God help them. The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining

  • teuniac_@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t really recognise this in responses that I’ve heard so far. Everyone seems to be quite aware that Israel’s military capabilities can’t be compared to those of Hamas and a large part of the escalation is in the hands of Israel.

    The western world can’t even agree on what liberals are. It is not that helpful to characterise 'liberals" in a particular way around this issue, especially when randomly involving minorities in Ukraine.

    Instead of focussing on whose side who is on, let’s focus on reducing suffering and how to work towards a situation where international agreements are upheld.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      72
      ·
      1 year ago

      The western world can’t even agree on what liberals are.

      the western world has known for over 2 centuries that liberalism is a bourgeois ideology that is progressive under feudalism and reactionary under capitalism. NEXT

    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      69
      ·
      1 year ago

      The western world can’t even agree on what liberals are

      Found the LIB

      What is it with liberals and not understanding that words have distinct meanings? Either they stretch the meaning of a term for a specific thing to make it cover everything they they don’t like (e.g. fascism, genocide, nazi) or they pretend like the meaning of a word has no definite meaning because they are too lazy to actually go look it up.

      • teuniac_@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        In political science definitions aren’t prescribed, they are described. The meaning of liberalism is dependent on what actors who call themselves liberal say or do.

        There are different kinds of liberalism. There is social liberalism, classic liberalism, conservative liberalism, etc. Considering how broad liberalism is, for most people it doesn’t make sense to “oppose” liberalism.

        • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          1 year ago

          The meaning of liberalism is dependent on what actors who call themselves liberal say or do.

          Nope. If a monarchist calls themselves a liberal that doesn’t mean that liberalism can also mean monarchism. Calling yourself a banana doesn’t make monkeys want to eat you.

          Yes there are permutations and variations of liberalism but as you have pointed out they have their own names. They are defined to show the similarities and differences. All forms of liberalism have certain characteristics that make them liberal.

          Words have meanings. If you don’t know you can look them up Words aren’t just based on feefees. This assertion that words mean whatever the speaker wishes is hyper-liberalism. Its like you believe in individualism and egalitarianism, so hard that you delude yourself, into thinking what you feel subjectively in the moment, has more validity than material reality.

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          In western liberal political science, sure, but western liberal political science doesn’t even recognize capitalism as a totalitarian system, so it is pretty much worthless for actual, real world, political analysis. It works as a way to move your way through academia, or western electoral politics, but using it as a way to describe the world and the movement of economics and capitalism, it is worthless as a analytical tool, it’s historical analysis skills ground to worthlessness from decades of internalized propoganda masquerading as acquired knowledge.

          The fact that you can’t even recognize modern political science itself as a modern totalized liberal ideology is itself indicative of it’s formations and power.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      68
      ·
      1 year ago

      Hamas is currently performing heroic acts in the interest of reducing suffering, if settlers aren’t happy they shouldn’t have stolen and ethnically cleaned that land in their European colonial project

    • Hagels_Bagels@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      56
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      let’s focus on reducing suffering and how to work towards a situation where international agreements are upheld.

      It seems very weird to bring that up now. The entire history of the state of Israel is disregard for international agreements.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      36
      ·
      1 year ago

      Bernie Sanders isn’t a liberal? Trudeau isnt a liberal? Biden isn’t a liberal?

      The entire democratic party aren’t liberals? The German government aren’t made up of liberals? Macron, the Tories, Keir Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, Cornel West, according to you none of these people are liberals?

      I mean you’re not even obfuscating, youre just straight up delusional

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          20
          ·
          1 year ago

          Liberalism is the ideology that justifies the continued existence of capitalism

          It has many subspecies with tactical differences, but they are all united in the preservation of capitalist property relations

      • teuniac_@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        A country doesn’t have an ideology. People and parties do.

        People assign different meanings to it. Many people are aware of the differences in liberalism between the US and Europe, but also within Europe there are many differences. Liberalism in the UK differs quite a lot from Sweden and the Netherlands. And within countries conservative Christian parties might say they are liberal, as well as centre leftwinged parties. Yet, they might find it hard to collaborate and have strong disagreements on the role of the state.

        Liberals can easily have entirely different views on the conflict between Palestine and Israel.

        Liberalism doesn’t tell you exactly what to prioritise here. For sure is that the establishment of settlements isn’t very liberal, and violence against civilizations isn’t either. But liberalism doesn’t dictate a solution.

        • Stylistillusional [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          23
          ·
          1 year ago

          You’re telling me that a constitution is not, by definition, an ideological document?

          I don’t understand how you can live in this world where you recognise that the parties and people that make up the state apparatus are ideological but the state itself is not. There’s no magical step where the functioning of these explicitly ideological people somehow becomes non-ideoligical. Believing otherwise is itself an ideological position, namely a liberal one.

          Just because different lib parties have disagreements doesn’t mean they aren’t liberal. Almost without exception they ‘recognise Isreal’s right to defend itself’. They all implicitly, if not explicitly, support a settler-colonial apartheid state. And what would be more fitting than liberals supporting such a state? When it was liberal thinkers like Locke who’s theory served to justify the British settler-colonial project in the Americas.

    • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      let’s focus on reducing suffering and how to work towards a situation where international agreements are upheld.

      That’s what the Palestinians are currently doing.

      Colonizers get the fuck out. Simple as. Israel could have prevented this any time in the last 70 years by stopping the slow genocide of the Palestinians.