I mostly agree. Nevertheless Israel defenders have to mention Hamas and to a less visible extent Muslims in general. Otherwise there is no possible response for the lack of proportionality, none. You have to make Hamas look like a super power.

But yes, US support has not been mentioned much here. Without US support Israel could not be getting away with as much as it does. It gets most of its weapons from the US and the US is the sole vote against the UN resolution condemning the violence. But pressure inside the US is changing rather quickly and sooner or later, this will have a strong reaction in Israel, because they will be isolated and won't be able to kill children like nothing and destroy press buildings.

It goes even before that. The term "neoliberalism" was coined Walter Lippman Colloquium in Paris in 1938 by liberal (market based) minded intellectuals and economists, in part as a reaction to the New Deal but also in general because they saw the liberal project as conceived by property rights and competition being corrupted in the late 19th and early 20th century, more or less.

It comes in large part from the Austrian School whose most lauded member is Von Mises. But it included Joseph Schumpeter, Willheim Röpke, Hayek and many others. They thought about how to save market society for a very long time. And only really started implementing such views, in as much as they could, by the time of Reagan and Thatcher, although as you know, it was forced down on the people of Chile under Pinochet. Friedman was a member, but quite simple minded compared to others.

Quinn Slobodian documents this very well in Globalists: The End of Empire and The Birth of Neoliberalism. Recommended to me by you know who.

There are others too by different authors: Marginal Revolutionaries by Wasserman, The Morals of the Market by Whyte, Never Let A Serious Crises Go to Waste by Mirowski, etc., etc.

In any case, it has very much managed to seep into all of us to some extent or other. It may be starting to crack, as evidenced by Biden's agenda, which far, far from ideal, is a step away from austerity.

Zionism even had anti-statist branches, based on mutual cooperation. It's what Chomsky's father was in to as was Chomsky himself.

Then again, WWII did not allow for many options for the Jewish people. So the US and Europe are also directly connected to this mess. It need not have played out this way...

into a system of multiple elites: an educated left wing elite and an income / wealth right wing elite, both of which are inegalitarian. The left wing elite is interested in cooperation, but not to the point where is would endanger it's privileges, and the right wing is committed to competition as the basic principle. — Echarmion

I think that makes sense. I'd only add that some of this left elite may be willing to "give back", in terms of paying slightly higher taxes and some may even want modest welfare reform. But this does not mean "endangering it's privileges" in a manner that would actually cause them to lose privileges.

If they were smart, they'd want modest "reform", because it gives something to the people and could serve to temper the anger which is felt throughout the world. And then they would look good and perhaps even do some good, while staying safe. But even that's too radical for most elites.

As for the right, yes. I've seen it pop-up specifically within the neoliberal/liberal (liberals can be anything these days, from right to left) framework, "competition" is a dogma. But this mindset is going to kill us all. Almost no one is safe from global warming, nor massive war. All which increase drastically due to this "competition" mentality.

The egalitarian/socialist left seems to me to suffer from serious problems in coordination and sustaining the movement. There's way too much fighting in the left: you aren't left enough, Marxist that's nothing I'm an anarchist, anarchist how naïve I'm social democrat, etc, etc. It's crazy.

Sorry for the long rant. It's just that the problems facing us as a species cannot wait for much...

I have to laugh.

I expected some pushback from these "defenders" of Israel, aside from actual Israelis. But some arguments here about "complexity" are ridiculous.

Bomb shelters open in northern Israeli cities after rockets from Lebanon

The northern Israeli cities of Acre, Nahariya and Haifa opened public bomb shelter after rockets were fired from Lebanon.

The Israeli army however is saying procedures in the north are back to routine. (Noa Shpigel)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israeli-officials-expect-gaza-cease-fire-within-days-as-rockets-fired-at-south-1.9821476

The problems Hamas poses for its people are for the Palestinians to decide, not Israel.

It's not as if Israel loved the PLO either, they were labeled "terrorists" for the longest time.

I'm not in the US anymore. But I have to ask, how the heck do you get people together for a long enough time to manage significant changes that would help the many? I'm mostly thinking of greatly expanding welfare and a generous UBI, which is perhaps more of my hippie-ish ideals.

In any case, by now the ideology of "freedom" and "leave me alone" is so strong in the US (and being fair, is also growing in other parts of the world), that I don't know what could overcome it. Not that it cannot be defeated, just that I don't see how at the moment.

To be fair, BLM was very important in the George Floyd protests. Occupy was important too.

Occupy could not be sustained to the degree it had attained when it was in Zuccotti Park. BLM on the other hand, seems to still be active.

Then there's these sporadic demonstrations, such as the recent ones condemning Israel or even back to the women's protest when Trump won.

But these protests are only a few days long.

I know others have, correctly in my view, said that neoliberalism cannot possibly account for everything. True. But it does account for a large part of our current global problems. They've been organizing for more than 80 years.

The left does not have that...

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If you merely want to weep over the Palestinian causalities, I'll leave you alone with your grief. — counterpunch

We may not have much of it left. History that is.

Nice quote. Never heard of it. :roll:

Feel free to analyze the profound complexities of WMD's in Iraq or of Japanese aggression in WWII. :up:

Exactly what the Jews said in 1947. — counterpunch

Sure. No one else cared.

But the British were in a terrible state after WWII, and couldn't maintain their commitments. Resolution 181 was based on demographics. The Jews accepted it. The Arabs rejected it and launched militia attacks on Jews that then led to a wider conflict. — counterpunch

Fine. The point is most of the people living in Palestine were Palestinians. Why should they accept some other people coming in to take their land?

But again. This is not the point of the thread. I've already stated the point many times. If you want to start another thread dealing with the conditions of how Israel was created and why it was complicated, you can do that.

The occupation now, the time that matters for the issue at hand, is not hard to understand. If the the situation were inverted and Jews lived in Gaza and the West Bank, I don't think you'd raise these points. It would be simple: Palestine needs to give Jews what is their land as stated in 242. That's it.

But that's the thing. We can talk of history for a long time. We can even go back to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as a catalyst that would lead to the creation of Israel eventually.

We can speak of how the Palestinians could have accepted the UN partition which would have given them 45% of Palestine, which was once 100%, but it would've been better than what they have now.

We could also mention how the US could have taken in most of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and we could speak of the Jewish population in the Kibbutz living in Palestine before Israel existed.

All that is complex and multi-faceted and includes many actors.

But that's not the point at all. What's relevant and the reason why people are angry at Israel is because of the occupation and enslavement of Gaza and the way they treat Palestinians as sub-human, with caloric restrictions imposed on them.

The occupation of land and the bombardment of Gaza are not complicated. Israel just needs to stop and give them a state. It's can only be complicated if you are an Israeli trying to rationalize the unjustifiable. The same way many in the US rationalized war crimes in Iraq or way back in Vietnam. For the vast majority of victims, it is not complicated.

It's not clear to me what my views would be after WWII. It's not like many people in the US, including Roosevelt cared about the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust did not become a major issue until the 60's more or less. Maybe I would have supported Israel back then, maybe I wouldn't care.

The US and I suppose a large portion of the population might have been indifferent. There was Japan to worry about after Germany surrendered and then Korea soon came afterwards.

Today settler colonialism is looked at as brutal behavior. It is now recognized as such in the US, Canada and in Australia. Not in Israel. We've also improved quite a bit in terms of racism and sexism, but there's a long way to go. So there is such a thing as moral progress. It's slow but it happens.

I'm simply looking today at Gaza and saying what is evident for everyone to see: it is horrendous. I don't see the issue here being much more complex than one of the largest armies in the world pounding an open air prison to smithereens.

You may wish to find more nuance if you'd like. As there surely was more nuance is Apartheid South Africa too. But that wasn't the point of protesting South Africa.

And it is not the main point in Gaza.

Perhaps. Assuming the other hominin species were peaceful too.



Knee jerk reaction? I'm speaking about settler colonialism.

In any case, Netanyahu is looking for even more blood now. He's speaking about a "clear victory".

:100:

Yes and yes. We can only hope they don't ever go through with it.

Link doesn't work.

Feel Good Inc. - Gorillaz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyHNuVaZJ-k

Well you point to something important. If we go back far enough, everybody's an invader or colonialist of some kind.

Maybe not the Aborigines in Australia. But in many parts of the world this is the case. But now it would be silly for country X to say to country Y "my people lived here 500-2500 years ago, this is rightfully mine." It would be a million wars.

Settler colonialism is ending. Israel might be the last place in which this is practiced from the European lineage. Now we look at Gaza and see monstrosities, which they are. Human history is ugly...



Absolutely. I think if Israel doesn't go back to resolution 242 and help with a "two state solution" of some kind, as a start, they may be leading down a path of destruction.

The Samson Option, mentioned by Handel4 or whatever name he uses is crazy. In effect it would mean Israel would be willing to bring down the whole world if it feels threatened by bombing Europe!

I wouldn't have mentioned it if it wasn't brought up, because it sounds so insane. But it's a doctrine they have. How seriously they take this, is an open question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

One author's interpretation goes like this:

"...in the "aftermath of a second Holocaust", Israel could "bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)" as well as the "holy places of Islam." He writes that "abandonment of proportionality is the essence" of the Samson Option."

Chomsky corroborates something similar to this, it's called "nishtagea" in Hebrew.

Would you consider yourself a metaphysical monist?

Some other day I'd like to discuss the materialism I associate with, with your idealism. It may come down to semantics at bottom, but if there is some substance it could be beneficial for me.

Mabe in some other thread, to not derail this one. :)

Yes. All settler colonialism is like this. At least the Israeli's didn't kill them all when they created the state. Maybe they would've liked to, less trouble for them today. But they got into the state building affair a couple hundred years late, when it was more complicated to eradicate people willy-nilly and they couldn't conquer the whole Arab world.

Not that what happens today is nice - the contrary, it is most horrific.

How history might have been different if colonialism took place 150 years later. Maybe more indigenous people would be alive.

People now see Gaza and are shocked. How would we see what happened to indigenous people in the whole American continent, parts of Africa, Australia and the like?

I almost entirely agree with that statement. But isn't less confusing to just use the term "scientism"? Materialism is also used in Marxist thought or in the ordinary usage of "buying many things."

Scientism doesn't have those problems.

Exactly.

It's not dissimilar from the US reaction in relation to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Afghanistan isn't even mentioned.

BitconnectCarlos, for example, recognizes that Israel is not perfect and that settlements are a "necessary evil". This would be the equivalent of what a patriot Democrat or a "centrist Republican" would say about US policy in Iraq at the time, in terms of war crimes and all the mess that comes with that.

But putting Carlos aside for the moment, It's very, very hard to step away from your country and look at it neutrally. It's a bit like critiquing your family. But this doesn't take away from the facts you point out.

Once you find out that "terrorism" is not limited to Muslims at all, and that the meaning of the word is essentially violence, then things become clear. And we use this word to refer to all acts of violence on behalf of states.

If someone doesn't accept this fact about terrorism, then one can begin to make these distinctions of an "army" vs. "fanatics" of "defense" vs "terror" and so on. And then you begin looking for justifications for things which lack them.

Like the US got rid of Al Qaeda and The Taliban?

You won't get rid of Hamas by killing it. You could kill its leaders, new ones will come in, probably worse. Look at how ISIS arose.

It's cliché, but it's true: you can't kill an idea. Or even an ideology. You can only change moods and expectations by changing the circumstances that led the people in Gaza to choose Hamas in the first place.

Freedom is an idea. We say that ideas are something that occur to people, usually through some obscure process in the brain.

I don't take anything away from freedom. Freedom is, whatever you think it means. But why isn't freedom physical? I'm not "reducing" the idea of freedom to the brain. I wouldn't even know what that would mean. All I'm saying is that a person lacking a brain cannot conceive of freedom, or anything else. We call parts of what the brain does "mental". An in fact, I think mental aspects of physical reality are the ones we are most acquainted with, because we have these ideas.

But I wouldn't say that the mental conflict with the physical. Why? The physical is just whatever there is.

Physical circles in the real world? I don't think these exist. We see representations of circles, but we never see a circle in the world. We construct them out of sense data. These form part of our innate capacities.

The only distinction I can make sense of for the moment is "mind independent" and "mind dependent". Mind independent things are what we hope our best science captures. Mind dependent things are everything else. But both are physical.

We simply don't know enough about physical stuff to claim that mental stuff cannot be physical, including thoughts. You'd have to tell me why physical stuff would repel or be incompatible with other kind of stuff. The reason I don't say everything is mental is because I don't think the world depends on me for its existence. I cannot exhaust the world by thinking about it. We don't know enough to do this.

:up:

Also true. But you are asking what thoughts are. So we'd at least need to be able to speak about one thought, otherwise we are just left speaking of what goes on in my head that I'm more or less aware of.

Or else, someone can say, whatever thoughts are, are part of what my brain does. But that says very little. Sure, thoughts come from the brain, not my finger.

One thing I can think of, though this may deviate from your question, is to look at some of Oliver Sack's works. He talks about people who have unique experiences, different types of thinking that ordinary people and so on.

As promised, here is the Gideon Levy interview from two days ago. Worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4pPP0wVFnY

Imagine supporting war crimes so some corrupt politician can retain his hold on power, all the while bleating about Hamas while Israel murders children in real time. — StreetlightX

It's not a new tactic.

But it does get progressively worse since Gaza suffers from each "war". Such considerations should automatically impeach any prime minister or president who goes to war prior to an election.

Not unlike the US going to Iraq prior to the 2004 elections.

Nevertheless, one positive aspect out of this carnage is that public opinion has never been as strong as it is now for the Palestinian cause. Took way too many deaths to get to this point. Yet here we are.

But we still don't know when this assault will stop...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-intercepts-drone-near-jordanian-border-as-gaza-fighting-continues-1.9818178

The IDF added that they it was examining the origins of the drone, and whether it came from Syria or Jordan. It has reported multiple drone launches by Hamas forces over the course of the fighting, including a explosives-laden unit that was downed and “fell on the launch squad” in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing two militants.

180, as to be expected from your contributions, awesome tune. Fun lyrics. Pure style. :cool:

Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N4jf6rtyuw

I remember when
I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
And when you're out there without care
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice
Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you
Who do you think you are
Ha ha ha, bless your soul
You really think you're in control

I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on the limb
And all I remember is thinking I want to be like them
Ever since I was little
Ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come
And I can die when I'm done

But maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably

Well, well. I may have cited too soon:

The Israeli army said that a siren had sounded in northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, and that they were investigating.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-bombs-home-of-hamas-chief-after-heavy-rocket-barrages-target-tel-aviv-1.9812903

Man, this better not get in the way of the Iran negotiations. That would be to add disaster on top of massacre. A miniscule glimpse of good news would be most welcome...



There's a lot to say about Democrats.

There's nothing to say about Republicans....

but as for the process of thought itself, this is open to question because in some ways it is hard to know when thoughts stop — Jack Cummins

You're right. We can't stop thinking outside very rare circumstances and even here it's questionable.

But now you've introduced, correctly I think, the distinction between particular thoughts and the process of thought.

Which one is it that you want to clear up on? These are different, albeit obviously related, aspects of thought.

Yes. And it is normal to expect a response if provoked.

However as other Israeli sources are saying, because of the potential Iran-US peace deal, they'd want to avoid escalating beyond what happened:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-hezbollah-has-no-interest-in-gaza-fighting-spreading-to-lebanon/

Yes. I think that's right on point.

It's all very confusing if you think about it. :lol:

To be clear, I'm totally making it up here. But I think this "dirty work" has to be cleared up a bit somehow, maybe using a totally different framework or something, but if we don't clear up what "thoughts" may be, we'll not get far.

Having said all this, if it gets interrupted, then it wouldn't be a thought. It would be mental activity. Something like that

What I'm trying to get at is that an awful lot of stuff happens when we are thinking, if we consider them all to be thoughts, then I don't see how we'd make any distinctions.

It's a bit lamentable that consciousness should cause so much controversy in philosophy.

I mean, sure, it has many aspects and you may want to highlight one aspect or another. But I don't see many people arguing about the existence of brains, for example, it's taken as a fact.

But returning to the thread, I suppose that for something to be called a "thought" properly, it should have a beginning and an end point. Otherwise we'll have to consider everything that goes on in our minds thoughts. I don't know if that's helpful...

You're welcome!

Absolutely it's tragic really.

The definition of consciousness I'm using is "non-verbal sentience or awareness of internal and external existence." Oh, no! Then what does it become when I put it into words? — T Clark

How dare you?

Blasphemy I say.

Fair enough :up:

You speak of Hamas as if it existed in a vaccum, it does not.

You don't mention settler violence, which is not only savage but humiliating in the extreme and the cause of the violence. Unless you suppose that those Palestinans in the West Bank aren't deserving of any rights.

As for "self-relfection", I think I'm more than meeting you half-way.

Yet I wonder if the Palestinians are furious with Hamas as opposed to Israel. Apparently not.

You say that no country would willingly take attacks on a civilian population and do nothing about it. That's correct. It's simply much worse in Gaza, by a lot, as you point out.

It's shooting fish in a barrel. Total massacre. Hamas is defending itself too.

But then we are back at the beginning. If Hamas doesn't shoot rockets, Israel wouldn't need to retaliate. But if Hamas doesn't defend itself, it loses all dignity.

If Israel lifts the blockade and allows Gaza some actual relief, as opposed to crumbs, I'm quite confident violence would go down significantly. You'd disagree. I think it's just common sense.

It's just brutal. So brutal.

Live feed of Gaza from Al Jazeera:

https://www.aljazeera.com/

Now they are reporting shortage of medication. Also speaking of a man whose house was bombed and lost all his family...

Yes. I very much agree with that.

I especially agree with the neuroscience angle. There is very interesting work done in the field no doubt about that, but certain philosophers and scientist working in this area claim much more than is warranted from the evidence.

I don't think you can hope to explain mental processes if you leave out psychology and epistemology altogether. We speak and experience beautiful sunsets, horrific massacres, wonderful music and the like, not of the V4 cortex or the amygdala doing something which plays a part in our perception of the world.

These are just two different sets of phenomena, which are linked in a way we don't understand.

It is basically not wanting to deal with a massive portion of reality.