Body-count asymmetry is morally indeterminate. Higher civilian deaths on one side do not, by themselves, establish: - unjust intent, - disproportionate force, - or moral equivalence / non-equivalence. They often reflect variables like population density, defensive strategy, evacuation capacity, media access, or who is fighting from among civilians. Outcome-based morality doesn’t map onto causation. Moral responsibility in war—if it’s to mean anything—has to track choices under constraint, not raw outcomes abstracted from context. “More dead civilians” does not equal “more immoral” unless you smuggle in assumptions you haven’t defended: - that both sides had comparable alternatives, - that harm-minimization costs were symmetrical, - or that intent and foreseeability are irrelevant. Most public discourse quietly assumes all three and then treats the conclusion as self-evident. Structural inevitability forces a shift in moral vocabulary. If civilian harm cannot be reduced below a certain floor without abandoning the war aim entirely, then: - either the war itself is judged illegitimate as such, - or civilian harm must be assessed relative to necessity, alternatives, and responsibility for the structure of the battlefield—not as an absolute metric. What makes Gaza so morally destabilizing for modern observers is that it exposes a contradiction we’d rather not face: we want wars of annihilation against enemies we define as existential, while also wanting zero civilian blood guilt. History suggests you don’t get both. Ancient societies were brutally honest about this; early modern ones could occasionally finesse it; modern humanitarian language tries to deny it altogether. That denial produces moral claims that feel profound but dissolve under scrutiny—because they rely on numbers standing in for judgment. So it's not that civilian deaths “don’t matter.” It’s that they don’t mean what people insist they mean, absent a serious accounting of structure, strategy, and constraint. And once you take those seriously, a lot of confident moral posturing turns out to be empty.

Here is the recording of our latest session. A national identity constructed entirely upon the negation of another people cannot be reformed. It can only be dissolved. This was the central, hypothesis driving our latest daily session. The room dissected the concept of the "Two-State Solution" not as a moral aspiration, but as a mechanical failure. The collective argued that the "Palestinian" identity is not a standard nationalistic movement. It is a specific political construct manufactured by the Muslim Brotherhood and sustained by UNRWA to serve as a perpetual battering ram against the Jewish State. The group posited that as long as this identity exists, the desire to retake "from the river to the sea" will remain the primary operating system of the culture. Friction emerged regarding the timeline of a solution. Samantha argued for a strategy of indefinite containment, suggesting that Israel must maintain military occupation for centuries if necessary, waiting for a theoretical "deradicalization" before granting autonomy. She represents the lingering hope that time creates new variables. Others argued that if an identity is rooted in the conquest of Tel Aviv and the erasure of 1948 borders, time does not heal. It festers. The discussion pivoted to historical precedents of population transfer, citing the shifting borders of Poland and the partition of India. The consensus suggests that the West has treated this conflict as a unique anomaly when it should be treated as a standard historical correction. We are left with a stark choice. We can continue the diplomatic fiction that two opposing vectors can occupy the same space, or we can acknowledge that peace requires the total defeat of the revanchist narrative. This is not an echo chamber. It is a testing ground where ideas like indefinite containment clash with arguments for total dissolution. Bring your perspective to the table and sharpen your understanding of the West’s most critical conflicts. View the calendar at this link to join our next discussion: https://www.skool.com/libertypolitics/calendar

I've heard time and again that the Israeli response to October 7th was "disproportionate." Well, what exactly is the proper proportion? Here we have a little country that basically wants to be left alone to (depending on your demographic) study Torah or make technological advances or agricultural advances or whatever. That country is surrounded by people who want that country gone. Islam is an inextricable part of this, because jihad is central to Islam, and the presence of a country of people who should be dhimmis in the middle of dar al Islam is an inherent affront. Many of these people are located in a little strip of land (really, part of traditional Israel, namely the Western Negev). A group among them who openly espouse the destruction of that country and the murder of its inhabitants, make it their raison d'être, and work tirelessly towards that goal control the populace, most of whom are ideologically aligned with that group. Also happens to be that that group is thoroughly embedded in hospitals and other civilian-dense areas. After a particularly brutal attack by these people, who have been at it for decades, the country goes to war to destroy them. The soldiers of that country make efforts to not kill civilians but it's a VERY densely populated area and their enemy purposefully embeds itself among civilians because it knows the PR game in the West. War is rough. War leads to people dying. So, what's proportionate? One for one? Is two civilians for one fighter too much? Why? Are civilians who are ideologically aligned with the enemy not counted like those who are not? Let's make the ideologically aligned civilians count as half. Maybe a third. What's our calculus here? Why are we pretending that context doesn't matter? If someone is racing after my wife or my daughter to kill her, and the only way I can save her is to kill the guy and very possibly a hundred of his comrades, almost inevitably at least twenty of his comrades, I will, and I will sleep well at night. Israel isn't hunting down civilians, but war is war, and this war, because of Gaza and what it is, could not have turned out different in this respect. Honestly, I would be happier if Israel had far fewer algorithms in place to protect its enemies' civilians which put their own soldiers in harms way. Many Jewish soldiers have died unnecessarily in this way. More civilians in Gaza dying? War sucks. And almost everyone who condemns Israel for being disproportionate wouldn't be satisfied no matter how many such algorithms are in place and how few civilians get killed.