SeventyTwoTrillion

It's quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They're not.

"Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you're the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying."

This is where the moronic "maybe the curtains are just blue" reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn't a racist caricature, it's just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they're less intelligent; that they're inherently subservient to men; that they "belong in the kitchen"; that they should be "barefoot and pregnant"; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said "Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they're the real sexists, not conservatives?" then you would, hopefully (though I'm not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Oh, okay, so you think that Israel is bombing Gazans. However, if they wanted to do this, first the bomb would have to fall half the distance to the ground. However, if we treat that as the new starting point, then the bomb then has to fall half the distance to the ground again. Repeat this until infinity and it's pretty obvious that it would take infinite steps for the bomb to hit the ground, and thus it is impossible for Israel to be bombing Gazans.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says "Idiocracy is a documentary!!!" and invoke Hanlon's Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Russia, China, and Iran (the last of which isn't even on that image) have hypersonic missiles, which effectively mean that aircraft carriers are now pre-sunk artificial coral reefs in a direct conflict with those countries. America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.

Surprisingly, if healthcare is governed by the profit motive instead of an actual duty of care towards people, then the people in charge of healthcare will focus more on making profits than on providing care.

Never you fear, the disparity between America and Europe will go down. Not because America will improve - god no, it'll get worse, even - but because the capitalists, backed by fascists, are here to loot European countries and rip the wiring out of the walls as the profitability crisis continues.

Because arriving at a party when there's not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren't already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible "Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!" analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it's allowed to be the exception is because it's a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world's oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it's also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you're not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there's a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it's extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase "... has a right to exist", it's always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this "right" in the West's eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn't. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it's one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas' victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of "X hates Y and so they're fighting" obfuscates a lot of what's actually going on geopolitically. It's extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn't mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn't to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn't just some inherently religious war.

I generally like Simplicius but this article sucks. It shows the limits of capital-L Liberal conspiracybrain, suggesting that everything the world over is connected and there are no real surprise events.

The part about Pearl Harbour at the beginning is actually quite illustrative of one of the big flaws of conspiratorial thinking like this, which is the "Everything Is A Hidden Message And You're A Smartypants If You Figure It Out" thing. For example, he says:

There are many circulating accounts of all the things that seem “off” about Hamas’ attack, so I won’t recount every single point here as most of you have likely read them in multiple places; things like the very implausible breach of Israel’s high tech gates and defenses, to the unprecedented failures of Mossad and Shin Bet, to Netanyahu’s eerily scripted invocation of ‘Pearl Harbor’, which is very telling considering that Pearl Harbor was also a falseflag attack with the purpose of bringing the U.S. into WW2.

(did I miss something about Pearl Harbour being a false flag? is that a thing? I admit my WW2 historical knowledge isn't that great as I like other time periods better. regardless:)

The implication here is "Netanyahu used the words 'Pearl Harbour', which isn't a coincidence! He was actually referring to how Pearl Harbor was a false flag, and therefore so is this attack! Aha! I am a 200 IQ very smart person for figuring out this hidden sign!" which is just bonkers; why would Netanyahu covertly spill his plan out to the world? What benefit would that give him? It's much more likely that he just reached for the biggest, most shocking event he and his scriptwriters could think of.

To Simplicius' credit, he does talk about how you could conceivably imagine either the US/Israel or Russia/Iran/China coming up with this masterplan, with it either benefiting US world hegemony or destroying it, depending on what facts you look at and consider compelling. I don't think either narrative is convincing. If the West had planned it in advance, then they would have known that it would have ruined the Saudi normalization deal. Simplicius says that that could be the point because normalization < neverending chaos in the region, but frankly I think there's much more in it for the West to have everybody on their side as much as possible. If Iran had planned it in advance, my understanding is that Iran's government is fairly compromised - I don't know to what degree, but stuff seems to spill out one way or another (and, to be fair, Israel's government may also be fairly compromised if rumours are true). Such plans to do this uprising would have been leaked in advance.

Israel created Hamas!

It was already being razed in slow motion. It was an open air prison in desperate poverty. It was a concentration camp that the demons in charge of Nazi Germany would have given their fullest approval.

Dunking on them, or doing idiotic "play stupid games, win stupid prizes!!!" shit is like watching Jewish people trying to escape the Warsaw ghetto in an uprising and then watching the Nazis exterminate them and then saying "Well! If they didn't want this to happen, the Jews shouldn't have resisted! They should have calmly and peacefully allowed themselves to be taken to the concentration camps!"

Palestine had the choice of a guaranteed slow death by drowning, or a quick end to the conflict - one way or another. Decades have gone by and nobody outside of the Middle East (apart from the DPRK and a couple others) really give a shit about Palestine. All the back and forth of "ohh where should we put our embassies? ohoho, should we acknowledge that Palestine is a state? ohoho!" achieved nothing. Ten million people could have protested across Europe every single day for decades for the liberation of Palestine, and it would have accomplished less than a single Palestinian soldier making a single rocket to be shot down by the Iron Dome. All the diplomatic shit means nothing. It has meant nothing for decades. Even peaceful protest of Israel in the form of BDS is basically outlawed in some places, and largely ineffectual regardless.

Palestinians shouldn't, and almost certainly don't, give a shit about the condemnations of western countries. About what western politicians are saying about them. It means nothing. Their strategies should be independent of "how it looks to outsiders". A Palestinian could throw a pebble in the vague direction of an Israeli soldier and receive more condemnation from the media than Israel murdering a hundred thousand Palestinian civilians in bombing raids in retaliation. "If you didn't want the bombing raid, you fucking stupid idiot, then MAYBE you shouldn't have thrown that pebble! Play stupid games!" Who gives a shit about "how it looks" anymore.

I do have a question for you: let's say Russia takes, say, Kramatorsk, surrounding it such that no civilians could escape. Imagine those civilians resisted, made Molotovs, fired improvised explosions at the Russians, and the Russians responded by carpetbombing Kramatorsk. Hundreds of civilians dead every single day. I then say "Well, looks like the civilians have guaranteed their own deaths, then. Well done, fucking idiots. Shouldn't have fired those rockets at the Russian military if you wanted to live." Would you be in my position, angry that you could possibly think that about a group of people valiantly resisting? How you could possibly look at the buildings being toppled by Russian bombs and think that was justified?

To demoralize Israel. Which it has been, severely.