Absolutely surreal.[/quote]
Israel is America’s sacred cow so one would expect a certain degree of surrealism but one aspect of the cult which defies rational understanding is its ubiquitous use of the term “settler”. How exactly does one settle a land which already has millions of inhabitants and cities, towns and villages which are hundreds of years old? The best I can figure is devotees process the term as some sort of article of faith for which he who believes no explanation is necessary and for he who doesn’t quite get it no rational explanation is possible.
So it goes.
I see, it’s “restraint” that they choose to only kill them by the thousands instead of just annihilate the entire population. So I suppose by your logic every single conflict the US has been in since World War II is them showing “restraint” because after all, they could just annihilate the entire planet if they so choose. 
And I suppose by your logic, China has always shown tremendous “restraint” against Tibet. We shouldn’t worry about senseless deaths and generational hardships because after all, click of a button and they all die. So yeah, we’re rewarding “restraint” now. Oh how far our standards of international diplomacy have fallen when we make statements like this…
But don’t let me interupt. We were discussing the Nobel Prize for the Israeli “restraint” 
That almost sounds like you’re silly enough to think you’re the only one who understands the conflict. let’s see how far you get with this line of reasoning… 
this conflict will only stop when Hamas surrenders, disbands, dissolves, and disappears, allowing the Gaza strip to be ruled by calmer moderate Muslims who don’t insist on the elimination of Israel and Jews.
Not apologising for the Israeli actions which are terrible but seem necessary to them, as Netanyahu is a hawk and his army and populace are squarely behind him, but seriously: how will it end? Not well. There is no military solution for Palestine or Gaza: they are hopelessly outgunned and outclassed, and they are fighting from a position of defiance and all having drunk the Koolaid for too long.
If you poke a dragon with a stick enough times it will burn you up, regardless of what the rest of the world says to the dragon. Sure, the Gazans are living in a prison, but the way to open the door is not to poke the dragon but to talk to it and to give up your claims. You gotta realise when you’ve lost, and the Gazans lost a long time ago.
[quote=“urodacus”]this conflict will only stop when Hamas surrenders, disbands, dissolves, and disappears, allowing the Gaza strip to be ruled by calmer moderate Muslims who don’t insist on the elimination of Israel and Jews.
Not apologising for the Israeli actions which are terrible but seem necessary to them, as Netanyahu is a hawk and his army and populace are squarely behind him, but seriously: how will it end? Not well. There is no military solution for Palestine or Gaza: they are hopelessly outgunned and outclassed, and they are fighting from a position of defiance and all having drunk the Koolaid for too long.
If you poke a dragon with a stick enough times it will burn you up, regardless of what the rest of the world says to the dragon. Sure, the Gazans are living in a prison, but the way to open the door is not to poke the dragon but to talk to it and to give up your claims. You gotta realise when you’ve lost, and the Gazans lost a long time ago.[/quote]
We know what will happen if they give up their claims. Complete absorption of occupied territory into Israel and a complete takeover of land by Isreali settlers but no citizenship for the Palestinians in Gaze or the West Bank.
There is no military solution for the Palestinians but there is no diplomatic solution under the current Israeli government which wants them beaten and humiliated until they disappear (which they can’t). Israel is not about to enfranchise a few million Palestinians. Sensibly so, but still there is no point pretending that the Palestinians are going to be able to live normally within a greater Israeli democracy at any point in the coming century.
Bleak is probably an understatement.
[quote=“urodacus”]So where to from here?
Seems pretty bleak.[/quote]
It’s bleak for everyone including the Israelis who simply can’t keep this apartheid system going and pretend to be a democracy.
Obviously I have no solution. I do believe Israel has brought this upon itself to a large degree and as I wrote, I have long stopped supporting them by default. This particular conflict disgusts me to no end as the conditions for it were entirely manufactured by Israel.
I really do wish we on this board could come up with a solution to stop killing, suffering, and lost futures. Unfortunately, even the smartest people with the biggest budgets haven’t been able to do so in half a century.
I think the only solution is communication. Find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to get to know each other as human beings, not as members of the “other side.” Sadly, this kind of policy requires time to be effective. Lots and lots of time. The current generation of suffering people may never see such a day.
I hope you’re wrong, because I think the only viable solution for long term peace is unification. Israel’s greatest inconsistency is its self-perception as both a Jewish state and a secular democracy. The former isn’t sustainable unless it wants to keep Palestinians in apartheid forever. The latter is the way to peace. But that won’t be possible until Hamas is disbanded or completely reformed.
I know it’s unlikely, but just imagine the possibilities if Hamas did disband, and cooler heads were allowed to prevail in Palestine, in the spirit of Gandhi, MLK, and Cesar Chavez. A complete, absolute commitment to peace and non-violence. Israeli attitudes would shift, and the hawks in power would be replaced by doves. The possibility of unification would go from remote to real very quickly. But again, that simply cannot happen while a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel remains in power.
far worse than the Palestinian plight is that of the big cats. In Africa, 50 years ago there were 450,000 lions. Today there are less than 20,000. Cheetahs have crashed to 12,000. Leopards have not fared much better. Tigers, from Asia of course, are on the brink and many local populations are extinct. Cloud leopards are almost gone across their range, including Taiwan and China. Elephants too are at 10% of numbers 50 years ago, or less. Legal hunting still goes on, and poaching takes ten times as many, often at the hand of gangs of violent criminals using 50 cal machine guns and hand grenades. Hardly sporting, hardly ethical, hardly human. except that it is very human, and selfish, short-sighted, and founded on ultimate ignorance.
Most of that is the fault of Chinese. But that’s just ignored.
People as a whole are not at all endangered. There are simply far too many of them. Too many people want to live in the same space, using the same water and land and air. It’s not tenable, but the rest of the planet 's inhabitants actually suffer far more than they do.
Not a palatable viewpoint for many, so flame away. But human life is cheap, and other species are irreplaceable.
You’re kidding, right urodacus? That’s the most egregious example of false equivalency I’ve ever heard.
Will someone mourn for the loss of gigabytes on my external harddrive? Or all the broccolis killed for the local zizhucan?
Please. These are human lives. Big cats are important. An individual person infinitely more so.
Absolutely not. Human beings are not at all more important than animals. What happens when there are only humans left on the planet? Nothing.
what a waste. Moral equivalence run amok when you say that you are more important than any animal. Especially the last of a species.
fuck the Chinese medicine and avarice epidemic that’s ridding the last of the real life on earth.
Humans are cheap and replaceable. Big vertebrates (other than farm animals) are infinitely more precious than humans at this point in time. Prove your point: without resorting to hollow arguments to soul or religion or utility. Why is an animal whose existence is virtually guaranteed, thanks to modern medicine and security from predators, although they are arleady in plague proportions, more valuable to the continued existence of diversity and ecosystem viability across continents as a whole put in prime place above the other animals who cannot use the same tools for survival that humans designed in the last 100 years or so? it makes no sense from a planetary point of view. Any point of view that abandons planetary survival of ecosystems and the integrity of natural systems (evolved over the long term) is false, selfish, and unsustainable. We are already in the midst of a crisis of extinction of human origin, not to mention the ravages of climate change caused by use of fossil fuels on the rest of the planetary life cycle.
This took a weird turn. :eh:
I hope you’re wrong, because I think the only viable solution for long term peace is unification. Israel’s greatest inconsistency is its self-perception as both a Jewish state and a secular democracy. The former isn’t sustainable unless it wants to keep Palestinians in apartheid forever. The latter is the way to peace. But that won’t be possible until Hamas is disbanded or completely reformed.
I know it’s unlikely, but just imagine the possibilities if Hamas did disband, and cooler heads were allowed to prevail in Palestine, in the spirit of Gandhi, MLK, and Cesar Chavez. A complete, absolute commitment to peace and non-violence. Israeli attitudes would shift, and the hawks in power would be replaced by doves. The possibility of unification would go from remote to real very quickly. But again, that simply cannot happen while a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel remains in power.[/quote]
I am skeptical as enfranchising the Palestinians would be such a threat to Israel’s continuance as a Jewish state it would never be allowed. And frankly, after living in a Muslim state for the past year, and one of the supposedly most modern, educated and enlightened, I am beginning to have no faith in Islamic leaders. Not the people, who are no different than anywhere else, but the top leadership which just seems toxic the world over and incapable of offering any vision but that of orthodoxy, repression, hatred, and resentment.
Of course there are toxic leaders everywhere, and we in the west have dealt with them. Hamas is no less radical than the Chinese under Mao, or even under Xi Jinping, and yet we reached out to them and opened up when they were still hell bent on eschatological annihilation of the west.
Taiwan has signed near free trade agreements with a country that threatens its very survival, and so, life goes on. I have suspicions that if money and power were available to Hamas in the usual ways available to the well connected in a normal economy, they might maintain the rhetoric but they would lose the terrorism.
Ancestral land and all that. But if we could give the Israelis Idaho or some other state that could solve the ISreal / Arab conflict. But, i suspect there still will be no peace in the MId East. Even if Israel became New Palestine or something.
It is just an incredible mess in the Mid East. Sadness and sorrow on all sides.
Possibly the kindle to the War to end all Wars that will one day come.
I don’t have much to contribute, except that I don’t know how this offensive will improve the situation for Israelis in the long run, but I thought this interview was informative.
Rabbi Henry Siegman, Leading Voice of U.S. Jewry, on Gaza: “A Slaughter of Innocents”
democracynow.org/2014/7/30/h … oice_of_us
It’s not the first time such a weird turn was taken in the midst of human slaughter:
[quote]
Nazi Germany was the first nation to ban vivisection. A law imposing total ban on vivisection was enacted on August 16, 1933, by Hermann Göring as the prime minister of Prussia. He announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and said that those who “still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property” will be sent to concentration camps. On August 28, 1933, Göring announced in a radio broadcast:
An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is not only a necessary law to protect animals and to show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself… I have therefore announced the immediate prohibition of vivisection and have made the practice a punishable offense in Prussia. Until such time as punishment is pronounced the culprit shall be lodged in a concentration camp.
Göring also banned commercial animal trapping, imposed severe restrictions on hunting, and regulated the shoeing of horses. He imposed regulations even on the boiling of lobsters and crabs. In one incident, he sent a fisherman to a concentration camp for cutting up a bait frog.[/quote]
so are you all saying that the future of a few Palestinians and Israelis is more important than the extinction of all the top predators in Asia and Africa?
How fucked up is that.
[quote=“urodacus”]so are you all saying that the future of a few Palestinians and Israelis is more important than the extinction of all the top predators in Asia and Africa?
How fucked up is that.[/quote]
I don’t get it. Are you saying solutions to this two problems are mutually exclusive? It seems to me that, although you made points I would agree on, you’re doing so in a deliberately inflamatory way. Sure people don’t give a rat’s ass about other species extinction and (imo) that is a far bigger problem on the grand scale of things than some localized human conflict, but I fail to see how the two problem are related or what such a statement brings to the conversation.
I’m saying that making poaching endangered species a cause celebre in the context of crimes against hunanity seems to be some sort of coping mechanism.