That’s neither a funny joke nor a serious idea of any worth.

It’s a logical fallacy that I have to solve peace in the Middle East before I can evaluate the morality of kidnapping, rape, and murder.

But I do recognize my privilege. Moral qualms and principles are a luxury. Does this make them meaningless? Ceding morality to those locked in a cycle of murder takes us to a dark place.

The Israelis say the same shit you are, frankly. “You would do the same thing if they’d taken your family!” And “easy for you to criticize from the outside.” So this is easy to reflect back at you. Unless you’re sitting in Tel Aviv right now, you’re judging from a privileged place

Like I said, I’ve followed this conflict for 40 years. Casting off moral qualms to engage in a tooth and nail cycle of endless murder is what got everyone here, not what’s going to get them out. Hate cannot drive out hate, said someone less privileged than I.

You can have the final word here. I only ask that you spend it on something other than ad hominem if you can.

Yeah that sounds oddly specific.

I’m very much in favor of felons having access to work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean equal access to every single form of work, and I’d be quite content to ban them from the highest office in the land.

Such selective logic. Their massive terrorist attack has caused such blowback that now they have no good options to minimize child deaths. Maybe the terror attack was not about preventing child deaths? That’s the point here.

I understand you want to champion the Palestinians because they are dreadfully overmatched. But don’t let that whitewash your view of a very grey situation.

I wish their entire strategy was built around minimizing the number of children dying, but it is clearly not. There is no actor in this picture whose is.

I see it as people wanting to commit righteous violence. People have violent impulses, but we usually control them. Some people with extraordinary violent tendencies go looking for a place where it’s “okay” to let them loose. This is not the only example.

Palestinians tried everything the “right” way.

I’m well aware - have been following this conflict for 40 years, generally siding with the Palestinians. I will say however that no one has done such a clean job of “trying it the right way” as you make out here. It’s been far more morally grey from the start.

But let’s accept your point and the language you’re establishing here. They tried everything the right way. Now they’re trying everything the wrong way. It’s like I said: they stopped waiting for the world’s moral outrage to save them, went it alone, and have played it as dirty as they think they need to. Understandable. Predictable.

They don’t need me to think it’s excusable, and it happens that I don’t. They’ve discarded any hope of moral rectitude and are simply trying to win the fight in practical terms by whatever means available. They’re not trying to be right, they’re trying to be effective - to control land, repel Israel, and help Palestinians.

How would you say they’re doing?

Instead of quibbling over whether suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism are orally excusable, judge them by their effectiveness on behalf of the Palestinians.

It’s hard to say what their condition would be without the suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and hostage takings over the last 20 years since the second intifada. No one knows what would have happened in an alternate reality where they continued doing things “the right way.”

But from what I see, “the wrong way” is not only wrong but ineffective. The October attacks have succeeded at the impossible: restoring Israel’s moral standing in the eyes of the world. If the west were silently complicit before, they are actively and vociferously complicit now. Gaza is nearly sanitized of all life. There isn’t even a bargaining table at which to give everything away at. Palestinians are being erased from existence.

So maybe, just maybe, on “effectiveness” grounds, these tactics are a practical failure as much as they are a moral evil.

Palestinians heartily agree with your “what else are we supposed to do” notion and long since stopped waiting for the world’s moral courage to come to their rescue. When they did that they also said that they no longer cared what anyone thought of the morality of their actions. They don’t need them to be excusable by us and frankly they aren’t. I’m past excusing anyone involved in this conflict.

Do you really tjink the October attacks gained them any “negotiating leverage?”

Understandable, yes.

Predictable, yes.

Deserved, yes.

Effective, perhaps.

Excusable? No.

Are we really debating whether it’s okay to rape / kidnap / slaughter civilians?

It’s true, but so is retooling aviation around hydrogen. This is just a prediction but I think before that ever happens, EITHER we’ll have light batteries that are safer and more effective that Lithium OR we’ll have carbon-neutral ways to produce hydrocarbon fuels that can be used with conventional aircraft.

Hydrogen has struck out on personal electronics and ground transportation. Now it’s angling for aviation where its energy density may matter more. But it hasn’t been losing because of energy density.

He says it so many times in so many ways that he actually starts to make it seem more complex than it is. You start wondering if you’re missing something, because you got it in 6 seconds but 12 minutes later he’s still talking about it.

But its only exhaust is PuRe wATeR!! /s

It still makes me LOL to see people tout this, when battery EVs don’t exhaust anything.

I actually AM surprised that they don’t have one village idiot who loves Trump. It always seems like there’s one asshole who wants to wave the Trump flag as a fuck-you to their world.

Yay I feel young!

It’s one thing to differentiate between a company and the staff who work for it. But I think you have to be pretty thick to gleefully patronize a company whose founder and CEO you detest. If you want to compartmentalize to such an extreme, that’s your business, but don’t argue it to me as if it makes any objective sense to ignore who you are enriching by your purchasing power.

Companies are like Soylent green, after all: they’re made of people.

You keep saying “but the product is fine” as if you don’t understand the concept of a boycott on moral grounds. It’s also hard to trust your privacy to someone who doesn’t believe you should have the same rights. Yes I consider that dehumanizing. If you’d been prevented from marrying your immigrant POC you would feel dehumanized as well, and I hazard to guess you might choose alternatives to products built by those who helped bring you to that state. At least fuck I hope so, because otherwise you are missing a screw.

We’ve got a lot of Americans who want everything tested for 20 years to make sure your eyes don’t fall out after a decade.

It’s tempting to see his donations to prop 8 as just his personal business, but like so many others you’re missing the fact that when your political beliefs are that other humans are actually subhuman and not equals, that goes beyond “personal politics.” Like outright naziism, there should be no safe place for a single ounce of this thinking. If you think it’s akin to liking shrimp more than chicken, you should deeply rethink your own “personal politics” because you’re casually glancing over the dehumanization of other people with a shrug.

But it makes AI sound stupider, so they went with it. Anyway outside gaming circles, a lot of normals still think all video games are for children.