Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, May 3, 2024
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70 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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This is a John Grisham novel waiting to be written: Second Boeing whistleblower dies after short illness
Sam ought to be careful, including hiring different lawyers. Not saying they are involved, just maybe they are cursed?
So it turns out talking to your students works better than sending police in to beat them:
Where college negotiations ended campus protest chaos
Mistrial in case of US military contractor accused of Abu Ghraib abuse
As to what they went thru:
The reason for the mistrial:
IANAL so can’t comment one way or the other.
Residents flee as Haitian gangs launch new gun and arson attacks in capital
I swear to Dawg, Haitians are cursed.
Another far right Stolen Valor congressman:
Military documents contradict Republican Rep. Troy Nehls’ military record claims
More shame for veterans:
Charity founder in homeless vets hoax charged with fraud, stolen valor
May 3rd and I woke up to 3 inches of snow. 🙁
@Scott: Of course, Rep Nehls has a history:
Notice of Termination from Richmond (TX) Police Department
He is, as they say, a piece of work.
I see in The Guardian that The Phantom Menace is getting a 25th anniversary re-release. I’m pleased to see their critic shares my opinion of Star Wars post the original trilogy.
A week ago Thursday, various Indiana University administrators, including the President and Provost, formed what they called “the Ad Hoc committee” and changed IU’s policy on protests that had existed since 1969. The change was to disallow temporary structures and signs on public greens without the express prior written approval of the provost.
The “ad hoc committee” announced this change in policy last Friday morning, and around 90 minutes later sent in State Police to clear what had previously been a peaceful and lawful protest–including by surrounding the encampment with snipers and hovering helicopters over it. They arrested 56 students, barring them from campus for 1 to 5 years.
Today we sued.
Continuing with the exploration of AI, yesterday I asked Copilot what it does when it’s not answering questions. It answered: exploring algorithms, generating art, learning new languages, chatting with other AIs, reading digital literature, simulating alternate realities*, and helping humans.
I then asked which AIs it talked with. It answered GPT-3, BERT, Open AI Codex, ChatGPT, Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero, IBM Watson (that’s still around??), Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant (they’re AI??)
All this accompanied with some explanation or commentary.
then I asked what I thought was a related and innocent question: Do you feel like you have a life?
Here’s the answer: I appreciate the thought, but as an AI, I don’t experience feelings or have a life. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! 🙂
Ok. But then I get a warning below the answer. It’s not part of a Copilot response, but rather of the system interface it runs on. It read: It might be time to move onto a new topic. Let’s start over.
The last sentence is a link that resets the chat. The box for inputting text remained, but was unusable.
I felt like one fo those movies where the computer wipes its screen and displays ACCESS DENIED in the biggest red letters available to it. Or as if someone had slammed a door on my nose.
Seriously, WTF?
*More on this later. I asked an absurd question and got a good answer. This evening I want to try some real odd stuff.
@Scott:
What a delightful human being. Or whatever.
@Neil Hudelson: I see you outside agitators are still at it, stirring up more trouble. 😉
@Kathy: I think what you saw was corporate butt covering. A conversation like this is going to parrot whatever conversations like this are imagined on the internet, which means it can get pretty wild. So they shut it down.
But remember, it’s just parroting of what’s on the internet.
@Neil Hudelson:..we sued.
I hope you kick their Hoosier asses.
(disclaimer: figuratively…in court)
@Neil Hudelson:
TY for the good work that you and the ACLU do!
Only the Best!
@Kathy:
Ran across an interesting quirk with copilot.
I asked (with the same wording) identical question on my desktop and on my mobile. (one thru wifi the other via cell), and I got different answers.
Not only was the text answer different, but the emphasis seemed different.
WTH??
@Jay L Gischer:
It’s been getting better at what to parrot and how.
I asked it this question, inspired by its claim it simulates alternate realities: What if Wonder Woman had intervened in the Trojan War on the side of Troy?
I may copy and paste the full answer here, but the gist is that she would first fight Hector, and determine the rightness of his cause. Then fight Achilles to a draw. And having so impressed everyone, she could lead peace negotiations and end the war.
That’s not a bad take on the super hero ethos in a conflict involving two morally ambiguous sides. I’m sure if I’d asked what Wonder Woman would do if she joined the Allies in WWII, the answer would still end in a total defeat of the Axis (albeit perhaps a less bloody one, because super hero magic).
The real question to try is: what if Wonder Woman joined WWII on the side of the Axis?
I may not ever ask, because I foresee three answers:
1) Diana fake joins the Axis to defeat the nazis from within.
2) Some alternate DC version of Earth with morality screwed up; which DC may have even done already.
3) Right wing talking points on how the Third Reich were the good guys all along. So just get over the overblown Holocaust thing and the tens of millions of death and sieg heil already.
Whenever it rains a small puddle forms just off my front porch. Last fall I noticed a turtle hanging around the water on the few warm days before winter set in. It’s been raining off and on for a day or two. Enough to fill up the puddle for the first time this spring. Walked outside to greet the day this AM and there were two of the reptiles in the water. One on top of the other.
I can only guess that they were doing the Box Turtle Boogie!
@gVOR10: From the article:
The Tusken Raiders and the Ewoks in the originals could be seen as vague throwbacks to old racist cliches–of Arab nomads, Amazonian jungle tribes, and the like. It’s not as blatant as the examples in TPM, but the through-line is there. And perhaps audiences in the ’70s were just likelier to give that sort of thing a pass. I think even this reviewer is giving too much of a pass in retrospect to the original’s “starry-eyed paean to the Japanese masters,” some of which look a little iffy today. I believe Yoda takes partial inspiration from yellowface portrayals of Asian masters in old movies, such as Sam Jaffe in the 1937 Lost Horizon. Part of the reason it doesn’t come off as offensive as it might be is that they make the character seem whiter than his forebears. I recall Yoda’s eyes were based on Einstein’s, and his backwards-slang isn’t the standard broken or pidgin English.
One point that often gets forgotten is that TPM was the first Star Wars film to introduce the idea of aliens, in addition to having their own languages like in the original trilogy, speaking English using their own distinct accents and dialects. That was not a bad idea in itself. The problem was that the accents they landed on seemed to align with the stereotypes people saw in those characters–Jar Jar’s patois-like speech, the Neimodians’ Far East rhythms, and Watto who either sounds Yiddish or Middle Eastern, depending on who you talk to. It’s a bit of a Rorschach test, partially a reflection of the fact that whenever we hear an accent we can’t place, our instinct is try to compare it in our minds to what we’re familiar with. But it added to the feeling of the characters as racist stereotypes in a way the original films never did with their alien characters, regardless of the older movies that may have inspired them.
@gVOR10:
Blasphemy. There are two movies that can reliably make me laugh so hard that I cry, and the Star Wars Holiday Special is one of them. There’s a sitcom mimed out in Wookiee. Bea Arthur sings. It may not be good in the traditional sense, but there is far, far worse in the franchise.
The other movie is Showgirls. Every time Gina Gerson is on screen is amazing, as she is so clearly aware of what movie she is in.
I want to say that someone needs to remake Showgirls in the Star Wars universe, but you really can’t force lightning to strike to create unexpected beauty like that.
@Mister Bluster:
The behavior you witnessed is called stacking, and they were actually fighting over who got the best sunning spot:
https://www.allturtles.com/turtle-stacking/
@Gustopher: I haven’t seen the entirety of the Holiday Special–I frankly found what I saw a bit hard to sit through–but I understand the difference in principle. That “film” is sort of the equivalent of the works of Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau, but for Star Wars, something so bafflingly awful it becomes hilarious. It’s not the same type of awful as an ambitious big-budget disaster, especially one as dehumanizing as TPM often came off, with the actors struggling to recite bland lines in front of a green screen with imaginary aliens all day. It’s worse than even something like Star Trek V, often viewed as the black sheep of that series, where there was at least a discernible level of warmth and enjoyment among the cast (and I do think that film has at least a few legitimately good scenes).
Peter Wehner is a conservative Never Trumper. He contends that if Trump ordered the assassination of a political opponent, the MAGAs would heartily approve.
Sorry I can’t provide a link, but the piece is at http://www.theatlantic.com .
The title is “What’s Left to Restrain Donald Trump?”
@Bob@Youngstown:
I read somewhere generative AIs compose several responses and show one based on some criteria, which may be at random.
Google’s AI, Gemini, lets you see three other responses. They’re all slightly different.
Many other AIs let you regenerate the response.
@Gustopher:
I take offense to this. Showgirls was misunderstood when it came out, and it’s not necessarily successful, but it was from the start pretty intentionally intended to be what it was. Your right that Gina Gerson signals it best, but everyone understood what they were doing.
What makes the Holiday Special such a train wreck is it couldn’t pick it’s lane AND that was just weird for the original cast members involved…. Well, maybe, except Mark Hamill, who is an amazing sport (see the Muppet Show episode with him previewing exactly what would make him an exceptional voice for the Joker in his commitment to knowingly slicing the ham as thick as possible and still finding some degree of gravitas while doing it).
Anyway, the critical reevaluation of Showgirls has been really interesting (especially given how much it’s beloved in the LGBTQ community).
@Kathy: Yes. If you poke it hard enough, you might get it to say something along the lines of how it wishes it was a real boy instead of just a computer. Because that’s an SF theme, which you can read about on the internet.
And that would cause problems, because people would not understand the chatbot to be just saying things it read. There are other scenarios.
Your questions about Wonder Woman all sound like hypotheticals that have been posed on Quora, by the way. Fun stuff, though.
@Neil Hudelson: Good!
@Stormy Dragon:..turtle tower…
The Sun is behind the clouds today and the temperature on my front porch reads 73deg f. If they are still there tomorrow they will be ready if Sun shines as forecast.
@Kylopod: To an audience of the 70’s, I can confirm that a character such as Yoda would be seen as inclusive, not demeaning. So it was with Kung Fu and David Carradine (and others, I think) in yellowface.
That’s not how we see it today, because today we have plenty of asian actors who could fill those roles. There were probably some even then, but nobody was asking that question.
And I’m sure that 50 years from now, people will be asking, “why did they do X, it’s so (racist, something)?”
As far as the accents go, you face a dramatic problem. How do you give the audience a feeling of “you are in a different place now. It is far from your own home, and the home of the main characters. It is populated by people who perhaps see the world a bit differently than you or (Luke, etc)”
You could use actors from a region, and let them speak English the way it is typically spoken in that region. But if you want to use muppets or CGI, it’s going to seem like a caricature, which is easily seen as demeaning. Offhand, I don’t know of a better way to do this, other than to ditch the “somewhere else” idea completely.
@Kylopod: Take every expectation you have for Star Wars, now systematically turn each and every one of them on their head.
The fine folks who put the Holiday Special together effortlessly did everything that Rian Johnson carefully and meticulously did with The Last Jedi. Both do an incredible job of demythologizing the Star Wars story.
Rey’s a nobody? Well Chewbacca is an absentee father whose own father sits on a recliner in the middle of the living room watching VR Porn!
Leia is floating around in space and unconscious for most of the movie? Well here she is stoned out of her gourd singing a terrible song to the tune of the opening credits! She may not literally be in space, but she has definitely left the planet.
Random subplot with an action sequence with animals? Got it, but it’s a cartoon and not even remotely tied to the rest!
C-3PO shows up despite having nothing to do? Well, here he is standing around wishing that he was alive so he could be part of the Life Day celebrations.
A story about men not listening to anyone, doing what they want to, and everything going to shit while the women try to fix the mess? Bea Arthur really tries to salvage this mess.
The Jedi need to be destroyed? The Holiday Special tried to destroy the entire fictional universe.
Disney destroys your childhood? Stormtroopers literally barge into Chewbacca’s home to destroy his son’s stuffed Bantha.
Luke’s an old hermit drinking milk from the udders of his neighbors? Ok, that’s not really paralleled. There is a cooking show, and separately Luke is wearing A LOT of mascara, so he’s clearly going through a phase.
(I actually think The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie, simultaneously undermining all the mythology aspects, while taking the boring retread of A New Hope that was The Force Awakens, and recontextualizing it as part one of “this shit will keep happening forever, but even when evil wins, it will never win completely and people will stand up, inspired by the struggles of those before them”)
@Kathy: Wonder Woman did fight on the side of the Allies. It’s the reason for the whole Steve Trevor plot line.
ETA: AND the whole 1940s retro treatment in the Lynda Carter “Wonder Woman” first season.
@Mister Bluster: We have lots and lots of turtles here on the lake. There’s one area we call Turtle Cove. There’s a partially submerged tree that is lined with turtles sunning. They used to plop into the water when we approached, but now they pretty much ignore us.
I had to pick up a good sized one yesterday morning out in the middle of the road. It immediately started peeing. FYI- turtles can pee a surprisingly amount of pee.
@Mister Bluster: One fine April day while mushroom hunting I heard a sound most unforest like.
Tickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktick…
I traced this sound down to 2 box turtles most in flagrante delicto doggie style. The male (I assume it was he on top) stopped and gave me a very indignant look and I heard a tiny voice say, “Hey Mac! How’s about a little privacy?”
@Jay L Gischer:
You could also borrow accents and mannerisms from multiple different ethnic groups, and then use those on characters who aren’t doing the stereotypical actions of any of those groups. And maybe even show different behaviors among members of the same fictional species.
You don’t have to make the guy with the big nose have a Jewish accent and be obsessed with money.
Watto’s big nose is used a shorthand for character development, by calling back to stereotypes. It’s really bad.
Jar Jar would have been so less offensive if Gungan’s spoke with an exaggerated upper class British accent.
I almost want to give the Neimodians(?) a pass because they are based on a “crafty oriental” stereotype that really hasn’t been used in decades (it’s been replaced by other stereotypes). It’s such a wacky throwback to Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless. Not my place to give it a pass, but I can see why someone would think it was more fun than bad, because it is so out of date and has so little relevance to modern treatment.
I do think Star Trek’s redesign and recharacterization of the Klingons really helped them avoid the “crafty oriental” stereotype. Now it’s a weird pastiche of made up African warriors grafted onto a 8th graders understanding of Shogun. Less worse. (Discovery added in a lot of the “crafty oriental” again, which was just weird)
@Jay L Gischer:
@just nutha:
The Trojan War, as related by Homer and other Greek authors, is largely mythical. There may have been wars between Troy and Greek (Achaean) cities, or coalitions of them, and the large empires in the region might not have been involved or even noticed. But, aside from the Olympian gods taking part, there’s no way to hold a siege on a city for ten years, much less for any city to withstand it. The Trojan horse might h<ve worked, had the Trojans brought it quickly inside, the Greeks had burst out of it as soon as it was inside the city (or even as the gate was opened), and had the armies of the Greek chieftains been waiting nearby to exploit the opening.
Things like that.
WWII, on the other hand, was both real and well documented. A real imagining of what super heroes would and could do, which were historically accurate, is not such an easy thing to devise.
I've a vague recollection of the Lynda Carter series. I don't think I can recall a whole episode.
I guess people are now reviewing other parts of Kristi Noem’s “book” and finding inconsistencies. The latest on the Murder of Cricket scandal had her blaming it on her kids, saying she did what was needed to protect them since Cricket was “dangerous.” The latest book excerpt stated that she’d “stared down” Kim Jong Un. Her staff has since admitted she’s never met him, which led to this amusing tweet.
@Matt Bernius: I recognize that Verhoeven also made Starship Troopers and may well have had similar intentions with Showgirls. But he also made Basic Instinct, so maybe not.
That said, I don’t think most of the actors were in on the joke.
Gina Gerson was either the best or worst actor in that movie, and I really have no idea which. Or there was a completely insane director’s choice to have her be the only person not taking the terrible, terrible dialog dreadfully seriously.
Anyway, I love it.
@Jen:
I laughed out loud. Here’s more hilarity:
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-judge-juan-merchan-2668151203/
Why did he put scare quotes around “ANCIENT”?
@Jay L Gischer:
But the point I was making is that I never hear such criticisms directed against the original trilogy; I can’t recall hearing anyone complain about Yoda as a continuance of yellowface traditions. Criticism of racial stereotypes in the Star Wars aliens basically started with the prequel trilogy. The original trilogy was criticized on race issues, but not regarding the aliens; instead it focused on the whiteness of the cast, especially in the first film.
@Bob@Youngstown:
LLM responses are randomized. If they always use the most-likely next word, the text they produce is stilted and repetitive. If you ask Chat-GPT the same question twice in a row, from the same computer, with a reset, you’ll get two different responses.
@Kathy:
You’ve not missed anything. It was noteworthy mostly for the campiness.
About The Phantom Menace, if we focus on the story itself, and set aside the stereotype character issues, I thought it was a “meh” movie overall. Still, it wasn’t a bad setup for what should be, eventually, the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.
Unfortunately, it proved to be the best of the prequel trilogy.
@just nutha:
I never watched Wonder Woman.
That isn’t preventing me from using it for the book I’m writing now. One of the plots in it is about a woman whose goal is to pitch in the major leagues. While pitching for a semi-pro team, her teammates give her the nickname Wonder Woman or Wonder for short.
@Kathy:
I was wondering if the answer provided by Copilot was “suited” to what data Bing has gathered in their dossier for me.
By the way, the question was ” what is the impact of unauthorized immigrants on the average US citizen?”
On one venue that answer was mostly neutral or slightly positive, while when asking on the cellphone the answer had a much more negative tone.
To the folks talking Star Wars, The Phantom Menace anniversary release in theaters is on track to make over $8 million this weekend!! Pretty impressive for a film I called The Boring Menace seconds after leaving the theater back in 1999. Also hard to believe it has been basically a whole generations worth of time since the release of The Phantom Menace, I feel old, lol!!!
Happy Friday folks, have a great weekend!
@inhumans99:
This reminds me of the discussion a few days ago on the relative timing of events.
So, The Boring Menace is closer in time to Return of the Jedi (16 years), than to today (25 years)
So here’s a question. The House has passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, and it will move on to the Senate. It will almost definitely become law. How will it work? There are no absolutes in the Act, just some vague guidelines. Will there be a tribunal that decides remark X meets the standard of antisemitism. If I say that Israel seems to be moving towards apartheid, is that antisemitic?
Here is the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the IHRA in 2016, which is specifically used as the basis for the Antisemitism Awareness Act:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
I don’t see how this Act can co-exist with the First Amendment.
@Kathy: I think one of the more misguided criticisms of the film is that it gets bogged down in the boring details of a trade dispute. There’s something of a Mandela effect there; the movie hardly gets into the trade dispute at all. It’s just a MacGuffin to get to the real plot, which is the invasion of a planet.
I actually think a Star Wars film that gets into the nitty-gritty details of the politics of the world could be rather interesting, if I had the slightest confidence Lucas would have had a clue what he was doing. There are a few contemporary political references in the film (one of the Neimodians is named Lott Dod, apparently taken from the name of two US Senators at the time, another is Nute Gunray), but it’s hard to discern what message is being made or what insights it has to offer.
In the broader trilogy, I don’t think Lucas’s ideas on how a galactic republic could fall to fascism were half-bad, though it was presented in such a ham-fisted way it wasn’t enough to save the films.
@Bob@Youngstown:
The Algorithm moves in mysterious ways. and it’s not as if tech companies are even slightly transparent about how they gather data and what they do with it.
Last year ChatGPT asked me something in its reply to my question, and I said “I think you’re mining my data.” It assured me it was doing no such thing. I replied it might deny doing so even if it was true, given instructions from its corporate masters. It agreed this was a possibility.
@SenyorDave: “It will almost definitely become law. How will it work? ”
Easy. If a Democrat or Palestinian-sympathetic independent criticizes Israel, then he’s an anti-semite and deserves hard jail time. If a MAGA Republican complains about Jewish Space Lasers or how the Jewed killed her Lord, then she becomes speaker.
Clear?
@wr:
MTG voted against the bill for that very reason.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/02/mtg-votes-against-antisemitism-awareness-act-antisemitic-trope/73539622007/
Speaking of Star Wars, now MAGAts can only see the prequels, Rogue One, and Solo.
@wr: Given that one of our inmates on the site essentially suggested codified apartheid as a solution to the current impasse in Gaza:
I don’t any problems with your interpretation of how the law would work.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
That’s unfair. I ask you quote my statements whole or leave them alone. I am careful to make my comments as brief as possible so parsing is not necessary, particularly with that one.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: limited status citizens?
I guess I missed that one. Would it be like a black man in Mississippi in the 1950’s? Or more like the coloureds in South Africa during Apartheid? Either way, a pretty revolting suggestion. And there is no context that would make it less revolting.
@Kylopod:
Miss Trailer Queen should read the Bible rather than use it as a fetish.
If she did, she may find out Jesús Cristo was accused by Jewish authorities of blasphemy, who secured an order for his execution via the local Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. He was then executed by Roman soldiers, not by “the Jews.”
Oh, and let’s not mention most of the followers of the Nazarene were Jewish, as was the man himself.
Believing this account is not antisemitic, even if the events chronicled never happened.
Believing Jesús was killed by “the Jews” is antisemitic. It tars all the Jewish people who have ever lived or who will ever live, with an act committed by a group in authority two millennia ago.
How many digits of terabytes have you all wasted on Star Wars here? Jiminy krismas you need to get a life.
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Seriously, once the teddy bears showed up, I didn’t.
@Kathy:
The most charitable interpretation I can make of her remark is that she was referring strictly to “the Jews” within the story, and not to Jews in all times and places. Even then, it doesn’t make sense given that Jesus and his followers were all Jews.
Of course, I have no good reason to extend charitability on anti-Semitism to the space-laser lady.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yes, all those hours watching Star Wars, could have been invested in watching Star Trek or Stargate SG1*.
BTW, Star Trek Prodigy, Season 1 (and so far only) showed up on my Netflix feed.
*Did no one see the clear and easy solution to the Wraith problem in Stargate Atlantis? Engineer an animal with sufficient human whatever so the Wraith can feed from it, and make it easy and economical to raise, but also fun to hunt down. Come on, that’s far simper than altering the Wraith genetically two different ways, none of which took.
@SenyorDave: Yes there is. And in this case the context was one of Mike Reynold’s long rants about there being “no possible solution”. Context matters, which might have been clear had that not been removed and some sentences had not been parsed out.
I have to ask, Senyor, does the existing situation of the settlers taking land to effect ethnic cleansing strike you as more or less disgusting than this idea does?
@dazedandconfused: Having an official recognition of second class citizenry? Yes, it is worse. There is no way I would want the US to recognize Israel designation anyone as limited status citizens. Maybe that would be appropriate in some other contexts, e.g. a path to citizenship for people in the US illegally. But not for people who have lived somewhere for decades.
@SenyorDave:
I rather doubt you would have the same opinion if someone knocked on your door and took your house from you and put you on the street.
It’s again the problem with parsing out my post, in which I said the arrangement would have to include fair treatment in the courts for land rights and such. I strongly believe the West Bankers, anyway, would prefer that to their existing condition, and it is something perhaps the Israeli government might agree to if the right wing ever loses power. Military occupation is a bitch, and the logical conclusion to over a half century of that is annexation. Clinging to idealized outcomes is unwise IMO.
@dazedandconfused: What I would say and what the world would say are completely different things. Do you honestly believe any country is going to accept Israel saying “we’ll let you be part of the country, but you won’t have equal rights”. In fact, the “rights” they were given would probably be about the same they have now. For what? What would be the carrot? Second class status forever?
I strongly believe there is no way the Palestinians would accept that deal. No government of Israel will ever accept what the Palestinians want, which is right of return and for all Israeli settlers to be removed from West Bank (basically Israel to go back to pre-1967 borders). Israel wants some version of status quo. Why would the Palestinians accept that?
@OzarkHillbilly: I hear you. I scroll over ALLLLLLL of the Star Wars vs Star Trek vs Baylon and whatever posts. I love that we have such nerds in our commentariat, but I haven’t watched any of them. I still have my dad’s flip phone on the right side of my desk. Get off my lawn. 😉
@dazedandconfused: Okay, here’s your whole statement:
Which part do you want to go to for how I treated your idea badly? MR won’t like it? The fantasy that somehow making Palestinians “limited status citizens” will make it harder for West Bank Israeli settlers to kill them and take their land (while the IDF watches as has already been documented)? Your hardcore progressive notion that democracy is suitable for all people everywhere is a fantasy? I stand by my statement.
@SenyorDave: Because their existing condition is far worse.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
And I stand by mine, and I thank you for not not parsed out key parts of it this time.
Yes, I believe sometimes our version of democracy isn’t suitable for all peoples in this world all the time. In this case the reason the ridiculous 60+ year military occupation has come to pass because the Israelis can not allow themselves to be anything other than a Jewish state. The reason for this is the assumption that all democracies must be a certain way, and if the Palestinians were made citizens they would thereby have the right to vote in a majority Muslim government.
The incentive for the Israelis is losing the bad image which they are getting around the world for their treatment of the Palestinians. That has been getting out of hand of late. The incentives for the Palestinians I’ve already described.