Israeli settlers in the West Bank, emboldened by Trump’s return and a far-right Israeli government, are pushing for formal sovereignty over the territory.
Settlement activity has surged to record levels under Prime Minister Netanyahu, with nearly 6,000 acres designated as state land in 2024 and dozens of new outposts established.
While settlers see this as fulfilling Biblical claims, Palestinians view it as erasing hopes for a future state.
Critics warn annexation could jeopardize regional stability and U.S.-brokered normalization efforts, such as those with Saudi Arabia.
Technically, a successful genocide stops. If the goal was specifically that the genocide would end more quickly, then I suppose they got what they wanted.
The "a vote for Kamala is a vote for genocide" people were literally saying before the election that Palestinian genocide cannot get worse because genocide is genocide.
i don't understand that crowd at all. how do you look at kamala's promise to stay the course, and donald trumps promise to send even more aid, and not understand it is possible to send more. there is not a ceiling to more. our military industrial complexeis very capable of delivering more.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is planning to effectively annex parts of the occupied West Bank in what would be a major - and highly controversial - act.
A quiet bureaucratic maneuver by Netanyahu’s government has begun transferring control over the occupied territory from military to civilian leadership—violating international law.
I have a modest proposal. It is a way, at very little cost, to solve global warming and save countless human lives from violent deaths. It is the logical option, on purely utilitarian grounds.
I propose that we gather up a list of every ethnic group on Earth. And I'm talking pretty specific here. I'm not talking "European," or even "German." No I mean like "Bavarian." That level of specificity. We'll have a list thousands of ethnicities long.
I will then cut the list apart. Each ethnicity will be on a paper slip. I will put these slips in a hat, give a few good shakes, and select one ethnicity at random. And I mean truly random. It will be a fair drawing. We select an ethnicity from the hat. Individuals of that ethnicity are left alone.
Everyone else goes to the camps.
In this process, we will, depending on the size of the ethnicity randomly selected, wipe out between 90-99.9% of the entire human population. So, on the downside, we will have to lose...approximately 8 billion lives. That is the downside cost.
But think of the upside! We have randomly selected a single ethnic group and wiped everyone else out. That single ethnic group, while still having numbers large enough for viability, now inhabit an empty world. Global warming is now solved. They'll have no problem with CO2 emissions, as there's a planet's worth of solar panels and batteries waiting for them. Over time, their numbers will doubtlessly grow, and they will eventually repopulate the planet.
But think of what will now happen. At the, admittedly steep cost of 8 billion lives, we've now eliminated racism forever! In the long run, they might need to engage in some minor genetic engineering to prevent genetic drift, but that should be quite doable. There will now be only a single ethnicity that all humans will share. Think of how many racial pogroms, expulsions, moral panics, race riots, and outright genocides and race wars have happened through history. We've been doing that since the dawn of time. Does anyone today think that we'll ever be immune from that kind of hatred and violence?
So yes, we lose 8 billion lives today, but in turn, we avoid racial prejudice and violence from now UNTIL THE END OF TIME. And we have no idea the scale of conflicts in the future. In a far space faring future, human population might be in the quintillions. In that kind of society, trillions of deaths by racial violence a year would be the equivalent of the hate crime rate experienced in the US today. And we can prevent all of that by simply ethnically downsizing the human population today!
We pay the cost of 8 billion lives now. But in return, we are going to save trillions, perhaps quadrillions. Project forward billions of years, maybe even quintillions.
From a purely utilitarian point of view, the choice is obvious. We must take the path that will save the most lives. We must commence the omnicide.
/Obviously this is not a serious policy proposal, but an illustration of the flaws of utilitarian ethics. Yes, Kamala getting elected would have been objectively better for the Palestinians. It would have likely net saved lives. But the omnicide would also, on net, save lives. And utilitarian value cannot be the only way we make decisions. Justice and the respect for human life are not some trivial thing to be ignored. Let's not mince words. Biden abetted a genocide; there can be no excuse for this. If there is a Hell beyond this place, then he has assuredly secured himself a fine residence there. What he did was, in fact, a profoundly wicked act. Evil in any meaning of the word. And Kamala promised to continue that evil. Trump would have objectively done even more evil. But again, utilitarian ethics is not the totality of things.
For millions of voters, their moral compasses simply wouldn't let them have any part of it. The reason we don't do the omnicide is that we do not have the right to sacrifice countless innocent people based on our best guesses of how the future will turn out. And it's completely incompatible with any moral system that places innate value on human life. The moral calculus of the pro-Palestine voters that stayed home works on similar logic.
Yes, per our best estimate on election day, Trump would likely be worse for the Palestinians than Kamala would have been. But that is still in the unknown future. We don't know what tomorrow will hold. But we do know that Kamala was the VP of a president that abetted a genocide. And we know that Kamala herself says she will continue these policies. She was part of that administration. She has culpability in this. Should she not be held accountable? Does she not objectively deserve punishment? Denying her a victory would be an act of justice for those she helped kill. But in turn, it would cause the election of someone likely to be much worse. But there are people who have already died. There are people today in unbearable suffering because of this. By electing her, you are denying them justice. In exchange for what may come to be in the future.
Or think of it another way. Imagine you had a terrorist leader on trial, someone on the order of Osama Bin Laden. He's convicted and sentenced to hang. As he's taken to the gallows, he says, "I have a dozen sleeper cells planted through the US. If I die, expect dozens of suicide bombings across the country within the next few days." Do you stay his sentence, or put it on hold? Or do you just carry forward, and let these future terrorists be responsible for their own actions?
This is the core problem the Palestine abstainers faced. Are elections more about future policy, or are they about accountability? In truth, they're both. And different people have different ratios of accountability to future policy that they vote on. I personally voted for Kamala, but I can absolutely get the ethical case for not participating at all in this race. If you care far more for future policy than accountability, you vote for Kamala. If you care far more for accountability than future policy, you stay home. A lot of people picked accountability, and as a consequence, Kamala lost.
But perhaps I, and others who did vote for Kamala, have the worst outcome of any voter. I sold my soul and voted for Kamala. I gave up my one chance to apply the only bit of power I have as a voter to hold her accountable. I did it all because I hoped for a better future. But in the end, it didn't matter. I lost my chance to hold her accountable, and the greater evil still won.
You put so much work into this post but it is hopelessly naive. Most people are just downvoting but I'll break it down.
Let's say the "Bavarians" from your example win the lottery. Who is a Bavarian? How many generations of Bavarians back of both parents being Bavarians do we go? It's ridiculous.
If you include immigrants to Bavaria, we go right back to skin color racism, so you need "pure bloods". What about the family that moved to Bavaria in 1879 from Congo?
We are a global society whether we like it or not, and "simple" things like electricity and home water access will definitely stop if 90%+ of the population of earth is eliminated.
You seem to be speaking under the assumption that we will become a spacefaring species, colonizing planets. This is highly dubious with current and predicted technology. If you eliminate most people, do you think this could possibly happen? I personally don't think it will ever happen.
Oh you're religious. Nevermind. No point in discussion of the future when you believe there is a dimension we magically travel to when we die.
Thank you for voting. Please continue to vote if we have the option of true elections in the future.
Whatever ethnicity that survives is incapable of disposing of 8 billion people.
Even if they could execute them all (they can't), they wouldn't be capable of burying or cremating 8 billion people before the diseases spread by rotting corpses kills them as well.
Congrats! You just came up with a plan for human extinction!
This thread is full of people who are clearly struggling with the consequences of their actions (their vote, and pushing a false narrative that Harris would be just as bad), and they are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to absolve themselves and relieve their guilt.
It seems like many have settled on "genocide can't get worse, it can only speed up or slow down, but the end result is the same" without realizing that the distinction is meaningless. A genocide speeding up is the genocide getting worse.
Bad news for those people: it's just going to get so much worse.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is planning to effectively annex parts of the occupied West Bank in what would be a major - and highly controversial - act.
A quiet bureaucratic maneuver by Netanyahu’s government has begun transferring control over the occupied territory from military to civilian leadership—violating international law.
They were calling for annexation of the west bank a month ago, gaza violence never stopped, and they are doing the same now in Lebanon. Are we now pretending that Biden was holding them back? He clearly wasnt.
He even came out to stop Bernie’s proposal to stop arms shipments to Israel, and called the ICC arrest warrant of Netanyahu and Gallant “outrageous” just to drive home the point.
People have called for it but it slowed during the war etc. There's a reason Smotrich waited until after the American election to announce that he was tasking government officials to draw up plans etc.
Gaza violence is not the same as annexing the West Bank.
I am starting to wonder if all the people who decided that voting for Harris was voting for genocide even know that the West Bank and Gaza are totally different places.
Settlement activity has surged to record levels under Prime Minister Netanyahu, with nearly 6,000 acres designated as state land in 2024 and dozens of new outposts established.
Okay, but this was all done under Biden not Trump?
Good luck. This is the sort of person who, after Roe got struck down, insisted that Hillary would have installed the same SCOTUS justices to do the same thing. I really encountered more than one person who made that claim after that happened.
Yes I'm sure the 4 settlers Biden sanctioned for 3 weeks, definitely threw a wrench into Israel's plan of overtaking the west bank.
It'll totally be because Trump takes office and not because settlers didn't just get 14 months of free land grabbing with zero repercussions on top of their yearly land stealing antics ever since Israel's inception.
Cool, so we can finally dispose the myth of Israel being a democracy, get over chasing the chimera of a two state solution, and crystallize the struggle to the simple, unambiguous goal of ending Jewish supremacy and the apartheid and establishing a democratic republic with equality and rights for everyone from the river to the sea. Cool.
"That will show them for not voting properly. If only they had voted. I did my one and only civic duty of voting, and it was for the less bad candidate. They're too busy marching and protesting and organizing to see that the only thing we can all do is vote. If only they voted properly."
It's a fact that Trump will hurt their cause more than Kamala. Protest all you want. But also vote for whatever may help your cause. I don't understand why people don't understand this.
Supporting the least bad option makes the bad option less visble. It is a real and constructive action one can take to make things better and reduce human suffering.
Not supporting the least bad option because it is still bad, makes one feel better and morally cleaner. It does not make things better. It leaves no dent in evil or human suffering.
Actively dissuading other people from choosing the least bad option makes one feel better than others. It is a real and destructive action that increases human suffering.
People who choose moral masturbation over real and beneficial action are not actually driven by empathy for the suffering children of the world. Do not accept for a second that they genuinely want anything else than to feel good.
Yes, this 100%. And you can tell the difference when some of them (for example, the "Muslims for Trump" woman) have walked it back and admitted they were wrong as soon as they started seeing Trump's cabinet picks. They're the ones who actually care about people, and aren't just trying to make themselves feel ok.