TYL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Americans

Jared Kushner vibes.

This has nothing to do with qualifications, and everything to do with loyalty. Putin is shaky.

Dispair, nothing else.

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Logistics is king folks, remember that.

Why hope it’s “not just for negotiating”? I mean why not use this as leverage to force the Russians to negotiate on Ukraine’s terms?

Fuck the morality police.

Right, because orthodox economists are so good at listening to what political scientists are saying.

The scholars outside economics have been screaming about it for years.

But it seems it takes one of their own for them to maybe potentially consider the possibility that there might exist some specific corner case in which they might need to ponder the necessity to listen. And even then, economics reductionists will still pretend it’s suspect.

Wikipedia: 1,180 killed[18][c][d] 797 civilians,[e] including 36 children[f] 379 security forces[19]

For sources cited (they are legit), see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel

Basically, the unacceptable and disgusting Hamas terror attack had a 32% legitimate targets to total hits ratio

Edit:

Or you can say that for every 1 legitimate target they also killed 2 illegitimate ones.

That of course does not mean that killing of legitimate targets cannot be a war crime (eg when they surrender).

But for the IDF to not be comparable to an abominable terror group, the ratios should be much different. And if we are to accept the “most moral army” thing, the ratio should be radically different (angel vs devil comparison).

Is it?

Olympic breakdancing is awesome. Zeus would definitely approve.

Russia has enough of a population that crazies pop up. Think Florida man.

Tale as old as time…

(But please don’t.)

Any solution that depends on actually working towards a just peace will sound naive because it is predicated on the belief that the majority of people are basically good and want peace. So any one person or some minority who is crazy and does an evil thing looks like a proof that people are evil and want blood. You are worried for some Israelis in East Jerusalem. In a democratic “Israel and Palestine” state their safety would be as much at peril as the safety of the Gazans a few kilometers down the coast or of the people in the West Bank attacked by settler riots. Peace takes nerves of steel.

But the current situation is also simply untenable in the present and unsustainable in the long term. It just generates intergenerational cycles of violence. The ultimate naivety is believing that these cycles will stop with more of the same. That more violence and more oppression will somehow in the long run assure Jewish safety. It won’t. Never has, never will. Every wall eventually falls. More oppression today means more extreme reaction tomorrow. End the cycle, break the ratchet.

The idealistic solution is practical on the other hand. You’re afraid of what will happen all of a sudden? Fine. Implement it gradually but with clear milestones that the powerful side is accountable for. You have complexities on the ground? Let actually impartial courts deal with those. Make just Law and trust it. You have extremist factions (and it’s definitely not just in the Palestinian side) that threaten the peace consensus? Politically out-manoeuvre them by showing to the mass of people that the moderates are more effective at securing their rights and making improvements to their lives peacefully (instead of constantly using heavy antibacterials and then acting surprised when evolution creates super-bugs).

The only thing that prevents mass violence in the long run is a just peace. It’s hard but there is no other way. Israelis love blaming the Palestinians for rejecting multiple chances. They need to start realizing they in practice resolved the classic Israeli trilemma (Jewish, Large, Democratic, pick two) down to a dilemma by fixing the “Large” variable with the settlements.

Honest to god, my ideal peace solution was for a long time the two state solution. But I don’t think that is feasible any more. The Israelis killed that option by installing 700k settlers in the best lands of the place where a Palestinian state could have existed. These people will never vote to leave their homes, and they will never accept to be transferred to palestinian jurisdiction. The Israelis have also completely integrated the economy and the everyday life of the Palestinians in their apartheid system in a way that I just don’t see realistic to untangle. So, at this point, realistically, at best, “two state solution” in practice would mean Bantustans and Reservations. At worst, it is just a stalling tactic of “warfare by negotiation” to eat up the salami while pretending the other side has no interlocutor.

Put simply, the Israelis worked very hard for 30 years to create “facts on the ground”. Those are now just the facts. And Israelis have to reckon with the consequences of the facts they created.

The single democratic state solution on the other hand just cuts the Gordian knot. Human rights for all, a truth and reconciliation process, humanity has done this before. It’s not guaranteed to work, but nothing is, and what’s happening now isn’t working either.

Because moderation is always relative. Haniyeh was willing to do things that Sinwar is not.

This is obvious stuff, not sure what you don’t understand.

Free Ireland did not mean the destruction of the Protestants. End to Apartheid South Africa did not mean the destruction of the Afrikaners and the other whites. A free democratic Palestine can and should be the national home for Israelis and Palestinians with equal rights freedoms from the river to the sea.

I have no fucking clue man and frankly, I don’t give a fuck at this point. Go ask the Israeli political establishment, anything right of Hadash really, what their fucking plan has been all along. They are the ones that have made everything possible to delegitimize, jail, corrupt, murder, slander and demobilize all the actual moderate Palestinians for 30 years now. When Israelis show actual political will for dismantling apartheid and working for actual just peace, then I will start to entertain hypothetical problem solving scenarios for them. Until then, let them play wargames with Hamas and Hezbollah and make the whole point of Israel as a safe haven for Jews even more of a joke than it already is.

It was not a cross border attack. It was a special military operation.

And the Assyrians and the Pontic Greeks.

Free Palestine is not a call for the destruction of Israel. It is a call for a Free Palestine.