Comment by guelo
2 months ago
If you don't have decades of built up propaganda it's pretty easy to see that Israel is the bad guy. The condescending "it's complicated" line is part of the propaganda telling you that you're not allowed to come to the obvious conclusion for yourself. My 10 year has figured out that Russia is the bad guy in Ukraine and that Israel is the bad guy in Gaza.
Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Yes, it's pretty scary that anyone sees things so black and white and would encourage their children to do the same. These are multi-decade conflicts where no one has clean hands.
10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14 months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the power of propaganda.
People know it’s evil, they are just unwilling to point it out because driving the conflict into some resolution is already hard without these simplistic views which helped no one before and continue to do so. Kid’s naivety is just that, naivety. Put him into a rulers chair (either side), provide all the factual info with zero propaganda and see him trying to escape at all costs, because all decisions including doing nothing make people die or worse. At some point you just have to choose sides without much meaning attached to it.
I suspect most parents would be prepared to risk the lives of strangers' children if it stopped their own from being killed.
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> Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
Good, what’s your plan of resolution?
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That is not at all the definition of genocide. Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing. Hard to take anyone seriously making such good/evil distinctions, especially when the they are not reckoning with the evil of Hamas & co. beyond “well gee shucks Palestine ain’t perfect either yall!”
Only one side has the state md objective of “ethnic cleansing” and it’s not the Israelis
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Well he didn't have decades of propaganda but still roots for Israel... I didn't mention this subject there because I have better things to do with my time than ruin Christmas by talking politics with teenagers so I can't tell you where he got that from
> If you don't have decades of built up propaganda
But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?
I'm saying it doesn't apply to my 10 year old
Properly propagandized parents have no issue letting their perspectives flow to their children.
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If Ukraine's fighting back include indiscriminate bombing of the majority of Russian cities, cutting off their water and food supplies (letting Ukrainian civilians attack aide trucks), then, we'd have more equivalence in your ridiculously simplistic logic.
That's a 40 year old pretending to be 5 year old, not a proper 13 year old zo
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