Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@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.

@SandyO@urbanists.social @QasimRashid I think in rhetoric and political debate around this it is probably best to start from a shared assumption that Hamas is a baby killing rapist terrorist group of thugs, and so our questions are more about how to best degrade their abilities, stop similar groups from rising up, and so on rather than whether we want them to do something different like return hostages or stop using human shields. Of course all civilized persons think they should free hostages, and stop taking hostages or do sick thuggish/terrorist things like use human shields. No need to call on people like Rashid to repeat that over and over again. He even just said, unnecessarily in his 2nd post, that he believes in the sanctity of Jewish and Palestinian lives.

The useful questions are things more like:
* is there a non-military solution that gets them to stop raping/killing/kidnapping?
* how do we degrade their capabilities without "radicalizing" more people to take their place?
* how do we get actors like Iran to stop using them and the Palestinian people for their own political gains?
* Should we pressure Israel to e.g. better enforce protections against settler violence, or better due process before doing things like bulldozing suicide bombers' houses?

I say "we" here because I'm in the US and as far as I can tell my tax dollars are bankrolling whatever the IDF is doing here: Rashid will have outsized influence on these questions if he wins the election, even though this isn't Israel.

@anubis2814 @QasimRashid Yeah, anti-semitism doesn't need much prodding to rear its ugly head from all over the political spectrum. Disgusting.

@OvertonDoors @QasimRashid Bill Foster is a conservative?

@hedgielib AI can help you write the prose you need to write to do (1), (2), and (4). *ducks*

@ljrk @QasimRashid Yeah, it's regrettable that Foster walked away (is that what happened?) instead of asking about what you're saying – "how can Israel achieve the security goals it obviously needs to achieve if it ceases firing weapons?" There might be great answers to that question; I'm not really sure what they are, though.