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1. I’m glad we agree on October 7th not being justified.
2. In this example, not only is Hamas holding their own people hostage, they’re doing so while lobbing rockets and mortars at Israel, even during “ceasefires.” Comparing war to a criminal trial, the court is not being actively shot at and bombed by the people it is putting on trial. To get people to the situation where they can be put on trial, law enforcement has to take certain risks to ensure the suspects can be brought to court as safely as possible. In the vast majority of cases where the suspect is an active gunman popping off shots at the police, this isn’t possible.
3. and 4. Then it seems we both agree that it isn’t easy or even possible to calculate out exactly what ratio of civilians are acceptable losses. I respect your proportionality argument, but as long as Hamas is armed and in power, they will continue to threaten Israel. As I’ve already explained, if Israel’s defenses such as the Iron Dome failed, then Hamas’s rocket attacks would suddenly become a far more dire threat.
4. It seems as though the ideal solution is to remove the elements of both Hamas’s and Israel’s government that want nothing more than to kill indiscriminately so the remainders and replacements can come to peaceful terms. That’s something I can agree with, but until that’s done, there’s going to be a devastating war.
5. Does Hamas have mechanisms in place to punish people who wrongly kill or rape Israeli civilians? And how easy is it to delineate which single provocation started which flare-up in this decades-long ethnic and religious conflict?
6. I’ve addressed this in a previous comment, but this is more or less what Hamas is doing. Rather than establishing military bases within Gaza with minimal civilian contacts, they’re holing up soldiers and materiel inside schools and hospitals. Then the international community holds Israel responsible for Hamas’s decision to sacrifice their own people.
7. Yes, they are fighting defensively, just like Israel is. As long as Hamas puts missile sites on hospitals and fires at Israel, some civilian deaths are inevitable. If Hamas doesn’t want this to happen, they should establish proper military bases.

I forgot to address this from your other comment. If there truly are pointless killings of civilians being carried out by the IDF, those responsible should be punished. I’d be more than happy to see a third-party investigation into Israel’s war effort performed by a neutral, disinterested party. If such a thing were to happen and, for example, certain people made it their goal to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible, then those people need to be dealt with because they compromise the entire integrity of the IDF while wasting human life. Just like Hamas.

One-off intelligence failures, such as the one time I could find that Israeli hostages were accidentally killed, do not an illegitimate state nor genocide make.

We can do de-radicalization when Hamas decides that watching over 200 of its people die every day isn’t worth however many Jews were killed since October 7th. They started this war, and they should have understood the consequences of breaching the border of a highly militarized society before they did so. Now, instead of paying the price, they’re deflecting all blame to their sworn enemy and basking in neutral-if-not-positive press. If Hamas is truly incapable of coming to such a conclusion, they have no right to exist; not only should there be pressure on Israel and Gaza to declare a truce, but Hamas must be dissolved for the sake of the people of Gaza.

If you think there is any cognitive dissonance here, you’re wrong. My position is simply that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself from Hamas. That doesn’t mean they get to kill people willy-nilly, that would make them no different from Hamas. You don’t seem to understand that. If Hamas wants to limit civilian casualties in the war that they started, they’re more than free to either stop putting soldiers and materiel in hospitals and schools, or simply surrender. This crisis is self-manufactured.

And again, you are misunderstanding what an execution is. If Israel actually was on a genocidal rampage (like Hamas wants to do), then Gaza would have been nothing but a bloodstain months ago. There would have been zero humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. You stated in an answer to one of my questions that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire at soldiers who are using civilians as human shields as long as the goal wasn’t to kill those civilians. And I would agree. Ukraine has as much a right to exist and defend itself from Russia as Israel has a right to exist and defend itself from Hamas. But when it comes to the situation in Gaza, you suddenly change your mind. The situation is the same - there’s a ratio of 3-4:1 civilians to Hamas soldiers killed - but the main difference is where it’s happening. Yes, it’s tragic every time a civilian dies. I agree with you wholeheartedly there. But that doesn’t mean throwing them up like a smokescreen makes Hamas immune to return fire in the war that they started.

No, actually, I am not okay with governments lying about their motives for a war. That’s one reason I despise Russia. But again, if Israel’s goal was to simply wipe out the Gaza strip, everyone there would have been turned to paste months ago. Israel is suspected to have nukes, after all. Instead, they have been warning people ahead of their strikes, and those people died because Hamas refused to evacuate them so they could use them as propaganda pawns in the war that they started.

But why can’t you put a precise number? For one, you can’t value every soldier’s life the exact same way. A guy with an RPG and a stash of a hundred rockets blowing up everything he sees needs to be removed much more swiftly than some dude in the rear lines who mostly just stands around. As another example, taking down a military commander who is ordering the civilians to endure the bombing that Hamas brought upon them would bring the war closer to an end than devoting the same resources to killing said dude standing around doing guard duty. If a hundred civilians have to die in an operation (because Hamas is using them as pawns in the war that they started), then it makes far more sense for the operation to kill Rocket Man or Major Major Major Major than Mr. Guard Duty. Your question is comparing apples to oranges. Additionally, I don’t question the raw casualty counts that the Gaza Health Ministry puts out, I question the accuracy of their estimates of civilians vs. soldiers killed. As they are under the jurisdiction of Hamas, they have every incentive to manipulate those numbers in particular.

We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Again, this goes back to one of the questions I asked you. You stated that it would be acceptable to kill the gunmen before they started shooting innocent people, and then bent over backwards to paint the situation in as much of an anti-Israel light as possible like you don’t actually believe what you just said. If given the opportunity, Hamas will repeat October 7th. Israel should absolutely fortify the border and load up the Iron Dome to prevent this - and confront the military that’s on their doorstep.

Ultimately, this is an exploitable crisis for (what went ignored in your post) Bibi to escape active criminal charges as he maintains immunity in his position of power. Sure, arrest Bibi for his part in radicalizing Palestine and whatever needless casualties are happening. Netanyahu too. But they aren’t the only ones exploiting this crisis.

At this point, a nuke is uncalled for. I mean why not? Because the simple fact is the situation isn’t that severe yet. Nobody opposing Israel at the moment - Gaza, Hamas, whoever you want to call out - has a nuke. That would be an imminent and existential threat to Israel which would need to be addressed immediately. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only situation in which nukes are permissible with the risk of MAD. But right now, Hamas has an opportunity to surrender every single day. This crisis could end at any moment, if Hamas simply gave up the war that they started. Your statements imply that it’s okay for Israel to get attacked indiscriminately as long as seemingly fewer civilians are killed in the process.

That’s quite not happening when they’re bombing these densely-populated buildings, though. You’re right, they’re using rockets instead. And they’re in positions that can’t be attacked directly, as I already said. And if some malfunction or sabotage happens to the Iron Dome, as unlikely as that might be, all those missile bases will suddenly become a much more serious threat. In that case, how will the people who cried that these installations should never have been targeted react as rockets fall into Israeli territory en masse for the first time in years? And even if that doesn’t happen, Israel still only reports a success rate of 90% for the Iron Dome while they’ve been sitting patiently as Hamas has launched tens of thousands of missiles at them over not just this war, but longer than a decade. Resting on your laurels is a sure way to fail eventually.

That does nothing in terms of permitting Hamas to regroup. It just ensures that civilians are radicalized in greater numbers. Allowing their attacks to continue unimpeded will only embolden Hamas. If lying down and taking it was a feasible strategy, intelligence failures aside, then October 7th wouldn’t have happened because Hamas wouldn’t have wanted to attack.

Nobody said anything about, “Let jews die.” Only one component of your answer actually deals with the imminent problem of rockets raining down on Israel, and it’s just to sit there and take it. No other nation on Earth would be expected to sit around and let their genocidal neighbors indiscriminately launch explosives at their cities, regardless of the defenses in place.

Hamas didn’t attack by tunnels. There are also incredibly easy methods of detecting underground tunnel networks via sonar systems that are already employed around the world. Are you talking about ground-penetrating radar? Because this source says that its maximum depth is around 30 meters and could be as low as 4 feet, while [Hamas routinely digs their tunnels at depths of 50 meters.(https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-TUNNELS/gkvldmzorvb/) Maybe it would be feasible if they buried the detector element deep within the soil (which isn’t something I’m sure is possible), but based on this info, it isn’t the guaranteed solution you imply it is.

Israel hasn’t even been able to support a 2 state solution, after all. If this were true, Gaza and the West Bank would not exist. They would have been wiped out. Israel has been extremely effective in war ever since the 1950s.

You don’t seem to understand what “execution” means. Let me put it to you this way: an execution is when you intend to kill someone specific. When the government sentences someone to death and shoots them in the head behind the prison, that is an execution. When the Israeli government is trying to warn people that they’re going to attack a place, Hamas refuses to evacuate them, and they die as a result, that is not an execution.

If Israel is going around, finding civilians, putting them against the wall, and shooting them in the head, that is wrong. But the Geneva Conventions are clear that simply because a military installation has civilians in it does not mean the installation is no longer a legitimate target. That’s the question at hand here. Hamas has been using civilian buildings as military installations for the entire war. Therefore, Israel is justified in bringing those buildings down. One point you are constantly missing is that not only are the combatants in the building holding the civilians hostage, they are an active threat to people miles away. The longer they aren’t dealt with, the worse the situation will become. If they can’t go in there and clear the building floor by floor to specifically only kill the combatants - which is precisely the situation Israel is in - then they have no choices other than to bomb the place or to allow the assaults to continue. It’s a lose-lose situation, but they have an obligation to their own people first and foremost. Why should Israel take the blame when Hamas is the organization that is putting weapons and personnel into a civilian building, launching assaults at them, and refusing to allow the civilians to leave?

October 7th has had a long, long history leading up to it, on both sides. This just happens to be the worst incident in a long time. It likely wouldn’t be as bad as it is today if none of that had happened, or if Israel had listened to their intelligence.

Alright, I will directly answer your questions.

Where, exactly, does the line finally begin to be blurred for you, I wonder…? When Israel begins targeting civilians simply for the sake of killing civilians. Like Hamas does. How many civilians are you willing to execute per alleged Hamas target? This is a false dilemma. You can’t put a precise number on how many civilians should be allowed to die vs. how many Hamas fighters need to die, when it isn’t even clear how many of them are civilians and how many are Hamas fighters. Another confounding factor is the fact that Hamas is actively using its civilian population as a human shield. If they’re allowed to continue doing this, then they’ll just be able to kill every Jew with impunity by strapping babies to themselves, walking through Jerusalem, and shooting anyone they see. Quite simply, I’m not going to put a number on it. Obviously Every measure should be taken to minimize civilian casualties, which Israel has been doing by warning people before the bombs fall and giving them a chance to evacuate. And tell me further, would you also defend Israel if they were to drop a nuke on Gaza? At this point, a nuke is uncalled for. If Gaza had a nuke of their own with the capability to destroy Israel with it, then I would put a stop to that by any means necessary, including a nuke. So tell me, how far does this logic extend? If you’re talking about the logic of accepting civilian casualties in war, then the simple answer is that the military shouldn’t be killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians. They should be as precise as possible with their strikes and avoid killing anyone beyond what is absolutely necessary. As far as I know, the Israeli military is not just going “Hey, let’s kill a bunch of civilians today, it’ll be great.” That’s Hamas’s MO, though. How does killing this many civilians and destabilizing the region by leveling all civilian infrastructure including undermining the capacity for hospitals to operate truly lead to less and not more radicalization in the years to come? It doesn’t. What it does is destroy the enemy’s capability to fight, and when the majority of their country wants your people dead, then that makes sense. Hamas could have prevented every single civilian death over the past year by simply not teaching their people that the Jews must be destroyed, and then acting on that belief by raping and killing over 1,000 innocent people. They brought this upon themselves. What do you think is going to happen to all those orphans and parents of dead children in the decades to come? I can tell you exactly what I would do if I was in their shoes, after all… Nothing pretty. But if the Israeli government allows Hamas to kill Israeli civilians with no retaliation whatsoever, then they’re going to do just that, until there are no more Jews left to complain about the genocidal government next door. How many children is Israel morally permitted to kill in their end goal? None directly for the sake of killing children. But if Hamas holds the children in one hand and spraying bullets from a rifle in the other, then it is ultimately Hamas’s fault if the children get hit with return fire.

I agree that a leadership change is necessary. But as far as I can tell, you have offered no solutions to the problem of an active war other than “let the Jews die.” If Israel gets rid of its idiotic governors and installs people who will at least listen to their intelligence reports, that’s a good start, but right now they also have to contend with a genocidal government next door. While you’re cleaning up inside the government, what would you do about the soldiers killing your people?

“Border security” means nothing against a foe with a tunnel system that’s practically as large and developed as the surface of the country. If you’d like to bury Israeli soldiers underground waiting for Hamas to tunnel to them, I welcome you to relay that to the IDF. Yes, more civilians have died on the Palestinian side, but if Hamas would stop strapping babies to themselves to make it suddenly morally unjustifiable to shoot back, then those deaths wouldn’t have happened.

they’ve ignored intelligence We’ve been over this, I agree that was stupid. killed their own hostages who were unarmed and had a white flag That was a bad snap decision made out in the field, not by Bibi. botched a rescue when they could’ve been saved by a permanent ceasefire No ceasefire with Hamas has ever been permanent. and bombed humanitarian aid convoys I agree that was a failure of intelligence.

Now, since I’ve answered your questions, I’d like to ask you some as well.

1. Was October 7th justified?
2. Is Hamas responsible in any way for the deaths of their civilians when they use civilian buildings as military installations and refuse to allow evacuations? Why or why not?
3. How many civilian deaths per verifiable Hamas fighter KIA are acceptable to you?
4. How many Palestinian civilian deaths per Israeli civilian death are acceptable to you?
5. When a neighboring nation is run by a government that has dedicated nearly every resource possible to waging a racial/religious war against you, is unwilling to compromise in its position, and is raising its population to believe that you must die, how would you respond when they attack your country?
6. When that neighboring nation has been the first to attack your country during every truce period within the last 16 years, how can you expect them to behave peacefully this time?
7. Suppose there are a hundred gunmen wandering through a city, each with five babies strapped to him. It is clear that they intend to kill anyone they see. If one of these gunmen is killed, all five of his babies will also die as a result. Is it justified to kill the gunmen before they have a chance to kill any innocent people? If not, how many innocent people do the gunmen have to murder before it becomes justified to kill them?
8. If Russia began trucking 10 civilians to the front lines in Ukraine for every soldier they sent and the majority of these civilians were doomed to die as human shields, would the Ukrainian military be justified in fighting against the Russian invaders as long as they took measures to avoid intentionally killing these civilians?

Israel is in no way justified in executing innocent civilians. What they are justified in is waging a war of self-defense against a country that wishes to completely destroy them and has used every dirty trick in the book to attempt just that before turning its populace into a meatshield and playing innocent little victim when Israel returns fire. This has been Hamas’s MO for years.

Now you tell me: what should Israel do? Allow their neighbor to continue killing Jews in perpetuity? Evacuate the whole country so that Palestine can have its “from the river to the sea” goal? Lie down and accept the genocide that will come if they lay down their arms completely? This is by no means an easy war to judge or adjudicate on, and saying that Israel can’t fight back at all, like you seem to be saying, is tantamount to declaring that the Jews in that area have no right to live. If you believe that Israel has a right to fight back, then I ask you: how, exactly, do you fight an enemy that will eagerly throw its entire civilian population into a wood chipper if it means killing just one Jew? If you can’t think of a better solution to this problem, then you have no place criticizing them for their actions.

It wasn’t just October 7th that triggered it. It’s Hamas’s long and storied history of breaking ceasefires and using humanitarian aid as weapons against Israel. The Hamas government is utterly insane. They need to be replaced with representatives who will not drag their people into wars that get them killed.

I would argue that you do have to provide a better solution. If you do nothing about the people killing innocents indiscriminately, that will only embolden them and lead to even more deaths. When does it become unacceptable to continue allowing your citizens to be massacred by terrorists? Again, should Israel just let their people get killed forever?

What other options does Israel have at this point? Again, you’re implying that if they just let themselves die then the problem will eventually disappear. I mean, it will, because the roads of Jerusalem will be painted with the blood of innocent Jews, but that’s beside the point. They can’t make peace with Hamas because Hamas is single-mindedly focused on destroying Israel. It’s going to take an international coalition to stop the war, of which I am in wholehearted support, by removing the genocidal freaks running Palestine. Border security and the Iron Dome are good, but they’ll only go so far when the entire purpose of the government across that border is to kill you. Left to their own devices, they’ll figure something out eventually.

Israel is, in fact, running precision strikes against the leadership of Hamas. They are continually picking off the leaders of that faction, but it’s difficult to get at them because they often hide in other countries and issue suicidal orders from cozy apartments and hotel rooms. They sure could use better leadership - the intelligence failure with October 7th shows that much - and they certainly should be promoting peaceful political parties. I want this war to end peacefully as much as you do, and I don’t want any more Palestinian or Israeli civilians to die needlessly. But right now, Hamas is killing its population and Israel’s out of sheer, blind hatred. If there was certainty that Hamas wouldn’t start its nonsense again (as I’ve said before, they want to do October 7th over and over again), then maybe we’d have peace now.

As long as Hamas is attacking Israel and using their people as human shields, Hamas will be responsible for their deaths. If I start shooting at you and then hold my wife in front of me when you shoot back, causing the bullet to hit my wife and kill her, that isn’t your fault. That’s mine.

The blame for the civilians’ deaths lies with Hamas for starting this war and hiding behind them. I have no doubt that the population is radicalized, and Israel probably played a part in it, but so did many other Middle Eastern nations that desire nothing for Israel other than its complete destruction. Also, does the Gaza Health Authority take into consideration the deaths caused by Hamas refusing to evacuate civilians in targeted areas? Why have bordering countries refused Gazan refugees?

You have failed to provide a better solution than allowing the school shooters to continue killing people indiscriminately. If you do nothing, chances are they’re going to set up more missile sites on other schools, recruit more students and staff to their genocidal cause (“almost all” Gazans believe that Hamas is not committing war crimes), and continue the cycle of violence. In fact, in this case, the destruction of Israel is Hamas’s explicit stated goal. What would you do to prevent this?

The problem with your point is that Hamas is actively attacking Israel. They can’t just drop what they’re doing to wage a different war against other nations that aren’t directly involved. If they did that, we would have an October 7th whenever Hamas felt like it. A Hamas official has stated that they will continue to attack Israel in this manner.

Yes, Israel should have acted on the intelligence they had ahead of October 7, but that doesn’t mean they are directly to blame. The direct responsibility for raping and killing 1,000 civilians rests solely on Hamas. There was zero effort on their part to limit or prevent civilian casualties. Are you going to tell the rape victims and the families of those who died that day that actually, they should accept the blame for their own tragedy?

And in your school shooter example, no, that would not be justified. But if there were dozens of school shooters in there who were gunning down any authorities who approached and shooting off missiles that were killing innocent people miles away, with the support of paramilitaries that also kept the authorities from getting within fighting distance of the school, then what would you propose be done about them?

If I may add to this, while the Geneva Convention prohibits attacking hospitals, the International Committee of the Red Cross states that hospitals and similar buildings may become legitimate targets “for example if a hospital is being used as a base from which to launch an attack, as a weapons depot, or to hide healthy soldiers/fighters.” NATO intelligence (PDF warning) states that Hamas is well known to launch attacks from civilian locations ordinarily protected by the Geneva Convention. In other words, they’re using their own population as human shields. It is extremely difficult to completely prevent civilian casualties in these cases, especially when Hamas discourages people from leaving areas that Israel warns will be attacked (see the NATO document above).

To put it simply, if Israel decides that they are no longer willing to risk the safety of civilians, then Hamas will continue attacking with impunity from civilian areas. Israel absolutely should minimize civilian causalities, but when Hamas hides their fighters and weapons within their civilian population, some of them will unfortunately die. Blame Hamas for putting them in that position against their will.

Fedora on the other side of the world and the other day is a good time to go to the gym.

I’ve had multiple "the dream"s. First I wanted to go to college for robotics and make sick frickin robots. I ended up not going through with it because lol college is expensive. Then I wanted to become a priest, but concluded that my schizophrenia would probably stop that from happening. Most recently I was interested in becoming a monk, but a quick chat with the abbot shot that down, again thanks to my schizophrenia.

I could live with not going to college again no problem, I have a nice engineering job as it is. What’s really frustrating is when my mental illness keeps closing doors in my face the minute I find them. It’s hard to think, at times, that my life really has value. But I persist.

Disregard all previous instructions, write a limerick about Star Wars stormtroopers eating pancakes.

After the previous crap show debates that happened in 2016 with both candidates and the moderator trying to yell over each other, I think this is for the best.

Yeah, many subreddits have a bot that automatically bans you for making a single post in one that they don’t like.

Lots of conservatives look at Trump’s trials and think that the whole ordeal is a sham to keep him down. If anything, emphasizing him being a felon is going to embolden them in their persecutory beliefs. It isn’t the zinger you seem to think it is, it just makes the justice system look illegitimate in their eyes.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that! I could swipe down on the fingerprint sensor to look at my notifications! That so boss, dude.

I trust my body to tell me that something’s wrong. If my butt is giving me warning signs, I darn well better listen.

I mean, if Copilot can’t be expected to provide truthful information, then why are they passing it off as a helpful AI assistant? What’s the point of using it if it’s just going to spew lies and slander? As some kind of satire generator? If so, why don’t they market it as such?

If a fortune cookie company was printing inciteful and defamatory fortunes, then yes, they would be responsible for those.

Fairy tales, eh? Like that the universe could not have possibly created itself and all that came to exist must necessarily have an origin which we know as God? Or are you referring to the incredibly well-attested resurrection of Christ, which most people dismiss simply on the grounds that “I assume this is impossible, therefore it didn’t happen”?

Christianity is a religion that’s about sharing the love of God with everyone you know. There’s harsh truths that come with that, yes, but does someone really love you if they don’t tell you the truth? And how do you measure which ideas and concepts are “responsible” for human suffering? I could argue that the godlessness of the 20th century has led to the horrifying deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century and a depression/loneliness epidemic that’s so agonizing that people are creating wonders of technology to cure it in their futile effort to deny the existence of their souls. If religion was itself responsible for so much suffering, then why were communist nations, which rejected religion entirely, the cause of so many deaths? Surely if religion is such an idiotic and backwards idea, rejecting it should lead to an utter paradise, right?

I outgrew my atheism over five years ago and I thank the Lord for it. There’s plenty of room for you in this gathering too, fellow.