I am Groot

To me, what's happening atm is the continuing struggle between civilization and barbarism. What we saw last weekend from Hamas was barbarism at its worst. Needless to say, I want civilization to win.

The Palestinians are Muslims. They have adopted a version of Islam which calls for continuing holy war. After numerous suicide attacks killed hundreds of Israelis, the Israeli government began walling off the Palestinian territories, as any government would have done. Just about every attack on them since then has involved retaliation for attacks on Israelis or pre-emptive attacks to arrest or kill terrorist leaders. If the Palestinians stopped attacking Israel they would have peace. It certainly wasn't my idea.

Their lands back? They tend to think of 'their lands' as everything in the area including the state of Israel. They make little secret of that fact. Hamas will not negotiate with Israel and calls the PLO illegitimate because they're even willing to talk to Israelis. Hamas wants to establish an Islamic state throughout the region, including Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. And it has called for the Jews to be killed everywhere in the world. How do you suggest Israel 'negotiate' with such people? Israel backed off and left them to govern themselves and the people of Gaza elected a group of religious fanatic terrorists to be their leaders. Unsurprisingly, this has led to considerable conflict with Israel.

I recognize that. But democracies require certain elements/abilities not present in Russia. Like, for example, the ability to run in an election against Putin. The last guy who seemed interested in doing that is serving twenty years in prison after surviving an attack by poison. In fact, anyone who dares criticize government policies tends to wind up dead or in prison. Another thing a democracy requires is some form of media that can inform the people about what is happening. Russia lacks anything like a free media. A third thing a democracy requires is free elections. Anyone who thinks Putin's boys and girls wouldn't stuff the ballot boxes is painfully naive.

Russia is not a democracy of any sort. There haven't been any real elections there in decades.

Kind of irrelevant to the current war. There is some controversy about what guarantees were made to the Soviets by Baker and others, but the important point is they were made in 1990 to the Soviet Union, and that entity ceased to exist a year later. It was nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952. And what right does Russia have to consider an independent, sovereign state to belong in some way to them? You spoke of an informal agreement with the Soviets. The Ukrainians had a formal agreement with the current Russian state signed by the current Russian president guaranteeing their borders. A corrupt man bought and paid for by Russia which rigged the election. In any event, the dispute was over an economic agreement with the EU which the Ukrainian parliament had approved overwhelmingly. There were protests, which the police put down brutally, shooting hundreds of unarmed demonstrators. The president and parliament then agreed to the government resigning and an interim government being set up with quick elections to follow. But the president fled the next day and called on Russia for help. The parliament than unanimously voted to remove him from office. So does Russia, Lots of them. The Ukrainian units you speak of have mostly disappeared now. Do you honestly think a Jewish president would leave them intact for long

You left off a very important problem for couples considering children. For women, especially. Security. It used to be the case that when you had a decent job you were set for life. You could count on it being there forever. Once I had my first reliable, permanent job I was able to go out and buy a brand-new car, my first. Not long after that I was able to buy a house, my first. There aren't that many of those jobs around now. The gig economy does not inspire confidence. Working for companies that have a tendency to drop you every few years don't either. Without a secure income, one with sufficient disposable income you can pay the rent and other bills and still won't be in a hand to mouth existence even with kids, couples are highly reluctant to have children. Hookups. Couples used to marry by eighteen. That got pushed back to mid-twenties. Now many don't marry at all. When they do, it's often in their thirties. Only about 35% of Canadians are legally married. Without the security of knowing they're going to be together couples, especially women, are reluctant to have kids. And since they often don't feel that security until well into their thirties, nor have job and income security until then, they have very few years in which to have whatever kids they're going to have.

No, they do not pretty much have the same views. I disapprove of Netanyahu and think his governments over the years have been stupidly counter-productive but if he had the same views toward Palestinians as Hamas has toward Jews there'd be no Palestinians today. Israel's problem is its dumbass electoral system which gives political power to extremist right-wing groups out of all proportion to their electoral popularity. This is also due to the balance of power being so narrow in the Knesset. Only a tiny percentage of Israelis support these parties, which mostly get votes from the non-working ultra-orthodox nutbars in Israel who also don't join the army. I've heard of no opposition to Hamas. The last poll I saw gave them 57% support in Gaza and 42% in the West Bank. How do you broker a peace deal with a group whose reason for existence is ridding the world of your people and destroying your country? Would you suggest Israel make a peace deal with Adolph Hitler and his Nazis if some of them were still about? Same basic idea.

Any humane outlook on the world must recognize that civilians never deserve to suffer due to the group into which they were born or because of actions committed by those who claim to speak on their behalf. For that reason, I feel as much empathy for the Palestinian children who will die in bombardments of Gaza as I do for the Jewish children who were killed in Hamas’s attack on Israel. Each civilian death is a tragedy on the same moral order. But while every civilian victim is in equal measure undeserving of their tragic fate, moral philosophers have for centuries recognized a key distinction between forms of military action that may be legitimate and forms of terrorism that will always remain illegitimate. In the former, military action is directed against military targets; while some civilian deaths are foreseeable as a consequence of such attacks, soldiers undertake to minimize them insofar as possible. In the latter, political action is directed against civilian targets; the killing of innocents is the goal, not an unintended side effect, of the attack. https://archive.ph/FaHlg

So were almost all the Jews, In fact, only a minority of Jews in Israel are from or descended from those who fled Europe. The majority are descended from Jews who have lived in that region for millennia or those who fled the pogroms in other Arab states. Back off? You mean make no attempt to either avenge their dead, defeat Hamas, or get their hostages back?

Well, they did give that a trial run by letting them self-govern. They elected Hamas, a group of religious fanatics dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the implementation of an Islamic state throughout the region, and the death of all Jews. Soooo, I guess that didn't work out so well. So what do you imagine a completely independent Gaza would do? I mean, first, they'd import a lot more heavy weapons. That's a no brainer. Then they'd attack Israel again, only more effectively. The organizers for these demonstrations made it pretty damned clear their purpose was to celebrate the 'great victory' over Israel.

How did they do that? By defending themselves? By giving Gaza a measure of self-government, which they immediately used to elect a brutal theocratic terrorist entity? By not keeping their women away from the border where they would be raped and murdered? By existing? Israel has kicked the shit o ut of all the Arab world combined multiple times and can do it again. As for their Arab population, I'm sure they're ambivalent about things. But then again, not all of them. https://nationalpost.com/news/hamas-hostage-survivor#:~:text=Arar%2C who was bleeding profusely,released a few hours later.

Not today it's not. Not when it comes to Hamas and ISIS vs Israel.

I wouldn't say anyone has trained us so much as our own elites, who have long played up the need to compromise in all things, go 'go along to get along' with each other, and not do anything that offends or disturbs each other. Everything has to be by agreement - mass agreement - of anyone even remotely concerned and anywhere near whatever is being developed. To ensure this they've surrounded industry with so much regulation and bureaucracy nothing moves at more than a snails pace. Nothing is a better example than the Trans Mountain pipeline. The original was blasted through rough, raw territory in 1951 in less than a year. Easy peasy. The twin, which was to simply run alongside it, has taken years and years and YEARS of interminable studies, lobbying, negotiations, then back-and-forth discussions with natives, multiple court cases, more politicking, and condition after condition attached to the building, including huge bribes to every native group remotely near the route. Work on the pipeline has been going on for years, and is years behind schedule and tens of billions over budget Like every major project in Canada that involves the government. And EVERY major project in Canada now involves the government. Its fingers are into everything. Its rules and regulations control everything. Every year it comes out with new regulations, new administrative procedures, new policies and programs, and expands by hiring thousands of new bureaucrats to oversee it all. But then, ultimately, it's our fault for voting in these people. Go along to get along, right?

Then the question becomes: Why the hell are we doing it? Stats Canada debunked the story about us having a labour shortage. Our shortage is largely in unskilled labour, and that is not that big a deal. It should be handled through Capitalism's normal system of redistributing workers according to increasing pay rates. Demographics statisticians have said there is no way immigration is going to do very much at all to offset a decreased birth rate. And there seems to be evidence now that this much immigration, and the results of it (stagnating wages/high costs of housing) are causing our birth rate to further decline. It's also not going to do much of anything about an aging population, particularly given the average age of immigrants is around middle age and that they increased the number of elderly immigrants who can be sponsored sixfold. Leaving me with the belief it's to allow the Liberals to gain votes in certain ethnic/immigrants groups that tend to vote Liberal, for virtue signalling, and to please the corporate honchos who is Trideau's future employers, the ones who will offer him board seats with comfortable payouts and little or no work.

They destroyed one tank, that we know of, that was pretty much left alone by an unprepared crew and overwhelmed by attackers. I rather doubt that would happen in an invasion.

It seems the Laurentian Elites and their stooges in the media are wrong again about what Canadians want. When asked about tripling Canada’s population in its largest cites, six-in-ten (60%) describe their initial thoughts on this idea as ‘bad’, but impressions are split as to how bad; 32% think it’s a bad idea, while slightly fewer (28%) think it’s a very bad idea. Around one-in-ten (13%) think this is a good idea, although just 2% feel it’s a very good idea. • More than three-quarters believe an increase in population would worsen the preservation of farmland (78%), access to nature (76%), and housing affordability (76%), while around two-thirds feel it would worsen a healthy environment (73%), quality of life (66%), and efforts to address climate change (66%). • 61% also indicated that they would be upset with more crowded cities and towns in their community. 5 Key Highlights Half (49%) of Canadians believe that immigration should be less than the current level, while 20% are happy with the current level, and a similar number (18%), believe it could be higher than it currently is. Only 15% believe that Canada should allow cheap labour into the country to support companies which pay low wages. • 19% believe that immigration should be used to change the ethnic and cultural makeup of Canada https://sustainablesociety.com/what-do-canadians-want-opinion-research-report/

What's the difference between pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas? These organizations called for the demonstrations and people came out onto the streets to 'cough cough' support Palestine before Israel had even really responded to the slaughter of their innocent civilians. And from their own words on the callouts, the organizations made it clear these were demonstrations of support and celebration for what Hamas had done.

This board of this group appears to consist entirely of 'new Canadians'. Which once again brings to the fore the thought that we should have been a lot pickier in who we allowed into our country and should start screening newcomers very thoroughly. https://www.yfs.ca/board

Oh, hardly. There's only two million of them, half of which are under eighteen and they apparently lost almost two thousand fighters already. How many trained fighters do you think they have left against a quarter million heavily armed and well-trained Israelis?

If you're cheering on Hamas then you're cheering on terrorism. If you're chanting worse like "Gas the Jews' you're committing hate speech. I'm not sure how easily such people could be prosecuted but I know what WOULD be easily, and that's to stop giving money to groups that organize such public events, and to remove their charitable status. But I sincerely doubt this government, as desperate as it is for votes from the Muslim community, will take any action.

I honestly don't know. Jordan certainly wanted the West Bank once before. It annexed it and formerly mad it a part of its territory. The UN, the West, and Gulf countries would have to pledge massive aid to help infrastructure in both the West Bank and Jordan, at a bare minimum. And there'd have to be some security guarantees for Jordan to ensure the Palestinians don't launch another abortive coup attempt like they did the last time. But it's the only way out I can see. On its own or in concert with Gaza, the West Bank would not be economically viable. And outside parties would be extremely reluctant to invest anything in it.

Yes, the word gets overused by authoritarian regimes. Just as the word 'racist' gets overused by the Left in Canada. Just as words like 'hate' get so overused by the Left, and "Islamophobe" and "homophobe." Does that mean those words should never be used and that nothing the Left uses to describe with those words really IS those things? No. It doesn't. The ignorance and rapacious need for ever more emotional words to use to condemn people who disagree with them doesn't erase that the words in their original meaning stood for something. And so does terrorist. If you spend hours eagerly and happily slaughtering and raping unarmed, innocent people, dancers, farmers, and toddlers in a daycare, then 'terrorist' is the least of the words you qualify for under almost any definition of the term.

Israel has been surrounded for generations by a sea of hostile religious fanatics desperate to kill them all. Every Israeli grows up and lives with the knowledge that everywhere around them, and even in countries that don't touch their borders like Iran or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people who desperately want them dead. And all around their borders are people trying every day to get in, to get through or over or under or around their fences and borders just to kill a Jew or two in hopes they'll then go to heaven and be given 72 virgins to molest for all eternity. Any Jew will do! Soldier or civilian. Very old or very young. Man or woman, boy or girl or baby. We saw the reality of that last weekend. Anyone looking at a map of the region can see that this country looks odd. That's because it was carved up and the borders drawn along religious lines. But that means the West Bank carves a huge hole into 'Israel' and thus makes it extremely difficult to defend from a large-scale attack. The West Bank, by the way, was taken over by Jordan shortly after the Arabs lost the first war they launched against Israel. It was not just absorbed but annexed formally. So barring some calamitous intervention, there was never going to be a Palestinian state. Jordan lost that land, just as Egypt lost the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War. They could have gotten them back by signing a peace treaty but they refused to do so. And Israel wasn't about to give the West Bank back and let Jordan station tanks and artillery at the border with them, and then maybe attack again. Why would they? Why should they? Give it to the Palestinians? Why? The first thing the Palestinians would do, in both the West Bank and Gaza, is import as much heavy weaponry as they could so they could then threaten or outright attack Israel. And it's not like this Palestinian state would be a land of freedom and democracy. It would either be a totalitarian state like the West Bank or a brutal Islamic State (most likely) like Iran.

You are obsessed with American culture war garbage.