reaching out in rationality and dissolving love, we are free.

But then descriptions of Hegel or Plato as pantheists are completely wrong, as are descriptions of them as "anthrotheists." The point is that we are only deified to the extent we are self-determining, free, and we are only free to the extent we transcend, and we only transcend to the extent that we are intellectually determined by rationality and emotionally determined by an open love.

And this seems actually closer to more orthodox religion, Rumi, Saint Paul, etc. than many forms of "philosophical religion." It's the same sort of transcendent attitude you see in "God is love," "God is in us," "living through the will of God," "Christ living in us/us living in Christ," which is smattered across Saint John, Saint Paul, and even to a degree Saint Peter's writing.

Absolute transcendence is crucial for the fullest sort of freedom because to have something that is outside one's self is crucially to be defined by that thing. But if one transcends all boundaries then there can be full self-determination. And I think you see a bit of this intuition in Shankara too.

If the stocks of missiles, guided munitions and overall ammo supply gets low, armies you them less frequently. If they are plentiful, then you can use them far often and not only when the most urgent need arises.

Sure, but Israel is at risk of running low on PGMs in the short turn, not "all munitions." They would run low on dumb munitions only after firing 60 years of surplus into a heavily urbanized area where the population has nowhere to flee from. You see the problem, right?

By the time they have to start rationing shells Gaza could be destroyed. Second, in Ukraine the front line could be evacuated. What do you think would have happened to civilians in Bakhmut if they had been there as Wagner human waves rolled down the street? This is why everyone agrees that a ground invasion will produce more civilian deaths.

Uh, I'm really not sure about that, apart from weapon systems that can hit Iran itself. Israel isn't facing a conventional enemy, hence it's not fighting a conventional war.

And the guided munitions used in either case are radically different?

JDAMs aren't long range. Hellfires aren't long range. The drones and fighters they are used with are long ranged. The weapons being used in Gaza are exactly the sort of weapons that would be used to fight Iran in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, or Iran itself and are being deployed off the same platforms. You don't need special "long ranged weapons," for your strike aircraft.

Hence the wars against Egypt and Syria were actually quick with the Arab side being the one that had gone through it's ammo and vulnerable to Israel marching to the Capital, basically.

Egypt and Syria got more munitions and hardware in 1973 than Israel did through Nickel Grass. The problem wasn't that the Soviets weren't resupplying them, they even escalated to nuclear threats to bat for the Arabs, the problem was that the Syrians kept lying to the Egyptians about their successes and forced them to abandon their modest, quite successful attack for "push them into the sea," antics where they left their SAM umbrella and chaotically tried to advance into defenses. The Arab offensive didn't collapse because they ran out of PGMs, which they had virtually none of anyhow, or because they ran out of munitions more generally, but because poor strategy and leadership led to a rout once the tide turned. Essentially, the problems documented in De Atkine's influential "Why Arabs Lose Wars," which have more to do with training, culture, trust, NCO structure, centralization, etc.

Nah, that's much more true of the early Empire. After Trajan the boundaries don't really expand, only shrink, but that's 359 years before the Western Empire is generally accepted to have bought it, 1,336 years before the Eastern Empire was destroyed.

The Romans very much shifted from external wars of conquest to endless civil wars to control the current boundaries. They continued to skirmish with Parthia in that period, but aside from that? After the Diaspora they also had a long period where Germans were only a minor issue as well, and they would be an issue as migrants, conquers, and looters, not as peoples to be conquered.

As you can see the boundaries are pretty much set by 117 AD. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F3ns316ykoei51.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D68175b728ff078a772e698d2be807caca412e146

When it was united under Ottoman rule. So see, Erdogan deserves a Nobel peace prize!

Although, I would point out that it was peaceful for longer under Roman rule, so Berlusconi probably is owed one too for his efforts to bring the old Caligula spirit back to Italy. (And yes, even the Ceasars could admit that "mistakes were made," in Roman-Jewish relations, but there were some long stretches of peace aside from the catastrophic wars).

If I'd say Jews are oppressing Palestinians or say they're complicit in the murders of innocents then I'm an anti-semite (even though Israel defines itself as the nation-state for Jews but whatever). So critics have to constantly tiptoe around making sure they're nuanced.

Wouldn't the correct solution be to be nuanced in both directions?

"We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law," was how Abbas put it on Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

But, to your point, it is worth pointing out that the median Israeli voter is better represented by their state than your median inhabitant of Gaza likely is by Hamas. Hamas isn't exactly known for their "please, let's have a debate, feel free to oust us and let Fatah or some new group rule Gaza if you no longer want us here," style. So, in that sense it's even worse to conflate Hamas/Gazans. This is especially true for their military operations, which they carry out in secret, divorced from any form of public discourse.

Israel needs more PGMs because PGMs are expensive and no one has enough for any sort of sustained warfare. This was made obvious during Odyssey Dawn, etc. where the whole of NATO was running out of PGMs not that long into a (relatively) small air campaign in Libya. Even your cheapest base model Excalibur 155mm shell is $70,000 a piece, and those are only so "precision guided." They have a much better safety profile (for civilians and your own forces obviously, not for the targets), but you're still talking pretty wide variance in where you can expect the shell to land.

Missiles that are sure to get on target tend to be much more expensive and have to be used with platforms that are intrinsically expensive to utilize (i.e. aircraft). The safer they are to use in urban areas, the smaller their effective radius tends to be. So, something like the R9X Hellfire variant, which deploys spinning blades instead of explosives and thus has a very targeted lethal radius is great if you don't have many targets and they don't know you're coming and so aren't hiding under cover. But otherwise, they lose effectiveness.

The case for giving Israel PGMs at this point would be:
1. To deter Iran. The idea is that, if Iran thinks Israel isn't being resupplied, they might think they are low on munitions and decide now is a "window of vulnerability." This might in turn incentivize them to attack if they think it's likely they'll fight at some point, since it's better to fight when your opponent is weak than when they are strong. And to the degree that this calculus holds, and that it would not be good for a wider war to start, this makes a certain type of sense.

2. Using PGMs is safer for civilians. More accurate munitions let you use less powerful munitions. Most countries don't use 300lb 203mm shells any more because artillery has gotten more accurate and a 90lb 155mm shell will do. But obviously, when it comes to unintended targets, larger shells have a bigger blast radius and are more likely to hit civilians or damage civilian infrastructure. This problem simply scales up with we compare relatively small payload guided missiles that can hit a given window with 1,000lb dumb bombs used to level the entire building.

3. PGMs are more effective at hitting the intended target. The flip side of hitting unintended targets less is hitting the intended targets more. And if you can hit targets more effectively from the air you have less incentive to invade on the ground. And since pretty much everyone agrees that a ground invasion will produce significantly more civilian deaths, giving PGMs might be justified to the extent that it stops a ground invasion or makes it more contained.

4. If you're providing arms to a country you have some degree of leverage in that you can say "don't do x or we cut the sales/aid."

You had the same factors in play with US sales to the Saudi's vis-a-vis Yemen. The Saudis were in the war and weren't likely to leave if the US backed out of sales. So to the extent that they'd just use Chinese rockets and Russian dumb bombs, not selling them weapons wouldn't have made things better.

But, of course, the key question at play here is "would the country getting the weapons actually still pursue the war, and pursue it as long and as widely without the sales? And if not, then aren't the sales making things worse even if they do make civilian deaths less likely in local instances?"

Those are very important questions, but also maddeningly hard to answer.

I would say this probably was more applicable to the Saudi situation, in that I think they would have quit Yemen earlier if they had more losses and less success due to not receiving the same weapons systems.

But Israel is probably going to attack to try to heavily damage or destroy Hamas no matter what the US offers in the short term. If that's true, then it doesn't really do Palestinians any good for them to be trying to accomplish that by raining down old dumb fire artillery shells except in the jaded sense of: "but maybe if they kill enough civilians they otherwise could have avoided killing if the IDF had more accurate weapons the world/Arabs will unite to turn on Israel." Given the number of atrocities we've seen in the world, and in that same region, and given how little has generally been done about it, this seems like a pretty long shot thing to hope for, a sort of nihilistic millenarianism where somehow its better if more, less accurate, higher payload weapons go flying into an urban area because some unlikely cascade of geopolitical shifts might happen.

The best justification for US sales/aid to Israel would obviously be if they could somehow convince Israel not to do a ground invasion in exchange, or do only a limited one. And who knows? They might not. I have considered that the mobilization could be to force Hamas to mobilize and build fighting positions and give out weapons so that said activity can be spotted from the air and Hamas soldiers targeted that way, but that might be too much to hope for.

Palestinians who immigrate to America say that the Israelis have been abusive on an on-going basis, like collections of Jewish guys beat up Palestinian guys and leave them for dead. None of that ever gets into the headlines and it's been like that for decades.

This sort of thing is in the headlines though, just not top international news. It's how many previous episodes of violence have started. And Israel's previous major crisis involved widespread riots and communal violence between Jews and Israeli Arabs (those left inside Israel's 1948 borders and given citizenship) within Israel, as opposed to within the Occupied Territories. If you look back to the 90s, there was sort of this idea that the Israeli Arabs, a large share of Israel's citizenry, represented a bridge for negotiating peace. But now they just seem to be sucked into the same vortex.

Previous "wars" and skirmishes have been kicked off by various cycles of "lone wolf," attacks, police brutality, mob violence, and lynchings, which increasingly get caught on camera, often being broadcast by the perpetrators.

That's part of what makes this attack unique. It wasn't carried out in response to ratcheting episodes of communal violence the way past attacks have been. Lately, the violence has tended to start with individuals and crowds, and only later do the IDF, Hamas, and Fatah step in. It's been one of the things that makes commentators even less hopeful, because those with power over their respective groups don't even seem to be leading with any strategy in mind, just reacting.

Although, when people said "the ostensible leaders need to take more control," they probably didn't mean "carry out a bunch of mass shootings with no larger goal," or "invade Gaza just to be doing something."



Agreed. I find it hard to see the justification of these attacks precisely because they don't seem aimed at any goals and seem unlikely to advance any legitimate goals.

People seem unable to decouple "a party is justified in resisting x group through whatever means necessary," and "a party is justified when they engage in violence that is unnecessary and counter productive for their own cause." If you're going to shoot up a peace concert, you should have a justification that relies on how that helps Gaza or larger goals, not "violence can be justified, so all violence is justified."

For example, when Hamas took control of Gaza they purged all resistance to their rule in essentially a civil war. And they continue to ensure their domination. Is it justified for Hamas to kill Palestinians? Maybe. In times of war, discipline needs to be enforced. But just become some infighting might be justified we obviously wouldn't say that Hamas would be justified in carrying out random mass shootings within Gaza because this would simply hurt their own cause, erasing any justification. But it seems to me that the same sort of thing is in play here.

If we were in 1941 the "whatever Hamas does is justified," position would be the equivalent with saying "how can you criticize Stalin's "no step back," policy, refusal to evacuate citizens from sieges, absolutely atrocious leadership, etc., look at all the evils the Nazis have done. Criticizing Stalin is tantamount to supporting the Nazis."

But it doesn't seem to me that, just because Stalin was justified in some of the cruel acts he took to win the war against Hitler, that he was justified in all of them. Many of his choices led, quite predictably, to millions more dead and wounded Russians than would have been the case with competent leadership. And his leadership showed a complete disregard for the well being of those he was ostensibly justified in acting to protect.

And that seems to be the core disagreement. It also seems to suggest that if living conditions in Israel were as poor as Gaza, if both sides had inflicted similar costs on each other, then both sides would be justified in pushing towards some mutual genocide, and that doesn't seem to be a good conclusion to reach.

Further, to the extent that this attack was done at the behest of Iran, with the goal of halting the tacit Israeli-Saudi alliance from being formalized, it seems unjustifiable. We can't know the thinking of those involved and we probably won't have good evidence for a long time. But if a major part of the calculus was the benefit of the benefactor of elite members of Hamas at the obvious expense of your average Gazan, with the goal of the operation focused on securing broader Iranian goals in the region, that simply seems atrocious. The height of cynicism in Iran's aid for its "allies."

Right, if they wanted to kill a bunch of people they could lob artillery shells with impunity and do that from saftey. But there is a recognition that this wouldn't further their cause and isn't the right thing to do in any event (my cynical view of the Israeli leadership is that the former is much more relevant here).

The siege will be justified by the argument that they can't very well allow weapons to flow in during a battle. But it's also likely intended as a form of collective punishment with psychological aims. "Look, Hamas had 20 years, and this is where they have you, starving and hiding." They'll truck food in to avoid criticism and because it's a psychological attack on Hamas as well. "They provoked us, but they can't even feed you." Plus, humanitarian corridors and food trucks coming under attack by Hamas is another propaganda win if it happens.

I'm skeptical of their ability to actually remove Hamas during a siege though, but if they are able to dominate enough of the city, forcing Hamas to "blend in" without offering heavy resistance over wide areas, that's another blow to their legitimacy. It says they exist less as the army and government they want to be seen as.

I would imagine the calculation is that, if they can inflict these psychological losses on Hamas and kill enough of their membership, it might collapse. Which, if that's the strategy, the only good thing is that it militates against rules of engagement that are too loose. Whether the angry people on the ground follow along with the strategy is also a different story.

I can't think up any other goals for a large ground invasion otherwise, aside from being seen to "do something." But they have a professional military so I like to think they've had something on the drawing board more coherent.

I would point with ↪Wayfarer to Descartes, as I think that distinction is what underlies the "objective domain" cited by the OP.

Right, and this definition of objective is what I most took issue with in my original response. I think it's lumping multiple ideas together that are better separated.

So when <talking about> the mind knowing mind-independent reality as it is in itself, 'mind-independent reality' designates things like boulders, trees, mountains, walls, paint, etc. It doesn't really matter if the distinction is artificial, so long as an appreciable number of designata are understood by the term, and able to be spoken about. I don't see that the thread has foundered on this distinction in any way. It seems like everyone knows what is being spoken about. To be precise, though, the most obvious and most primary complement would be private, mind-generated realities, such as thoughts, opinions, Descartes' recognition that he is a thinking thing, etc.

It seems fine as a pragmatic distinction to me as well. Like I said, I think such a distinction is fairly widely recognized. What I was asking was: is there a definition of mind independence that goes beyond merely a rejection of subjective idealism-- i.e. a definition that can challenge objective idealism --- while remaining monist, coherent, and consistent?

Personally, I'm not aware of such a definition that avoids falling into dualism. But if there isn't such a definition, then it's unclear to me exactly what objective idealists are arguing against or what their critics are arguing for.

As you point out, in obvious ways, some entities seem mind independent (rocks versus the mental image of a rock). In other obvious ways, nothing we know is mind independent (trivially true). In general, neither objective idealism nor its physicalist converse challenge these intuitive distinctions, which leads me to question what sort of definition would put what is at stake into clear terms? "Objectivity" here is, IMO, a red herring, neither here nor there, since it is best defined in terms of perspective and subjectivity.

Plus, the obvious cases bleed into less obvious ones. Is the United States of America mind-independent? Communism? Species? Color? It seems fairly obvious that these can all be described objectively to some degree. For example, there is an objective fact about the color of stop lights. But color being "mind independent" seems to spark more debate.

See below for more detail on why I think such a definition of mind-independence will be hard to come up with.



That's certainly an important part of the history. But the problem seems to have accelerated first with Kant's notion of the noumena and again with positivist attempts to argue that "objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit." This is then combined with the larger issue of "objectivity" becoming conflated with "noumenal," "mind-independent," or "real."

Per you're earlier response:

I take the term 'objective' at face value, that is, 'inherent in the object'.

This seems to be a definition of objectivity that requires too many metaphysical assumptions for me. That it might be popular just suggests to me that the definition is part of the problem. It seems to me that it requires:

1. That objects are ontologically more fundamental than properties. I.e., that objects are not defined by their properties. If objects were defined by their properties, we'd have to explain on what grounds we can eliminate objects' properties vis-á-vis mind from consideration when it comes to "defining" an object. This is the case if we want to achieve a conception of "mind independence," anyhow. If objects are defined by their properties, then mind independent objects and those interacting with mind would be different objects, a sort of Kantian dualism of the sort Kant made efforts to avoid (arguably unsuccessfully).

2. It seems to require that objects hold the properties they do intrinsically. If objects have the properties they do in virtue of interactions with other objects, then any conception of "mind-independence" would need to explain how interactions with mind are not the type of extrinsic relations/properties that come to define an object. Same problems as #1 re dualism.

3. It seems to require a substance metaphysics since objects need to be more fundamental than their attributes. Objects must be somehow "contained" from the rest of the world, such that we have objects, plural, and not a single object.

I think there are ways around #1 and #2. Metaphysics has the idea of "bare substratum," pure haecceities or "objectness" that properties can attach to. But even advocates of substratum have approached it with reticence, and the need for such a view, to my mind, is simply evidence against objects being ontologically basic in the first place.

Of course, you could take most of the above as simply a good argument against any strong mind-independence, which you seem to be arguing for. That's fair. But there does seem to be an intuitive way in which external objects are mind-independent and I'd like to find a way to define that relation too. Further, if "objectivity" gets thrown into this issue, I feel like it puts us in the less defensible position of having to attack the "objectivity of the world," rather than simply arguing that objectivity is not what is at stake when defining "mind-independence."

If we instead define objectivity in terms of views being more or less objective/subjective, not loading the term up with ontological implications, it seems like we can separate the desire to speak of an achievable "objective view of the world," from whole issue of Kantian-style dualism.

I suspect….I’d like to think…..the extent to which you have a problem with indirect realism, isn’t so great.

For sure. My reticence re indirect realism doesn't equate to support for most formulations of direct realism. It's more a dissatisfaction with current theories of perception. Not that I have a good alternative; it's always easier to critique.

I do, however, tend towards the "direct," in some key ways. Hegel's intuition that, when we come to think differently about something, we change that thing, seems apt to me. The most obvious cases are those involving institutions. As history progresses, we come to view entities differently. "Communism," today doesn't mean what "communism" meant in 1848 when the Manifesto was published. The entity has changed with our conception of it. The very fact of our coming to see the entity in different ways changes the entity. The same is true with "chivalry," "Christianity," "the Second Amendment," etc.

But those entities can obviously also be described objectively in many ways. Hegel's insight is that this sort of change also applies to seemingly more "concrete," entities as well. When we discover more about water, lead, foxes, bacteria, etc. their relations with the world also change because our conception of them is one such relation. Thus, if objects are described relationally, then they change as the history of consciousness unfolds. And in this sense, the relation between perception / thought and entities seems quite direct.

If we say that only our "representations" of entities change throughout cognitive history, I fear we end up in dualism. How does this apply to things like "economic recessions?" Obviously, our representation is part of what that sort of entity is. But then recessions also have global causal powers; they enact a lot of physical effects for mere "representation," effects that can be objectively studied. A hard line between mental objects that change as conceptions of them change and objects-in-themselves who only have their representations changed seems doomed to end up very blurry. Thus, I find it better to talk about concreteness, and just accept that any "representation" is itself a direct relation between mind and the object being represented.

So saying, transcendental theory, as epistemologically grounded as it is, makes explicit there are not two separate things, the real and the representation of the real, a seemingly ontological consideration to be sure, insofar as the representation is not a thing in the same sense as the thing which appears, is. This denominates representation to a speculative procedural constituent, logically concluded or rationally presupposed, rather than empirically given. It also makes the determination as to necessity vs contingency a mitigating condition in itself, the logic being necessary, the empirical, contingent.

And this is, IMO, the presupposition that is the weak link. I don't agree with everything Hegel says about Kant, but I do agree with the position that the presupposition that perceptions are of objects in Kant is the stumbling block therein. This is given dogmatically, and I tend to agree with Hegel that it can't be taken for granted since it essentially begs the question on the issue of representation vis-a-vis reality. The point isn't that thoughts/perceptions cannot be of objects; it's that we can't start with that as a given. Recovering the objects of sensation without assuming them resolves the dualism (if you buy the story Hegel is selling anyhow).

Not sure what you mean by "fed," but you could probably say "yes," in a few ways.

The defeat of ISIS was fed by the Saudis and other Arab states who led the air campaign that defeated ISIS in the field. However, even back when ISIS was seen as a major regional threat, the coalition still kept their efforts and eyes focused on Iran to a great extent. I recall analysts at the time accusing the "coalition against ISIS," of being as much a "coalition against Persians."

But Saudi Arabia is also involved in feeding the jihadi wave that threatens their state to a great degree. Private donors helped the Salafi movement spread and many of the big donors have been from the Gulf. At times the states crack down on it, but they've also tacitly encouraged it too. It's a mix of simply confused policy, owing to different people involved having different beliefs and priorities, Arab states using the radicals as cat's paws against each other, and them using them against Iran, particularly in the context of Iraq.

There is no one group to blame in empowering ISIS. Even Assad was giving them tacit support back when they were AQI, using them as a means to frustrate US interests. Every one involved in the region, the US included, has had blowback from supporting jihadis who later turned on them.

As of late, the Saudis seem to have cracked down on aid to a larger degree. I think this is because of ISIS blowing up.

They absolutely have the ability for a war. They have a fairly large, professional force. But they also lack the conventional forces, artillery, tanks, aircraft, to challenge Israel in any sort of invasion. Their successes have generally been to bait Israel into attacking them on their home turf to fight essentially an insurgent style war, allowing them to hide in urban areas. This works if you're baiting Israel into invading Lebanon but it won't let you push over the border through open spaces where aircraft and artillery will shred your forces.

But if Israel is focused on Gaza they are unlikely to fall for the bait and Hezbollah don't have the element of surprise anymore for a raid where they take prisoners to force Israel to pursue.

What they might do is fire rockets, try to bait out air strikes, and then use Iranian AA that Iran has previously been reticent to spread to Hezbollah/Lebanon to inflict losses on Israel. However, there are a number of problems with this. Giving weapons that could down commercial airliners to a group widely recognized as a terror organization comes with consequences for Iran and unpredictable blowback if they are used poorly (e.g. an Arab commercial flight being shot down by accident). It also comes with risks to their assets in Syria. And Israel has already shown they can fly literally thousands of sorties through Iranian air defenses without losing a pilot.

In terms of will, I think it's there, just not strong enough to want to risk something like a suicidal head on invasion attempt. That's why I would think it stays relatively contained, but I could easily be wrong.

Edit: also, Hez can't afford to bleed strength. ISIS is defeated but Sunni jihadism is alive and well and the attitude from them is still that Hez and Iran represent heretics who need to be cleansed from the Earth.

I recall an essay I read a while back by a Lebanese woman who lived through the civil war. She talked about how attacks simply became a reason onto themselves, the raison d'etre of the armed groups. This seems like a similar situation from what I can tell.

Obviously, wars, at least initially, boost solidarity and support for Hamas, so that could be a goal. But after they are over, if there is simply more death, destruction, and poverty, and their strategy has failed to move the needle, this doesn't necessarily continue.

In this I think it's important to recall that Hamas uses its resources to promote the cheering crowds and rallying moments, while not exactly being a paragon of free speech and openess to criticism. I think at times they fall into the same trap that foreigners do, thinking anger at Israel is equivalent with love of Hamas. The two overlap, particularly during flash points, but even if one supports one's country in a war, that doesn't mean you can't be enraged by an inept command (e.g. conservatives in Russia in 1914-1917.)

I doubt Hamas believes it can defeat the IDF. It is more a point of principle, of not being allowed to be insulted by the government and of telling other Arab countries outside Iran that they still exist.

I don't think any Arab states forgot they exist. Half the reason Gazans have nowhere to go is that they are blockaded by an Arab country. The shift has been that the Palestinians are no longer geopolitically useful for most of the Arab regimes, and the "Israeli boogie man," has lost its luster due to time, other, more relevant conflicts coming to the fore, and the Palestinians many wars with their ostensible allies over the years.

It's not exactly an issue the Arab elite has any reason to bring up. Sure, the cause might still be "popular on the street," to some degree, but loosing wars to Israel wasn't popular, Palestinian violence/subversion wasn't popular when occuring within the surrounding states, and they don't exactly want to relive a history where they forced the Palestinians into squalid camps in a fairly transparent attempt to keep the conflict alive. The whole affair isn't really a unifying issue anymore, particularly for elites now that a history of secret negotiations on exchanging "people for land," has come out, showing the land was always the target fought over, the people the burden they had to be "paid to accept."

And to the extent the attack is done in the way it was, it's made it much easier for those states, states that quite frankly, see Hamas as an enemy, just an enemy popular with the "street," to continue ignoring them.

I don't see a long term strategy here from Hamas. To the extent there is a strategy it seems aimed at Gaza first, unifying support, and the West Bank second, attempting to increase support in their ongoing rivalry with Fatah.

Israeli messaging seems to look towards a perilous strategy: removing Hamas root and branch. The main question is if they can actually achieve this with losses they would find acceptable and if they can do it without civilian losses that make it unacceptable to the Israeli public and the rest of the world. The other question is if what grows back will be any better.

To the latter question, the answer might very well be positive. If disrupted enough Hamas could lose its grip on power. Cheering crowds in the street only tell half the story. There are Palestinians with families to protect, jobs, loves, who voice angst over the fact that an unaccountable leadership plans their strategy in secret, divorced from the populace, and brings shells and bombs raining down while failing to deliver on real wins or governance (or freedom to speak these grievances) That doesn't mean that Israel is at all popular, just that Hamas does have competition for a reason, decades of failure has political consequences even if there is a unifying enemy.

And maybe that might make things better in the long run. If Fatah ran Gaza and didn't face such competition from more radical elements I think it's obvious that we'd be closer to peace and the Israeli right would be weaker (the radicals of each camp feed on one another). Israeli apologists make much of Arafat walking away from a two state solution but the fact is that part of the reason he did so is because he faced mounting internal threats and was losing control over his own party. This has to do with the way Israel itself handled the Intifada though.

The other side of a "better outcome," would be that Netanyahu is discredited and his coalition ousted. If Hamas is gone and new leadership on both sides emerges, maybe something better will come. I just see the odds being bleak. I don't think the IDF can uproot Hamas and I don't think Netanyahu will lose power, and it's hard to see any positive outcome in that case.

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BTW, people seem to have a hard time distinguishing between Hamas being justified in violent resistance and Hamas not being justified in pursuing losing strategies that have made their situation worse over several decades. That the Arab states pivoted away from supporting them has reasons that are internal to Hamas, which doesn't operate in a vacuum. The loss of wider support is a Hamas policy failure more than any Israeli victory. But if your fight is worth shedding blood over then failure in that fight is worth critique. A just cause doesn't make you immune to criticism. Stalin was justified in defending against Hitler, but that didn't make his atrocious strategy and lack of concern for his soldiers and populace justified. And like I said, this is where Israel's assassination of Hamas' leadership is coming back to bite them since it has degraded that strategic thinking.

Your guess is as good as mine. I would hope cooler heads prevail.

I would think it's more likely that it stays contained to Gaza because Iran's only way to move significant material into the theater would be through Iraq and then Syria, and both Syria and Russia have other things to worry about while Iraq has had tensions with Iran lately anyhow. Hezbollah will fire some rockets, but Hezbollah also governs and has domestic goals and seems a lot less likely to jeopardize those for adventurism, especially since the memory of the civil war and occupation has faded.

So to be clear, when I am talking about knowing mind-independent reality, I am talking about knowing things whose existence is distinct and unrelated to mind. Your claim that <If a reality can be known, then it is not mind-independent> is therefore neither here nor there. I don't think anyone in the thread has been conceiving of "mind-independent reality" in this way.

Gotcha. I see what you mean. I agree, most people don't think of "mind independent reality" the way I put it. I brought it up that way though because I'm not sure if "mind independence," can usefully be defined any other way without recourse to dualism.

If the supposition is that "mind independent entities " are those whose existence is not causally dependent on minds interacting with them, then this seems like a type of "mind independence" objective idealists acknowledge as well. There are exceptions, but generally the idealist claim isn't that perceiving or thinking about objects causes them to exist.

Can we have "mind independent existence," in a stronger sense? Maybe. But if it's something like "all the properties and effects of mind independent objects exist without reference to mind," that just seems wrong to me. It would seem to require some sort of implicit dualism where things' interactions with mind, and the properties instantiated in those interactions, are somehow unreal or "less real" properties.

But what is a definition of "mind independent existence," that goes further than "thinking of things doesn't cause their existence," but also accounts for the reality of the fact that all the objects we know about do,trivially, interact with mind?

This, I am stumped on. Generally definitions I am familiar with run along the lines of: "objects have all the properties they have independent of mind. These properties cause all phenomena. We can know about the objects because of their phenomenal effects. However, phenomena have no effect on objects' properties (i.e. their "mind independence")." This reminds me a bit of Neoplatonism's downward causality, only inverted such that Nous is below Psyche and Psyche is determined by and beneath the material world.

My objection is that it seems to me like the influence between the supposedly "mind independent" objects and phenomenal experience is a two way street. E.g., you don't like how your wall looks so you paint it, people think mountains are pretty so they photograph them, etc. The two causally flow into each other without distinction, which is what monist naturalism seems to suggest should happen.

Any division seems artificial to me,conflating a epistemic distinction with an ontological one. To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world.

Presumably it's a message to Israel's other enemies to not be getting ideas.

That and they go through the Eastern Med anyhow. Following the attack, other Iranian affiliated groups have made threats on US bases "across the region," as well, so it's more a deterrent against other actors in the region.

But it also sounds like they might transfer PGMs to them. Which at least gives the US leverage. Given that Israel has plenty of dumb bombs and artillery, this doesn't seem like the worst thing. This was true with the Saudis too. All else equal, it's better if someone can use one guided weapon to destroy the one vehicle they are after, rather than leveling the block because all they have is dumb fire artillery.

But you seem to be holding to two conflicting principles. Either the mind can know mind-independent reality as it is in itself, or it cannot. If it cannot, then there is always a reason to deny the existence of external objects a la post-Kantian philosophy (thus modern philosophy is intrinsically bound up with solipsism). If it can, then reality does not have an inextricably mental aspect a la western science.

I'm just not sure if the bolded part follows here. It seems more like the reverse conclusion should be true.

If:
1. The mind cannot know mind independent reality.
2. Mind independent reality exists.

Then it seems to follow that the unknowable mind independent reality, the noumena, are a part of the world that is not inextricably tied up in mind.

Whereas this isn't a problem if mind independent reality can be known. If mind independent reality can be known, than at least in some way, it isn't mind independent. The mind can access it.

And nature itself doesn't seem to be discrete from itself. There are no "totally isolated systems," and it seems likely that there are no unique "substances," without beginning or end, just one substance (this is the goal of unification anyhow). This being the case, divisions within nature are simply abstractions. They are based on real differences in nature, which we have knowledge of, but in an important way the universe is one undivided process. But if that's the case, and if mind is in the universe, then it is indeed impossible to extricate mind from the world in an important way.

Obviously, there are ways in which we can extricate mind from (parts of) the world, as when we say "that rock is not conscious." But this is a separation via abstraction, which doesn't seem like it should "cause" any real ontological separation. It's just like how our ability to separate the sweetness of honey from the honey doesn't entail that honey isn't sweet. In the rock example, the rock is part of a unified process that includes mind. Further, since mind knows of the rock, clearly the rock is actually involved in mind in some way

So all of the universe is involved in the process of mind to some degree in that mind would not be here if the universe was not. We are cognizant of "the whole universe," when we have these discussions, another relation. And the universe would have different properties if mind wasn't possible, since clearly it has properties vis-á-vis its interactions with mind.

Big questions about elections in Ukraine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-elections-war.html

Interestingly, watch dogs seem to be more against holding elections, as are the opposition candidates. The idea is that the elections will be marred by continued martial law and that it also won't be a particularly fair election environment. Being wartime leader confers huge advantage for Zelensky and could help him expand his power.

There is also the question of votes in Russian held areas, which would shift outcomes.

I would have to imagine Egypt is lobbying quite hard against a ground incursion. I can't imagine public opinion won't turn against the blockade if people can't leave but letting them leave is a pretty huge risk for Egypt. And given levels of trust, it's not exactly like they can flee for Israel.

Hopefully that would preclude any sort of major operation and make them think about the situation they've let develop.

BTW, I'm reading this right now:



It has a similar set of ideas at its core, although it goes a lot further, trying to show how the "enlightened," view of reality ties into conceptions of human freedom, the pursuit of the sciences, art, ethics, and ultimately, conceptions of God.

It isn't perfect, but a very neat book. It draws on Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Murdoch the most in terms of modern philosophers, along with Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Kant. Although the big sources of inspiration are in the title.

It's sort of neat to see the tie ins between Wittgenstein and Hegel, given how Russell was such a reaction against Hegel, and influenced
Wittgenstein.

Of course, how is simply recognizing the nature of being "mystical?" It's a loaded term for sure. But I'd say it fits in that we obviously have such a strong tendency NOT to see the world this way, making the turn a sort of "revaluation."