You know what has got to stop?

People thinking any mention of a personal attribute of the other person is an “ad hominem.”

That’s not what “argumentum ad hominem” means.

Here’s an example.

“You are wrong, because [a long list of logic, with good supporting evidence from credible sources], you [enterinsult].”

That is not an ad hominem. Here’s an example of what would be:

“You are wrong, because you are a [enterinsult.]”

I’m not inventing this shit. I’m not generalising. He is an Israeli person by all accounts, and he’s touting IDF propaganda. So in this case, it is actually factual as well. In most cases, people are using ad hominem, because they’re going “no, we don’t need to listen to you, because you are a [enterfactioninsult]”. That IS an ad hominem. Deconstructing the actual rhetoric used by the IDF and calling the other person a troll for refusing to engage with any of the evidence is actually, factual, and not the argument I’m making.

“Elevate the discourse.”

You know I’m so tired of this. I’m honestly tired of people getting more worked up about a mild insult online than they are of actual genocide going on. If I could count the times someone’s gotten mad and used that as an excuse to highroad me, oh boy, it’d be in the tens of thousands. It’s ridiculous. There are far more pressing issues in the world than trying “not cuss” at other people.

It’s infuriating honestly. Especially when it’s a really mild and accurate “insulting” description from a comment in which I actually make a proper argument, with sources. In my opinion, that sort of “no we can’t use that kind of language” is exactly the sort of attitude why bad people are in power in the world. Because people think “you should always respect the person you’re talking to.” Fuck that. I’m not going to respect a person who is defending the genocide of children. No, sir, I will not.

And we shouldn’t respect the billionaires and other fuckers either. There’s the disconnect. We all want to live in a good world, and want everyone to be respectful and respectable, but not everyone is, and the people who keep exploiting every normal, respectable person, don’t deserve respect. And we should make it very clear to them.

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

I’ve said several times, you’re not someone who can be persuaded. That’s the only thing I’m trying to persuade people of. Hopefully you’d realise that too, but as mentioned previously, you’re not a person who can change their mind.

The point is to showcase just how strong Israeli propaganda is.

Currently, you’re literally chanting “UN doesn’t matter, OCHR doesn’t matter, human rights don’t matter, nothing can ever be proved and everything online is wrong, no reporters should be trusted (unless they’re pro-Israel) and in fact, facts don’t actually exist, anywhere, at all!”

What exactly would it take for you to admit that Israel is committing several war crimes, the worst of which is the genocide of Palestinians? This is rhetorical, because you’re literally unable to answer that, as there is no amount of evidence that would ever change your mind, because you don’t base your opinion on facts, you base it on what you get told.

Weird how “you can find anything on the internet”, but you can’t seem to find anyone who disagrees with the UNITED NATIONS and the Human Rights Watch. Guess “anything” doesn’t include “support for my propaganda”, huh? I mean, ofc it does, but even you realise how ridiculous those propaganda sites would be in comparison to the Human Rights Watch, United Nations, International Court of Justice and the OCHR.

For instance you trying to assert that you, a random IDF trollito on Lemmy would know better than Raz Segal, the associate professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, who says:

Perpetrators of genocide rarely express their intentions in direct and explicit ways, so courts are left to infer such intent through an analysis of state actions or leaked memoranda. In the case of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, however, as the Law for Palestine database shows, people with command authority have been making genocidal statements repeatedly over the past three months.

They have dehumanised Palestinians in their rhetoric, and painted the population in Gaza, as a whole, as Israel’s enemy. Bolstered by the hubris of settler colonial power and the knowledge that it has killed, maimed, destroyed, expelled, humiliated, imprisoned and dispossessed with more than seven decades of impunity and by the continued material and moral support of the United States, Israelis are explicit and unashamed about their genocidal intent because they have imagined and prosecuted a war against people who they see as colonised “savages”.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians precisely in this way, as “human animals”, in his proclamation of the “total siege” on October 9. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Gaza as “the city of evil” on October 7, and then on December 24, framed Israel’s attack as a fight against “monsters”. “This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it is a battle of civilisation against barbarism,” he said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said a few weeks earlier, on December 5, that Israel’s attack on Gaza is “a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilisation… [from] an empire of evil”.

Netanyahu and other senior Israeli ministers have left no doubt that saving “Western civilisation” requires the total destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza by describing them as the Biblical people of Amalek – a people perceived in whole as an enemy that must be destroyed – and as Nazis.

How does it feel being on the wrong side of history?