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WhatTheBuck

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Posts posted by WhatTheBuck

  1. 19 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

    The relevance is explained in the rest of my post, which you didn't read. 

    Look, I know that you really want to argue about ancient history, because you sincerely believe that Jews shouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to the land a hundred years ago or start a nation there.  I've been through those arguments a dozen times on hornfans and the Shag, and I'm seeing the same bogus pro-Palestinian arguments as always on this thread. But the reality is that it doesn't matter now.   Arguing as if it does only legitimizes your premise that Israel's right to exist today is somehow dependent on a relitigation of the UN vote. 

    But it isn't.  Israel exists.  The native population in Israel proper is Jewish.  Whatever it was in 1917, or 1817, or the year 17, it's not Arab land now.  The Palestinian diaspora is largely native to other countries, along with Gaza and the West Bank.

    The only issues that matter now are the settlements, skirmishes, and possible peace compromises.   And there are reasonable arguments against a number of things that the Israelis are doing there.   But "The Jews claim to the land is based on bullshit from the Bible" hasn't been one of them for many, many years. 

    The issues that matter to you aren't the issues that matter to the Palestinians. You fail to see it from their perspective. If you could see it from their perspective through the impartial lens of history then you would understand why the conflict exists and why it will never end so long as Johnny-come-lately has all the power.

    Yes, Israel exists. Shitloads of Jews have moved there from all over the world since 1917 in order to outnumber the local residents and dominate "elections" so they could create the pre-ordained Jewish state. It's no more practical or feasible to send them back to where they came from than it would be for us to send our African-American friends back to where they came from like the white supremacists are fond of demanding.

    The only solution, imo, is to get along. I don't know about you but I'm dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. A great American president once espoused that as a virtue. That can't happen in Israel because it would mean the end of Jewish sovereignty, Jewish supremacy. As an American I oppose that political structure regardless of the religion. You should too. 

  2. 33 minutes ago, Newdoc said:

    Is there some sort of chart that I can pick a date in this conflict so I can support my preconceived views about what side is righteous in this mess?  From the looks of this thread, there's gotta be one or should I just Google "Israeli Jews suck, I need biased talking points" or "Brown people bad, the state of Palestine should never exist"?

    Here's a date: March 4, 1789.

    What would Israel look like if they were operating under the U.S. Constitution?

  3. 8 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

    I can't say that is a surprise, given your other posts on this.  Covering your eyes and ears is easier than giving some thought to an opposing viewpoint. 

    It doesn't matter what the Jewish population in Palestine was in 1947. How is that relevant?

    I'm not sure you know your history. You know about the Balfour Declaration of 1917, right? What was the Jewish population in Palestine then? What about in 1817? What about in 1717? What about in 717?

  4. 5 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

    No, I wouldn't agree.  That was one rationale for some people.   But the main rationale was that there were already 650,000 Jews there by 1947 (about half the number of Arabs), and a brewing conflict, so splitting the country seemed like a reasonable compromise to enough people that Israel got the votes.   Historical ties to the land certainly motivated Jews to move there in the first place, but the UN vote was based in the reality that was developing on the ground, not ancient tales. 

    But that is ancient history now.  Whatever the motivations in 1948, Israel exists, and far more Jews have a native claim to the land than Palestinians born elsewhere.  You might as well argue that the United States's claim to the West is nullified by the religious beliefs of the proponents of manifest destiny.  Yeah, that motivated many of them many years ago, but it's not the basis for the US sovereignty in California now. 

    Jews have Israel now for the same reason that Arabs had it before them.  They moved there, they live there, the vast majority by now were actually born there, and they defend their land.   Yet you deride their claim to the land as merely ancestral, while elevating the claims of Palestinians based purely on their ancestors.  How does the land belong to an Arab baby born in Jordan or Lebanon or, hell, Germany or Mexico, because that baby's grandfather lived in Jerusalem in 1945, but a Jewish baby born in Jerusalem is an interloper?

    Argue all you want about the partition in 1948, but that argument was resolved the moment the UN voted.  The consequences can't be unwound. 

    I stopped reading at "1947." The story is a lot older than that.

  5. 1 hour ago, Mojo Hand said:

    There are some serious internal contradictions and double standards in this post.  Set aside the West Bank for the moment, since you are talking about Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.   What exactly makes the land within Israel proper "Arab land"? 

    75% of Israel's Jewish population was born on the land.  The land is theirs by birth. How many global Palestinians are age 70+ and were born where Israel proper stands?   Why exactly aren't the rest all citizens of the countries in which they were born, like how the Palestinians born here are American citizens?   Why aren't West Bank Palestinians all citizens of Jordan, which held that territory before Israel took it?   

    I don't support a number of things Israel is doing right now, just as I'm a proud American who doesn't support most of what the Trump administration is doing.   I support a Palestinian state that includes most of the West Bank.  But you've fallen for propaganda if you think this is about God's promise to the Jews versus the poor displaced natives.  It's not.  It's about the Arab nations using the Palestinians as political pawns, and you're playing right into their game. 

    The rationale for giving the Jews their own state where it currently resides is based on the scriptural tale that the God of Abraham promised them that land in his covenant with Moses. You'd agree with that, right?

    That land had been majority Arab for well over 1,000 years prior to the Balfour Declaration. The Jews that lived there during that time were more like their Arab neighbors than the European diaspora that came flooding in to create the Jewish state. It wasn't just a religious clash, it was also a cultural clash. Promises made to the Palestinian Arabs by the British were broken. 

    If you were a Palestinian Arab 70 years ago, one not lucky enough to be granted citizenship (but not citizenship fully equal to your Jewish neighbors), you watched infidels come and push you off your land and force you into a life of subjugation. You have been deprived of any political power. Freedom and equality for you and your children is NOT an option. You will take your subjugation and like it.

    If your Arab family lived there for centuries and you're now living under apartheid, you don't give a shit that the Jewish grandson of someone from Ukraine who's now living in your old house was actually born in the same hospital you were. A hospital that won't see you anymore. That statistic about 75% of Israeli Jews being born there is an insult to anyone who has lived there for dozens of generations. Or ten. Or six. How does that make them superior? 

    Of course those people are going to react with violence. They have no alternative. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that was the inevitable outcome of creating a Jewish state on Arab land. Again, it was Arab land because that's who lived there for centuries before Western (aka Christian) powers gave it to the Jews. That they once lived there 2,000 years ago doesn't make it their land. The only way you can argue that it does is to subscribe to religious myth which, not coincidentally, was authored by the very people making the claim on said land. (Funny how that works, isn't it?)

    I don't care about the politics and as an American I'm really only exposed to Israeli propaganda. But I know my history. I also believe in the Constitution and the First Amendment. My solution, which I know will never happen, would be for everyone in Israel, including Gaza and the West Bank, to all be citizens of the same state with equal rights for all. But then it wouldn't be a Jewish state. So fucking what? It would be a true Western style democracy.

    (Yes, I realize that we're still struggling to live up to our own ideals. I wish we would do a better job of setting a good example for the rest of the world but the religious nuts keep fucking things up over here too.)

    • Like 2
  6. 55 minutes ago, SquishMitten said:

     


    That’s a bit far. The international community isn’t changing its entire view of NK because Trump is a dipshit. He’s likely going to continue fucking up this deal like many of us assumed, but he’s not adding legitimacy to them in the process. It’s not like the rest of the world leaders are sitting around thinking Trump is a reasonable person to deal with.

     

    That's not the audience Kim is performing for. 

  7. 44 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


    I’d laugh at the series of posts declaring victory and shitting all over those of us who said “expect the DPRK to go all DPRK”....but this shit isn’t funny. It never was.

    This is how things go when you expect that simpleton tactics and magical thinking will do what 60 years of diplomacy hasn’t. It’s not good. We need realistic and practical thinking and approaches to North Korea.

    And we’re not going to get them.

    I'm going to wait to gloat about being right all along until after the story has played out. Things could still change 

    Nothing that's happened so far has surprised me other than the American president acting like a fool, though. At least the three prisoners were freed. Let's enjoy that until the next batch are seized.  

  8. 26 minutes ago, TxEx99 said:

    I'm sorry are you talking about Israel or Saudi Arabia?  

    If they'd known about oil they never would've given the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula to the Saudis. Oops. 

  9. 24 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    I don’t believe they have a divine right to the land. The victors of ww2 gave them the land and they have had the military might to keep it. That is the reality that Hamas cannot accept. I completely agree with your second paragraph 

     

    the bolded sentence is pretty pretty ironic 

    The victors of WWII? Google the Balfour Declaration.

  10. 22 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    So fozz is your opinion Israel does not have a right to exist?

    Is it your belief that the God of Abraham actually exists and promised the land they call Israel to the Jews? Unless you believe that fairy tale, there is no reason for there to be such a thing as a Jewish state, especially not on Arab land.

    There's no reason to have a Christian state either, or an Islamic state, or a Hindu state, etc. There should be a wall separating church and state. Granting citizenship to anyone in the world who practices your religion, but not to people who have lived within your borders for centuries just because they practice a different religion, is immoral. 

    • Like 2
  11. No matter what happens, Trump will declare that it was awesome and historic and the best ever. No matter what happens, his followers will believe him and repeat it as gospel. 

  12. 34 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

    It will be interesting to see what happens to Trumpkins once Trump is out of power and the hubris, arrogance, and attention magnet aspect of the God Emperor is suddenly removed. Like suddenly turning down the blaring radio everyone is the car is singing along with. 

    I wondered something similar after Bush/Cheney. I thought surely we'd learned our lesson. Surely there was no way to move even more to the right. Yet here we are.

    I can't rule out the possibility that it will happen again. If we ever elect a president farther right of Trump then we probably will have witnessed our last election. 

  13. 4 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

    I heard its not a kidney thing. Some are saying she's getting some sort of plastic surgery. That entire fucking family has had more plastic surgery, botox, etc than an entire roster of porn stars.

    Eric should sue someone. 

  14. 27 minutes ago, ChickenSandwich said:

    if 100 years had passed since you were conquered, I'd say get on with it because you are never getting that land back.

    Lol. Are you seriously saying that in defense of Israel? If we'd followed that advice in 1917 then we wouldn't be having this problem. 

  15. 47 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    I haven't read this thread yet (and probably won't) but i have a question that may already have been covered:

    How is that we can give Israel $38B but we can't provide affordable healthcare in the US? 

    Because Jewish Americans make up a substantial voting bloc in the U.S. and Israel has a powerful lobby. 

  16. 4 hours ago, Aphelion said:

    The idea that Christianity is anti-science is a recent meme that is based on a complete disregarding of history.  Modern science is largely the progeny of Christian thinkers and the majority of the significant contributions to science are from Christians.  Here are just a few:  Roger Bacon (father of scientific method), Copernicus (heliocentrism, considered to have ushered in the scientific revolution), Kepler (elliptical planetary orbits, laws of planetary motion), Descartes (analytic geometry), Pascal (hydrostatics and fluid dynamics), Boyle (founder of modern chemistry), Newton (mathematics based physics, mechanics, universal gravitation, optics, calculus), Leibniz (symbolic logic, relative mechanics, calculus), Euler (analysis, mathematical function, analytic number theory, principle of least action), Cauchy (complex analysis, study of permutation groups in abstract algebra), Mendel (founder of modern science of genetics), Kelvin (one of the primary founders of thermodynamics, 2nd law of thermodynamics), Riemann (Riemannian geometry), Faraday, Maxwell (founder of electromagnetism), Cantor (set theory), Lemaitre (big bang theory), Heisenberg (uncertainty principle), Godel (incompleteness theorems).  

    Universities are also a development of Christian institutions.  Various academies and places of learning existed in ancient China, India, and Greece, but the modern degree-granting university where research was conducted began around the 12th century and was the product of Christian monasteries.

    “Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries.” – From University of Texas site on the origin of universities.  

    The oldest universities in both Europe and the US were founded as Christian institutions:  Oxford, University of Paris, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton.  Many were established as seminaries and for theological studies. 

    “From their monastic roots and through the nineteenth century, all universities were founded as Christian institutions, regardless of whether they taught law, theology, or medicine.  Until well into the nineteenth century, even with the growth of scientific studies, Western universities and colleges ‘almost always operated within theological boundaries.’”  - Alvin Schmidt

     

    The above is not meant to imply that Christians are somehow smarter or that nonbelievers do not contribute to science (they absolutely do).  But the idea that Christians on the whole are anti science or that Christianity is somehow pitted against science is nonsense.

     

    There are irrational folks in every significantly sized group of people.  There are plenty of agnosticism who think vaccinations cause autism.  This says nothing about agnosticism or agnostic people in general.  

    The vast majority of Christians are strong advocates for modern medicine.  Hospitals and the roots of modern medicine were also developed almost entirely by Christian organizations.  In-patient medical care in the sense of what we today consider a hospital was an invention driven by Christian mercy, starting with the Byzantines in the fourth century A.D. Some hospitals maintained libraries and training programs, and doctors compiled their medical and pharmacological studies in manuscripts. Byzantine hospital staff included the Chief Physician, professional nurses, and the orderlies. 

    “During these centuries [4th through 14th] the Christian faith . . . permeated all aspects of life in the West. The very conception of medicine, as well as its practice, was deeply touched by the doctrine and discipline of the Church. This theological and ecclesiastical influence manifestly shaped the ethics of medicine, but it even indirectly affected its science since, as its missionaries evangelized the peoples of Western and Northern Europe, the Church found itself in a constant battle against the use of magic and superstition in the work of healing. It championed rational medicine, along with prayer, to counter superstition.”  Albert Jonsen, University of Washington historian of medicine

    Bullshit. Religion and science are separate enterprises. Science is based on observable facts and no conclusion is held so sacred that it can't be overturned if evidence disproves it. Religion is based on faith and dare not be questioned. There is no scientific evidence for a soul. Virgin women in the First Century couldn't get pregnant. People dead for days can't be brought back to life. Germs cause disease. The Sun is the center of our solar system. 

    The cosmos is about 14.5 billion years old, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. All life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor and anatomically modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago based on our best evidence. New fossil discoveries could push that back. Regardless, humans have been living and procreating and dying for many tens of thousands of years before any religion currently practiced in this world was ever conceived. No matter what religion you practice, the notion that there is a sentient creator who waited that long before sharing its thoughts with its creation is absurd. 

    It's a recent Christian meme that science is somehow a Christian invention. The fact that Newton believed in God doesn't make physics a Christian invention. The fact that the church was a source of funding to pay for one's education, and working a job as a member of the clergy gave one time to conduct scientific research, doesn't make the science a religious enterprise. It wasn't because of the religion that the science got done. It was in spite of it. Contributions to science have been made by many people of many faiths, and by many people of no religious faith at all.

    Christianity tells you to pray and believe. Science tells you to think and question. You can do both, but when you're doing one you're not doing the other. 

    • Like 2
  17. 1 minute ago, Jhawk said:

    What could he do to convince you otherwise?

    Acknowledge that Russia committed an act of war against our democracy and take appropriate steps to punish them and ensure it doesn't happen again.

    For starters. 

  18. 1 minute ago, FondrenRoad said:

    You have to give Mary credit. She committed to her story instead of just coming clean about fucking the mailman. 

    Joseph could never show his face at the local pub. 

  19. 40 minutes ago, El Diablo said:

    How were the Egyptian pyramids built with what are by modern standards only rudimentary mechanical techniques? There are great mysteries from recent human history that we cannot explain. Well, can't explain unless one considers alien intervention and a deep abiding faith in Ra.

    We know the pyramids weren't built by Jewish slaves.

  20. 7 hours ago, Thetexashammer said:

    There is no contradiction between science and the church.

    Prior to the development of artificial insemination technology in the 18th century, the only way a human female could become pregnant was through sexual intercourse. A virgin pregnancy wasn't possible until the 1700's. 

    The human brain can survive for about six minutes without oxygen. After that time a clinically dead human cannot be revived. No human being who's been dead for more than several minutes has ever been brought back to life. 

    It's science that's resoundingly contradicted by church doctrine. 

  21. 2 hours ago, ChickenSandwich said:

    Adam Siver can get fucked trying to collect a Royalty from all wagers. It’s part of what makes your sport popular and if the NBA were gone tomorrow there would still be gambling. What a greedy fucker. 

    Leave them off the board for a year and watch them come crawling back. If you can legally bet on every sport but one, viewership of that one will suffer dramatically. 

    • Like 1
  22. 1 hour ago, Gil Bang said:

    The news is saying Melania just had a fairly serious surgery on her kidney today will be hospitalized for several days

    This presidency has been tough on my kidneys too. 

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