monideas

Total destruction of cities is generally the way that wars end. This is simply a historical fact and anyone who studied history with any sort of interest would understand this.

I don’t think public parks in the 1950s in America were filled with used heroin needles and homeless people strung out or defecating.

You can correct me if I’m wrong though.

Well Israel is also the only developed country on earth with a fertility rate above replacement.

I don’t know what metrics you would consider non-psychopathic.

Getting married, having children, being materially successful, destroying your enemies. These are good things.

Ok so you agree there’s no genocide, I guess because they want to keep them alive for fun or something.

The sexual assault thing never happened. It was simply a lie.

You can use the term Palestinians if you want. Many of the people who engaged in atrocities on October 7th were Palestinian civilians, not Hamas.

For example the Bibas children and their mother were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians and sold to a Salafi terrorist organization within Gaza, they weren’t taken by Hamas. This is why the mother and children were strangled to death instead of being held as leverage and there were issues recovering their bodies for the hostage exchanges.

They were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas and handed over to a different terrorist organization which had different priorities than Hamas.

So yes it is appropriate to use the term Palestinians here. It wasn't just Hamas and it wasn’t just “Gaza”, it was the Palestinian civilians too.

The context of this discussion is the idea that war could have been avoided if Israel had been willing to negotiate with Hamas over the hostages.

Often times when communicating an idea you need to repeat yourself.

In this case I also mentioned the Greece Israel Cyprus military alliance which I didn’t before. This is an alliance which is due to the threat from Turkey which transcends a lot of the petty ideological issues with Israel coming from Western Europe.

There were many temporary ceasefires in exchange for hostages but this was done as part of the broader war effort, ultimately Israel is not bound to anything in these “agreements”. It’s basically just saying and doing whatever needs to be said and done to accomplish the war goals.

If that is what you’re talking about ok, but it sounds like you were saying to actually make concessions.

The point is to accomplish the aims of the war. There are no concessions that have to or should be made. Israel is by far the stronger power.

Yes it would have been insane to accept any concessions. If you don’t understand that then you have work to do on yourself. This is a very weak and suicidal position to take.

50k civilians dead out of a population of 2.2M. The population of Gaza has increased since the war began. That’s not a genocide insofar as the word means anything.

If it was a genocide you would expect basically 90% of the population of Gaza to be dead. Israel controls the water supply and the food into Gaza, they could just poison the food and water, dropping bombs isn’t even necessary.

I don’t know how to make it more simple than that.

What did you mean then?

Essentially your point is that Hamas protected the hostages from the IDF by not returning them and keeping them underground in chains in near starvation conditions.

This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.

The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.

The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.

Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.

Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.

Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.

Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.

Well we’ve already established that the use of the term genocide is nonsense, I’m arguing something different. In this case that the type of defective thinking displayed in the idea you need to be a member of some institution to apply your intellect is in part responsible for the fact every other developed society is dying, it has to do with agency and libido (the psychological sense of the term).

They’re not all actually decreasing in population, they are increasing via mass migration, legal and illegal. That is how the elite strata of Western European societies and the Anglo sphere countries (US, Canada, Australia) are dealing with this.

In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.

“in part” this would only require 1 building to be destroyed to satisfy this definition, in fact any sort of action taken at all during war or any sort of inter ethnic conflict would satisfy this definition.

That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.

If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.

How do you think Arabic came to be spoken in Palestine?

What you’re describing is basically a people + a covenant + a system of law. That is basically the structure of the Jews, the covenant they have with G-d, and the Torah.

The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.

In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.

Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.

I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.

I don’t know what you’re calling a strawman, but the point is that wxw’s response is simply an epitome of the underlying problem. He’s just engaging in political discourse completely in line with the ideological superstructure which is ultimately responsible for this very problem (violence against teachers being normalized). You can’t expect the typical person to be able to transcend that, hence “to be fair”.

This is a consequence of the fact that they are what constitute the legible identity of a given society. The middle and underclasses in any given society just reflect the structures and circumstances created by the elite. The middle classes of every society simply desire psychological security i.e the ability to follow a track laid out before them, the underclasses of every society simply want to fulfill their base desires. The specific character of a society comes from the elite strata who desire self actualization, the character of a society being what self actualization means in that society.

They are precisely the ones that can damage society because their beliefs, activities, desires are what the society actually is.

In this case it was a bespoke extemporaneous prayer, not something memorized but your point still stands. This is not an example of reading but it is used for the basis of the institution of the silent Amidah prayer according to the Talmud, even then of course it would have been memorized but today it is read from a prayer book.

More broadly there’s a lot of societal infrastructure in terms of just cultural norms that are no longer the same or intact at all. For example, grandparents are not really involved in child rearing anymore in the West. That’s why I just focused on the material costs, the issue is really not a material one but a cultural one or a matter of societal constitution.

“Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.”

Samuel 1:13

The Hebrew says literally “speaking on her heart”

If you compared the costs of the items and services that people paid for for their children in the 1950s to the costs of those same exact items and services today I would bet they were the same or cheaper.

In 2026 in the West, most correct ideas and understandings of things come across as crazy because the elite strata within Western societies promotes ideas and even entire epistemological frameworks which are abjectly and just simply wrong and often also insane

Even more generally you need the elite strata within society to actually lead and promote high culture with a sense of noblesse oblige rather than optimize everything for just satiating the base desires of the masses (the middle class) and the rabble (the under class).

This eventually destroys the society because the elite strata itself is drawn from a small selection of the children from the middle and underclass who are identified as having elite qualities and are put into elite schools and other elite conditioning institutions. When you don’t even show these types of children what high culture even is then they don’t have an avenue to express and develop their elite talents and sensibilities, then they never get identified, or perhaps the special tracks and institutions for them don’t even exist by that point

This eventually starves the elite strata of genuinely elite people

Have you tried Astra? Way ahead?

When you use a name for some thing, especially when you use it in a familiar way, it makes you feel like you understand that thing (nominalism), but G-d is ineffable so it’s important to be considerate of that, even if we’re using English and the word we use is Germanic in origin.

This is incorrect and very puerile (it’s theological slop) and even in a Christian frame this is known as Marcionism which is a heresy.