> The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance.
Prosecutorial discretion means they can just collect evidence and choose not to charge you unless they want to leverage you for something. This already happens, but universal surveillance means it can literally happen to anybody, because everybody breaks the law in some way due to how many laws we have.
Discretion is the real problem I think. It seems extreme, but maybe discretion should be eliminated: if you commit a crime you will be charged. This will at first result in way too much prosecution, which will lead to protests and hopefully repealing laws and we'd end up in a better place where the law is understandable and predictable by mortals.
Epstein did not need to be the blackmail man. His function in the machine was as a Hoover, vacuuming up as much about as many as possible in case some of it turned out to be useful to the machine operators at some later date.
If you're going back decades, then Palestinians started started multiple civil wars against Jews before the founding of Israel. It's almost as if the Jews knew they couldn't peacefully coexist with most Palestinians on the same land.
That is simply wrong. Palestinians were first attacked by the British, supporting the Zionists, in the 1930s. Then, in 1947, during plan Dalet, Israel attacked Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.
Before that, of course, they colonized Palestine under the shield of the British empire.
An easier way to disarm this argument is: Why did the Zionists come and displace the Palestinians? And who would respond peacefully if you try to displace them?
That's rich. If "talk of colonization" is propaganda, why did Herzl write about "important experiments in colonization" in Palestine? and why did Jabotinsky say "Zionism is a colonization adventure"? Why did Max Nordau say: "the existing and promising beginnings of a Jewish colonization shall be looked after and maintained till the movement will be possible on a large scale"?
Why would the founders of Zionism engage in "ahistorical propaganda" against themselves?
Zionism is one of the most brutal examples of colonialism ever, and the founders of Zionism don't disagree. Zionists are equivalent to Nazis in their treatment of the "other" and their belief in a pure ethnostate, the consequences of these beliefs are exactly the same. And young people are finally waking up to this.
I never mentioned jews and the point remains : It is untrue to say that Hamas started everything on 7th of oct and it is untrue to say that they were the first.
Stop diverting attention from the causes of what happened.
> Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years.
If Mexico had started attacking the US across the border, what would the US do? I'm curious to hear what you think a country should do in this circumstance.
Are the US currently illegally occupying large parts of Mexico and progressively colonising it, displacing and oppressing the Mexican population?
And if that were the case, would you say that Mexico had started attacking the US across the border? Or would you say that the US are waging war against Mexico and Mexico is fighting back?
The depressing thing is that you don't know that the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed 178 years ago, and that territory can be legally ceded by means of peace treaties. The part of Palestine that is considered illegally occupied is the part that lies beyond the 1949 armistice borders and has never been legally ceded to Israel by any treaty.
I disagree with this timeline (the Jews got there in the first place with the precise, declared intent of colonising somebody else's land. That's the whole point of Zionism).
But more in general, there's no point in following a tit-for-tat that goes back 80 years or more with the intent of finding "who was the first". Each event further down the chain completely reverses the assessment, and you can't base any solid reasoning on such grounds. What you have to look at is the big picture: who is occupying someone else's territory? Who is oppressing the other with overwhelming force? Which side keeps taking and which keeps losing?
> the Jews got there in the first place with the precise, declared intent of colonising somebody else's land. That's the whole point of Zionism
Yes, but they were doing it by legally purchasing land, not through violent displacement. Arabs then rioted against Jewish communities, and that started the cycle of violence.
And note how this push for Zionism coincides with a global expansion of antisemitism after WWI. The only place Jews could find reliable support was among their people and protected by the British who were bound to uphold the Barfour declaration.
> What you have to look at is the big picture: who is occupying someone else's territory?
But if you ignore the history, you can't actually determine whose territory it is can you? Jews purchased land from Arabs, Arabs repeatedly started conflicts with them and Jews repeatedly beat them back. Losers in a conflict lose territory, and the armistice following Israel's founding drew the expanded lines.
As for the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank today, I agree it's problematic, but what exactly Israel supposed to do when they keep getting attacked? They were attacked after the armistice with Jordan and Egypt, so once again, they didn't start anything.
If Mexico repeatedly attacked the US, they would do the same thing. Hamas continues to have over 70% support among Gazans, even now, and Hamas murders anyone who speaks against them.
> but they were doing it by legally purchasing land
This is false- the land they purchased was only 12% of what they claimed at the moment of independence. Besides, privately buying land doesn't give you any right to declare sovereignty over it- try that in your country.
> The only place Jews could find reliable support was among their people
Sucks for them, but absolutely can't be used to justify a crime against a third party- the Palestinians.
> Jews purchased land from Arabs, Arabs repeatedly started conflicts with them and Jews repeatedly beat them back
This is entirely false and even a cursory reading of actual history (not the passively repeated Zionist propaganda points that you're exposing here) would change your mind.
> As for the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank today, I agree it's problematic, but what exactly Israel supposed to do when they keep getting attacked?
First of all they should not occupy any territory that doesn't belong to them, because that makes the attacks entirely reasonable and justified.
I don't see how Israel/Palestine is any kind of evidence that ethnostates can't work. There are Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades. There are unique historical reasons why there's so much conflict in this region.
> Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades.
when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…
> I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.
I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
> I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
This matches the "individuality thesis" [1] (often debated among philosophers).
For those who haven't explored the territory, I recommend the journey. There is no rush to figure it out. I suggest trying out various viewpoints and taking your time with it: maybe even remaining a bit uncertain for your entire life!
- Uncertainty often takes an unfair beating. Uncertainty is preferable to confused or premature certainty. I would actually go further and say there is deep virtue in uncertainty -- there is an openness there. Absolute certainty closes doors; in a way it closes its eyes to new experience.
- There is value in being uncertain about one's values! For individuals, locking in one's ethics can be unwise. [2] For cultures, value lock-in can be stifling or even oppressive. For AI, value lock-in is sometimes called incorrigibility and can be problematic or worse. Humans have a tendency to grow and change, all the way down to our value systems.
Anyhow, I digress. Here are some relevant selections from Wikipedia's entry on Will Kymlicka:
> In Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka argues that group-specific rights are consistent with liberalism, and are particularly appropriate, if not outright demanded, in certain situations.
> For Kymlicka, the standard liberal criticism, which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities, rather than autonomous social agents, is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
[2]: I learned this from What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Did he borrow it from someone else? Maybe Derek Parfit? I'll need to research more.
This is wildly one-sided and basically incorrect. The Palestinians initiated multiple conflicts against the Jews, even before the foundation of Israel. The Jewish people beat them back every time, and this same pattern continued after the Israel's founding. What happened throughout history when someone beat back a hostile enemy that attacked them? The loser lost territory, resources, and freedoms.
Which isn't to say that Israel hasn't done some seriously unethical things, but this notion that the Palestinians are poor innocent victims that have never hurt a soul and carry no blame for their situation going back a century is absurd and ahistorical.
This conflict has nothing to do with "the Jews," and framing it in that way seriously distorts it.
It's a conflict between the native population of Palestine and people who came in from the outside with the goal of making Palestine their own. The outsiders won for a number of reasons (British backing, superior political organization, etc.). They now rule over the native population, most of whom they deny any rights to. They justify this by saying the native population deserves it because it hates them and resists them.
It is about the Jews, because the Arab population started violent conflicts against Jews who were legally purchasing land up through Israel's founding. Palestinians lost territory because of the violence they repeatedly started, despite legitimate military losses over territory and new borders drawn by armistices.
The Israelis could be Shinto or Sikh, and it would make no difference at all to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians just care that foreigners came in and took over their land.
By casting this as the Palestinians hating "the Jews," you're trying to frame the conflict as just another example of antisemitism. The Palestinians get cast in the role of the Nazis, and the Israelis get to pretend they're the victims of antisemitism.
The actual situation is completely flipped. The Israelis exercise military rule over the Palestinians and subject them to an apartheid system, not the other way around.
It’s not though. Before the British gifted land to the Israelis they owned 7% of the land through land purchases and just ended up with 51% of the land after pressuring the British to leave with a series hotel and car bombs. So, yeah the Palestinians were victims and then about 750,000 of those people were forced from their homes into crowded ghettos Nazi style. All of that occurred irrespective of any armed conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide are obviously not the same. If Israel's intent were to kill virtually all Gazans, that would be genocide, but it seems very plausible that they would be entirely satisfied if all Gazans just left Gaza, which would be ethnic cleansing.
Look, I remember this being discussed at the time as a euphemism to avoid the necessity for intervention.
The wikipedia article suggests that I'm not alone in this belief:
"Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group,[6][7] or calling it a euphemism for genocide or cultural genocide.[8][9]"
Prosecutorial discretion means they can just collect evidence and choose not to charge you unless they want to leverage you for something. This already happens, but universal surveillance means it can literally happen to anybody, because everybody breaks the law in some way due to how many laws we have.
Discretion is the real problem I think. It seems extreme, but maybe discretion should be eliminated: if you commit a crime you will be charged. This will at first result in way too much prosecution, which will lead to protests and hopefully repealing laws and we'd end up in a better place where the law is understandable and predictable by mortals.
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