They probably deserve it.

Oh boy, this is gonna hurt a little, I'll try to be gentle.

This is the claim that JR and I object to:

You repeated that claim here as B:
Note that we are not arguing against A and C. Although I find it pretty hilarious that you actually googled the midterm results for A. Lol. Now in your very long post where you made sure to identify what you proved:

True. You did prove the very obvious claims we were not disagreeing with at all. But what you DIDN"T say was that Assertion B - the one we actually disagreed with - was true.

Now the key issue here is that we have poll that says 31% percent support and 30% oppose. You agreed with the numbers here "that is true".

Now are you paying attention?

Just making sure....

Ready for the kicker?

The part that conclusively shows you are wrong?

Okay here we go: 30% oppose, 31% support is just NOT the same as your claim they "largely support" it. In no universe is 31% - what was measured - anywhere close to "largely" - what you claimed.

So you were wrong. JR was right to claim you were wrong. I was right to support his claim that you were wrong. Not a little wrong. A LOT wrong.

To be fair, you did give some responses to this claim which didn't disprove the poll but let's deal with those. First up:

If this stands to reason, then why in the same poll that gave this number did we get only 31% supporting it? Clearly your claim - that republicans largely oppose the deal - is not substantiated by the poll and other facts that might or might not change this level of support didn't change it because the poll is right there.

Now is where the hypocrisy comes in:

X and Y here (in the case of jewish american support) are not that far apart. Yes it would be great if we had polls from american jews AFTER the framework, but if 84% of the them are approving BEFORE the framework comes out, the chances that a strong majority are approving after is a pretty reasonable guess.

But notice that YOU had absolutely no problem using questions with entirely different framing to deduce your claims about GOP support, yet are objecting to relatively similar framing being a bit different here.





Again, the favourability of Netanyahu is a VERY DIFFERENT METRIC than whether they support the iranian nuclear framework. Remember, they both liked netanyahu AND supported the nuclear deal before the framework came out when netanyahu was still very strongly against. There is no reason to suspect this magically reverses itself. Again, you are using ever further removed metrics to try and deduce your positions.

And to kick it off, despite me giving perhaps the clearest and most obvious example - with back to back quotes showing the error - about your terribly misrepresented rapist example you still - STILL - can't concede the error. If you can't do it here in the most obvious of cases, I doubt you ever will.

That's exactly it. This really should be very quick one sentence acknowledgment that the big reuters/ipsos poll didn't support his claim and we move on to more important topics. Especially since Gamblor apparently believes his time debating this here is worth thousands of dollars an hour, surely some efficiency in conversation would be valued.

Dearest IPayToSee:

Crimes have two elements: the mens rea, which is the intention. This is not merely a legal formality; it is a principle of fundamental justice, which means this issue goes straight to the idea of fairness and what is right and what is wrong. Indeed, of the myriad of criminal codes on earth, just about all of them deal with this issue in one way or another. There is nearly universal societal consensus that, in order to judge someone's actions, their intention is a fundamental element.

Four example, accidentally taking something that you thought was yours is not the same as stealing it, even though in both instances the item did not belong to you. In both instances you took something that did not belong to you. Only in the latter should you be considered a thief.

The issue we are discussing is terrorism, which, per the post you replied to, is, paraphrasing, the "intentional targeting (murder, etc) of civilians for the purpose of intimidating the electorate or the government into making political concessions."

So the IAF dropped a bomb, or the IDF fired a tank shell, and that bomb/shell hits an apparent civilian building. You have added the intention assumption - that the IDF is killing children to terrorize/intimidate the Gazan population.

The widespread use of civilian infrastructure by Hamas fighters as bases of operation, to fire rockets, to plan and direct military operations, etc is well-established itt and does not need further proof. That immediately casts doubt on your assumption that the purpose of the bombing is to intimidate the population - it immediately confounds the issue, because you don't know if they are targetting military or civilian installations. It also casts into doubt situations where civilians were killed, since expecting a perfect target-direct hit ratio is unreasonable; the average war has a civilian-combatant casualty ratio ranging from 10-1 to 1-1, in various contexts. It could just as likely been mistake, close proximity of civilians to legitimate targets, or a number of reasons other than "The IDF is killing civilians for the purpose of intimidating Palestinians."

This thread is filled with concrete examples of victims being called civilians, but turning out to be fighters; it is filled with concrete examples of civilian property being used to launch attacks on Israelis, either through tunnels or by rocket. Hamas has openly intimidated reporters and Gazans about pushing the dead civilian stories. This is all well documented itt and elsewhere.

Finally, it makes no sense that this is the IDF's plan. As haters here love to repeat, violence begets extremism. So they are essentially arguing that the IDF is trying to increase intransigence and extremism in the hopes that they will achieve political concessions. What political concessions do you believe Israel gets from Hamas? If you think they are trying to foster extremism in Palestinian society to make the RoW support Israel, perhaps you missed the outcry during the Gazan war as reporters and NGOs worked together to scream about how evil Israelis are. So that idea makes no sense.

So the accusation that Israel is terrorizing Gazans to achieve political gains makes zero sense, especially in light of the fact that a total of zero Israelis live in Gaza.

If you want to argue that Israel is committing some other crime, I.e disproportionate response, indiscriminate bombing, those have different "intention" requirements. But as far as terrorism goes, you are outright wrong. Israel is not terrorizing Gaza to get political concessions, so it is not terrorism..

You don't get to say "Israel is terrorist" then say "see, they are guilty of some other things." They aren't, but you're wrong anyway.

If you read the post, you would realize that while neither you nor I are experts, we both have widely at our disposal the ability to read the news which is including comments from precisely such experts. When I praise the inspections regime, it is not because I have read the entire framework and have enough contextual knowledge of nuclear physics inspections to be able to adjudicate it myself - and neither do you - but I CAN paraphrase from what I have read from experts who do have this ability. And I can also - as I did before - cite various specific examples cited by these experts.

I am also not an expert in climatology and don't directly read climate studies with enough knowledge to properly adjudicate them, but I CAN reference the experts who have done this.

This "but but but your not an expert" line is a pretty terrible way to dismiss someone's point.

Moderate relative to Iranian politics, obviously.

Whether or not he was involved in something bad decades ago in Argentina is really entirely beside my point which is that there does appear to be public sentiment in Iran in support of normalizing relations with the west in exchange for giving up nuclear capacities. He ran on that and got elected for that. Yes of course the details are often still far apart and a final deal is still far from a sure thing - especially given diverging rhetoric over the last few days - but that general point stands. The fact that Rouhani was Iran's top nuclear negotiator for decades says a lot more relevant to this point than that he also engaged in typical anti-Israel rhetoric from iran.

iPaytosee & gamblor:

I'm quite happy with the phrase "Israel intentionally kills civilians". So do the Americans. And just about anyone else in a war. That is, Israel takes actions (ie the bombings) that they know have a high probability of having a very high civilian death toll. So they intend an action which is predicted to have this consequence.

Note carefully that this is a very different point from intentionally targeting civilians. There is no good evidence that Israel directly aims to kill civilians for the point of killing civilians and plenty of evidence that they very obviously take steps to reduce civilian death toll. Indeed, they could kill everyone in gaza very quickly, if they desired, which eliminates the extreme end of the argument.

So there are bad arguments that can be made on both sides. Those critical of the war need to make sure that when they talk about intentionality they are referring to my first concept, and go nowhere near the second. But that said, pointing out that Israel isn't targeting civilians doesn't absolve it from the responsibility of intending actions they can predict will have devastating civilian consequences. As in, this response is ONLY a good response to someone making a bad claim.

In any war there usually is a trade off between military objectives and minimizing civilian suffering. For instance in the extreme, a nuclear bomb accomplishes the max military objective of no more hamas (ignoring global pushback) but is intolerable due to the civilian suffering. On the other extreme, doing nothing accomplishes no military objectives but minimizes civilian suffering. There is a balance between these two in every modern war where we care about military objectives.

The appropriate way to criticize the war is something like this: "under the assumption of having a war (ie ignoring the question of whether the war is justified in the first place), the actions by Israel in the war swung considerably too far in the "military objective" side and not the "minimize civilian suffering" side.

There are three claims in there, and JR certainly didn't say that. JR said:
You supported this contention:
You are referring to the above post, in which JR bolded the following sentence:
So you are already lying; he objected to the entire post, and you objected to the entire sentence (of which the claim about republicans is only one small part), which contained the three assertions I laid out as A, B, and C. It actually contained more, about Keeed's echo chamber, but I guess I ignored it. That's my bad.

You are not off to a good start here.

Yes I did.

Your post said that you were, and your words above prove that.

You were the one that challenged it. I prove what I say here. woof, uke_master.

Nope, again. According to your own words, you did disagree with it.

Not exactly. I did disagree with it, although I conceded that none of the argument on either side was conclusive. As I wrote:
But the crux of the matter was that he
Once again, you failed to read carefully. Again. As usual.

Yes, I agreed with this. I explicitly noted that it was only 31%.

31% support, 30% against, now we are trying to figure out how the other 40% feel. Why do you think 40% of Republicans are still undecided? Perhaps they are determining whether this deal "maintains or expands current sanctions", as I pointed out in that poll? Maybe they are undecided on whether the current deal fits their position that maintaining or expanding on current sanctions is important? And since it really doesn't, it is likely that many of them will oppose the deal? And despite that reasoning, I explicitly say that I am open to another interpretation.

But that's irrelevant, because JR said (and you supported him, that the whole post was ridiculously false; not just one small part of it. You have once again ignored that you are zeroing in on one small assertion as false while ignoring that you have said all along that the entire sentence was "ridiculously false."

For a nitpicker, you suck at nitpicking.

This is really horrible because X and Y are fundamentally different. They are not even in the same ballpark, and you are relying entirely on the idea that the hypothetical deal as posed in the question is essentially the same deal. It's not anywhere close.


Here is the question again:
Did you catch the bolded? In the question as posed, the assumption is that there are full-time international inspectors that MAKE SURE IRAN IS NOT DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That's a deal even ****ing Bibi Netanyahu would support.

The actual deal has no such guarantee. X is nothing like Y. This is not a framing issue, this is a fundamental term of the hypothetical agreement that is not in the actual agreement.

As I said, it is one
You offered me a Porsche, then told me I'd obviously love a unicycle because obviously, I like things with wheels and they are basically the same.

Of course it is a VERY DIFFERENT METRIC! I specifically said that the polling data about Netanyahu's favourability was being posted (drum roll)
Incidentally:
Woof, uke_master.

must... not... take... bait...

aids incarnate

Unfortunately bringing this back to personalities for sec, but out of fairness to keeed...

uke_master has been super cool. Barking at him (if that's what you're doing) is very childish. (unless it's like a Simpsons reference I'm not getting or something)

On the subject matter, I'm interested in the implications of Gazans feeling that they won the war.

79% of Gazans felt that they won the war.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middle...723979443.html

why?

I think most Israelis feel that they won.

900 fighters killed
3000 rockets destroy
3300 rockets fired w/o great effect
12 tunnels destroyed

http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/06/...-the-gaza-war/

Well I guess this is better but I was actually encouraging you to abandon tone policing all together.

Gamblor: "Republicans LARGELY oppose deal"
Reuters: "31% of Republican oppose deal"

Sorry, bud, you didn't say a word against this. You were wrong. JR and I are correct that you are wrong here. Can you REALLY not concede this? I guess not.

Your only "defense" of your 31% being FAR FAR FAR away from whatever percent is implied by "largely" is something about the undecided:
Who knows. Most likely because Republican voters are pretty ****ing ignorant and don't know and will never know the details of the framework or final deal. But in no way or form do you get to add the 40% of undecided voters to the "oppose" category. It just doesn't work like that. You said largely. The truth is 31%. You were wrong. Time to fess up.

Um. This is objectively false. Even we we accept your "I get to add undecideds in" premise which is ridiculous, JRs best case is 30+40=70% support. But of course you can't go and make 40% undecided into "opposers" or "supporters" just to make your statement work. You were clearly and objectively and verifiably wrong.



Really? When he bolded that paragraph you REALLY thought he was objecting to the claim that republicans are half of voters? Really? When he quoted the poll about republican support - when I seconded the poll - you really thought he and I were trying to dispute that roughly of half of votes are for republicans?

This is just basic contextual awareness. Nobody in their right mind could possibly conclude that JR was at all contesting the obviously fact every single person ITT knows which is that roughly half of americans vote republican. And no, he never said "whole". Disagreeing with a post does not mean disagreeing with each and every single word of it. Maybe - just maybe - this would be slightly confusing if he left it at "your post is ridiculously false"....but he described in the post precisely the thing he disagreed with and spoilers, it had nothing to with the percent of voters that vote republican.

Amazing. Just amazing.





Right. And the international inspectors are doing just that: making sure iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. See how X and Y are pretty similar now?

I mean, seriously, this is the whole point of the agreement to have an inspections regime that makes it so Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. They have to give up 97% of their low enriched stockpile, all their enriched stockpile, not make more enriched, and reduce their enrichment capabilities considerably. And international inspectors are there to make sure they are doing this.



I have no idea why you are posting his favourability. The point you certainly appeared to be pushing back on (that 84% pre-framework may not be true today) is certainly not challenged by this. Americans jews favoured the negotiations when bibi didn't and it is very likely they will CONTINUE to favour the negotiations when bibi doesn't. I expect we will have a poll coming along soon enough that will demonstrate my guess: american jews favour the deal post framework. So I guess cool story bro on this totally unrelated metric while you apparently have entirely capitulated on pushing back on my point?


Of course not. Just ignore the most clear cut example of you being clearly objectively and totally wrong I can think of. You've systematically ignored your basic error before, not chance you will start now.

For the record, I don't mind. Yes implying that my value to the conversation is like a dog barking at Gamblor is a pretty childish troll, but I don't really mind. And while I don't usually resort to such lows, I will say things like "Amazing. Just amazing" as I just did which obviously come with built in connotations of condescension. So we are both being condescending to each other, it is just my choice of expressing the condescension isn't as much below the belt. But this is the internet, I'm a big boy, and am happy to participate in conversations with mutual condescension.

Frankly, I would far prefer Gamblor to be more flexible at admitting the little errors and moving on opposed to being stubbornly digging in - like...err....a dog? - than I would him improving the little "woofs" in his posts.

Paywall on the article, but ya amazing the level of cognitive dissonance.

I think there is a couple factors here. Firstly, I presume the "metric" being used here is basically "got a lightening on the blockade". So sure, if you blind yourself to every other metric like, oh i dunno, people dieing, then ya this metric starts looking okay. But then the metrics you gave are not necessarily that important (outside of the deaths) for gazans either.

Secondly, never underestimate the tendency to spin things to a win for your side. Otherwise, all these thousands dead and destruction was for nothing. Much easier to try and rationalize it as a win.

Resistance fighters around the world have long found "sustained during an oppression" as equivalent to winning. Like they got through the war, however badly, and so that is in and of itself a win. It seems a fairly basic human condition.

I don't think that your average Gazan would say that any of those thing were the actual Israeli war aims. They would more likely say something like the Israeli war aims were to break the spirit of resistance of the Gazans. From that standpoint they might say that they won.

Weird you're hitting a pay wall and I'm not. Maybe they stole my cc. I don't pay for any web news. (I'm old though and still get a newspaper.)

I think the latter two paragraphs.

One thing I don't like about it, and it isn't good for peace, is that maybe they think survival is winning because they think Israel was trying to destroy or occupy Gaza and was repelled. Maybe they could reasonably think Israel was trying to remove Hamas.

The other disturbing thing, that doesn't bode well for peace, is that they consider things like "making Israelis scurry to shelters like mice" as a victory and are willing to trade lives for something like that.

Rather simple, imo. They are still there. They fight for their right to exist, as the people they are. Eventually the Israelis have to either give up and withdraw completely, or commit genocide to every man woman & child.

There is something very disgusting, in my mind, that happens in conflicts which is that you think something bad happening to the other side is by definition good for you. If my enemy is hit, that is good for me. That is a win for me. This isn't just a hamas thing, we do it when glorifying wars in the US, there was that infamous vid of the cheering israelis as bombs went down in gaza, etc. It is a sad part of the human condition.

I think Hamas is wrong to think that their actions help them. It makes peace vastly harder. It makes easing the blocakde harder. Even if you define their objective as "eliminate israel" it has no hope of accomplishing that. They are delusional to think the rocket program helps them in any way. But when the metric becomes "hurt enemy is a win" then well...you get what we have. And in wars, that often is what it comes down to.

Like for me, I don't even just care about civilian deaths. I'm not happy there was 800 Hamas deaths. Plenty of these are just young kids who have grown up in this ****ty situation made worse with a horrible ideology. I understand their motivations to some level. I don't want them to die. They might need to die, they might have forced Israel's hand, but I don't think they "deserve" to die. Ditto taliban etc.

I think that's right and I don't think Israel should ever reasonably expect to force Palestinians into a peace agreement.

Israel/Egypt and Israel/Jordan needed quite a bit of time between war and peace (5 years anyway). That was kind of what could have happened with the 5 year Oslo plan.

A deal with Iran could help start 5 years of relative peace and maybe an opportunity to finish Oslo. Saudi Arabia has already been less hostile publicly towards Israel at times anyway.

I agree. I don't think Palestinians are even necessarily wrong to want to continue the war, other than hurting themselves. The war has gone on for longer than most people in I/P have been alive. Very few of them have any responsibility for starting it.

Eventually the Palestinian leadership needs to give up and quit firing rockets, digging tunnels, running over people in the streets and making heroes of people who stab everyone on a bus, quit allowing Iran and Saudi Arabia to use them as a proxy, and make peace or not and live with the status quo.

At least they have to make an effort or want to make an effort or something.

And then...

Again:
So what is it? Did I not say a word against it? Or did I make a ridiculous premise against it (which you are making up anyway, not me)? It can't be both. You keep saying I didn't say anything, then say I said ridiculous things.

Anyway, I conceded in the OP that and again already that I don't have a strong argument for B. Why do you keep insisting that I can't admit I was wrong about it?

HERE IT IS AGAIN:
He did not parse that sentence in any way, there is no "preciseness" to it, and neither did you. OH OF COURSE THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS THAT HALF OF AMERICANS VOTE REPUBLICAN. There was a sentence, JR challenged all of it, I showed at least 2/3 of it were right, I admitted 1/3 of it is sketchy, and you're still blasting away at the 1/3, pretending I can't admit I was wrong. That is what's amazing.

This is just awful. You are still beating the drum that a 100% guarantee is the same as this deal.

The whole debate is that this deal doesn't prevent that. We've heard everything else - this is our best deal we could get, why shouldn't Iran have nukes, we have to trust them, this is a good deal, - but nobody has said this deal is a 100% guarantee, like the JStreet question asked.

You are essentially saying these two questions are the same:
1) "Would you like a lot of money?"
2) "Would you like a job?"

uke_master: "They're the same question - the whole point of a job is to get a lot of money!"

They are two different ideas, and they are country miles apart.

How can I capitulate on a point I didn't argue? I never said that Netanyahu's favourability and opposition to this deal are the same, except for you! Who are you even arguing with?

When did Bibi say he didn't favour negotiations? Why are you making things up? He has been very clear - that any deal must be strong and have teeth, that Iran must never get the bomb, etc.

The reason I brought it up is because the CS monitor article (and the pollsters, JStreet), adopted a tone suggesting that American Jews are against Netanyahu, and I was just showing that it's a false storyline, that American Jews are largely in support of Netanyahu.

But you're the one that keeps trying to tie these things together, not me. That is why people use the word "Incidentally." Exactly to say that they are not related.

You, once again are arguing a sham. You're making it up as you go with every excuse, and your whopper about Netanyahu being against negotiations is a real ugly one.

...

...

Oh, did you think I was going to let this one go?

oh wow.

In a thread full of idiotic, ignorant, horrible unsupported claims, you just won the prize. 40% of Republican voters are undecided because "Republican voters are pretty ****ing ignorant". You want to walk that one back, boss?

I guess I get to say it now:

"Your post is ridiculously false."

lol "fight for their right to exist"?

Are there any Israelis in Gaza?

lolwut are you talking about?

Iran only backs Hamas. Saudi Arabia is pretty much uninvolved.