What could make a racism so institutionalized it’s written into the Constitution liberalism? What about a constitution that would allow such provisions to be amended? I agree they are outmoded in purpose and spirit and should be amended. I won’t go so far as to say they existed for no reason or for an offensive reason ab initio. Even if I did believe that, it’s irrelevant to reality: Israel is there and it began as an ethnostate.

The logical conclusion to your position is that you believe Israel doesn’t have a right to exist / defend itself, unless and until it amends the offensive provisions of its constituon. Is that your belief?

I don’t find arguments about who lives there now and who used to live there compelling at all. They fall apart just at face value when the earliest historical record has the land occupied by Hebrew-speaking bronze-age people called Judites. That is to say the land records are a total crapshoot of lands changing hands, peoples changing identities, cultures changing over time, and shifting borders. It’s also futile because, again, Israel is there now, is a nuclear power, and any plan forward must realistically account for this (Israel is going to defend itself).

Suppose Israel amends the offensive provisions, annexes all the disputed borderlands, and naturalizes every person therein with full rights and privileges, but then Iran and others in the region don’t stop funding terrorism at Israel’s borders and don’t stop carefully cultivating a culture of martyrdom and anti-western and anti-liberal violent extremism? Are we not right back where we started?

No doubt. I’ve seen some organizing though. There are some homeless individuals around me who are members of regional organizations at least. They use technology and organize locally.

Palestinians in the “occupied” territory aren’t citizens of Israel; they don’t want to be and the world doesn’t want them to be. People would flip their shit at a one state solution, they’d be self imolating all over the place. What you’re suggesting is called annexation. I’d support annexation if it would stop all the pointless killing and help democratize the region. If Palestinians wanted to be Israeli, there wouldn’t have been 100 years of terrorism on both sides or even now, we’d be talking about lawful occupation and jurisdiction of under terra nullius, or irredentism.

Actual experts at the UN disagree strongly, and have no consensus on this. I went to school with some of them and was a better student. Some others of them, as it turns out, were actually far-right religious terrorists themselves, and were using the UN for decades as a platform to teach generations of Palestinian kids the honor of martyrdom culture and terror culture.

Here’s the thing about Desmond Tutu and other legal scholars who wrote comparative-law content on Palestine and apartheid (lower case a): “like” and “as” don’t mean the same thing.

There was a lot of legal scholarship for a while around the time that the world turned on South Africa, and for years after, during reconstruction, when it was trendy to draw comparisons to Apartheid (big A). I concede that interested people have taken that comparative work, and misquoted it to suggest that there was any kind of serious scholarship saying that Israel-Palestine was as apartheid, until it became truth for some people. I disagree with them. Racially oppressive government’s exist all over the world, yet the world has not turned on them as it turned on South Africa in an such a unanimous and unprecedented way. It was really something to behold. And even afterward, all the help and support the world gave South Africa with reconstruction: so many people were so proud to help launch a new democracy, to write from scratch a constitution for a modern nation that was freeing itself from being oppressors and its people for being oppressed.

Desmond Tutu’s work doesn’t support that he believed Palestine was literally the same as apartheid (small a), he drew certain comparisons, said certain policies were apartheid-like, and I agree. Correct me if I’m wrong. Certain policies in America are apartheid-like, too. Also, if memory serves, it was only in the last few years of his life that Tutu stopped being offended by such comparisons and started making them himself. Nelson Mandella never said it was equivalent. Correct me if I’m wrong. I agree Palestinians are oppressed people. I disagree with the Lemmy Zeitgeist about who has led them to oppression and who maintains it.

In any event, one thing Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu agreed on, and I agree with wholeheartedly, is that the cure for Apartheid or apartheid, and for systemtic oppression in all forms, is democratic governance enshrined in a written Constitution with clear minoritarian rights–freedom of speech, assembly, and a right to petition, due process of law, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment–the kind of rights that religious law cannot ever provide because religious law doesn’t have them to give and claims for itself a right to take rights away by religious proclamation, which is antithetical and mutually exclusive to democracy, a constitution, or minoritarian rights.

That is to say that, if your opinion is that Israel-Palestine is apartheid, you must agree that the cure for it as it was in South Africa is democratic governance. If you’re not totally ignorant or brainwashed, you must also agree that the first step to making that happen is to dispose of Hamas and Hezbollah. Can we agree on that?

No and no.

Would be nice to see them all organize and descend on Washington, a tent city wave vis a vis the Bonus March in 1932.

I wonder how bad homeless would need to get before major reform. Camps are going to keep popping up until they overwhelm local resources, and then disperse some, a microcosmic cycle of ruralization and urbanization, with greater and greater capacity, and more and more sophisticated systems of public services, trade, and justice, until existing institutions and policies are replaced by popular hobo demand.

What’s more, increasing poverty and homelessness is a major social, economic, public wellness, and national security issue that, in addition to not going away anytime soon, is something I think most Americans find compassion for, and even demand action on, when it’s face to face, people like themselves.

It’s like, as the oceanliner sinks, and the 99% have to fight for a few life boats and a piece of door, while the 1% fly away on a helicopter, the 99% must realize they were exponentially closer to being in the same boat together than any of them were to being on the helicopter.

Nobody thinks innocent people deserve to die, that’s what innocent means. Don’t have to deserve it to be killed incidentally, which is inevitable in war, and yet war can still be just.

As an aside, these are not distant, national, state-actor regimes. They are hyper-local partisans, non-state actors who are classified by most of the western world as terrorist organizations, doing things that most of the western world, including the ICJ, considers to be criminal: shooting 1,000 rockets a month as Israeli civilians.

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Apartheid. Give me a break.

I remember apartheid. The minority race didn’t let the majority race vote, citizens of the same country. That was what turned the world against South Africa, made Apartheid a crime against humanity.

Israel is an apartheid state because they don’t let people from terra nullius vote in their elections? Okay buddy.

Okay take it up with political science. I didn’t invent the terms.

They will have another election soon and can popularly reverse course, right?

I would say that, as people go, as the long arc of history bends slowly toward truth and justice, as human rights are hard won and hard kept, Israel is a diamond in the rough. I’m reminded of the words of Marquis de Lafayette, a rich French kid who joined the military at age 13, on the eve of the American Revolutionary War, which he volunteered to come over and fight, when he said “the good fortune of America is closely tied to the good fortune of all humanity.”

At that time, obviously America still had a thriving slave trade; it wasn’t about what America was right then, but what the idea of it could be, what the ideals of representative democracy could do for human kind.

Realize how crazy of an idea it is, how astonishing it is that in any place in any time, it came to be that there were no kings and the people chose their leaders? Prior to that, the law was literally “the king can do no wrong.”

To even break free of the mental shackles of that kind of dark-ages governing took modern mankind hundreds and hundreds of years, spark to flame, and has been widely regarded as a great idea, having secured real civil and human rights to billions of people. How I see it anyway.

I’ll take one shitty liberal democracy before I take five shitty far-right religious dictatorships.

Dude wants to sabotage the US on purpose to give Russia an advantage.

And then for every question, totally ignore the question and just keep listing lies.

That’s because he’s a loser with a loser mentality.

Well shit was it four or was it five?

I sort of agree it’s a good idea but c’mon, the worst trip anyone I know has ever had was just a lot of crying and sadness.

This dude chopped off his dick. That’s not the mushrooms doing.

Mushrooms did not induce anyone to cut their dick off. What an absurd statement. Dude was already fully psychotic, as anyone who has eaten mushrooms can tell you.

I’m assuming a scenario where the perpetrators are killed on the scene, and the actual masterminds are already in Iran or in Iranian proxy territory, and for some time after the attack, their identities unknown to the west.

It’s certainly not beyond Iran and its proxies to keep someone hidden in total luxury for the rest of their life.

In a scenario where the perpetrators or planners have somehow made it to Iran and are known to the West, no, for sure, sovereignty will not stop the West from getting them.

They’d be in Iran.

No they don’t.

You’re better off taking a few minutes to really relax your muscles in your neck and back. Start by breathing in as deep as you can into your belly, then in the same breath, switch to your lungs, and breathe in as deeply as you possibly can until it hurts, and then exhale. Do that for a minute and then when you think you can’t possibly breathe in any deeper, breathe in deeper still.

If you do this for a few minutes and feel crazy muscle spasms in your neck and back, you need to start taking a lot more deep, relaxing breaths.