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Israel does have some moral and PR failings. Namely, its settlements efforts in the West Bank, which are unnecessary for its security and do infringe on Palestinian terrority that was agreed to be theirs. As well, the incidents like Israeli soldiers shooting Israeli hostages that came out with white flags, or blowing up the World Central Kitchen aid workers after saying they want WCK to take over from the UN in distributing aid. I think Israel has reasonable Rules of Engagement; their problems come when they don't enforce those RoE. The US does have reason to put strings on its aid, aid shouldn't be unconditional. But those conditions should be like minimizing unnecessary deaths like attacks in the West Bank, not trying to avoid necessary deaths like an invasion of Rafah. This is often something leftists don't consider, because they just zero in on what has the highest death numbers, but it's important to differentiate between just and unjust killings. All of Hamas' killings were unjust, and most of Israel's killing were just, but Israel has had some unjust killings.

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This is good and I agree 99%. The 1% I don't agree with is the suggestion that the US "forged a new civilisation". Though now vastly more powerful, the US is far more a continuous offshoot of Britain than anything new. It's not even Rome to Britain's Greece - the language, the rule of law, the system of democracy are essentially identical in civilisational terms.

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May 27·edited May 27

I'm confused by this.

The US system is republican, the UK's is parliamentary (an evolution that is reasonably comparable to the change from Athenian direct democracy to Roman republicanism). Both are built on the common law, but have different constitutions, and they diverge considerably in other ways too. The US system is slower to change, and harder to change, which contributes to the below.

As the story goes (it seems true), the original emigrants to the US were 'risktakers' (or plain fanatics) by English standards. And that has evidently played a role in leading Americans to better preserve English culture then the English themselves. Maybe even purifying it? Yeah, I'd say so.

The UK today is completely mirred in safetyism (eg, suspicious of knife ownership, let alone gun; rampant surveillance) and turning its back on core liberal principles (severely-enforced hate speech laws overturning free speech, etc.). It must mean something that the original country has lost its vigor while the transplant is still thriving. Oh, and look at Australia and New Zealand: also colonies, like America, but losing the plot, just like England.

I think the Americans innovated from the beginning. Don't sleep on the Constitution or Bill of Rights, lol. Distillation is important.

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I don't disagree at all. But if you're studying history in a thousand years, you won't learn that a new Civilisation started in 1776, which was implied in RH's post. The very fact that we're using the English language is the strongest marker of this.

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Well, yes. It's called modern Western civilization. England and America led the way.

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It just goes to show that most people live in an illusion. The biggest one is that there ever was a Palestinian people. Nope, it was Jews who were indigenous to the land. Arabs came in after with Mohammed. Both lived under Ottoman rule. Then the British decided on the name Palestine after WW1, which they derived from the Romans when they occupied the Jewish land. Falastina was the derogatory term the Romans gave to the provincial outpost.

By the way, my family had to endure attacks by Arabs against Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. I was birn there, so I’m just as much a “Palestinian”. There was no modern-day Israel then. The lies are tiresome. It’s all about Jew-hatred. They don’t want peace and unfortunately never will.

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Hebrews were indigenous to Israel/Palestine but they were defeated and forced out for over 2,000 years. In the meantime, others came to settle the land and lived there for 1,400 years. Arguing one group indigenous is irrelevant when their ancestors had been gone for millennia and others replace them. It's basically saying the land belongs to the indigenous in perpetuity, even if they left. It's like saying the US doesn't belong to Americans, but to the Native Americans, even though the latter has been killed off and their culture and people decimated. The US is not the eternal land of the indigenous Native Americans.

The best argument for Israel is that it exists now and Jews will fight for it. The problem is Palestinians keep fighting for it too.

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The point is, if the "Palestinians" wanted peace there would be peace tomorrow. Most of them unfortunately seek the elimination of the Jewsish state. Remember they had their own country; it was and is called Jordan. They were kicked out of Jordan, why? Because they just couldn't rescind their terroist activities and on it goes.

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deletedMay 22
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If the Palestinians wanted peace, they would easily be outvoted.

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Jews were a majority in Jerusaelm in 19th century. They have never disappeared.

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It's totally irrelevant that Jews were 50%+ of the population in one location in Ottoman Palestine for a brief period of time. You also ignore that Palestinians were the majority of the population in other cities and villages and Palestine as a whole during that same exact period.

I also never said Hebrews disappeared entirely for 2,000 years, but you know this. You're responding to an argument I never made.

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There was no such thing as Ottoman Palestine. Palestine did not exist as a defined region for the Ottomans. .

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I'm not sure how important that sort of correction is. Most people understand the conflict broadly as a battle between Israel and Muslims. The fact that this particular group of Muslims was arranged by post world War 2 meddling is actually pretty friendly to the sort of woke framework Hanania was describing.

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The truth is that Israel isn't great. It's ugly (not the nature which is great, what's left of it, but the buildings). It doesn't produce anything much of cultural value. It's loud, and crude, and generally stressful, and full of dumb brown people who aren't much better than Arabs and are incredibly entitled and resentful. People dress shabbily and the whole timbre of life is drab and ugly. The schools are a disaster zone. It's a terrible waste of human capital. There's some cool tech going on, but also a lot of shady stuff and rent seeking.

However, what cannot be gainsaid is that the Palestinians are the absolute worst. Even if you think it's all Israel's fault (which it isn't, it's mostly the Palestinian's "supporters"), the fact is that right now they are dogs**t. Arguing they should have a state is like arguing some schizo murderer sex offender should be allowed to walk free because he was abused as a kid. Support for the Palestinian cause is support for the most depraved national movement on earth *precisely because it is the most depraved national movement on earth* . There are dozens of stateless peoples who want a state. Most of them would probably just make a mess of it if they got one, but at least their leaders *try* to *pretend* not to be sadistic maniacs. Palestinians can't bothered, and that's what gets their supporters turned on.

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Nice facts about Israel.

1) It is the only economy among the world's 30 largest economies with a total fertility rate above the replacement rate, except for Saudi Arabia.

2)It is a world leader in the number of publications per capita in the top scientific journals like Nature, Science, and Cell (except for Switzerland and perhaps Denmark).

3)It leads in the number of Turing Awards per capita (the Nobel Prize of computer science) by a significant margin.

4)In the Jewish sector, it has a very low rate of murders per capita and fatal road accidents per capita. Unfortunately, the situation is worse in the Arab sector.

5)Besides the USA, it is a world leader in the number of tech startups.

6)Within an area the size of New Jersey, it has a great variety of nature - desert, Mediterranean coast, and forest in the north.

7)Tel Aviv is one of the most vibrant cities in the world.

8)It is the freest country in the Middle East, by a large margin.

9)Its small territory contains some of the most important sites for the study of human prehistory.

10)In Israel, more new books are published each year than in the entire Arab world

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Straight up FACTS אחי. Did you get (7) from the CIA 'most vibrant cities' index?

In all seriousness, though, Israel has it's plusses. It's a better option for the time being, all things told, for a non-Charedi Jew than the communist insane asylum I was born in (England). If we could sterilise all the Likud and Shas voters we could turn it into someting genuinely awesome. Not so great as it could live up to the fantaises of its hasbara simplords - but, then, who could? - but still pretty good. But we can't, so it's going to just get browner and crummier until it's eventually just as crummy and brown as the surrounding countries and then they will use their numerical advantage to destroy it. Don't blame me, blame Menahem Begin.

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The future population of Israel will have a smaller percentage of Mizrahim. This is because most immigrants and most Haredim are Ashkenazi.

I think you're being unfair to the Mizrahim. When Israel was led by the Ashkenazi Labour Party, it was too naive in dealing with the Arab world, putting its existence at risk during Rabin and Peres' time. It also preferred socialism over capitalism until the Likud party took power in 1977.

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"I think you're being unfair to the Mizrahim. When Israel was led by the Ashkenazi Labour Party, it was too naive in dealing with the Arab world, putting its existence at risk during Rabin and Peres' time."

I don't think even this is true. They won in 1948, won in 1967, even won in 1973. What has Israel won since?

"It also preferred socialism over capitalism until the Likud party took power in 1977."

The fact is the whole world went through the same neoliberal reforms for the same reasons at roughly the same time. It's not really important which politicians pushed them through. However, for the record, Begin was appalling at economic management and pushed inflation to 486%. Rabin's government was better at implementing economic reforms. The subsequent association of the Right subsequently with the free market is really just about Bibi.

But all that doesn't matter anyway. What matters is does my neighbour think it's OK to dump a bag of dirty nappies on the street because he's a lazy fat moron. This is 50% nature and 50% nurture, but the nurture in Israel is also awful so we're stuffed.

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Pretty hardcore, especially that ending paragraph. But yeah, think you right Richard. Never rly thought if this way before, but yeah, Israel on international stage is really a proxy/symbol for Western colonialism, which makes it the perfect target for all these petty thirld world tyrants and their syncophants to target as their stocking horse. And at the same time, gifting the Republicans with an actual feasible and morally sound foreign policy objective to rally behind. Good article

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It's an amazing irony that Israel is often seen as a symbol of colonialism, because Israel is the only country that is in the same place, believes in the same God, and speaks the same language as it did 2,500 years ago, as Charles Murray noted. We even have DNA tests that show that Jews, even the Ashkenazi ones, belong to the Levant. But huge ironies are not unfamiliar to Jewish history.

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So is Western colonialism good or bad in your eyes? The US had a meltdown over "Russian interference" in our elections. Imagine a foreign country was actually controlling us or dictating law and policy from afar. We went to war to free ourselves from our English oppressor. Why would you think other peoples still harbor resentment over foreigners controlling or interfering in their country? No one likes being conquered.

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Western colonialism lead to a larger advancement in the average level of personal freedom and human civilization than anything else that's ever happened in the entire history of mankind. Russian colonialism was, and is, purely a domineering and extractive affair. Though things were nonetheless on a pretty good course before the Bolshies came along and fucked the whole world up. As either a constitutional monarchy or a February Revolution republic, they could easily have been a civilized member of the family of nations, much like Pahlavi-era Iran was before the Stalinized mullahs came along.

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Not totally sure about that. Regarding Eastern Europe, yes. But regarding Siberia, I legitimately don't know. How poor were the Yakuts before Russia invaded? Did Russia just extract a bunch of oil from Siberia? Didn't they build the Trans-Siberian Railway?

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If only the stupid natives would recognize the superiority of Western colonialism, they'd be living better lives now. Guess the US should really invade the world and invite the world. Everyone would really be much better off. Are you signing up for the armed forces to help bring this about?

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May 27·edited May 27

It's pretty bruising at the beginning, but you're further ahead in the end. There's only one path to escape from 'history' (poverty, strife, disease, etc.) and that's Westernism. Should this be forced upon anyone? All while the imposer collects some plunder? I don't know. The West is mostly past the direct extraction phase of its colonial history, anyway (modern left definition of 'imperialism' is so abstract/strained as compared to legit past imperialism as to mean little more than 'American corporations invest in poor nations, but capitalism is exploitation, and labor standards abroad are worse, ergo, America is still a plunderer.') Regardless your great-grandchildren might thank you.

Tons of peoples 'hate' the West because they're not yet Western (it's envy). They want the good things (wealth, security) but not the rest of it (secularism, hedonism, fragmentation, disorientingly rapid change), but it's a package deal. Some immigrants try to skirt this issue by accepting the wealth but denying the culture that created the wealth, insisting upon their culture instead (though it caused the dysfunction they're fleeing).

Oh, and there's nothing shameful about a people existing 'in history'. Everyone did until the Europeans got kind of lucky a few hundred years ago. It is often made into problem for Westerners by non-Westerners though, because, you know, envy.

All the blather about the West being uniquely evil is dumb. The West has a culture that creates wealth and wealth is always put towards warfare. It dominates for that reason, and anyone else who had the same power would do the exact same, EXCEPT the West actually does abide by higher moral standards than elsewhere, even in war. We just have never seen equal force on both sides, because there's not equal wealth. That'd be revealing. But don't confuse the culture-wealth-power process for a uniquely hostile nature on the West's part. Having more power ≠ being more evil.

I mean, how much credit does the West get for using its wealth and its navies to enforce a global end to slavery? Plenty of other places thought slavery was good and natural and would probably have continued practicing it up until the present day.

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This is mostly very good, thanks.

One nitpick though, about this part

> The Europeans, almost universally hostile to Israel and not all that powerful anyway, have completely disappeared as factors in the Middle East

Israel does rely on Europe for a lot of trade (as well as less-essential nice to haves like tourism). While this is somewhat naturally improvable in the long term (as Israel grows and Europe declines, Europe will need Israel relatively more, and India's growth will let Israel will have more options there), it's still a problem in the near to medium future.

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May 21·edited May 21

Well said. Here at home the challenge is transmitting our institutional achievements and liberal ideals from one generation to the next. A culture, any culture, that fails to do this will quickly disappear. It should begin in our elementary schools. And in our homes.

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Richard's stalwart defence of Israel clearly contradicts his disavowal of ethnonationalism, but I guess he's willing to live with that contradiction because he believes he can leverage Zionism to crush wokeness? A very unprincipled position. On most issues, Richard sticks to the truth but on this issue, his epistemic integrity goes out of the window. Sad.

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There is no contradiction in arguing that the US should let in more of our Hispanic neighbors, but Israel shouldn't let in its Arab neighbors. The former wants to work and contribute to our society, the latter is openly genocidal.

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So open borders is good if the would be migrant wants to work? Contribute is a fuzzy and nebulous concept. I'd argue that migrants from Central and South America work but don't contribute much in the way of taxes, at least not more than they consume. This argument also ignores the cultural, political and social changes immigrants bring.

Every country has the right to limit immigration, even for the sole reason of wanting to maintain it demographic and cultural superiority.

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Beyond the merits and demerits of immigration, mestizos and Indians aren't waging pathological wars of extermination against güeros. You don't see them suicide bombing busses and pizza restaraunts. Black people are noticeably more oppositional and violent, and even they aren't nearly as bad as the Palis are to the Israelis.

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I'm talking about immigration and the desire of nation-states to maintain their demographic and cultural superiority. Nation-states don't get to say no to immigration only if the migrants are trying to start a war of extermination. Israel limits the immigration of non-Jews as is its prerogative. I have no problem with this. I'm pointing out that it gets a pass here when other Western countries don't. England is also well within its right to limit immigration, including to prefer white, Protestant immigrants that would assimilate and disappear into the English population to maintain their distinct ethnicity and culture and demographic majority. This position is unpopular and considered racist, but only in the West. No one would expect Nigeria to allow mass migration from Cambodia and Laos that would make Nigerians a minority in their own country, even if the immigrants were rich and educated and made Nigerians economically better off.

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Hanania wrote a whole article refuting those points, but I won't rehash that debate here. My main point is that you can't compare Hispanics and Palestinians, and there's no contradiction in wanting to open our border to foreign workers but thinking that Israel should not allow in hordes of Palestinians who want to rape and kill them.

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Israel does have culture-war disputes about whether or not someone who is married to someone with a Jewish grandparent should be allowed citizenship. They are. This is the analogy for Israel of course.

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I'm sure Richard supports Israel allowing in high-skill immigration from India and China. I saw a poll of Israelis that showed they were split around half-half on this. In any case, Israel is a crowded country with a young population, a TFR of 3, and plenty of Jewish immigration, and so even putting aside the obvious security issues and alt-right trolling, it makes sense that the conversation is different. If the US had a TFR of about 3 and over 4 billion people (this is what we would have at Israel's population density), we would have a different conversation here.

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Hanania has always been a pragmatist. If Hamas wanted a liberal, multi cultural democracy, you’d have a point. Both sides are ethnonationalists, it makes sense for him to support the better one.

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May 27·edited May 27

Being in the US warps perspectives. Most nations were/ARE ethnostates, except we don't call them that. Sure, Israel was/is explicit about this, but why is it any different if the choice to exclude other ethnicities was taken a long time ago? As is the case for most countries. Ethnicity is the way people formed political entities historically speaking.

I know you're taking Hanania to task for internal contradiction, but unless he's going to start railing against Japan, most of Asia, all the -stan countries, a good deal of Latin America, many parts of Africa, et al., then he's not TRULY anti-ethnostate. But expecting insane levels of self-consistency is a game, almost treating logic like an end in itself, and not a reasonable relationship between beliefs and reality.

Also I have no idea what this has to do with epistemiology. He's comparing the behavior of the two sides. You could have argued that Palestine is an ethnostate and therefore TRUE CONSISTENCY would demand he take neither side in this conflict. Again, stupid game. And you're just using talk of 'principle' to try to hang him up, for reasons that are unclear to me.

Also how the heck does one leverage the desire for the Jews to have a homeland into stopping American progressives from being such tyrannical babies? No causal relation between the two. You're throwing darts in the the dark.

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"Ideally, the U.S.-Israel relationship would be bipartisan and remain strong no matter the results of any particular election. In reality, we are likely witnessing the beginnings of a tidal wave of anti-Israel sentiment that is going to sweep over the Democratic Party in the coming decades. It is not a coincidence that across the West, it is university campuses that are most supportive of the Palestinian cause. In places where individuals are most likely to endorse the oppressor-oppressed framework for understanding the world more generally, Hamas finds its most dedicated supporters. And as we have seen on issue after issue, fringe movements that start out on college campuses have a way of becoming mainstream within the Democratic Party. On Israel, the process is well under way. When asked whether they sympathize more with the Israelis or Palestinians, a recent Pew poll showed that Democrats and Democrat-leaners over 65 favor Israelis by 8 percentage points, while those 18-29 favor Palestinians by 40 points. While Hillary Clinton may denounce young people who know nothing about the region and President Biden took more than half a year to begin publicly threatening to cut off aid, even the latter’s moderately pro-Israel position belongs to a dying breed of Democrat."

This broke my heart reading, but you're absolutely on the money, Rich. The lies of the campus-protestors fathers -- and especially mothers -- have become their convictions, and there's no going back barring some sort of transformative political realignment, which is a waste of time to plan our lives around anyway, as such things have no guarantee of actually lining things up the way we want them.

I'm eating so much crow saying this, but we would've been much better off with a Hillary presidency than an Obama one. It's not even close. We were heading this way anyway, but at least maybe it could've been put off another generation, even if we didn't have what it took to avert course.

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deletedMay 22
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Lavon affair, USS Liberty, and Irgun terrorism against the British mandate occurred decades ago and before the U.S. started backing Israel. Israeli involvement in Iraq and 9/11 is baloney.

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More than that, we've on plenty of occasions supported the Arabs and Iranians at the expense of the Israelis, like with the Suez Canal or JCPOA. It's just failed every time, because axiomatic anti-Americanism is the lifeblood of socialists, campists, and Islamists.

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deletedMay 22
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Can you explain to me why they were excited about 9/11?

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There is a comprehensive and illuminating article about the dancing Israelis.

https://mischrev.substack.com/p/the-dancing-israelis-and-the-spurious

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May 21·edited May 21

I suspect a lot of people subliminally recognize what Richard Hanania expresses here with such clarity. I hope it encourages them to say it out loud, as Hanania frequently does, on this and so many issues. Give the woke, the anti-Zionists, the anti-Americans, the poorly educated, the useful idiots no quarter.

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deletedMay 22
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May 27·edited May 27

Totally lifting the veil on the 'Cathedral' today. My God, haha.

Yarvin's eyes would roll out of his head if he saw your name. You missed the irony part.

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Ally implies some sort of mutual benefit. Our support of this strategically unimportant speck of a country has cost us $300 billion in direct aid, much more in support of a Middle East policy based on supporting that nation and given us two smoking piles of rubble in Manhattan. Our support of Israel is contrary to our national interest and only exists because of the disproportionate influence of Jews in our political system. The term is parasite, not ally.

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May 27·edited May 27

Ah, if only everyone were so rational as you. World would be lovely.

I'm sure you're just carefully comparing the Benefits and Costs, and there's no other motivation involved. I'm sure you are equally disgusted by the various other 'parasites' that the US has helped throughout its history.

Let's hear some vehemence against the South Koreans, or all of Europe, for that matter. America tends to go out on a limb for others. Yet I doubt you have such strong feelings in those cases.

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And you would be wrong. The Europeans are effete leeches. I see every American grave on that continent as a tragedy and every dollar spent defending them a betrayal of American interests. The difference being that American policy toward Europe is the the result of rent seeking elites and not a disloyal fifth column dwelling within its borders, co-opting its policy making apparatus.

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The Israel/Palestinian predicament is analogous to that of the US/American Indian conflict. Could we have handled the Indian problem better? Almost certainly. Could Israel have handled the Palestinian problem better? Almost certainly. My guess is that the Palestinians will disappear, even more completely than the American Indian. Like most Americans, Israelis will be left with a little guilt in the coming decades. But, hey, that’s just the way of the world since the beginning. Survival of the fittest and all that.

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Palestinians won’t disappear. Israel has no apetite for genocide. They’ll keep growing until the demographic transition catches up with them.

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“Israel has no apetite for genocide.” Really? Not my read. A dispassionate observer would almost certainly say the behavior of Israel’s leadership is trying for something somewhere between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not that Hamas wouldn’t do the same if the power imbalance was reversed. What a sad situation.

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May 27·edited May 27

You do know they have nukes, right? And you do know genocide is attempting to wipe out a race? Not killing 4% of the population after months of close-fought urban warfare (with half of the 4% probably Hamas, the other half of the casualties being completely standard numbers for this type of conflict). Like, man, come on, try to imagine what they're up against.

Attempted genocide would look staggeringly different. Remember how far the one group got with machetes? (Nukes.)

And don't get fuzzy with 'ethnic cleansing'. Kicking people out of a territory is different than murdering them. I won't understand this desire to change language. Just say Israel is being very bad and you don't like it.

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deletedMay 22
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The Ukranians have vastly better weapons and more motivated troops. It's just the cucks in the Obama and Biden administrations didn't want to actually help them win their war, because they're brainwormed against any beliefs which reflect the reality of great-power conflict. Hence why we didn't do anything meaningful to help after the annexation of Crimea, barely did better after the '22 invasion, and are still putting the handcuffs on by refusing to let them attack behind the Russian border with the better weapons we gave them.

We did this same shit in Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan. It was dumb and wicked then, and it's even moreso now. It's also making it far more likely we'll end up seeing the sort of serious war the cuck brigade thinks their effors are leading us to avoid.

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You were the first one to say it. Everyone can see it, the proxy. What a great article! I wish I could force everyone with an opinion on Israel/Palestine to read every word.

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> Yes, in both stories, atrocities and injustices were committed along the way. But this is fundamentally less important than what these nations have accomplished and the necessity of making sure they continue to survive and prosper.

I did read the entire article, but there is a limit to this. At this point, Israel is even using AI generated kill lists, which was a tool used by Nazi-derived villains in a superhero movie. It's literally cartoonish levels of evil.

Of course, Hamas is also barbaric, which is why I ultimately support disengaging from the whole mess. Curtis Yarvin makes it sound like this would make Israel stronger, but this would be fine if it stops being seen as part of civilization.

EDIT: Link on the AI

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza

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972 is to Israeli media as Jacobin or Mother Jones are to US media. I wouldn’t trust a 972 article on the IDF any more than I’d trust Jacobin on the US military.

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A pretty elementary part of being part of the far Right is that anything a communist says about Israel is automatically true. Commie Jew subversives lie constantly and are responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened, is happening and will ever happen. But also commie subversive Jews are completely honest about Israel.

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Richard is a futurist. He doesn't care about the past or even the present. All sins are forgiven in the hope of future economic progress.

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You link to Yglesias' post https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-israel-does-matters but you don't actually say anything to contradict it. Israel having a lot of haters is something he explicitly acknowledges!

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