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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • They’re terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb civilians. If they were an official army they’d be war criminals the same way the IDF are war criminals for also indiscriminately bombing civilians. Anyone who bombs civilians (on purpose) is either a terrorist or a war criminal. People seem to be struggling with this concept that everyone in a conflict can be wrong, even if they have some legitimate grievances with each other.

    Israel is absolutely stealing Palestinian land and has been for decades. They need to be evicted and that land returned to the Palestinian people. Palestine needs to be an independent country, Israel has demonstrated that they’re incapable of leaving Palestine alone and a hard border between them is the only approach likely to fix that.

    Hamas on the other hand has spent decades killing Israeli civilians and even if there was a two state solution would continue to stage attacks on Israel as a significant portion of their members are Islamic extremists (further complicated by support from neighboring Islamic countries that hate the idea of a Jewish state for religious reasons). The problem Palestine faces is that Hamas is the only force they have access to that can do anything against Israel even if that thing is to launch terrorist attacks.

    There are strong parallels between Hamas and the IRA, another terrorist organization, but also stark differences. Both organizations have or had legitimate grievances they were responding to, but both also engaged in indiscriminate violence that did little to advance their stated goals. If by some miracle this current war is resolved without the genocide of the Palestinian people (a genocide the current Israeli leadership seems dedicated to) hopefully Hamas disbands the same way the IRA did, but I’m very doubtful of such an outcome, there is far too much religious and ethnic animosity in that region.

    In a perfect world Palestine would be its own country, have its own army, and Israel and Palestine would work together to stamp out Hamas. If Israel tried to push into Palestinian territory the Palestinian army would push them back and if it came down to it the Palestinian military and IDF would fight each other. What the Palestinian army wouldn’t be doing is murdering random Israeli civilians the way Hamas is (and if they did Palestine would face sanctions for those war crimes the same way Israel should be currently).

    All of this is of course made significantly more complicated by the US primarily but also other countries supporting Israel because they have a terrible relationship with the Islamic countries in the region (for both good and bad reasons) and want a friendly country to use as a military outpost. The US has been far too involved with Israel for decades now and they’ve become far too invested in propping up the current administration (also the US has its own significant issues with its current administration).

    Other countries need to stop supporting Israel and sanction them for both their war crimes and their decades of stealing Palestinian land. Hamas needs to be wiped out the same way ISIS does, but not by the IDF who have shown they’re incapable of doing so without engaging in even worse atrocities than Hamas commits.


  • Blowing up random civilians isn’t an act of vengeance, that’s exactly the sort of atrocity that Israel is committing now. If Hamas restricted themselves to blowing up IDF bases and attacking IDF soldiers there would be no question that they’re in the right, but they’re mostly killing Israeli civilians which is just as wrong as when the IDF does it to Palestinian civilians. Just because one side is significantly more powerful than the other doesn’t negate that. If the roles were reversed and it was Hamas who was committing genocide against Israel would you still be making this argument?

    What’s needed is an independent 3rd party. Israel needs to be forcibly removed from Palestinian land and the IDF disarmed until they can show they can do their job without murdering civilians. Hamas needs to be rooted out and Palestine needs an actual military that will be able to stand up to the IDF. None of that is going to happen under either Hamas or the current Israeli government, both of them would rather just keep murdering civilians.


  • Hamas is a violent terrorist organization, it just happens to also be the only one even remotely attempting to fight back against Israel’s attacks. There are no “good guys” in this war (barring the victims just trying to live their lives), just bad and worse. Israel has been attacking Palestine both physically and via illegally seizing their land for decades, while Hamas has been staging terrorist attacks against Israel for just as long. It’s hard not to fault the Palestinian people for supporting Hamas when they’re the only ones that are doing literally anything to fight back against Israel, but that also doesn’t make Hamas good. At best they’re a necessary evil.

    Hamas doesn’t want peace, they want victory, but Israel doesn’t want peace either, they want to finish the genocide they started decades ago. The only ones that actually want peace are the civilians that are stuck between Hamas and the IDF. Unlike Hamas though the international community supports the IDF even though the IDF is just as guilty of staging terror attacks as Hamas is.






  • This title and article confuses me. After reading the article it seems like there were a few lanes of traffic that were originally normal road lanes, but had been converted to bicycle only lanes at some point, and they are now talking about converting them back into normal traffic lanes. Where is the law in this? This sounds like a civil engineering exercise not a legal one. Did someone sue the government over this? The article title made it seem like the government was trying to ban bicycle lanes, but the article paints a very different picture.

    Edit: I’m talking about the title of this post that says “Canadian judge rules law to remove bike lanes is unconstitutional, cyclists have a right to safety”

    Edit 2: did the article title change after this was posted? If not this post seems to be violating the rule that the post title must match the article headline.



  • Men have exactly as much power to stop this as women do. None of the things you mentioned are acceptable. I don’t tolerate someone “memeing” Trumps “grab them by the pussy” remark except to paint Trump as a despicable person specifically because he made that remark (among many other reasons). Anyone trying to defend that kind of remark or shrugging off “all women are whores” as locker room talk is wrong and I would call out anyone who did so. But you also need to see how what you’re doing here is essentially the same thing. Someone said “all men are predators” and then when it’s pointed out that’s not acceptable you try to defend it by citing the statistics for women being assaulted and then dumping all the responsibility for fixing that problem on every man.

    I’m not a senator, I’m not a congressman, I’m not a judge or governor, I’m not a cop, I’m not even a manager. My ability to fix society’s problems is highly limited, mostly what I can do is call out bad behaviour when I see it which is exactly what I did in this instance. Beyond that I can donate to charities that try to address these problems which I do, and vote for politicians that try to address these problems which I also do (not that it ever seems to make a difference).


  • You didn’t understand a single thing I said and keep trying to change the subject. You entirely missed the point of the analogy which was to demonstrate that using statistics to try to justify discrimination is wrong and does not in fact in any way justify discrimination but that sailed right past you and instead you’re hyper focused on the fact that the two analogous situations are not perfectly identical.

    Then you went on and picked a different analogous situation but one which differs in a very critical way that undermines the entire analogy. You missed a critical point which was for a bear, not a population of bears, the longer you stay around and in close proximity to that bear the greater the chance you will be attacked. Bears, all bears, are dangerous. Not all men are dangerous. It doesn’t matter how long you spend around a man, your odds of being attacked don’t increase. Sure if you spend time around an ever increasing number of men your odds go up, but that applies to any interaction with anyone. The more time men spend around an ever increasing number of women the more the odds of the man being attacked go up. For a large enough population, no matter how small the likelyhood, the probability will always converge towards certainty.

    Ultimately though it’s entirely a side tangent as the only reason the analogy was brought up was to illustrate why trying to use statistics to excuse discrimination is wrong.

    Bigger problem -> overgeneralization -> backlash over the over-generalization while maintaining status quo. Wash, rinse, repeat.

    That’s because making overgeneralizations doesn’t actually do anything to address the problem and only undermines otherwise legitimate complaints. Instead of wasting all this time trying to defend the overgeneralization, maybe instead focus on trying to solve the problem, because attacking everyone in the majority group regardless of their guilt or innocence just discourages any of them from wanting anything to do with you or even listening to your complaints.


  • You’re putting a bunch of words in my mouth here. I never said any of the things you’re claiming and this feels like moving the goal posts. My issue, was the assertion made in the post that “all men are predators”. There may or may not have been more context to that, but since that was all we were given that’s all we can go on. Either you believe that is an accurate and true assertion, in which case you disagree with me and really do believe all men are predators, or you agree with me that that is not an accurate and true assertion.

    The rest of your post basically boils down to “you’re not allowed to defend against gender based discrimination unless and until you can show that you’re doing everything you possibly could to fix all of societies gender related problems”. If we all adopted that same premise nothing would ever improve. Or should we start demanding to see peoples credentials when they call out sexism, racism, fascism, etc. on the internet? Have you done everything you could to stop sexual assault? Have you been writing letters every day to your senators and congressmen to encourage new laws or reforms? Staging protests? Maybe working at abuse shelters? No? Well, seems like you don’t have the right to participate in this discussion then by your logic.

    You immediately assumed that because I don’t agree with what you said I must think all men are rapists or sexual assaulters, or that I think that it’s okay to accuse all men of this thing. That’s not the case. But what I’m asking you to acknowledge is that this is a story on the internet with scant details about the interaction from a person who’s got every reason to lie by omission.

    No, I didn’t. That was literally the point being argued over. I never claimed that there aren’t details missing or that there’s no potential subtlety here, in fact I very much agree with that, but that still doesn’t excuse broad discriminatory statements.

    Had that point been made originally, that there’s missing context and we don’t know what the interaction was up to that point that would be one thing. I never said I thought OP was a good guy, I was just pointing out that saying “all men are predators” is sexual discrimination and wrong, just like the example given in another reply of “all women are whores” is also wrong.

    You don’t stop discrimination by giving the minority group a free pass to engage in discrimination as long as it’s targeted at the majority. I would be making the same point (significantly more so) had OP been making discriminatory statements about women, the difference is I wouldn’t need to be defending myself from all of you. You should maybe think about that.



  • Sure but there’s a world of difference between “women need to be cautious around men” and “all men are predators”. One is an unfortunate but reasonable statement while the other is a discriminatory generalization. The former could honestly just be rephrased as “people need to be cautious around strangers” and it would be just as accurate.

    The problem with statistics like “There’s a sexual assault every 68 seconds” is that they sound really bad but you can do essentially the exact same exercise with any sufficiently large population and come up with similarly scary sounding numbers. E.G. There’s a car crash every 13 seconds.

    As for the bear analogy, while I’m sure there are plenty of circumstances in which a individual bear wouldn’t attack someone, as you spend more time around any given bear the likelihood of it attacking you approaches 100% even more so when taken as a population. The same does not hold true around men. There are billions of men on this planet the vast overwhelming majority of which are not a danger to women.

    I don’t know this man, or those men, but statistics say 92.1 % of sexual offenders are men

    Just like the example of African American crime there’s a lot more to this statistic. For instance is that number so high because most men don’t report sexual assaults therefore skewing the number of women sexual offenders down? There are lots of complicating societal factors there. Regardless that doesn’t justify the sweeping generalization that “all men are predators” or even the slightly weaker “most men are predators”, as very obviously the majority are not.