Totally fascinating. The cultural substructure of the Western world.
195 karma · joined June 6, 2015
The issue is the circumstances there don't meet the factual criterion of apartheid. That's not a question of feelings. The fact the apartheid label is applied here while it is not emphasized or even applied to non-Jewish countries is a double standard. That fits the definition of anti-semitism.
The land on the Palestinian side of that border are hills. Prior to when Israel conquered that land in 1967, Arab militants/terrorists would take pot shots at and occasionally kill drivers of cars and busses driving along roads in this region. It’s really that small, single digit miles wide. Apparently school busses were a favorite since they are large bright targets.
The settlements were originally limited in number and designed to offer the Israelis opportunity for physical security. This is still the case today when the preferred weapon of militants/terrorist is missiles.
After 1973 when the Right came to power the settlements adopted a religious connotation. They were massively expanded as a conscious effort to absorb the entire West Bank. Since then the problem has only deepened.
I also don't think this is a helpful way of phrasing your point that we should consider the downstream carrots and sticks of our positions.
For the Palestinians, perhaps reducing the Israeli would increase freedom in the short term. In the longer term, in the absence of Israel, it seems more likely they would end up dominated by either larger neighbors like Lebanon by Syria or experience low-freedom autocracies like Egypt, Iraq, etc.
This is happening everywhere.
It’s like people want to introduce more black swan possibilities in a world already inundated with them.
I think you may want to do some more googling.
Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad.
Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them.
In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.
That’s what I worry about when we try to learn a lot about human minds from a case.
Collective activity, ie the bedrock of humans human-omg, has not looked the same since
When someone says something about mysterious unseen evil activities and Israel it raises my conspiracy theory detector to yellow alert