A human rights monitor documented the sniping of at least 13 children in and around Shifa Hospital, all between the ages of 4 and 16.
A human rights monitor documented the sniping of at least 13 children in and around Shifa Hospital, all between the ages of 4 and 16.
This is becoming frustrating. We are on the same page that violence is the only answer; I’m only insisting that we understand that the violence has to be done against our fellow humans. It is a tragedy, but one that must be enacted because, as you say, there is no negotiation to be had here.
Denying their humanity weakens the claim of righteousness and, moreso than enabling room for their bad faith bullshit, directly feeds into their bad faith claims of antisemitism as dehumanizing them removes genocide from the argument and all your left with is killing animals/barbarians/evil monsters. I don’t know about you, but that argument is wholly unconvincing to me. You can certainly claim that because they’ve engaged in genocide, that’s why they’ve lost their humanity, but again, it’s an unnecessary mental step that gains us nothing and weakens the argument for deploying violence against them.
For the soldier / PTSD argument, I again disagree. Soldiers kill people. There should be no way around that fact. Dehumanization and making it easier for soldiers to mentally compartmentalize the taking of life is not a good thing and can easily be warped to make soldiers follow any order, regardless of the moral imperative. The soldiers can and should be made to understand that they are committing a traumatic amount of violence and death in order to stop an entire genocide. Violence is a tool and it must be wielded responsibly and with full understanding that the violence is both necessary and just.
Also chill with the faux philosophical ramblings of simulations and video game analogies. I don’t care what you believe outside of this context, but this is a serious issue and talking about “disabl[ing] PvP flags for the middle east” belies that this is the real world (simulated or not) with real, serious consequences. It damages your entire argument and makes you come across like you don’t see the actual human pain and suffering this massacre has caused.
There are times violence has to be done against fellow humans (right now against the Russian elite, for example; I really don’t think fighting a fucking meat grinder war is necessary but States would rather kill millions of civilians and dumb kids than fix the problem directly and make themselves vulnerable).
I don’t particularly care about being ‘righteous’ or glorious war or any of this crap. I want to stop people dying.
Ive laid out that I don’t particularly care about biological humanity. Just the things you can do with it, and if you wall those off, as happens to basically all of them with fascism, all the reasons I care about people stop being relevant.
This applies to members of my own family, but none of the ones I could possibly reach are doing genocide, just some awful animal stuffing itself into a bottle and ranting on Facebook somewhere, which required a brief period of mourning and moving the fuck on. Hope they die before drinking their kids’ inheritance, but its not worth the social disturbance of killing them.
But when youre comitting a genocide, youre already doing all the things that would be bad about killing a fascist, but at a much higher volume.
Theres ending a culture. That’s a bad thing about genocide. But either they’re Jewish (lol, I know, but for the sake of argument we can pretend) and that culture exists in thousands of cities all over the world, and only individuals (which fascists arent in any of the ways that make that precious) would be lost, OR they’re just murder-ghouls whose existence is only atrocities, in which case it extra needs to happen, we are better off without.
The video game analogy was a thought experiment, the hypothetical “even if you had a magic switch to just make it so nobody could do violence or even so much as fuck woth each other, no matter how badly they wanted to, everyone is completely safe from each other” in shorthand people understand and explaining what that (in a fantasy world where that could happen) might look like, mostly to avoid ‘what if’s’ because I’m rarely sure anyone’s arguing in complete good faith, even in more generally sensible places. I know thisisnt a fucking game. If this were a fucking game I’d be good natured about it. Or at least only a little bit of an asshole.
I’m aware people are dying. I don’t think we’d be talking about this if they weren’t.
I think when you become a fascist, most of the death has already happened. Most of the death that matters at least. Again, I have personal experience coping with this. I think most people do by now. Theres a range where you can pull them back, but after a certain point they’re just lost, and it only looks like the person you knew/loved.
Even a chicken has honest feelings, but fascists kind of don’t. Theres no moral wrong in killing them, except scaring others and traumatizing yourself by killing something that looks human. Hence the dehumanization. Because they need to be killed; they won’t stop any other way. I fucking hate them for that.
I see where youre coming from, and your arguments aren’t completely invalid; I just think youre wrong in this specific case.
I also think we see the same problem, and the fact there’s only two options left, one of them we both agree is completely unconscionable and not worth mentioning, the other we agree really fucking sucks.