• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • It is complex and yet it isn’t. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.

    If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.

    At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.

    Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.

    The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.



  • There is another question on a micro level. How many people who are not about to kill you can you kill in self-defence to save how many people?

    While in theory, every human life is as important and valued as another we do often in practice allow some movement morally.

    The third question is immediacy. Are you allowed to kill someone in self-defence if you know they will kill you tomorrow? Is it just current action, and how far current stretches.

    But while those are simplified questions on the philosophy of ethics in these situations they don’t entirely apply to Israel and Palestine. That is because they ignore the power imbalance.


  • While Israel is part of the cause of Islamic terrorism in Europe, I think we should not pat too much on our backs. Yes, our countries’ positions taking sides on Israel is problematic as hell and so is us being tied to the US in the minds of many people outside Europe. But so is our own Islamophobia. I get where it comes from, but othering and sidelining people will lead to further radicalization. Which for people whose Islamophobia is rooted in current oppression in many Islamic societies, is entirely opposite of what they want.











  • I think having a digital ID system is very important in the modern age but where it is required needs to be limited. You should not need to use it where it isn’t strictly necessary. We have one in Finland too. You will almost entirely use it to use official services that would need your ID in person as well. In this proposal, the issue is not digital ID but how it would be used. First, where it would be used could compromise revealing too much of your identity when you want privacy and secondly and more importantly, it could compromise revealing your private actions to the government. Latter can move into highly problematic territory when criminalizing actions that should not be criminalized.






  • Islam as religious text basis doesn’t really differ in a bad way from the other two Abrahamic religions. It even gives some extra rights to women that Christianity and Judaism don’t. Forcing hijab on women is also expressively banned in Islamic theological texts. Doesn’t change how it works in practice as forced hijab is pretty common in fundamentalistic Islamic theocracies. But might explain why converting is a little bit less insane than at the surface level. If I had to choose one of the Abrahamic religions on a purely theological basis I might end up choosing Islam. Please note, I am not trying to give a pass to Islam, Islamic countries or especially fundamentalist Muslims. The issues are myriad. People outside Islamic countries just have a somewhat skewed image of the religion. Both in theory and practice.