For the kneejerks among us who will undoubtedly not understand the subtlety I was trying to convey there, the saying can be interpreted to apply to both the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.

The Mandate ends and the Israelis get invaded...
so they take up arms to defend themselves...
and after doing so successfully they go on the offensive and capture more territory...
then the Palestinians take up arms to resist and try to get their territory back...
so they keep sending suicide bombers and launching rockets over the border...
so the Israelis retaliate with helicopter airstrikes...

And on and on and on.

And it depends where you are online. I'm a member of an online RPG called Kingdom of Loathing with a pretty active chat system.

The moderators are *very* active. Say what you will about heavy-handedness, but recent events have proven that if you start throwing around anything with a flavor of misogyny to it in open chat, you will be banned with much prejudice. May be partially related to our uncharacteristically high female playerbase but the game creators are all guys.

Well damn, I sure wish somebody had pointed that out sooner than halfway down the page of 600 comments.

The pragmatic argument is, do any such laws protecting J Random Group protect the group better than they cause other problems.

Not to belittle the social issues we face, but people complaining about the Internet being a horrible place trigger my "no duh" reflex.

"Doctor, it hurts when I go on 4chan"

Any theories why that is? I'm trying to imagine why there would be such a big skew towards people actually wanting to *kill* women in this context. It doesn't help them achieve any of their stereotypical oriented-around-women objectives.

My armchair philosophy stab in the dark would be inferiority complex. Rage if you want, but I'll admit I have one sometimes.

For awhile there, every time I read a summary I assumed that the editor/submitter was lying to me somehow and just had to figure out which part was the lie. And it was pretty accurate.

So then you go read the comments until you find the one guy who ACTUALLY knows what's going on when it turns out even the writers of TFA, while not lying per se, are usually purposely misrepresenting the issue. I have to give Slashdot credit for that, as I know I'm not going to get accurate news about copyright law, DRM, government end-runs etc. anywhere else.

I'm more over at Soylent these days, but I think the first part has gotten a bit better here since then.

Are you seriously holding up other countries where minorities are actively oppressed as a positive example?

Isn't "straight cis" redundant? At least for Slashdot's general target demographic, U.S. readers.

(cue people screaming about how the general Slashdot readership somehow isn't American and I should DIAF)

Sounds like you're a member of the wrong gaming communities

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. -Matthew 26:52

I didn't object to that statement for being nonfactual so much as coming off as very sloppy research and implying a general carelessness for the topic that I'm sure all those involved would find incredibly offensive. The rest of your points sound pretty reasonable so I'll assume you probably didn't mean it that way.

There's obviously more than enough blame to go around, unfortunately.

There are still groups whose sworn goal is the total destruction of Israel and yet people complain about Israel stealing houses. I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder.

You conveniently ignored the part where I said I really doubt Israel's goal is genocide.

Beg pardon? Ethnicity and nationality are two very different things. You can't call it ethnic cleansing if it isn't targeting an ethnicity. Google calls genocide "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation." So ethnic cleansing and national cleansing are both subsets of genocide (then you get into fun terminology twists like "religious vs. ethnic Jews"). For them to be the same thing requires that all the inhabitants of the country are the same ethnicity, and no significant populations of that ethnicity exist outside the country either.

Labeling it "genocide" supposes that the motivation of Israeli killing Palestinians is to wipe out the Palestinians as a group (can you have an "accidental genocide?"). I would think that their goal is instead to keep them suppressed so as to minimize their ability to hurt them (Israel), NOT to wipe them out. Although of course you will probably find hardliners in the population that think they *should* just wipe them all out.

Sorry about the pedantic hair-splitting, but this argument looks like it's swiftly degenerated into name-calling and moderation swing, so I'm trying to bring a little objective definition to the discussion.

Ah crap, replied to wrong comment.