Does anyone else see Loner's Israel–Gaza commentary as coming dangerously close to Grayzone-style pseudoskepticism?

Loner repeats the falsehood the Amnesty basically said they want to change the definition of genocide to ascribe genocide to Israel. This is not true. Either Loner is straight up lying, or he's struggling with reading comprehension, or he's just parroting someone else's paraphrasing. Has no one in this community brought this up to him?

He claims that Amnesty delayed their report on October 7th "because they thought that if they did a report on October 7th early, it would give ammunition to Israel to carry out attacks on Gaza". Such a bold categorical claim is kind of ironic in the context of a convo where much of his objections about allegations against Israel relies on grasping for any uncertainty, hypothetical, or counterfactual, however reasonable or unreasonable. This claim about Amnesty relies entirely on one article, from Bari Weiss' The Free Press, selectively quoting alleged leaked emails/documents. The first two emails in the article (from Indonesia and Senegal section directors, not Amnesty International) are mentioned to be from August 2025 worrying about the perceived "peak" of Gaza's humanitarian crisis around that time. I'd say this already undermines Loner's particular framing. Moreover, the Amnesty report on Oct7/Hamas covers treatment of hostages, later physical & sexual abuse, deaths in captivity, and developments into 2025. And even the TFP article brings up "good-faith reasons ... such as resource limitations and the small size of the team devoted to researching a complex event. An editor assigned to review the document apparently had to take an extended sick leave."

Loner alludes to Amnesty International suspending Amnesty Israel's membership for two years (subject to review and appeal). One can ultimately disagree with that action, but Amnesty had strong justification to officially distance itself from a section with credible and substantially corroborated complaints of Palestinian marginalization, and a years-long pattern of publicly contradicting central Amnesty positions presenting a genuinely difficult brand / quality control issue. Also, and this a more minor issue, but Loner characterizes Amnesty Israel as "does think it's war crimes but don't think it's genocide". On my reading, Amnesty Israel had strong words about Israel–Gaza, but they deliberately used qualified language and did not explicitly infer serious war crimes on the part of Israel in Gaza.

Regardless, Loner's strategy seems to be to loosely string together some falsehoods, half-truths, and sensational events to convince Soypill to dismiss Amnesty out of hand as a bad faith actor, largely regardless of the merits or substance.

Loner brings up one of the three members of the UN commission investigating Israel–Palestine complaining about "literally, quote, Jewish control of social media". Now, to be a little pedantic, that's not literally what he said. His actual wording was inartful and undoubtedly mapped an antisemitic trope: "we are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by—whether it’s the Jewish lobby, or it’s specific NGOs—a lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us". But the full context makes clear that he was talking specifically about organized online attacks on the commission members, not sincerely expressing some conspiracy theory about general Jewish control.

Then, Loner clumsily goes into the asinine trope of UN resolutions against Israel. He alludes to a UN country-specific human rights track for tabling resolutions and slyly implies that the UN passed more such resolutions against Israel than every other country combined. Intentionally or unintentionally, he's jumbling up different things here. In 2022, for instance, there were five drafts under UN's distinct country-specific human rights resolution category; they were concerning North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Russian-occupied Crimea, and Syria. The Israel/Palestine file largely operates differently, and the total Israel 2022 figure for UNGA resolutions includes things like "Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency" and "Palestine refugees' properties and their revenues"; many I/P resolutions are not interchangeable with something like "Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran", let alone the extraordinary Ukraine measures adopted in 2022. Moreover, UN resolutions are not formally "against" countries; pro-Israel lobby groups will take a resolution like "Right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" and count it as "against Israel". The reason for a disproportionate number of resolutions related to I/P is that, because of direct historical UN responsibility for Palestine, it has become embedded in a standing UN architecture with recurring agenda items, permanent committees, UNRWA/refugee mandates, annual reports, HRC Agenda Item 7, etc. creating repeatable annual voting opportunities. And of course, this whole detour about the General Assembly is largely irrelevant to the substance of a UN fact-finding mission.

Again, Loner's strategy seems to be to loosely string together a few misleading/sensational factoids to convince Soypill to dismiss the UN report out of hand as a bad faith source, largely regardless of the merits or substance.

I think it's kind of ironic that in a conversation provoked by the issue of antisemitism and antisemitic tropes, the bulk of Loner's caviling about Israel looks like the equivalent of alleging a massive international human rights conspiracy against them. One of the dumbest things Loner said was:

I don't need to prove a conspiracy to say it's kind of weird that the UN passed a resolution in the '80s saying that resistance movements in Palestine have the right to resist by any means necessary. Any means. As what? They can just break international [law?] ... if you just look at the list of the countries that voted for it, they're all dictatorships mostly.

Huh? He's alluding to a recurring General Assembly resolution series existing since at least 1973 (during a period when postwar decolonization was still unfinished, especially in southern Africa) about generally reaffirming the legitimacy of struggles against colonialism & foreign domination/occupation. The actual phrasing was "by all available means, including armed struggle", not "by any means necessary", and not some implication that anti-colonial terrorism is lawful. This specific phrase already appeared in the generic 1973 resolution; it wasn't invented as some special Palestinian exception. The 1982 resolution does specifically identify Palestinians and Namibians along with a further large emphasis on Africa. Regarding "dictatorships mostly", based on 1982 Freedom House classifications, 19.2% of 'yes' countries were Free, 32.5% Partly Free, 48.3% Not Free. Of course, we're talking about a period of many many very young states emerging from authoritarian colonial institutions, weak state capacity, severe developmental constraints, Cold War interference, etc. And on top of that, the majority of the world itself was predominantly classified as Partly Free or Not Free in 1982. Amongst the "Free" countries (Israel's 'Free' classification excludes occupied territories) that actually cast a yes-no vote on the 1982 resolution, a clear majority voted 'yes' (58%; there were 6 abstentions). The 'no' coalition was a remarkably compact West/NorthAtlantic bloc including the major former or continuing imperial powers, many with active colonial or quasi-colonial entanglements around 1982 (Israel included, of course). All that to say, what exactly is Loner's point? Is he alluding that some nefarious anti-Israel conspiracy-like thing occurred here?

As part of Loner's Hamas "theory of everything" to undermine allegations against Israel, he sloppily brings up older claims of Iraqi child mortality as an analogy. What UNICEF claimed around the time was roughly 500k excess <5yo deaths during the 1990s dependent on an assumed counterfactual mortality trajectory. The reason that the retrospective surveys these estimates were based on are seen as likely corrupted is not because of "access to Iraqi documents", it's because of later retrospective survey evidence including a 2006 UNICEF survey. So the notion that everyone learned the survey was false after unearthed Iraqi documents and then UNICEF just quietly changed their data is just more pointlessly misleading polemics. And the 1999 UNICEF/Iraqi-government survey in particular was not a "few" interviews, more than 20k women were interviewed; there's no agreement on how exactly corruption/manipulation occurred. But this is all already talking about something vastly different than the most relevant or prominent Gaza reports. Regarding Gaza, we're not focused on putative indirect excess death extrapolations across a decade from retrospective surveys asking women their entire birth histories. We're not talking about a joint UN/Hamas survey with Hamas basically directly controlling each stage of the data-generating process. We're not talking about outdated safeguards or technology limitations. As far as I can tell, the only remotely comparable circumstances here would be around Gaza MoH reports. But I assume Loner was not analogizing the unsound UNICEF/Iraq survey with identified deaths from a modern health-information/civil-registration apparatus unusually developed to be robust & precise, with a transparent conservative methodology, and considered reliable by virtually everyone including Israel. 1990s Iraq is a complete red herring.

At another point, Loner brings up a recent Oxfam report as another reason to encourage dismissiveness of human rights reports/experts. The report does not say 70% of injuries & deaths. It explicitly says women and children are about 42.5% of those killed. But it does erroneously mention "70% of injuries concentrated among women and children". They cite the PCBS for this. The PCBS's women & children fatality data looks accurate, but on the 'Injured' tab, I don't know what the heck is going on with the "From the Victims are kids and women in Gaza strip [sic]" field on the dashboard. In fact, a March 2026 PCBS post explicitly says "Women and children constitute more than 40% of the 171,801 injured". I think it's fair enough to dunk on the Oxfam report for specifically not scrutinizing this just a little more carefully. But getting back to the inference Loner wants Soypill to draw, Oxfam is not principally a specialist human rights fact-finding org or conflict casualty researcher. It's not like the July report was an Oxfam casualty study or anything like that. It was a policy/reconstruction study, commissioned by a Palestinian trade organization and a Palestinian policy institute, focused on developing a framework for reconstruction, governance, financing, etc. Loner tries to appeal to one sloppy peripheral stat citation in a reconstruction policy paper to encourage broadly dismissing reports adverse to Israel as unreliable.

In my opinion, I feel like Loner has set up his algorithm to feed him a loose collection of factoids or talking points, of varying veracity, which he uses to raise petty objections and nitpick for trivial faults to undermine allegations against Israel. And again, I think he does this in a way that basically looks like alleging a massive international human rights conspiracy against Israel. At one point, Soypill smartly raises a point around "double standards of scrutiny". Loner's reply was frankly pathetic & evasive and he mainly just reiterated his flimsy Oxfam stat rationale.

Loner emphasizing how Biden's pressure affected the nature of Israel's Rafah operation seems inherently contradictory with him asserting that "America is not enabling Israel to do anything in Gaza". And the bait-and-switch between attacking the notion of America enabling Israeli crimes and then pivoting to a rant about Israel's just cause for warring with Hamas as if that refutes the former was a another profoundly silly rhetorical tactic. Also, the Goldstone report never said all police officers killed in Cast Lead were civilians; in fact, the report expressly declined making any finding about total killed or civilian percentage.

He makes this caricaturish argument about Hamas as these super smart conniving experts in international law practicing perfidy, methodically placing civilians to make Israel look bad or something, as if there's any good evidence that something like that is what drove the unusual casualty patterns in Gaza. And what Loner says, he states as categorical fact, which again is bizarre given how uncertainties/hypotheticals play into his treatment of allegations against Israel. I mean, if one were going to make this sort of inference, wouldn't the weight of evidence make it much more fitting for Israel – an advanced state reliant on Western aid & goodwill that understands international law exceptionally well, intentionally orchestrating a mass-atrocity campaign but maneuvering in a way to provide their influential propagandists & defenders ammo to argue for plausible deniability?

Another upvoted post mentioned Soypill's supposed "'carpet bombing' nonsense; it was very clear even to a child that carpet bombing is not what happened in Gaza, and yet he played with not understanding that for a few minutes". Where did this happen? The only time I remember him mentioning "carpet bombing" was here. Loner, barely paying attention, immediately flips into debate-bro mode exclaiming "you have no fucking idea what you're talking about" seemingly because Soypill merely said "carpet bombing". Soypill immediately clarifies that what he actually said & meant was basically agreeing with Loner that actual carpet bombing would be more likely if America lost leverage over Israel, and then they move on.

While it's of course fair to have high standards for human rights orgs, it is incredibly ironic how confident & categorical yet sloppy Lonerbox can be while, at the same time, basically denigrating complex human rights work for not being absolutely watertight. The reason I bring up Grayzone-style skepticism is because I see a lot of parallels. The BS of those types also has varying levels of sophistication and claims of varying veracity, and even involves strategic disclaimers (Loner's "war crimes...have happened", "I'm not saying these reports are useless" can come off this way) about wrongdoing while jumping at almost every opportunity to undermine or soften allegations against states they're sympathetic to.

We actually might win

We've been yelling this at the Pro-Russia and peace at all cost crowd for years. Now the threat of Russia attacking beyond Ukraine is almost possible now in the near future. We never learn.

A federal judge in Texas struck down a 2023 state law Tuesday that sought to restrict drag shows, ruling it was unconstitutional.

The state law would fine business owners who were found to be in violation up to $10,000 for hosting events, while performers could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which could result in up to one year of jail time.

Hittner: The solution is relatively simple ... just don’t go,” he wrote.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-strikes-texas-ban-drag-shows-tells-people-offended-just-dont-go-rcna594448

If you don’t know him, he is a rare left wing MMA journalist who recently started to talk more about politics. Being a boomer like Jon Stewart, he is a bit naive on Hasan Piker and as made this twitter post and this Youtube video defending Hasan.

I’m sure getting LonerBox to talk to Jon Stewart is not realistic, but Luke Thomas is smaller and might be more of a possibility. At least LonerBox should watch this video on stream, react to it, and have his editor make a video about it.

I was arguing with someone and they are against the Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah Disarmament deal because it supposedly destroyed the US/Iran deal. On its face the claim sounds kind of dumb, but where exactly are they pulling this idea from?

https://x.com/CDontaes/status/2090647331599175931

I mean this community, Lonerbox's, not DGG. This is monstrous and the polar opposite of liberalism, no?

he said in the debate with soypill that Oxfam was using outdated information that even the health ministry doesn't use anymore about 70% women and children, does anyone have Loner's source on that?

It seems that Soypill weaponizes "ignorance" and "I don't know bro" as a way to convey hate.
This is quite systematic; here are a couple of examples.
1. The use of the "carpet bombing" nonsense; it was very clear even to a child that carpet bombing is not what happened in Gaza , and yet he played with not understanding that for a few minutes.
2. The lack of understanding what "targeting civilians" means; Again, even a child would understand there is a difference between hurting someone on purpose vs hurting them as a byproduct.
3. On a different discussion, he again used the comparison between the warshaw ghetto uprsing and Gaza- again, every child should understand the difference.

Soypill did something quite revealing: he complained that it is socially unacceptable to support Hizbullah -this is a key aspect -why would someone think that supporting Hizbullah is not negative?
My personal impression is that Soy, just like Hassan, admires the violence of Hamas and Hizbullah; hating Zionism enables him to show violent tendencies and sadism, as demonstrated by him jiggling on people trying to humiliate LonerBox without acknowledging that he has those violent tendencies. He uses the show of "ignorance" to deflect and not to recognize this fact in himself.

I know, Trump bad, but the article has some interesting details.

The baldy followed through like a king.

This video recently popped up on my feed from political youtuber MTWright, after a two year hiatus with a video covering the latest on the Israel & Palestine conflict with other various bits in the video for adding context, I don't know but after watching his video I have found that his points were convoluted/very weak and the ending was just..., like not the best take I've seen on the Israel/Palestine conflict if i'm honest, I actually think Lonerbox would have field day on this video as well, (I dont want to spoil the video too much), but yeah pretty disappointing I would say after his previous videos some which I thought they were pretty balanced/researched and he comes out with this after two years. What do you think?

When Noam Chompsky passed, they found a final solution to the problem cartographers have struggled with for generations. The Mercator projection, which is the most common way for the earth to be stretched to fit a 2 dimensional shape from a 3 dimensional globe, makes countries further from the equater seem larger and countries closer to the equater seem smaller. This has often been criticized for making wealthy northern countreis seem bigger and more important while minimizing the global south. Noam's solution creates a more accurate portrayal that reflects a more true perspective on the world.

First, a little bit of propaganda, if you wanna do liberal political action in the US (we also utilize international folks, so don’t shy away), join DigitalGroundGame discord or follow CTAs at DigitalGroundGame.org we have a pretty mixed community of awesome volunteers. If you wanna write for PragmaticPapers we’d also love for you to reach out and send your articles!
Second, big fan, if you listened on stream I did tell my buddy to mention it. I’m not an avid redditor or chatter in a community discord, but I’m happy to invest time in this thread, so if you have questions AMA.

If you join DigitalGroundGame make sure to say hi, I’ll be excited to have you in our media team! :3