Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@thetechtutor @luckytran How clear is it that the phrase "river to the sea" necessarily implies a desire for ethnic cleansing?

It feels like Tlaib kind of made it clear she wasn't calling for that, but was instead pushing for a 1-state/everyone-gets-one-vote kind of scheme.

Surely the belief that a single state there with proper democratic voting rights isn't inherently an evil opinion to hold.

Personally, I suspect that proposal has a good chance of ending in disaster, and that a 2-state solution would be much better. I also disagree with Tlaib's take on what the IDF is doing, and let's be honest pretty much everything Tlaib does or says, but still. I found myself similarly defending Ilhan Omar when she was criticized for talking about money in politics a few years ago. I mean, I disagree with her point (and pretty much everything she says generally) but it has to be ok to talk about money in politics.

Maybe US rhetorical standards make it too easy for phrases to be considered "problematic", leading to nonsense like this.

@TammyGentzel (who's arguing the mother is less important?)

But whatever – why are people arguing that it is *as* important, you mean?

I think it's because, as we agreed, using those things to ascribe value is ghastly?

@TammyGentzel

I think it would be kind of hard to find someone that thinks someone's life is less important because of their level of "social connectivity or whether they're actively contributing to society. Either would be ghastly.

@freemo I'd encourage you to be a little more flexible about what form an argument takes. Yes: I'm not doing a comprehensive take-down of your post with every post I write. That's ok, right? (There's a few reasons why I might not be doing that, not least of which is that we are basically just repeating ourselves over and over here in this thread. Memories was like the main *new* thing I noticed in your reply.) Or... do you want me to address something specifically?

I'm just trying to make a point about how the way you are arguing about fetuses isn't really consistent with how most people think about the idea of "killing is wrong". In this case, for example, nobody really thinks "killing is wrong" (or "murder should be illegal" or whatever) *because* the victim has *memories*. Not even "memories in combination with a list of other qualities".

@freemo @jbschirtzinger "memories" – Whoa if we knew the coma guy was going to have total amnesia then would it be ok to murder him?

@freemo @realcaseyrollins I picked it pretty much randomly; they're all pretty easy to attack, I think.

We don't murder people who can't think, temporarily, for some reason. (Coma again, I guess?) etc.

@freemo @jbschirtzinger "their brain may only be temporarily not functioning" And fetuses just temporarily don't have brains?

"A person without a brain is never waking up in their current state" Unless their brain starts growing. Like what happens usually with a fetus.

etc...

@freemo @jbschirtzinger Hmm, I thought it was useful, since it's an example of someone without a currently-functioning brain that we don't kill.

But maybe I'm not understanding exactly why not having neurons is significant for you.

@TammyGentzel @freemo None of us is really independent. But you mean something specific that I'm glossing over, right? Can you nail it down?

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

"consciousness absolutely doesnt exist" so sort of a "better safe than sorry" approach?

But that's still my point: even if we know consciousness doesn't exist at N weeks, that doesn't matter – using consciousness for this question is ghastly.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins "thought" and "consciousness" are things on a list of differences between a 5 week fetus and an adult. This list also includes things like "size" and "experiences" and "independence" – (some people use those instead).

All the things on this list generally end up being problematic to use in this way.

For example: "consciousness" – someone who is asleep or in a coma doesn't have that, but we would consider killing someone in those states to be murder. And so on.

@jbschirtzinger – instead, focus on whether active agreement/disagreement is interesting and relevant (it isn't) – e.g. suppose you're in a coma and can't agree or disagree to anything. Is killing you at that point murder? What if you're likely to wake up soon?
@freemo

@lonelyowl @freemo

I'd love to hear y'alls thoughts on the usual retort about 1 state == genocide.

Do you feel confident that the non-Jewish majority that there would be in such a river-to-the-sea single state won't do something awful to the Jews that live in the state, like kick them all out, deny them rights in some important way, and so on?

I don't know what the best evidence is that this would happen, but you occasionally see poll results like "Seventy-one percent of Palestinians support the terrorist murder of two Israeli Jews in..." and so on. Is there good analysis of this?

In countries like the US, democracy "works" in that sense only because the percentage of voters who would like to do things like expel entire ethnic groups is generally pretty low, like I estimate 1 or 2%. Maybe 5%. But certainly they aren't winning elections.

Second question: regardless of that analysis, why is some kind of 2-state solution obviously so much more awful?

(Lonelyowl great point about how the history here, while interesting and worth learning, is ultimately completely irrelevant to what should happen now.)

@freemo @dashrandom I think you know what I mean. 😂 You're assuming people you disagree with are doing what they do with the worst possible motives, rather than for the reason they say they're doing it. You're doing this for no discernible reason. It's weird.

Here's one of several problems with it: I don't know, maybe Dash thinks corporal punishment is a responsible way to raise kids, and here maybe you have a chance to convince someone! But instead, you blow the opportunity: you come off like an unhinged person, certainly unlikely to convince anyone who knows *very well* that they personally use corporal punishment because they honestly believe it is the best way to keep their kid from running with scissors.

@freemo @dashrandom I think coming up with silly caricatures of people you disagree with rarely ends up being useful.

@claude_cahun "your criticism of Israel" Specifically here I mean like questioning whether they could do more to protect innocents. More broadly things like due process and fairly enforcing laws and so on.

The rest of your note... that's what I was trying to respond to with my previous note, so I'm not sure what to say to move this forward.

@claude_cahun well I think I made it pretty clear up thread that anything Israel is doing is definitely an appropriate target for criticism. I'm maybe not saying the same things you heard someone else say? (As a voter in the US, this criticism is important for me to do.)

The point here is just that simplistically casting any civilian casualties as "collective punishment" is maybe not helpful without further analysis. I appreciate your comment because you aren't doing that.

You make a good point of course about history not beginning on October 7th. But still, my take on things at this point is that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue to exist as is, so the IDF seems to need to carry out this military operation. The rest of us should be closely watching how they do that, to minimize civilian suffering, of course.

Maybe that's wrong, though: there are reasons to think a military operation can't help. I don't know.

@chiraag @freemo Oh I see. Well, I think anyone who is serious knows the vast majority of Palestinians are less than thrilled with Hamas, to say the least: https://twitter.com/cvaldary/status/1718803547968483437 puts it well.

It feels like you're getting at a moral comparison between the Myanmar military and the IDF in these two situations. They seem quite different. If that wasn't your point, beg pardon; please ignore this paragraph.

Anyway: pretty much every war ever, just or not, ends up looking like collective punishment, unfortunately. The only answer I know of is not to start a war? It seems like it is too late for that here.

@chiraag @freemo What's the upshot of that?

@chiraag @freemo Do the Rohingya have their own government that carried out an attack on ethnic Burmese, killing thousands, raping, and kidnapping? If so, Burma might be reasonable in attacking military Rohingya targets as a part of the war that the Rohingya started. Civilian casualties of course would be expected, and we should all pressure Burma to minimize those.

As far as I know, nothing remotely like any of that happened there.