No but when someone says "Israel is uniquely evil and must be destroyed because of [reason that also applies to dozens of other countries whose destruction they're not demanding]" it implies either ignorance or bad faith.
It's not a defense argument rather than reality. People seem to think this conflict is special, but usually due to ignoring similarities to their own countries and their own moralities.
Regarding court, there is a very valid defense in court called selective enforcement, and this is exactly for situations when someone is scape goated
The only thing special about this conflict is that it's far more "televised" than any other genocide in history, due to the proliferation of internet access and social media, and that the US is directly funding it.
I think it makes a lot of sense to be more incensed about the genocide in Palestine vs. the Myanmar civil war if you're an American citizen. Americans are struggling and the government is sending billions of our tax dollars to war criminals overseas.
Except that it's not a genocide, claiming Israel is out to destroy the Palestinian people after two years of war with precision bombs is hilariously incorrect and highly misrepresented.
There's a reason that your example includes mass civilian executions, rapes, ethnic cleansing and burning villages, largely hamas' tactics, rather than precision bombs and evacuation calls in different channels.
Because Israeli tactics are extremely counterproductive for a genocide. There's reasons why genocide is usually done by concentrating populations rather than dispersing, and why aerial bombing can't be used, as victims would flee, or why the victims aren't forewarned..
It seems this entire popular argument rests solely on propaganda and redefining words without any shred of critical thinking
They've been out to destroy them for decades. The last 2 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering they've imposed on Palestinians through apartheid.
What's going on now IS a genocide and it's not being done by bombs but by starvation, which tracks exactly with what you said about "concentrating" people.
Do you have statistics as to how many people have died by starvation in Gaza? How is it related to concentration and how is it working to destroy the entire population of Gaza? (as in death rates vs birth rates)
Zero sympathy from this quarter - what started as a tax dodge to, let's face it, defund schools, hospitals and social security, ended up as a "poor me" self-effacing blog post.
tax incentives to create solar infrastructure are designed to create solar infrastructure, I don't understand why it's being described as a pejorative "tax dodge" when the government directs funds this way rather than takes the money directly and buys those things.
I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit like a thing the government needs to do because of bad behaviors.
As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society.
Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.
I don’t think it’s because anyone has resigned themselves to thinking all rich people are cheaters who will win. I think we use tax incentives in the US primarily because of two beliefs - the first that the private market is often more efficient than public purchasing (which has a pretty poor showing from this article, as you point out!), and the other is that people can choose how to contribute some of their obligations back to society from the set of taxable deductions. We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others, and adjusting taxes work well as a lower risk lower force way to do that.
I think a big fraction (the majority) of people who hold the belief that private market is more efficient are also saying things like "you should not do X or the private companies will just go in another country where they don't impose X", with X being usually a thing beneficial for the community/society (collecting fair tax, protecting the employees, protecting the environment, redistributing the money towards basic infrastructure where people cannot afford them, making sure the market is fair, ...). Trying to avoid any of those X is usually morally questionable (and on top of that there is the fact that they will not hesitate to turn their back to the country that provided the environment were they were able to be successful).
So, a lot of these people who hold this belief are agreeing (not explicitly, they just know it's true but don't want to say it out loud) that rich people are doing what is better for them, not what is better for the society. Which is why people view negatively rich people who profit from government tax incentive.
I think you summarize my understanding on why using tax incentives are seen as a negative trait with the sentence
> We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others
If you have to encourage behaviors that are good for the society and discourage behaviors that are bad for the society, it means that some people, without these incentives, will prefer to do the "bad" behaviors rather than the "good" behaviors. I understand that people will not like these people.
Again, tax incentives are totally useless if the rich people are people with normal moral who will naturally try to do the correct thing. The government, not you, is already choosing the domain where it applies tax incentives. So the argument that you don't want to give tax because you think you will do a better job at choosing the project than the government does not hold: if you are doing something where the government provides a tax incentive, you are doing something that the government wanted to be done. And the government is also more than happy to get good advice and support on such projects, but again, there, those generous rich people are not doing anything despite their nice posture. If indeed they don't trust the government to do "good things", it's funny that they don't do them themselves and instead jump on the first tax incentive opportunity. Posture is cheap, but when it comes to invest extra, without government help, for something that is "good", there is no one remaining from the group of the people who explains that a government collecting tax is not a good way to have nice things done.
> Support for Israel extends beyond religious justifications
Yes, it extends that support to cover apartheid colonial occupation, more-than-likely genocide by all the accepted definitions, and the usual smattering of targeting civilians, executing paramedics in marked ambulances and ethic cleansing.
Well, considering that Israeli's are occupying land that rightfully belongs to someone else, I'd say not very well indeed. It's the final major European colonial outpost, and its fighting hard not to go the way of Algeria, Kenya, Malaya and a long long list of others.
Even if you believe Israelis don’t have a right to the land, it’s still not a colonial outpost. That’s just lazy European and American self important intellectualizing in my opinion.
First a colony is one controlled by a foreign nation. Next the population of Israel is, or was, about half Sephardim. Meaning Jews from the Middle East, many of whom were unwilling expelled from Muslim countries.
Secondly Arab Muslim Palestinians could also be considered colonizers if ones that’d been there many generations.
The Israel and Palestine conflict in many aspects is more similar to between Turkey and Greece after WWI. In 1923 they “swapped populations” due to the aftermaths of Greeces independence from the Turkish Ottaman Empire and the following wars. Populations which had lived together segregated after the wars and were expelled on both sides in roughly equal numbers.
It was similar after the 1948 war with about 850,000 Middle Eastern Jews and 750,000 Palestinians being displaced.
Except Palestinians were never integrated into Egypt or Jordan. Partly by their own choice and partly by that of the Arab countries. The stated goal was that they’d destroy the new state of Israel and return.
you do know that jews come from the current state of israel right? and that they lived there before the founding of said state? and that, no, neither group of 7M people are going to pack up and leave.
This is no more relevant than the guys in the OAS banging the table and claiming 2M Frenchmen have always lived in Algeria. It's not the age of exploration any more, you can no more rock up on someone else's patch, declare it terra nullis and start building condos. What's worse again, is trying to make it some religious thing... this book here says I own all you guy's land because the book says God gave it to us guys and not yous.
Reaching for the escape key with your left pinkie while trying to keep your fingers on the home row hundreds of times a day in order not to have to dislocate your right pinkie to reach the arrows is is the idea of the century
Snark apart, praising vim without mentioning escape key remapping is criminal imho
To each their own, but to me the only key easier to hit than the Escape key is the space bar, and returning to the home row is like a 20ms move. On the other hand, if you're actually using control keys in the (now standard) lower left and lower positions, then we're just on different planets. :)
I heard that IBM got the PC keyboard positioning wrong. You can remap this in both macOS and Windows and Linux so its not a big deal anymore. Use Esc<->Capslock and have a gentle vim/neovim existence.
> Anyone who doesn't use Vim is just evil in my eye
Hehe. Evil users are vimmers. Evil stands for - Extensible vi layer for Emacs. Try Emacs for a while, and you may realize - Emacs can vim better than Neovim.
