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Author Topic: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'  (Read 41194 times)

Forumsdwarf

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #510 on: April 05, 2010, 03:03:06 am »

Quote
There's a reason why the ENTIRE WORLD besides Israel and the US says that Cast Lead was chock full of war crimes.
The other thing about people who make up phony "war crimes" is they make up a phony world in which they serendipitously enjoy unanimity of opinion everywhere except the United States and the country in question (should the accused country not be the United States.)

How convenient.

Quote
Sounds to me like you just don't want countries you like to be held accountable for war crimes.
Show me a real war crime and we'll talk.  Bad shit happens during war.  War crimes have to be really bad shit that rise above the level of the horror of war.  (And "really bad" is codified, rules like "always wear a uniform so you don't blend in with civilians thus making them into targets.")
Here's a thought experiment.  It isn't meant to speak to any specific laws, it's just a thought.  Imagine the horror of war.  Bombs falling.  Innocent children dying.  Cities burning.  Pretty horrible, isn't it?  War crimes have to be worse than that or they're not war crimes.
Inflicting collateral damage when fighting an enemy that commits the specific war crime of fighting out of uniform in densely-populated areas isn't a war crime.  It's war.
Using civilians as human shields by fighting out of uniform in densely populated areas is a war crime because it leads to inflated civilian casualties.
So Hamas commits real war crimes while their allies accuse Israel of made up war crimes and to top it off invent an "ENTIRE WORLD!" that agrees with them.
Hey, if you're going to make shit up, might as well go all the way.  Never mind what India has to say.  The ENTIRE WORLD is unanimous!

Quote
Anyway, anytime somebody starts telling me 700 Gazan civilians deserved it
It's war.  Nobody "deserves it"; collateral damage is part of the horror of war.  I'm willing to say, however, that the world deserves to be free of people who target the other side's civilians with suicide bombs and artillery then hide amongst their own during the counterattack.  The world deserves dead terrorists, whether or not the terrorists deserve to be dead.
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Neruz

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #511 on: April 05, 2010, 03:08:35 am »

It always amazes me just how many people fail to understand what 'War' is.

War means you are pointing at a country, and then you are killing everyone in it who tries to stop you.
(This is also why War is supposed to be a last resort; it's not fucking pretty.)

Jude

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #512 on: April 05, 2010, 07:39:15 am »

Quote
There's a reason why the ENTIRE WORLD besides Israel and the US says that Cast Lead was chock full of war crimes.
The other thing about people who make up phony "war crimes" is they make up a phony world in which they serendipitously enjoy unanimity of opinion everywhere except the United States and the country in question (should the accused country not be the United States.)

Ain't nothing phony about it

Tell me the name of a country that rejects the Goldstone report

And it's nothing new. Any time Israel is supposed to be held accountable for any of its crimes in the UN, guess why they aren't? Well, I'm guessing you already know.
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Huesoo

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #513 on: April 05, 2010, 07:53:31 am »

Quote
There's a reason why the ENTIRE WORLD besides Israel and the US says that Cast Lead was chock full of war crimes.
The other thing about people who make up phony "war crimes" is they make up a phony world in which they serendipitously enjoy unanimity of opinion everywhere except the United States and the country in question (should the accused country not be the United States.)

Ain't nothing phony about it

Tell me the name of a country that rejects the Goldstone report

And it's nothing new. Any time Israel is supposed to be held accountable for any of its crimes in the UN, guess why they aren't? Well, I'm guessing you already know.


Be cause if die JEWS!

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Jude

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #514 on: April 05, 2010, 08:03:07 am »

here's a hint: Somebody gave the US veto power over that stuff
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Strife26

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #515 on: April 05, 2010, 09:50:49 am »

here's a hint: Somebody gave the US veto power over that stuff

Because the UN human rights council is so fucked up it isn't even funny?

Israel's prone to big military actions with big collateral, and neither side make hurting civvies especially hard.
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The Architect

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #516 on: April 05, 2010, 11:09:46 am »

Once again, I find myself on Forumsdwarf's side. If you provoke a war by targeting civilians, you'd better expect to get a damned war. In reality Israel bends over backwards rather than just kicking the whole muslim population out of their country (or making war in a method more fitting to the terrorist tactics of their opponents). Anyone can realize there are innocents involved on both sides, but the responsibility is with those who should not to be supporting and hiding murderous terrorists if they do not wish to be caught in the crossfire.
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Jude

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #517 on: April 05, 2010, 03:41:09 pm »

In reality Israel bends over backwards rather than just kicking the whole muslim population out of their country

See this is part of the problem

The Muslims were there first and basically all they're asking for (besides the minority of extremists; the rest of the terrorists - who are also a minority I might add - join up with them because they grow up in apartheid ghettos under military occupation with no human rights) is to be able to live in their own country in peace

That's why I keep saying if you would change the conditions that Palestinians are forced to live in then terrorists would lose their support, it's that simple. They would become a bunch of fringe wackos with no foot soldiers to do the dirty work. The foot soldiers are poor kids who grew up in hell on earth with no future, and if they had better lives they would not join up with terrorists. There are plenty of Israelis who realize this. Unfortunately, they're not in power, and even when they are none of them have the balls to stand up to the settler movement.

That's why I think Israeli extremists are more dangerous and scary than Palestinian ones. (well, and the Israeli extremists have a government and army to do their dirty work for them). The Palestinian ones have been turned into extremists by being oppressed for decades. The Israeli ones are wackos who could live a perfectly comfortable life in Tel Aviv, or for that matter, in Brooklyn (where plenty of them come from) but insist that God wants them to conquer the promised land again
« Last Edit: April 05, 2010, 03:43:32 pm by Jude »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #518 on: April 05, 2010, 03:56:34 pm »

for the record: yeah, Clash of the titans sucked. I think the 80s version was far better.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2010, 04:00:36 pm by ChairmanPoo »
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Bauglir

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #519 on: April 05, 2010, 04:38:51 pm »

The Muslims were there first and basically all they're asking for (besides the minority of extremists; the rest of the terrorists - who are also a minority I might add - join up with them because they grow up in apartheid ghettos under military occupation with no human rights) is to be able to live in their own country in peace

I just want to say, this is more complicated than you're making it out to be. The Jews were there firster. Both groups have incorporated the land into the traditions at the roots of their cultures. It's not so easy as to say that one side has a legitimate claim and the other doesn't.

Also, I was gonna go see Clash of the Titans. Does it suck badly enough to warrant seeing, or is it merely mediocre?
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Sergius

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #520 on: April 05, 2010, 05:24:30 pm »

I just want to say, this is more complicated than you're making it out to be. The Jews were there firster. Both groups have incorporated the land into the traditions at the roots of their cultures. It's not so easy as to say that one side has a legitimate claim and the other doesn't.

Sure, they were there "firster", like, hundreds or thousands of years ago or whatever. They also travelled everywhere and stuff. Half of the world is land that was taken and retaken from people who were there "firster". But if today you decide that somehow, Israel has claim over the "holy land" because they come from there originally, it's not different than say, 50% of the United States decided that they wanted to go back to live in England or whatever so they make an "Old United States" and displace all the population of England. I mean, they used to live there, right?
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Jude

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #521 on: April 05, 2010, 07:41:24 pm »

The Muslims were there first and basically all they're asking for (besides the minority of extremists; the rest of the terrorists - who are also a minority I might add - join up with them because they grow up in apartheid ghettos under military occupation with no human rights) is to be able to live in their own country in peace

I just want to say, this is more complicated than you're making it out to be. The Jews were there firster. Both groups have incorporated the land into the traditions at the roots of their cultures. It's not so easy as to say that one side has a legitimate claim and the other doesn't.


Far be it from me to say that "Jews" as an abstract, conglomerated entity have less of a claim than "Palestinians," as same, to that piece of land. Such a statement is meaningless, which is why a number of they key rationalizations for Zionism are dumb (the religious one that God said so, and the secular one that Jews once had a kingdom there, therefore any random American or European who happens to be Jewish has more of a right to live there than do the locals. The one that wasn't dumb is the argument that nowhere in the world is safe for Jews, which in the early 20th century was indisputably true. Its not true any longer, but that's another story).

In any case, the argument that "The Jews were there firster" is also dumb for a number of reasons. Let me break it down, starting with its assumptions.


Assumption 1: The actions or ways of living of people 3000 years ago should directly affect our assessment of human rights today.

To this assumption, I can only say, wtf are you smoking? Obviously nobody would state this as a principle outright, but it underlies the argument that "Jews have a right to live in Palestine because their distant ancestors did." Anyway, does that mean that since I'm a German, and 2000 years ago my ancestors were rampaging around Central Asia, I have the right to show up in Central Asia and establish a state that favors my ethnicity while disenfranchising the locals? Or that as a Mennonite, I have the right to show up in Switzerland and do the same? The idea that the way things were 3000 years ago should be held as a claim to anything is completely absurd on its face.

Secondly, the Palestinians were there first, as in, today's Palestinians are from the population that had continuously been living in Palestine not only for the past few centuries, but in many cases since the times of the Jews (and many of them WERE Jews, but I'll get to that later) AND before. Remember those Canaanites in the Bible? You better believe many Palestinians AND Jews could trace their ancestries back to those people. And THOSE people weren't the first either.

But today's Palestinians were the ones there in living memory. There are people still alive who were exiled in 1948, had their homes and land (i.e., livelihood, since they were mostly farmers) seized, and were never allowed to return to what became Israel, while any random-ass American who happened to have a Jewish grandparent WAS allowed to come there and live happily on their land while they languished in refugee camps. Same thing happened again in 67 in smaller numbers. No reasonable person can dispute that someone who lived in Palestine in 1948 had a right to. You can make quite strong arguments that their children and grandchildren (today's terrorists, btw, since they've grown up under martial law and/or in hellhole ghettos, ghettos in the European sense) have a right to. But how the hell do you make an argument that Joe McAmerican whose grandmother was Jewish has some innate right to live there, especially while people who were kicked off that land are not being allowed to return?


Assumption 2: "Jews" are a distinct and separate lineage from the rest of humanity, and as such can be traced directly back to the Kingdom of Judah of 2500 years ago.

Again, nobody would straight up admit they believed this, but the assumption underlies arguments behind why something like the "Law of 'Return'" should exist. But the thing is, people intermix. Ethnic identities are basically culturally constructed, much as I hate that term. People's ancestries are intertangled. Every generation a person traces their lineage back, the number of direct ancestors DOUBLES, until you start to hit overlap due to inbreeding or due to the number becoming larger than the population of Earth. Any European or European-American probably has a significant number of Jewish ancestors, and any European Jewish person has a significant number of Gentile ancestors (why do you think Jewish people look like the people around them instead of like Levantine farmers?). Palestinian Arabs certainly have lot of Jewish ancestors. Palestinian Christians have the longest Christian tradition of all, obviously since Jesus lived there, and the first Christians were of course Jews. You better believe some of their massive number of ancestors were early Jewish converts to Christianity. Similar with Muslims, of the Jews left in Palestine when the Muslims invaded, a number certainly converted, voluntary or forced. Basic population genetics makes it really absurd except in terms of studying culture to say that ethnic groups are somehow distinct in terms of descent, if they've shared the same geographic area at all at any point in their history.

Anyway, this post is already well into the pits of tl;dr oblivion so I'm just going to close by saying that it's totally fucktarded to say a given person has some innate right to live in a certain place more so than does the rest of humanity, simply because they belong to a certain ethnic group. The only reasonable standard is, have they and their family been living there and been settled there for a long time? Do they have their livelihood invested in it? Obviously, the answer is "yes" for basically all Palestinians, and for native-born Israelis to a lesser extent since they're mostly the children or even grandchildren of immigrants, and a resounding "no" for anybody whose ancestry was in any other part of the world for the past millennium, no matter what their self-identification. Now I'm of the opinion that anybody should be allowed to live anywhere in the world they want, regardless of ethnicity and of claims of God's promises to mythical ancestors, as long as they're willing to respect the people who are there already and play by their rules and most of all, not fuck them over using superior military power. If the fledgling state of Israel had played by those rules, everyone could be living happily in parallel, if not together. And to sum it up, Jews don't have a right to live in Palestine because their distant ancestors did. They have a right to live there because they're humans, and humans should have the right to live wherever they want as long as they respect the place and its inhabitants who were there when they arrived. period.

Edit: Sergius already made one of my points quite well, albeit in less detail.

Also, to anticipate the argument that "Well fledgling Israel tried to play by those rules but the Arabs attacked them!" - yeah, the Arabs attacked them. The Palestinians didn't. The Palestinians were a bunch of farmers minding their business (and, I should add, living by and large on quite good terms with their Jewish neighbors, included recent immigrants). The Arabs in this case were the armies of neighboring countries run by asshole dictators. I know some Israelis and the pro-Israel crowd love to refer to Palestinians as just "Arabs" since it lumps them in with the rest of the Arab world as if they're indistinguishable, serving many propaganda purposes I won't bother listing. but keep in mind who attacked Israel (it wasn't the Palestinians) and who got fucked in the ass because of it (it was the Palestinians)
« Last Edit: April 05, 2010, 07:53:52 pm by Jude »
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Bauglir

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #522 on: April 05, 2010, 10:31:20 pm »

Actually my point is that who was there first is no longer a valid argument, as most (and, soon enough, all) of the current generation of people living there have lived there their whole lives. It's just a matter of degree between Palestinians there 60 years ago and Jews there 2000 years ago. I didn't intend "the Jews were there firster" as a valid argument (I had hoped that use of the word "firster" would make that clear), but as a demonstration of why "The Palestinians were there first" is invalid.

For the time being, living memory does include people still alive. 20 years from now, though, that numbers going to start getting vanishingly small. And quite frankly, this far down the line from when all the troubles began, arguing about who started it is completely pointless and detrimental to solving the problem because nobody who WAS alive at the time is going to admit to contributing and everyone born since has been thrust unwillingly into the situation.

Guess you just missed the possibility that I'm not a moron, though.
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Jude

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #523 on: April 05, 2010, 10:40:32 pm »

Actually my point is that who was there first is no longer a valid argument, as most (and, soon enough, all) of the current generation of people living there have lived there their whole lives. It's just a matter of degree between Palestinians there 60 years ago and Jews there 2000 years ago. I didn't intend "the Jews were there firster" as a valid argument (I had hoped that use of the word "firster" would make that clear), but as a demonstration of why "The Palestinians were there first" is invalid.

For the time being, living memory does include people still alive. 20 years from now, though, that numbers going to start getting vanishingly small. And quite frankly, this far down the line from when all the troubles began, arguing about who started it is completely pointless and detrimental to solving the problem because nobody who WAS alive at the time is going to admit to contributing and everyone born since has been thrust unwillingly into the situation.

Guess you just missed the possibility that I'm not a moron, though.

Well, as I said somewhere in that monster wall of text, I say first of all, the issue of who was there first is still relevant in the sense that even when the generation who remember 48 is dead, there will still be millions (and counting) Palestinian refugees who certainly have a right to live in what's now Israel, basically because their lives there were stolen from them. The difference between that and, say, a 40th generation diaspora Jew wanting to move there from England should be clear. Now you can't say the same of native born Israelis obviously, but I'd say that having very recent ancestors DOES give some innate right to live in the land, if anything can, whereas having distant ancestors does not.

But at this point, the question isn't "who has a right to live there" but "is Israel going to recognize the Right of Return" and the answer to that is certainly no. For one thing, the influx of millions of poor and unemployed Palestinians with no place to live would wreck things economically. And of course it would make Jews a minority in Israel and it wouldn't be a Jewish state anymore.

Now if I had my way we'd have none of this ethnic state bullshit. No Jewish state, no Palestinian state, because both are inherently racist. They privilege one ethnic group over another, in theory and even more so in practice. That's even withOUT having the occupation mean that several million MORE people are ruled by a government that does not represent them in any way whatsoever. What should have happened was one state should have been formed with no religious or ethnic preferences and liberal immigration policies that would let Jews in but also anybody else who wanted to. Hell will freeze over first of course.
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Bauglir

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Re: Let's discuss 'Avatar.'
« Reply #524 on: April 05, 2010, 10:51:27 pm »

I completely agree that Israel's fucking things over, just to make it clear. I just think that any "I was here first" argument is complete bullshit, and it's not the reason WHY Israel is wrong. I happen to think that a lot of Palestinian methods are wrong, too, but given their opponent I can't come up with a better solution, all I can do is condemn the murders they do commit. Honestly, both sides need to try and make this a moral war, not a tactical war. The side that stops killing people to achieve their goals is the side likeliest to win in the end, but the trouble is nobody's willing to do that because everybody feels (somewhat justly) wronged.

Actually, back on topic, this is what I meant with Quaritch. He's got a legitimate problem with the Na'vi, which is that they killed his friends and are a constant threat to his life and career. The trouble is, the Na'vi have a legitimate problem with the humans, which is that they're basically invading and conquering their homeland without any concern for the locals. The main problem with the analogy is that Quaritch chose to go to Pandora, which means he put himself in that situation, and that's really the only thing in my mind that really makes him out-and-out evil instead of a shades-of-grey-asshole. He's too prideful to realize that his problems were a clear and necessary outcome of his own choices about his life.
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
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