3,058 Forum Posts by "lapis"
At 1/27/10 11:21 AM, Luxury-Yacht wrote: Why should they ban burqas that show the face?
Because burqas cover the face by definition, so that's a contradiction in terms. Picture.
At 1/6/10 08:57 AM, awkward-silence wrote: It does make me wonder what course of action the ineffective TSA will take if a terrorist uses a supository explosive [its not that far fetched, people smuggle coke up there]
The successor to the body scanner will be the automated cavity searcher. Hey, if you have nothing up your butt then you have nothing to fear. Why does this make me think of that one South Park episode where Butters gets "tested" using a huge red-tipped vibrator?
Also, those images posted above were not sexy at all. Apparently, it's easy to digitally recolour the images to make them more..., let's say interesting (slightly nsfw). Maybe airport officials will now stop being such sourpusses.
At 1/8/10 11:52 AM, lapis wrote: using the amount of actual times the query was entered in my region/language area,
On the other hand, I wonder how many people used the exact phrase "obama is literally hitler" as a search query.
Does the recommend feature vary per region? I get different results and I can see the number of results per search phrase - I guess the sort the results using the amount of actual times the query was entered in my region/language area, not using the number of results.
At 1/3/10 05:52 PM, DizzeeRascal wrote: Just because Axis forces were defeated in North Africa doesn't mean the Italians didn't put up a good fight, which in many areas, they did.
Dude, they fought out a few of what were at best skirmishes with British recon troops before retreating, being counterattacked and losing a buttload of soldiers and material. I don't think that qualifies as good.
and not enough mechanised units, meaning they were far less mobile than the German troops dooming them.
Isn't that hindsight? If the Maginot Line was never going to be flanked, why would they need to be mobile? You don't need to be quick if you just want to hold your fortifications, and they held out fine for months until the Germans crossed the Ardennes. I mean, you only prepare for a new type of war if you expect that the way that wars are fought is going to change. The way the war was "fought" before May of 1940 was well suited for heavy fortifications.
But anyway, we're hijacking this thread and turning it into a WW2 topic. Let's talk about Berlusconi getting smacked in the face with a cathedral replica. Or let's reenact it online. I also like the earlier mentioned subject of body hair, let's delve into that.
At 1/2/10 09:31 PM, DizzeeRascal wrote: Italian forces in Africa did fare quite well, as they were the cream of the Italian army. They were more let down by the lack of supplies, mostly fuel from their German allies. Really they did no worse than the Germans and in some cases, far better.
Well, the possible causes, poor planning and/or lack of motivation, don't really change my assertion that I can't think of any noteworthy good fights that the Italians put up during the war, although they might have been better at serving as support units during fights that the Germans put up in North Africa than the Free French were able to support the Allies. I don't think there's much of a difference, though.
As for France, they did have fairly good reasons for leaving the Belgian border unprotected.
Didn't De Gaulle warn against putting too much faith in the Maginot Line? Anyway, if we assume that the Maginot Line was destined to be flanked then I don't see much else that the French could have done to avert the collapse of their country that isn't inspired by the strength of hindsight.
As for what they achieved, they did take Ethiopia, and force a humiliating climbdown of the Greeks prior to the war.
Exactly :)
I can't believe I forgot to mention the failed Italian invasion of Greece. Also, to clarify, I'm not saying that my country did anything meaningful to swing the war either way. But Italy actually had the potential to achieve something. While France can really only be blamed for having made a terrible strategic blunder by completely focusing on the Maginot line and leaving the border with Belgium unfortified, Italy has a whole string of humiliating defeats (given its potential) on its track record with nothing to compensate for it. It's just weird.
At 1/2/10 02:21 PM, Ericho wrote: Of course, they still managed to put up a better fight than the French at least.
Could you mention any fight that the Italians put up during WW2? From what I know, the Italian advance in North Africa stranded when the Italian forces sighted British troops and realised that further progression without German support could actually result in them having to exchange fire with the army of a nation that was more powerful than Albania or Ethiopia (against which they had previously lost a war). And, if I'm not mistaken, when the Allies landed in Italy itself nearly all Italian forces that could not call on the Germans for aid surrendered immediately.
See what I'de like to hear are some points or opinions on wether the West is dying or thriving or neither.
I heard from a Chinese colleague that they celebrate Christmas now in cities like Shanghai and Nanjing. Nothing that Jesus would approve, just a celebration of hedonism carried out in the form of shopping sprees in malls decorated with Christmas trees and appropriate lighting.
At the same time the Chinese government is forcing companies such as Google to use censorship if they want to delve into the Chinese market. I mean, it all depends it what you consider to really define "the West". Ask a Western politician about what he thinks are important values and he'll give you something like liberty or freedom or democracy. Yet those ideas are currently being curbed and constrained in powerful countries such as China and Russia. But I guess that Western culture, or at least the superficial apsects of it, are spreading.
I mean, it's probably best to first clearly define what you mean by "the West", or at least split up the different aspects of the "the West" before a cogent discussion about the spread and/or decay of its influence can take place.
Israel is just making stuff harder for itself in the future, nothing more.
And that's bad? This is going to sound like something an aspiring Miss World might say, but I want peace. This is making peace harder.
Or that. But no. He wants his coalition together. I'm convinced he wants to officially say he stopped but he can't.
Let's agree to disagree.
Democracy has long time ago lost it's literal meaning of "Democracy".
Like "nation" became to refer to a state, and like "anti-Semitism" became to refer to hatred for Jews - even by other Semites. I'm not saying you're the only one who uses this, well, different definition of demoracy, but it would please me if people would use the terms correctly.
Today country that has elections isn't a democracy.
Agreed, in a way. They need to be fair and meaningful.
But their media is already control.
Hmm, you didn't answer this earlier, but you really do think that Italy isn't a democracy? Berlusconi controls nearly all television coverage in Italy and that's the main news source for most (older) Italians.
1) Or i could just as well say that The Westerns nations are indirectly responsible because they were too libral with the Palestinians and backed them after horrible acts they committed, just because they are poor, and showed them they could do what ever they want, ruining peace, and still be supported. Right?
And Taiwan is partially to blame. And Micronesia. The answer to whether a country is to blame is not binary: there's a wide scale of amount of blame that a state can have. Europe's influence in this conflict has been negligible during the past two or three decades, and the US has always backed Israel (still - current US pressure on Israel is meaningless as Netanyahu knows that the US will back him when push comes to shove).
2) Collective punishment is punishment. No one is punishing, Israel is just defending itself from the rockets it's getting. The civilians killed are not killed by collective punishment, but by Hamas using them as human shields by launching rockets from civilian areas.
Dude, even in this post you stated that if we "would show them that [the Palestinians'] acts have consequences, they wouldn't do them and we probably had peace right now". When you inflict consequences to correct certain unwanted behaviour, then you're punishing, in the narrowest possible sense of the word.
In Europe the default opinion of a person is pro-Palestinian, because of the media.
It should be pointed out that the media here are mostly trying hard to be unbiased. But reports about what's going on in Israel are not always accompanied by a complete narration of the long series of events that preceded the news item.
Then if he goes and honestly investigates the conflict people get more and more neutral.
Meh. I tend to be a bit more neutral in personal discussions about the issue, but this is the Internet where I'm anonymous and can shout whatever I like without reprimands in real life.
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Somewhat related note: I'll be rather busy next week and weekend (conference) so if you post a reply to this, then don't see a response for a week and suddenly notice that the thread has been bumped it's because I wasn't able to respond earlier.
At 11/20/09 09:01 AM, gumOnShoe wrote: Yeah, but all the statistics point to a fixed election anyway by the Baaj. So, its still probably not a democratically elected president.
Statistics? You mean exit polls?
There would always be people who claim that. In that case they were insignificant.
Unfortunately, yes. But they were right.
And the Westerns, Arabs and many Israelis all together supported it and were sure there is going to be peace.
Diplomats are always "sure" there is going to be peace. Western diplomats are still "convinced" that the Road Map will be a success story.
Did you even read the article? You saw what the
The ...?
Where did you even bring that isolating position from?
Knowlegde of the values that the UN tends to stand for?
You can lie to yourself as much as you want but Hamas was elected for the simple feature of vowing to fight Israel and claiming they would never recognize the Israeli state.
As I said before, another big reason for Hamas' poll victory was the fact that corruption was rife within the Fatah government. "When asked why they chose Hamas, the highest ratio (43.0%) of Palestinians who
voted for Hamas said they did vote for Hamas with the hope of ending the corruption
and a ratio of (18.8%) voted for Hamas for religious reasons. Only (11.8%) voted for
Hamas because of its political agenda."
People tend not to like corruption when they don't profit from it.
The area was just a land until the beginning of Palestinian nationalism that followed the Israeli formation of The Palestinian Authority. Doubtfully you remember how the issue came up, but you claimed that the situation would be comparable if NATO forces built settlements in Iraq in Afghanistan.
I said that because, unlike you, I don't believe there's much of a moral difference to begin with. I think settlement in another people's land is wrong, period. I'm not enough of a rabiate leftwinger to not believe in the existence of nations (again, in the narrow definition). Then I consider a nation's territory to be land that is historically used by that nation, with the focus being on the use per se, not on the functionality or the intensity of the use. I believe that all people of a nation living in territory that belongs to that nation should have self-determination in that territory, which includes being able to prevent unwanted settlement or the founding of another state on that territory. In my opinion, it doesn't necessarily include military control, though, and whether the nation actually controls that territory through a (nation-)state is even less relevant.
That's why I'm against mass Han settlement in Tibet and Xinjiang, Jewish settlement in the occupied territories or hypothetical settlement of Brits in Iraq. Statehood is not a factor to be taken consideration - actually I don't support an independent Tibet (or Xinjiang) and I wouldn't care if the West Bank was reannexed to Jordan - as long as the Jordanian government looks after the self-determination of the Palestinians.
The reason I was focusing on Iraq was that your first response to my post included faulty reasoning (especially the reference to the decades of statehood) - and which you've watered down now, going by what you just wrote. But I realise that only firing at your reasoning without positing my own is unconstructive and maybe a bit cocky.
Israel conquered the areas in legitimate wars.
Meh. Israel conquered them (especially the Strip) during a preemptive war - and preemptive wars form a subset of the aggressive wars; they are legitimate aggressive wars, one might say. While I don't disagree with Israel reasons for going to war in 1967, I find annexing territory during an aggressive war to be immoral. The settlement in those territories is only augmenting the suckiness from my point of view.
Usually when people discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they call the '1993-2000 era' Oslo accords.
I don't consider that to be usual, and especially when you refer to an offer made during the 2000 Camp David summit it's at least odd to say that it happened in "the Oslo accords". Even more so when you then specify that this happened after the creation of the PA, which is also directly related to the Oslo Summit. That's also why I think you're just trying to cover up that you made a mistake, but whatever, there's not much else to discuss here.
You know what's killing me? I wonder how deep you had to dig in the internet and how selective with the facts you read you had to be, all just not to admit you had it wrong with your East-Jerusalem assumption.
I went to source-farming hotspot Wikipedia, and found this as the first link that was saying something about the Jeruslam issue specifically - confirming what I knew and on the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Familiar with the word conclusion?
Dude? Barak is summarising what happened during the negotiations after the conclusion of summit. What are you getting at?
During the talks Israel DID offer East-Jerusalem, not the Americans, not the Israelis and not even the Palestinians deny it.
And neither did I. The only one was you thanks to a mistake, which I found and still find to have been comic gold.
It's ridiculous how disgustingly arrogant you act (Comic gold),
Broham, please just read the quote that you just posted. It says that 91% of the West Bank was offered to be returned. Now I'm going to guess that the remaining 9% included the outskirts of East Jerusalem.
The creaming on the cake here is of course that a mere two paragraphs above this you accuse me of not "remembering how the issue came up". In all fairness, I put the way this issue came up in the little summary of the discourse in my previous post AND put an underlined reference to what we were discussing in the quoted text that accompanied my post.
Again, though, I'm only shooting at your posts and not being constructive (like Arafat, lololol). About Barak's offer: I think it was mostly great and I can agree with annexing certain settlements on the border in return for Palestinian villages that are now part of Israel. But the outskirts of East Jerusalem are important for the demographic composition of the city. Having a capital that's basically a peninsular enclave (is there even going to be corridor that connects East Jerusalem with the rest of the West Bank? But I assume yes) in a Judaified city is a big prestige blow and considering that the reason for this are settlements that are built on the "Palestinian" side of the 1949 border I think it's best to tear them down.
If Arabs didn't exist, the whole conflict wouldn't have happened. Typical biased thought.
Splendid. And your thought isn't biased?
ISRAEL SHOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED.
That's not a given. Why shouldn't the Zionists have accepted the proposal in the 1939 White Paper to found a Palestinian state in which both Jews and Arabs would get representation according to their demographic strength, under the condition of restrictions on Jewish immigration? Formulated differently: why should a people who were for the better part first, second or third generation immigrants have the right to found a nation-state on land inhabited by natives who were not to be part of the nation bound to said state? Your statement is far from a default moral judgement.
Solid as it is, don't blame Israel. Blame the Arabs.
Let's blame them both.
At 11/20/09 07:59 AM, zoolrule wrote: The amount of civilians who were evicted isn't the point and it's not what made it a huge sacrifice, that's superficial thinking.
What made it a huge sacrifice was the major opposition to the act within Israel, the act itself of unilaterally disengaging was the issue. People claimed it would only make the situation worse. I supported the plan but sadly i was wrong.
Right, but that says something about the majority opinion in Israel and not about the act itself. That the public opinion in Israel is not exactly what I'd like it to be is what I consider to be an unfortunate kind of a given. That this act, evicting a small portion of the settlers that will eventually need to be evicted, is already considered a huge sacrifice by you and a lot of other Israelis is what I consider to be part of the problem, and not an argument in itself.
Or maybe because the Israeli trust in Palestinian was smashed?
That eventually boils down to the same thing.
It will take a long time until the situation will come back to how it was before the intifada, if ever. It was previously pointed out that the amount of laborers was so small before and after the disengagement that it had no influence on the political decisions. The Palestinians could always work in Egypt, a country that didn't get thousands of rockets into it while it spending million
The amount of work available in the Sinai is limited and taken by the native Bedouins. They could work in the Nile area, but even if the six hour bus rides to get there weren't unpractical it would still be likely that letting the Palestinians work in Egypt and thereby taking away jobs that could have gone to Egyptians will not go down well with the Egyptians, particularly because Egypt doesn't owe a historic debt to the Palestinians that needs to compensate for depriving them of their land of birth. On the other hand, Israel has more demand for cheap labour that can less adequately be supplied by its own inhabitants.
And transportation costs for export of goods to Egypt is higher, and while most Egyptians wil sympathise with the Palestinians they won't pay extra to buy goods produced in the Strip. Import of unrefined goods from Egypt (the Strip can produce little on itself) will also most likely be cheap goods and the transport costs will be a heavy burden on such enterprises. Furthermore, I'm not sure if the US and Israel would even appreciate more or less open borders between Egypt and the Strip, because Hamas would surely use this to smuggle arms or materials used to produce arms into the Strip.
Also, and this is from a pure realistic point of view, Egypt has less need for a stable Gaza Strip simply because qassams aren't landing on Egyptian cities. Of course, the past Gaza crisis was bad for Mubarak's already low popularity because he is a US ally who also closed the border with the Strip, so there is some motivation to sacrifice something. But the Egyptian government will only sacrifice something if the fruits of this sacrifice will gain more popularity for the government than the sacrifice itself cost. Without a comprehensive plan for the Palestinian territories and the Strip in particular it's unlikely that any iniative from the Egyptian side will have a noteworthy effect.
First of all they lived in a shitty conditions either way.
I'd be the last to dispute that. But the disengagement made conditions even shittier.
But you would think that after a unilateral Israeli peace act the Palestinians (Or people who supposedly want peace) would respond with an equal peace act - Such as not electing Hamas.
Add to that, even if all of the Gazans together would vote to Hamas it still wouldn't be enough to get Hamas elected. At least one third of the West Bankers had to vote to Hamas. Wait, how are you going to blame Israel now?
Partially by conveniently pointing out your earlier remark of conditions already being shitty, and by adding that living conditions in the West Bank were, albeit not as shitty in the West Bank, still reasonably shitty. But your first fallacy is that you assume that I'm saying that the Hamas' poll victory should only be attributed to the disengagement. This is of course not the case. But you seem to have expected that after the disengagement the public opinion in the Strip should have become more favourable towards Israel. Since the living conditions only got worse, this didn't happen, and support for Hamas surged - that's what I'm saying.
Also, a lot of support for Hamas stemmed from the fact that Fatah was corrupt as Hell, also in the West Bank. Of course, this is not something to blame Israel for. This is your second fallacy: you assume that I'm convinced that only Israel is to blame for the situation of the Palestinians. Of course not, but Israel is responsible for a sizeable portion of it and I think that it would help the situation if a lot of Israelis would immediately parry criticism with pointing to the Arabs as being the bigger pests.
"Bringing" them back would destroy Israel.
Which is why they needed to go away in the first place. This is what makes arguments like "the Palestinians could have stayed, but they chose to leave on their own will" flawed. Had the Palestinians that fled after 1948 and 1967 not done what they did, then they'd have to be removed anyway to make the functioning of a Jewish state of Israel possible. In 1947, 40% of the people living in the area that was to be bcome Israel was Arab - and this did not include largely Arab areas that later went to Israel - like the far outskirts of West Jerusalem, comprising cities such as Ramla and Lydda of which the inhabitants were partially expelled at gunpoint for military reasons. A (hostile) minority that forms over 40% of a state is an unworkably large minority, and Jewish migration was in time likely to be outweighed by the higher birth rates of the Arabs.
In that sense, the fact that so many Arabs fled, to never be granted re-entry, was fortunate from an Israeli point of view and an accomplisment of what would inevitably happen.
And why would they come back? They were people who fought against Israel in 1948. Palestinians who didn't fight are called Israeli-Arabs and they are equal civilians in Israel.
Well no, they aren't "equal".They live in a nation-state and they don't belong to the nation that the state is bound to. You call them Israeli Arabs because they'll always be just that, and never actual Israelis. In order to anticipate: I'm not denying that Arabs in Israel have it better than, say, the few Jews that remained in a country like Iraq. But it's not the same kind of equality that a Brit of Pakistani descent has compared to his orginally native compatriots - the British nation-state considers them to belong to the same nation. (Also, to avoid even further confusion or another side-argument about semantics, I mean a nation in the narrow sense, so not as a synonym of country.)
Although I wouldn't even see that much of a problem with this formal inequality if the Palestinians weren't native to the region.
And if instead of just saying "They are poor and stupid it's Israel fault" every time the Palestinians fuck up any attempt of promoting peace,
Kind of an odd argument coming from someone whose main argument seems to be that it's all the Palestinians' fault. Fair enough, though, because I realise that most of what I've said so far in this thread has been against Israel. But in my more general opinion there's a lot of fault on both sides.
you would show them that their acts have consequences, they wouldn't do them and we probably had peace right now.
Violence that results in poorer living conditions just breeds more violence. It always has. To bring it back to the Caucasus (but this time factually correct), look at Chechnya. Shouldn't they have learned that their actions have consequences?
At 11/17/09 02:25 PM, AapoJoki wrote: Not quite, considering that all the candidates must be pre-approved by the Guardian Council
There was a more moderate candidate available (Rafsanjani?), and he lost against Ahmadinejad. So the majority voters chose the conservative Ahmadinejad in favour of moderation. Of course, the fact that many reformists boycotted the election might have well cost them the election. Still, it's doesn't hurt the democratic factor if people choose not to vote even if that's against their own interests.
What would have happened if all candidates were allowed to run is speculative - the reformist side might have well been split into pieces (or not have won a majority at all) and a second round might have still gone to Ahmadinejad due to people refusing to vote for a different reformist candidate when push comes to shove, but at least the absence of (discovered) massive fraud did not mean that the people's choice wasn't Ahmadinejad.
Of course, Iran is in the direction of Morocco when it comes to the democracy scale and in that sense less democratic than a country like France. Still, in this case the people of Iran had a choice that mattered as to who would form their next government and they went for Mahmood.
Arabs were the ones raising the claims (To continue the struggle. They did well honestly), and Human Rights agencies tend to adapt any claim by raised by the Arabs. Even though the Arabs declared 1948 war, and the refugees were their fault and responsibility completely.
This is very a bad attempt at playing the blame game. If Israel hadn't been founded, there wouldn't have been a reason to declare a 1948 war.
But okay, let's assume that the refugees were the sole fault of the Arabs. Then, still, article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights maintains that they need to be able to return to their homes afterward. So this assertion is irrelevant. The Palestinian claim to a right to return is unrealistic, but solid.
Again, i already agreed with you that Israel should stop building in the settlements, just for own interests.
And I said that that was good. But you're still defending the bad attempts at justification for the settlement policy. So don't mind me if I say something about those specifics.
no expanding settlements. Just building in the settlements.
That is what I call "expanding settlements". The fact that they are not expanding territorially is only minor solace. Once, those settlements will need to be evacuated and expanding them only makes this step harder.
Netanyahu doesn't officially says he stopped building because he wants to keep his coalition together.
Or he's saying he's restricting building because he wants to avoid a further blow to the credibility of the US government as a mediator. A term as vague as "natural growth" is just waiting to be abused.
Add to that, he said he would begin talking with the Palestinian authority any time they want, Abbas is the one stalling the talks...
And then refuse to concede. Stalling or not is just a political choice that represents what the respective politician thinks will go down best with his electorate.
First of all they should talk with Abbas, because he was chosen president.
Also with him, yes.
Second, Democracy is not just majority rule are you kidding me? Is Iran a democracy?
No, because there was massive voter fraud during the last election. Do you follow current events at all? But when Ahmadinejad was elected the first time, that happened democratically.
Human rights and Freedom (Of knowledge) are main components of democracy, because without them civilians cannot make fair decisions.
Then Italy isn't a democracy (with freedom of knowledge), because almost all of the media, both private and state-controlled, are in the hands of Berlusconi. Which, accordingly, caused the Freedom House organisation to remove Italy from the list of countries with a free press.
But Italy could have a free press, if the voters simply voted to oust Berlusconi. So they are still a democracy in my book. If voters can vote unrestricted, without fear of consequences resulting from their vote, then it's democracy. Because the people (demos) then have the power (kratos) to change their government. That's why Iran isn'a democracy, and countries like Morocco are neither (monarchy). In Palestine, however, voter intimidation was not reported by international watchdogs to be at an extent where I wouldn't call the poll victory of Hamas democratic.
A lot of freedoms, on the other hand, fall under the category of Liberalism. If you want to assert that that's a positive value, be precise and don't assume that I agree with you redefining the meaning of the word "democracy". I'm sick enough already of people throwing that word around. Democracy in Egypt would most likely mean a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood, and that would be detrimental to the interests of the West.
You say elections are fair? Then Palestinians are responsible for the rockets on the Israel cities.
I agree to some extent. A majority of the Palestinians is indeed responsible for the rockets on the Israel cities. A few sidenotes however, which I'm sure you'll have fun with:
1) Israel, due to its past actions, is also indirectly partially responsible for the rockets on Israeli cities. In a way (I'm not drawing complete parallels here, mind you) like France was also partially responsible for the outbreak of WW2.
2) Democracy per se doesn't justify collective punishment, because a sizeble minority didn't vote for Hamas.
And just for some perspective , look at what Israel has to deal with in the images below, and compare it to reality, compare it to the points discussed. That's injustice. These protest are in western countries, and you don't see anyone objecting. Because it's not fashionable to support Israel. Democracy = Out
Oh, go cry me a river. And doesn't the right to protest fall under your very definition of democracy? So, by your logic, people protesting while holding signs that say Peres = Hitler then that = democracy. I don't agree with what's in those pictures, but what you're saying is not only irrelevant to the discussion but you're shooting yourself in the foot considering the paragraph preceding this bit.
At 11/17/09 05:36 AM, zoolrule wrote: Point?
That you're pretending that Israel made a huge sacrifice for the sake of peace by withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, while if you look at the big picture you can see that the amount of settlers that was evicted was negligible.
First of in and since the second intifada the amount of Palestinian and especially Gazan workers reduced immensely,
And that number never recovered. Take a guess as to why. Maybe because, after the disengagement, the five border crossings (of which one was added around the time of the disengagement, basically for show) were so strictly monitored that many more labourers that wanted to work in Israel or merchants that wanted to export to Israel were denied entry, before being completely shut down after Hamas gained power.
after the Israeli disengagement plan Israel made sure to transfer large quantities of fuels, cash, foods etc,
When you have no job and no prospects, that means little. Maybe if those quantities were so large that a significant portion of the Strip's inhabitants could live comfortably off them, but I strongly doubt that. Let me reiterate: 1.5 million people living on 360 square kilometers cannot form a functioning economy if trade and export of labour to the outside world are severely restricted. When you have no prospects, you will have a lot of pissed off people. And when you have a lot of pissed off people, you'll see support for extremists such as Hamas surge.
Then again, even though this approach was doomed to fail, I have no easy solution ready either. The reason why so many people are crammed unto this tiny piece of land is because Palestinian refugees were not allowed to return to Israel after 1948 and 1967. If you ever want to have a chance of the Strip becoming stable, you'll have to either let most of its inhabitants "back" into Israel, let them freely trade with and work in Israel or make it so that a lot of the people "go away". Otherwise, get used to the rocket fire - sorry for saying it so bluntly.
NOW you say it was bound to result in chaos?
Others said it way back in 2004, in articles prophetically titled Plans to pull out of Gaza Strip will fail.
You'd say that no matter why. But the reason it was bound to fail is because the Palestinians are brainwashed and do not want peace.
If being trapped in a big, overcrowded prison with no prospects of future improvement is what you call "peace", then I can imagine why a lot of Palestinians don't want it.
At first the world and your kind
For fuck's sake.
But should i remind you?
US:
"I strongly support
No shit.
United Nations
Withdrawing per se. Find me a quote were the UN calls isolating the Gaza Strip "courageous".
That's the difference, simple.
You're doing a shit job at defending the drivel you posted eariler and you know it. You said: "the difference is that the Palestine is not a country and never was a country, it was just an area until the last decades". IRAQ was just an area and not a nation until the last decades. Find me one instance of a point in time in which the area that now comprises Iraq was considered an Iraqi nation before the 1930s. And, once again, the same goes for almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, except maybe Ethiopia and Liberia (maybe also Mali, but that one is arguable). Certainly not the CAR or Chad.
Because, somehow, this has to do with being able to settle in someone else's land. Apparently it's totally cool to plant people of your nation into an area strictly against the will of the natives, but only if those natives have never been a nation until a few decades earlier. Now I personally think this is bullshit, but I want you to at least try to apply this "principle" consistently, to areas like Iraq.
In the end, you posit this argument as if it's natural, but you only find it convincing because it helps you in this specific instance. Consistently applied, it's nonsensical, excuse me for pointing out that it is.
You do know the Oslo accords continued as long as 7 years?
Let me explain it for you because this is indeed VERY complicated material: first there's a summit. Then, if the parties attending said summit reach agreement, the agreement(s) that they reached are called (an) accord(s), and those are usually written down on paper. For instance, in 1993, there was a summit in Oslo and the agreements reached during that summit are now refered to as "the Oslo accords". In 1978, the Camp David summit of that year produced the "Camp David accords". There is no confusion with the accords of the Camp David summit of 2000, because those negotiations broke down and no substantial agreements were reached to be called accords.
Do you understand now?
Don't you think you should read before you come and argue?
lolololololol
It seems like you choose sides and then look for arguments, instead of simply seeking justice.
For fuck's sake, don't even start with the accusations of bias. You live in Israel, don't tell me about "choosing sides" first.
In 2000 in Camp David Summit Ehud Barrack offered Arafat 97% of the land the Palestinians claimed, not including East Jerusalem designated to be the capital of the future Palestinian state.
This is complete comic gold. Holy fuck. I wouldn't have believed that these were actual quotes if I hadn't been one of the two parties.
Me: The modern outskirts of East Jerusalem could easily also be considered settlements and I'm sure they weren't offered to be returned.
You: LOL? You are sure?
Me: LOL. Yeah.
You: Don't you think you should read before you come and argue? (...) In 2000 in Camp David Summit Ehud Barrack offered Arafat 97% of the land the Palestinians claimed, not including East Jerusalem
You're right in a way though. In the words of Barak: I will not agree to give up the strengthening of Israel and the bolstering of greater Jerusalem, with a solid Jewish majority, for future generations.
(...)
We have considered, and some ideas were raised, that in order to make Jerusalem wider and stronger than at any time, in any previous time in the history of the city, we should consider annexing to Jerusalem cities within the West Bank beyond the '67 border, like Maale Adumin and Givat Ze'ev and Gush Etzion (read: outskirts of East Jerusalem) , and in exchange for this to give to the Palestinians the sovereignty over certain villages or small cities that had been annexed to Jerusalem just after '67. These ideas were raised, they were contemplated. But as the whole summit was run under the rules of "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed," even those ideas are now null and void.
At 11/12/09 01:11 AM, 4urentertainment wrote: The point is, you've got the whole world raging when a lady is killed in Iran, but when a Muslim lady is killed, you don't hear anything about it.
Wow, that's a really bad point. That woman is Iran was most likely intentionally killed by a government-backed militiaman, and the Iranian authorities have made no effort wharsoever to investigate her death, let along prosecute the culprit. Better yet, they filed an arrest warrant for defaming Iran against one of the eyewitnesses who after the incident fled to England and spoke to Western media about the event.
I mean, if it strikes you as odd that this case sparked more international condemnation than a solitary racist lunatic stabbing somebody then you're at the very least missing the big picture.
At 11/14/09 05:16 PM, Warforger wrote: Then WWII came, the Jew's demanded that they deserved some compensation for the Holocaust, a Jewish state (IIRC wasn't Poland like that though?) so Britain listened to the Zionists and they got Palestine,
Well, that's not exactly how it happened. The British had supported the intention of the Zionists to found a Jewish nation-state in Palestine in the Balfour declaration of 1917, but when Jewish mass immigration increasingly led to tensions that resulted in a few big riots in the 1920s and 30s the British frantically started to look for a solution that would piss the least amount of people off. In 1937 the Peel commission had recommended to partition the land but after that proposal was strongly rejected by the Arabs the British adopted the 1939 White Paper which was to curb Jewish immigration and which asserted that the promise of the Balfour declaration had been fulfilled by allowing the Jews to found a "homeland" in Palestine. As for the future, Palestine was to become a single state controlled by a mixed Jewish/Arab government with the power divided according to the size of their demographic proportions.
This on the other hand was strongly rejected by the Jews and through the late 30s and 40s Jewish (para)military groups, first the Lehi, then the Irgun, and after the war even the Haganah, started to wage open war against the British. The British, tired from WW2, wanted out and in 1947 announced that they would pull out the next year. The UN tried to mediate between the Arabs and the Jews, but another partition plan was shot down by the Arabs and a solution was not to be found before the British finally withdrew from Palestine in 1948, with Israel being founded in the power vacuum.
But the Holocaust itself had little influence on the British stance towards the Zionists. Relations between Britian and the Zionists were actually abysmal in the 1945-1948 period. Ties between the two countries improved in the years after 1948, however.
At 11/14/09 02:37 PM, zoolrule wrote: Oh and most importantly, we saw how much unilaterally removing all of the settlements from Gaza in 2005 helped us. And we saw that even after removing all of the settlements Israel is still not allowed to defend itself.
Less than a mere 10,000 settlers lived in the Gaza strip before the withdrawal, and, most importantly, the withdrawal was accompanied with shutting the borders for most Palestinian workers in the roughly the same period of time. Of course, since it's an area of 360 square kilometers with 1.5 million inhabitants, it needs to rely on at least free trade or hinterlands belonging to the same country to maintain itself. Having neither, the disengagement was bound to make the living situation in the strip worse than before the pull-out, and the aggrevated instability was not much of a surprise.
You can't just point to this event and say "because this pull-out didn't work, no other pull-out will". It was poorly executed and bound to result in chaos. The best part of the withdrawal seemed to be that Israeli citizens were further away from the Qassam launching areas.
At 11/14/09 03:15 PM, zoolrule wrote: No it doesn't. There's a different between an area that has been occupied by Jordan and Egypt before, than an independent state.
What? Oh yeah, sorry, of course, an area that has been occupied by Jordan and Egypt is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from an area that has been occupied by France and/or Great Britain. What state of Iraq was there before the British created it? And this goes to a lot stronger extent for countries like the CAR, Chad and even Ghana.
LOL? You are sure?
LOL. Yeah.
"According to Israeli journalist David Makovsky, the issue of Jerusalem had been included in a draft declaration of principles, known as the Sarpsborg Accord, concluded in the early stages of the Oslo negotiations, before the Israeli Government took an official role in the proceedings. In fact, in that early draft, there was a vague suggestion that East Jerusalem might be included in the Palestinian self-rule areas. In June 1993, when the Oslo talks were upgraded, Israel attempted to remove Jerusalem entirely from the final status issues. However, Palestinian negotiators refused to concede, and Jerusalem remained an issue for negotiation."
And this is from the website of the ADL.
It is something the Arabs came up with in order to continue the struggle with Israel.
You're fucking kidding me. Yeah, the Arabs wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Of course now many Arab countries normalized ties with Israel,
Two countries. Egypt and Jordan. And Egypt only because it isn't a democracy, otherwise the Muslim Brotherhood would gain power.
and Israel biggest enemies now have peace with it, but their past acts screwed up the Palestinians and for some reason the Israelis are to be blamed.
Blegh, you're just shifting blame. Am I saying the Arab regimes have been perfect?
Natural growth is building inside existing communities, but building settlements have stopped.
And this is different, how? The size of the settlements will keep increasing in either case.
Democracy is a little bit more than just majority elections as i'm sure you know.
Well, no, not necessarily. Democracy means that the people, through voting, choose their representatives who in turn form a government through majority rule. I'm sure that's what happened here.
And of course, if Hamas is democratically elected,
then Western government that seek to talk to the representatives of the Palestinian people should talk to Hamas. Look, what struck me is the fact that you chose democracy not just as the biggest reason why people should support Israel but as the biggest two. Hamas rule is the direct consequence of democracy in practice. I feel you nitpick your morals to fit your case, and the rest of what you wrote in your post is hardly relevant here.
At 11/14/09 02:29 PM, zoolrule wrote: But the difference is that the Palestine is not a country and never was a country, it was just an area until the last decades.
That holds for not just every sub-Saharan African country except perhaps Ethiopia and Liberia, but also for Iraq. The country of Iraq is just a bunch of lines drawn on a map by colonial powers a few decades ago, why is the situation so different?
Never mind that i agree that the settlements are unjustified and stupid nowadays,
Good.
but in the Oslo accords (After Israel created the first Palestinian autonomy in history - The Palestinian authority) Israel offered to remove all settlements but the Palestinian claimed they refused because they didn't get the right to return (AKA into Israel).
The modern outskirts of East Jerusalem could easily also be considered settlements and I'm sure they weren't offered to be returned.
And, of course, the right of return in contentious, but you do realise that it is not something the Palestinians came up with, but that it is enshrined in article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even though it is unrealistic to demand the return of all descendants of the Palestinian refugees to Israel, it of course hurts the universality of the Hman Rights declaration if exceptions are allowed to be made.
Plus the building in the settlements stopped de facto,
Hmm, I doubt it. For all I know it has been renamed to "natural growth".
But future agreement is far from close when the global community can't even stand against terror organizations like Hamas.
Unfortunately, it's the democatrically elected organisation of Hamas. You just named these observations as things that speak in favour of Israel a few posts ago:
A. It's a democracy
b. It's the only democracy in the middle east.
If democracy is such a great value, then I feel that this hurts your opposition to talking to Hamas.
At 11/14/09 12:52 PM, zoolrule wrote: even though in my opinion what Americans and British are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is worse.
Maybe if the Americans and British moved 400,000 settlers into those countries then the situations would start to become comparable.
At 11/13/09 06:25 PM, animehater wrote: Some might say it was actually founded on a modification and/or a complete rejection of them.
A "complete rejection" of, say, Locke and de Montesquieu? A modification is logical, everyone will have his own interpretation of ideals and even more so when he founds country, but there was certainly no complete rejection of European ideals. Of absolute monarchy, perhaps? Yes, but even though in that time the absolute monarchy that opposed the founding fathers came from Europe doesn't mean that the oppostion to it was thereby inherently non-European.
At 11/13/09 05:59 PM, Tancrisism wrote: An odd thing considering America has had a very dominant role in the entire world's history for the past 60 years. Perhaps it's denial.
Really? I think most people know about Nixon and Watergate or JFK getting shot. Then again, why would a random European need to know something about Gettysburg or the 1812 war? On the other hand, your country was founded on European ideals, you need to know something about European history if you want to know something about yourself, which is good for shaping national identity. Since the need to know is different, the knowledge will be different.
At 11/13/09 06:02 PM, lapis wrote: sympethatic
the fuck.....
At 11/13/09 05:23 PM, YK-Blaze wrote: russia almost obliterated S.Ostia for less....
Why the fuck would the Russians want to obliterate South Ossetia, considering that a lot if not most of South Ossetia's inhabitants hold the Russian nationality? The Georgian shelling of the region did most of the damage to South Ossetia, although some other damage was done to Georgian villages in South Ossetia by Russian roops and South Ossetian militias. Still, the South Ossetians, who are sympethatic to Russia, incurred most of the damage and your faulty reference to this conflict shows how little you know, kiddo.
At 11/11/09 10:21 PM, Warforger wrote: this is just like hating Irish people in America during the late 1800's
As an addition, you could accompany it with a relevant link, even if it's Wikipedia.
At 11/11/09 02:05 PM, Ranger2 wrote: All I did was rest for 2 days and take Tamiflu,
Hmm, that's not good. If you aren't part of a group that's at an elevated level of risk and you take Tamiflu then you're only increasing the risk that a brand of the swine flu virus that's resistant to Tamiflu becomes dominant in your body and that you then spread it. Even though you might not personally be put in danger because of it, you could infect people with your new brand who might have actually needed Tamiflu.
At 11/11/09 12:38 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: Like, if you have a pencil it represents itself because it is that exact pencil with all of its given properties.
Oh, I agree with you there. A blue pencil can only represent both itself and a red pencil if the difference between red and blue is irrelevant. Otherwise, you'd need two diferent symbols.
And if a set is finite then an infinite set of combinations of properties could not be mapped onto that set, only onto another infinite set with at least the same cardinality. As for the set of all points in space, it's infinite, but the set of abstract concepts is probably bigger because every point is in itself a concept and then there's more, like the "abstract concept" of a blue point in space, even if such a concept is nonsensical.
Sidenote: to some (perhaps slight) extent your logic resembles Gödel's proof for the existence of God in its usage of properties. You may find it interesting to read through, if you haven't already.
At 11/11/09 12:22 PM, lapis wrote: The amount of possible points
The *set of possible points. It sucks when you realise you're saying something stupid right after you've clicked the 'post' button
At 11/11/09 09:01 AM, gumOnShoe wrote: resources are finite including both space, time & matter,
I'm not sure if I really follow your line of reasoning here, but, even though you could assume that time is discrete with Planck time as the smallest time interval and then time would be finite if there were an upper bound (and the start of the Big Bang would mark the lower bound), space certainly isn't finite. The amount of possible points in space between my eyes and my computer screen is already uncountably infinite.
Apparently I'm a social liberal.
But, fuck, I know that the political compass test isn't perfect, but at least it just allows you to choose something between "strongly disagree" and "strongly agree" without forcing people to choose a motivation when they answer.
I mean, for question #2 of your test one of the answers was "Yes! The government should own the air waves. We need a system like the BBC." Like there aren't any British private news media that compete with the BBC. When they force you to pick one option from a set of poorly formulated answers to a question then I barely take the test seriously, even though the test in the end put me in the category that I consider myself to belong to.
