If you'll allow me to play devil's advocate: I've never understood the whole "I bet you can't find ____ on a map" way of thinking. When Hamas carried out its terrorist atrocities on October 7th, nobody thought to themselves "hmm, let me go read up on recent Palestinian history before commenting, in order to ensure that I am able to issue a well-informed take." That would have been insane! When you see footage of terrorists murdering civilians, you don't *need* any context in order to know that it's wrong. The same goes for Israel's murderous assault on Gaza, as well as its maintenance of an apartheid system in the occupied territories.
Well I think you need to know something about the numbers, details, and deaths to know if the war is justified. If Israel had only killed like 8 people and would effectively root out Hamas (or hummus as one former president called it) then their actions would be justified.
Well, obviously you can't have a reasonable opinion with *literally no* information. But I don't think that's really happening; the complaint is that people are condemning Israel without *sufficient* information, not with *no* information. I'm just suggesting that the bar for sufficient information might be lower than people often think.
People had very strong opinions about things they know nothing about long before social media. The overwhelming majority of people who had a "radical" on Vietnam couldn't have found it on a blank map.
We aren't an epistemically modest species - if we were most "debates" would just be both sides admitting they don't have a well informed point of view. But arriving at the truth is not what the social activity of arguing with people is usually about.
Yeah, what limited reading I’ve done on the student movements of the 60s supports this: those people were just as poorly informed and dogmatic as today’s boring radicals. (“Boring radicals” is a nice term, though!)
In general, I think your point is correct, but Israel-Palestine seems like a particularly poor example. You don't need to know details about the history to know that killing 10k children is wrong. It wouldn't matter if all of the propaganda from Israel was true. It wouldn't matter if everything they said about Hamas, the underground tunnels, human shields, the previous failed negotiations, etc was all correct. None of it would justify what they're currently doing. You don't need to have Chomsky's encyclopedic knowledge to make a determination here. This is one of the cases where just seeing the footage of the mass destruction and mass murder is enough to condemn Israel.
That might be right, but wouldn't a world be more interesting if most who talked about the topic actually knew something about the history and had responses to standard arguments given in support of the war.
Definitely, and it would mean more effective activism too. It reflects rather badly on activists if they don't even know which river and sea their slogan is referencing.
Some people claim the war is necessary though, to stave off future, worse suffering. I'm not agreeing with their argument, but wouldn't you need some knowledge of the subject to respond to them?
It's hard to imagine any real-life case where it could possibly be justifiable to kill 10,000+ children. You could come up with a scenario in a philosophical thought experiment, but not a real-world case. I don't think you need much more than a basic grasp of ethics and a basic grasp of the scale of the current massacre to find any 'future suffering' argument to be implausible. I also haven't heard any argument quite like that - they might think it will mean less suffering for future Israelis, but in total, counting everyone involved? But anyway, it's certainly better for people to understand the subject. However, in this case, you can make a very reasonable judgement condemning Israel without knowing much more than the scale of the death and destruction.
>they might think it will mean less suffering for future Israelis, but in total, counting everyone involved?
I just want to point out that if you're modelling nations as utilitarians instead of egoists you're most likely hopelessly confused. The vast majority of people support Israel's military objective at the cost of innocent children dying as collateral because nobody wants to live in a utilitarian nation that values enemy lives at the same rate as its own citizens' lives. Using "wrong" the way you do while ignoring what's rational for a nation to do just comes across as holier-than-thou - "I don't care what's best for your citizens, I *just* know it's wrong" comes across as a paradigm of ignorance/dismissal, not one of impartiality.
I wasn't modelling nations as that, the 'less future suffering' argument is the one he presented. That was explicitly my point... the only suffering Israel cares about is that of Israelis. But it's strange you say 'ignoring what's rational for a nation to do,' you're just assuming it's rational to be egoists. I certainly don't consider that rational. I also don't think most people are supporting Israel because they don't want some precedent to be set where nations act as utilitarians. That's a bizarre analysis of the support. And I don't think most people support nations acting with complete disregard to everyone outside their nation. Even if we're just focusing on prudential reasons, that would be insane. But, anyway, if declaring that it's wrong to murder 10000 children is 'holier-than-thou' then I'm okay with that. Also, Israel's actions have historically been at the cost of their own security. Unless they completely wipe out the Palestinians, that probably won't change.
>I wasn't modelling nations as that, the 'less future suffering' argument is the one he presented.
The user you're responding to didn't specify, but it should be clear from the conflict and power capabilities of Israel and Palestine that Israel escalating violence will result in more people killed than Palestine escalating violence. The "less future suffering" argument clearly isn't just counting up total deaths, the deaths are weighed in proportion to how much the sovereign countries involved value their citizens more than noncitizens,
>That was explicitly my point... the only suffering Israel cares about is that of Israelis.
which is not infinite considering Israel could launch an indiscriminate killing campaign and wipe out a substantial portion of Palestinians, but they haven't, so they are behaving as an egoist nation that's constrained by international blowback.
>But it's strange you say 'ignoring what's rational for a nation to do,' you're just assuming it's rational to be egoists.
Most people living in a nation don't value outsider lives at the same level as citizen lives. That's *why* nations exist, enforce borders, enter into wars, etc.
>I also don't think most people are supporting Israel because they don't want some precedent to be set where nations act as utilitarians.
I think most people supporting anything are typically clueless and can't defend their positions, but presumably the mainstream justification for Israel's ground invasion of Gaza is along the lines that sovereign countries have the right to defend themselves against terrorist attacks, hostage kidnappings, etc.
>And I don't think most people support nations acting with complete disregard to everyone outside their nation.
Being an egoist doesn't mean doing whatever you want, it means doing what you want conditional on the expected blowback from international affairs. I think this is an accurate model of nations, whereas a utilitarian one would be more along the lines of "If more of their people die than ours in an attack, we shouldn't launch that attack," which is not how nations reason in geopolitics.
>But, anyway, if declaring that it's wrong to murder 10000 children is 'holier-than-thou' then I'm okay with that.
You're missing the point because you're using an evaluative term like wrong while refusing to evaluate other relevant circumstances, like that most people would support their country launching a ground invasion of another country if that country kidnapped 100s of its citizens. It's like saying vaccines are dangerous because they result in people dying (which is true), while ignoring the mountains of lives saved from natural diseases by vaccines which vastly outnumbers the deaths from vaccines. Likewise, endorsing a principle like "Don't be retributive if our attack will kill more people than if we didn't attack" is pretty relevant to the evaluation of which action is "wrong" - most people don't want to live in a nation that just lets its citizens get killed because responding back would result in more deaths - I and most other people would consider this far more "wrong" than a ground invasion that results in more people killed in another country.
If you say 'less future suffering' that implies suffering in general. That sounds like a utilitarian argument, and like I said, I've never heard an Israeli supporter try to make that kind of argument. Their excuses are usually something like 'they attacked us, human shields, hamas bad, etc.' But I don't disagree that most nations behave like egoists, particularly if that means the government. As for citizens, much of the 'blowback' wouldn't exist if everyone was an egoist when it came to international affairs. No one thinks Israel is behaving like utilitarians, or that any nation behaves that way, and I never claimed otherwise. But, much of the world also thinks Israel has gone way beyond a 'right to defend itself.' They think it's wrong independent of 'blowback.' They think it's wrong because of how many innocent people are dying. Valuing citizens of your country more than citizens of another country doesn't mean you value those citizens infinitely more than anyone else. That's close to what you would have to do to defend Israel.
In any case, this just seems confused: "you're using an evaluative term like wrong while refusing to evaluate other relevant circumstances, like that most people would support their country...." Whether or not it's wrong is independent of what most people would support. As for that retributive principle - you can think your country has a right to self-defense while also thinking that self-defense should be necessary and proportional, just like individual claims to self-defense.
I don't value the lives of citizens of other countries more than citizens of my own, I think that's insane. I think you can make an objective argument for governments having some partiality to their own citizens. It also, in practice, might be easier to protect certain interests of fellow citizens rather than other people. I suppose you could make an argument that an 'attack that will kill more people than if we didn't attack' could be justifiable if the benefits of upholding some retributive principle outweighs that harm done. That's very limited though. I wouldn't support a ground invasion that kills 30000 people, most of whom are civilians, 10000 of which are children, and injures 70000 because 100s of people are kidnapped. And anyone who does support that isn't just giving some partiality to their own citizens, or supporting a self-defense principle, they're acting like psychopaths. It's crazy to suggest "we have to carry out a genocide, otherwise it will set a bad precedent about national rights to self-defense."
Is it really radical to call the situation in Gaza a genocide or Israel an apartheid state? There is room for debate but to call it radical at this point seems inaccurate. A bunch of moderate liberal institutions have endorsed those conclusions (particularly the second one). Am I a “boring radical” for accepting the conclusions of human rights watch, amnesty international, the ICJ et al without reading a book on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon? Is it radical to call other controversial human rights crises genocidal (like the suppression of the Rohingya in Myanmar)?
When I say radical I just mean out of accordance with mainstream opinion in the United States. I make no claim about whether it's really implausible. These claims are made by virtually no U.S. politicians, for instance.
It isn't radical relative to mainstream opinion. Around 50% of registered Democrats and 18% of Republicans believe Israel is committing genocide. The reason Democratic politicians won't say it is it's a wedge issue they'd rather ignore and wish would go away.
You can err in the opposite direction of "boring radical" and be a "boring skeptic." It's OK to take a position without completing a PhD on the subject and debunking every contrary apologetic.
I'd agree with you if I thought that the pragmatic content of Americans expressing pro- or anti-Israel views were predominantly about Israelis and Palestinians. But I think they're actually overwhelmingly a proxy for domestic political conflicts. This seems like the best explanation for why most of them didn't give a shit about Yemen, or Somalia, or Azerbaijan, or ongoing non-war mass suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or malnutrition.
The genocide argument isn't just dumb and wrong it's a tactical mistake.
Even if Israel stood up and said, "yup we intend to murder every last resident of Gaza to destroy Hamas" it wouldn't be genocide because that requires an intent to destroy (in whole or in part) an ethnic group and as long as that wasn't Israel's intention (as evidenced by the lack of similar bombing in the west bank) it still wouldn't be genocide. They have to be interested in actual ethnic cleansing.
It's just fucking stupid. It alienates many natural allies and shifts the debate away from the issue of whether Israel's response is disproportionate or insufficiently concerned with protecting civilians and onto a subject where it's easy to show that Israsl lacks the relevant intent.
Indeed, the court case is just about whether Israel has exercised sufficient discipline over some extremists in the military and not about the underlying justice of the bombing campaign.
Hot takes are a lot of people needing to be understood. I wrote a good opener sentence it goes T the essence of prop all agitated isnot it is like effect that cus words make themselves understood it is aerobic jazzercise of pure power. Funny that I hate ax murderers but Agree with t Talking heads Line why say something again? And love the tune of olord please dont let me be misunderstood but I donot agree. Blame rock and roll. Or Bulldog? Tell us something about how to read attitude with like latitude as if it was the quantity of tone language in English. Like it is the inverse of the wrong chestnut t. says 90% of talk is visuall? I inverse the numbers. And that is a bad guess. 14 per cent? Sold.
If you'll allow me to play devil's advocate: I've never understood the whole "I bet you can't find ____ on a map" way of thinking. When Hamas carried out its terrorist atrocities on October 7th, nobody thought to themselves "hmm, let me go read up on recent Palestinian history before commenting, in order to ensure that I am able to issue a well-informed take." That would have been insane! When you see footage of terrorists murdering civilians, you don't *need* any context in order to know that it's wrong. The same goes for Israel's murderous assault on Gaza, as well as its maintenance of an apartheid system in the occupied territories.
Well I think you need to know something about the numbers, details, and deaths to know if the war is justified. If Israel had only killed like 8 people and would effectively root out Hamas (or hummus as one former president called it) then their actions would be justified.
Well, obviously you can't have a reasonable opinion with *literally no* information. But I don't think that's really happening; the complaint is that people are condemning Israel without *sufficient* information, not with *no* information. I'm just suggesting that the bar for sufficient information might be lower than people often think.
People had very strong opinions about things they know nothing about long before social media. The overwhelming majority of people who had a "radical" on Vietnam couldn't have found it on a blank map.
We aren't an epistemically modest species - if we were most "debates" would just be both sides admitting they don't have a well informed point of view. But arriving at the truth is not what the social activity of arguing with people is usually about.
Yeah, what limited reading I’ve done on the student movements of the 60s supports this: those people were just as poorly informed and dogmatic as today’s boring radicals. (“Boring radicals” is a nice term, though!)
Yeah but I think it's gotten worse recently. When people get their news from 30 second video clips they tend to be less informed.
In general, I think your point is correct, but Israel-Palestine seems like a particularly poor example. You don't need to know details about the history to know that killing 10k children is wrong. It wouldn't matter if all of the propaganda from Israel was true. It wouldn't matter if everything they said about Hamas, the underground tunnels, human shields, the previous failed negotiations, etc was all correct. None of it would justify what they're currently doing. You don't need to have Chomsky's encyclopedic knowledge to make a determination here. This is one of the cases where just seeing the footage of the mass destruction and mass murder is enough to condemn Israel.
That might be right, but wouldn't a world be more interesting if most who talked about the topic actually knew something about the history and had responses to standard arguments given in support of the war.
Definitely, and it would mean more effective activism too. It reflects rather badly on activists if they don't even know which river and sea their slogan is referencing.
Some people claim the war is necessary though, to stave off future, worse suffering. I'm not agreeing with their argument, but wouldn't you need some knowledge of the subject to respond to them?
It's hard to imagine any real-life case where it could possibly be justifiable to kill 10,000+ children. You could come up with a scenario in a philosophical thought experiment, but not a real-world case. I don't think you need much more than a basic grasp of ethics and a basic grasp of the scale of the current massacre to find any 'future suffering' argument to be implausible. I also haven't heard any argument quite like that - they might think it will mean less suffering for future Israelis, but in total, counting everyone involved? But anyway, it's certainly better for people to understand the subject. However, in this case, you can make a very reasonable judgement condemning Israel without knowing much more than the scale of the death and destruction.
>they might think it will mean less suffering for future Israelis, but in total, counting everyone involved?
I just want to point out that if you're modelling nations as utilitarians instead of egoists you're most likely hopelessly confused. The vast majority of people support Israel's military objective at the cost of innocent children dying as collateral because nobody wants to live in a utilitarian nation that values enemy lives at the same rate as its own citizens' lives. Using "wrong" the way you do while ignoring what's rational for a nation to do just comes across as holier-than-thou - "I don't care what's best for your citizens, I *just* know it's wrong" comes across as a paradigm of ignorance/dismissal, not one of impartiality.
I wasn't modelling nations as that, the 'less future suffering' argument is the one he presented. That was explicitly my point... the only suffering Israel cares about is that of Israelis. But it's strange you say 'ignoring what's rational for a nation to do,' you're just assuming it's rational to be egoists. I certainly don't consider that rational. I also don't think most people are supporting Israel because they don't want some precedent to be set where nations act as utilitarians. That's a bizarre analysis of the support. And I don't think most people support nations acting with complete disregard to everyone outside their nation. Even if we're just focusing on prudential reasons, that would be insane. But, anyway, if declaring that it's wrong to murder 10000 children is 'holier-than-thou' then I'm okay with that. Also, Israel's actions have historically been at the cost of their own security. Unless they completely wipe out the Palestinians, that probably won't change.
>I wasn't modelling nations as that, the 'less future suffering' argument is the one he presented.
The user you're responding to didn't specify, but it should be clear from the conflict and power capabilities of Israel and Palestine that Israel escalating violence will result in more people killed than Palestine escalating violence. The "less future suffering" argument clearly isn't just counting up total deaths, the deaths are weighed in proportion to how much the sovereign countries involved value their citizens more than noncitizens,
>That was explicitly my point... the only suffering Israel cares about is that of Israelis.
which is not infinite considering Israel could launch an indiscriminate killing campaign and wipe out a substantial portion of Palestinians, but they haven't, so they are behaving as an egoist nation that's constrained by international blowback.
>But it's strange you say 'ignoring what's rational for a nation to do,' you're just assuming it's rational to be egoists.
Most people living in a nation don't value outsider lives at the same level as citizen lives. That's *why* nations exist, enforce borders, enter into wars, etc.
>I also don't think most people are supporting Israel because they don't want some precedent to be set where nations act as utilitarians.
I think most people supporting anything are typically clueless and can't defend their positions, but presumably the mainstream justification for Israel's ground invasion of Gaza is along the lines that sovereign countries have the right to defend themselves against terrorist attacks, hostage kidnappings, etc.
>And I don't think most people support nations acting with complete disregard to everyone outside their nation.
Being an egoist doesn't mean doing whatever you want, it means doing what you want conditional on the expected blowback from international affairs. I think this is an accurate model of nations, whereas a utilitarian one would be more along the lines of "If more of their people die than ours in an attack, we shouldn't launch that attack," which is not how nations reason in geopolitics.
>But, anyway, if declaring that it's wrong to murder 10000 children is 'holier-than-thou' then I'm okay with that.
You're missing the point because you're using an evaluative term like wrong while refusing to evaluate other relevant circumstances, like that most people would support their country launching a ground invasion of another country if that country kidnapped 100s of its citizens. It's like saying vaccines are dangerous because they result in people dying (which is true), while ignoring the mountains of lives saved from natural diseases by vaccines which vastly outnumbers the deaths from vaccines. Likewise, endorsing a principle like "Don't be retributive if our attack will kill more people than if we didn't attack" is pretty relevant to the evaluation of which action is "wrong" - most people don't want to live in a nation that just lets its citizens get killed because responding back would result in more deaths - I and most other people would consider this far more "wrong" than a ground invasion that results in more people killed in another country.
If you say 'less future suffering' that implies suffering in general. That sounds like a utilitarian argument, and like I said, I've never heard an Israeli supporter try to make that kind of argument. Their excuses are usually something like 'they attacked us, human shields, hamas bad, etc.' But I don't disagree that most nations behave like egoists, particularly if that means the government. As for citizens, much of the 'blowback' wouldn't exist if everyone was an egoist when it came to international affairs. No one thinks Israel is behaving like utilitarians, or that any nation behaves that way, and I never claimed otherwise. But, much of the world also thinks Israel has gone way beyond a 'right to defend itself.' They think it's wrong independent of 'blowback.' They think it's wrong because of how many innocent people are dying. Valuing citizens of your country more than citizens of another country doesn't mean you value those citizens infinitely more than anyone else. That's close to what you would have to do to defend Israel.
In any case, this just seems confused: "you're using an evaluative term like wrong while refusing to evaluate other relevant circumstances, like that most people would support their country...." Whether or not it's wrong is independent of what most people would support. As for that retributive principle - you can think your country has a right to self-defense while also thinking that self-defense should be necessary and proportional, just like individual claims to self-defense.
I don't value the lives of citizens of other countries more than citizens of my own, I think that's insane. I think you can make an objective argument for governments having some partiality to their own citizens. It also, in practice, might be easier to protect certain interests of fellow citizens rather than other people. I suppose you could make an argument that an 'attack that will kill more people than if we didn't attack' could be justifiable if the benefits of upholding some retributive principle outweighs that harm done. That's very limited though. I wouldn't support a ground invasion that kills 30000 people, most of whom are civilians, 10000 of which are children, and injures 70000 because 100s of people are kidnapped. And anyone who does support that isn't just giving some partiality to their own citizens, or supporting a self-defense principle, they're acting like psychopaths. It's crazy to suggest "we have to carry out a genocide, otherwise it will set a bad precedent about national rights to self-defense."
Is it really radical to call the situation in Gaza a genocide or Israel an apartheid state? There is room for debate but to call it radical at this point seems inaccurate. A bunch of moderate liberal institutions have endorsed those conclusions (particularly the second one). Am I a “boring radical” for accepting the conclusions of human rights watch, amnesty international, the ICJ et al without reading a book on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon? Is it radical to call other controversial human rights crises genocidal (like the suppression of the Rohingya in Myanmar)?
When I say radical I just mean out of accordance with mainstream opinion in the United States. I make no claim about whether it's really implausible. These claims are made by virtually no U.S. politicians, for instance.
It isn't radical relative to mainstream opinion. Around 50% of registered Democrats and 18% of Republicans believe Israel is committing genocide. The reason Democratic politicians won't say it is it's a wedge issue they'd rather ignore and wish would go away.
Can you send me the poll on that?
This is what I was citing:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/24/americans-believe-israel-committing-genocide-poll#:~:text=Almost%20half%20of%20those%20surveyed,%2C%20while%2030%25%20are%20undecided.
I'll add a correction.
You can err in the opposite direction of "boring radical" and be a "boring skeptic." It's OK to take a position without completing a PhD on the subject and debunking every contrary apologetic.
I'd agree with you if I thought that the pragmatic content of Americans expressing pro- or anti-Israel views were predominantly about Israelis and Palestinians. But I think they're actually overwhelmingly a proxy for domestic political conflicts. This seems like the best explanation for why most of them didn't give a shit about Yemen, or Somalia, or Azerbaijan, or ongoing non-war mass suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or malnutrition.
I strongly endorse this post!
The genocide argument isn't just dumb and wrong it's a tactical mistake.
Even if Israel stood up and said, "yup we intend to murder every last resident of Gaza to destroy Hamas" it wouldn't be genocide because that requires an intent to destroy (in whole or in part) an ethnic group and as long as that wasn't Israel's intention (as evidenced by the lack of similar bombing in the west bank) it still wouldn't be genocide. They have to be interested in actual ethnic cleansing.
It's just fucking stupid. It alienates many natural allies and shifts the debate away from the issue of whether Israel's response is disproportionate or insufficiently concerned with protecting civilians and onto a subject where it's easy to show that Israsl lacks the relevant intent.
Indeed, the court case is just about whether Israel has exercised sufficient discipline over some extremists in the military and not about the underlying justice of the bombing campaign.
Hot takes are a lot of people needing to be understood. I wrote a good opener sentence it goes T the essence of prop all agitated isnot it is like effect that cus words make themselves understood it is aerobic jazzercise of pure power. Funny that I hate ax murderers but Agree with t Talking heads Line why say something again? And love the tune of olord please dont let me be misunderstood but I donot agree. Blame rock and roll. Or Bulldog? Tell us something about how to read attitude with like latitude as if it was the quantity of tone language in English. Like it is the inverse of the wrong chestnut t. says 90% of talk is visuall? I inverse the numbers. And that is a bad guess. 14 per cent? Sold.