That's your political opinion.
> Maybe if the wilfully politically ignorant could figure out how to write good character driven stories, those people would have options. But for some reason, people with good souls and hearts write the best stories... And people without them write inane drivel that fails to connect on any deep level, ever.
That's your political opinion.
I don't see why it's not an obvious truth that sometimes people prefer not to have to think about politics or political ideology. And to suggest art or entertainment devoid of political ideology is "drivel" or for people without "good souls and hearts" is baffling.
Surely when every major genocide researcher and lawyer, human rights groups, etc are all shouting at the top of their lungs that this is the worst genocide this century, you'd try a little harder to make your case.
I call what's happening in Gaza and the WB genocide. Clearly, and to a horrific degree.
I have nightmares about it that linger with me for weeks. I've seen full HD horrors and atrocities being committed for 92 days now.
I've seen outrageous lies - beheaded babies, mass rapes - promulgated by corporate media and even the POTUS, all as a thousand very real babies have been murdered. Netanyahu is still repeating the beheaded babies lie. It's farcical, and I truly believe that only a highly deranged mind could fall for it. And yet at least 80% of Israelis think there hasn't been enough violence. It's a horror beyond comprehension.
I don't get why people are tolerating such genocide denial tbh. It's nice that we're so polite here, but like ... read the room. And by the room, I mean the vast majority of every single population outside of Israel; who all want the same thing: just stop killing so many people Israel, ffs.
Just stop killing people, and treat them like humans. It's not a big ask. It's not political. It's important, and if you try to tell people not to talk about it you can expect pushback.
Israel is not genocidal. Hamas IS genocidal. Everyone shouting "from the mountains to the sea" IS genocidal.
Hamas did kill babies. Your willful blind eye to the actual facts on the ground is astounding.
Second off: it is manifestly not the case that everyone shouting that slogan is genocidal. One indication of that: Israel has used the slogan itself. Most people who use it probably don't really even know what it means, as seems to have been the case there.
Third: please stop declaiming. It's not persuasive, it doesn't teach anybody anything, and it pumps cortisol into the thread. You don't have to have a thing to say here. Sometimes it's best just to let charged threads like these die down on their own.
> Surely when every major genocide researcher and lawyer, human rights groups, etc are all shouting at the top of their lungs that this is the worst genocide this century, you'd try a little harder to make your case.
Then they probably hold antisemitic beliefs because this isn't even in the top 5 this century: Ukraine, Ethiopia, Yemen, IS, South Sudan, Uyghur, Myanmar, etc.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143772
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinian-children-deat...
It seems like a pretty apolitical and objective statement to me. Perhaps not as fast as every 10 minutes but probably not far off.
> That's your political opinion.
Not really, no. They have said as much themselves. "There is no red line" is a direct quote.
Zionists, aka the ones committing and supporting this particularly heinous genocide, consider it a political view - no one else.
Zionists say it's complicated, it's self defense; even as they openly state their true intent [0]. But the entire rest of the fucking planet considers it wanton murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. We're heartbroken, we're furious, and we'll not stop talking about it until it ends.
> I don't see why it's not an obvious truth that sometimes people prefer not to have to think about politics or political ideology.
I explained why, as did other commenters. If you want to be ignorant and apathetic towards 'politics' (inequality and genocide and the planet burning for profit) that's your problem. Not mine. But it's a bit rich to then complain that you can't find good character driven stories, that enable and support such an apathetic and delusional choice of worldview.
> to suggest art or entertainment devoid of political ideology is "drivel" or for people without "good souls and hearts" is baffling.
I didn't.
I 'suggested' that if you want good stories devoid of 'political content' then maybe you can't find them because vapid and ignorant and soulless people don't write very good stories. If you can find them, then why bother complaining that other people are discussing and enjoying 'political' content.
0 - https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
What would happen next if the Palestinians laid down their arms and renowned warfare?
What would happen next if the Israelis laid down their arms and renounced warfare?
Do you really think that if Hamas (not to be confused with the civilians who are being murdered) "laid down their arms" then Israel would start to treat Palestinians like humans? ... Really?
Do you think that Palestinians who lost their homes, their families, their whole world to this 3 month orgy of atrocity are more or less likely to take up arms than people with something to lose?
30,000 Palestinians have been murdered. A million people are facing death by starvation and disease. It needs to stop.
>Do you think either of those scenarios are possible?
You either missed the part about thought exercise or slipped in a bad-faith query.
One side has tried repeatedly to compromise, the counter-party is fundamentally opposed to any compromise. Try gaming that out and see how you might succeed in reaching a successful compromise for peace.
>Do you really think that if Hamas (not to be confused with the civilians who are being murdered) "laid down their arms" then Israel would start to treat Palestinians like humans? ... Really?
What happened when Egypt was offered land for peace? What happened when the PA was offered 95% of the west bank in exchange for peace? Are you familiar with the "Peace Now" movement from the 1990s? It was way too large to call it a fringe movement? The response was suicide bombings. That was a quarter century ago and the last 25 years have made it rather bleak to realistically find peace, unless you think "the river to sea" as a peace proffer, perhaps. Do you? Really??
Granted its radicalizing for sure. Can you see how Palestinian if not Perso-Palestinian tactics would be as radicalizing on Israelis? Is one radicalization better than the other?
>30,000 Palestinians have been murdered. A million people are facing death by starvation and disease. It needs to stop.
Casualty stats are like polls. Its quasi data at best. OF COURSE it needs to stop. BILATERALLY. Have you heard one Palestinian person so much as nuance that their misery is a reaction to a Palestinian act of atrocity? Its a glaring double standard.
Its a race to the bottom, and pretending that the Palestinians are pure victims while the Israelis are pure evil only illuminates your one-sidedness in this matter.
Until both sides are able to find empathy for each other's existence, the race to the bottom is a sure thing.
One last question for you:
Can someone name a large-scale armed military conflict in which the civilian population caught in that conflict weren't treated as expendable?
Israelis are bombing refugee camps and hospitals. Openly calling for the destruction/removal of the entire population. Assassinating journalists, preventing food and electricity and clean water from an entire population.
> Casualty stats are like polls. Its quasi data at best.
30,000 murdered people in three months isn't a statistic. It's human lives. Those are real people. They have names, and you can see the lists compiled.
The average age of murdered children over there is five years old.
If you want better stats, get Israel to let journalists in (maybe ask them to stop killing them while you're at it).
> Can someone name a large-scale armed military conflict in which the civilian population caught in that conflict weren't treated as expendable?
Ah - there it is. Palestinian civilians are expendable to Israel, and you call this normal.
But how many senior Hamas leaders have been taken in Gaza? Zero.
How many hostages have been rescued? Minus three.
All while a child is murdered every ten minutes.
Israel is committing verified war crimes and atrocities every day. It's not excusable. There is a responsibility, even in war, to protect civilian life.
Israel is not "openly genocidal". I disagree that it is genocidal at all; certainly not openly. Arguments that Israel's policy is genocidal do not tend to survive acquaintance with a serious international lawyer. Human rights violations, maybe.
It is simply false that 92% of people have no effect on policy. (They elect presidents.) Maybe you think that 92% of people's preferences don't affect policy. That's almost certainly also false - use common sense - and based on correlational polisci work, in a setting where correlations are not very persuasive (I am thinking of Gilens and Page) and where the very idea of preferences is pretty suspect.
Nobody in this thread has complained about the existence of political work. They've complained about politics making the art worse. I'd say there are many cases of art which has been made worse by the clumsy addition of politics, or of bad art being praised because it had the right politics. Have you never seen that?
I think your opinions are much stronger and more certain than your knowledge base warrants.
Yes, it is [0].
> Arguments that Israel's policy is genocidal do not tend to survive acquaintance with a serious international lawyer.
False [1].
> It is simply false that 92% of people have no effect on policy
Oh yeah [2]? Also, the majority of the US supports free healthcare, a ceasefire in Palestine, free college, clean water, modern drug policy, fair housing, and higher taxes on the rich. It's pretty obvious that the people are not being represented.
> Nobody in this thread has complained about the existence of political work.
You're changing the argument.
> I think your opinions are much stronger and more certain than your knowledge base warrants.
You might be right. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, and your arguments that I am are pretty flimsy for a self-proclaimed scientist.
0 - https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
1 - https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icj-southafrica-israel-g...
2 - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of...
As for Palestine, you're citing an advocacy organization, and the UN, of which the less said the better. To quote Ben Kiernan, "Israel's retaliatory bombing of Gaza, however indiscriminate, and its current ground attacks, despite the numerous civilian casualties they are causing among Gaza's Palestinian population, do not meet the very high threshold that is required to meet the legal definition of genocide." Here's another reasonable take: https://archive.is/O8HpJ
-- Giora Eiland
> If we act strategically correctly, there will be immigration and we will live in the Gaza Strip. We will not allow a situation where 2 million people live there.
-- Smotrich
Two of dozens and dozens such statements, with rather tame language compared to others. Under the Geneva Convention the Israeli government is required to prohibit and prosecute such speech, not engage in it. And then there are is the actual murder, which in turn unrolls into hundreds of things, including soldiers incriminating themselves with a sort of "humor" that reminds of the cruelty of Abu Ghraib, plus "the Temple will be built soon" and all that.
Even outright targeting of journalists. https://rsf.org/en/israeli-politicians-call-journalists-gaza...
(Smotrich and Ben Gvir have said worse things than this!)
None of this is to vouch for Netanyahu, who is himself a deeply problematic figure and is of course responsible for forming a coalition with these people in the first place --- something I think most people feel he did in order to escape prison.
Not to keep one of these cursed threads going even longer, just, if you're trying to parse reasons why citing Smotrich isn't getting you more traction with your interlocutors, that could possibly be one reason.
And their words match the current military actions, the flattening of villages, the religious zealotry, the wanton attacks on civilians. When I referred to Abu Ghraib I wasn't trying to be polemic, that's just the best one-phrase description I can give of all the shit I've seen and read and seen justified.
> There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster
When it comes to Israel itself, thinking that these people are "monsters" isn't enough under the convention against Genocide. As for the rest, where are the calls to stop this? Where is even honest reporting on it? NYT is currently lying about "Israel scaling back the war", meanwhile:
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17443264624490293...
https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1744351540435935525
Again, just the tip of the ice berg. Videos chosen for not being very graphic. Just enough to realize that the convenient, clean narrative put forward can't possibly be correct.
And the people who watch in horror and watch how it's swept under the rug, how the people scratch each other's back while having "concerns" (say, Biden delivering weapons, saying no to a ceasefire, while paying some lip service to being a nice human because that's all he has against Trump), how Palestinians are just treated as non-persons, vermin to be exterminated to take their land, while that is glorified with sombre references to the Holocaust, will never forget it.
Every time there is something about, say, the atrocity that was putting Japanese Americans into camps during WW2 (which it was), they will think back on how Palestinian children and civilians were blown to bits, starved to death, in the ten thousands currently, with the declared target being hundreds of thousands if not millions, and how their neighbors, friends and family, shrugged and said "their fault for voting Hamas 2006", and how the connection they felt to that person died that day. That's not an argument, but that's what will happen. It already happened. We don't know why people do this or that, just like we never will fully understand the Holocaust, but we know what they did, and that will have to do.
I'm not saying this to convince anyone. I can't convince anyone who isn't shocked about what I already posted and looking into it themselves. I try to stay on top of it, and I pass on some of the things I saw I see nowhere outside of the sources I stumbled onto by caring about and researching the issue. I like to think that makes it valuable enough, certainly as valuable something that contains no quotes and just rephrases justifications that are well known. When I reply to a person I haven't talked to before in a thread I haven't posted in yet, I might repeat a quote or a link, obviously. I don't have the time to come up with something fresh every time.
To the extent we're having these discussions on HN (which I think are largely cursed), I'm interested in the facts being on the table: that Gaza isn't somehow an independent territory Israel can wash its hands of, that Israel is not in fact populated mostly with Europeans and Americans, that everybody from Hezbollah to the IDF has used the "river to the sea" slogan, and so forth.
I meant what I said in my preceding comment. I'm not suggesting to you that because Smotrich is a fringe figure, you should recalculate your opinions about Israeli leadership. I'm literally telling you that you can make a better, more succinct, and more persuasive case by relying less on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Assume the persuadable audience for what you're writing already reviles both of those characters, and avoid giving your readers an excuse to stop reading by make them load-bearing parts of your argument.
Alternatively: stop having an argument at all! It's extraordinarily unlikely that you will ever on HN have a "debate" with a counterparty on the other side of this issue that ends in you somehow "winning". And as these "debates" progress, they get less compelling, more tedious, and more damaging to everybody's case. Apathy could have no better advocate than a 30-comment-deep HN thread.
Instead, just wait for things to appear that are contrary to the facts, and calmly correct the record.
That's horrific bro.
Heinous semantic quibbles aside - 30,000 people have been killed. PEOPLE. Lives ended.
ZERO senior Hamas leaders have been killed.
ZERO hostages have been rescued.
75% of all homes have been destroyed, for 2.3 million people.
This result cost 11 figures.
And you and Ben Kiernan say you're not sure if there's enough intent to call it a genocide! Buddy, Israeli state TV have a bunch of schoolkids singing about "total annihilation" of Gaza. There's HD video of too many war crimes and atrocities to list. These people are filming unimaginable horror, and you're cherry-picking one genocide researcher's statment from 2 months and 20,000 murders ago. That's a yikes dude.
The list of genocidal statements from Israeli leaders is looooong - I already posted it. You dismissed it as "from an advocacy group", even though it's fully sourced. The less said the better about the UN?? Why - because Israel have killed more UN workers than any conflict in history?!
You are literally a genocide denier. You're helping ethnic cleansing happen. You are. Deny it, call it what you like, that is what you are choosing to do with your one life on earth. God help you.
1) Hamas quotes 22K people killed. I don't know where your 30K figure comes from. Even if you believe the figures of Hamas, which has every incentive to lie and no ethics to hold it back, this is 1% of the Gaza strip's population. If Israel wanted to kill many more times that, it obviously could. I suggest to you that urban warfare against irregular forces has inevitable casualties, which does not make that war unjust. Was the taking of Berlin genocide? If not, what is the difference?
2) Numerous hostages have been rescued, in negotiations which were enabled by the military pressure put on Hamas.
3) A senior Hamas leader was widely reported killed just 2 days ago.
4) You don't know how many homes have been destroyed. The UN estimates 65,000 homes. The highest estimate quoted here by the Guardian is 33%. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/the-numbers-th...
I'm happy to believe that Israel has committed war crimes, and it would not surprise me. I worry about ethnic cleansing too - though that will be shown by what happens after the war and not by the fact that Israel encourages civilians to flee a war zone. Claims of genocide are overblown, and I suggest you should tone down your heated rhetoric. The original context was one guy making a lot of inaccurate claims; a second person doing the same does not weaken my case.
I'm honestly horrified that this thread is so full of people unironically whining that someone dared write a blog post about comics without hiding their opinion.
The US is funding an openly genocidal regime that is killing a child every ten minutes, saying there's "no red line". With near-unanimous bipartisan support, and against the will of the vast majority of voters (not to mention the entire rest of the planet).
Inequality is at record levels. The political process has presented us with the least two attractive options for president for the last two (and probably the next) presidential elections. The poorest 92% of citizens have absolutely no effect on policy.
And people are sad that they have to listen to political opinions in the best media.
Maybe if the wilfully politically ignorant could figure out how to write good character driven stories, those people would have options. But for some reason, people with good souls and hearts write the best stories... And people without them write inane drivel that fails to connect on any deep level, ever.