While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Crezth]

This reminds me of that one time I said "modding is easy, modding well is hard" and Crezth threatened to haul me before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of #nes and have me disembowled. Suddenly it turns out I was right.

How do you think you still had a point after what fc did? I don't understand how you think your banal observations are remotely interesting when they're the intellectual equivalent of saying "Writing a novel is easy, you only have to put X amount of words in order." It's true, but it's so trivially true it's meaningless. It's literally robotic arts. "Beep-boop I have put words on paper; novel acquired."

You're only sad because we didn't stroke you off to your AWESOME and ORIGINAL DO NOT STEAL insights. By the way, how's LENES coming? Modding is easy, bro.

 

[Luckymoose]

I wish I was 12 again. I knew so much about the world then. People should have written it down.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Back before you encountered my insidious, corrupting influence.

 

[Luckymoose]

Back before you encountered my insidious, corrupting influence.

I, as Symph said, would rather not talk about anything I said prior to about a year or two ago.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I consider myself an intellectual because I read Wikipedia articles for fun.

That's my quote of the day, right here!

This reminds me of that one time I said "modding is easy, modding well is hard" and Crezth threatened to haul me before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of #nes and have me disembowled. Suddenly it turns out I was right.

Coooooomraaaaaades, why did you not tell me we had a revolutionary tribunal?

 

[Lord of Elves]

How do you think you still had a point after what fc did? I don't understand how you think your banal observations are remotely interesting when they're the intellectual equivalent of saying "Writing a novel is easy, you only have to put X amount of words in order." It's true, but it's so trivially true it's meaningless. It's literally robotic arts. "Beep-boop I have put words on paper; novel acquired."

You're only sad because we didn't stroke you off to your AWESOME and ORIGINAL DO NOT STEAL insights. By the way, how's LENES coming? Modding is easy, bro.

As usual your debate style is about as close as you can get to intellectual masturbation.

Get a room.

 

[Crezth]

Art thou mad, brother?

 

[Luckymoose]

Getting a room for masturbation would be a poor financial decision. What do they teach you lazy ass kids these days?

 

[erez87]

It's intriguing to me that when a (brown, Muslim) man steals a bulldozer in Jerusalem and does some damage with it out of frustration with his circumstances, he's a terrorist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_bulldozer_attack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Jerusalem_bulldozer_attack

When a (white, Christian) man steals a tank or turns a bulldozer into one in America and does some damage with it out of frustration with his circumstances, he's just a criminal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Nelson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer

Curious.

I think it depends on the reasoning for the attack. And on your definition of Terrorist I guess.

 

[Shadowbound]

You mean the killdozer? That wasn't a criminal: that was a supervillain.

 

[Kozmos]

When Hamas praises your attack and your victims turn out to be ultra-orthodox jude laws its kind of expected to be thrown into the 'death to kuffars' camp of people.

 

[Grandkhan]

To be fair, the guy in jerusalem in 2008 was a habitual drug abuser who had a psychotic break before driving a front-loader into a traffic jam screaming "Allahu Akbar."

We know nothing about the motivations of the most recent heavy civilian vehicle attack, so an act of terrorism can't be ruled out.

"Frustration with his circumstances," one ain't and one might well not be.

 

[Symphony D.]

"Frustration with his circumstances," one ain't and one might well not be.

I don't see how anything you said invalidates the assertion that he was frustrated with his circumstances. Why do you suppose he was abusing drugs? Why do you think he had a psychotic break? Mohamed Bouazizi wasn't frustrated, he was just suicidal! Did you know all Buddhist monks are secretly pyromaniacs? It's actually a requirement to become one!

Anyway, considering basically none of the shooting sprees in the US have been treated as terrorist acts, with the exception of the Tsarnaev brothers (who set off a bomb at a public event), murder, even mass murder is clearly not the threshold for terrorism, regardless of the mental state and motivations of the person in question. Behavior specifically undertaken with the intent of terrorizing someone else (stalking, rape, etc.) is not the threshold for terrorism, even when this action is undertaken for explicitly political purposes (say, abortion clinic bombings). So realistically, Americans, at least, should not be describing bulldozer attacks as terrorism, unless terrorism is defined as "when someone non-white/American does something bad," which given all of the above, is probably the actual working American definition anyway.

In unrelated Minecraft news, currently producing 8.5 million cobblestone per hour.

 

[erez87]

It probably is... Which is obvious racism. But defintions can be tough.

 

[Symphony D.]

No, definitions merely present inconveniences for certain people whom would prefer their actions be described in less frank terms.

 

[erez87]

No, definitions merely present inconveniences for certain people whom would prefer their actions be described in less frank terms.

I see those people who blow up abortion clinics as terrorists. I define it terrorism as doing things that aim at hurting civilians and causing fear. Nationalistic (religious) terrorism is just one type...

 

[Symphony D.]

So do I. Why do you suppose media and politicians don't call it that when it clearly is? Because it'd be inconvenient.

In the same way as calling the IDF flattening a neighborhood over a soldier who was already dead "disproportionate" or anything stronger (and more accurate) would also be inconvenient.

 

[ChiefDesigner]

In the same way as calling the IDF flattening a neighborhood over a soldier who was already dead "disproportionate" or anything stronger (and more accurate) would also be inconvenient.

So, what's your solution?

Put yourself in the shoes of an Israeli policymaker. What do you do differently?

 

[Symphony D.]

So, what's your solution?

Put yourself in the shoes of an Israeli policymaker. What do you do differently?

I already offered a solution in this very thread. If you want to stop tunnels, dig. If you want to stop an oppressed population from retaliating in whatever way they possibly can, stop oppressing them. Lift the blockade. The way to delegitimize Hamas is to stop making them look attractive, and the way to do that is stop making everyone in Gaza feel helpless and besieged. Likewise, keeping the Palestinians as a shackled colonial population just entrenches and perpetuates their resentment.

This isn't a hard problem. It's only difficult to implement solutions because a notable percentage of the Israeli population now thinks that they're entitled to the whole thing and that blowing up Palestinians is just the price to be paid for it. So you have these Israeli civilians interviewed on TV in open air cafes talking about how dreadful the (almost totally ineffectual) rocket attacks are, and how psychologically scarring air raid sirens are (as if people in say, Seoul, haven't been hearing them for 60 years) completely without irony as their military flattens civilian neighborhoods and blows up UN schools. The moral, ethical, and logical choice as a policymaker would be to play the long-term game and to tell such people to go screw themselves and stand up to the hardliners who are just perpetuating the situation for short-term gain. You would promptly be voted out but at least you'd have done the right thing.

As it is, I have to wonder: don't you think the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto would've fired rockets at the Nazis if they'd had any idea what was coming? "The Israelis would never do something like that to the Palestinians!" And how would the Palestinians know that on the basis of how they're being treated? They're already being treated more or less like blacks in Apartheid-era South Africa. Several members of Likud already treat them like a statistical rounding error that just has to be cancelled out. They're already spoken of as "the enemy" with "[ethno-cultural-religious-racial]" only just barely missing from the middle of the construction.

Somebody else summed it up pretty well elsewhere:

Okay, this is a fair point. Yes, we're all drenched in blood, historically and recently. Hell, up until the 70s my own country was running a bona-fide eugenics program aimed at the Roma, the Sami, the mentally handicapped and ill, etc. etc. etc. All of European and American history is pretty much us butchering each other for no good reason, followed by going round the entire world and heaping atrocity on atrocity by murdering or maiming the out of the people already living there. We've traded other human beings like chattel, we've pushed drugs onto unwilling countries, we've raped and pillaged and murdered. None of us have the moral high-ground.

That being said, however, we eventually (finally) realized that what we were doing was in point of fact not only utterly counterproductive, but also morally wrong. Which is why I suspect a lot of us are going "What the holy is Israel doing" and why there's so much pushback and angry yelling in the thread right now; We already know where this comes from, where it inevitably leads, what the final act will be like, and personally, I'd rather not see it happen again, ever. The reason we know where this is going to end up if things continue as they are, is precisely because of our own histories.

For me, this isn't about being "morally superior" to any and all Israelis, it's about pointing out that the Israeli government and army are in the process of committing a series of escalating and frankly hideous crimes against the Palestinians, crimes that a not insignificant proportion of the Israeli population at least seem to support. In a sense, at least in my case ( and maybe with others in this thread, who knows ), Israel did its work too well;

If you want to blame something, blame hammering the words "never again" into us so hard that we also think it should apply to Palestinians.

Let me ask you a question. What's really the difference between all this and the Madagascar Plan?

“The day after peace talks fail, we need to have Plan B,” said Knesset member Tzipi Hotovely, a rising star in the Likud party and deputy minister of transportation in Netanyahu’s government.

Instead of a sovereign Palestinian nation arising in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital — which has been the focus of on-again, off-again peace negotiations since the Oslo Accords in 1993 — the two-state opponents envision Israel annexing large swaths of the West Bank.

While once content to simply voice their opposition to giving up what they see as Jewish land or rights in the West Bank, these two-state opponents have gone beyond shouting “no” and are preparing details of their own vision for how Israel should proceed unilaterally after the current round of peace talks fails — which they say is inevitable.

As for the Gaza Strip and its 1.6 million inhabitants, which Palestinians consider central to any future nation, the Israeli expansionists say Gaza should be abandoned to its own fate — to be eventually absorbed by Egypt or left as a hostile semi-state, run by the Islamist militant organization Hamas and isolated from Israel by existing separation barriers.

As for the Palestinians living in the West Bank, depending on the ideas under discussion, the annexationists suggest that they be offered Israeli citizenship or residency or be made the responsibility of Jordan.

“I think we should no longer think of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but Palestinian settlements in Israel,” Danny Danon, deputy defense minister, said in an interview.

Danon, recently elected to head the central committee of the Likud party, imagines an archipelago of Palestinian cities — Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron — as Arab islands in an Israeli sea.

[...]

Uri Ariel, the housing minister, has said he would start with Area C and continue to assert sovereignty in stages to eventually annex all of the West Bank.

Ariel said Palestinians who wish to become citizens would have to apply and meet criteria such as speaking Hebrew and pledging allegiance to Israel.

Hotovely, the deputy transportation minister, said she envisions annexing all of the West Bank and granting its residents full Israeli citizenship. She said her Greater Israel would remain democratic and Jewish by encouraging the mass migration of Jews from around the world to Israel.

“This is not a binational state. There will still be 70 to 75 percent Jews, with a large minority of Palestinians,” Hotovely said. “Israel can live with this reality.”

And: what do you suppose Plan C is when this Plan B inevitably doesn't go off without the Palestinians fighting tooth and nail against it? Moshe Feglin has an answer: concentration camps.

 

[Kozmos]

Provided things go on as they have in the past without major upsets I think Israel will keep this up until its offensive and defensive technology far outstrips anything their Loyal Opposition can patch together and they lose all hope entirely and just give up and/or move elsewhere. Then again people keep wowing to rebuild their homes in tornado alleys and flood valleys so....