I’ll take a shot at answering Jesse’s question about kids being maimed and killed not making Israel safer. To do a throat clear, I’m a non-Jewish American, would probably be considered a moderate on the situation (I’m for a 2-state solution on 1967 borders and am against settlements) but am a lifelong student of military history and know every single war involving air powers since aerial bombing was invented.
This is not making me trying to influence anyone here’s moral judgements, but what Israel is doing not surprising in an air superiority military sense involving an enemy dug into tunnel networks. Seeing as no one cared about civilian deaths in the campaign against ISIS, because the whole world was against ISIS, it may surprise you that 10’s of thousands of civilians were killed in the campaign to destroy ISIS, including 10,000 in Mosul alone. Mosul had a bit over 10,000 fighters who weren’t dug into tunnel networks. Hamas has 50,000+ dug into the most advanced tunnel system maybe in the history of warfare under a densely packed city-state.
Israel’s main strategy is, and logically has to be if they want to destroy Hamas, the complete destruction of those tunnel networks, the creation of which was where most of the “humanitarian” resources actually went over the last 16 years.
In aerial bombing campaigns, even with guided bombs, even when the enemy is completely on the surface, you will get kids being blown up. Again, another throat clear, I’m not justifying this, I’m just describing recent aerial bombing campaigns. Israel is in a pickle. They (from their strategic perspective) need to clear those tunnels. The normal strategy would be to go in on the ground, block every tunnel entrance and let all of Hamas die of thirst, but they can’t do that because Hamas has hostages, including foreign hostages. So they need to clear the tunnels bit by bit in the worst tunnel warfare ever. To avoid that, they seem to be trying via bunker buster to blow up tunnel sections from the sky to minimize the amount they need to go into individually. The tunnel systems they can hit are all under civilian areas, ingeniously placed by Hamas under places they know will cause the most international backlash via civilian deaths if Israel bombs them. Using human shields, Hamas is trying to demand the IDF go into one of the worst deathtraps ever, because “from the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers, the Al-Qasdam Brigades love death more than you love life.”
I can go on but I’ve already written an essay here, but if you want an example of trying to destroy an enemy army dug into tunnels, look up Iwo Jima and Okinawa, neither of which had tunnels as advanced or extensive as Hamas does. During WW2, the doctrine of Total War meant on all sides, there wasn’t an expectation of preventing civilian casualties if there was a military purpose. If you want to see what true carpet bombing looks like, true indiscriminate destruction to dig out an entrenched army from tunnels, look at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The United States turned those islands into the surface of the Moon.
I was going to email Jesse a response to his question, but then noticed this comment was better than what I would've written, so thank you.
I would add one component to the analysis, the notion that Israel's current military campaign will lead to even more people being sympathetic to Hamas and even joining their ranks. This is true, but ignores the importance of leadership/experienced fighters and also ignores that Hamas has control over the schools in Gaza.
The problem is that the status quo is unacceptable for Israel. Doing nothing also strengthens Hamas over the long run by allowing them to pick the time and place of their next atrocity, train even more fighters, and flood the next generation with anti-Semitic propaganda. As long as Hamas exists, lasting peace is not possible. Hamas itself has said as much. This leaves Israel with only bad options. Destroy Hamas entirely and unavoidably inflict massive civilian casualties in the process, or leave Hamas intact and watch its ideology become even more firmly entrenched (and option that encompasses everything from doing nothing to limited "proportional" strikes). Israel clearly sees option one as the less bad of the two, and the only chance at eventual peace. Doesn't mean that the choice is correct, and it does have a ghastly price tag in human lives, but it does make logical sense. I have yet to hear someone sympathetic to Israel provide a realistic alternative.
This idea that fighting terrorists will lead to more terrorists is a myth that needs to die (along with the terrorists).
Do you know how many Vietnamese children the US napalmed in the Vietnam War? Heck, the US bombed Cambodia and Laos too for basically no reason. Do we have a big Laotian terrorist problem today?
And honestly how many people you kill. If you actually defeat people its a lot easier to stop recurrence. Look at WWII.
If the allies had "come to terms" with Germany/Japan in 1942 there would have still been Nazis and Japanese imperialists for much longer. Sometimes violence really is the answer.
For people left of... some point on some dimension, it's a certainty that they default into assuming must be true, for sure, and don't show any real empirical interest in being more thorough never mind questioning than that.
People on the right on the issue do tend to assume it's fully not-true no matter the circumstances, or even as one sometimes-applicable variable in a complex system of factors.
I know this wasn’t really your point but I’m always surprised when I hear/read people say that we bombed Laos for no reason. I think the Vietnam war was absolutely terrible and based on a lie, so I’m not seeking to defend the war itself, but… have you just taken a look at the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and which countries it went through?[1]
Additionally, Laos was basically used like Pakistan was by the Taliban (well, except worse because the Vietnamese were trying to topple the government of Laos as well.)
At one point, the North Vietnamese actually came into Laos via the Ho Chi Minh trail to take out an airplane guidance system that we had placed there with the permission of the Laotian government. In this battle, the North Vietnamese killed 13 US Air Force members who were there to protect it (even though that force was clearly far too small for the task, Laos wouldn’t let the US place any more people there), which was “the largest single ground combat loss of United States Air Force members during the Vietnam War.“ [2]
Do you disagree that those things are true? Why do you think it was “for basically no reason”?
Of course I can, and I just did. Do you admit that just because someone got bombed that doesn't mean they are 100% guaranteed to turn into a terrorist later?
Sorry the comparison is absurd. Period. Vietnamese are not Palestinians. Vietnamese wanted to kill Americans for what we did but the Pacific Ocean is very wide.
Quit calling people terrorists. That is neo con ideology.
It is human nature to seek revenge. We have been doing it for millions of years. You kill my family, I am going to kill yours.
If it’s “human nature to seek revenge,” why wasn’t Europe filled with gangs of marauding Jewish terrorists during the centuries when European Jews were getting constantly pogromed?
I agree the 'bombing civilians will only lead to them hating you more' isn't quite the truism people seem to think. The reality is maybe it will maybe it won't. Hamas controls the school system there and pretty much rachets up the hate to 11 already. And notably, the allies killed A LOT of German and Japanese civilians during WW2. Like a lot a lot. Children included. We didn't see them develope long lasting hatred for the allied Nations. Even in a place like Iraq where the completely unjustified invasion of Iraq killed probably 1 million people, the reaction of the Iraqis is more mixed. Even Vietnam is pretty friendly with the US these days.
Probably partly because the invasion of iraq only killed about a tenth of that million, the rest killed by other iraqis, while the US tried ineffectually to stop it. The Iraqis are too busy hating and fearing their neighbors to hate and fear the US, especially since they understand that the US is their de facto protector against their sectarian enemies.
Nonsense. Germans and Japanese definitely wanted to kill Americans for what we did to them. They didn’t have the means to do it after their country was annihilated.
Everyone is friendly now. Sure, but deep down there is still hatred.
Us Americans are so naive and happy faced. This is what I see with these comments. Come on people, Americans are hated and most of the world wants us dead. Wake the F up.
No trolling. Just pushing back on what I see as happy history with a triumphant America who bombed the hell out of its enemies and those enemies came to love Americans.
Resentment and revenge are wired into humans, no matter what us happy rainbows and unicorns Americans think.
Is it seriously your contention that under the decades of peaceful cooperation, friendly interactions, cultural exchange and mutual admiration Germans and Japanese people still secretly hate Americans and hope for us to be hurt?
To clarify, I don't think fighting resulting in even more terrorists is automatic in any war. To copy Jesse's catchphrase, it's complicated and depends on a number of factors. However, given the current confluence of factors with Hamas (religion, nationalism, past history, etc.), I think that assumption is fairly justified in this specific case.
The percentage of people who are willing to fight to the death in a truly hopeless cause is actually rather small - and I suspect most of them are already enrolled in the Hamas militias. Dropping bombs will push some people into this category - but it will also kill a lot of them if your aim and your intelligence is good. And of course, leaving the fanatics in charge to propagandize the next generation will also move more people into the “fight to the death” category.
I think Israel has erred in the past in treating Hamas as a tolerable threat, a counterweight to Fatah, a nuisance that can be handled by Iron Dome and an occasional decapitating strike into Gaza to prove your point. But really they’ve run a dangerous middle ground - aggressive enough to anger Palestine and their allies, to provide propaganda fodder, but not decisive enough to actually end Hamas. I think that has flipped now, and the utter destruction of Hamas is the objective. How many Gazan civilians die is largely tied to how many Hamas prevents from leaving the combat zone.
The other part of this is that Hamas leadership are craven cowards that aren't even in Gaza. They're very likely in Qatar or Iran (Iran hosting Sunni militants seems out of place, but the enemy of my enemy and all that).
I mention this not only because they're reprehensible pieces of shit, but because Israel is going to kill them at some stage. In order to do that they're going to need to find out where they are and how much opportunity they have to pull it off. Bombings, and the rush of communications that flow out in the wake of them, may provide opportunities to do this.
It's easy to hide, unless you're forced to talk to everyone you used to know. Killing Hamas leadership in Gaza will create those opportunities.
I find it very interesting how no one seemed to be concerned with civilian casualties when France was bombing ISIS in response to the Bataclan massacre (with one fourteenth the number of killed on 10/7). In fact the Wiki page doesn't mention civilian casualties at all:
I think the real difference is that ISIS were globally renowned as reprehensible cunt monkeys across the globe, whereas Hamas is being conflated with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have a far softer reputation, globally, particularly in left wing circles.
That's their reputation globally, at least. When I was in Jordan they had a horrid reputation, but that may have had something to do with Black September in 1970.
The Lebanese aren't huge fans of them, either, as they had a lot to do with sparking the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.
None of that makes them all culpable for what's happening now, or for anything that happened back then. The vast majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with any of it. This courtesy is rarely extended to the Israelis.
So... the further away you get from Palestine, the more glowing the view of them tends to be. ISIS never received praise of that nature, except from people with severe mental health issues.
Every once and a while I look at the Wikipedia page for the war against ISIS solely because the opponents section is probably the longest for any war ever, pretty much every country, every militant group, every other Jihadist group, were all opposed to ISIS. It’s the one time something that could even be tangentially called an army declared war on the entirety of Earth.
Because the largest US military base in the Middle East is in Qatar. Obviously the Qataris are playing both sides here to a degree, but in this case it probably renders any direct action on Qatari soil off limits.
Drones get a lot of press, but for targeted assassinations they're not that great. If you want to guarantee the kill, you basically guarantee civilian casualties, which would be unwise on foreign soil with a country they're not at war with.
Also, we all think they're in Qatar, but I can't guarantee that. The rats are likely darting all over the place in fear of Israeli assassins. It'll take work to pin them down.
I have learned more about the military challenges facing Israel from this comment thread than I have from anything else I have read or listened to in the last four weeks. (And I have read and listened to a LOT.) Kudos and a huge thank you to all of you who took the time and effort to offer such detailed answers.
I probably will on other threads. The biggest problem I’ve noticed, especially on the Pro-Palestinian side, is lack of context around death tolls, and as I always say, it’s not that I agree with everything Israel does, I definitely don’t, but in my eyes, you can’t use the word Should under you know what Is.
The history of warfare has been taught horribly for decades. Knowing past wars, when I saw those tunnel networks, my view on the war altered greatly and I though “yeah this is gonna be a nightmare for everyone involed.”
Thankfully I’m just an armchair general and don’t actually need to plan this personally for the IDF. Let’s rewind the tape a bit. Hamas shortly after the attack said they’d execute 1 hostage for every civilian area bombed by the IDF. Israel called their bluff, knew they wouldn’t do that because half of Hamas’ strategy is a PR campaign to get the population of the world that doesn’t warfare cause-and-effect to forget they’re holding hostages in the first place. This has worked, seeing as people are tearing down posters of the hostages, but if they killed them on live TV, Western college students might have a harder time sympathizing with them.
Hamas is insane but not completely stupid. And when I say insane, I mean insane. They are maybe the only governing body I’ve heard of to rip out their own water supply and hand water control over to their enemy. Why did they rip out their water supply? Of course to turn into unguided rockets to shoot randomly into towns in the desert to accomplish no military goal. It cannot be overstated that Hamas is one of the craziest governments ever and have dedicated themselves to be Jihadist mole-people.
Sorry for the tangent but point is, I figure, Hamas has the hostages in the deepest parts of the tunnel complex, so deep that a surface nuke wouldn’t kill them. They need them alive for international PR points, or something, it’s hatd to tell with them. The IDF knows their psychology and the layouts better than a Substack Jester hanging out in the States. I’m not saying the IDF is correct in their strategy, especially not morally, I never make moral points in war, but they must know something about the tunnel system where they’re hitting that it isn’t the hostages and are expecting to use special forces to clear the potential hostage areas grid by grid.
If you read this, and care about the hostages, from a cold eyed perspective, I think most of them are going to die. I think the IDF thinks this, but they want to destroy Hamas so badly they accept it. If not for international backlash, in their fury, they probably would bury every tunnel entrance, like we would’ve done in WW2. Or, frankly, any non-Western military would do.
I'd agree with you that most hostages will probably die. It's a pretty cold calculation, but it doesn't make sense to risk the lives of thousands of soldiers to rescue hundreds of hostages. I expect some highly publicized special forces operations to rescue a couple of them, but then, when a special forces operation is made public, it's almost always for political reasons.
I have no idea why I’m so obsessed with this, I’m a noninterventionist who thinks war is hell and is haunted by images of the burned corpses of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo as an American even though I wasn’t alive at the time but learning about every single war in human history is something I fixated on probably since I first played Command & Conquer: Red Alert when I was 4.
My husband would very much appreciate your analysis. You are not alone in your stance on war and an obsession with it. My husband was a conscientious objector during Vietnam. He is particularly obsessed with that war and the German side of WWII, but really anything military. He read War and Peace at a very young age and became a Hindu priest at age 18. He left the monastery for reasons I won't go into here, but he is fascinated with human nature. He has obsessively followed military commentary regarding Ukraine and now Israel/Hamas. I have not been able to hear about what he hearing because I am engrossed in the project of getting my Dad with Alzheimer's into assisted living and cleaning out his house. He and our son get to listen to me every night blather on about the intimate details of my father's dementia and experience of moving. I am looking forward to getting home and hearing what he has been learning. I am not a big Ezra Klein fan, but I did listen yesterday to an interview he did with Peter Beinart and Spencer Ackerman that I thought was good. I am more interested in the political side of this and the social maybe even anthropological side of it than the military, but I also don't think you can separate these tracts of study. I have read a couple of books on Israel/Palestine but not nearly enough to feel I understand it - I tend to have more questions than real understanding. And have been listening to Darryl Cooper's Martyrmade podcast which has been helpful.
Unfortunately, they probably don’t. This isn’t being spoken about openly by leaders in Israel for obvious reasons, but if you look at how Israel is operating, they seem to have accepted that the hostages are not going to be rescued alive.
Thanks! My friends tonight I believe thought I was in a deep texting conversation with someone but nope, just living on the Blocked & Reported threads.
Iwo Jima was an uninhabited rock, so turning it into Lunar 2.0 was unproblematic from a collateral damage standpoint. Okinawa was, and is, a densely populated island, and as far as I know the US never really went heavily after the major population concentrations there, but I don't think it needed to (for whatever reason, the Japanese did not heavily fortify Naha, the largest city on the island). That said, there were scads of civilian casualties on Okinawa, quite possibly more than the military dead.
Where we did wade full-bore into a heavily populated and fortified urban area was in Manila, and that was a humanitarian catastrophe. The whole old city of Intramuros was essentially erased from the earth and it's estimated that over 100,000 civilians were killed (compared to around 20,000 military dead, of which over 90% were Japanese). Not all of that can be laid at the feet of American tactics-- the Japanese themselves engaged in a nihilistic orgy of some of the worst war crimes ever seen-- but a lot of them were just buried in rubble from artillery and aerial bombardment.
US tactics at the time, which had proven highly effective at generating enormous kill ratios of Japanese to American military dead (see that 90% figure), called for essentially burying Japanese fortified positions in ordinance from distance. That worked well in places like New Guinea* where the fought-over places were mostly thinly-populated malarial lowlands (especially since the Japanese were also dying of disease almost as quickly as the Americans could kill them). It was not well-suited to capturing a heavily built-up modern city.
The "blow things to rubble and then bounce the rubble repeatedly" strategy didn't work particularly well on Iwo Jima, either, the chief problem there being that "from distance" is impossible to achieve on an island of eight square miles. It didn't work on Peleliu* or Tarawa either. Frankly, the idea that repeated bombardments are going to do serious damage to a well-built tunnel network strikes me as folly. In this case, however, and unlike in Manila, the civilian population is hostile, so it's not clear to me that the IDF actually cares whether the tunnel-bombing is effective or not. In some ways, it would be better for it not to be, because that allows the collective-punishment-with-a-fig-leaf-of-military-justification to go on indefinitely.
*The US military did a study of the battle of Peleliu measuring the amount of ordinance expended per enemy soldier killed, and it is absolutely astounding to read about-- one of the major histories of the battle quotes from it, and it's where I came across the figures. I don't remember them exactly, but it was several hundred bullets and dozens of artillery and mortar shells of various calibers per kill.
It’s 100% a fair point on Iwo Jima, I realize that sentence was didn’t split that out, mainly I wanted to point out what an area of land looks like to get out an entrenched enemy when you don’t care about the landscape.
Manila is interesting in a few ways, first because the sadism inflicted by the Japanese there, especially when they knew it was going to fall was so sickening I think it even tops their behavior in the Rape of Nanking. Die via bomb or die via IJA? I’ll take the bomb, not that that was the American calculation, they just wanted to kill all the Japanese. IIRC, the entire Philippine campaign at the time was controversial because people viewed it as MacArthur wanting to fulfill his promise more than it being necessary to take the home islands. Once the Navy was destroyed, the US could’ve boxed out the Philippines. Not saying this would be morally correct.
As for bouncing the rubble, the normal bombs, and especially the artillery the Americans were using true, did not go deep, but look at the crater from the refugee camp bombing. I’m not defending the bombing, note, but with the depth of that crater, it would’ve destroyed a tunnel. I can see the argument that part of this is collective punishment, it may well be, I can’t read minds, but humans are known to do such things. The phrase “glass the place” is said too often amongst warmongers.
However, you agree the IDF wants revenge, no? Well to get their true revenge, they need to clear those tunnels, which they desperately don’t want to wade into, so if they Could bunker-buster as many as they could. 100 ft less of tunnel is 100 ft less of the worst warfare imaginable. Trench warfare like Ukraine via Russia is a special kind of hell, but 300 miles of concrete tunnels is something out of a damn horror movie.
If you want even more wasted ammunition, see the figures from US soldiers in Afghanistan, the ratios are astronomical.
Appreciate the long reply, most people I know, even ones who talk endlessly about this war, never concretely talk about the military aspects, which is probably why I’ve spent so much time writing. Although I probably should write not just off the top of my head.
Like you, I will not wade deeply into the general morality of the Philippines campaign. I think aspects of it were militarily useful in regards to closing shipping lanes through the South China Sea (and the widely-mooted alternative target, Taiwan, would have had similar collateral-damage concerns). I also think the US went waaaaaaay overboard invading practically every island in the entire archipelago, long after the Japanese garrisons had been island-hopped into irrelevance, and that was due to MacArthur's mania and hubris. In regard to Manila itself, I think we should have taken one for the team and gone in on foot without the heavy bombardment, knowing that this would increase US military casualties, rather than put all the burden of suffering on the Filipino populace.
Back to Gaza: armor-piercing and bunker-busting ordinance is effective at neutralizing specific point targets even when they're heavily fortified. If what you want is to collapse the Fuhrerbunker, you can do that with modern munitions in a way that I don't think was really available to the Soviets at the time.
What it's not effective at is neutralizing vast fortified areas. The very nature of precision armor-piercing munitions-- their ability to not blow up as soon as they hit something-- makes it difficult for them to have a broad area of effect. And if all you're doing is knocking out individual nodes of a tunnel network, it's going to take literally forever, in the sense that the enemy is going to repair or replace them faster than you can blow them up. Imagine a chessboard, with 64 squares. Now imagine that instead of bombing a square, you are bombing the EDGE of a square. Suddenly you have 128 targets, not 64. Now imagine the enemy draws additional lines through the middle of each square-- now you're dealing with 512 targets. Etc etc ad infinitum.
There's no alternative to going square by square and physically occupying them.
Also I restacked this post and tried to highlight your comments. You’ve made really good points and if I could bump this exchange to the top, I would. I appreciate all the likes I’ve gotten but you’ve made solid counters that I think people should see.
I realized I may have replied to myself with my last comment, scroll down for the fuller response but you chess board analagy isn’t 100% what would happen. I don’t know how good of a map Israel has of the tunnels, in particular where the intersections are, but if they did know where the intersections are, but I doubt they’re evenly spaced. Say you blow up 2 intersections, trapping, maybe 1,000 ft of tunnel. Anyone in the stretch of tunnel is now trapped. I’ll give Hamas that they are probably the most skilled by-hand tunnelers in the world, raised by the shovel if you will, but a section trapped with destroyed intersections, that section has been neutralized. Drawing additional lines would assume that they Could draw those lines with the resources they had while trapped in the tunnel section, which has suddenly become pitch black.
This, granted, rests on a ton of assumptions, mainly on the exact layout of the tunnels, which I would love to see a full rotatable 3D map of, but the tactics of bunker busters collapsing certain segments isn’t completely pointless.
That is, if your goal is to kill all of Hamas while minimizing your own deaths, not saving as many hostages as possible.
And, not saying this is a good thing, but I believe the IDF wants to kill all of Hamas more than they want to save all the hostages, grim as that may be.
Solid assessment on the Philippines there, and I think when it comes to the tunnels, there’s a possibility that Israel is flailing somewhat just because of the insane task they have in front of them, they could be having, for lack of a better term, tunnel vision.
In the end, you’re correct on square by square has to be the way it’s done, but just, there are so many miles of tunnels. Hamas has spent 16 years making the Caliphate of the moles. In other eras, or in other armies, say figure the Russian army, or especially the Syrian army would say “the hostages aren’t worth it, find the entrances, block them all, let them surrender or die slowly.” Or most famously, General Sherman, that ending war quickly is the only way to fight a war.
But doubt they’ll do that, frankly I’m not sure how this plays out with those tunnels, there isn’t a true apples to apples comparison where you have to clear anything that extensive that thoroughly and that individually. As I mentioned before, none of what I say is the “morally correct” thing to do. Mainly I’m just looking at what concretely Israel would have to do to achieve its strategic goals, and whatever that may be, if they’re truly dedicated to this path, it’ll be extremely painful.
This is the smartest thing I've read on the internet in a long time. If you have written more on this topic, I'd love to read it. Same goes for Ukraine.
Thanks! I’m kind of surprised that, of all subjects, that this is the one that I’ve gotten the most interest in. Israel/Palestine isn’t something I spend much time thinking about, beyond the historical aspects unless it comes up in the news.
As for Ukraine, my thoughts aren’t that complicated on it. The war should’ve ended in a ceasefire a year ago but instead Boris Johnson scuttled it and 10’s of thousands have died for no reason since then. Simply militarily, based on resources, manpower, and the fact Russia has nukes, Ukraine can’t win. The Russians have fortified that line so heavily it’s going to be trench warfare forever and we’re also running out of munitions we desperately need if we care at all in protecting the semiconductor plants in Taiwan. Seeing as modern civilization rests on those plants not falling to Xi, I think that’s a bit more important. Support for Israel makes logical sense because there is an achievable end state, which Ukraine does not have. It’s going to end up Status Quo Antebellum, and I’d rather have it end up there with less dead Ukrainian (and Russian) young men. I don’t like needless death.
Also, the Democratic Party’s obsession with the primacy of Ukraine funding above any other issue sets off alarm bells with me, and hell, Jamaal Bowman actually set off an alarm to delay a vote that lacked Ukraine spending in it.
All the Democrats voted against auditing all the money sent. At the very least I’d say we can’t send more money without a full record of where and what was already sent. Don’t be fooled into thinking Bob Menendez and his gold bars is the only corruption in Washington. He’s not uniquely corrupt, he was just uniquely stupid about it.
I probably will stick to writing about the subject if I’m doing specific responses but my main interests lie more in the realm of what reporters like Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang and especially the great Jacob Siegel (you should check him out in Israel stuff, he’s much more knowledgeable than me, was in the military, and lives in Israel) have expose regarding internet censorship and the warping of social media from 2016 onwards. Jacob Siegel’s Tablet Magazine piece “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century” is the best piece of journalism of my life time.
Vietnamese tunnels were all over the place but were low in depth and mostly propped up with wooden braces. RT has a video showing Hamas’ tunnels, tough to find RT on the internet these days but it’s worth looking for. Hamas’ tunnels are on a whole nother level and are fully concrete. It’s like something you’d expect for a nuclear fallout shelter. I was absolutely baffled as to how it was possible they made them but remembered you can do a lot with dedication and 16 years.
Couple things. 1. There are hundreds of miles of tunnels, really try to comprehend that. Even nuking Gaza wouldn’t destroy ALL the tunnels. They’re going bit by bit.
2. There’s no way to do this not sloppy. Again, unlike most people, I’m not giving you a morality play here, your morals are your own, I’m just trying to guess what the IDF are doing.
3. If you hate Netanyahu, don’t worry, he’s toast after the war is over. I heard one of his old supporters say he should have already resigned and never shown his face in public again. The level of Israeli support for Netanyahu is about the level of people who believe Queen Elizabeth was a lizard.
They are going after Hamas. We have no way of knowing how many of the hostages are even still alive.
I think the massive Palestinian protests going on in the USA are actually having the opposite effect they intend. Thousands of people chanting for Jews to be killed ( from the river to the sea ) is deeply unsettling to normal Americans. I think it is going to lead to real political consequences for the Dems.
Yeah, seeing those people scaling the fence at the White House (just when they got Major out of there...), climbing up Ben Franklin's statue, and vandalizing monuments... that doesn't play well outside of the echo chambers the protestors live in.
I'm really curious to know what percentage of Americans (e.g. not just Democrats) support Hamas/ Palestinians here. The %'s I see seem to focus on Democrats/ the left, as though there weren't also a right wing. Might be hopelessly naive, but I'm hoping that a broader count would be a little bit less pro-terrorist.
The CCP is deliberately warping the Tiktok algorithm to forcefeed the English speaking world anti-Israel propaganda. Xi Jinping isn’t a Jihadist, obviously, but he does everything in his power to sow discord in the West to give him a better chance of success at seizing the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan.
What effect is this having? Unfortunately, probably a lot among young people if the amount of time I hear they spend on that platform is correct.
I’m 31 and know people my age and older generally across the political spectrum, and all the people I know except for those who fell into the “woke” trap post 2017 could probably be considered “Pro-Israel”.
If there are any college age people in the comments section, I would be curious to hear the extent of this.
The CCP can access any user data it wants. “Stored in the US” doesn’t mean “Inaccessible from anywhere outside the US”.
Frankly my main source is they would be idiots not to be doing that and Xi is many things, but he ain’t stupid.
I’ll give one example of a different platform doing this. ‘Project Owl’, which Google implemented to mess with their search algorithm to boost “authoritarive sources” to fight “misinformation”, which was really just to get the Democratic Party off their backs during Russiagate. Google messes with their algorithms all the time.
I like to play a game called “I want the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. What should I do?”
Well, one longterm strategy you do is with the social media you control, shatter the social cohesion of your enemies by massively separating the beliefs of those who use your platform (the youth) and those who don’t (older people). The default is Pro-Israel? Push Pro-Palestine. Every aspect of what is called “woke”, for lack of a better term, gets amplified, which is useful because it can divide young from old better. A country’s soldiers are by definition young, can’t have them being stoic and patriotic, now can you? Is much of this organic? Of course. You can’t build a good psyop out of thin air, but Chinese Tiktok is very very different than Western Tiktok. Western Tiktok is an ingenious weapon of psychological warfare. This doesn’t mean I think it should be banned outright, I don’t like banning things, but it’s important to know what it is.
Never before in our lifetimes have there been 2 superpowers focused on 1 specific thing, the most valuable resource of all time, the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. I’m not saying that’s the lens you should look at Everything, that way lies madness, but it’s a useful lens to see the proxies within proxies for this terrifyingly inevitable, apocalyptic battle for who controls the island on which modern civilization is built.
That is my perception too, but I am far from college age. My workplace is not super woke, but it is solidly liberal, and the sentiment is firmly on Israel's side among most.
You have to scroll down, and they use "Palestinian people" which is going to get a more positive answer than Hamas. Americans are still broadly sympathetic to Israel, with Rs more so, as you correctly assumed.
You know the very real "woke" backlash that Democrats pretended didn't exit?
The backlash to the Pro-Hamas/Palestine crowd is coming even faster. It took years for anti-woke to move out of the fringes of the right into the middle. It's only taking a month with respect to the Pro-Hamas folks before I'm seeing pushback from the middle.
`from the river to the sea' is *not* a call for genocide and it's ridiculous that the right is attempting to frame it that way.
It is a call for a one state solution with equality for all. When Fatah started using that slogan they were calling explicitly for a single nation of Arabs and Jews. They dropped it/didn't use it as much when they agreed in principle to seek a two state solution (this resulted in much backlash for Fatah). After that it was used in a general way to express freedom and equality for the Palestinian people.
Seeing as how Israel made a two state solution impossible, what with settler activity, etc., the slogan has again become relevant again and reverted to its original meaning.
I heard no Jew hatred at the rally over the weekend. The protestors were regular Americans, young and old, mostly black and brown, some naturalized but most first or second generation Palestinian American, and the idea that they hate Jews let alone want to murder them if fantastical.
I fully concede that the American public's political responses to stimuli often make no sense (e.g. getting super-mad at Obama for a recession caused by Republicans), but it would be weird to blame Democrats for not being sufficiently pro-Israel when I quite literally do not know how they could possibly be more pro-Israel than they actually are. Like what additional pro-Israel actions would people even want? Sending American ground troops into Gaza?
Israeli President (Herzog) is great. He's very popular here and abroad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, is a flaming dumpster fire disaster, as is pretty much the entire government, save for Gantz's National Unity Party, which joined after the war started to stabilize things a bit. So they all have to go. They weren't that popular before the war, and, by and large, they're managing terribly now. Their response up to this point has been atrocious. The reason we're getting through this is (1) the Army and Security Services have woken up and are pulling their shit together and (2) ordinary citizens have been rallying to massive extents to provide for the internally displaced, the soldiers, etc.
Regarding the hostages--not a military expert by any stretch here. But my gut feeling is that while the Army will do their best to get people out, and they (please God!) will succeed, it's safe to assume that some aren't going to make it. To a certain extent, the army has to fight as if there were no hostages. We literally have hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people right now. (Hotels in my city, Jerusalem, are full of refugees from the South and the North). Large swaths of the South and the North are more or less unlivable until the threats are neutralized.
We do have to think about the hostages, but there's a limit to how much the Army can allow that to dictate their actions. It can't be easy, and I'm very glad I'm not the one who has to make those decisions. Every time I open up one of the local news sites I'm literally praying I'll see another update that they managed to rescue another hostage.
I can’t imagine how rough that’s gotta be and I’m hoping for the best for y’all. Grim as it is, I’m glad you’ve got a more realistic take on the hostages. I’m no military general, just a Jester, so figure the brass at the IDF know better than me, but I truly don’t know how they get a large amount of hostages out of the tunnels without a local surrender of at least a group of Hamas, but the Jihadist mole-people seem as fanatical as the Imperial Japanese. I’m an optimist though in general, so we’ll see. By the way, if you want a good clear-eyed take on things, check out Jacob Siegel on the Manifesto! podcast. He’s an American write, ex-military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently lives in Israel, he’s tied with Matt Taibbi as the best analyst of American intelligence agencies schemes but also is really nuanced about the whole situation over there. I’ll admit, a lot of the tunnel analysis I took from him.
Thank you for the podcast recommendation. My father was a WWII history buff and I was always bored hearing about it as a kid, but when things like this happen I'm grateful that there are people out there who DO study military history.
I think there’s a lack of care about HISTORY as a general topic.
Historically speaking, if this whole thing had happened only 100 years ago, Israel’s right to do what it’s trying to do to defend itself would have been obvious. None of the current confusion and tip toeing would have been a thing.
I think about the long line of conquests, wars and conflicts that have shaped our world and see that to the victor goes the spoils, and if you can’t defend what you have then you don’t deserve to have it. The story of the human race in a nutshell.
Hi. I've read some of the responses below regarding Hamas/ Israel. It looks like those with more of a military bent have responded. I'm weighing in as an Israeli citizen who lives in Jerusalem.
1) "Proportionality"--I don't think that this word means what you think it means, at least not in warfare. Jesse, you honestly sounded like the crazy trans activists you complain about who throw around empty phrases and /or redefine words to suit their agenda, and ignore any evidence that they don't like. The goal of war isn't to be proportional. The goal or war is to win. You're a journalist, and a good one. Look that one up. Speak to people who really know this area. There are no shortage of journalists, legal and military experts and pundits from the left and the right who, even as they come to different conclusions, are honest brokers. (Consider Haviv Rettig Gur, Yossi Klein Halevi, Gershon Baskin* to start.) Wildly different conclusions but each come from a position of caring about Israel (and living here).
2) Speaking of honest brokers, why *would* we listen to the UN or other Palestinian apologists? They condemn us constantly while flat out ignoring mass murders going on in other places (e.g. China, Syria or Sudan). They appointed Iran to be the head of the UN Human Rights Council. They literally couldn't manage to condemn Hamas for the October 7th attacks! But we're supposed to take them seriously, assume that they have our best interests in mind? We should have faith that the UN and/or others have condemning us have looked at the situation, considered them carefully and genuinely believe, based on an in-depth analysis of both sides and the needs, safety and security of both? Maybe you can be that delusional. We can't afford to be.
Or, as a lot of people have pointed out in respect of the calls for a cease-fire, there WAS a cease fire, on October 6th. It was a cease fire which featured thousands of Palestinians from Gaza working in Israel, legally. Earning better salaries. Using that money to build homes and raise families. And, sadly, using the opportunity to collect intelligence information which it fed back to Hamas. Hamas used this information to simply devastating effect when it broke the cease-fire on October 7th. Now they want a new cease-fire? I bet they do. Fuck them.
3) And speaking of people showing us who they are (and the importance of believing them)... Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have flat out told us who they are. They have admitted--proudly--that their goal is the destruction of Israel (and the West) and the annihilation of Jews. They have admitted that, if they have a chance, there will be another October 7th, and another and another. Hamas has admitted that they use civilians as human shields and they have no responsibility for the welfare of Gazans. They're a psychopathic death-cult. It's a shame that the Gazans chose such a shit government, but they did (after we withdrew completely from Aza, by the way). We're supposed to accept periodic massacres and constant rocket attacks in order to spare the poor, poor Palestinians? Thanks. Tried that. Didn't work. Not again.
To wrap up, a quote from Golda Meir. “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.” While you might see things differently (FWIW, you do come across here as trying very, VERY hard to be one of the 'good, it's just cultural!, not like THOSE Jews, Jews) from what I can see, folks only like us when we're dead and/or battered victims. Fuck that too.
(For the last point, I recommend Dara Horn's "People Love Dead Jews". )
* Re: Gershon Baskin, I was seriously injured in a suicide bombing attack in 2002. A few years later, I was invited to participate in one of his initiatives "Warriors for Peace". This brought together former terrorists and victims of terror for dialogue. I went to a few events. The last event I went to was a group 'discussion' between Israelis and Palestinians in which the Palestinians went off about how Israelis were so terrible and the Israelis were expected to agree. And I realized that the initiative was doomed. Baskin was also an architect of the Shalit deal, which gave Hamas the brilliant idea that, if they kidnapped enough of us, we'd give up with a mild whimper. So I'm not a big fan.
I think people's thinking in America are skewed by the absurd level of existential safety we have. America is protected by an ocean in each side and the most powerful military ever to exist. Outside of nuclear war (which I don't think feels real to anyone these days) there's no realistic way anyone is going to do existential level damage to America any time soon. China could take Taiwan and that would be bad, but it would still be a story most Americans read once and then sort of forget about. Sure America has 'lost' wars in recent memory, but our version of 'losing' is getting tired of inflicting 10 to 1 casualties on a population that doesn't want us around. It lacks any real ability to scare the average citizen. Israel has faced the very real prospect of losing something like a total war in recent history, with the consequences of that being pretty grim.
"Proportionality" refers to tactics, not strategy. It means you can't drop a nuke on a city just to kill a single guy with a gun. It doesn't mean, and has never meant, if the other country kills X number of your people, you are only allowed to kill Y number of theirs.
There are a fair number of people who know this area very well and who are experts in the area of international law/ human rights law/ Geneva Accords and the like. I'm not one of those people; I'm a middle aged accountant who knows her lane. From listening to enough of those people, however, I do know that proportionality isn't what Jesse implied it is.
And by this standard Israel is committing war crimes. They are bombing convoys of ambulances because they suspect some fighters may be in one; they are bombing refugee camps where 50--100 people were killed to take out two `commanders'.
For the last fifteen years they treated Gazans as though they were prisoners, intentionally failing to do anything to bring peace and keeping Hamas around to be sure, and are turning the prison into rubble.
Also, over a fifteen year period if they're constantly killing 10*X civilians then their tactics need to be revised, otherwise they discount Palestinian life at ten-to-one.
Do you always trust everything Hamas tells you? And why don't you recommend a change in tactics, since you are clearly more knowledgeable about such things than the IDF?
You presuppose that is the correct course of action.
Not my job to direct the IDF offensive. If they can't figure out how not to kill ten times as many civilians (compared to targets and/or Israeli civilian deaths) in every retaliation then they ought to stop doing whatever they're doing.
As I mentioned in our other thread, our disagreements over AI and what Xi is thinking are intractable so there isn’t much use in that but with this, I’m genuinely curious. Disregard tactics for a bit, what, concretely is your goal for the region and how, starting today, do you realistically think this goal could be achieved?
People say “Should” a lot, in my estimation, you have to start with what “Is”.
It’s a fair idea but the problem is none of the parties involved seem to want that, and there isn’t anyone you can actually negotiate with on the Palestinian side that speaks for all Palestinians. Abbas is corrupt and holds the loyalty of basically no one, especially not Hamas who’d probably kill him if they could. Hamas is downright insane, Netanyahu in his idiocy thought he could manage having them around but clearly couldn’t.
In all that I say, I’m not not some super “Israel can do nothing wrong” guy. If I could wave a magic wand I’d like a 2 state solution on the 1967 borders, no settlements, like the old UN agreement, or maybe having Gaza be part of Egypt and the West Bank part of Jordan like in the past, but there’s no wand to wave.
I don’t know the answer to this mess, I just try to describe reality as best I can. Running through the permutations though, I think for any peace, Hamas needs to be destroyed. I know many on the Pro-Palestinian side bristle at Hamas being called “genocidal” or other words like that, because some right-wingers lump all Palestinians in with that belief, but it is not an exaggeration that Hamas is a group so unhinged it’s hard to find historical analogues for them. There’s much blame to go around in how a group like that gained control over Gaza, and Israel is not blameless, but who is to blame doesn’t change the facts on the ground.
I’m a big advocate for criminal justice reform, especially ending the drug war, and I’ve got this saying that the only reason you can justify putting a human being in a cage is 1. They are literally too dangerous to be out in society (think Ted Bundy) or 2. If you didn’t put them in there, too many people would do their crimes and society would collapse (Theft and fraud for example). Hamas, as an organization, are so far gone that as a government, they may be category 1. From the facts on the ground as they stand, I don’t know how we get to a place where this conflict finally ends, but the only concrete thing I can think of to move forward is the destruction of those tunnel systems.
Apologies for the endless essays, but I hope you can tell, I don’t sit around wanting to dunk on people, throw out ‘gotchas’ or anything, I would just like others to see what I see, maybe that’ll help them find the answers I can’t.
`We're supposed to accept periodic massacres and constant rocket attacks in order to spare the poor, poor Palestinians? Thanks. Tried that. Didn't work. Not again.'
Looking over the death and casualty statistics over the past fifteen years indicates pretty clearly who's suffering periodic massacres---it's the Palestinians. Israel doesn't get to claim victim status here when they've killed ten times as many Palestinian civilians over that period of time than they suffered.
Israel has been collectively punishing Palestinians for decades. Israel received collective punishment on 10/7. Civilian Israeli deaths? “This is the tragedy of war.”
This was a good episode but Jesus Christ, sometimes I DO want people to be sent to Rikers. If you have a years long rap sheet of assaulting people, I seriously don’t care what happens to you as long as you are out somewhere you can no longer assault people. Prison is a good option in times like this. I live in Seattle, a city notorious for being full of people like the ones referenced in Brooklyn, where there is little to no interest shown in the welfare of people attacked in public, or who feel unsafe....going to work. I am strongly considering moving somewhere else (Bellevue!) because I have run out of patience for this permissive culture of violence. I am 31 and am not some sort of “conservative reactionary,” no matter how people try to brand me. Jesse, I wish you would take a slightly less ambivalent stance on issues like this, it just makes you look like a coward.
I agree, I don’t understand why so many people have to change how they live and move to work around people who pose a danger to others. Aren’t they the exact people we want to keep off the streets?
As a society, we need to pay far less attention to upper middle class white 25 year olds LARPing as “anarchists” / “communists.” They have no life experience and their ideas are shitty.
I totally agree. These are my age peers and I find, frankly, that many of them don’t even live in the communities where they fight tooth and nail to defend menacing individuals
I lived in the George Floyd riot neighborhood for about 6 years and got to see thousands of people who never lived there cheer for it to be burned down. Its arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis, so of course the progs wanted it destroyed.
Some of my East Coast relatives have a hard time believing what happens in West Coast cities. Some of them shake their heads and say something about people watching too much Fox News, but it really is that crazy.
I tell them about how this summer in Seattle a guy attacked a tent in a homeless encampment with IEDs. The encampment caught fire It was near a hospital (with the only level 1 trauma center for like four states), the roof of one of the hosptial's parking garages briefly caught fire. It was also near a major highway. They have a suspect and they think he did it because of a dispute over 80k in fentanyl money but they haven't caught him yet. The man deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison but there are plenty of people in the city who think that wouldn't be solving the "real problem". I'm not sure how you get to the point where attacking people with IEDs is not the real problem, but that's how much of a shit show the West Coast is.
The worst part is that Seattle isn't nearly as crazy as Portland or San Francisco.
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, etc. are not "shit shows." Baltimore and Philly are shit shows. St. Louis has almost four times as many murders per capita as the most violent West Coast city.
I live in SF and it's not crazy at all where I live-which leads me to suspect that, as in SF, the "crazy Hellscape" in LA, Portland, and Seattle is limited to a few, fairly small neighborhoods. If you live in one of those neighborhoods you are probably greatly affected, but for the rest of the population things are not very different than they were 10 years ago.
All the West Coast cities, except for Oakland, are among the least violent big cities in the US. SD, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are not even in the top 20 by per capita murder rate. There are definitely serious problems with public disorder and property crime, but, compared with most other cities, "shit show" seems like a Hannity/Carlson meme.
Auto burglary is a problem- but it is considered a property crime, not a violent crime. As everyone knows, a lot of property crime goes unreported. Violent crime usually IS reported, and homicide is virtually always reported-it is the hardest metric we have for violent crime. Murder rates are thus the best way to compare cities in terms of risk of violent crime, and almost all West Coast cities score well in this comparison.
I live in SF. I drive all over the city and know where to park and have not had a break-in in 20 years. Break-ins occur in very predictable locations and target almost exclusively tourist vehicles.
Even if it's not classified as violent crime, this is still the kind of thing that's going to negatively affect the overall quality of life. Do you really think it's normal to have to live two decades somewhere to be able to know where to go safely? In the episode Jesse expressed skepticism about the idea of no-go zones in some European cities, but don't you think this is what you are describing?
What I'm saying is there is something in between "Blood-soaked Seattle!/Dumpster Fire San Francisco!" and "everything is normal, it's all Fox News propaganda"
West Coast cities have a lot of property crime and a lot of highly visible disorder and misery in certain public spaces. High levels of homelessness, open-air drug markets, fentanyl deaths in the streets, etc. That is all real.
Most residents of these cities are still safer than most residents of high violent crime rate cities. And- the high murder rate cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Philly, etc.) ALSO have the highest rates of fentanyl deaths, etc. So "shit show" is not mainly a coastal phenomenon, or one mainly caused by "loony progressive DA's" (though they're probably not helping). "Shit shows" are mainly caused by poverty and inequality, not by politics.
This is a question of stocks versus flows. While, objectively, Seattle (and I assume Portland/SF/etc) is not dangerous relative to the country as a whole, it has experienced in the last three years a near doubling in the number of homicides from its 2019 levels. The number for 2023 is projected to be even higher, and we're on track to be as dangerous as we were in the early 90's during the tail end of the US crime wave. We've wiped out 20 years of progress, and people feel that
According to The Seattle Times, the homicide rate in the first 6 months of 2023 in Seattle increased 7% c/w 2022: about the same as Richmond, VA. In the same period, they rose 28% in Memphis, fell 28% in Norfolk, VA, etc. etc. These are local fluctuations. Perhaps something unusual IS happening in Seattle. (??). The big picture is still of a relatively non-violent (by US standards) city. Seattle is still not even in the top 50 cities for homicide rate- it wasn't in 1994 and it isn't now.
Yet the Daily Mail headline last month was "Blood- Soaked Seattle...!", which they tie directly to "defund the police" policies. I'm against Defund policies- but it's very unlikely they explain differences in murder rates between US cities.
Yes, yearly changes are not particularly insightful. But Seattle has gone from ~3 homicides per 100K in 2010, to 4.3 homicides per 100K in 2019, to 7.4 homicides per 100K in 2022, and it is on track to be even higher this year, as mentioned. You're right that this doesn't even place it in the top 20 most dangerous cities in the nation. But when compared to a city like New York, which returned to its 2019 homicide rate in 2022, this is a serious public policy failure.
I give approximately zero credence to the Daily Mail and I find it annoying when national/international papers parachute into a local news story, often without the necessary context. But as a resident, the problem is not getting better, and I'm not surprised that outside parties would want to report on it. And I do believe the fault, in large part lies with the city government, which was (until recently) cutting back on both funding for police officers and weakening their ability to maintain public safety through changes in the law.
The rise in homicide rates in Seattle is a fact. I just don't think we can conclude the the cause of that rise is "public policy failure"- at least not on a city level.
It's likely that public policy around crime as such, at least at the local level (who is mayor, who is DA, Police Commission oversight, PD staffing levels, etc.), has minimal impact on homicide rates.
What does impact homicide rates? The density of teenage and young adult males in a given locality, particularly if rates of unemployment are high in that population. Why do Seattle, Portland, SF, LA and SD have relatively low homicide rates? Because those cities don't have nearly as many unemployed young adult males hanging around as do Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, etc.
Crime-wave propaganda is among the most effective right-wing propaganda out there (it activates racism among soft racists while also making non-racist normies squeamish), so it makes sense that we're seeing a lot of it whether the facts support it or not. In right-wing world, we are always living in the burning Bronx of the 1970s.
All of those situations are shit shows, they're just different types of shit shows.
I don't know about Baltimore, but in Philadelphia, the murder rate varies a lot by neighborhood. There are a lot of murders in Kensington and parts of North Philadelphia, but there aren't very many murders in East Falls, Manayunk, Mt Airy or Chestnut Hill; the murders are happening in poor neighborhoods and the rich neighborhoods don't have many murders. Needless to say, Philly and Baltimore need to tackle their gun violence problems so their residents stop getting murdered.
The disorder in West Coast cities is a big deal for a lot of poeple. I did not appreciate it when a homeless guy set a fire right in front of my building. And it is a big problem when public spaces can't be used because they're occupied by homeless people and trash or because people are behaving in a dangerous way or smoking fentanyl. It's also a big deal when people won't go downtown because they're worried about their safety or they have to walk in the streets because the sidewalks are blocked with tents.
Interestingly, Portland's black homicide rate was about 100 per 100,000 while Philly's was about 65. Portland is also significantly wealthier than Philly, which makes this even worse given that murders tend to be something that happens in poor neighborhoods.
Yeah, it really has to be emphasized that this stuff about San Francisco is just... total conservative fantasy nonsense? Like my parents live there and it is completely fine, no chaos, no rampant disorder. It's not perfect; there's crime, etc., like any city. But it's pretty damn good. I take the bus all the time when I'm back there and have never felt unsafe about doing so. It's a normal city full of normal people.
Interesting. Other commenters are discussing things like homicide and burglary, but what do you make of stories like this one stating that "According to the [National Retail Federation], San Francisco and Oakland ranked #2 in the list of top areas affected by Organized Retail Crime."
Well the first thing that strikes me is that the NRF is a right-wing lobbying front group for businesses that I regularly litigate against when it comes to things like union-busting, so hearing them say something doesn't take their claims out of the realm of "conservative fantasy nonsense." If anything, it reinforces the association.
That being said, there does seem to be some retail theft increase since the pandemic. I put this down to the fact that San Francisco, like a number of cities, has faced what amounts to an undeclared work stoppage since 2020 from police who are salty and pissed off about being held accountable for their rampant violence against civilians. I would like to see someone do something about that, ideally involving getting rid of a lot of the current fascist police force and replacing them with smarter, more civically minded individuals. Yglesias's idea of "police for America" seems like a good one.
Do you have a preferred resource for retail crime statistics that substantially contradicts the quote above? A quick search of PPIC and Chamber of Commerce reports seem at least consistent with the claim above by NRF.
If being presented with contrary evidence reinforces your previous assumption as you say, it probably won't be productive to discuss this topic further (not to mention that you believe the SFPD is 'fascist'), though fwiw I will look at resources if you were to link or list them for my own information.
Living in Seattle radicalized me. What is the point of earning a bunch of money if you're going to get assaulted by junkies and have people pissing in your front yard? What is the point of paying taxes when they will be squandered on people who make the city worse? At some point you're just enabling this system that generates human misery.
Precisely. I have worked to earn the amount of money I make so that I can live comfortably and safely. Not so the cultural contract can fray year by year and leave me, say, huffing someone else’s fentanyl fumes if I dare take the bus.
Seattle’s craziness has bled into even Bellevue recently, we’ve had a number of shootings. Twice in the past two years we’ve had a park near my house used as an impromptu shooting range in the middle of the night.
Our cops are well funded and more likely to catch criminals than most other cities around here, but all felonies are prosecuted at the county level, and Leesa Manion is just continuing the work of her old boss, Dan Satterburg.
I'm definitely opposed to involuntary treatment for people with addiction who aren't committing crimes against people or property. Once they do commit those kinds of crimes though, separation from society is justified and reasonable. I'd much prefer a treatment setting to a jail/prison setting for most prisoners.
That is a very reasonable concern! It's one reason why I'm opposed to involuntary treatment in general, but I'd rather a person with addiction who has committed a crime against another be placed in a supportive mental health setting rather than what we've allowed our jails and prisons to become.
“A senior Hamas official yesterday called for the 'annihilation' of Israel and promised to repeat the horrific attacks of October 7 'again and again'. 'Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country,' said the terrorist group's former Foreign Minister Ghazi Hamad”
Yeah, for sure it won’t make Israelis safe by doing everything to strangle Hamas. No problem with more murder, rape and kidnapping toddlers.
I think.people forget that Katie and Jesse are leftists at heart, yet on a long, slow journey away from the excesses of leftism that started manifesting about 2017.
Katie is further along on the journey than Jesse. Katie getting dramatically cancelled by that alternative newspaper and the Seattle LGBT community likely accounts for the difference. It's one thing to argue with randos on Twitter. It's quite another to be ostracized by real-life friends. Katie seems to be still be hurt and I don't blame her.
For all we know, Jesse may never get there, wherever we think "there" is. When I keep this journey in perspective, my disappointment in Jesse is lessened.
Just on the subject of treatment with Suboxone (I am an Addiction Medicine Provider, this is what I do for a living every day) I think to some degree your comments on Suboxone are confused with Methadone. You don’t have to come to the clinic at a certain time to get it. Getting Suboxone is a lot like having an appointment at your Primary Care clinic. Initially, yes, until you are induced (that is you get “over” from a full opiate agonist like Fentanyl or Heroin on the Suboxone which is tricky for biochemical reasons I won’t get into here) on to the Suboxone, you might have frequent appointments, like every 2 or 3 days, and get your 2 or 3 days of medication at the pharmacy to take home. But that is the first maybe 2 weeks. And you make those appointments like you would any other clinic appointments, when you can get on the schedule that is convenient for you and as they are available. Methadone is the thing where you show up every morning super early (typically) to get your dose. Once you are induced on Suboxone, you typically for a while, have a weekly appointment and go to the pharmacy and get your Suboxone to take home. Then it goes out to 2 weeks if all is going well. Then probably a month if you remain stable and it is all going okay. Addiction is a bio-psychosocial disease and also requires other facets of care which need to be in place too. So medication alone doesn’t do the trick typically. But it is hard to get off opiates without it. As to the whole “if people don’t want to get clean you can’t make them…” thing. I have found that often people think that they don’t want to get clean, and then once they are forced to and they are out of that fog for a few weeks and realize how much better they feel physically and mentally, and they are on a good dose of Suboxone and the cravings are controlled and they are not sleeping on the streets and having withdrawals and living in fear of assault or arrest and having to do sex work etc…. They are really happy to be clean. They realize it was a delusion that they didn’t want to be clean. So you are doing them a favor forcing them to see what being clean looks like. Because often they have completely forgotten. This can be a tough population to work with. They are not always the most sympathetic population. But nobody at age 5 says “Oh, I know what I want to be when I grow up, an Opiate Addict!”. As Jesse would say, “It’s complicated”. And since treatment is really the only way to both restore their lives and get them back to making a positive contribution to society, and protect us from the negative consequences of addiction, I think coercing them into treatment if they won’t go is often necessary.
As an addiction physician, this is exactly what I was going to say.
Methadone, which is a stronger opioid and which stays in your system a long time, is dispensed through methadone clinics (Opioid Treatment Programs). Methadone prescribed for pain can be done with a regular pharmacy, but methadone prescribed for addiction has to be through one of these clinics, and patients generally have to show up every day and follow a strict program, including regular drug testing.
Suboxone, which is a weaker opioid and which doesn’t stay in your system as long (so it is usually taken multiple times per day) is prescribed by physicians and distributed through pharmacies. It used to be that physicians had to have a special extra license called an X-waiver to prescribe it, but the law was changed this year so any physician with a DEA number can prescribe Suboxone. Suboxone is still tough to get, a lot of insurance hangups, many pharmacies don’t carry it, and so on.
So yes, addiction medicine has more barriers than other types of medicine. It’s still easier to prescribe an oxycodone for pain than it is to prescribe medication for addiction.
I don't know about madness. The OTPs do force people into a certain amount of structure, and that can be good in addiction. Methadone is also a tricky drug that I don't like to prescribe. But in general, I also don't like any sort of government regulation of my practice. That's why I went to med school: so I could make medical decisions.
My walls of text have alread eaten up too much of this thread but your comment reminded me of something. I need to actually do a full Substack post on the potentially disturbing reasons for the Obama administration changing its policy on oxy in September 2013 and getting the DEA to shut down the pill mills, which the government’s own researchers warned would start a heroin epidemic.
Which, of course, it did, but no one imagined just how big a nightmare this would become once fentanyl got thrown into the mix.
Question becomes of course, if you knew shutting off the oxy spigot would cause millions of people to switch to more readily available heroin, thereby increasing their chances of death (10x as it turns out), why shut down the pill mills in the first place?
Facebook is not a safe space to say this, so I will say it here:
What the fuck was Hamas thinking? What did they think the outcome was going to be?
The blood of all dead Palestinian kids is on their hands. I know so-called "honor culture" is disparaged in modern American society, but what Hamas did was an insult that had to be repaid with blood, and they had to have known this going in.
There was no universe where October 8th wasn't going to see massive, massive payback from a smart, organized, very well armed, and very angry nation who could push them right into the sea if it wanted to.
Hamas wants this to happen. This is literally their strategy - they want as many dead Gazans as possible so they can be used as propaganda to break up the Arab states’ attempts to normalize relations with Israel, get the UN to put even more pressure on Israel, and draw in Hezbollah and maybe the other Arab states into the war against Israel. This is why they store weapons in mosques and build headquarters under hospitals. They know the Israelis must strike at them, and in striking at them, dead civilians are inevitable.
Hamas considers Gazan civilians killed by (or blamed on) the IDF a good thing. Remember this, and their actions make much more sense.
Yup. Hamas’ main strategic goal at the moment, and I’m not exaggerating here, is to maximize the number and perceived number of civilian casualties. That means making sure civilians stay over the tunnels, to the point of (allegedly) having snipers shoot people if they try to leave, it means falsifying death reports, etc, etc. Beyond even preparing for the ground offensive, they need the civilian death toll to get the people in the surrounding countries to view Israel as genocidal and make it so opportunistic nihilists like Erdogan can deflect attention away from their own schemes.
The actual ruling monarchies of the local Arab states want Hamas blasted with a low orbital ion cannon because they’re a nuisance but they use the “Palestinian Cause” as a political football to control their populace. Sisi would be ecstatic to get rid of Hamas once and for all, but will he actually help Israel get rid of them? Of course not, that would require effort.
`Yup. Hamas’ main strategic goal at the moment, and I’m not exaggerating here, is to maximize the number and perceived number of civilian casualties. That means making sure civilians stay over the tunnels, to the point of (allegedly) having snipers shoot people if they try to leave, it means falsifying death reports, etc, etc.'
Not sure how you possibly know their strategic goals.
Israel will take care of civilian casualties, Hamas does not need to try to affect them.
People aren't leaving because they don't trust that Israel will allow them back to their home (or now rubble). Israel does have a bit of a reputation for doing this.
The Gaza Health Ministry has provided accurate numbers in the past and there's been some preliminary reporting that suggests current numbers aren't being forged.
Unless Hamas is catastrophically stupid, that has to be their main strategic goal. If you think Hamas cares about civilian deaths, I’ve got some beachfront property on the Moon to sell you. One of their mottos is “We love death more than you love life” and they mean it. If there’s one type of people you should believe at their word, it’s Jihadists.
Take a step back. What is Hamas’ long term strategic goal? Well, just read their charter, it’s via death or expulsion (preferably death) the removal of all Jews from what the British called Mandatory Palestine. Now, this is an insane goal of course, and they’ll never achieve it, but that’s what they say they want and I believe them.
Israel has a modern army and nukes, so, how does a group whose expertise lies in lunacy, digging tunnels, and shooting rockets randomly into towns defeat a modern army? Well, they don’t, because they can’t. But what they can do is make it so to defeat them, it requires killing a staggering amount of civilians. Hamas knows most of the UN hates Israel (it’d take another essay to explain, via human nature via humiliation and insecurity why) and especially the Islamic countries just look for any excuse to go after Israel.
Ramp up the civilian death toll, get more countries to pressure Israel, finally get the US to get Israel to stop, and you ‘Win’, your beloved tunnels and Caliphate of the Moles is safe and you can go back to randomly firing rockets.
Hamas teaches children from grade school to glory in the deaths of martyrs, to want to be martyrs, everything is about the glorification of death. It’s a deliberate strategy to maximize death to make it impossible for Israel to defeat them due to international backlash. If Hamas’ just fought like a normal militant group, even a normal Jihadist group, Israel would’ve destroyed them 15 years ago. However, when no only do you not care about your own civilians dying, but you actually want more of them to die, it opens up previously unherd of tactics in warfare, tactics that wouldn’t work if their was no international community that hated Israel.
Hamas’ existence depends on using Palestinians as human shields. Without that grisly tactic, they’d instantly be obliterated.
What that they may not have expected is that, to a certain extent, we are past caring about 'international pressure'. I just came back from a Shabbat lunch where my fellow guests--formerly super liberal, peace and love, co-existence, left wing types--were literally quoting Ben Shapiro. (I'm going to listen to his speech from Cambridge now; they recommended it).
We realize that this isn't another limited engagement; this is a war for survival. If the way to survive is to fight Hamas on it's turf, with that associated cost, then that's how it's going to go down.
Speaking as an ordinary citizen, and not as a military expert, of course.
That Oxford student who said that the UK didn't bomb civilians in Germany during WW II! The audience *laughed* at her -- and they were mostly on her side in terms of supporting Hamas.
> were literally quoting Ben Shapiro
People say I get all my talking points from Ben Shapiro. That's not true, and I'm going to tell you why. But first, let me tell you about ExpressVPN.
Thanks for telling me about the Ben Shapiro event at Cambridge.
I've never listened to a large chunk of him before. Clearly very smart and right on some things, wrong on others. But his defense of Western ideals was fiyah.
Provoking a response was the strategy. They want to kill Jews, they want a war and the response will cause even more terrible suffering in Gaza and more destitute young men with no future will chose religious extremism and join Hamas. Every death in Gaza is a win for them.
Hamas doesn't view the safety of the Gaza population as their responsibility, one of their spokespersons said so in a recent interview. They have put the screws on the people there, terrorising them, extracting money from them, diverting humanitarian aid, brainwashing their children in their despicable death cult. Even if they didn't count on being as "successful" as they were on 10/7, they new there would be some retaliation, as it always happens. And when that happens, they were counting on the killing of Palestinian. To them, the more Palestinian civilians dead the better, because they know the horror of it will push public opinions in Western countries to call for a ceasefire before Hama's military capability degrades too much. After that, they would just have to regroup for a while, and be ready to do another attack.
I was listening to Sam Harris's interview with Graeme Wood, and he believes it's quite likely that Hamas are basically the dog that caught the car. They had not been planning for the operation to be as successful as it was and, given the lack of direct command Hamas has over their own combatants let alone affiliated jihadist groups, the violence and bloodshed basically spiralled well beyond their ability to control. Grame believes that Hamas likely can't even account for all of the hostages, because many of them were captured by other groups. Not to say they have any moral problem with how this played out, but it does seem possible this did not align with the strategic objectives of Hamas leadership
Please be aware that it’s a war crime to use hospitals as military command and control centers. Which Hamas has done for years. And to use ambulances as personal vehicles to escape in a war (Hamas fighters) and to use parking lots next to schools as missile launching pads.
Hamas is the architect of Gazas problems. Steals resources and aid continuously.
My current neighborhood and past one had a similar situation - frequent violent fliers and people too up their own asses to recognize that these folks had been offered endless resources (and frankly, completely evaded and consequences).
One of these people finally escalated this month and was released twice for harassment before attempting to kidnap someone. And I’m pissed it had to go this far and I’m unfortunately sure he’ll be out again. An attack on multiple people, including a baby and an elderly person, in broad daylight in a nice neighborhood.
And I’m tired of being told by white liberals that it’s racist that I want to feel safe. I’m sure there are POC saying this stuff too but I live in Missouri.
Over half white by just a bit, 1/5 black, like 1/8 asian, trends pretty high income relative to the rest of the city. Most of the white population is home owning and a few of the local HOAs have contacted a private police force.
My old neighborhood was almost entirely Black (and me) with a very loud neighborhood association that was mostly white
Jesse. Israel basically built Iron Dome as a purely defensive system against Hamas and Islamic jihad. They allowed Gazan workers into Israel to work to boost the Gazan economy. (Yep those guys mapped out cities and kibbutzim for October 7). So what happened? Israel naively slept while the depraved Hamas savages did October 7.
So Israelis don’t care about anything but removing Hamas. Your armchair sighs are a bit annoying.
During the summer of 2020, a progressive bakery had a sign that said if you were mugged by the Black man, don’t call the police. Save a Black man’s life.
All I could think of was the next old woman who falls as a result of the next mugging and that ends were life as an independent person.
Jesse, if you see this comment, I recommend that you read Locked In by John Pfaff. This book provides a corrective to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Pfaff shows that “mass incarceration” is largely driven by violent offenders filling up state prisons rather than federal drug prisoners. The progressive prosecutor movement (of which Pfaff is an advocate), is underpinned by the explicit philosophy that more VIOLENT offenders must be released from prison earlier (or be diverted from prison) in order to meaningfully reduce the number of people incarcerated to end so-called “mass incarceration” in the United States.
Legalizing recreational cannabis and other forms of drug possession, expunging people’s records for drug possession, and decriminalizing theft under $1000 accompanied this as low hanging fruit, but low-level nonviolent offenders are not the primary focus of progressive prosecutors. They want to reduce the number of people who are behind bars. Period. They understand that we must dramatically reduce prison sentences for people who are often repeat violent/gun offenders in order to meaningfully reduce the prison population. This was a more popular position when the violent crime rate in this country was at all time low in the 20-teens, now it’s a tougher sell, but it’s still the objective they are just quieter about it.
Then, just because somebody is incarcerated on a nonviolent drug offense for their third strike, it doesn’t mean they committed only nonviolent offenses because people plea down! That guy who is saying he was locked up for 30 years because he ONLY had some cocaine on him might have also robbed someone with a gun while also being in possession of cocaine, but drug possession is the offense that he pled guilty to. I’m not saying crooked cops have never overcharged anyone and that prosecutors didn’t collude with them, but barely anybody is serving out a prison sentence for the most serious crime they were arrested for & convicted of, since almost everyone pleas down.
Also unpopular opinion, but broken windows policing works. We saw a downturn in crime, then it got removed (along with several other soft on crime measures) and now we see an increase in criminality. Maybe in an ideal world we could have the best of both, but I'm not seeing it in reality.
I agree that broken windows style policing works, but it creates the externality of higher rates of incarceration. 3 strikes "worked" too, since a lot of violent offenders (who in today's legal climate would be released in under 5 years) were locked up as teenagers and 20somethings for decades, resulting in them *actually* being too old to participate in crime when they were released. Violent crime rates plummeted from the late-1990s until about 2015 and have been increasing in most US cities ever since, with a big spike during covid. There's little appetite for returning to enhanced sentences for gun crimes because it's viewed as too inhumane and/or too expensive to lock people up and throw away the key. Then, police simply don't have the resources to return to broken windows or stop and frisk even if the community sanctioned this. Big city police departments are down hundreds of officers and they have huge backlogs of homicide cases, while new shootings occur weekly that divert all their attention from quality of life issues.
Plus, now major metro police departments have to divert resources to managing thousands of migrants that have been dropped off at their doorstops. They've had migrants sleeping in police stations in Chicago for months!
Incarceration rates have been falling as a result, from a peak in 2008 of about 1.6 million to 1.2 million today. There's no way in hell that progressives will let prison populations increase back to those rates, and conservatives are reluctant to pay for this, too.
The caveat I'll add to this dire prognostication is that we don't *need* to return to the height of mass incarceration to dramatically reduce murder and assault rates. Fewer than 20,000 people are murdered with a firearm annually. Some proportion of these homicides are committed by the same people. If every single person who committed homicide was apprehended and locked up, the prison population would not return to previous heights but communities would be exponentially safer. Instead, we're clearing less than half of murders nationally, much less in some cities with large backlogs.
A 15-year-old who fires his gun at a crowd in a drive-by, whether or not he kills someone, deserves to have his life ruined for decades. He will almost certainly not become a productive member of society, and the rest of society would certainly be much better off without his presence. Life isn't fair, he wouldn't have done it if he grew up in a better spot, but he didn't, and he's the one who has to pay the price, along with his victims. We have such a high rate of incarceration in this country because we have so many criminals.
That's a good point. Westerners don't have an appetite for effective but cheap punishments. But I do think we could issue fines at least? And if that's not paid force them to do community service? Like there has to be something. Anyway, I hear Florida is doing great with crime so whatever they are doing there seems to be a good model to emulate. Their budget is doing well do.
And yeah, don't even get me started on the migrants.
The inevitable problem that defenders of mass incarceration run into is that it is globally aberrant. Other developed countries do not punish crimes (violent or nonviolent in nature) to nearly the same degree that the US does, yet they generally score better on metrics of social stability. Three-strikes laws are a popular and justified target here because they impose willfully (indeed, by design) disproportionate sentences on people, but they're the tip of the iceberg when it comes to excessive sentencing.
To the extent that people are unable or unwilling to come to grips with that fact, it indicates to me that they are either not serious about the issue or have bad motives.
The US is a bigger more diverse country with a more independent culture, a history of being colonists by non-conformists, and way too many weapons. Along with an entrenched group of underclass enclaves with cultures of violence.
The US isn't like Europe or Japan because it isn't like them. If you had combined all the western European countries into a super state in 1970 the rate of violence would be higher there too (though not so high as here).
You are getting the causation backwards, the US doesn't have high crime due to high incarceration, it is the reverse. Higher incarceration is attractive because antisocial people/behaviors are so common.
There is also just generally a much lower sense of community here, something that is getting worse not better. Almost everyone can think of reasons their murderer son/neighbors doesn't need a giant sentence, mitigating factors. But the farther you get socially the less people are interested in excuses, and the US is a culture where most people are very far apart socially. Its not like fucking Denmark, like at all.
I would ask what data you were relying on here, but in this case I actually know you cannot possibly have data to back your intuitions because I am well aware of the limitations of the data that exist in this area, particularly when it comes to nonviolent property crime (which the US punishes by aberrantly long prison terms). There is no data from which you could conclude that the US has a particularly high baseline crime rate, and certainly not one that could explain more than a fraction of its ridiculously large incarceration rate.
Now, there IS data from which you could conclude that the US has a particularly high MURDER rate, but that boils down to basically just the guns thing, and could easily be solved by Australian-style confiscation except that this is a democracy and the demos (or at least the controlling faction thereof; I think there's actually a lot of soft opposition to gun culture but the gun nuts are much better organized and much more disciplined in voting) prefers continued ridiculous murder rates to giving up their guns. Fair enough, I guess; there's no democratic solution to the problem of "the demos has shitty opinions." But it doesn't drive mass incarceration rates because even here, murders are quite a small percentage of total crime.
Don't you love comments that begin with "I love you guys but" -- so here goes. I love you guys but. No it isn't cancel culture to fire someone who blames Israel for the attack by Hamas. That is such a gross distortion of reality it is actually the "harm" that so many on the left claimed they were experiencing. This is some sick cosmic joke that we are in a place where we can't tell the difference and I fear that is how bad things happen in history - people lose perspective from too many boys who cried wolf. At any rate, I would not want someone working for me who thought Manson's murder of Sharon Tate was justified. I would not want someone working for me who said that the Columbine shooting was justified.
Cancel culture was dangerous not so much because people were losing their jobs but because of its vast institutional support that led all the way up to the POTUS. A line from the blue-checks on twitter (RIP, thank you Elon) all the way up to government saying what people could and couldn't say, what people could and couldn't think.
Maybe under Conservatives we would get there again vis a vis Israel - looks like Nikki Haley wants to do just that but at the moment people, especially Jewish people, are well within their rights to protect themselves and their business from fanatic cult members who have been radicalized online.
"It's not cancel culture to fire someone for their ideas if their ideas are, in fact, bad" is not the revolutionary free speech take you seem to think it is.
I spent a good two minutes while Katie was talking thinking “wow, is she like, *really* stoned? Is she code-switching to the North Carolina accent? Why is she talking so slow?” … I had accidentally turned the listening speed on to x.75
I don't really have the emotional energy to fill this thought out, but it is a strange bit of cognitive dissonance for Jesse that he thinks both a) sometimes involuntary detention, whether inpatient treatment or incarceration, is necessary for the safety of the community; and b) "how could Israel possibly be made safer by destroying Hamas?"
Katie is right: antisocial behavior will always exist, and sometimes people will be unreasonable and unwell. When it's a single person threatening others with shoves or knives, you can put them behind bars; when it's 20,000 people with rockets and machine guns and mortars, you have to do a little more than that.
To Katie’s point about how difficult it is for opioid addicts to get treatment. I’m a licensed clinical social worker in the state of Va. I worked as the chief clinical officer for a medium sized opioid treatment center. It is not by any means difficult to get on opioid replacement therapy. There are multiple treatment centers in all US cities. Admission criteria is very simple for clients seeking service and you can self report the admissions criteria which basically means if you show up they will treat you. Yes you cannot get it RX’d by your PCP in most cases but to say that it is difficult to get RX’d methadone or buprenorphine is not true. Additionally in my state Medicaid now pays for opioid treatment therapy! Love the show and think the world of K&J. Thank you for all you do.
I can think of a number of examples in which real-world issues conflict with, or at least complicate, leftist cultural and political analysis. The fact that "anti-asian hate" is often centered in the black rather than white population. The fact that not every kid who gets irrevocable gender treatments is well-assessed, or really "knows themself." The fact that making it known you won't be prosecuted for retail theft tends to encourage retail theft. Etc. It is WILD to me how often leftists respond to these situations like some people on the Greenpoint subreddit apparent did: by acting as though the only appropriate response is to IGNORE IT AND HOPE IT GOES AWAY. When did so many on the left become so childish?
I don't know when it happened but as a lefty, I find it completely demoralizing. Supporting a death cult like Hamas does not reflect left values to me, at least not mine. Denying material reality and promulgating ahistoricity are also not left values to me.
Yes it is, and to me, that's not left. Or maybe, as John McWhorter elucidates in Woke Racism, its cultural leftism as opposed to material leftism. I have yet to read Woke is not Left by Susan Neiman but I have heard her speak and I suspect I will agree with her 100%.
I’m center left. Want reproductive rights. Hate trans ideology. Believe in capitalism with constraints. I don’t understand the far progressive left allied with utter regressive groups like Hamas.
As someone who leans towards "individual liberty is paramount" I've often been surprised to find out how little some advocates for drug policy reform, marriage equality, and sex work policy reform care about liberty. Some are in it for an all-purpose preference for the underdog, some are in it to undermine bourgeois norms, and some just think that you should be allowed to smoke weed and sell sex in the dystopian totalitarian nightmare world they want to create.
I’ll take a shot at answering Jesse’s question about kids being maimed and killed not making Israel safer. To do a throat clear, I’m a non-Jewish American, would probably be considered a moderate on the situation (I’m for a 2-state solution on 1967 borders and am against settlements) but am a lifelong student of military history and know every single war involving air powers since aerial bombing was invented.
This is not making me trying to influence anyone here’s moral judgements, but what Israel is doing not surprising in an air superiority military sense involving an enemy dug into tunnel networks. Seeing as no one cared about civilian deaths in the campaign against ISIS, because the whole world was against ISIS, it may surprise you that 10’s of thousands of civilians were killed in the campaign to destroy ISIS, including 10,000 in Mosul alone. Mosul had a bit over 10,000 fighters who weren’t dug into tunnel networks. Hamas has 50,000+ dug into the most advanced tunnel system maybe in the history of warfare under a densely packed city-state.
Israel’s main strategy is, and logically has to be if they want to destroy Hamas, the complete destruction of those tunnel networks, the creation of which was where most of the “humanitarian” resources actually went over the last 16 years.
In aerial bombing campaigns, even with guided bombs, even when the enemy is completely on the surface, you will get kids being blown up. Again, another throat clear, I’m not justifying this, I’m just describing recent aerial bombing campaigns. Israel is in a pickle. They (from their strategic perspective) need to clear those tunnels. The normal strategy would be to go in on the ground, block every tunnel entrance and let all of Hamas die of thirst, but they can’t do that because Hamas has hostages, including foreign hostages. So they need to clear the tunnels bit by bit in the worst tunnel warfare ever. To avoid that, they seem to be trying via bunker buster to blow up tunnel sections from the sky to minimize the amount they need to go into individually. The tunnel systems they can hit are all under civilian areas, ingeniously placed by Hamas under places they know will cause the most international backlash via civilian deaths if Israel bombs them. Using human shields, Hamas is trying to demand the IDF go into one of the worst deathtraps ever, because “from the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers, the Al-Qasdam Brigades love death more than you love life.”
I can go on but I’ve already written an essay here, but if you want an example of trying to destroy an enemy army dug into tunnels, look up Iwo Jima and Okinawa, neither of which had tunnels as advanced or extensive as Hamas does. During WW2, the doctrine of Total War meant on all sides, there wasn’t an expectation of preventing civilian casualties if there was a military purpose. If you want to see what true carpet bombing looks like, true indiscriminate destruction to dig out an entrenched army from tunnels, look at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The United States turned those islands into the surface of the Moon.
I was going to email Jesse a response to his question, but then noticed this comment was better than what I would've written, so thank you.
I would add one component to the analysis, the notion that Israel's current military campaign will lead to even more people being sympathetic to Hamas and even joining their ranks. This is true, but ignores the importance of leadership/experienced fighters and also ignores that Hamas has control over the schools in Gaza.
The problem is that the status quo is unacceptable for Israel. Doing nothing also strengthens Hamas over the long run by allowing them to pick the time and place of their next atrocity, train even more fighters, and flood the next generation with anti-Semitic propaganda. As long as Hamas exists, lasting peace is not possible. Hamas itself has said as much. This leaves Israel with only bad options. Destroy Hamas entirely and unavoidably inflict massive civilian casualties in the process, or leave Hamas intact and watch its ideology become even more firmly entrenched (and option that encompasses everything from doing nothing to limited "proportional" strikes). Israel clearly sees option one as the less bad of the two, and the only chance at eventual peace. Doesn't mean that the choice is correct, and it does have a ghastly price tag in human lives, but it does make logical sense. I have yet to hear someone sympathetic to Israel provide a realistic alternative.
This idea that fighting terrorists will lead to more terrorists is a myth that needs to die (along with the terrorists).
Do you know how many Vietnamese children the US napalmed in the Vietnam War? Heck, the US bombed Cambodia and Laos too for basically no reason. Do we have a big Laotian terrorist problem today?
Yeah, it definitely CAN add fuel to the fire. And killing people is bad regardless. But who's left in charge seems to matter more.
Depends on culture, ideology and religion.
And honestly how many people you kill. If you actually defeat people its a lot easier to stop recurrence. Look at WWII.
If the allies had "come to terms" with Germany/Japan in 1942 there would have still been Nazis and Japanese imperialists for much longer. Sometimes violence really is the answer.
For people left of... some point on some dimension, it's a certainty that they default into assuming must be true, for sure, and don't show any real empirical interest in being more thorough never mind questioning than that.
People on the right on the issue do tend to assume it's fully not-true no matter the circumstances, or even as one sometimes-applicable variable in a complex system of factors.
Those conflicts ended, those countries have peaceable relations with the US. This is an ongoing multigeneration conflict. absurd comparison.
I know this wasn’t really your point but I’m always surprised when I hear/read people say that we bombed Laos for no reason. I think the Vietnam war was absolutely terrible and based on a lie, so I’m not seeking to defend the war itself, but… have you just taken a look at the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and which countries it went through?[1]
Additionally, Laos was basically used like Pakistan was by the Taliban (well, except worse because the Vietnamese were trying to topple the government of Laos as well.)
At one point, the North Vietnamese actually came into Laos via the Ho Chi Minh trail to take out an airplane guidance system that we had placed there with the permission of the Laotian government. In this battle, the North Vietnamese killed 13 US Air Force members who were there to protect it (even though that force was clearly far too small for the task, Laos wouldn’t let the US place any more people there), which was “the largest single ground combat loss of United States Air Force members during the Vietnam War.“ [2]
Do you disagree that those things are true? Why do you think it was “for basically no reason”?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail#/media/File%3AHoCMT.png
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lima_Site_85
Absolutely nonsense comparison. Failing grade. You cannot compare the war in Southeast Asia with the Israel Palestine conflict. Nonsense.
Of course I can, and I just did. Do you admit that just because someone got bombed that doesn't mean they are 100% guaranteed to turn into a terrorist later?
Sorry the comparison is absurd. Period. Vietnamese are not Palestinians. Vietnamese wanted to kill Americans for what we did but the Pacific Ocean is very wide.
Quit calling people terrorists. That is neo con ideology.
It is human nature to seek revenge. We have been doing it for millions of years. You kill my family, I am going to kill yours.
The Israel and Palestinian war will never end.
If it’s “human nature to seek revenge,” why wasn’t Europe filled with gangs of marauding Jewish terrorists during the centuries when European Jews were getting constantly pogromed?
This completely flies in the face of history. All wars end, eventually. Go away now.
I agree the 'bombing civilians will only lead to them hating you more' isn't quite the truism people seem to think. The reality is maybe it will maybe it won't. Hamas controls the school system there and pretty much rachets up the hate to 11 already. And notably, the allies killed A LOT of German and Japanese civilians during WW2. Like a lot a lot. Children included. We didn't see them develope long lasting hatred for the allied Nations. Even in a place like Iraq where the completely unjustified invasion of Iraq killed probably 1 million people, the reaction of the Iraqis is more mixed. Even Vietnam is pretty friendly with the US these days.
Probably partly because the invasion of iraq only killed about a tenth of that million, the rest killed by other iraqis, while the US tried ineffectually to stop it. The Iraqis are too busy hating and fearing their neighbors to hate and fear the US, especially since they understand that the US is their de facto protector against their sectarian enemies.
Baloney. What Iraqi thinks now that our illegal invasion was good? We are their protector. Oh sure.
Our invasion of Iraq was the most brutal and unnecessary act we have ever done. As bad as Vietnam and a war crime.
Nonsense. Germans and Japanese definitely wanted to kill Americans for what we did to them. They didn’t have the means to do it after their country was annihilated.
Everyone is friendly now. Sure, but deep down there is still hatred.
Us Americans are so naive and happy faced. This is what I see with these comments. Come on people, Americans are hated and most of the world wants us dead. Wake the F up.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not
No trolling. Just pushing back on what I see as happy history with a triumphant America who bombed the hell out of its enemies and those enemies came to love Americans.
Resentment and revenge are wired into humans, no matter what us happy rainbows and unicorns Americans think.
Is it seriously your contention that under the decades of peaceful cooperation, friendly interactions, cultural exchange and mutual admiration Germans and Japanese people still secretly hate Americans and hope for us to be hurt?
To clarify, I don't think fighting resulting in even more terrorists is automatic in any war. To copy Jesse's catchphrase, it's complicated and depends on a number of factors. However, given the current confluence of factors with Hamas (religion, nationalism, past history, etc.), I think that assumption is fairly justified in this specific case.
Yes, but *not* bombing them seems to produce terrorists too. So what do they do, because they can’t give Hamas what they demand?
There will be peace when the Palestinians are out of Gaza/WB or when the Jews are out of Israel. I know which world I would rather live in.
The percentage of people who are willing to fight to the death in a truly hopeless cause is actually rather small - and I suspect most of them are already enrolled in the Hamas militias. Dropping bombs will push some people into this category - but it will also kill a lot of them if your aim and your intelligence is good. And of course, leaving the fanatics in charge to propagandize the next generation will also move more people into the “fight to the death” category.
I think Israel has erred in the past in treating Hamas as a tolerable threat, a counterweight to Fatah, a nuisance that can be handled by Iron Dome and an occasional decapitating strike into Gaza to prove your point. But really they’ve run a dangerous middle ground - aggressive enough to anger Palestine and their allies, to provide propaganda fodder, but not decisive enough to actually end Hamas. I think that has flipped now, and the utter destruction of Hamas is the objective. How many Gazan civilians die is largely tied to how many Hamas prevents from leaving the combat zone.
The other part of this is that Hamas leadership are craven cowards that aren't even in Gaza. They're very likely in Qatar or Iran (Iran hosting Sunni militants seems out of place, but the enemy of my enemy and all that).
I mention this not only because they're reprehensible pieces of shit, but because Israel is going to kill them at some stage. In order to do that they're going to need to find out where they are and how much opportunity they have to pull it off. Bombings, and the rush of communications that flow out in the wake of them, may provide opportunities to do this.
It's easy to hide, unless you're forced to talk to everyone you used to know. Killing Hamas leadership in Gaza will create those opportunities.
I find it very interesting how no one seemed to be concerned with civilian casualties when France was bombing ISIS in response to the Bataclan massacre (with one fourteenth the number of killed on 10/7). In fact the Wiki page doesn't mention civilian casualties at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op%C3%A9ration_Chammal
I think the real difference is that ISIS were globally renowned as reprehensible cunt monkeys across the globe, whereas Hamas is being conflated with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have a far softer reputation, globally, particularly in left wing circles.
That's their reputation globally, at least. When I was in Jordan they had a horrid reputation, but that may have had something to do with Black September in 1970.
The Lebanese aren't huge fans of them, either, as they had a lot to do with sparking the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.
None of that makes them all culpable for what's happening now, or for anything that happened back then. The vast majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with any of it. This courtesy is rarely extended to the Israelis.
So... the further away you get from Palestine, the more glowing the view of them tends to be. ISIS never received praise of that nature, except from people with severe mental health issues.
Every once and a while I look at the Wikipedia page for the war against ISIS solely because the opponents section is probably the longest for any war ever, pretty much every country, every militant group, every other Jihadist group, were all opposed to ISIS. It’s the one time something that could even be tangentially called an army declared war on the entirety of Earth.
Why doesn't Israel Drone hamas's leaders in Qatar? Mossad excels at extrajudicial assassinations. Or get the Qatari government to hand them over?
Because the largest US military base in the Middle East is in Qatar. Obviously the Qataris are playing both sides here to a degree, but in this case it probably renders any direct action on Qatari soil off limits.
Drones get a lot of press, but for targeted assassinations they're not that great. If you want to guarantee the kill, you basically guarantee civilian casualties, which would be unwise on foreign soil with a country they're not at war with.
Also, we all think they're in Qatar, but I can't guarantee that. The rats are likely darting all over the place in fear of Israeli assassins. It'll take work to pin them down.
I have learned more about the military challenges facing Israel from this comment thread than I have from anything else I have read or listened to in the last four weeks. (And I have read and listened to a LOT.) Kudos and a huge thank you to all of you who took the time and effort to offer such detailed answers.
"I can go on but I’ve already written an essay here."
I would be interested in reading more, if you have more thoughts that come up as the conflict goes on.
I probably will on other threads. The biggest problem I’ve noticed, especially on the Pro-Palestinian side, is lack of context around death tolls, and as I always say, it’s not that I agree with everything Israel does, I definitely don’t, but in my eyes, you can’t use the word Should under you know what Is.
The history of warfare has been taught horribly for decades. Knowing past wars, when I saw those tunnel networks, my view on the war altered greatly and I though “yeah this is gonna be a nightmare for everyone involed.”
Not disagreeing with you, but I’m also curious how they can get hostages out if Hamas has the hostages hidden in tunnels.
Thankfully I’m just an armchair general and don’t actually need to plan this personally for the IDF. Let’s rewind the tape a bit. Hamas shortly after the attack said they’d execute 1 hostage for every civilian area bombed by the IDF. Israel called their bluff, knew they wouldn’t do that because half of Hamas’ strategy is a PR campaign to get the population of the world that doesn’t warfare cause-and-effect to forget they’re holding hostages in the first place. This has worked, seeing as people are tearing down posters of the hostages, but if they killed them on live TV, Western college students might have a harder time sympathizing with them.
Hamas is insane but not completely stupid. And when I say insane, I mean insane. They are maybe the only governing body I’ve heard of to rip out their own water supply and hand water control over to their enemy. Why did they rip out their water supply? Of course to turn into unguided rockets to shoot randomly into towns in the desert to accomplish no military goal. It cannot be overstated that Hamas is one of the craziest governments ever and have dedicated themselves to be Jihadist mole-people.
Sorry for the tangent but point is, I figure, Hamas has the hostages in the deepest parts of the tunnel complex, so deep that a surface nuke wouldn’t kill them. They need them alive for international PR points, or something, it’s hatd to tell with them. The IDF knows their psychology and the layouts better than a Substack Jester hanging out in the States. I’m not saying the IDF is correct in their strategy, especially not morally, I never make moral points in war, but they must know something about the tunnel system where they’re hitting that it isn’t the hostages and are expecting to use special forces to clear the potential hostage areas grid by grid.
If you read this, and care about the hostages, from a cold eyed perspective, I think most of them are going to die. I think the IDF thinks this, but they want to destroy Hamas so badly they accept it. If not for international backlash, in their fury, they probably would bury every tunnel entrance, like we would’ve done in WW2. Or, frankly, any non-Western military would do.
I'd agree with you that most hostages will probably die. It's a pretty cold calculation, but it doesn't make sense to risk the lives of thousands of soldiers to rescue hundreds of hostages. I expect some highly publicized special forces operations to rescue a couple of them, but then, when a special forces operation is made public, it's almost always for political reasons.
The benefit is purely political and probably not to be minimized.
It’s like a saving private Ryan situation.
Wins like that is what infuse the public with the will to persist.
Thanks for explaining. That makes sense.
Frankly, I trust the IDF on this. They know their enemy better than any armchair experts in the west, and they know what is at stake.
I have no idea why I’m so obsessed with this, I’m a noninterventionist who thinks war is hell and is haunted by images of the burned corpses of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo as an American even though I wasn’t alive at the time but learning about every single war in human history is something I fixated on probably since I first played Command & Conquer: Red Alert when I was 4.
One problem is, as bad as war is, unilaterally declaring you won't fight one won't actually get you less war necessarily.
My husband would very much appreciate your analysis. You are not alone in your stance on war and an obsession with it. My husband was a conscientious objector during Vietnam. He is particularly obsessed with that war and the German side of WWII, but really anything military. He read War and Peace at a very young age and became a Hindu priest at age 18. He left the monastery for reasons I won't go into here, but he is fascinated with human nature. He has obsessively followed military commentary regarding Ukraine and now Israel/Hamas. I have not been able to hear about what he hearing because I am engrossed in the project of getting my Dad with Alzheimer's into assisted living and cleaning out his house. He and our son get to listen to me every night blather on about the intimate details of my father's dementia and experience of moving. I am looking forward to getting home and hearing what he has been learning. I am not a big Ezra Klein fan, but I did listen yesterday to an interview he did with Peter Beinart and Spencer Ackerman that I thought was good. I am more interested in the political side of this and the social maybe even anthropological side of it than the military, but I also don't think you can separate these tracts of study. I have read a couple of books on Israel/Palestine but not nearly enough to feel I understand it - I tend to have more questions than real understanding. And have been listening to Darryl Cooper's Martyrmade podcast which has been helpful.
Unfortunately, they probably don’t. This isn’t being spoken about openly by leaders in Israel for obvious reasons, but if you look at how Israel is operating, they seem to have accepted that the hostages are not going to be rescued alive.
I believe this was intended as a response to Mike’s concerns below. Great analysis Jester.
Thanks! My friends tonight I believe thought I was in a deep texting conversation with someone but nope, just living on the Blocked & Reported threads.
Iwo Jima was an uninhabited rock, so turning it into Lunar 2.0 was unproblematic from a collateral damage standpoint. Okinawa was, and is, a densely populated island, and as far as I know the US never really went heavily after the major population concentrations there, but I don't think it needed to (for whatever reason, the Japanese did not heavily fortify Naha, the largest city on the island). That said, there were scads of civilian casualties on Okinawa, quite possibly more than the military dead.
Where we did wade full-bore into a heavily populated and fortified urban area was in Manila, and that was a humanitarian catastrophe. The whole old city of Intramuros was essentially erased from the earth and it's estimated that over 100,000 civilians were killed (compared to around 20,000 military dead, of which over 90% were Japanese). Not all of that can be laid at the feet of American tactics-- the Japanese themselves engaged in a nihilistic orgy of some of the worst war crimes ever seen-- but a lot of them were just buried in rubble from artillery and aerial bombardment.
US tactics at the time, which had proven highly effective at generating enormous kill ratios of Japanese to American military dead (see that 90% figure), called for essentially burying Japanese fortified positions in ordinance from distance. That worked well in places like New Guinea* where the fought-over places were mostly thinly-populated malarial lowlands (especially since the Japanese were also dying of disease almost as quickly as the Americans could kill them). It was not well-suited to capturing a heavily built-up modern city.
The "blow things to rubble and then bounce the rubble repeatedly" strategy didn't work particularly well on Iwo Jima, either, the chief problem there being that "from distance" is impossible to achieve on an island of eight square miles. It didn't work on Peleliu* or Tarawa either. Frankly, the idea that repeated bombardments are going to do serious damage to a well-built tunnel network strikes me as folly. In this case, however, and unlike in Manila, the civilian population is hostile, so it's not clear to me that the IDF actually cares whether the tunnel-bombing is effective or not. In some ways, it would be better for it not to be, because that allows the collective-punishment-with-a-fig-leaf-of-military-justification to go on indefinitely.
*The US military did a study of the battle of Peleliu measuring the amount of ordinance expended per enemy soldier killed, and it is absolutely astounding to read about-- one of the major histories of the battle quotes from it, and it's where I came across the figures. I don't remember them exactly, but it was several hundred bullets and dozens of artillery and mortar shells of various calibers per kill.
It’s 100% a fair point on Iwo Jima, I realize that sentence was didn’t split that out, mainly I wanted to point out what an area of land looks like to get out an entrenched enemy when you don’t care about the landscape.
Manila is interesting in a few ways, first because the sadism inflicted by the Japanese there, especially when they knew it was going to fall was so sickening I think it even tops their behavior in the Rape of Nanking. Die via bomb or die via IJA? I’ll take the bomb, not that that was the American calculation, they just wanted to kill all the Japanese. IIRC, the entire Philippine campaign at the time was controversial because people viewed it as MacArthur wanting to fulfill his promise more than it being necessary to take the home islands. Once the Navy was destroyed, the US could’ve boxed out the Philippines. Not saying this would be morally correct.
As for bouncing the rubble, the normal bombs, and especially the artillery the Americans were using true, did not go deep, but look at the crater from the refugee camp bombing. I’m not defending the bombing, note, but with the depth of that crater, it would’ve destroyed a tunnel. I can see the argument that part of this is collective punishment, it may well be, I can’t read minds, but humans are known to do such things. The phrase “glass the place” is said too often amongst warmongers.
However, you agree the IDF wants revenge, no? Well to get their true revenge, they need to clear those tunnels, which they desperately don’t want to wade into, so if they Could bunker-buster as many as they could. 100 ft less of tunnel is 100 ft less of the worst warfare imaginable. Trench warfare like Ukraine via Russia is a special kind of hell, but 300 miles of concrete tunnels is something out of a damn horror movie.
If you want even more wasted ammunition, see the figures from US soldiers in Afghanistan, the ratios are astronomical.
Appreciate the long reply, most people I know, even ones who talk endlessly about this war, never concretely talk about the military aspects, which is probably why I’ve spent so much time writing. Although I probably should write not just off the top of my head.
Like you, I will not wade deeply into the general morality of the Philippines campaign. I think aspects of it were militarily useful in regards to closing shipping lanes through the South China Sea (and the widely-mooted alternative target, Taiwan, would have had similar collateral-damage concerns). I also think the US went waaaaaaay overboard invading practically every island in the entire archipelago, long after the Japanese garrisons had been island-hopped into irrelevance, and that was due to MacArthur's mania and hubris. In regard to Manila itself, I think we should have taken one for the team and gone in on foot without the heavy bombardment, knowing that this would increase US military casualties, rather than put all the burden of suffering on the Filipino populace.
Back to Gaza: armor-piercing and bunker-busting ordinance is effective at neutralizing specific point targets even when they're heavily fortified. If what you want is to collapse the Fuhrerbunker, you can do that with modern munitions in a way that I don't think was really available to the Soviets at the time.
What it's not effective at is neutralizing vast fortified areas. The very nature of precision armor-piercing munitions-- their ability to not blow up as soon as they hit something-- makes it difficult for them to have a broad area of effect. And if all you're doing is knocking out individual nodes of a tunnel network, it's going to take literally forever, in the sense that the enemy is going to repair or replace them faster than you can blow them up. Imagine a chessboard, with 64 squares. Now imagine that instead of bombing a square, you are bombing the EDGE of a square. Suddenly you have 128 targets, not 64. Now imagine the enemy draws additional lines through the middle of each square-- now you're dealing with 512 targets. Etc etc ad infinitum.
There's no alternative to going square by square and physically occupying them.
Also I restacked this post and tried to highlight your comments. You’ve made really good points and if I could bump this exchange to the top, I would. I appreciate all the likes I’ve gotten but you’ve made solid counters that I think people should see.
I realized I may have replied to myself with my last comment, scroll down for the fuller response but you chess board analagy isn’t 100% what would happen. I don’t know how good of a map Israel has of the tunnels, in particular where the intersections are, but if they did know where the intersections are, but I doubt they’re evenly spaced. Say you blow up 2 intersections, trapping, maybe 1,000 ft of tunnel. Anyone in the stretch of tunnel is now trapped. I’ll give Hamas that they are probably the most skilled by-hand tunnelers in the world, raised by the shovel if you will, but a section trapped with destroyed intersections, that section has been neutralized. Drawing additional lines would assume that they Could draw those lines with the resources they had while trapped in the tunnel section, which has suddenly become pitch black.
This, granted, rests on a ton of assumptions, mainly on the exact layout of the tunnels, which I would love to see a full rotatable 3D map of, but the tactics of bunker busters collapsing certain segments isn’t completely pointless.
That is, if your goal is to kill all of Hamas while minimizing your own deaths, not saving as many hostages as possible.
And, not saying this is a good thing, but I believe the IDF wants to kill all of Hamas more than they want to save all the hostages, grim as that may be.
Solid assessment on the Philippines there, and I think when it comes to the tunnels, there’s a possibility that Israel is flailing somewhat just because of the insane task they have in front of them, they could be having, for lack of a better term, tunnel vision.
In the end, you’re correct on square by square has to be the way it’s done, but just, there are so many miles of tunnels. Hamas has spent 16 years making the Caliphate of the moles. In other eras, or in other armies, say figure the Russian army, or especially the Syrian army would say “the hostages aren’t worth it, find the entrances, block them all, let them surrender or die slowly.” Or most famously, General Sherman, that ending war quickly is the only way to fight a war.
But doubt they’ll do that, frankly I’m not sure how this plays out with those tunnels, there isn’t a true apples to apples comparison where you have to clear anything that extensive that thoroughly and that individually. As I mentioned before, none of what I say is the “morally correct” thing to do. Mainly I’m just looking at what concretely Israel would have to do to achieve its strategic goals, and whatever that may be, if they’re truly dedicated to this path, it’ll be extremely painful.
This is just a superb write-up, thank you.
This is the smartest thing I've read on the internet in a long time. If you have written more on this topic, I'd love to read it. Same goes for Ukraine.
Thanks! I’m kind of surprised that, of all subjects, that this is the one that I’ve gotten the most interest in. Israel/Palestine isn’t something I spend much time thinking about, beyond the historical aspects unless it comes up in the news.
As for Ukraine, my thoughts aren’t that complicated on it. The war should’ve ended in a ceasefire a year ago but instead Boris Johnson scuttled it and 10’s of thousands have died for no reason since then. Simply militarily, based on resources, manpower, and the fact Russia has nukes, Ukraine can’t win. The Russians have fortified that line so heavily it’s going to be trench warfare forever and we’re also running out of munitions we desperately need if we care at all in protecting the semiconductor plants in Taiwan. Seeing as modern civilization rests on those plants not falling to Xi, I think that’s a bit more important. Support for Israel makes logical sense because there is an achievable end state, which Ukraine does not have. It’s going to end up Status Quo Antebellum, and I’d rather have it end up there with less dead Ukrainian (and Russian) young men. I don’t like needless death.
Also, the Democratic Party’s obsession with the primacy of Ukraine funding above any other issue sets off alarm bells with me, and hell, Jamaal Bowman actually set off an alarm to delay a vote that lacked Ukraine spending in it.
All the Democrats voted against auditing all the money sent. At the very least I’d say we can’t send more money without a full record of where and what was already sent. Don’t be fooled into thinking Bob Menendez and his gold bars is the only corruption in Washington. He’s not uniquely corrupt, he was just uniquely stupid about it.
I probably will stick to writing about the subject if I’m doing specific responses but my main interests lie more in the realm of what reporters like Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang and especially the great Jacob Siegel (you should check him out in Israel stuff, he’s much more knowledgeable than me, was in the military, and lives in Israel) have expose regarding internet censorship and the warping of social media from 2016 onwards. Jacob Siegel’s Tablet Magazine piece “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century” is the best piece of journalism of my life time.
That and open source AI, I love open source AI.
Thx
How do the Vietnamese tunnels compare? I’ve read about those and it’s mind blowing.
Vietnamese tunnels were all over the place but were low in depth and mostly propped up with wooden braces. RT has a video showing Hamas’ tunnels, tough to find RT on the internet these days but it’s worth looking for. Hamas’ tunnels are on a whole nother level and are fully concrete. It’s like something you’d expect for a nuclear fallout shelter. I was absolutely baffled as to how it was possible they made them but remembered you can do a lot with dedication and 16 years.
And billions of dollars in misspent relief money.
Where did that money come from? The west? The UN?
Yep - I think it comes to the tune of a billion per year.
And donations from the US! To groups like: https://www.pcrf.net/ That money goes directly to fuel terrorism
Also Arab states (e.g. Qatar) and Hamas shaking down the populace and stealing everything that's not nailed down.
Great post.
This is a great podcast for anyone wanting to hear more about the military perspective:
Tech, Ethics, and the City in Israel's Looming Urban Battlefield - War on the Rocks
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6kgnEHAQqxyGXHmP1xkJdv?si=NIJSqpxTRhqbki5semF_vg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=copy-link&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A5ec5TBvVh3w4aobgx0qgYj&_branch_match_id=1250532454816877061&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAA8soKSkottLXLy7IL8lMq9TLyczL1i9JyvQ2CC3NMXBJAgActw4tIAAAAA%3D%3D&nd=1
Couple things. 1. There are hundreds of miles of tunnels, really try to comprehend that. Even nuking Gaza wouldn’t destroy ALL the tunnels. They’re going bit by bit.
2. There’s no way to do this not sloppy. Again, unlike most people, I’m not giving you a morality play here, your morals are your own, I’m just trying to guess what the IDF are doing.
3. If you hate Netanyahu, don’t worry, he’s toast after the war is over. I heard one of his old supporters say he should have already resigned and never shown his face in public again. The level of Israeli support for Netanyahu is about the level of people who believe Queen Elizabeth was a lizard.
They are going after Hamas. We have no way of knowing how many of the hostages are even still alive.
I think the massive Palestinian protests going on in the USA are actually having the opposite effect they intend. Thousands of people chanting for Jews to be killed ( from the river to the sea ) is deeply unsettling to normal Americans. I think it is going to lead to real political consequences for the Dems.
Yeah, seeing those people scaling the fence at the White House (just when they got Major out of there...), climbing up Ben Franklin's statue, and vandalizing monuments... that doesn't play well outside of the echo chambers the protestors live in.
I'm really curious to know what percentage of Americans (e.g. not just Democrats) support Hamas/ Palestinians here. The %'s I see seem to focus on Democrats/ the left, as though there weren't also a right wing. Might be hopelessly naive, but I'm hoping that a broader count would be a little bit less pro-terrorist.
The CCP is deliberately warping the Tiktok algorithm to forcefeed the English speaking world anti-Israel propaganda. Xi Jinping isn’t a Jihadist, obviously, but he does everything in his power to sow discord in the West to give him a better chance of success at seizing the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan.
What effect is this having? Unfortunately, probably a lot among young people if the amount of time I hear they spend on that platform is correct.
I’m 31 and know people my age and older generally across the political spectrum, and all the people I know except for those who fell into the “woke” trap post 2017 could probably be considered “Pro-Israel”.
If there are any college age people in the comments section, I would be curious to hear the extent of this.
`The CCP is deliberately warping the Tiktok algorithm'
Source? I don't even think that accessing American user data is easy for the CCP, let alone changing the algorithm .
The CCP can access any user data it wants. “Stored in the US” doesn’t mean “Inaccessible from anywhere outside the US”.
Frankly my main source is they would be idiots not to be doing that and Xi is many things, but he ain’t stupid.
I’ll give one example of a different platform doing this. ‘Project Owl’, which Google implemented to mess with their search algorithm to boost “authoritarive sources” to fight “misinformation”, which was really just to get the Democratic Party off their backs during Russiagate. Google messes with their algorithms all the time.
I like to play a game called “I want the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. What should I do?”
Well, one longterm strategy you do is with the social media you control, shatter the social cohesion of your enemies by massively separating the beliefs of those who use your platform (the youth) and those who don’t (older people). The default is Pro-Israel? Push Pro-Palestine. Every aspect of what is called “woke”, for lack of a better term, gets amplified, which is useful because it can divide young from old better. A country’s soldiers are by definition young, can’t have them being stoic and patriotic, now can you? Is much of this organic? Of course. You can’t build a good psyop out of thin air, but Chinese Tiktok is very very different than Western Tiktok. Western Tiktok is an ingenious weapon of psychological warfare. This doesn’t mean I think it should be banned outright, I don’t like banning things, but it’s important to know what it is.
Never before in our lifetimes have there been 2 superpowers focused on 1 specific thing, the most valuable resource of all time, the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. I’m not saying that’s the lens you should look at Everything, that way lies madness, but it’s a useful lens to see the proxies within proxies for this terrifyingly inevitable, apocalyptic battle for who controls the island on which modern civilization is built.
That is my perception too, but I am far from college age. My workplace is not super woke, but it is solidly liberal, and the sentiment is firmly on Israel's side among most.
Here's a poll that breaks it down by party: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-israel-ukraine/
You have to scroll down, and they use "Palestinian people" which is going to get a more positive answer than Hamas. Americans are still broadly sympathetic to Israel, with Rs more so, as you correctly assumed.
I think you're right!
You know the very real "woke" backlash that Democrats pretended didn't exit?
The backlash to the Pro-Hamas/Palestine crowd is coming even faster. It took years for anti-woke to move out of the fringes of the right into the middle. It's only taking a month with respect to the Pro-Hamas folks before I'm seeing pushback from the middle.
`from the river to the sea' is *not* a call for genocide and it's ridiculous that the right is attempting to frame it that way.
It is a call for a one state solution with equality for all. When Fatah started using that slogan they were calling explicitly for a single nation of Arabs and Jews. They dropped it/didn't use it as much when they agreed in principle to seek a two state solution (this resulted in much backlash for Fatah). After that it was used in a general way to express freedom and equality for the Palestinian people.
Seeing as how Israel made a two state solution impossible, what with settler activity, etc., the slogan has again become relevant again and reverted to its original meaning.
I heard no Jew hatred at the rally over the weekend. The protestors were regular Americans, young and old, mostly black and brown, some naturalized but most first or second generation Palestinian American, and the idea that they hate Jews let alone want to murder them if fantastical.
Pleasant, nice, regular people.
I so hope that this is the way most feel. It would be wonderful if they could all just live in peace together.
I fully concede that the American public's political responses to stimuli often make no sense (e.g. getting super-mad at Obama for a recession caused by Republicans), but it would be weird to blame Democrats for not being sufficiently pro-Israel when I quite literally do not know how they could possibly be more pro-Israel than they actually are. Like what additional pro-Israel actions would people even want? Sending American ground troops into Gaza?
Israeli President (Herzog) is great. He's very popular here and abroad. The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, is a flaming dumpster fire disaster, as is pretty much the entire government, save for Gantz's National Unity Party, which joined after the war started to stabilize things a bit. So they all have to go. They weren't that popular before the war, and, by and large, they're managing terribly now. Their response up to this point has been atrocious. The reason we're getting through this is (1) the Army and Security Services have woken up and are pulling their shit together and (2) ordinary citizens have been rallying to massive extents to provide for the internally displaced, the soldiers, etc.
Regarding the hostages--not a military expert by any stretch here. But my gut feeling is that while the Army will do their best to get people out, and they (please God!) will succeed, it's safe to assume that some aren't going to make it. To a certain extent, the army has to fight as if there were no hostages. We literally have hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people right now. (Hotels in my city, Jerusalem, are full of refugees from the South and the North). Large swaths of the South and the North are more or less unlivable until the threats are neutralized.
We do have to think about the hostages, but there's a limit to how much the Army can allow that to dictate their actions. It can't be easy, and I'm very glad I'm not the one who has to make those decisions. Every time I open up one of the local news sites I'm literally praying I'll see another update that they managed to rescue another hostage.
I can’t imagine how rough that’s gotta be and I’m hoping for the best for y’all. Grim as it is, I’m glad you’ve got a more realistic take on the hostages. I’m no military general, just a Jester, so figure the brass at the IDF know better than me, but I truly don’t know how they get a large amount of hostages out of the tunnels without a local surrender of at least a group of Hamas, but the Jihadist mole-people seem as fanatical as the Imperial Japanese. I’m an optimist though in general, so we’ll see. By the way, if you want a good clear-eyed take on things, check out Jacob Siegel on the Manifesto! podcast. He’s an American write, ex-military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently lives in Israel, he’s tied with Matt Taibbi as the best analyst of American intelligence agencies schemes but also is really nuanced about the whole situation over there. I’ll admit, a lot of the tunnel analysis I took from him.
I'll check him out, and thanks for the positive thoughts. The Call Me Back podcast with Dan Senor has featured some really insightful interviews.
"Jihadist mole-people," I'm totally using that.
Thank you for the podcast recommendation. My father was a WWII history buff and I was always bored hearing about it as a kid, but when things like this happen I'm grateful that there are people out there who DO study military history.
I think there’s a lack of care about HISTORY as a general topic.
Historically speaking, if this whole thing had happened only 100 years ago, Israel’s right to do what it’s trying to do to defend itself would have been obvious. None of the current confusion and tip toeing would have been a thing.
I think about the long line of conquests, wars and conflicts that have shaped our world and see that to the victor goes the spoils, and if you can’t defend what you have then you don’t deserve to have it. The story of the human race in a nutshell.
The Prime minister needs to go but newsflash. The broad Israeli public supports this war. For existential reasons.
We need to replace Bibi with Daniel Hagari. At this point, I think he's the only person that we all trust.
Hi. I've read some of the responses below regarding Hamas/ Israel. It looks like those with more of a military bent have responded. I'm weighing in as an Israeli citizen who lives in Jerusalem.
1) "Proportionality"--I don't think that this word means what you think it means, at least not in warfare. Jesse, you honestly sounded like the crazy trans activists you complain about who throw around empty phrases and /or redefine words to suit their agenda, and ignore any evidence that they don't like. The goal of war isn't to be proportional. The goal or war is to win. You're a journalist, and a good one. Look that one up. Speak to people who really know this area. There are no shortage of journalists, legal and military experts and pundits from the left and the right who, even as they come to different conclusions, are honest brokers. (Consider Haviv Rettig Gur, Yossi Klein Halevi, Gershon Baskin* to start.) Wildly different conclusions but each come from a position of caring about Israel (and living here).
2) Speaking of honest brokers, why *would* we listen to the UN or other Palestinian apologists? They condemn us constantly while flat out ignoring mass murders going on in other places (e.g. China, Syria or Sudan). They appointed Iran to be the head of the UN Human Rights Council. They literally couldn't manage to condemn Hamas for the October 7th attacks! But we're supposed to take them seriously, assume that they have our best interests in mind? We should have faith that the UN and/or others have condemning us have looked at the situation, considered them carefully and genuinely believe, based on an in-depth analysis of both sides and the needs, safety and security of both? Maybe you can be that delusional. We can't afford to be.
Or, as a lot of people have pointed out in respect of the calls for a cease-fire, there WAS a cease fire, on October 6th. It was a cease fire which featured thousands of Palestinians from Gaza working in Israel, legally. Earning better salaries. Using that money to build homes and raise families. And, sadly, using the opportunity to collect intelligence information which it fed back to Hamas. Hamas used this information to simply devastating effect when it broke the cease-fire on October 7th. Now they want a new cease-fire? I bet they do. Fuck them.
3) And speaking of people showing us who they are (and the importance of believing them)... Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have flat out told us who they are. They have admitted--proudly--that their goal is the destruction of Israel (and the West) and the annihilation of Jews. They have admitted that, if they have a chance, there will be another October 7th, and another and another. Hamas has admitted that they use civilians as human shields and they have no responsibility for the welfare of Gazans. They're a psychopathic death-cult. It's a shame that the Gazans chose such a shit government, but they did (after we withdrew completely from Aza, by the way). We're supposed to accept periodic massacres and constant rocket attacks in order to spare the poor, poor Palestinians? Thanks. Tried that. Didn't work. Not again.
To wrap up, a quote from Golda Meir. “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.” While you might see things differently (FWIW, you do come across here as trying very, VERY hard to be one of the 'good, it's just cultural!, not like THOSE Jews, Jews) from what I can see, folks only like us when we're dead and/or battered victims. Fuck that too.
(For the last point, I recommend Dara Horn's "People Love Dead Jews". )
* Re: Gershon Baskin, I was seriously injured in a suicide bombing attack in 2002. A few years later, I was invited to participate in one of his initiatives "Warriors for Peace". This brought together former terrorists and victims of terror for dialogue. I went to a few events. The last event I went to was a group 'discussion' between Israelis and Palestinians in which the Palestinians went off about how Israelis were so terrible and the Israelis were expected to agree. And I realized that the initiative was doomed. Baskin was also an architect of the Shalit deal, which gave Hamas the brilliant idea that, if they kidnapped enough of us, we'd give up with a mild whimper. So I'm not a big fan.
I think people's thinking in America are skewed by the absurd level of existential safety we have. America is protected by an ocean in each side and the most powerful military ever to exist. Outside of nuclear war (which I don't think feels real to anyone these days) there's no realistic way anyone is going to do existential level damage to America any time soon. China could take Taiwan and that would be bad, but it would still be a story most Americans read once and then sort of forget about. Sure America has 'lost' wars in recent memory, but our version of 'losing' is getting tired of inflicting 10 to 1 casualties on a population that doesn't want us around. It lacks any real ability to scare the average citizen. Israel has faced the very real prospect of losing something like a total war in recent history, with the consequences of that being pretty grim.
Supporting Hamas is a luxury belief for those that live in the US.
"Proportionality" refers to tactics, not strategy. It means you can't drop a nuke on a city just to kill a single guy with a gun. It doesn't mean, and has never meant, if the other country kills X number of your people, you are only allowed to kill Y number of theirs.
There are a fair number of people who know this area very well and who are experts in the area of international law/ human rights law/ Geneva Accords and the like. I'm not one of those people; I'm a middle aged accountant who knows her lane. From listening to enough of those people, however, I do know that proportionality isn't what Jesse implied it is.
And by this standard Israel is committing war crimes. They are bombing convoys of ambulances because they suspect some fighters may be in one; they are bombing refugee camps where 50--100 people were killed to take out two `commanders'.
For the last fifteen years they treated Gazans as though they were prisoners, intentionally failing to do anything to bring peace and keeping Hamas around to be sure, and are turning the prison into rubble.
Also, over a fifteen year period if they're constantly killing 10*X civilians then their tactics need to be revised, otherwise they discount Palestinian life at ten-to-one.
Do you always trust everything Hamas tells you? And why don't you recommend a change in tactics, since you are clearly more knowledgeable about such things than the IDF?
Do you always trust everything the IDF tells you? The US recognizes the same figures.
New tactics: stop bombing civilians and treat Palestinian life as though it were as valuable as Israeli.
How would Israel remove Hamas without bombing them?
You presuppose that is the correct course of action.
Not my job to direct the IDF offensive. If they can't figure out how not to kill ten times as many civilians (compared to targets and/or Israeli civilian deaths) in every retaliation then they ought to stop doing whatever they're doing.
As I mentioned in our other thread, our disagreements over AI and what Xi is thinking are intractable so there isn’t much use in that but with this, I’m genuinely curious. Disregard tactics for a bit, what, concretely is your goal for the region and how, starting today, do you realistically think this goal could be achieved?
People say “Should” a lot, in my estimation, you have to start with what “Is”.
A 10--15 year project of integrating Palestinians into the Israeli state with full rights.
It’s a fair idea but the problem is none of the parties involved seem to want that, and there isn’t anyone you can actually negotiate with on the Palestinian side that speaks for all Palestinians. Abbas is corrupt and holds the loyalty of basically no one, especially not Hamas who’d probably kill him if they could. Hamas is downright insane, Netanyahu in his idiocy thought he could manage having them around but clearly couldn’t.
In all that I say, I’m not not some super “Israel can do nothing wrong” guy. If I could wave a magic wand I’d like a 2 state solution on the 1967 borders, no settlements, like the old UN agreement, or maybe having Gaza be part of Egypt and the West Bank part of Jordan like in the past, but there’s no wand to wave.
I don’t know the answer to this mess, I just try to describe reality as best I can. Running through the permutations though, I think for any peace, Hamas needs to be destroyed. I know many on the Pro-Palestinian side bristle at Hamas being called “genocidal” or other words like that, because some right-wingers lump all Palestinians in with that belief, but it is not an exaggeration that Hamas is a group so unhinged it’s hard to find historical analogues for them. There’s much blame to go around in how a group like that gained control over Gaza, and Israel is not blameless, but who is to blame doesn’t change the facts on the ground.
I’m a big advocate for criminal justice reform, especially ending the drug war, and I’ve got this saying that the only reason you can justify putting a human being in a cage is 1. They are literally too dangerous to be out in society (think Ted Bundy) or 2. If you didn’t put them in there, too many people would do their crimes and society would collapse (Theft and fraud for example). Hamas, as an organization, are so far gone that as a government, they may be category 1. From the facts on the ground as they stand, I don’t know how we get to a place where this conflict finally ends, but the only concrete thing I can think of to move forward is the destruction of those tunnel systems.
Apologies for the endless essays, but I hope you can tell, I don’t sit around wanting to dunk on people, throw out ‘gotchas’ or anything, I would just like others to see what I see, maybe that’ll help them find the answers I can’t.
Thanks for taking the time to share such a nuanced perspective with us during what must be a really shitty time. Seriously, thank you!
You said it so well.
That’s infuriating on so many levels. I’m sorry that happened to you.
`We're supposed to accept periodic massacres and constant rocket attacks in order to spare the poor, poor Palestinians? Thanks. Tried that. Didn't work. Not again.'
Looking over the death and casualty statistics over the past fifteen years indicates pretty clearly who's suffering periodic massacres---it's the Palestinians. Israel doesn't get to claim victim status here when they've killed ten times as many Palestinian civilians over that period of time than they suffered.
Israel has been collectively punishing Palestinians for decades. Israel received collective punishment on 10/7. Civilian Israeli deaths? “This is the tragedy of war.”
This was a good episode but Jesus Christ, sometimes I DO want people to be sent to Rikers. If you have a years long rap sheet of assaulting people, I seriously don’t care what happens to you as long as you are out somewhere you can no longer assault people. Prison is a good option in times like this. I live in Seattle, a city notorious for being full of people like the ones referenced in Brooklyn, where there is little to no interest shown in the welfare of people attacked in public, or who feel unsafe....going to work. I am strongly considering moving somewhere else (Bellevue!) because I have run out of patience for this permissive culture of violence. I am 31 and am not some sort of “conservative reactionary,” no matter how people try to brand me. Jesse, I wish you would take a slightly less ambivalent stance on issues like this, it just makes you look like a coward.
I agree, I don’t understand why so many people have to change how they live and move to work around people who pose a danger to others. Aren’t they the exact people we want to keep off the streets?
As a society, we need to pay far less attention to upper middle class white 25 year olds LARPing as “anarchists” / “communists.” They have no life experience and their ideas are shitty.
I totally agree. These are my age peers and I find, frankly, that many of them don’t even live in the communities where they fight tooth and nail to defend menacing individuals
I lived in the George Floyd riot neighborhood for about 6 years and got to see thousands of people who never lived there cheer for it to be burned down. Its arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis, so of course the progs wanted it destroyed.
Some of my East Coast relatives have a hard time believing what happens in West Coast cities. Some of them shake their heads and say something about people watching too much Fox News, but it really is that crazy.
I tell them about how this summer in Seattle a guy attacked a tent in a homeless encampment with IEDs. The encampment caught fire It was near a hospital (with the only level 1 trauma center for like four states), the roof of one of the hosptial's parking garages briefly caught fire. It was also near a major highway. They have a suspect and they think he did it because of a dispute over 80k in fentanyl money but they haven't caught him yet. The man deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison but there are plenty of people in the city who think that wouldn't be solving the "real problem". I'm not sure how you get to the point where attacking people with IEDs is not the real problem, but that's how much of a shit show the West Coast is.
The worst part is that Seattle isn't nearly as crazy as Portland or San Francisco.
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, etc. are not "shit shows." Baltimore and Philly are shit shows. St. Louis has almost four times as many murders per capita as the most violent West Coast city.
I live in SF and it's not crazy at all where I live-which leads me to suspect that, as in SF, the "crazy Hellscape" in LA, Portland, and Seattle is limited to a few, fairly small neighborhoods. If you live in one of those neighborhoods you are probably greatly affected, but for the rest of the population things are not very different than they were 10 years ago.
All the West Coast cities, except for Oakland, are among the least violent big cities in the US. SD, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are not even in the top 20 by per capita murder rate. There are definitely serious problems with public disorder and property crime, but, compared with most other cities, "shit show" seems like a Hannity/Carlson meme.
Least violent because people won’t/don’t bother reporting crimes?
You can’t fucking park a car anywhere in Portland, Seattle or San Francisco without the glass getting smashed.
In Seattle, a comment like this would be someone’s cue to helpfully remind you that “the real problem is car culture.”
Ooh, and the expectation that the city will provide safe car storage space. So really cars deserve to be broken into.
The real problem is owning things.
You will own nothing, and be happy!
And you WILL eat ze bugs!
Auto burglary is a problem- but it is considered a property crime, not a violent crime. As everyone knows, a lot of property crime goes unreported. Violent crime usually IS reported, and homicide is virtually always reported-it is the hardest metric we have for violent crime. Murder rates are thus the best way to compare cities in terms of risk of violent crime, and almost all West Coast cities score well in this comparison.
I live in SF. I drive all over the city and know where to park and have not had a break-in in 20 years. Break-ins occur in very predictable locations and target almost exclusively tourist vehicles.
Even if it's not classified as violent crime, this is still the kind of thing that's going to negatively affect the overall quality of life. Do you really think it's normal to have to live two decades somewhere to be able to know where to go safely? In the episode Jesse expressed skepticism about the idea of no-go zones in some European cities, but don't you think this is what you are describing?
What I'm saying is there is something in between "Blood-soaked Seattle!/Dumpster Fire San Francisco!" and "everything is normal, it's all Fox News propaganda"
West Coast cities have a lot of property crime and a lot of highly visible disorder and misery in certain public spaces. High levels of homelessness, open-air drug markets, fentanyl deaths in the streets, etc. That is all real.
Most residents of these cities are still safer than most residents of high violent crime rate cities. And- the high murder rate cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Philly, etc.) ALSO have the highest rates of fentanyl deaths, etc. So "shit show" is not mainly a coastal phenomenon, or one mainly caused by "loony progressive DA's" (though they're probably not helping). "Shit shows" are mainly caused by poverty and inequality, not by politics.
This is a question of stocks versus flows. While, objectively, Seattle (and I assume Portland/SF/etc) is not dangerous relative to the country as a whole, it has experienced in the last three years a near doubling in the number of homicides from its 2019 levels. The number for 2023 is projected to be even higher, and we're on track to be as dangerous as we were in the early 90's during the tail end of the US crime wave. We've wiped out 20 years of progress, and people feel that
According to The Seattle Times, the homicide rate in the first 6 months of 2023 in Seattle increased 7% c/w 2022: about the same as Richmond, VA. In the same period, they rose 28% in Memphis, fell 28% in Norfolk, VA, etc. etc. These are local fluctuations. Perhaps something unusual IS happening in Seattle. (??). The big picture is still of a relatively non-violent (by US standards) city. Seattle is still not even in the top 50 cities for homicide rate- it wasn't in 1994 and it isn't now.
Yet the Daily Mail headline last month was "Blood- Soaked Seattle...!", which they tie directly to "defund the police" policies. I'm against Defund policies- but it's very unlikely they explain differences in murder rates between US cities.
Yes, yearly changes are not particularly insightful. But Seattle has gone from ~3 homicides per 100K in 2010, to 4.3 homicides per 100K in 2019, to 7.4 homicides per 100K in 2022, and it is on track to be even higher this year, as mentioned. You're right that this doesn't even place it in the top 20 most dangerous cities in the nation. But when compared to a city like New York, which returned to its 2019 homicide rate in 2022, this is a serious public policy failure.
I give approximately zero credence to the Daily Mail and I find it annoying when national/international papers parachute into a local news story, often without the necessary context. But as a resident, the problem is not getting better, and I'm not surprised that outside parties would want to report on it. And I do believe the fault, in large part lies with the city government, which was (until recently) cutting back on both funding for police officers and weakening their ability to maintain public safety through changes in the law.
The rise in homicide rates in Seattle is a fact. I just don't think we can conclude the the cause of that rise is "public policy failure"- at least not on a city level.
It's likely that public policy around crime as such, at least at the local level (who is mayor, who is DA, Police Commission oversight, PD staffing levels, etc.), has minimal impact on homicide rates.
What does impact homicide rates? The density of teenage and young adult males in a given locality, particularly if rates of unemployment are high in that population. Why do Seattle, Portland, SF, LA and SD have relatively low homicide rates? Because those cities don't have nearly as many unemployed young adult males hanging around as do Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, etc.
Crime-wave propaganda is among the most effective right-wing propaganda out there (it activates racism among soft racists while also making non-racist normies squeamish), so it makes sense that we're seeing a lot of it whether the facts support it or not. In right-wing world, we are always living in the burning Bronx of the 1970s.
All of those situations are shit shows, they're just different types of shit shows.
I don't know about Baltimore, but in Philadelphia, the murder rate varies a lot by neighborhood. There are a lot of murders in Kensington and parts of North Philadelphia, but there aren't very many murders in East Falls, Manayunk, Mt Airy or Chestnut Hill; the murders are happening in poor neighborhoods and the rich neighborhoods don't have many murders. Needless to say, Philly and Baltimore need to tackle their gun violence problems so their residents stop getting murdered.
The disorder in West Coast cities is a big deal for a lot of poeple. I did not appreciate it when a homeless guy set a fire right in front of my building. And it is a big problem when public spaces can't be used because they're occupied by homeless people and trash or because people are behaving in a dangerous way or smoking fentanyl. It's also a big deal when people won't go downtown because they're worried about their safety or they have to walk in the streets because the sidewalks are blocked with tents.
Interestingly, Portland's black homicide rate was about 100 per 100,000 while Philly's was about 65. Portland is also significantly wealthier than Philly, which makes this even worse given that murders tend to be something that happens in poor neighborhoods.
Yeah, it really has to be emphasized that this stuff about San Francisco is just... total conservative fantasy nonsense? Like my parents live there and it is completely fine, no chaos, no rampant disorder. It's not perfect; there's crime, etc., like any city. But it's pretty damn good. I take the bus all the time when I'm back there and have never felt unsafe about doing so. It's a normal city full of normal people.
Interesting. Other commenters are discussing things like homicide and burglary, but what do you make of stories like this one stating that "According to the [National Retail Federation], San Francisco and Oakland ranked #2 in the list of top areas affected by Organized Retail Crime."
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-retail-theft-sf-walgreens-shoplifters-geary-boulevard-17th-avenue/13520154/
Does that strike you as normal?
Well the first thing that strikes me is that the NRF is a right-wing lobbying front group for businesses that I regularly litigate against when it comes to things like union-busting, so hearing them say something doesn't take their claims out of the realm of "conservative fantasy nonsense." If anything, it reinforces the association.
That being said, there does seem to be some retail theft increase since the pandemic. I put this down to the fact that San Francisco, like a number of cities, has faced what amounts to an undeclared work stoppage since 2020 from police who are salty and pissed off about being held accountable for their rampant violence against civilians. I would like to see someone do something about that, ideally involving getting rid of a lot of the current fascist police force and replacing them with smarter, more civically minded individuals. Yglesias's idea of "police for America" seems like a good one.
Do you have a preferred resource for retail crime statistics that substantially contradicts the quote above? A quick search of PPIC and Chamber of Commerce reports seem at least consistent with the claim above by NRF.
If being presented with contrary evidence reinforces your previous assumption as you say, it probably won't be productive to discuss this topic further (not to mention that you believe the SFPD is 'fascist'), though fwiw I will look at resources if you were to link or list them for my own information.
Living in Seattle radicalized me. What is the point of earning a bunch of money if you're going to get assaulted by junkies and have people pissing in your front yard? What is the point of paying taxes when they will be squandered on people who make the city worse? At some point you're just enabling this system that generates human misery.
Precisely. I have worked to earn the amount of money I make so that I can live comfortably and safely. Not so the cultural contract can fray year by year and leave me, say, huffing someone else’s fentanyl fumes if I dare take the bus.
Seattle’s craziness has bled into even Bellevue recently, we’ve had a number of shootings. Twice in the past two years we’ve had a park near my house used as an impromptu shooting range in the middle of the night.
Our cops are well funded and more likely to catch criminals than most other cities around here, but all felonies are prosecuted at the county level, and Leesa Manion is just continuing the work of her old boss, Dan Satterburg.
If they’re mentally ill and violent, I’d prefer they receive forced inpatient treatment. They likely need to be medicated or even sedated.
Involuntary commitment, in our civil rights optional era, is not necessarily the solution you think it is.
I'm definitely opposed to involuntary treatment for people with addiction who aren't committing crimes against people or property. Once they do commit those kinds of crimes though, separation from society is justified and reasonable. I'd much prefer a treatment setting to a jail/prison setting for most prisoners.
The problem I foresee is that commitment will be weaponized against people that aren't this.
That is a very reasonable concern! It's one reason why I'm opposed to involuntary treatment in general, but I'd rather a person with addiction who has committed a crime against another be placed in a supportive mental health setting rather than what we've allowed our jails and prisons to become.
“A senior Hamas official yesterday called for the 'annihilation' of Israel and promised to repeat the horrific attacks of October 7 'again and again'. 'Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country,' said the terrorist group's former Foreign Minister Ghazi Hamad”
Yeah, for sure it won’t make Israelis safe by doing everything to strangle Hamas. No problem with more murder, rape and kidnapping toddlers.
I mean Jesse seems clueless on this issue.
Jesse has been an extreme disappointment.
I think.people forget that Katie and Jesse are leftists at heart, yet on a long, slow journey away from the excesses of leftism that started manifesting about 2017.
Katie is further along on the journey than Jesse. Katie getting dramatically cancelled by that alternative newspaper and the Seattle LGBT community likely accounts for the difference. It's one thing to argue with randos on Twitter. It's quite another to be ostracized by real-life friends. Katie seems to be still be hurt and I don't blame her.
For all we know, Jesse may never get there, wherever we think "there" is. When I keep this journey in perspective, my disappointment in Jesse is lessened.
Just on the subject of treatment with Suboxone (I am an Addiction Medicine Provider, this is what I do for a living every day) I think to some degree your comments on Suboxone are confused with Methadone. You don’t have to come to the clinic at a certain time to get it. Getting Suboxone is a lot like having an appointment at your Primary Care clinic. Initially, yes, until you are induced (that is you get “over” from a full opiate agonist like Fentanyl or Heroin on the Suboxone which is tricky for biochemical reasons I won’t get into here) on to the Suboxone, you might have frequent appointments, like every 2 or 3 days, and get your 2 or 3 days of medication at the pharmacy to take home. But that is the first maybe 2 weeks. And you make those appointments like you would any other clinic appointments, when you can get on the schedule that is convenient for you and as they are available. Methadone is the thing where you show up every morning super early (typically) to get your dose. Once you are induced on Suboxone, you typically for a while, have a weekly appointment and go to the pharmacy and get your Suboxone to take home. Then it goes out to 2 weeks if all is going well. Then probably a month if you remain stable and it is all going okay. Addiction is a bio-psychosocial disease and also requires other facets of care which need to be in place too. So medication alone doesn’t do the trick typically. But it is hard to get off opiates without it. As to the whole “if people don’t want to get clean you can’t make them…” thing. I have found that often people think that they don’t want to get clean, and then once they are forced to and they are out of that fog for a few weeks and realize how much better they feel physically and mentally, and they are on a good dose of Suboxone and the cravings are controlled and they are not sleeping on the streets and having withdrawals and living in fear of assault or arrest and having to do sex work etc…. They are really happy to be clean. They realize it was a delusion that they didn’t want to be clean. So you are doing them a favor forcing them to see what being clean looks like. Because often they have completely forgotten. This can be a tough population to work with. They are not always the most sympathetic population. But nobody at age 5 says “Oh, I know what I want to be when I grow up, an Opiate Addict!”. As Jesse would say, “It’s complicated”. And since treatment is really the only way to both restore their lives and get them back to making a positive contribution to society, and protect us from the negative consequences of addiction, I think coercing them into treatment if they won’t go is often necessary.
Thanks for sharing this perspective, it’s really helpful to hear from someone who works in the field!
As an addiction physician, this is exactly what I was going to say.
Methadone, which is a stronger opioid and which stays in your system a long time, is dispensed through methadone clinics (Opioid Treatment Programs). Methadone prescribed for pain can be done with a regular pharmacy, but methadone prescribed for addiction has to be through one of these clinics, and patients generally have to show up every day and follow a strict program, including regular drug testing.
Suboxone, which is a weaker opioid and which doesn’t stay in your system as long (so it is usually taken multiple times per day) is prescribed by physicians and distributed through pharmacies. It used to be that physicians had to have a special extra license called an X-waiver to prescribe it, but the law was changed this year so any physician with a DEA number can prescribe Suboxone. Suboxone is still tough to get, a lot of insurance hangups, many pharmacies don’t carry it, and so on.
So yes, addiction medicine has more barriers than other types of medicine. It’s still easier to prescribe an oxycodone for pain than it is to prescribe medication for addiction.
The true madness is its also easier to prescribe Methadone for pain than for OUD treatment.
I don't know about madness. The OTPs do force people into a certain amount of structure, and that can be good in addiction. Methadone is also a tricky drug that I don't like to prescribe. But in general, I also don't like any sort of government regulation of my practice. That's why I went to med school: so I could make medical decisions.
My walls of text have alread eaten up too much of this thread but your comment reminded me of something. I need to actually do a full Substack post on the potentially disturbing reasons for the Obama administration changing its policy on oxy in September 2013 and getting the DEA to shut down the pill mills, which the government’s own researchers warned would start a heroin epidemic.
Which, of course, it did, but no one imagined just how big a nightmare this would become once fentanyl got thrown into the mix.
Question becomes of course, if you knew shutting off the oxy spigot would cause millions of people to switch to more readily available heroin, thereby increasing their chances of death (10x as it turns out), why shut down the pill mills in the first place?
It’s an excellent question.
Facebook is not a safe space to say this, so I will say it here:
What the fuck was Hamas thinking? What did they think the outcome was going to be?
The blood of all dead Palestinian kids is on their hands. I know so-called "honor culture" is disparaged in modern American society, but what Hamas did was an insult that had to be repaid with blood, and they had to have known this going in.
There was no universe where October 8th wasn't going to see massive, massive payback from a smart, organized, very well armed, and very angry nation who could push them right into the sea if it wanted to.
Hamas wants this to happen. This is literally their strategy - they want as many dead Gazans as possible so they can be used as propaganda to break up the Arab states’ attempts to normalize relations with Israel, get the UN to put even more pressure on Israel, and draw in Hezbollah and maybe the other Arab states into the war against Israel. This is why they store weapons in mosques and build headquarters under hospitals. They know the Israelis must strike at them, and in striking at them, dead civilians are inevitable.
Hamas considers Gazan civilians killed by (or blamed on) the IDF a good thing. Remember this, and their actions make much more sense.
Yup. Hamas’ main strategic goal at the moment, and I’m not exaggerating here, is to maximize the number and perceived number of civilian casualties. That means making sure civilians stay over the tunnels, to the point of (allegedly) having snipers shoot people if they try to leave, it means falsifying death reports, etc, etc. Beyond even preparing for the ground offensive, they need the civilian death toll to get the people in the surrounding countries to view Israel as genocidal and make it so opportunistic nihilists like Erdogan can deflect attention away from their own schemes.
The actual ruling monarchies of the local Arab states want Hamas blasted with a low orbital ion cannon because they’re a nuisance but they use the “Palestinian Cause” as a political football to control their populace. Sisi would be ecstatic to get rid of Hamas once and for all, but will he actually help Israel get rid of them? Of course not, that would require effort.
`Yup. Hamas’ main strategic goal at the moment, and I’m not exaggerating here, is to maximize the number and perceived number of civilian casualties. That means making sure civilians stay over the tunnels, to the point of (allegedly) having snipers shoot people if they try to leave, it means falsifying death reports, etc, etc.'
Not sure how you possibly know their strategic goals.
Israel will take care of civilian casualties, Hamas does not need to try to affect them.
People aren't leaving because they don't trust that Israel will allow them back to their home (or now rubble). Israel does have a bit of a reputation for doing this.
The Gaza Health Ministry has provided accurate numbers in the past and there's been some preliminary reporting that suggests current numbers aren't being forged.
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/31/gaza-death-palestine-health-ministry/
Unless Hamas is catastrophically stupid, that has to be their main strategic goal. If you think Hamas cares about civilian deaths, I’ve got some beachfront property on the Moon to sell you. One of their mottos is “We love death more than you love life” and they mean it. If there’s one type of people you should believe at their word, it’s Jihadists.
Take a step back. What is Hamas’ long term strategic goal? Well, just read their charter, it’s via death or expulsion (preferably death) the removal of all Jews from what the British called Mandatory Palestine. Now, this is an insane goal of course, and they’ll never achieve it, but that’s what they say they want and I believe them.
Israel has a modern army and nukes, so, how does a group whose expertise lies in lunacy, digging tunnels, and shooting rockets randomly into towns defeat a modern army? Well, they don’t, because they can’t. But what they can do is make it so to defeat them, it requires killing a staggering amount of civilians. Hamas knows most of the UN hates Israel (it’d take another essay to explain, via human nature via humiliation and insecurity why) and especially the Islamic countries just look for any excuse to go after Israel.
Ramp up the civilian death toll, get more countries to pressure Israel, finally get the US to get Israel to stop, and you ‘Win’, your beloved tunnels and Caliphate of the Moles is safe and you can go back to randomly firing rockets.
Hamas teaches children from grade school to glory in the deaths of martyrs, to want to be martyrs, everything is about the glorification of death. It’s a deliberate strategy to maximize death to make it impossible for Israel to defeat them due to international backlash. If Hamas’ just fought like a normal militant group, even a normal Jihadist group, Israel would’ve destroyed them 15 years ago. However, when no only do you not care about your own civilians dying, but you actually want more of them to die, it opens up previously unherd of tactics in warfare, tactics that wouldn’t work if their was no international community that hated Israel.
Hamas’ existence depends on using Palestinians as human shields. Without that grisly tactic, they’d instantly be obliterated.
What that they may not have expected is that, to a certain extent, we are past caring about 'international pressure'. I just came back from a Shabbat lunch where my fellow guests--formerly super liberal, peace and love, co-existence, left wing types--were literally quoting Ben Shapiro. (I'm going to listen to his speech from Cambridge now; they recommended it).
We realize that this isn't another limited engagement; this is a war for survival. If the way to survive is to fight Hamas on it's turf, with that associated cost, then that's how it's going to go down.
Speaking as an ordinary citizen, and not as a military expert, of course.
That Oxford student who said that the UK didn't bomb civilians in Germany during WW II! The audience *laughed* at her -- and they were mostly on her side in terms of supporting Hamas.
> were literally quoting Ben Shapiro
People say I get all my talking points from Ben Shapiro. That's not true, and I'm going to tell you why. But first, let me tell you about ExpressVPN.
Thanks for telling me about the Ben Shapiro event at Cambridge.
I've never listened to a large chunk of him before. Clearly very smart and right on some things, wrong on others. But his defense of Western ideals was fiyah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtX1-OBeEQU
Provoking a response was the strategy. They want to kill Jews, they want a war and the response will cause even more terrible suffering in Gaza and more destitute young men with no future will chose religious extremism and join Hamas. Every death in Gaza is a win for them.
Hamas doesn't view the safety of the Gaza population as their responsibility, one of their spokespersons said so in a recent interview. They have put the screws on the people there, terrorising them, extracting money from them, diverting humanitarian aid, brainwashing their children in their despicable death cult. Even if they didn't count on being as "successful" as they were on 10/7, they new there would be some retaliation, as it always happens. And when that happens, they were counting on the killing of Palestinian. To them, the more Palestinian civilians dead the better, because they know the horror of it will push public opinions in Western countries to call for a ceasefire before Hama's military capability degrades too much. After that, they would just have to regroup for a while, and be ready to do another attack.
I was listening to Sam Harris's interview with Graeme Wood, and he believes it's quite likely that Hamas are basically the dog that caught the car. They had not been planning for the operation to be as successful as it was and, given the lack of direct command Hamas has over their own combatants let alone affiliated jihadist groups, the violence and bloodshed basically spiralled well beyond their ability to control. Grame believes that Hamas likely can't even account for all of the hostages, because many of them were captured by other groups. Not to say they have any moral problem with how this played out, but it does seem possible this did not align with the strategic objectives of Hamas leadership
There were written instructions in Arabic to do all tne depraved crap that these barbarians did.
Please be aware that it’s a war crime to use hospitals as military command and control centers. Which Hamas has done for years. And to use ambulances as personal vehicles to escape in a war (Hamas fighters) and to use parking lots next to schools as missile launching pads.
Hamas is the architect of Gazas problems. Steals resources and aid continuously.
My current neighborhood and past one had a similar situation - frequent violent fliers and people too up their own asses to recognize that these folks had been offered endless resources (and frankly, completely evaded and consequences).
One of these people finally escalated this month and was released twice for harassment before attempting to kidnap someone. And I’m pissed it had to go this far and I’m unfortunately sure he’ll be out again. An attack on multiple people, including a baby and an elderly person, in broad daylight in a nice neighborhood.
And I’m tired of being told by white liberals that it’s racist that I want to feel safe. I’m sure there are POC saying this stuff too but I live in Missouri.
Blink: Hey there from Northeastern Missouri!
Keep posting, please! I always look forward to what you have to say!
What's the demographics of your neighborhood?
Over half white by just a bit, 1/5 black, like 1/8 asian, trends pretty high income relative to the rest of the city. Most of the white population is home owning and a few of the local HOAs have contacted a private police force.
My old neighborhood was almost entirely Black (and me) with a very loud neighborhood association that was mostly white
Jesse. Israel basically built Iron Dome as a purely defensive system against Hamas and Islamic jihad. They allowed Gazan workers into Israel to work to boost the Gazan economy. (Yep those guys mapped out cities and kibbutzim for October 7). So what happened? Israel naively slept while the depraved Hamas savages did October 7.
So Israelis don’t care about anything but removing Hamas. Your armchair sighs are a bit annoying.
During the summer of 2020, a progressive bakery had a sign that said if you were mugged by the Black man, don’t call the police. Save a Black man’s life.
All I could think of was the next old woman who falls as a result of the next mugging and that ends were life as an independent person.
I’m sure the bakery would offer her reparations.
Jesse, if you see this comment, I recommend that you read Locked In by John Pfaff. This book provides a corrective to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Pfaff shows that “mass incarceration” is largely driven by violent offenders filling up state prisons rather than federal drug prisoners. The progressive prosecutor movement (of which Pfaff is an advocate), is underpinned by the explicit philosophy that more VIOLENT offenders must be released from prison earlier (or be diverted from prison) in order to meaningfully reduce the number of people incarcerated to end so-called “mass incarceration” in the United States.
Legalizing recreational cannabis and other forms of drug possession, expunging people’s records for drug possession, and decriminalizing theft under $1000 accompanied this as low hanging fruit, but low-level nonviolent offenders are not the primary focus of progressive prosecutors. They want to reduce the number of people who are behind bars. Period. They understand that we must dramatically reduce prison sentences for people who are often repeat violent/gun offenders in order to meaningfully reduce the prison population. This was a more popular position when the violent crime rate in this country was at all time low in the 20-teens, now it’s a tougher sell, but it’s still the objective they are just quieter about it.
Then, just because somebody is incarcerated on a nonviolent drug offense for their third strike, it doesn’t mean they committed only nonviolent offenses because people plea down! That guy who is saying he was locked up for 30 years because he ONLY had some cocaine on him might have also robbed someone with a gun while also being in possession of cocaine, but drug possession is the offense that he pled guilty to. I’m not saying crooked cops have never overcharged anyone and that prosecutors didn’t collude with them, but barely anybody is serving out a prison sentence for the most serious crime they were arrested for & convicted of, since almost everyone pleas down.
Also unpopular opinion, but broken windows policing works. We saw a downturn in crime, then it got removed (along with several other soft on crime measures) and now we see an increase in criminality. Maybe in an ideal world we could have the best of both, but I'm not seeing it in reality.
I agree that broken windows style policing works, but it creates the externality of higher rates of incarceration. 3 strikes "worked" too, since a lot of violent offenders (who in today's legal climate would be released in under 5 years) were locked up as teenagers and 20somethings for decades, resulting in them *actually* being too old to participate in crime when they were released. Violent crime rates plummeted from the late-1990s until about 2015 and have been increasing in most US cities ever since, with a big spike during covid. There's little appetite for returning to enhanced sentences for gun crimes because it's viewed as too inhumane and/or too expensive to lock people up and throw away the key. Then, police simply don't have the resources to return to broken windows or stop and frisk even if the community sanctioned this. Big city police departments are down hundreds of officers and they have huge backlogs of homicide cases, while new shootings occur weekly that divert all their attention from quality of life issues.
Plus, now major metro police departments have to divert resources to managing thousands of migrants that have been dropped off at their doorstops. They've had migrants sleeping in police stations in Chicago for months!
Incarceration rates have been falling as a result, from a peak in 2008 of about 1.6 million to 1.2 million today. There's no way in hell that progressives will let prison populations increase back to those rates, and conservatives are reluctant to pay for this, too.
The caveat I'll add to this dire prognostication is that we don't *need* to return to the height of mass incarceration to dramatically reduce murder and assault rates. Fewer than 20,000 people are murdered with a firearm annually. Some proportion of these homicides are committed by the same people. If every single person who committed homicide was apprehended and locked up, the prison population would not return to previous heights but communities would be exponentially safer. Instead, we're clearing less than half of murders nationally, much less in some cities with large backlogs.
A 15-year-old who fires his gun at a crowd in a drive-by, whether or not he kills someone, deserves to have his life ruined for decades. He will almost certainly not become a productive member of society, and the rest of society would certainly be much better off without his presence. Life isn't fair, he wouldn't have done it if he grew up in a better spot, but he didn't, and he's the one who has to pay the price, along with his victims. We have such a high rate of incarceration in this country because we have so many criminals.
That's a good point. Westerners don't have an appetite for effective but cheap punishments. But I do think we could issue fines at least? And if that's not paid force them to do community service? Like there has to be something. Anyway, I hear Florida is doing great with crime so whatever they are doing there seems to be a good model to emulate. Their budget is doing well do.
And yeah, don't even get me started on the migrants.
The inevitable problem that defenders of mass incarceration run into is that it is globally aberrant. Other developed countries do not punish crimes (violent or nonviolent in nature) to nearly the same degree that the US does, yet they generally score better on metrics of social stability. Three-strikes laws are a popular and justified target here because they impose willfully (indeed, by design) disproportionate sentences on people, but they're the tip of the iceberg when it comes to excessive sentencing.
To the extent that people are unable or unwilling to come to grips with that fact, it indicates to me that they are either not serious about the issue or have bad motives.
The US is a bigger more diverse country with a more independent culture, a history of being colonists by non-conformists, and way too many weapons. Along with an entrenched group of underclass enclaves with cultures of violence.
The US isn't like Europe or Japan because it isn't like them. If you had combined all the western European countries into a super state in 1970 the rate of violence would be higher there too (though not so high as here).
You are getting the causation backwards, the US doesn't have high crime due to high incarceration, it is the reverse. Higher incarceration is attractive because antisocial people/behaviors are so common.
There is also just generally a much lower sense of community here, something that is getting worse not better. Almost everyone can think of reasons their murderer son/neighbors doesn't need a giant sentence, mitigating factors. But the farther you get socially the less people are interested in excuses, and the US is a culture where most people are very far apart socially. Its not like fucking Denmark, like at all.
I would ask what data you were relying on here, but in this case I actually know you cannot possibly have data to back your intuitions because I am well aware of the limitations of the data that exist in this area, particularly when it comes to nonviolent property crime (which the US punishes by aberrantly long prison terms). There is no data from which you could conclude that the US has a particularly high baseline crime rate, and certainly not one that could explain more than a fraction of its ridiculously large incarceration rate.
Now, there IS data from which you could conclude that the US has a particularly high MURDER rate, but that boils down to basically just the guns thing, and could easily be solved by Australian-style confiscation except that this is a democracy and the demos (or at least the controlling faction thereof; I think there's actually a lot of soft opposition to gun culture but the gun nuts are much better organized and much more disciplined in voting) prefers continued ridiculous murder rates to giving up their guns. Fair enough, I guess; there's no democratic solution to the problem of "the demos has shitty opinions." But it doesn't drive mass incarceration rates because even here, murders are quite a small percentage of total crime.
Don't you love comments that begin with "I love you guys but" -- so here goes. I love you guys but. No it isn't cancel culture to fire someone who blames Israel for the attack by Hamas. That is such a gross distortion of reality it is actually the "harm" that so many on the left claimed they were experiencing. This is some sick cosmic joke that we are in a place where we can't tell the difference and I fear that is how bad things happen in history - people lose perspective from too many boys who cried wolf. At any rate, I would not want someone working for me who thought Manson's murder of Sharon Tate was justified. I would not want someone working for me who said that the Columbine shooting was justified.
Cancel culture was dangerous not so much because people were losing their jobs but because of its vast institutional support that led all the way up to the POTUS. A line from the blue-checks on twitter (RIP, thank you Elon) all the way up to government saying what people could and couldn't say, what people could and couldn't think.
Maybe under Conservatives we would get there again vis a vis Israel - looks like Nikki Haley wants to do just that but at the moment people, especially Jewish people, are well within their rights to protect themselves and their business from fanatic cult members who have been radicalized online.
We HAVE to be able to tell the difference.
"It's not cancel culture to fire someone for their ideas if their ideas are, in fact, bad" is not the revolutionary free speech take you seem to think it is.
I spent a good two minutes while Katie was talking thinking “wow, is she like, *really* stoned? Is she code-switching to the North Carolina accent? Why is she talking so slow?” … I had accidentally turned the listening speed on to x.75
I don't really have the emotional energy to fill this thought out, but it is a strange bit of cognitive dissonance for Jesse that he thinks both a) sometimes involuntary detention, whether inpatient treatment or incarceration, is necessary for the safety of the community; and b) "how could Israel possibly be made safer by destroying Hamas?"
Katie is right: antisocial behavior will always exist, and sometimes people will be unreasonable and unwell. When it's a single person threatening others with shoves or knives, you can put them behind bars; when it's 20,000 people with rockets and machine guns and mortars, you have to do a little more than that.
To Katie’s point about how difficult it is for opioid addicts to get treatment. I’m a licensed clinical social worker in the state of Va. I worked as the chief clinical officer for a medium sized opioid treatment center. It is not by any means difficult to get on opioid replacement therapy. There are multiple treatment centers in all US cities. Admission criteria is very simple for clients seeking service and you can self report the admissions criteria which basically means if you show up they will treat you. Yes you cannot get it RX’d by your PCP in most cases but to say that it is difficult to get RX’d methadone or buprenorphine is not true. Additionally in my state Medicaid now pays for opioid treatment therapy! Love the show and think the world of K&J. Thank you for all you do.
I can think of a number of examples in which real-world issues conflict with, or at least complicate, leftist cultural and political analysis. The fact that "anti-asian hate" is often centered in the black rather than white population. The fact that not every kid who gets irrevocable gender treatments is well-assessed, or really "knows themself." The fact that making it known you won't be prosecuted for retail theft tends to encourage retail theft. Etc. It is WILD to me how often leftists respond to these situations like some people on the Greenpoint subreddit apparent did: by acting as though the only appropriate response is to IGNORE IT AND HOPE IT GOES AWAY. When did so many on the left become so childish?
I don't know when it happened but as a lefty, I find it completely demoralizing. Supporting a death cult like Hamas does not reflect left values to me, at least not mine. Denying material reality and promulgating ahistoricity are also not left values to me.
But isn’t denying material reality the trans ideology also ?
Yes it is, and to me, that's not left. Or maybe, as John McWhorter elucidates in Woke Racism, its cultural leftism as opposed to material leftism. I have yet to read Woke is not Left by Susan Neiman but I have heard her speak and I suspect I will agree with her 100%.
I’m center left. Want reproductive rights. Hate trans ideology. Believe in capitalism with constraints. I don’t understand the far progressive left allied with utter regressive groups like Hamas.
I’m about as far left as it gets and the trans activism, anti-racism, and friends have completely lost me.
I mean…you’re either racist or anti-racist and the only way to be anti-racist is to actively discriminate based on race….ummm what????
I even thought of myself as progressive. Decriminalize drug use. Marriage equality. Decriminalize prostitution.
As someone who leans towards "individual liberty is paramount" I've often been surprised to find out how little some advocates for drug policy reform, marriage equality, and sex work policy reform care about liberty. Some are in it for an all-purpose preference for the underdog, some are in it to undermine bourgeois norms, and some just think that you should be allowed to smoke weed and sell sex in the dystopian totalitarian nightmare world they want to create.