hezbollah has no democratic legitimacy and should not be ruling at all, let alone by force.
if you stand with democracy in lebanon, you stand against hezbollah, and it's a serious issue that needs serious addressing.
Sunday, July 28, 2024
the lebanese army is essentially failing to protect the people against hezbollah. lebanon is very much a failed state.
israel could present itself as filling that vacuum left open, and seek to generate political support to do what the lebanese army won't. a lasting political union between the two canaanite groups, the israeli jews and the lebanese christians, could benefit both parties.
but, the lebanese have to make that choice.
how likely is it that you could get the christians in lebanon to build an alliance with israel to push out hezbollah?
the problem in lebanon, as i understand it, is fear. the christians in lebanon are deeply fearful of the muslims, and essentially willing to do what they're told to avoid sharia law. this is a horrific situation and not something that should be tolerated by the west, but trying to get the christians to choose to fight over submission is a historical problem that goes back centuries. unlike muslims and jews, christians legitimately don't like to fight.
however, there is a natural alliance between the maronites and the israelis and it could lead to a lasting peace if you could convince the lebanese of it's utility. as the issue is fear, the israelis should propose to protect the maronites (and the druze and sunnis) from the shi'ite muslims, in exchange for collaboration.
if israel can present the idea effectively, this is an opportunity to win their freedom that the christians in lebanon might not see again for a long time. they should choose to align on the right side of history and rise up and take control of their own destiny, with help from israel and, hopefully, a nato willing to pull it's head out of it's ass and make a correct choice for once.
the other option is going to be catastrophic for everybody in the region, and there's no other clear way to avoid it.
israel has reversed and is changing policies it brought in about 20 years ago and going back to policies it had before that, which means a more aggressive occupation zone surrounding israel in order to better protect it's borders. the first phase was a re-occupation of gaza that is unlikely to end in the near future, and should not end in the near future; the fundamental condition for the occupation to end is that the international community needs to find a way to deradicalize the population in gaza via aggressive education initiatives, which the united nations needs to be doing the day-to-day work on from a legitimately neutral perspective, and not be acting as "free palestine" proxies in regards to. morally speaking, israel cannot be expected to withdraw, otherwise. this is going to be a diplomatic fight that could take a generation to enforce.
gaza cannot be a country and the idea that it can is retarded. it should be annexed by egypt when the conditions allow for it, which could be 50 years from now. for the foreseeable future, it will need to be occupied by israel to prevent further violence.
if they don't like that, they should have thought about it before they carried out the october 7th attack. the consequences need to be deep, longlasting and real to creative a disincentive for further attacks. in the short term, they will need to get used to occupation, and they will need to find a way to change who they are as a culture and as a people if they want to end it. this has to be the end of this barbaric terrorist bullshit; there can be no further tolerance of it.
and, no, gaza is not like afghanistan. the comparison is moronic. afghanistan is a mountainous region with a gigantic surface area that, if laid out flat, would be one of the biggest countries in the world. gaza is an enclosed space that is smaller than most cities. the tunnels will slow the process down, but they have a finite number of exit points that can be mapped and controlled with enough effort. it's a challenge that is surmountable. the challenges present in afghanistan mostly don't exist at all in gaza and to the extent that they do, the comparison requires the acknowledgement of a substantive difference of scale. israel should be able to get hamas under control and pacify gaza at least as well as it has in the west bank.
a policy change is also in process in regards to the west bank that will likely lead to annexation, which has been in process for decades. opposition to this process is properly dated to c. 1995. it cannot be reversed at this point, and i frankly don't think it should be. instead, israel should offer full citizenship rights to the existing inhabitants of the west bank and tell them to take it or leave it. jordan and saudi arabia should absorb the remnant population.
the next phase is lebanon.
tersely, there is a river flowing through southern lebanon. under international law, the lebanese state is not supposed to have militias south of the river, but it has ignored this (and hezbollah has especially ignored it). this region was previously occupied by israel; the iranians moved in to the vacuum when israel withdrew, which was not what was supposed to happen. the region was supposed to remain a dmz.
if the un won't enforce the dmz and push the iranians out, the israelis are justified in pushing the iranians out themselves by force and occupying the region and that may be in the process of materializing. this is, however, a dangerous activity by israel, and it may result in an all out war between israel and hezbollah. while israel would be morally and legally justified to carry out this operation, it may be strategically foolish. this is in many ways a judgement call, as they need to do something to push the iranians out, and the united nations is of no utility to israel. nor are the iranians rational actors willing to negotiate in good faith.
it was clearly a mistake to withdraw. that doesn't mean reoccupying is the right thing to do, strategically, even if it is the right thing to do legally and morally.
worse, it is an open question, of which the legalities are less clear, if israel intends to occupy areas north of the river. i have previously argued that israel has a convincing, but convoluted, territorial claim to most if not all of lebanon. i would nonetheless advise against doing that, at least right now, if they intend to push to the river at all.
israel's better option is to seek for a political revolution in lebanon, or perhaps even organize a coup. lebanon is 40-45% christian, and the christian areas are the more urban areas. muslim arabs are invaders to lebanon and largely live in the rural areas; the christians are the indigenous canaanites, a sister people to the hebrew jews. if tel aviv can get hezbollah pushed out of power, it may find a much more friendly government in lebanon that doesn't require attacking and may seek to act jointly to eradicate the terrorist group, perhaps with nato help. they may seek to demilitarize the zone south of the river voluntarily, which is the preferred outcome.
israel has a problem here that it needs to deal with, but it is not invincible and it may be in the process of making a mistake that it should think carefully about. israel will probably defeat hezbollah in the end, but it must seek to avoid a pyrrhic outcome.
israel needs an ally in lebanon if it is to do this with seriousness and with serious likelihood of longlasting victory.
i've pointed out repeatedly that there's a lot of spooks reading this site.
why does trump talk about hannibal lector as though he's an illegal immigrant? i don't know.
i know that i have used hannibal lector as a comical example of why anarchists can't eliminate jails and posted about it for years. anarchists like to argue that crime is economic and communism will make crime obsolete, which is probably mostly true, but that doesn't give us a plan with how to deal with legit nutcases, like hannibal lector.
(i don't want to cite jeffrey dahmer in arguments. it's reductio ad hitlerum. hannibal lets me get the point across with delving into the extremes.)
here is one example:
this isn't exactly trump's stump, but it's oddly close, and i've been using it online since the 00s.
it's curious.
hey, you should fire this bum vance, don coyote.
i'm going to be moving on, but i want to draw attention to a part of the debate.
do you remember when biden started bragging about his golf game, and trump told him he was full of shit? this was a role reversal - biden sounded a lot like trump all of a sudden, and trump was right to tell him he was lying, because he was.
well, sort of.
an open question over the last ten years has been whether it's accurate to call a trump a liar or not, as lying requires a mens rea component, in addition to the actus reus. that is, you can't accidentally tell a lie; in that case, you're just wrong or misinformed. a lie is a special case of being wrong where you know you're wrong and purposefully say something that isn't true, knowing you're wrong, in order to mislead somebody.
so, was biden lying about his golf game?
i want you to consider the possibility that he wasn't, which i suspect is the actual case, and extrapolate that to the problems inherent to the biden presidency, and which are likely going to manifest themselves in the harris campaign, malignantly.
what if they told biden his golf game was better than it is?
what if they told him it was improving when it was actually deteriorating?
the reason they would do that is that they would be rewarded for it, as yes-men and yes-women (the yes-people, and i'm not talking about bill bruford), because biden had an ego, and inflating it came with self-interest. you tell the president what he wants to hear, not what is true, because you get promoted for it.
so, will biden ever learn that his golf game isn't what he believes it is?
it doesn't really matter.
but harris likely needs to address the issue and eliminate a lot of people if she wants to win and if she wants to govern effectively.
it's worth remembering that the people that advised joe biden and continue to advise kamala harris are not public servants hired to govern the country, but political staffers paid to advance a campaign and a candidate. there's been some outcry amongst partisan democrats "why didn't you tell us!?". the answer is obvious enough, and that it is that these are people with mortgages and bills and ending biden's campaign would also mean they would lose their job. that would be like signing up to get fired. it's not in their self-interest. there was a similar issue with liz truss, where they actually caught a number of people behind the scenes talking to each other, where the conversation was something like "she's fucking incompetent, but i need the squid, so fuck it."
a better question to ask is why it is that democratic candidates didn't see this coming. i want you to go back and watch the 2020 debates and tell me with a straight face that he looked capable and competent. he didn't. so, why didn't anybody primary him? the answer is that nobody thought they could win, and they were probably right. still. even after his resignation, biden would still win primaries against virtually anybody running, with the possible exception of bernie sanders.
this is a "it's not me, it's you" type situation, from the perspective of voters. biden won in the first place because the field was horrific. harris ended up as vp because there was nobody else willing to do it. for all the rhetoric about choices from an identity politics marketing perspective, the reality is that the party doesn't have many popular candidates that can win close elections in contested districts, because you could never raise enough money to run, if you actually had popular support. it's a catch-22.
so, the country ends up stuck with the bidens in the spectrum, and keeps voting for them, even after they're senile, and even after they've resigned.
i'm cringing at harris, but they are correct on some level. they need to build grassroots support. but, they're going to do that by focusing on populist economic messaging and presenting a serious candidacy, not on stupid pop culture memes that make her look desperate and half-retarded. presidents should spend the summer getting shitfaced and falling down the stairs. right. and, the actual truth is that this woman is so right-wing, the uk tories would tell her to fuck off and go call nigel farage. she's too conservative for the tories; they'd call her an extremist. you'd think these people could figure that out, but they can't and they're probably never going to.
so, the american people need to figure it out for them and organize on their own. i would advise choosing the green party as the vehicle to do it with.
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