I return to Reddit mostly to harvest memes to bring here, or to ask obscure questions that I don’t think there’s enough of an audience here to get a good answer (I’m still looking for the “The Swaggoraki are swarming!” pic, if any Warhammer meme fans can find it)

Apathy - the human constant

Maybe the Afghanis didn’t want to be a vassal state to the country that was invading them for 20 fucking years.

Luckily, as every good campist knows, the holsum Taliban, definitely not an imperialist catspaw of Pakistan which has been invading them for 30 fucking years, is widely beloved by comparison.

I mean, the Progressive Politics comm is run by campists who will accept any argument as long as it can loop back around to some form of critique of The West™. In that same thread is a commenter saying that violence is the only language those damn woman-educators understand.

Not sure why you expect them to remove this critique of the Western-backed Afghan government, regardless that it’s built on a racist premise. It’s against Bad Camp, after all!

.world

Sh.itjust.works

Sopuli.xyz

Lemmy.cafe

The purpose of a legal system is to provide consistent and coherent methods of conflict resolution that are superior for the functioning of general society than means outside of a system of centralized coercion for certain, sufficiently disruptive acts.

By this extremely broad definition, the legal system in my country, the USA, fulfills its purpose. But so would the legal system of fucking Napoleonic France.

More narrowly, a legal system should be oriented towards a standardized means of punishment and reform of those who disrupt the basic functioning of civil society.

By this narrower definition, my country only succeeds on ‘standardized means of punishment’, and even there arguably only partially. It largely fails at reform, and the punishments are both visited on those who do not disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (minor drug offenses, immigration crackdowns, anti-homeless legislation), and failed to be visited on many of those who do disrupt the basic functioning of civil society (gestures broadly at corporate America and the current coterie of fascists in power in government).

Do you think internal disorder is unlikely? There’s broad disinterest in helping the Palestinians in any way, but Israeli society disagrees about nearly everything else.

I think disagreements in Israeli society are relatively weak insofar as they all adhere to a common vision of Israel as a Jewish apartheid state. As long as there’s that to unite them - and make no mistake, at BEST 37/120 Knesset seats are held by non-Zionist parties, and more realistically, 14/120 - any crisis will bring together Israeli society in defense of that core existential concern.

Political disputes will continue, to very strong degrees. But there isn’t going to be some mass defection from the core existential idea of Israel or Israeli sovereignty, including over its hypermilitarized state.

My point isn’t that they’d glass the Middle East, my point is that the threat of even small-scale nuclear warfare is enough to ensure that Israel might be pushed back from imperialist projects, but never existentially threatened without massive internal disorder.

I would argue that the Levant is the least likely region of the Middle East to change with the coming decline in oil.

Uh, many occupations have done so, simply by genociding everyone of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity in the area.

‘Good’ doesn’t always win. The world is not inherently just.

We might not fully invade enemies often, but the Arabs definitely have.

The days of massive Pan-Arab socialist coalitions are over, and even back when they were still a threat, Israel beat them off pretty handily without significant US support.

Threats to Israel at this point are largely not existential, and if they were changed to existential threats, further radicalization seems more likely than redress and reconciliation. Especially considering Israel’s nuclear program.

What is your threshold for often?

When was the last time a country with a functioning military was overthrown by outside intervention?

I guess we can count Iraq, though that requires connecting the First Gulf War and the Second, since the First Gulf War is when the Iraqi military was last seriously functioning.

The best way to punish them is to give Isreali left wingers and “out” which allows them a path back to normalcy so they can take political power and condition that with punishment of high ranking war criminals and a two state solution. But this cant really happen due to the current US admin.

I think you overestimate the appetite of the Israeli left-wing for normalcy, a serious two-state solution, or punishing war criminals. Like I said, at best, you’ll get a handful of offenders from internal politiking. But the chance of there being some punishment for any significant percentage of the very large number of very active and intentional orchestrators of this genocide is… small. Zionism is unlikely to be meaningfully repulsed by anything but time, and that’s assuming a best-case-scenario that the problem doesn’t intensify.

People will fight to the death if they’re backed into a corner but they will throw a few people under the bus if given a path out.

Again, I consider that covered under my “Slobodan Milošević” scenario. Don’t get me wrong, seeing Bibi die in a prison cell would be based and hilarious. But even that would only be a drop of water in the ocean of blood.

But if by Zionists you mean anyone who wants isreal to exists then you are backing isrealis in to corner and guaranteeing the conflict continue to be played out.

By Zionists, I presumed it was meant those who see Israel’s existence as an explicitly Jewish apartheid state as core to its continuation. And as long as Israel remains Zionist in that sense, this shit will keep happening. Ethnostates are notoriously amiable to the whole lebensraum idea, regardless of whether it’s currently-occupied territory they’re looking at, or potentially occupied territory - or both.

Israel is one of the worlds most powerful militaries, if they wanted to get things over as quickly as possible they could have polished Gaza off on October the 8th.

Considering that the brutality of this war has only been matched by its incompetence, not so sure that’s correct.

Without that, they wouldn’t constantly be attacking other countries.

I don’t know that I agree. At this point, I think between the instability of their neighbors and the built-up siege-state of Israel itself, it would continue acting like a rogue state even if the US cut off funding.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t cut off funding - we absolutely should. And extend that ‘umbrella’ of protection to Israel’s neighbors, not Israel, which might at least reduce blatant incursions.

But I suspect that the response of Israel to reduced or eliminated US support would be to become even more militarized, not less.

We can’t. At least while the USA is a thing.

Even if the US wasn’t a thing, punishing Zionists wouldn’t be possible without subduing Israel through a literal war. Something which is not often attempted.

At best, we’d have the half-ass ‘punishment’ levied on states like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Djibouti, and North Korea, wherein the primary punishment is “It’s slightly harder and more expensive for the elite to get their precious foreign luxuries.”

Don’t get me wrong, that’s better than nothing. It’s just…

Prevention is generally a more fruitful avenue than punishment, when it comes to international polities and ideologies even with just regional majorities.

The chance of seeing genocidal cunts swing, or even acknowledge their wrongdoing, are generally small. Even the worst genocide of modernity, the Holocaust, had only a relatively small number of Nazis punished, despite literally every major extant power agreeing on how horrific their behavior was, and quite literally destroying all military capacity for the Nazis to resist and occupying every inch of their territory.

At most, you might get a handful of them in international courts by internal politiking, like Slobodan Milošević, but even then we’re unlikely to see the fully ‘cathartic’ end we want. “My dad is a war criminal” will still be sung proudly.

I don’t even disagree, it’s just not productive to constantly harp on this when we’ve all heard it a million times

Man, there are people who still believe that helping fascism win was a good idea. Look in this very comment thread, where people are openly extolling the virtues of having Trump win from a ‘leftist’ standpoint, and teaching those damn dirty SHITLIBS a lesson.

As long as those opinions remain widespread on here, it remains necessary to highlight just how morally repugnant they are.

A movement tried to make Palestine a relevant political issue for the electorate. It got stomped out.

No, it succeeded in its goal - making sure the fascist won.

I mean I wouldn’t call it a beacon of democracy, but all things are relative. I picked one of the more reasonable polities in MENA with a mostly-functioning multiparty system. The alternative would’ve been saying I hoped for Turkiye, but, uh, considering Erdogan’s behavior, I wasn’t sure I wanted to make that comparison as a positive.

My point is simply that there is still hope for Syria to improve into something better than it was - and certainly better than some immensely calcified repressive regime like Iran or the Saudis, and that this… immensely distasteful conservative dreck does not necessarily sink that hope.

We look for Syria to take a step forward, not to become Sweden in a decade (though that would, obviously, also be immensely welcome; just less likely). Institutions are built a year at a time, a battle at a time, not all once.

It was never going to be a liberal government. The rule is conservative dreck, make no mistake, but the norm was already for burkinis and other such swimsuits to be worn. It’s not a radical departure from extant behavior.

My concern, going forward, is more towards whether the government will resolve itself in a reasonably democratic way.

I’m not holding out hopes for a Tunisia, but a Jordan or Lebanon might be reasonable to cross one’s fingers for.

Workers taking action, love to see it.

Man, if being ineffective stopped Dem policy, we’d have a lot less Dem policy.