In a fashion which was probably highly unwise I actually went to the effort of trawling through and critically analyising this comment brawl.

Now to be fair their was intellectual shakiness on each side and neither seemed to display the level of self-awareness I think you need to adopt when approaching this endlessly turned-over and incessantly debate. But the Zionists struck me as especially incapable of rational coherency.

A good deal of this stems from their inability to put all their cards behind utilitarianism. Indeed, any such case is effectively impossible to stage without plunging into the worse of Millian excesses and declaring that the uneducated barbarians of the Gaza Strip are worth less in pleasure than the high minded Levanites who bombard them. Even Zionism hasn’t got anyone mad enough to argue that. It is fairly blatant that it is the IDF which is causing the overwhelming majority of suffering and death (250 to 1 says it all, really) and so they are left with either talking about the relatively uncommon event of a missle caused fatality (which risks emphasising the ease of focus since amount of deaths from this imprecise method of fire as compared to air strikes is so much smaller that the scale is a personal instead of mass one).

That’s fairly clearly never going to work since if it’s an anecdote war the Palestinians are, for once, heavily outgunning their oppressors. So the second approach is perhaps their strongest: that of legitimacy. Endlessly distinctions will be drawn between the stateless terrorists and the state actors of the relative sides. Somehow efforts to “sap” the Palestinian resolve do not constitute “terrorism”. Military efforts to achieve political ends via militant force are distinguishable from those perpetuated by the true terrorists since the organisation of Hamas is one which is anti-semitic and genocidal, while the IDF is merely an army and must be considered a protective tool rather than an aggressive organisation.

Of course this rather makes things problematic for those who advocate Two State Solutions seeing as Hamas would be in power if the Palestinian state was a democracy (indeed, even if it was not they would probably defeat Fatah military, as they have done previously) and therefore the creation of a separate Palestinian state would simply be the creation of a Palestinian Defence Force with equivalant legitimacy to the Israli version. Which is why that is unlikely ever to occur.

But this is made especially awkward given that Israel’s firmest backers are American. The irony here is quite overwhelming. Here poster LFC invites us to:

Imagine a fully armed and organized 100,000 man army under Hamas. Do you think this is “better” than what Israel faces now?

I’m not sure about “better”, LFC, but that sounds like the sort of force that could wage a War of Independence.

However to be fair to the pro-Israelites the second strand of their argument can not be understood fully without their third: that each side has different motivations and therefore we must treat the actual consequences of their actions as substantially distinct bodies. The outcomes of Israeli policy and of Palestinian can not be compared directly and the context of the intent of the actors is of the highest importance.

In other words its a fairly twisted piece of deontology, which suggests that somehow the IDF is free from cause & effect while Hamas is not. Hamas must be held responsible for their (occasional) killing of civilians while the IDF are entirely at liberty to arrange raids where they know civilian death will occur. The amount of agony caused is an irrelevance so long as it is accidental. Inept execution of intent to kill is worth ending unconnected human life over.

How exactly this fails to distort entirely the meaningfulness of death and the value of a sentient being is utterly beyond me.

Furthermore this also often leads to the unfortunate that the Israelis no less than a blog commenteer in favour of their behaviour:

Palestinian suicide bombers directly targeted civilians. The IDF tries to kill military who unfortunately hide within civilians. Hamas tried to goad the IDF into responding in the hopes that civilians would be killed. The IDF responded and were in the propaganda cycle now.

So are we to understand that the IDF and its masters were all somehow unaware that assailing the Palestinians would bolster support for the Palestinians? That this would thus exacerbate the crisis and assure further footsoldiers for the Gaza Strip? Or are they simply unaware of the fact that massive loss of innocent life is occuring?

(That is the only argument I could feasibly accept for this: ignorance. Unfortunately…)

Strand four is the simplest: as we can not tell who has been killed and belongs to Hamas and who has been killed and does not it is assumed that the IDF was successful in its discriminate use of such an indiscriminate weapon as large amounts of high explosive delivered from a great height.

Not, I think we can agree, the safest of assumptions. But it seems that a large amount of weight rests upon it given the quantity of occasions that this action is couched in the terms of smashing Hamas instead of massive scale bombing killing everyone in the area struck, as bombs truly do tend to.

Naturally when this is accepted at all the standard line is to blame Hamas for their “perfidy”. What I am interested in is how a civilian based battle force could do anything but surround themselves with other civilians. They are not a distinguished military force in the official sense and it would be making themselves fairly obvious to present themselves in so blatant a way as purchasing distinct property. Now I am not going to act apologist for this bunch of low-life theocrats but I do wonder if distinguishing themselves physicially from their cover isn’t expecting a little too much of these asymmetric warriors.

And it is hardly as if Israel is unaware of this practice. Nor is it the case that the Palestinian population is filled with members of Hamas. Voters? Unquestionably, due to their hard-line on the people starving and pumping excrement towards the Palestinians, they have massive electoral support. But the Labour Party has far more voters than members, as does any other British Party.

Which leads us, inexorably, back to an earlier point: either it is acceptable to “punish” Palestinians for their views over who should run their country, to cow them into backing someone less hostile to Israel, to back state terrorism which sees these individuals as a collective to be battered and converted via attrition, or else hundreds of innocents are dying in an accident everyone is capable of predicting and continuing to .

And even this is politely disregarding the children of Palestine, as the ardent & partisan Zionists would doubtless have us do, who will remain forever unaffiliated.

For the most part the row triggered by talking about this issue isn’t worth the row, but with over 200 dead I am prepared to make a seasonal exception. This scale of killing is absurdly disproportionate. If Israel imagines that it can kill of the widespread support for Hamas (a democratically elected body) in this fashion they have failed to learn from the distinct absence of success when they adopted much the same strategy over the past decade.

If you want a shot of despair then try reading this.

My choice quotes:

Even if the end figure of deaths has more naughts at the end, I am still in support of Israel’s response.

And:

Hamas had it coming. They are completely to blame.

Well let us hope that only Hamas were killed in these effectively indscriminate killings over 200+…

Rupert has a plan:

I think I have a pair of slightly mouldering size 12s which should just fit the parcel. Gordon may expect a package shortly, once the post sorts itself out…

I may have spotted this a little late in the day. Worth putting up, though:

FREE THE SHMINISTIM – ISRAEL’S YOUNG CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS. The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories. Join Ronnie Gilbert, Adrienne Rich, Robert Meeropol, Adam Hochschild, Rabbi Lynn Gottleib, Howard Zinn, Rela Mazali, Debra Chasnoff, Ed Asner and Aurora Levins-Morales and show your support by contacting the Israeli Minister of Defense.

The concept of conscription is one I find abhorrent. The state exists to protect and enhance the freedom of every individual. And yet to compel any individual into a situation where they might have to kill, and might be killed is surely the greatest possible infringement of liberty. Especially when this compulsion targets a particular section of society that has only just gained the ability to influence that state through the vote.

(Hat-tip: BenSix)

The tiresome smears of Chavez are seemingly endless. Here he is conflated with the far more dubious dictator Raul Castro and described as “obviously no democrat” (which is why he honoured a referendum he lost by less than a percentage point). A sterling response by Cleve Jones was issued and Andrew Sullivan excidedly describes him as a “Vicious homophobe.”

As ever, the evidence provided is precisely nil. The bizarre dedication of various figures to declaring Chavez a dracon is most odd. I have seen far fewer state the same about the president of Mexico, who rests upon a far shakier mandate. Yet someone who has reigned triumphant in a series of elections by vast margins is to be treated as a totalitarian.

Something to do with his approach to oil, perhaps?

I read with great interest that the Guardian thinks that Barack Obama “Risks sounding cocky” by outlining his plans for Presidency. This despite it being a tradition for plausible participants in a presidential election declaring “When I am president…”

Now the only difference is that McCain is not within that category.

Endeavour, comrades, to find some pity for that most wretched of creatures: the intellectual conservative.

The excellent Glenn Greenwald notes the GOP suddenly watering down their former favourite line. The loss of old standards can cast a political party adrift at the best of times {just witness the woe that has befallen the Conservative Party now their “small state” rhetoric is the exact opposite of what the public desires} but when it is one as widely despised and intellectually vapid as the Republican Party it is hard to imagine any way back out of the wilderness. To propose another Buckley as required would be an understatement and clearly insuffecient. They seem more in need of a Bernstein.

McCain supporters take on…Some McCain supporters.

Glad to see that the more rational side of McCain’s campaign are purging the nut-jobs. I wonder, though, what it is that attracted them there.

Oh yeah, and the long pause when they were asked to support their accusations amused me.

As you can probably tell, I’m not getting a lot of spare time here. Certainly not enough to write much worth reading, but neither enough to follow politics as closely as I once used to. One of the rare sites still worth delaying essays for is fivethirtyeight, which I really can not commend highly enough. They are a mixture of hard stat crunching and annecdotal excellence, of the sort you can only get from a website that has taken to both carefully analysing and amalgamating figures and sending a team all around every swing state in the country.

The results are passages like this:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

Accompanied with the best consideration of the latest polling you’ll find anywhere on the internet.

I imagine that I’ll give up on them for at least two years after November but for the time being they’ve got a machine nobody else can match.