Exactly, and in my opinion, online discussions are not the place for the “unreasonable” tactics. It’s not really possible for an individual to be “louder” via text, and it’s not just the unreasonable person you are reaching. It’s all the people who may happen across the conversation later, and you have no way of knowing just how many of those are people that may still be swayed by reason.

Are you just not capable of viewing a conflict as anything other than absolute good vs absolute evil? Are you a person that believes the ends always justify the means? Who then gets to decide which ends are the most just?

You misunderstand my position. Maybe that’s on me for being too vague.

My position can be summed up as “talk softly, carry a big stick.” At no point does that necessitate compromising. When dealing with online discussions, it’s not just you and the person you are directly speaking to. There’s other people reading. Some of those people are the frothing at the mouth right wingers, who you are never going to reach anyway, and so they are irrelevant. On the other hand, some of those people will be the young, some will be the adults who are just become politically aware. These are all people who can be persuaded with logic, and you want on your side. None of that necessitates you compromising your ideals (and not should you).

The same thing applies to when you go out protesting. The point is to get more people on your side, without simply becoming what you are fighting against. So you should be peaceful, you should be respectful, but in the interest of not compromising, you should also be armed.

I think you need to think through the full implications of what it means when I say that all actions have consequences. I don’t just mean that in the context of Hamas’s actions. It applies to everyone. Hamas’s existence is a consequence of actions taken by a whole host of people (there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to any geopolitical issue in the middle east).

The point I’m trying to get across is that everyone is responsible for their own actions. No one get to use the “look what you made me do” excuse. It’s your fault for choosing to do a thing, and it may be someone else’s fault for forcing you into that choice. If you want to try to follow the butterfly effect backwards to some original fault to find someone to point at and go “it’s all their fault!”, good luck to you. There’s too many what-ifs. Does any of this happen if the Arab world doesn’t go to war with Israel off and on since the 40s? Does the US even think twice about Israel if there wasn’t the sunni schiite schism and the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy wars driving instability in the region? Do we blame it all on the British for drawing arbitrary lines across the map?

Honestly, when it comes to these types of conflict, I’m less concerned about the overall morality of the movement, and more concerned with the the individual actions, and even then, I’m generally more concerned with effectiveness, rather than whether or not it was “right”. That question tends to get very blurry as time goes on. Look at historical revolutions against monarchies like the French or Russian revolutions. Does the initial “righteousness” of the movement cover for actions that came later?

I’m a believer in being aware of and accepting the consequences of the choices you make, both good and bad. If there are bad consequences to your actions, you have to own the fact that you’ve either deemed those consequences as acceptable, or else you were unaware that it would happen. Everything is a choice, and all choices have consequences. Judging the right and wrong of it is a quagmire I try not to delve into. I think it’s much more useful to keep sight of what choices led to what consequences, and learn from that.

And this is the learning that I’m saying has to happen. Did that kidnapping work? Are their families safe? Did it effect nothing? Or, did it make things worse? What were the consequences of that action? That’s what I’m saying we have to not gloss over by making Hamas out to be innocent angels, and Israel the cartoon villains. In 20 years, if some freedom fighter on another continent looks to this conflict for inspiration, should they take away that everything Hamas ever did was a good idea, by the simple virtue that Israel was worse? Or should they actually learn?

Do I kidnap the home invader’s kid in response? The world is not as simplistic as you’d apparently like it to be.

Sometimes there are no good choices, but that doesn’t absolve you of the consequences of that choice you had to make.

The world isn’t made up of good guys and bad guys. Hamas doesn’t get a pass on their actions just because Israel committed worse. And my purpose in pointing this out is not to absolve Israel of their actions, it’s to ensure people remain aware of what actions are likely to result in what consequences.

My hope is that in the future, when some other fight for freedom starts up somewhere else, the people there can learn from what happened in Gaza. Learn which actions worked, which ones were futile, and which ones actively made things worse. That learning gets real muddy if we keep glossing the whole thing over with “Everything is only Israel’s fault”.

I’m old enough to remember the first Iraq. I’m also aware enough of history to understand that when you hold a group up as the innocent victims, when they were anything but, you create an environment where other groups emulate them down the road.

The Israeli government holds the lions share of the blame for the Gaza genocide, after all, they are the one’s doing it. But if we want to learn from this, and learn from what led up to it to hopefully short circuit things before they get this far in the future, we must acknowledge Hamas role.

Hamas may be fighting for the Palestinian people, but how you fight can have a major effect on how your enemies react, and also can have a major effect on soft support from third parties. Things like fighting out of civilian areas, and fighting without uniforms, etc, were made war crimes in the past specifically because of situations like this; it ends up getting civilians caught in the crossfire at best, and targeted at worst.

This isn’t a left/right position, this is just observations on what has happened globally every time an assymetrical war has been fought over the last 30 years.

Realistically, everyone holds some blame here. If the UN had some balls (and if the US and USSR could have pulled their heads out of their collective asses back in the seventies) there would have been peacekeepers and a two state solution after the first war. Probably should have made Jerusalem a city state like the Vatican, just to stop everyone fighting for control of that too.

Hamas doesn’t equal the entirety of the Palestinian population in the same way that the Israeli government/military doesn’t equal the entire Israeli population. Why is that so hard for you .ml tankies to separate? There’s a reason why I specifically make sure to phrase the discussion as “Hamas’s actions” not “the Palestinians’ actions”

Nobody is vilifying someone because they have different opinions on the importance of reading Shakespeare in high-school, or if they think, big centralised public libraries are a better option to lots of smaller public libraries.

No, but they are dumping people into that category in their mind, and then making all kinds of assumptions and conclusions about that person based off the one false assumption. And then because it’s the internet, the name calling starts and all constructive conversation ends.

Just look at this thread. I started it with “the current American political discourse sucks” and no-one commenting was able to take that statement at face value. Everyone replied with assumptions on what my stance was on issues I didn’t mention. It’s that exact reflex that I have a problem with. Essentially, I agree with the message, but I disagree with the delivery method.

Being called an extremist is not really the thing I’m taking issue with. The right wing has been doing that for decades, screeching “communist!” at the most ridiculous things. And depending on which particular ideals you subscribe to, being such an “extremist” is probably a good thing.

The issue I have is that instead of calling out that shitty behavior, the left has started emulating and expanding on it. In addition to calling everyone “fascist”, they’ve started attacking the entire concept of being a centrist (and I mean actual centrist here, not just right wingers arguing in bad faith). People aren’t born believing in one socioeconomic system or another, it’s learned. Generally, everyone is going to start off somewhere in the center, as they become politically aware. If the only voices they ever hear is two sides screeching names at eachother, you wind up with a disengaged and disinterested voting population, which will only help the fascists.

I never made any equivalences, stated any of my political opinions, or said anything other the fact that the current US political discourse sucks.

And things are only going to get worse because people like you would rather make up shit to get offended by, instead of doing anything that might get the majority on your side.

Wrong again. I’m trying to point out that it’s exactly this type of conversation that has been driving people away and making the left wing half of the US political spectrum completely impotent.

Found the source of the problem.

No two humans are going to agree on every point. If you vilify everyone that differs from you in the slightest, you are a detriment to your own cause.

But of course, no one actually wants to fix everything. They want to just make snarky comments online to feel superior.

And there’s the idiotic extrapolation I’m referring to. I’m talking about the discourse in general, not the specifics.

God I hate the current political discourse. You have extremists vs extremists, and now both sides are vilifying everyone that doesn’t blindly adhere to all their positions.

At the very least, you know your pilot is awake and has something to live for.

I’ve been seeing it pop up more in embedded/PC based devices. Seems to be replacing Windows XP and the other embedded Windows versions. Guess Microsoft wants too much for those licenses.

I’m not asking everyone to be able to become a hardware specialist, but if you can’t even figure out “my computer gets hot” I’m not going to be able to trust anything you do. Identifying a heat issue does not take a rocket surgeon.