I think you're right that Trump is doing badly. I think Klein's right that Roe v Wade is very motivating. I think Biden is not beloved, and if you believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, being able to take a moral stance on "never voting for a genocider" is a hard line in the ground to argue against and means you get to feel brave voting aginst someone you didn't really like to begin with. If the war isn't over and the Palestinians made whole it will be a very tight race. I'd give Biden the odds, but I did in 2016 too
Been trying my damndest not to get drawn into the Gaza shit, but there's no reasonable definition of "genocide" that applies here. One can argue about how they're prosecuting the war, but they're fighting a government who refuses to surrender. Today's Left would have accused the US of genocide in Germany and Japan in WW2. It's full and pure nonsense. In war, people die and it's sad. It doesn't make it genocide. And it's insulting to actual genocides that have taken place.
Oof. OOF. I worry that because the tankies have made their blanket anti-US stance on Palestine-Israel quite clear, it's played into you crafting a blanket anti-tankie stance on the issue. I hate the tankies, but history will remember this as a genocide. Hamas is absolutely complicit in exacerbating and prolonging it, but Israel's literally carpet bombing the places that they told the citizen population to take refuge in. They're withholding as much humanitarian aid from Palestine as they can. Famine is setting in. Hamas is irredeemably terrible, but they don't have blank checks from America for all of the weapons money can buy. Oct. 7th was a goddamn tragedy, but now the disparity in death tolls is something like a factor of 50. Israel did exactly what we did after 9/11. They went to "war" with guerilla terrorists, civilian collateral bedamned. In time, this will be viewed in a very similar light, and, worse, it's just gonna make a shitton more terrorists.
I would compare it more to what happened in Bosnia than to the atomic bomb. But you're right, dropping the abomb has also fallen out of favor with the left
I think it's true that there were a net number of lives saved from the a-bombs, and if America didn't use 'em, the Soviets would've demonstrated the tech in another few years. Even if WWII was over. It might have tilted the Cold War in favor of the Soviet Union for a long time. I'm glad I'm not Oppenheimer, though.
Operation Downfall called for SIXTEEN atomic bombs. Basically nuke it, march through the fallout, nuke it, march through the fallout, nuke it, march through the fallout, up to Tokyo. And if they had to keep going after that well, the US will have had time to make more bombs. People forget that the B-29 was more expensive and more of a strategic priority than the Manhattan Project. People also forget that Germany spent more on the V-2 than the US spent on the Atomic Bomb. "Big boom" is the horror weapon we all freak out about now but the WWII mentality was "the way we win this is by indiscriminate unguided bombing at scale from an extreme distance." We've created this false narrative around "should the US have used a horrific weapon like the atomic bomb" when the real dilemma, acknowledged by both the United States and Japan, was "will the Japanese be made extinct as an ethnicity before hostilities are over." The truth of the situation is the Emperor of Japan saw Hiroshima, went "stop this madness", was nearly murdered by a military junta, and enough loyalists regained control for the Emperor to declare unconditional surrender after Nagasaki. Anyone who wants to waffle around the absolute and total genocide anticipated by both sides of the conflict is a simp. We were gonna turn Japan into Carthage and the Japanese were all in on it.
Yeah :/, there's definitely a pragmatic case to be made. And it wasn't a genocide. But wow was it horrific for a bunch of civilians.
But it's the same basic calculation there as in any total war, which is that your objective is complete capitulation of the enemy, knowing full well that a cease fire only delays and probably exacerbates the killing. In the case of Germany, Japan or Hamas, an unconditional surrender is the endgame. That differentiates it completely from other interethnic conflicts that were not about surrender but annihilation. The reason I'm hesitant to weigh in is that if I say, "this isn't genocide", it doesn't mean I think there's no moral culpability or that the objectives couldn't be satisfied in a less awful way. Maybe they can. I don't know the situation on the ground any better than you do. It's just not a genocide, no matter how people want to remember it, because the aim is the elimination of a government, not of a people.
They are deliberately starving them, burning their food, denying aid. They've moved all the civilians into one city and are now bombing it indiscriminately. They fire onto unarmed civilians, even killing their own hostages shirtless waving a white flag. They are bulldozing houses and building settlements on their land. 75% of all structures have been destroyed. This is not total war. Hamas can barely fight back. Post Oct 7th, a fifth of the IDFs 188 deaths have been friendly fire. It is a slaughter by a government that promises that there will never be a Palestinian state.
You're arguing against a strawman. Nowhere did I say that the Netanyahu government is correct in their prosecution of the war. I said it's not a genocide, because it's aims aren't genocidal, they're statecraft. Pointing out how bad conditions are there isn't a counterargument.
I don't think that's really true, though. Sometimes the framing of things in terms of statecraft is abandoned entirely: There are many other statements from top government officials in this vein. The hatred runs deeeeeeeeeep. Goes both ways, of course, but this is incredibly asymmetric warfare, if it's warfare at all.it's aims aren't genocidal, they're statecraft
This week alone, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party went on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that “all the Gazans need to be destroyed.” Then, Israel’s ambassador in Britain told local radio that there was no other solution for her country than to level “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military infrastructure.
Right, but think about the ambassador's words for a minute. Early in the war there was a lot of handwringing about Israeli soldiers shooting up a hospital. The fact is, when you suspect that there's a weapons cache inside a hospital, you try to enter it. When people start shooting at you from inside, then you shoot your way in. The trouble is that Hamas freely admits to using hospitals, schools and mosques as places to shield fighters and materiel. That's the context around what she's saying there. It's shitty, but you still have to leap a giant chasm to get from there to genocide (there's a good reason that Arabs can be doctors, lawyers and cabinet ministers in Israel, but Jews (not Israelis) aren't even allowed to be tourists inside many Muslim countries). From October 7 onward, Hamas could have saved every single Gazan civilian by offering an unconditional surrender. They haven't and they won't. That's on them.
This is not to defend what Hamas did on Oct 7. But Ukraine could also stop all the killings with unconditional surrender. Israel wants complete military domination and will not accept any Palestinian state.
nah, you're right though. this sucks. i'm sorry for hubski being nothing but politics, i take the blame for a lot of that. it's not helpful. it's not fun. i like this place and the people a lot, I don't wanna be the one making it worse. i have a hard time not engaging and its clearly not making things better or anyone including myself happy see you in a while hopefully. can't wait to catch up on the CNC machine progress & the watch drama, that's been my favorite part & it's getting drowned out
It'd be nice if substantive debates were happening anywhere else. The ICJ and UN are about it.
Israel has decided that the only way to eliminate the Palestinian government is to eliminate the people. The exact degree to which this is true is something of a mystery, I agree, but I find it awfully convenient that the timing coincides with when Netanyahu needs to wage "war" for political convenience. And like I've said elsewhere, it would not at all surprise me to learn later that Israeli intel knew of an impending terrorist attack large enough to kill 1,160 Israelis and decided to sit back and let it happen. Supposedly their intel is the best in the world relative to their population size. Makes sense, they have the money for it. But yes, Hamas has lost some of my sympathy by recently refusing any terms of a ceasefire. But they understand that if they surrender, they'll be facing even less representation in Israeli politics than on October 6th. Which is how this all started anyway. edit: well, it really started with Israel being carved out of Palestine, but if we, erm, can.. forgive... the first Nakba... I think Israel should exist, but they sure as hell aren't making it easy for me. The left is correct about this one, but anyone pro-Palestine and also pro-Russia can be discarded.the aim is the elimination of a government, not of a people.
Most of the narrative around the formation of Israel is not grounded in history, unfortunately. My guess is that you're unaware that net migration into the area that is now Israel between the beginning of the Zionist movement and 1948 was far higher among Arabs than Jews. That's due to the fact that (a) only Bedouins lived there until the Jews started irrigating the land, which suddenly made a backwater shithole arable for the first time in centuries, and (b) the British really didn't want to cede territory to the Jews, the "problem" of which they had already "solved" long before the rest of Europe.
it was not.. the vast majority of the growth in the arab population was due to natural population growth and not migration - and more jews than arabs migrated to the country in total. unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by net, you have it backwards. the majority of the arab population was settled even at the time of the mandate censuses. the idea that palestine was an empty land is a colonial myth of convenience.
They've proposed an permanent ceasefire in exchange for all hostages. Israel will only accept a temporary ceasefire.
Ah. Well, yeah. "Give us back our people and we will resume the killings" is not such a great deal, huh.
Speaking of the power of language, crazy how all the Palestinians captured without trial and held and tortured are "prisoners" and not "hostages"