▪️Almost everyone (including many libertarians) approaches the Israeli/Palestinian conflict wrong. They view it as a disagreement over tribal, collective “rights” to the land. The Jews have historical claim, Palestinian land was stolen, blah blah. There is no such thing as collective, tribal rights to land, that thinking is what has led to most wars throughout history. There’s only a right to the land particular individuals own, or have cultivated.
▪️Very few Palestinians living today have any legitimate property rights claim to land in Israel. More importantly, that’s not what they’re fighting for. #FreePalestine is not a movement to protect the individual rights of Palestinians (or anyone), it’s a movement to install a dictatorship, a theocracy that controls “Palestinian land.” Not only is there no right for such a dictatorship to exist, any movement which seeks to implement one is not in any way associated with freedom.
▪️Every single time Palestinians have been given autonomy and the ability to self rule they have chosen dictatorships and authoritarianism. There are no rights of any kind in Gaza. No freedom of speech, religion, or property rights. If they controlled more land, it would mean more oppression, not only for Israelis but for Palestinians.
▪️Israel, meanwhile, is a crappy government like the US is a crappy government. It does all sorts of awful things, but it protects basic freedoms. You can be gay in Israel, be a Muslim, be an entrepreneur, be critical of the govt, etc. You can pursue your dreams for the most part. In fact, Arabs living in Israel are far freer (and better off) than those in Gaza or most anywhere else in the Middle East.
▪️No state who violates any of the rights of its citizens deserves to exist, but in reality this only applies if the alternative is more freedom. Freedom movements are only moral or justified if they call for and actually bring more freedom to an area. The Palestinian cause does not, it only brings tribal rule with a genocidal desire to erase Israel.
▪️It doesn’t matter what the historical claims of the Jewish or Palestinian people are (although the Jews have a better claim even there imo). It matters what government is better at protecting its citizens’ rights. In that regard, it’s not even close in who to support. It’s night and day morally. It takes brainwashing or a college degree to rationalize supporting “Palestinian freedom” in the current context.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
