Do you believe in the preservation or destruction of the Jewish state? If you're an anti-zionist then you ultimately aim at it's destruction. I thought I remembered you saying that you were in support of 1967 borders, but perhaps that was just step one of dismantling Israel. — BitconnectCarlos

I believe that a state favouring one religion above others is inherently discriminatory and should progress into an actual democracy instead of the Apartheid state it is now. The idea of a "jewish" state that favours Jews as Jews is obviously wrong to anyone with a modicum of knowledge about human and civil rights. It presupposes discrimination and the result is it is enshrined in its laws.

I would say Israel does pursue the ideal of non-discrimination. Israel has numerous laws that combat discrimination like any western nation. Israel's basic laws include a provision on equalityfor all citizens not just Jews. — BitconnectCarlos

And yet a host of discriminatory laws were passed because the basic laws do not operate as an actual constitution. It's the only "western" state that enshrines discrimination on the basis of faith and confers or rejects rights based on the distintion. The supreme court confirmed in 1989 that converting to another religion means you lose those priviliges. I've shared those laws repeatedly (at least 3 times in this thread). Here's a few of them:

• The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. The law denies the right to acquire Israeli residency or citizenship status to Palestinians from the occupied territories, even if they are married to citizens of Israel.
• The Absentees’ Property Law (APL) was enacted in 1950, ostensibly to address the management of property left by the roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees driven out of Israel during the 1948 war. In reality, the law provided not for management of these properties, but for their permanent expropriation.
• Admissions Committees Law. Admission committees operate in approximately 700 agricultural and community towns inside Israel. Their purpose is to filter out Palestinian citizens of Israel who apply for residency in these towns on the basis of their “social unsuitability”.
• The Land Acquisition for Public Purposes Ordinance – Amendment No. 10 (2010) allows Israel’s Finance Minister to confiscate land for “public purposes”. The state has used this law extensively, in conjunction with other laws like the Land Acquisition Law (1953) and the Absentees’ Property Law (1950), to confiscate Palestinian-owned land in Israel.
• The Jewish National Fund Law of 1953 bestows powers on governmental authorities designed to empower the Jewish National Fund and endows it with financial advantages including tax relief, and in the purchasing of land. Over time, the JNF has come to own 13% of all land in Israel. JNF is a Zionist organization established in 1901 to collect funds for the purpose of purchasing land for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.
• Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law (2018). a) It declares the exercise of national self-determination to be a right enjoyed by Jewish citizens only. b) It makes Hebrew the only official state language (prior to the Nation State Law, both Hebrew and Arabic were official state languages). c) It commits to expanding Jewish settlement as “a national value”. In practice, it prioritizes settlements for Jews at the expense of others within Israel and the occupied territories.

I could go on but you get the idea. And this is just in Israel. Obviously, the discrimination is worse in the occupied territories under the guise of "security". Including arbitrary detentions, demolitions, evictions etc. See (for the 4th time!): https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771

So according to you then violence against legitimate targets, e.g. government forces, is sanctioned until 1967 borders are returned to? Or until Israel is dismantled? A commitment to 1967 borders would still make you a zionist as it would leave the Jewish state intact. — BitconnectCarlos

From a purely legal point of view, only the 1948 borders would be legally justified although I think a land partition imposed on people without them having a say in the negotiations was morally unjust itself. The 1967 borders have been signalled by both the PLO as well as Hamas as being a starting point for negotiations for peace. If that represents Palestinian majority thinking that it is acceptable then that's what Israel should aim at. Instead, the zionists want it all. The end result this way is that it will have nothing. Empires come and go and so will the support of the USA and Europe. At some point Israel will be forced to negotiate from a position of weakness if it continues along this path and what it will be left with will be a matter of how magnanimous the other side will be. In the long run, the zionist path Israel is on is self-destructive and it's entirely within its power to avoid it.

But do you not realize the West is also institutionally racist and oppressive? Oppression and institutional racism are everywhere. They are charges that can be applied anywhere and every country is guilty of it. — BitconnectCarlos

I don't hate Israel. I'm anti- zionist. As to comparing Israel to other western countries. How many of those countries are currently committing genocide? And there's a difference, a rather large one in fact, between Apartheid where the discrimination is enshrined in law and reinforced by the Israeli supreme Court and racism that's an emergent property of societies but at least pursues the ideal of non-discrimination.

Why do you consider intentional violence against civilians "resistance?" — BitconnectCarlos

Never said that. I said that Palestinians have a right to violently resist their occupation but not all violence is permitted.

Yes, it's unfortunately in the job description and I can't offload it unto someone else. :cry:

That's just a variation on the tu quoque fallacy. Even if other people were worse, it doesn't make this acceptable. However, the figures are also false, entirely based on one article from John Spencer, who apparently can't count.

For starters, the 80%-90% casualty rate in modern warfare is bullshit. Not even the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad had such figures, which are clear examples of urban warfare at a time with much lower accuracy. Leningrad was closer to 1:1 and even qualified as a war crime due to the intentional targetting of infrastructure, restrictions in fuel leading to cold and, finally, famine. The conflicts that reached the 80-90% were established genocides, to wit: Cambodia, Rwanda, Second Congo War, Darfur and Northern Uganda (still disputed I suppose).

The figures on the ongoing war crime in Gaza reported by the UN, due to uncertainty of data, range from 2:1 to 9:1. So from a badly fought urban war to a clear corrolary to other genocidal conflicts.

Like father like son? A roadmap to genocide:

Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’

And certainly nobody else is into dehumanization:

Yoav Gallant: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’

Or guilt by association:

President Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible’

As Adam Shatz put it:

the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.

Looks like you need a nerdy girl. They’re probably the best ones anyway, in the scheme of things. — Mikie

Only partially right. She needs to be Christina, because christian girls have never been taught what not to do in bed.

Nature has an excellent process for this; it's called attraction. It's worked for millions of years. If you're attracted to him/her, go for it. If not, ignore. From personal experience, people overthink the whole process. It doesn't require deep analysis. Some people will throw themselves at you and we're all only human and might have sex or one-night stands. Nothing wrong with that but don't confuse sex and lust with attraction. They're not the same. The second can lead to love, the first won't.

Also, "soul mates" is an overromantisation. Like any relationship, communication is key as well as recognising other people's moods as well as your own to avoid feeding negative feedback loops. How a discussion about doing the dishes will lead to divorce is because people just keep adding oil to the fire.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

I see you added things after I posted. Normally you indicate that by adding "edit" to be clear and fair to your interlocutors. Prosecuting criminals isn't cutting down the law. And yes, you're dumb if you ignore facts that stand in the way of your idiotic both sideism.

It is established many J6 protesters weren't rioters but insurrectionists and were there to keep Trump in power. That's not a riot. Proud Boys wanted to murder the vice president. Boogaloo wanted to do as much damage to the government as possible. The Oath Keepers are anti- government, some convicted to 18 years for sedition. And you're here pretending prosecutors, judges and juries did so for shits and giggles.

Your attempt to equate them is the real hypocrisy here and is dumb as fuck. It doesn't require an intelligent discussion because your premises are so far removed from reality there's no discussion to be had until you acknowledge some basic facts first.

a leftist talking point would be: capitalism is bad and should be replaced with socialism. Pointing out facts isn't. You're so dumb you think everything is part of the culture war. What riot happened on his inauguration? None. Your expectations are ahistoric and unfounded.

That hysterical rhetoric is childish. Nobody overthrew the government. — fishfry

I said attempt. And no, it's not hysterical. But nice try at downplaying. Does it make you sleep better?

Again, only dumb Americans don't take J6 seriously. Everybody outside saw it for what it was. A bunch of thugs trying to keep their God Emperor Trump on the throne as they have admitted to and informants in the Boogaloo, Proud Boys and other militant groups, that were there, reported on. But yeah, keep your head in the same and pretend this was the same as a riot and watch it happen again next time Trump loses.

A riot is not an attempt to overthrow a government. The fact you're trying to equate them underlines the rot Wayfarer is pointing to. Bringing up Babbitt in response to the shameful treatment of cops doing their jobs, as if that excuses such a response, underlines the same rot.

Take it from somebody looking at American Bullshit from the outside; it's been rotting since Reagan.

Wet thumb and index finger and rub them together with the garbage bag opening between them. It will open in a jiffy.

I've cited them often in the past. Educate yourself for once.

https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index
https://www.btselem.org/

ethno-religion — BitconnectCarlos

Of course it isn't. There's Ethiopian Jews, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi Jews, which are distinct ethnicities. Plenty of discrimination between those groups as well by the way although at least on paper they are equal.

But under the law, once citizens, Jew and non-Jew are equal. — BitconnectCarlos

:rofl: Jesus Christ that's funny.

It's not my definition. The Israeli supreme Court has confirmed being Jewish is a religious claim. You can convert to Judaism and obtain all sorts of rights and you lose rights if as a Jew you convert to another religion because Israel is so civilised it has institutionalised discrimination.

A civilizational claim. And also apparently you have no regard for native american claims either. — BitconnectCarlos

It's religious because Judaism is a religion and the passing of jewishness via the mother a religious fantasy.

You really need to expound on that because I have no clue how to interpret that sentence!

I think introducing another calculation as to the moral worth of the individuals is a completely false move. This is what doctors are expressly forbidden to do, but their oath is to do their best for PolPot and Mother Theresa without distinction. — unenlightened

Which is why the Hippocratic oath and triage have nothing to do with morality either but with survivability of the patient irrespective of moral considerations.

Edit: to add, I think I would be forgiven to not help an attacker, favouring a victim, even when the attacker had a higher chance of survival. Maybe even in obvious ways even to me as a layman at the train station. It would be a moral choice for me personally to decide at that moment the smaller chance of the innocent surviving is more important to me, personally, than that of the aggressor. But I wouldn't condemn the layman for making the other choice either. Whether that's a triage decision or not. There's simply not much good either of us can do.

Yes. I challenge the idea that we have no obligation to strangers. We have a small obligation to do something if we reasonably can to make another's situation better if they are in difficulty. — unenlightened

Of course there's a moral obligations to help others but when helping means murdering others... I'm totally awesome but not so awesome to decide who gets to live and who doesn't and reducing this to statistics is not a solution as I could save the wrong person. I could save a Hamas leader or Bibi and I'd rather not.

Having read the recent replies, I still think the trolley problem isn't useful at all and is morally irrelevant. We need agency as a requirement for causality and even when there's agency it isn't a given our (in)action is the sufficient condition for the outcome.

In the trolley problem, save one person everybody knows is a Nazi but I secretly know he's planning to assasinate Hitler or five kids. Save 5 Nazis or 1 old man with terminal cancer. It is only useful where we know nothing about the past or the future, the situation is entirely decontextualised from reality and then we are commanded to chose. It is a game, nothing more and nothing less and we can always choose not to play. All valid moral choices.

↪Apollodorus I wasn't aware it was still in doubt such research was done there. So nothing new to me at least. The second part I'll ignore at the useless speculations of a layman. Especially since actual experts now think it's more likely there is a natural origin instead of a lab leak based on the find in Laos. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

I suppose that's what you get from reading the Telegraph. :vomit: — Benkei

Well, that comment certainly didn't age well. Ouch. :chin:

I just read the NY piece. Jaw dropping on various levels. I think the most important thing we (the Dutch) need to think about it how to include the risk we're being lied to next time something like this happens. What a difference it would've made if everybody knew this could've been specifically engineered to infect humans.

It's whatever made up stories Jews want to believe in; it just isn't reality.

You're the gift that keeps on giving. How stupid are you when you don't address what I actually say and raise straw men al the time? I'm speaking in your naive language after all.

Ancestral home means nothing because it's a religious claim. As is the claim to be descendant from original Israelites, which, with 10% intermarriage, means current Jews are less than 1,000th a descendant. It's ludicrous because some asshat with twirly hair decided that if your mother was a Jew, so are you. And we are to believe fairy tales as a reason to allow war crimes. This is why all religious people are dumb; they try to elevate stories to facts.

I can see why you thought that was a reply to you but your post simply reminded me of my own big worry that the next avian flu pandemic seems to be right around the corner.

I haven't followed it closely recently. I do recall there was an original Lancet study that said it couldn't be engineered. That turned out to be false but was widely reported in the media which had many people dismiss the lab leak theory as unlikely (myself included, I thought 1% chance). Then the Lancet study turned out to be wrong and the lab leak became more possible. I still gave it lower odds because transmission at a wet market would be more likely than a lab leak, which would at least have some controls against transmission. I also thought we would never really find out because it's an intelligence issue and this information wouldn't be shared.

What new evidence was revealed that this is current?

Good. That's what matters. Individuals murdered. Not killed; murdered. Slaughtered in house to house violence deliberately on their ancestral homeland. — BitconnectCarlos

It's not their ancestral homeland. That's an idiotic religious claim that anybody that isn't a Jew doesn't recognise.

And it would be great if you'd recognise that Israel does exactly the same but then 30 times worse except you're always making excuses why Palestinians deserve it because apparently you think they are all Hamas.

Do you have sympathy for a criminal when the victim hurts him? Most people don't. Because that's what you're asking.

It's not dehumanizing at all; it's consistent application of ethical principles: I don't side with the wrong side especially if they have zero self reflection with respect to their own actions.

I can sympathize with the persons that were attacked on 7 Oct. because on a individual level they are innocent. But Israel as a political entity doesn't get my sympathy. There wouldn't be any resistance if there wasn't injustice. So it's a conscious choice by Israeli leadership to put their own civilians in harm's way in a conflict they have every ability to resolve, if there was a will. But we know there isn't because Israeli leadership is currently made up of criminals.

Waiting for the next avian flu with all the cows infected in the USA. We can rename this thread to "avian flu" so it stays relevant.

Not on the ballot paper. Personally, I found it bad enough beheading a chicken. I do not believe either of us would even behead Putin or Trump. — unenlightened

There's the blank vote, the no vote, the manual write in of another candidate as well. Take your pick if you can't handle the revolution.

What about triage situations and organ shortages? If you have ten people who need an organ and only one organ, who gets it? Who lives and who dies? Do you save Mickey Mantle or a kid? — RogueAI

Nothing like triage either. Triage is merely concerned with who has the highest chance of survival.

As is usually the case, in for instance an election, will you vote for the Dispicables or the Incompetents? — unenlightened

I vote revolution. Off with their heads.

I think this problem is morally irrelevant. This is a game, where the game master has constrained your moral agency to a binary choice of bad outcomes. The lack of moral agency makes any choice morally acceptable.

Fallacious reasoning again. In this case an argument from ignorance. You're assuming other conflicts were fought correctly and we know the majority were not.

Maybe read some Illan Pappé to put all the Israeli crimes and intent of its Zionist leadership into historic perspective.

Oh for fucks sake. It's disproportionate, targets civilians etc. You know, all of the things I've consistently said from the beginning.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/

I thought this was interesting.

It is as a reply to atrocities by Israel. "but Hamas does bad things too" is a fallacy to argue for the permissibility of Israeli crimes, which you - and others - do all the time.