I had great plans to try some eclipse photography today. It was not to be. Up here in the Inland Northwest, we were expecting about 75% of the solar eclipse. Instead, we got 100% cloud cover. Boo! So I'm gonna offer some unpopular opinions about current events instead.
Biden and his challengers are all eager to leap on the bandwagon to support Israel as tensions between that country and Hamas exploded into open war a few days ago. The situation is complex, and to a certain extent, I am unqualified to discuss it, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else, either.
Never mind how the Palestinians are also a Semitic people, any criticism of Israel is immediately framed as anti-Semitic racism if not overt Nazism. To hell with that. No nation-state is beyond critique, and no government should be considered truly representative of the people they rule no matter how "democratic" their system may be. Not even ethnostates selling nationality and ethnicity as being intertwined.
Israel is a de facto apartheid state occupying lands that are not its property and treating the former denizens as second-class citizens for generations. The Gaza Strip is effectively a concentration camp with extra steps. Explanations are not justifications, and I don't intend to offer an apology for terrorism. None of this justifies killing Israeli citizens. They are not co-conspirators sharing some kind of genetic guilt by default. That said, pretending the Palestinians are just mindless savages avoids discussing the deeper problems while sounding sanctimonious.
I would like to step beyond the usual debate and offer a real solution. Republican candidates, if you want to protect Israel, here is how you do it:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
—Article IV, section 3, clause 1, United States Constitution
See? Simple as that. I put on my minarchist dunce cap to meet you half way and offer a plan of action. If Israelis want taxpayer money, they can vote to become taxpayers, too. If they want US military aid, they can join the US and serve in the military themselves. Same for Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea, and anywhere else the US government wants to meddle.
I know this will infuriate a lot of Christians who have dedicated themselves to their own peculiar forms of Zionism. I just challenge you to reexamine the Bible. Our Kingdom is not of this world, and we have a new covenant. None of these wars and governments exhibit the Fruit of the Spirit or the Seven Virtues, and instead embody the Seven Deadly Sins. We serve the Prince of Peace, not Mars. This latest wave of death and destruction is not resolved by taking sides and funding more of the same injustices and abuses which triggered this violent response.
There ya go, and off-the-cuff hot take. Agree? Disagree? Wanna call me names because I don't fall in lockstep with the current thing? Please comment and vote as you see fit.
No eclipse but it did get pretty dark. Your opinion is not unpopular, just not popular with the establishment and the MIC. We should all be on the side of humanity.
I agree. Pointless wars are something that only the political class approves of. Being anti-war is something that unites even anti-racists and white supremists... not even joking, check this out.
We all have children and people we love. Now if we could just come to understand our connection, we might be able to make this planet a rather amazing place to live for just about everyone.
"War is the health of the State" - Randolph Bourne
If they want war let them battle it out, leave all the civilians on both sides out of it.
That's the perversity of modern nationalism and ethnic identity movements, though. It makes people imagine the conflicts of others are somehow also their own. Such distinctions are lost as everyone is considered a belligerent based purely on geography or citizenship.
I don't believe I ever mentioned this on Hive, I've mentioned it elsewhere, and I especially avoid doing so on BitChute for obvious reasons, but I'm Jewish (secular, obviously) and I've had a seething hatred of the Israeli government since long before I became a libertarian, so allow me to provide some additional insight.
Orthodox Jews can explain far better than I can precisely why the very existence of the modern nation of Israel defies not only New Testament prophecy, but Old Testament prophecy as well. The gist is that the land was supposed to be given back to the Jews, not taken by force. The interference of western powers in the affairs of middle eastern nations, dating all the way back to the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, guarantee forever wars in the region. The Ottoman Empire, for all its faults, actually managed to keep the peace.
Second, the Israeli government is only stoking yet more antisemitism. Back in the sixties and seventies, when tensions blew up into the Arab-Israeli Wars (as a reminder, Hamas's latest attack took place on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War), it was yet another proxy conflict between the USA and USSR. The Soviets backed the Arab states not just because the Americans backed Israel, but also because Marxism is inherently anti-Semitic. The Soviet Union, contrary to what neo-Nazis on BitChute will tell you, was not remotely friendly to Jews. It should therefore come as no surprise that the radical left beats the war drums for Hamas and tries to either deny or worse justify their war crimes.
The radical left already tries to deny or justify the Holodomor. I expect to see a rise in Holocaust denial as well for the same reason. "Kulaks bad, therefore they were never massacred, Stalin did nothing wrong" will be replaced with "Jews bad, therefore they were never massacred, Hitler did nothing wrong," mark my words.
BTW, on a totally unrelated note, I found another statist blog to milk for content. On it is an absolutely hilarious strawman of libertarianism. I'll let you take this one, since I'm working on other things at the moment.
Check out the October 8th episode of Part of the Problem
I enjoyed the line "I am American first and Jewish second."
On the same token, I am Russian first, an American citizen second, and Jewish third.
I liked that Dave and Rob mentioned that America is playing both sides. However, it may interest you to know that China is also playing both sides. The current proxy conflict is exponentially more convoluted and insidious than the one during the Cold War. Honestly, the more I learn about the Chinese Communist Party, the more the Soviet Union looks like an ancap paradise and a picture of sanity by comparison... and we all know how I fond I am of Soviet Communism.
But yes, Israel is one of those sacred cows that will have even RFK beating the drums of war. SMH. This is why I generally don't trust anti-war pundits and I never trust anti-war politicians.
I think your hot take regarding US military aid is a little simplistic.
Geopolitics and foreign policy are obviously super complex with trade agreements, intelligence-sharing, etc all part of give-and-take ledger between countries. I think something like 20+ countries sent troops to Afghanistan to help the US in its extremely unpopular war there, with many more countries allowing US military bases to be set up to assist in the logistics of those efforts.
It's all way too complicated for me to understand, but if Republicans find your post and all manage to agree on basing their policy on it then good luck to them.
It doesn't need to be complex. Lots of governments going to war based on messy histories of treaties and agreements gets innocent people killed, creates new animosity, and solves nothing. What happened in Afghanistan? Billions spent, thousands dead, and the Taliban is back in charge 20 years later with zero evidence any of it was ever connected to 9/11. That isn't nuanced geopolitics, that's a clusterfuck of death and destruction enriching the political class.
Absolutely... but my point is that military aid is tied up with trade agreements, visa agreements, intelligence-sharing, foreign policy and a lot more. I'm not saying that I want it to be complicated, and I'm not defending that complexity, I'm just pointing out that if the USA just stopped providing military aid it would affect the country in so many different ways.
Maybe it would be worth it in the long run, I have no idea, I'm sure there are way more factors involved than I'm aware of.
Not contributing directly to death and destruction or enabling conflicts to grind populations down would be immediately worthwhile and beneficial in the long term. Any economic losses would be worth it compared to the cost in lives, and I suspect the alleged losses would be more than counterbalanced by restoring wealth to the populace instead of leaving it in the hands of politicians.
Totally agree about the cost of lives, but I'm not following about the counterbalance of restoring wealth to the populace. If visa agreements and trade agreements with the US were disrupted, how would US citizens paying more for imported goods, US farms and manufacturers having tariffs placed on exported goods and US companies no longer able to hire the world's best and brightest transfer wealth from the politicians to the people?
Why would not bombing people drive up the cost of trade? If it does, that seems to imply we have a bigger problem with state control of trade, which does not in any way violate my anarchist preconceptions.
Because military allies are more likely to trade with each other.
For example, USA and South Korea have a Mutual Defense treaty, they have a free trade agreement, they also have a tax treaty. There might be a bunch of stuff I don't know about. If the US threw away its Mutual Defense treaty with South Korea like you're suggesting, maybe the other treaties and agreements with Korea don't change... or maybe they do, I'm honestly not sure.
The free market loves Just In Time logistics, because it saves money on storage, but the downside is a lack of resiliency, so whenever there has been supply chain shipping disruptions, US companies, especially the auto manufacturers, struggle without micro processors from Taiwan. This is exactly why the CHIPS act was passed, to encourage microchips to be made in the US to decrease the corporate dependency on Taiwan... but it'll take a few years to really come into play.
Intelligence-sharing really helps US companies. Corporate cybersecurity teams interact with US intelligence agencies to both alert them and be alerted on cybersecurity threats and fixes. Some US companies are attacked 100s of millions of times every second. I don't know for sure, but I imagine the US intelligence agencies are also interacting with the intelligence agencies of its military allies to help all allied companies. I'm sure you know that the North Korean state and Russian private hacker groups attack outside companies relentlessly.
I think America has something defense treaties with something like 50 other countries. If it declared all those treaties null and void then I'd say that's likely to have unintended consequences regarding trade, etc.
Is the US the world's richest country that chooses to spend a huge budget on its military, or is the US so wealthy because it has the world's strongest military? No idea myself, but I'm sure valid arguments could be made for both sides.
It has been long since I witnessed eclipse
Seeing it again won't be bad idea, lol
About the war, I just feel bad.
We say here that there should be no war at all and the country that is on the truth should be supported by the whole world. We all know that which country is true and which country is false in war Only the lives of the people living there are being wasted and nothing is causing them much trouble.