this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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The image looks like AI to me as well. By the bearded man’s head, look at the blurry border between the roof and the oddly askew tree/treeline; this house also seems to have a 2nd story window with only one shutter and the two round windows are in weirdly close proximity to each other given their heights and depths. By the beardless man’s face, the house in the background has a 2nd story window nearly as large as the garage door; there is also an odd absence of houses or trees to the right of this house. Using AI to bring about content like this just seems like propagandist echo chamber slop rather than any sort of stimulating or thoughtful media.
? It's a cartoon, I don't see it trying to pass as a real picture of 3 people with a transcript of what was said in regular conversation.
Given the title of "civics", what I understood from this is that anything we say in current politics can be said reasonably, and people can choose to be decent, respectful and gainful in how they interact with each other. Lots of people and places have rules against "politics" talk because we can't behave ourselves. But being divisive is not a requirement of politics, that's just us being assholes.
The people in the cartoon are showing us that you can also talk about these issues respectfully and working together.
For instance, lots of assholes around these parts come in with their pro-Hamas rhetoric talking about how the US is supporting genocide, acting like the rest of us are happy with children being bombed. The difference is not that we support genocide, the difference is that we don't think the answer is anywhere near as simple as they want to make it. That region is full of religious hate and ignorance with roots of bloodthirst that go back thousands of years, and it will not be fixed overnight with any one policy.
And where is the outrage about Sudan? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/africa/sudan-darfur-humanitarian-aid-intl/index.html
10 million people have fled their homes due to civil war, the WHO says 8.5 million peoples are at emergency levels of food insecurity, and the UN is warning that the death toll could be 4 million people if we don't intervene aggressively https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-18004/famine-hunger-sudan-united-nations-food-insecurity
Let me be clear. My president in the US and his Secretary of State are already working hard on finding a cease-fire deal in Gaza, and the entire West alliance is putting pressure on Israel to end their operations. But who is working to do something for Sudan? While all these pro-Hamas drones are plastering the internet with Hamas propaganda and doing shenanigans at the DNC to get attention, yet nobody gives a shit about 4 million impending deaths by famine because they didn't see it on tiktok. Where are the calls to hear from a Sudanese-American at the Dem convention?
And here we are with this cartoon asking me to find a way to listen to the pro-Hamas tiktok simpletons, and try to communicate with them to find some common ground. It's hard, but it's true that we don't HAVE to be assholes, we just are for now. The one side starts at asshole and goes from there, and it brings out only the asshole out of the other side. Same for any topic. But it doesn't have to be that way, it's just the way we are doing it.
Now, for a practical demonstration, watch the response from the pro-Hamas simpletons.
They are less pro-Hamas or even pro-Palestinian so much as they are just anti-Israel.
Holy shit, what an evil comment.
We just going to ignore the blatant racism and ignorance this user just casually posted about the Middle East, and pretend they are being the reasonable one here?
Liberals just can’t resist being fascist, it’s amazing.
Genocide supporter pretending their opinions are valid, lmao.
"What an evil comment" says the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
that's being manipulated with propaganda warfare by terrorists groups, to support an agenda of hate and death on both sides of the conflict, including Palestinians civilians.
Those of us that want a decades-old conflict to reach a sustainable end are now "the fascists" in the eyes of the deeply disinformed and dangerously vocal tiktok simpletons.
You haven't made any effort to ponder on why the leaders of my country that take this stuff seriously and are trying to solve it won't waste a minute of their day to listen to your nonsense Hamas talking points. You just decided that anyone that is not like you knee-deep in terrorist propaganda has to be evil. Fantastic. What a champion of morals, willing to teach the rest of us how to not want children to die - we would be so lost without your moral guidance and tiktok-tier understanding of these complex issues.
Thank you for helping with today's demonstration.
Wonder what these words mean contextually 🤔
1/2 In short: No more bullets or rockets on either side moving forward. It would be a culmination of centuries of deeply rooted animosity in the region.
There are only 2 ways to get there. Either the bigger side kills every one on the smaller side, as is customary in human history. Or (#2) the Western world order steps in to force a Palestine state that will be fully recognized and protected by international agreements (the same way that Israel is allowed to draw breath today, through the protection of the bigger Western guns demanding peace).
Since it's clear we are simply not going to allow Israel to do #1, the only option left is to do #2. As long as Biden ->Harris goes, this is the direction of things. So on the current path we are on, we are most likely to end the Hamas terrorist rule, secure Palestine as a state and let them form a government, use my tax money to pay to help rebuild Gaza, and apply social equity investment to help Palestinians form trade and communication ties with the world to guarantee their place.
Once Palestine is a fully recognized country with a seat in the international community, they'll have to answer at a state level for any Hamas-like BS they might start later, and they'll also be protected from any future Israel incursions.
We all wish this could be done in a few days with zero civilian casualties, but that's not how things work, particularly when the terrorists that run Gaza want their own people dead (as martyrs and meat shields) with twice as much gusto as the invading force. The reason negotiating a cease fire is so complicated is that Hamas doesn't want one, because they are getting exactly what they want, a nasty war with lots of dead civilians for their propaganda channels.
Biden's strategy so far has been to use Western influence to put guardrails on what Israel is "allowed" to do in terms of operations and certain weapons use, and lean hard on all sides to accept a peace agreement. Mind you, settling ALL sides is quite a complicated mess because Hamas terrorism has a lot of support from Israel-hating states that love the depth of the conflict. Region countries that don't see human life as valuable like we do in the West, and are happy to use a destitute population in Gaza as martyrs for their political objectives against Israel.
2/2
War is easy. If we want to back off we can simply let Israel get their weapons anywhere else in the world because they don't need top-tier US war gear since Gaza is entirely defenseless and Hamas is fighting with low-tier weapons. So if we do what the pro-Hamas tiktokers want, we could simply have the US disengage, make a show of stopping weapons supplies to Israel, and then both Israel and Hamas would get exactly what they want which is to keep fighting it out to the last drop of blood, with scores of Gaza civilians dead in the middle.
Peace is hard. Staying involved so we can lean on Israel with Western influence and threats of pulling broad support, and working to bring half a dozen state actors to the negotiation table, drawing up several rounds of cease-fire proposals, trying to enforce food deliveries to civilians in a war zone. All that stuff is very hard. Even harder is to negotiate Palestinian statehood and sell it to the international community for full support. Even more will be having me, the US tax payer, pay for the Gaza reconstruction. And for the US troubles, they get labeled "fascists" by the tiktok crowd that would simply let Hamas have exactly what they want to prolong Gaza's suffering and destruction.
If any of this sounds foreign, take a moment to think about this. Gaza's population at the start of the conflict was 4 million people. They are fish in a barrel, locked in on every side by all countries, with no way to defend themselves against modern war weapons. People keep calling this a "genocide" under the accusation that Israel wants all Gazans dead. There are 40k dead by the count of the Hamas Health Ministry. That's 1% of the Gaza population. They've been fish in a barrel for nearly a year and only 1% official casualties. This is because the US puts guardrails on what Israel is allowed to shoot at as part of their anti-Hamas operation, as the US seeks to find a way to end the conflict with some form of agreement. If we pull out completely and let Israel and Hamas have at each other no-holds-barred like they want to, you think the death toll after 1 year of modern war rockets on a defenseless population would be 1%? Israel has the military might to wipe Gaza completely within weeks. The West is standing in their way using international pressure and the rules embedded in the weapons agreements.
The reason we DONT want to pull out of Israel is so that we can continue to stand in their way to protect Gaza's civilians. So that we have a say in pushing in food convoys. So that we can head the negotiation table and demand a cease fire.