JasSmith

And yours.

It's hard to engage with someone who genuinely thinks Apartheid was a nation state. We could call for the end of Apartheid without calling for the destruction of South Africa.

Well then John Cena is overweight. In fact, he’s obese, with a BMI of 33.9. So BMI isn’t objective reality. And I think it’s useful only as a very rough guideline.

BMI is a population level tool. There are individuals who are extremely muscular who can be in the obese range. I'm not seeking a perfect description - nor will ever such a description exist. If that is your standard then you are taking a postmodernist approach which is "everything is made up and the words don't matter." If up means down and the person in the discussion genuinely doesn't care, there's no real way to have a discussion after that.

We started with the question “Is Tilly fat?” And now suddenly you’re talking about medicine and health.

Because you raised the concept of soulism and utility. If we were to consider soulism and utility, I think using objective metrics make sense. I agree that there are many other frameworks we could use.

Humans view the world through their lenses of experience. Tolkien wisely remarked on creating fictional worlds that we should endeavour to change as little as possible compared to our world in order to suspend disbelief. When we do make changes, they should be meaningful, important for the story and world, and consistent. Unless Tilly's weight is explicitly described as healthy and normal, and it is part of some new universe law and storyline, I don't think we should be making any such assumptions. I think most people would balk at such a storyline and in-universe change. It would feel performative.

The same Wikipedia article hints at both Zionist and Palestinian use of a similar phrase even before PLO adopted it, so I am not sure if we can just plainly state that the cited sentiment is the original one behind this phrase.

When Menachem Begin’s Likud party won the 1977 elections, its official platform explicitly laid out a vision for the land that excluded any possibility of a Palestinian state. The relevant section states: "The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable... therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." It sounds kind of similar, and has been used by right wing parties since at various times. I condemn its use by them too.

I have a honest question though - if one calls for a one state solution, would you say that it always entails destroying one or the other?

This would require a 300 page document to answer. To shorten it, it would depend on things like the structure of the plan, the intent, the citizens involved, the negotiations, the history, and many other factors. As I have heard a one-state solution described by both Israel and Palestine leaders, they don't want that. They want the other state to dissolve and be replaced by their respective states. Their positions are so unbelievably intractable it is impossible to ever envision a one-state solution.

When I was younger I believed that a one-state solution were possible, but things have only deteriorated in my lifetime and having had long conversations with citizens of both nations, I cannot ever conceive of such a plan working. They hold a level of hatred for each other that is generational, built by collective trauma and pain, oppositional religious views which are extremely dogmatic, and a history which is literally Biblical.

I like how that focuses on the desired outcomes. Research shows that health risks increase (on average) after a BMI of 25 (slightly more for women). So I would propose a soulism approach in which anyone over a BMI of 25 be considered overweight. That's generally how medical guidelines categorise weight now.

Yes, you bashed out the tired old trope that if gay people are to exist in fiction then there must be a narrative reason.

No, that's not what I wrote. If you're going to try to strawman my position the least you could do is put some effort it.

“Palestine will be free”

This is not part of the original call to action. That is a modern addition used very selectively. It is frequently omitted, as we see on the t-shirt on the activist in the article. Selectively adding a nice phrase on the end of a very bad phrase doesn't erase the original meaning, intent, and history of the phrase.

Please also note that I did not suggest that the slogan is a call to kill all Jews. The slogan is a call to destroy Israel. Those are not mutually inclusive. Palestinian activists argue that when right wing Israelis call for the destruction of Palestine, that does constitute intent to commit genocide, and I agree. So I don't have much tolerance for hypocrisy on this. I find the call to destroy any nation - be it Israel or Palestine - to be incredibly immoral.

By defining the geographic scope of a future Palestinian state as the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the slogan encompasses the land where Israel currently exists. To remove all doubt about the context, remember that it has been widely used by groups like Hamas - whose founding charter explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used it to call for what they saw as a "decolonized" state encompassing the entirety of Mandatory Palestine. By 1969, after several revisions, the PLO used the phrase to call for a one-state solution, that would mean "one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel".

I'm sure there are people who use this phrase now and do not wish to destroy Israel. Just like there are people who use phrases like "all lives matter" and genuinely want racial equality. Unfortunately the terms are hard to disambiguate from the people chanting them.

Either way, we won't settle this argument now, and we don't have to. I simply do not wish to see people imprisoned for saying offensive things. That seems like an important pillar of democracy to me. I uphold the rights of people to say offensive things especially when I disagree with them. Free speech means nothing unless we're doing it when it's really hard.

1. Calling for the destruction of a nation - be it Palestine or Israel - is calling for genocide.

2. It should be legal to call for genocide.

To muddy the waters, being overweight exists somewhere between healthy and obese, and there isn't a clear definition. So there is definitely subjectivity involved. But I think that when someone toes the line of obesity, they can absolutely be classified as overweight.

It's true that general obesity can make it hard to identify overweight people today. I'm lucky to live in Europe, and it's not as bad here yet. Wiseman is somewhere around 35-40%, which is where the official diagnosis of "obesity" begins.

dude, gay people exist

Of all the thought terminating cliches to ever exist, this one exists the most. No one claimed gay people don't exist. Re-read what I wrote please.