all color categories are made up

and the only ones whose corresponding wavelength ranges are directly detected by our eyes are ~red, ~green, and ~blue

take it from someone who this year failed a color vision test so spectacularly that the doctor asked him ‘so do you just see in black and white?’: let people like things

even fake as fuck shades of color that we KNOW THEY’RE JUST MAKING UP to mess with us

wait what

I guess I still don’t really see what your initial comment here is supposed to contribute in response to OP, which isn’t really about being for or against child soldiers, or whether some child soldiers are good and others are bad.

OP isn’t really even about child soldiers per se. It’s about media narratives associated with images of children handling weapons in the contexts of two conflicts, one of the differences between which being that in only one case does the commentary on the image venture as to suggest that the child pictured has been conscripted as a soldier. It’s also about, perhaps more crucially, how allegations of child soldierdom are being used to justify killing children generally, across a whole, captive, civilian population, and that, again, in only one of those two contexts.

(My question was searching for an interpretation that connects GGP back to either of those, which are what the OP is about.)

Meaning

Child soldiers are children as well as soldiers

?

arm the moderate gays

You repeat the phrase ‘in good faith’ several times here but what you’re describing is still just entryism

It’s just another iteration of the Eternal September. Nothing too surprising imo

The crackerverse would holler otherwise, but the crackerverse would holler anyway.

This is also true in Israel. Due to the current state of the West Bank, a two-state solution would essentially require partition all over again, an opening of a new instance of the same kind of wound as 1948 constituted.

When the Israeli Jewish settlements were removed from Gaza, there was a huge uproar inside Israel. If the Israeli government did that in the West Bank today, it’d be a huge reversal and they’d have to contend with a very vocal, very armed, right-wing religious extremist faction going absolutely nuts over it.

Alternatively, if the Israeli government proposed to do land swaps instead (which they’d probably want to do since the West Bank is of special religious and historical significance to Jews, much more so than most of the territory the state of Israel now claims for itself), that could mean further mass displacement for Palestinians living in the West Bank, plus the same kind of domestic problem for the Israeli government in whatever territory they would give over to the Palestinians in exchange.

There’s no way to do a two-state solution that doesn’t require mass displacement by force, possibly for both sides. I don’t understand how that inflames things any less than decolonializatlon/reconstruction/reparations to transition to a single multinational state or a confederation with free movement across the whole territory or something like that.

Israeli Jews certainly cry out loudly today if anyone talks about a one state solution, but there would also be a massive outcry from them if steps were taken to actually realize a two-state solution, too.

(If, when they have a hand strong enough to actually meaningfully negotiate with Israel and hold them to account, Palestinians (including the Palestinian diaspora), should choose a ‘two-state solution’, you won’t find me opposing that. But I really struggle to see how that’s possible given current realities on the ground.)

In the ‘international community’ (i.e., among certain world leaders), this still seems to be the consensus. The idea is motivated not so much by a thought of what is most just, but what is (supposedly) most possible to get both parties to agree to. And China is here trying simply to echo that consensus.

I think at this point, though, it’s hard not to see that this ‘consensus’ is a zombie, and the territorial and political viability of such a solution is visibly, obviously dead. That does make renewed endorsements of a 'two-state solution’ untimely and even uncanny things to see, imo.

I agree that a single state covering the whole of mandatory Palestine seems more just. Palestinians deserve the right of return, full freedom of movement, and all national and civic rights, across the entire territory. I don’t see how a multi-state solution facilitates that.

I also don’t really know how to ‘help’ as an outsider, with a two-state solution. For a one-state solution, we have a model in the original anti-apartheid movement and an existing international movement in BDS. What would helping Palestinians ‘win’ a partitioned state even look like at this point?

Reaction videos are the lowest form of content imo. Far lazier and far less interesting than speedrunning, coding streams, reading/discussion streams, etc. (Not that I find Twitch streams generally compelling, either.)

And payments to streamers aren’t donations in the sense of charity and don’t claim to be. They’re tips paid to entertainers, like money tossed into the hat of a street musician. It’s a different model than wage work but it’s not like a scam or a trick or something.

Using those tips to employ the wage labor of others (e.g., video editors) is exploitation, though.

the gradual technical changes, from bullets to gas to bombs to depravation of water

I’d like to emphasize with you just how gradual that has been, comrade. Israel has been using criminal siege tactics against civilians, like we’re seeing today, including the deprivation of access to electricity, food, clean water, and medical supplies, since at least the 1982 invasion of Lebanon— over forty years ago. But unlike the 1982-2000 war in Lebanon, of course, each time Israel has ratcheted up these techniques against Gaza, the Gazans were already and continuously surrounded, penned in, and totally dependent on the IDF for all of their infrastructure needs. The Gazans were pre-invaded, occupied ahead of time, pre-besieged.

In the particular case of water, contaminated drinking water had already been a major source of disease in Gaza for years before this latest episode of escalating deprivation. There has been an astonishingly prolonged, unremitting march towards this point.

Interestingly to me, and aside from the positions of the IMT (do they support BDS today?), some dissident Israelis like Shlomo Sand used to oppose BDS on similar grounds, advocating instead for change from within. Sand has said he had to give that notion up in the face of reality, that Israeli society is simply too racist to change or be overturned except with massive pressure from without. (That’s perhaps an idealist reading of the reality, confusing symptom for cause.)

I think he says it at some point in this interview. Apologies if I’ve misremembered the source! If anyone watches, they can let me know. :)

deleted by creator

A Maoist patsoc? lol

You can find some PFLP literature on the website of Foreign Languages Press.

Jewish Marxist-Leninist podcast The Minyan did an episode on this text a few years ago, which I remember being pretty good.

Thanks very much for fleshing out my half-thought and also for complicating the picture a bit. :)

I’m reading though Gerald Horne’s book on US settler colonialism soon, so hopefully that will help me internalize some of these details!

I’d question the nature of that support. I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game in protecting them, however support for the recent bombings and ground assaults is significantly lower.

Well, a large supermajority of Israelis support continuing the current campaign, which is inarguably characterized by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, ‘until Hamas is completely eliminated’. This is a clear statement of support not just for the bombing which has so far taken place, but a claim that it must continue (indefinitely— until reaching a goal that is arguably impossible).

I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game

Are you familiar with the concept of strategic depth? Given Israel’s limited size and accessible terrain, its geography profoundly lacks this feature. This means Israel’s defensive capabilities have a virtual ceiling, and the ability to make strategic retreats against an invasion is very limited.

For this reason, Israel has a long history of preferring offensive action over defensive action. And indeed, a large plurality of those polled by IVP, as reported on in the article cited above, have come out and said that Israel’s biggest mistake leading up to October 7 was failing to carry out more offensive operations in Gaza prior to the attack.

Calls for Israel to ‘step up its military game’ are intimately tied to offensive action in Israel, and the pretense that they could conceivably relate only to defensive measures for ‘protection’ or ‘safety’ is unsustainable under any historical scrutiny.

there are many in Israeli leadership roles behaving that way. It’s hard to say whether they genuinely feel that way themselves or if they’re just encouraging it for their own benefit - Netanyahu is probably the latter, in my opinion

Why such interest in the rhetoric when there is a growing pile of civilian corpses behind it? Who cares what is in Netanyahu’s heart when the evident fact is that his finger is pulling the trigger?

Most people in any nation just want peace and prosperity for themselves, rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

The demand for peace without justice is a demand to normalize violence. Are you familiar with the concept of ‘normalization’ in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or in the BDS movement? If you aren’t, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I urge you to take the time to review and at least consider this recent lecture on the concept. Peace is indeed vital for all human beings, but how peace is demanded is equally vital.

rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

And yet Israel, a country in which conscription is mandatory for both sexes, military training typically begins at age 14, a large supermajority of the population serves in the military, and whose military and intelligence agencies are rooted in paramilitaries that antedate the formal state by decades, has been engaged continuously in exactly such a project of forceful expulsion for more than a hundred years, without pause.

If this history is unfamiliar to you, or Palestinian displacement has been presented to you primarily as very recent or unintentional, you may find some deeper engagement with the topic enlightening, if challenging (and you may not agree with all the analysis you read, of course).

There are a large number of books, including books by Jewish Israeli scholars, currently available for free on this topic.

If you’re interested in diving deeper, outside the context of this argument, please let me know. If you have preferences for audiobooks, videos, or other formats, I can help you find something that works for you.

I’m also willing to do a ‘reading exchange’ with you if you’re open to that— I’ll read one related book of your choosing if, after you give me a sense of what texts most interest you, you agree to read one book I recommend, and we can discuss both books together.

I understand that the latter is a big time commitment, so no big deal if you can’t do it.

This kind of functional role of ‘bad settlers’ is well-documented in settler-colonialism, and there are even instances of leaders and government officials in the United States case admitting the necessity of ‘unofficial’ settler violence, from paramilitaries to illegal settlements and more.

Can any comrades with more recent contact with this material than I’ve had help me out with a citation on this, ideally ‘from the horse’s mouth’?

Thanks for writing out your thinking on this explicitly, and for inviting discussion in that way.

Public support in Israel for Israeli military operations is typically very high (70% or more, often even above 80%). The only sense in which those supporting massively disproportionate violence and indiscriminate killing of civilians are a minority is in terms of rhetorical style— not the substance of supporting the actual operations that kill people.

Moreover, many of the Israelis on TV ‘frothing at the mouth’ are current or former government officials. To characterize them as a ‘tiny minority’ is extremely misleading about their role in effecting this violence.

you probably already know this, but if your password manager is also what you use to generate your passwords, you may be able to recover it from the generation history, which some password managers store locally

(this has saved me in the past)