SD on 5/3/2024 at 12:45
Quote Posted by Aja
Obesity is indicative of malnutrition, not a high standard of living. The most obese Americans are generally the poorest, too.
I didn't realise you were a nutritionist, but either way, not at all relevant to my point. A people who are starving hungry do not burn (
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-burns-15-tons-of-snickers-bars-following-recall/) 15 tons of Snickers bars.
Quote Posted by RippedPhreak
This is not relevant. In a war, one side is under no obligation to make sure their casualty numbers match the enemy side's casualties.
Indeed, I rather understood the whole point of war was to inflict greater damage on your enemy than they do on you.
With at least 12,000 of the claimed 30,000 number being confirmed enemy combatants, one would be hard pressed to argue it wasn't working.
RippedPhreak on 5/3/2024 at 14:27
Plus it's easy to say "just shoot at the Hamas fighters and never kill any civilians, duh," but Hamas makes that a bit difficult when they dress as civilians and hide in buildings full of civilians after launching attacks.
Hamas assumed that the pattern of previous decades would hold true: That the US would allow Israel to strike back for a few days, then jerk Netanyahu's leash and make him back down, thus giving Hamas time to rest, regroup and re-arm. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the US has become too weak to compel Israel to do anything. The US has no unified leadership (Biden isn't making any decisions or controlling anything), thus every faction or agency within the US government is free to pursue its own agenda without supervision.
Tocky on 5/3/2024 at 15:32
The US is not weak. Trying to twist this around to be an anti Biden screed is ludicrous. I do think those in power have seen the scenario play out so often that they support a change this time and secretly support the harsher response but nice try with the Biden accusation. They are hoping even Hamas can learn this time. They will find out if a negotiation can be done for the hostages they are raping.
Azaran on 5/3/2024 at 15:37
Quote Posted by RippedPhreak
Plus it's easy to say "just shoot at the Hamas fighters and never kill any civilians, duh," but Hamas makes that a bit difficult when they dress as civilians and hide in buildings full of civilians after launching attacks.
During WW2, Soviet partisans would
deliberately launch attacks on Nazis near civilian settlements, knowing that the Germans would then massacre everyone in the nearest village. It was a strategy to provoke Nazi terror on the populace, to ensure they'd then support the partisans
RippedPhreak on 5/3/2024 at 16:12
That works...until the villagers get so fed up that they kill the partisans on sight, before they can execute any attack.
Aja on 5/3/2024 at 18:00
You don't have to be a nutritionist to know basic facts about nutrition. That article about Snickers mentions that chocolate is one of few things exempt from Israeli restrictions (or at least it was eight years ago, when the article was written), which illustrates my point, that obesity is usually the result of poor access to quality food. I don't see how it's not relevant to your point since I take your point to be that the ill health of Palestinians is being exaggerated in the media for political purposes, and you're using their obesity statistics of evidence of this.
Cipheron on 5/3/2024 at 23:25
So SD thinks that because Hamas disposed of a product that had a safety recall from the manufacturer, back in 2016, it proves that they're not actually hungry enough?
The very fact that he had to go back almost a decade to find that one story should say it all.
Also, the product was 15000 kilograms, out of a population of 590,000 people. That's 25 grams of chocolate per person, so half a snickers bar, IF they had ignored the food safety recall and handed it out.
I don't think it's really proof that they aren't hungry if the local authorities refused to hand each person half a
poisoned snickers bar.
If your entire line of reasoning goes "15 tons is a lot! They have lots of food!" then you're not reasoning, you're trying to shut down reasoning.
SD's whole argument essentially boils down to a claim that everyone is lying about starvation in Gaza because "8 years ago they threw out half a poisoned snickers bar, per person. How hungry can they possibly be?"
(
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/04/middleeast/gaza-children-dying-malnutrition-israel-ceasefire-talks-intl-hnk/index.html)
zacharias on 6/3/2024 at 05:55
Thank you Cipheron. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks SD has zero credibility. He's always been one of the most obnoxious people on ttlg (and yet bizarrely so sure of himself, Dunning-Kruger much?) but his recent posts are a new low even for him.
clock123 on 13/3/2024 at 11:29
The so-called "Palestinians" started this whole conflict when they declared and went to war against the newly established Zionist state ( the state's creation was backed by UN's help ) back in 1948 to resist it, after they lost and the "fluidity" of the applicability of them losing any control in the region waned down, they went supernova and became upset and spiteful at any idea of living in a shared federacy/republic ( like the USA and Russia) with Israel , so they lash out at any notion of such up till now.
Just because you're weak and dumb it doesn't mean you deserve a reward for it ( there never was any conveyance of this idea in history up until the age of cultural decay which is now ). All Arab countries and many of their population go against many of the "norms" of the western hemisphere's intellectual zeitgeist ( they'd even go as far as supporting terrorism against the west ).
So unless you're an enemy of your own country ( which I assume is non-middle-eastern ), you shouldn't support Hamas/Hezbollah/Al-Qaeda/ISIS and their entities, there's a trivial reason why they're "evil" and bullying isn't it.
BTW, if European settlers hadn't established colonies in the Americas, instituting a form of government with law and order and designed and built the infrastructures that led to modern society there as it is - then the Native American tribes would still be warring with each other, living in teepees and doing rain dances hoping to get their crops to grow so they wouldn't starve instead of having the luxury of having grocery stores and all modern foundations which allow living in comfort.
The same can be told about the "Palestinians", look at the quality of life of the majority Arab-Israeli's versus Arabs in other Arab countries. Had the first dropped their grudges and agreed into living symbiotically with Israel, their quality of life and overall advancement would've been much better; but now it's too late, and that's not an excuse for having a "pity"...
demagogue on 13/3/2024 at 21:21
You're missing the point of your own analogy. White US Americans had Native Americans and Blacks in their territory that justifiably wanted to kill them, went to war or had rebellions, lost them... But at the end of the day there's one way to bring peace and normalize the situation. The US gave Blacks and Native Americans citizenship and equal rights, and in the case of Native Americans, often a level of autonomy over their own land.
I've been studying Apache land rights recently, and no one can credibly say Palestinians as a people are more war like and less trusted to live in proximity to whites than Apaches in the late 19th Century. Actually the Apache wars are still the longest war in US history. But they were given citizenship and equal rights all the same. There's no way around it if a country claims to follow rule of law and classic liberal values, like we don't ethnically cleanse territory of other races or nations.
If Israel insists on not allowing an independent Palestinian state, that's the only other option that every other colonial case study in the history of history has had to come to sooner or later.
Edit: Important caveats to make are that the equal rights of Native Americans and Blacks are far from being fully and equally realized in the US still today, and the US did in fact practice ethnic cleansing of Native groups in many cases, which still hasn't been adequately addressed. But citizenship and legal rights are an important foundation, and there's a process towards justice. That's the part that applies to this case. Equal citizenship isn't a silver bullet that solves everything overnight, but it is an important starting point.