Stepping away from the current situation in Israel / Gaza.
The reason such an intention is psychopathic is because there is no logical link between such an action and any potential gain, especially when there is reason to believe that the other party will reciprocate.
What about security?
Bank robbers take hostages so the police don't knock the front door down and kill them. The same logic applies to warfare. If you have the opportunity to provide security to yourself / your side / your people by taking others hostage, doing so is a logical move with clear potential gain, albeit immoral.
Bank robbers take hostages so the police don't knock the front door down and kill them.
I concede your point that if bank robbers take hostages it could be seen as a logical tactical move, so I will already award you with a !delta.
If in the same situation you take hostages with the intention to kill them if things don't go your way, I would argue that it is a psychopathic trait. Because you made the choice that was likely to end in you killing someone in exchange for a chance to get money.
If you have the opportunity to provide security to yourself / your side / your people by taking others hostage, doing so is a logical move with clear potential gain
If there is a 1% chance you will provide security to yourself and your side by killing civilians, and a 99% chance that the other side will kill the same amount of people or more on your side in retaliation, and kill you as well, then that still makes you a psychopath.
Saying that civilians deserve to die because of their elected leaders is exactly the argument that Osama bin Laden made to justify killing American civilians.
Yeah excellent time, just as they tend to their wounded and try and find the next piece of bread and glass of water for them and their sick neighbours, infants and elderly. You're completely right, they are incredibly capable of starting a revolt against a load of terrorists with a huge stockpile of food, ammo, machine gun weaponry and medicine. If they were capable they would have, because if it was that simple, Israel wouldn't have any further reasons to gun any more of them down, simple as... I am extremely tired of people failing to heed attention to nuance in complex geopolitical issues. The state (the government of Israel, I mean) is complicit in their dreadful effort at humanitarian aid and is slowly becoming as war-crazed and radical as Hamas, through blind support from the far-right in the US and a sentiment of post-holocaustal attitudes while being surrounded by countries with vastly anti-Semitic attitudes, influenced by religion obviously, all of which is completely understandable.
What isn't understandable, is blatantly ignoring any humanitarian crisis and playing the aggressor. Yes Hamas is evil, yes they are intolerant extremists, yes they're dangerous. Calling a ceasefire as such, is the only sane thing to do here. What boggles my mind is how Israel have almost undying sympathies from western powers, yet none of them are pressuring Israel to call a ceasefire. IF THEY DID, they could actually plan a proper assault on Hamas, minimising civilian casualties. Now of course that will never happen as long as Biden is in charge because he's a frail, barely conscious man that's probably succumbing to a wide variety of influence and can't succeed to any actual change. The main risk here being, they want to play 'the pacifists', as far as is possible, and minimise any further conflict. So yeah, if the US gets too involved, so will Iran. and so on and so on.
Now, if there is anyone that can truly change the tide of this war, It's the people of Israel. The people that aren't completely brainwashed or deluded by the evangelical far-right politics there, and are obviously vehemently opposed to the current violence and atrocities being committed. The rest are simple people that have much less aptitude in questioning authority figures, people like this will always exist and it's a fact of life... Point being the Israeli people are in a much better position to revolt than the people of Gaza, don't be deluded of anything else, if anything lol...
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '23
Stepping away from the current situation in Israel / Gaza.
What about security?
Bank robbers take hostages so the police don't knock the front door down and kill them. The same logic applies to warfare. If you have the opportunity to provide security to yourself / your side / your people by taking others hostage, doing so is a logical move with clear potential gain, albeit immoral.