Thanks for the links. Warby’s in particular hits home for me as I see now, more than ever, there is a pervasive, unhappy disconnect from nature, especially in urban settings. Children are more familiar with fictional characters than wildlife species. Even on a farm there is more nearness to nature. I always liked Edward Abbey, especially Desert Solitaire - “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
I like Thoreau's formulation: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
I feel like on econ blogs there is only one conception of what wealth, and productivity, looks like: destroying nature, filling all the niches, leaving none untouched. The narrowness of this notion, in curious contrast to its far-reaching consequences, frustrates me no end.
With reference to Gurri and, to a lesser extent Boyle, the key difference between the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel is that Ukraine never had a chance of prevailing in a military conflict with Russia regardless of the military aid provided by the US and NATO, whereas Israel's military goals (specifically, the elimination of Hamas) are feasible, but the Biden Administration (with the support of its European allies) is creating obstacles to Israeli victory. As critics of US foreign policy in the Ukraine war have argued, that policy appears to have been based on the premise that sanctions, in combination with military aid, would be sufficient to weaken Russia and engineer 'regime change,' but that premise proved to be erroneous. Indeed, I largely agree with critics who argue that the Biden administration made little effort to stop the Ukraine war, and it intervened to prevent a negotiated settlement in early 2022, because policymakers welcomed the opportunity to deal a 'knockout blow' to Russia by imposing sanctions and providing military aid to Ukraine. So much for that theory. If there is any linkage between the wars in Ukraine and Israel, it is the one identified by a blogger I won't name (someone who is extremely uncharitable to those with whom they disagree) -- namely, by engineering an unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine and failing to knock out Russia (and perhaps creating the impression that we had run out of ammo to supply our Allies), the Administration may have inadvertently encouraged Hamas in the belief that it was a propitious time to launch an attack on Israel.
One more thing. If the goal of US foreign policy is to prevail over 'tyrannical regimes hostile to our interests,' it needs to rely on 'soft power' as well as 'hard power' by setting an example that the citizens of hostile regimes will find attractive. The problem with America being a country where 'you can no longer speak freely in the land of free speech,' as Boyle put it, is that the infringement of free speech is not only destroying the country from within, but to paraphrase Russian libertarian Mikhail Svetov, the US is ceding the moral high ground to the so-called 'tyrannical regimes.'
I think it's more debatable than people like Gurri and Zeihan assume that the U.S. has become an increasingly passive global power. People seem to say this more after the retreat from Afghanistan but I don't really see how the Fall of Kabul is anymore relevant to the status of U.S. hegemony than the Fall of Saigon or the Iranian Hostage Crisis for that matter. I think what Russia, China, and North Korea have realized is that having nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles is a very easy way to negate or diminish American power projection overseas through military bases and aircraft carriers.
Re: "the standard way meritocracy decays: selecting for capacity (intelligence and executive function) but not for character."—Lorenzo Warby essay (excerpted by Arnold Kling)
This doesn't square with the way meritocracy has decayed in admissions to university.
Admissions criteria have abandoned or downgraded standardized tests (SAT/ACT), which are partly an indicator of intelligence, and have adopted a "holistic" assessment, which also purports "to judge the whole person."
Let's remind ourselves that applicants are approx. 17 years old. Thomas Sowell wrote somewhere that admissions officers confuse gatekeeping and god-like omniscience about an applicant's character.
And the admissions process undermines character-formation by requiring applicants to sing their own praises in contrived essays.
I have a relative who worked in the admissions office at an Ivy League school over a decade ago. She (note: nearly everyone in the office below top leader level was a she) recently tried to touch base with a few of her former colleagues there, but discovered that all but one had moved on to other things, not other admissions office jobs.
For the one still in that office, the comment that stood out was that despite being only barely "middle aged" (e.g., raising young children), she felt old because most of the the other women in the office were barely out of college themselves, and naturally almost all single, and most Ivy League-educated themselves.
"Demographics is Destiny" isn't just about "War Of The Cradle" stuff. When the demographics of a decision-making institution correlate with how decisions are made, in ways they produce huge outcome differences, then it's also "Long March Through The Institutions" stuff.
These days, if you put a bunch of young, single, elite-college-educated women in charge of anything, it's completely understating things to say that you aren't going to get meritocracy. You aren't even going to get "some meritocracy, and some exceptions for special cases", or even "meritocracy, but one only competes for the fixed-quota of slots reserved for those with similar features of group identity."
It's much, much worse than that. You are going to get evaluation on the basis of "Does this person check a minimum number of boxes of things I am looking for." And the trouble is, raw intellectual horsepower and merit for academic potential is just not one of the things they are looking for.
And furthermore - if you can believe it - it is still even worse than that. Because real merit along those lines when possessed by someone who doesn't check any of the key boxes is not even treated with indifference but with *aversion*.
The worst thing in the world would be to hand over one of your scarce prize golden slots over to someone who fits the anti-narrative archetype pattern, because giving them your credential as social proof of their merit would only serve to reinforce the public's false consciousness of what a typical ultra-smart person looks like.
You see, the whole point of admissions is specifically to alter the public's perceptions about this exact questions, by altering the reality of who gets the credentials, and relying on the fact that the public's perceptions of the fidelity of the signal provided by the credential is unshakably credulous and worshipful.
As a mere small subset of depressing examples, there are countless sad stories of some of America's top young mathematical prospects (high scorers at the International Math Olympiads, things like that) and with enviable grades and test scores being rejected in toto from all the """elite""" institutions. "Maybe try again for grad school, undergrad here isn't -about- talent, not anymore."
An alternate problem is that admissions DOES select for character, just not the kind of character I (or, I suspect, you or Arnold) would like to see. I am not saying Warby ignores that (I haven't read the essay yet) but I did notice in his essays saying that the nasty women are weaponizing propriety, to which I think a better view is to say every culture needs people to enforce propriety (not weaponize) but conflicts happen because different cultures have different rules of propriety, and in fact the leftists are a very different culture. So just as the HR ladies or whatnot are enforcing a different set of rules for propriety, admissions are selecting based on different character traits than what non-leftists would.
Applicants are supposed to arrive fully-formed as *good people*; a college education must be purely relativist and make no effort to shape them or include in the curriculum any idea of the good.
Re: "[Robin Hanson's] post strikes me as a shorter, less technical version of a paper Robin once wrote with Tyler Cowen arguing that disagreement is rational."
A paper by Cowen and Hanson (2004) is entitled, "Are Disagreements Honest?".
Here is the abstract:
"We review literatures on agreeing to disagree and on the rationality of differing priors, in order to evaluate the honesty of typical disagreements. A robust result is that honest truth-seeking agents with common priors should not knowingly disagree. Typical disagreement seems explainable by a combination of random belief influences and by priors that tell each person that he reasons better than others. When criticizing others, however, people seem to uphold rationality standards that disapprove of such self-favoring priors. This suggests that typical disagreements are dishonest. We conclude by briefly considering how one might try to become more honest when disagreeing."
The typescript is available via a link at Hanson's GMU page:
The ratio of killed Jews to killed Palestinians should have stopped at ten to one. It is now twenty to one. The Palestinian of "Palestinian" identity must survive. Just as that of Jews has survived. What is the difference? I shudder to think. What are these "others," the Substack crowd going to say ........
In 2020, the Dem deep state pressured private companies to censor the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the criminal bribery he and his father and other Biden family members did. Despite getting the files in 2019, the DoJ and FBI refused to confirm they were authentic, and in fact 51 top officers claimed, without evidence, that it was Russian disinformation. They lied.
Do we agree on these facts now, even if we didn’t think so at the time?
Robin’s ideas about disagreement includes the importance of updating prior opinions as new facts become known, but he doesn’t account for differences in definitions about what the facts mean. Kling, along with most FI Team choices, believe that this censorship does not mean the election was stolen. Some have even said it’s a form of rigging the election, but not stealing it. To me, it is a rigging of the election, and all elections rigged for one side that are won by that side, are stolen. (Had Trump won, the election could still have been called rigged for Biden, but not stolen). Kling has noted he would call the election stolen only if it was proven that false or invalid ballots were counted. He hasn’t said recently whether he considered votes for Saddam, or any dictator, to be part of a stolen election when the dictator gets 99+% of the votes-I call illegitimate elections, thus stolen.
Robin was talking more generally about cultural morality being learned early in life, without examples, a frequent length reducing practice I don’t like, and how moral reasoning prioritizes early moral learning over later. Which seems true and inevitable. As you learn about morality first in your family, and local community, and schools, you learn good and bad, right and wrong. These ideas and feelings become part of one’s identity. But Robin argues about a straw man moral truth that one believes is right for all times and places. Few actually do this, and he shows none, but moraity differences are interesting.
In the US today, morality seems more different according to political tribe.
In Gaza, and many Muslim countries, morality training includes messages about Jews being evil and bad, so it is good to kill them. Such early indoctrination will remain a problem for Israel trying to live in peace. It’s sad, but no surprise, that many who insist that the US election was fine, also insist that Gaza resistance is fine.
While I'm very hesitant to judge Israel harshly, I find it difficult to ignore the catastrophe killing many thousands of Palestinian civilians. Not unlike the progressives against Israel, I have no answers.
This seems to be a key point which you and Gurri miss. From what I can see, while many are decidedly against the killing being mostly committed by Israel, and favor doing more for Palestinians, I'm aware of very few who are pro-Hamas. As best I can tell, even most in Gaza aren't pro-Hamas. And, for better or worse, they speak against Hamas little or none because most of the killing is being committed by Israelis. It doesn't matter to them whether there is good reason or not. It doesn't matter to them what Hamas did leading to Israel's response. For them, no reason is good enough for that much killing and it even explains why some compare Israel to some of the worst in history, regardless of whether that comparison mostly misses the mark. Until supporters of Israel, which mostly includes me, understand why others aren't with them, there will be no converging of opinions.
Old Law of War: "States are allowed to do what is necessary to defend and secure themselves against violence, even if that results in the deaths of civilians, which states should nevertheless try to minimize by all reasonable efforts. The intentional use of civilians as human shields to deter an opponent state's lawful efforts is a war crime, the state is not responsible for those deaths, the liability for which lies squarely at the feet of the war criminals. The rationale behind this allocation of culpability is to minimize the incentive to abuse civilian populations and use them as human shields."
New Law of War: "If someone attacks you and intentionally makes it impossible to defend yourself without killing a lot of their civilians, then they have played the perfectly legal Human Shield Gambit against you for which there is no defense, tough luck, check mate suckers, you are just screwed, game over, you should thank your lucky stars they weren't able to murder and kidnap even more of your children during their attack. The rationale for this is, um ... hang on ... let me check my notes here ... ah, here it is: there is never any justification whatsoever for any civilian deaths, but note, when oppressors get killed, those don't really count as civilian deaths, because reasons."
I tend to agree with your assessment of Hamas. I tend to agree Israel is not responsible for the civilian deaths under the rules of war. (Thanks for clarifying that point a bit for me.) I don't agree that means what Israel is doing is ok.
A problem with this is a failure to provide an alternative set of actions for Israel to take that achieves the goal: eliminate the rule of Hamas in Gaza. Ceasefire doesn’t do it, starving all he Palestinians might do it, fire bombing Gaza, like the US did to Dresden might do it.
I don’t like Hamas using human shields, and since I can’t come up with a better way than Israel is now using, what Israel is doing IS ok.
It used to be said - urban myth or no, but actually it seemed rather likely - that certain voting or census precincts in the city in which I then lived, had more dogs than children. One was said to have no children ... I've thought about that, such a place under these new strictures could be targeted with impunity, I suppose. This is how I view population growth in a place like Gaza - as aggressive, in effect. But I suppose a more charitable view is that people who are not idle, who have reason to think about the trajectory of their lives, people with work to do, have reason to plan their children's births. Without that structure or meaning, there's no reason to plan, just mindlessly make babies.
This, I have found, is a controversial subject to alight on - ironically, of course, given the aversion to babies that educated people evince in the West.
"As best I can tell, even most in Gaza aren't pro-Hamas." I don't know what your opinion is based on, other than Western naivete and wishful thinking. Years ago, I was invited to dinner by a colleague, and among the other guests was a fellow of Palestinian origin. The hostess, who was from a Muslim-dominated country herself, inadvertently mentioned that I was Jewish. There had been no discussion of Israel that evening. I will never forget the look of unmitigated hatred the fellow gave me, which 'as best I could tell,' to paraphrase you, was simply because I was a Jew. It isn't about Israel, the so-called 'occupation,' or being pro-Hamas. The vast majority of Gazan Palestinians share with Hamas a visceral hatred of Jews, and when Hamas went into Israel on October 7th and killed, raped and kidnapped innocent Israeli citizens, they supported those actions. When someone hates you and wants you dead simply because of your ethnic identity, it is you or them. This is something that people living in 'Western civilization' find difficult to comprehend, but it is that simple.
I wouldn't be surprised if what you say about most Palestinians hating Jews is correct. IDK. But that is significantly different than what I wrote and you quoted. This survey show a level of support for Hamas (~1/3) that is higher than I remember hearing previously but still far from a majority.
Thanks for the links. Warby’s in particular hits home for me as I see now, more than ever, there is a pervasive, unhappy disconnect from nature, especially in urban settings. Children are more familiar with fictional characters than wildlife species. Even on a farm there is more nearness to nature. I always liked Edward Abbey, especially Desert Solitaire - “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
I like Thoreau's formulation: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
I feel like on econ blogs there is only one conception of what wealth, and productivity, looks like: destroying nature, filling all the niches, leaving none untouched. The narrowness of this notion, in curious contrast to its far-reaching consequences, frustrates me no end.
silverman.substack.com
With reference to Gurri and, to a lesser extent Boyle, the key difference between the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel is that Ukraine never had a chance of prevailing in a military conflict with Russia regardless of the military aid provided by the US and NATO, whereas Israel's military goals (specifically, the elimination of Hamas) are feasible, but the Biden Administration (with the support of its European allies) is creating obstacles to Israeli victory. As critics of US foreign policy in the Ukraine war have argued, that policy appears to have been based on the premise that sanctions, in combination with military aid, would be sufficient to weaken Russia and engineer 'regime change,' but that premise proved to be erroneous. Indeed, I largely agree with critics who argue that the Biden administration made little effort to stop the Ukraine war, and it intervened to prevent a negotiated settlement in early 2022, because policymakers welcomed the opportunity to deal a 'knockout blow' to Russia by imposing sanctions and providing military aid to Ukraine. So much for that theory. If there is any linkage between the wars in Ukraine and Israel, it is the one identified by a blogger I won't name (someone who is extremely uncharitable to those with whom they disagree) -- namely, by engineering an unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine and failing to knock out Russia (and perhaps creating the impression that we had run out of ammo to supply our Allies), the Administration may have inadvertently encouraged Hamas in the belief that it was a propitious time to launch an attack on Israel.
One more thing. If the goal of US foreign policy is to prevail over 'tyrannical regimes hostile to our interests,' it needs to rely on 'soft power' as well as 'hard power' by setting an example that the citizens of hostile regimes will find attractive. The problem with America being a country where 'you can no longer speak freely in the land of free speech,' as Boyle put it, is that the infringement of free speech is not only destroying the country from within, but to paraphrase Russian libertarian Mikhail Svetov, the US is ceding the moral high ground to the so-called 'tyrannical regimes.'
I think it's more debatable than people like Gurri and Zeihan assume that the U.S. has become an increasingly passive global power. People seem to say this more after the retreat from Afghanistan but I don't really see how the Fall of Kabul is anymore relevant to the status of U.S. hegemony than the Fall of Saigon or the Iranian Hostage Crisis for that matter. I think what Russia, China, and North Korea have realized is that having nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles is a very easy way to negate or diminish American power projection overseas through military bases and aircraft carriers.
Re: "the standard way meritocracy decays: selecting for capacity (intelligence and executive function) but not for character."—Lorenzo Warby essay (excerpted by Arnold Kling)
This doesn't square with the way meritocracy has decayed in admissions to university.
Admissions criteria have abandoned or downgraded standardized tests (SAT/ACT), which are partly an indicator of intelligence, and have adopted a "holistic" assessment, which also purports "to judge the whole person."
Let's remind ourselves that applicants are approx. 17 years old. Thomas Sowell wrote somewhere that admissions officers confuse gatekeeping and god-like omniscience about an applicant's character.
And the admissions process undermines character-formation by requiring applicants to sing their own praises in contrived essays.
I have a relative who worked in the admissions office at an Ivy League school over a decade ago. She (note: nearly everyone in the office below top leader level was a she) recently tried to touch base with a few of her former colleagues there, but discovered that all but one had moved on to other things, not other admissions office jobs.
For the one still in that office, the comment that stood out was that despite being only barely "middle aged" (e.g., raising young children), she felt old because most of the the other women in the office were barely out of college themselves, and naturally almost all single, and most Ivy League-educated themselves.
"Demographics is Destiny" isn't just about "War Of The Cradle" stuff. When the demographics of a decision-making institution correlate with how decisions are made, in ways they produce huge outcome differences, then it's also "Long March Through The Institutions" stuff.
These days, if you put a bunch of young, single, elite-college-educated women in charge of anything, it's completely understating things to say that you aren't going to get meritocracy. You aren't even going to get "some meritocracy, and some exceptions for special cases", or even "meritocracy, but one only competes for the fixed-quota of slots reserved for those with similar features of group identity."
It's much, much worse than that. You are going to get evaluation on the basis of "Does this person check a minimum number of boxes of things I am looking for." And the trouble is, raw intellectual horsepower and merit for academic potential is just not one of the things they are looking for.
And furthermore - if you can believe it - it is still even worse than that. Because real merit along those lines when possessed by someone who doesn't check any of the key boxes is not even treated with indifference but with *aversion*.
The worst thing in the world would be to hand over one of your scarce prize golden slots over to someone who fits the anti-narrative archetype pattern, because giving them your credential as social proof of their merit would only serve to reinforce the public's false consciousness of what a typical ultra-smart person looks like.
You see, the whole point of admissions is specifically to alter the public's perceptions about this exact questions, by altering the reality of who gets the credentials, and relying on the fact that the public's perceptions of the fidelity of the signal provided by the credential is unshakably credulous and worshipful.
As a mere small subset of depressing examples, there are countless sad stories of some of America's top young mathematical prospects (high scorers at the International Math Olympiads, things like that) and with enviable grades and test scores being rejected in toto from all the """elite""" institutions. "Maybe try again for grad school, undergrad here isn't -about- talent, not anymore."
An alternate problem is that admissions DOES select for character, just not the kind of character I (or, I suspect, you or Arnold) would like to see. I am not saying Warby ignores that (I haven't read the essay yet) but I did notice in his essays saying that the nasty women are weaponizing propriety, to which I think a better view is to say every culture needs people to enforce propriety (not weaponize) but conflicts happen because different cultures have different rules of propriety, and in fact the leftists are a very different culture. So just as the HR ladies or whatnot are enforcing a different set of rules for propriety, admissions are selecting based on different character traits than what non-leftists would.
+1
Applicants are supposed to arrive fully-formed as *good people*; a college education must be purely relativist and make no effort to shape them or include in the curriculum any idea of the good.
Re: "[Robin Hanson's] post strikes me as a shorter, less technical version of a paper Robin once wrote with Tyler Cowen arguing that disagreement is rational."
A paper by Cowen and Hanson (2004) is entitled, "Are Disagreements Honest?".
Here is the abstract:
"We review literatures on agreeing to disagree and on the rationality of differing priors, in order to evaluate the honesty of typical disagreements. A robust result is that honest truth-seeking agents with common priors should not knowingly disagree. Typical disagreement seems explainable by a combination of random belief influences and by priors that tell each person that he reasons better than others. When criticizing others, however, people seem to uphold rationality standards that disapprove of such self-favoring priors. This suggests that typical disagreements are dishonest. We conclude by briefly considering how one might try to become more honest when disagreeing."
The typescript is available via a link at Hanson's GMU page:
https://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson
The ratio of killed Jews to killed Palestinians should have stopped at ten to one. It is now twenty to one. The Palestinian of "Palestinian" identity must survive. Just as that of Jews has survived. What is the difference? I shudder to think. What are these "others," the Substack crowd going to say ........
In 2020, the Dem deep state pressured private companies to censor the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the criminal bribery he and his father and other Biden family members did. Despite getting the files in 2019, the DoJ and FBI refused to confirm they were authentic, and in fact 51 top officers claimed, without evidence, that it was Russian disinformation. They lied.
Do we agree on these facts now, even if we didn’t think so at the time?
Robin’s ideas about disagreement includes the importance of updating prior opinions as new facts become known, but he doesn’t account for differences in definitions about what the facts mean. Kling, along with most FI Team choices, believe that this censorship does not mean the election was stolen. Some have even said it’s a form of rigging the election, but not stealing it. To me, it is a rigging of the election, and all elections rigged for one side that are won by that side, are stolen. (Had Trump won, the election could still have been called rigged for Biden, but not stolen). Kling has noted he would call the election stolen only if it was proven that false or invalid ballots were counted. He hasn’t said recently whether he considered votes for Saddam, or any dictator, to be part of a stolen election when the dictator gets 99+% of the votes-I call illegitimate elections, thus stolen.
Robin was talking more generally about cultural morality being learned early in life, without examples, a frequent length reducing practice I don’t like, and how moral reasoning prioritizes early moral learning over later. Which seems true and inevitable. As you learn about morality first in your family, and local community, and schools, you learn good and bad, right and wrong. These ideas and feelings become part of one’s identity. But Robin argues about a straw man moral truth that one believes is right for all times and places. Few actually do this, and he shows none, but moraity differences are interesting.
In the US today, morality seems more different according to political tribe.
In Gaza, and many Muslim countries, morality training includes messages about Jews being evil and bad, so it is good to kill them. Such early indoctrination will remain a problem for Israel trying to live in peace. It’s sad, but no surprise, that many who insist that the US election was fine, also insist that Gaza resistance is fine.
Actually, Robin argued that disagreement is irrational.
right. typo fixed
While I'm very hesitant to judge Israel harshly, I find it difficult to ignore the catastrophe killing many thousands of Palestinian civilians. Not unlike the progressives against Israel, I have no answers.
This seems to be a key point which you and Gurri miss. From what I can see, while many are decidedly against the killing being mostly committed by Israel, and favor doing more for Palestinians, I'm aware of very few who are pro-Hamas. As best I can tell, even most in Gaza aren't pro-Hamas. And, for better or worse, they speak against Hamas little or none because most of the killing is being committed by Israelis. It doesn't matter to them whether there is good reason or not. It doesn't matter to them what Hamas did leading to Israel's response. For them, no reason is good enough for that much killing and it even explains why some compare Israel to some of the worst in history, regardless of whether that comparison mostly misses the mark. Until supporters of Israel, which mostly includes me, understand why others aren't with them, there will be no converging of opinions.
Old Law of War: "States are allowed to do what is necessary to defend and secure themselves against violence, even if that results in the deaths of civilians, which states should nevertheless try to minimize by all reasonable efforts. The intentional use of civilians as human shields to deter an opponent state's lawful efforts is a war crime, the state is not responsible for those deaths, the liability for which lies squarely at the feet of the war criminals. The rationale behind this allocation of culpability is to minimize the incentive to abuse civilian populations and use them as human shields."
New Law of War: "If someone attacks you and intentionally makes it impossible to defend yourself without killing a lot of their civilians, then they have played the perfectly legal Human Shield Gambit against you for which there is no defense, tough luck, check mate suckers, you are just screwed, game over, you should thank your lucky stars they weren't able to murder and kidnap even more of your children during their attack. The rationale for this is, um ... hang on ... let me check my notes here ... ah, here it is: there is never any justification whatsoever for any civilian deaths, but note, when oppressors get killed, those don't really count as civilian deaths, because reasons."
I tend to agree with your assessment of Hamas. I tend to agree Israel is not responsible for the civilian deaths under the rules of war. (Thanks for clarifying that point a bit for me.) I don't agree that means what Israel is doing is ok.
A problem with this is a failure to provide an alternative set of actions for Israel to take that achieves the goal: eliminate the rule of Hamas in Gaza. Ceasefire doesn’t do it, starving all he Palestinians might do it, fire bombing Gaza, like the US did to Dresden might do it.
I don’t like Hamas using human shields, and since I can’t come up with a better way than Israel is now using, what Israel is doing IS ok.
I stand by what I said. Not having a better alternative might make it "legal" but it doesn't make it ok.
If someone threatened to kill you and your only option was to kill them and an innocent bystander, would that be ok? I'm not so sure.
It used to be said - urban myth or no, but actually it seemed rather likely - that certain voting or census precincts in the city in which I then lived, had more dogs than children. One was said to have no children ... I've thought about that, such a place under these new strictures could be targeted with impunity, I suppose. This is how I view population growth in a place like Gaza - as aggressive, in effect. But I suppose a more charitable view is that people who are not idle, who have reason to think about the trajectory of their lives, people with work to do, have reason to plan their children's births. Without that structure or meaning, there's no reason to plan, just mindlessly make babies.
This, I have found, is a controversial subject to alight on - ironically, of course, given the aversion to babies that educated people evince in the West.
"As best I can tell, even most in Gaza aren't pro-Hamas." I don't know what your opinion is based on, other than Western naivete and wishful thinking. Years ago, I was invited to dinner by a colleague, and among the other guests was a fellow of Palestinian origin. The hostess, who was from a Muslim-dominated country herself, inadvertently mentioned that I was Jewish. There had been no discussion of Israel that evening. I will never forget the look of unmitigated hatred the fellow gave me, which 'as best I could tell,' to paraphrase you, was simply because I was a Jew. It isn't about Israel, the so-called 'occupation,' or being pro-Hamas. The vast majority of Gazan Palestinians share with Hamas a visceral hatred of Jews, and when Hamas went into Israel on October 7th and killed, raped and kidnapped innocent Israeli citizens, they supported those actions. When someone hates you and wants you dead simply because of your ethnic identity, it is you or them. This is something that people living in 'Western civilization' find difficult to comprehend, but it is that simple.
I wouldn't be surprised if what you say about most Palestinians hating Jews is correct. IDK. But that is significantly different than what I wrote and you quoted. This survey show a level of support for Hamas (~1/3) that is higher than I remember hearing previously but still far from a majority.
https://thehill.com/opinion/4273883-mellman-do-palestinians-support-hamas-polls-paint-a-murky-picture/