China's policy reduced the death rate by a factor of about 75% relative to the US.
The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.
Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.
All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.
Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq War I, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq War II were all fought for or over democratic ideals & the defense of democratic institutions.
All were driven by multiple competing and sometimes conflicting goals, and many look questionable in hindsight. It is fair to critique.
But it is absolutely not the case that the last time the US defended freedom through military means was WWII.
Not a single one of those wars was in defense of freedom and democracy.
I'm not going to go through all of those wars one-by-one, but are you joking with Iraq War II? That war was sold on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow behind 9/11, by a president who himself had stolen the 2000 election by getting his brother to halt the counting of votes in Florida.
Can you name a hospital in Israel that doesn't have an IDF presence?
"Presence" is an incredibly vague claim. In order to attack a hospital, you have to prove that the enemy is actively shooting at you from it, and your attack has to be proportionate. Vaguely asserting that some enemy might have set foot in the hospital at some point does not give you carte blanche to blow up a hospital full of civilians. Yet that's exactly what Israel has done over and over again.
I'm not vaguely asserting that "some enemy might have set foot in the hospital at some point." I'm accurately pointing out what is common knowledge: armed Hamas members were and are in hospitals, where they also took and killed Israeli hostages.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, Israel has not blown up any hospital buildings. This is a myth. If you think I'm wrong, point to which hospital building Israel blew up. Show me standard OSINT stuff: when it occurred, pictures of the rubble, the munitions used, who died.
Hospitals in Israel are generally guarded the same way hospitals in the US are: by police and security guards. As opposed to Hamas, the IDF doesn't use hospitals as bases. They don't build terror tunnels under hospitals. They don't take hostages to hospitals and kill them there. They don't shoot from hospitals. They don't store weapons in hospitals. Hamas does all of those things.
IDF personnel are in and out of every hospital in Israel all the time. Every other adult in Israel is IDF.
Israel has attacked every hospital in Israel with the blanket claim that some Hamas person was there at some point. Not that there was active fighting at the hospital. Not that Hamas was barricaded inside and firing out of it. Just that someone however loosely related to Hamas might have been near the hospital at some point. By that same argument, virtually every building in Israel would be a legitimate target.
This conflict has nothing to do with "the Jews," and framing it in that way seriously distorts it.
It's a conflict between the native population of Palestine and people who came in from the outside with the goal of making Palestine their own. The outsiders won for a number of reasons (British backing, superior political organization, etc.). They now rule over the native population, most of whom they deny any rights to. They justify this by saying the native population deserves it because it hates them and resists them.
It is about the Jews, because the Arab population started violent conflicts against Jews who were legally purchasing land up through Israel's founding. Palestinians lost territory because of the violence they repeatedly started, despite legitimate military losses over territory and new borders drawn by armistices.
The Israelis could be Shinto or Sikh, and it would make no difference at all to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians just care that foreigners came in and took over their land.
By casting this as the Palestinians hating "the Jews," you're trying to frame the conflict as just another example of antisemitism. The Palestinians get cast in the role of the Nazis, and the Israelis get to pretend they're the victims of antisemitism.
The actual situation is completely flipped. The Israelis exercise military rule over the Palestinians and subject them to an apartheid system, not the other way around.
My cousin was a Holocaust survivor, and he was utterly disgusted with what Israel was doing to Gaza - all the way back in 2014, before Israel completely leveled it and killed more than 20,000 children.
You keep comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis, which is utterly shameless, especially given that you support the side that has committed mass murder of tens of thousands of defenseless civilians and that holds millions of people under an apartheid regime.
I do not keep comparing the Palestinians to Nazis. I made an analogy between Hamas and Nazis to illustrate a rhetorical point. I stand by that comparison.
Germany invaded most of Europe and left much of it in rubble. You're picking a very weird, specific comparison (German vs. US cities) and leaving out the obvious comparison (German vs. Soviet or Polish cities).
Also, comparing Nazi Germany, a massively powerful industrial state, with a tiny, poor territory under foreign occupation by a vastly superior power is insane.
Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries: more soldiers, more rockets, more war-fighting infrastructure. Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east. It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel. It was a net food exporter.
I claimed Hamas had a larger and more powerful military than many European countries. This is a fact.
> What? You mean countries like Monaco and Liechtenstein?
No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.
> Simply counting the # of soldiers or rockets is disingenuous when this is obviously an asymmetric war.
Counting things like soldiers and military arsenals is the standard way to evaluate military strength. And of course there is a force asymmetry, Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world. That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate Gaza's military the way we would any other.
> Please explain what you mean by "war-fighting infrastructure ".
Well, for example, Hamas built the largest underground military tunnel system in the known world, a vast standing army numbering in the tens of thousands, gathered plenty of intelligence on Israel, militarized their population, and has a history of combat, for starters. But it goes way beyond this, and extends to the broad financial and military support they enjoyed from the IRGC.
> "Depends on what you mean by "standards of the Middle East", but just compare Israel($52k) and Gaza ($3455) for 2023:"
I'm not comparing it to Israel, which is a standout in the middle east, and among the most technologically developed countries in the world. I'm comparing it to other middle eastern countries. It wasn't exactly destitute, despite its murderous, anti-woman, anti-gay, and antiy-jew jihadi philosophy. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE-xjBRKkPL/
> It's clear that the method of combatant recognition employed by the IDF is flawed, given they're killing aid workers and people from the UN.
Have you considered that the some aid workers were also Hamas militants? Or that the UN, through UNRWA, employed Hamas militants? Many of the so-called aid-workers israel killed turned out to actually have been part of Hamas. There is unfortunately extensive evidence that UN employees participated in the 10/7 attacks and the subsequent fighting. And Hamas uses world central kitchen and other aid organization vehicles and infrastructure, so distinguishing is not easy in the first place.
> How did you develop your understanding of this situation? And what are you trying to communicate here?
I have developed my understanding of this situation from decades of study on this topic, and at least a thousand of hours of research over the past 2.5 years. In the span of 15 years, I've gone from leading so-called pro Palestine rallies to my current positions. What I am trying to communicate is that reality is more nuanced than many (including a younger version of me) like to think. Reality is nuanced, and at odds with the picture you paint.
>No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.
Hamas, who don't even own a single Howitzer. Much less a plane.
Stronger in munitions? One western artillery shell is worth countless Qassam rockets. The Qassam rockets are largely useless from a military perspective because you aren't going to hit anything with them.
This is an apples and oranges type comparison, except Hamas is stuck with crabapples.
Qassam rockets are not "useless." They've killed multiple people, including kids. They are relatively low-yield compared to later Grad/Fajr/M-75 type rockets Hamas used, but to say they're "useless" is a huge overstatement, and the implication that they represented Hamas's entire arsenal is wrong.
The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).
In addition to the direct devastation the rockets cause, they also force large swaths of the Israeli population into bomb shelters, which has other military benefits for Hamas. It was part of the 10/7 strategy they employed.
People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.
I suggest you look up the concept of CEP, circular error probable. It's a very important measure when discussing weapons like these.
Modern western rocket artillery will strike your target from tens of kilometers away within a circle of a couple of meters.
Your typical Grad will have CEP in excess of 1.5% of range. So at 10KM you'll have only half of your rockets land within 150 meters of your target.
These are weapons where your target selection amounts to "fuck someone in that general direction". Not "better shoot at that guy before he shoots at us". Fundamentally useless for fighting wars.
The Grads can be vaguely useful, but Hamas doesn't have the launch platforms to field them as an area denial weapon as originally intended.
EDIT: and you can probably stop reading right here, I'm mostly just repeating myself after this point.
> They've killed multiple people, including kids
I never thought I'd laugh at the idea of kids being killed, but in this context it comes across as pretty hilarious. This is not a good feature in a weapon of war! In war you typically want to kill enemy soldiers, not kids.
You can point a Gazan artillery rocket towards an urban center, maybe hit someone and kill a kid. It is not feasible to hit a target more specific than that using these weapons.
You can't fire one at a smallish enemy position.
>The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).
Hamas having dozens if not hundreds of M-302s is certainly a claim I'd love to see evidence for, but even if it were true this isn't very impressive at all. These are terribly inaccurate unguided artillery rockets! Western militaries don't really have much in terms of equivalents because they're practically useless.
>People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.
This is a straight up lie. Hamas had a plenty of manpower, but certainly has never had an arsenal to match. Artillery rockets you can realistically only use to indiscriminately strike civilian areas are absolutely useless when fighting a war.
The whole point is that Hamas is an unconventional fighting force that does aim at civilian centers and doesn't particularly care for accuracy. You sneeringly ask me to look up CEP, as though Hamas tries to be accurate and target military installations rather than sewing terror. They know they can't go head to head against Israel militarily, and they do purposefully kill civilians (see: 10/7). I can see you laugh at kids being killed, which is horrifying!
You also scoff at the idea that Hamas had M-302s, but the reality is not only did they have them but they fired them, for example on July 9, 2014 towards Hadera. In March 2014 the IDF also siezed M-302s being smuggled into Gaza. I can go on. Your snarkiness is no substitute for research.
I wrote "people like to pretend hamas was a tiny force" and you say that's a "straight up lie." But people on this very thread have claimed that. Yes, their arsenal didn't match European countries in terms of accuracy, but in terms of raw firepower, they had lots, which is why Israel spent billions developing the iron dome.
If Hamas had the tech, they'd surely blow up the whole of Israel, including military installations. But they don't (which I agree is good) and their history and words and actions all show a desire to target and kill civilians.
The most effective air force in the world is almost certainly the American one. The second most effective air force in the world may well be the American Navy.
I don't see how that's relevant to the earlier claim, but even this claim of yours is a gross overstatement.
There was a partial blockade, not a full blockade, and this partial blockade came after Palestinians launched the second intifada. Prior to the october 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas and gazan civilians, tens of thousands of gazans were able to travel out of gaza through egypt and israel, where many of them worked. nearly 75,000 truckloads of food and cargo went into gaza from israel in 2022. Gaza exported lots too.
My point is that Israel had full control about exactly what Gaza was allowed to import and export (and frequently used those controls for collective punishment as well)
I don't quite see how under those circumstances, they were able to build "a more powerful army than many European countries", unless you talk about Luxembourg or the Vatican.
Yes, Israel and Egypt together controlled what Gaza was allowed to import and export - not as a form of collective punishment, but to ensure its own security. There's a huge difference between that and a "full blockade" (which is what Russia did to Mariupol early in the war), so precision matters.
In terms of Hamas's army being more powerful than that of many European countries, I'll respond to that below.
And the Wikipedia article you cite has been manipulated by a band of ideological editors and is not reliable, and has no value (inverse value?) as a citation.
The article currently has 361 references. Also the accusation they use it in arbitrary means, for collective punishment is widely shared, not just here.
Explain to me how continuously reducing the area permitted for fishing is necessary for Israel's security.
Calling the Second Intifada "sparked by Israeli massacres" reverses the basic chronology and ignores Palestinian leaders' own admissions.
1) Marwan Barghouti (Fatah leader of the uprising in the West Bank) told The New Yorker in Jan 2001:
"The explosion would have happened anyway... But Sharon provided a good excuse."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/arafats-gift
2) UK Parliament Hansard (Apr 16, 2002) quotes the semi-official PA daily Al-Ayyam (Dec 6, 2000) reporting PA communications minister Imad al-Falouji:
"the Palestinian authority had begun preparations for the outbreak of the current intifada... in accordance with instructions given by Chairman Arafat himself"
and that it was not meant merely as a protest over Sharon's visit.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2002-04-16/debates/d69...
(search within the page for "Al-Ayyam" or "Al-Falouji")
1. Ariel Sharon staged a deliberate provocation by storming the Temple Mount with hundreds of policemen.
2. Palestinians protested, and Israeli forces shot live ammunition at them, killing four Palestinian civilians. Within weeks, riots had broken out and Israel had killed dozens of Palestinian civilians.
Israeli actions were the spark, not some planned Palestinian operation.
The long-term cause of the 2nd Intifada was Israeli refusal to carry out the Oslo Accords in good faith. The Palestinians recognized Israel and agreed to give up the armed struggle for their freedom in exchange for a set process by which Israel would rapidly withdraw from the occupied territories and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. The Israelis repeatedly reneged on that throughout the 1990s, and by 2000, the Palestinians were completely disillusioned with the so-called "Peace Process."
This mixes up the first 24 hours with who launched the Intifada as a sustained campaign.
Even if you think Sharon’s Temple Mount visit was provocative and Israeli police used excessive force on Sept 29, senior Palestinian figures later said the uprising was coming anyway and was planned, and Sharon was a convenient trigger.
Also, it is not just Israelis saying this. Mainstream sources record these admissions and describe the outbreak as Palestinian violence following the visit.
You've actually hit on the most important point: Although Oslo was sold as a two-state solution, the Israelis never agreed in writing to a Palestinian state.
The Israelis showed an incredible amount of bad faith. Rabin said in one of his last speeches that there would never be a Palestinian state - only a semi-autonomous entity under Israeli control. The Israelis never halted settlement construction. After Rabin was assassinated by the Israeli Right, Netanyahu deliberately sabotaged Oslo for years (which he brags about today), refusing to withdraw from the occupied territories as agreed.
After 7 years of this, with a Palestinian state no closer at all, a top Israeli politician (soon to become PM) staged a deliberate provocation, and Israeli forces began massacring Palestinian civilians.
Of course there were thoughts in the PLO about the possibility of future armed resistance. They would have been crazy not to think about that possibility. But they preferred a negotiated two-state solution, and they tried to get it for 7 years. After the Israelis started massacring Palestinian civilians, it would have been impossible for the PLO to keep a lid on the violence.
You are switching topics because the original claim does not survive contact with the record.
You said Israeli massacres sparked the Second Intifada. Your own timeline does not name any massacre that happened before it began. The first deaths were in the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is tragic, but it is not some prior massacre that supposedly set everything off.
Also, your Oslo framing is backwards. Oslo did not promise a Palestinian state or rapid final withdrawal. It is an interim framework that explicitly defers permanent-status issues like borders, settlements, and Jerusalem to later negotiations.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/isrplo.asp
A politician visiting a holy site under police protection is not a massacre and not a justification for launching an intifada.
Switching topics? We've been discussing the reasons for the 2nd Intifada. The Israelis reneging on Oslo was the fundamental reason for it.
> Your own timeline does not name any massacre that happened before it began.
Huh? I've mentioned the massacres that Israeli forces carried out in the aftermath of Ariel Sharon's storming of the Temple Mount several times now.
> The US-led Mitchell Report is explicit: Sharon’s Temple Mount visit did not cause the Intifada
You cite the Mitchell Report when it agrees with you, but ignore it when it disagrees with you.
The Mitchell Report explicitly states that the PLO had no premeditated plan to unleash violence.
In fact, it says that the proximal cause of the 2nd Intifada was the massacre that Israel carried out on 29 September 2000 against Palestinian protesters. Those protests were in response to Sharon's storming of the Temple Mount.
The report says that after that massacre, neither side showed restraint, which caused the violence to escalate.
So the report that you yourself are citing as an authority turns out to agree almost 100% with what I've been telling you all along.
> Oslo did not promise a Palestinian state or rapid final withdrawal.
Actually, Oslo II lays out a very specific timeline for Israeli withdrawal, to be completed within 18 months (by mid-1996!).
More generally, the Oslo Accords were sold as a rapid path to a two-state solution. If the Accords weren't about a two-state solution, then the Palestinians were completely swindled by the Israelis.
You opened with: the Second Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres. Now your alleged massacre is Sept 29, the first day of the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is not a prior massacre that precipitated anything, it is the opening confrontation itself, and you are laundering it with a loaded word.
On Oslo, you did not even mention it until your massacre story fell apart. And your Oslo summary is wrong on the text. Oslo II explicitly defers permanent-status issues (Jerusalem, settlements, borders, refugees, etc.) and excludes them from PA jurisdiction. The 18-month line is about phased interim jurisdiction, not a guaranteed state or full withdrawal. This was also obvious to everyone alive at the time and was widely reported. It's only now that people like you are attempting to rewrite history.
https://www.peaceagreements.org/agreements/410/
Read the Mitchell Report you keep invoking.
- It describes Sept 29 as large demonstrations where Palestinians threw stones and Israeli police used rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition, killing 4 and injuring about 200. Calling that a massacre is absurd. It was an armed clash, premeditated and planned by the palestinians, so not only was there no massacre, but the Palestinians themselves say armed clash was premeditated and Sharon's visit was just a pretext.
- The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Also, Sharon visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Mitchell even says holy places must be accessible to all believers. The choice to turn that into an uprising was a choice.
> You opened with: the Second Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres. Now your alleged massacre is Sept 29, the first day of the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is not a prior massacre that precipitated anything, it is the opening confrontation itself, and you are laundering it with a loaded word.
Those are the exact same thing. The "clashes" you're describing are Israeli forces firing live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in the wake of Sharon's deliberate provocation.
You pulled out the Mitchell Report as an authority on the subject, and it turns out that the Mitchell Report backs me up.
> Calling that a massacre is absurd.
Police opening up with live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators, killing 4 and injuring 200 is not a massacre?
> but the Palestinians themselves say armed clash was premeditated and Sharon's visit was just a pretext.
No, no one said the September 29th clashes were premeditated. How would the PLO even be responsible for Israel deciding to open up with live ammunition on a crowd of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators? Did the PLO use mind control on the Israelis?
> Also, Sharon visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Mitchell even says holy places must be accessible to all believers.
The Mitchell Report says that Sharon's visit was a deliberate provocation. He wasn't just a random believer visiting a holy site. He was a top Israeli politician (on the verge of becoming prime minister) and a notorious general with a long career of slaughtering Palestinian civilians (including in Lebanon, where he let fascist Christian militias carry out a massacre in a Palestinian refugee camp). He stormed the holiest Muslim site in Palestine with hundreds of police officers. It was a political stunt intended to spark a reaction. One would have to be incredibly naive to think otherwise. Sharon knew that his actions would spark a massive outrage among Palestinians. Or are you claiming that Sharon had no idea what he was doing?
> The 18-month line is about phased interim jurisdiction, not a guaranteed state or full withdrawal.
No, the 18-month deadline is explicitly about full withdrawal of all Israeli forces from virtually the entire West Bank (including Area C) to specific military bases. Israel just completely reneged on that. Netanyahu has boasted about torpedoing Oslo by reneging on that specific requirement.
You opened with "Israeli massacres sparked the Second Intifada." Now the "massacre" is just the first day of the riots themselves, and when that gets challenged you pivot to Oslo (which you never mentioned in your original claim).
Mitchell's chronology is not "Israel opened fire on peaceful unarmed demonstrators." It describes a confrontation after Friday prayers where Palestinians began throwing at police near the Western Wall; police used rubber-coated bullets and live ammo; 4 Palestinians killed, about 200 injured; and 14 Israeli policemen injured. That is a violent riot plus (arguably) bad crowd-control, not a one-sided massacre. Same report: "no persuasive evidence that the Sharon visit was anything other than an internal political act" and "The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada."
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/mitchell_plan.asp
Nobody is claiming Palestinians pre-planned Israeli live fire or used "mind control." The point is what happened next: Palestinian leaders chose to turn this into a sustained uprising. Barghouti said the explosion would have happened anyway and Sharon "provided a good excuse."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/arafats-gift
Also, a politician visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Throwing stones and turning it into a street war is.
Your Oslo II claim is wrong on the text: interim jurisdiction explicitly excludes settlements, Jerusalem, borders, etc. The 18-month clause is phased redeployments, not "full withdrawal from Area C."
https://www.peaceagreements.org/agreements/410/
It's hard to believe the earth is round, but it is.
As I mentioned above, Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.
They also had tens of thousands of rockets.
Look, I'm obviously not saying that Hamas is stronger than all European countries in every metric, and I already did mention their lack of an air force. All I'm trying to say is that by some standard ways to judge military force (e.g., number of active soldiers) Hamas surprisingly is ahead, which gives lie to the idea that it's a small force. Your position has some nuance, which I appreciate, but another commenter in this very thread wrote "This is such an insane statement that you instantly disqualify everything else you say."
It's obviously not an insane statement, given that we can debate things like the accuracy of their munitions and the lack of air power. the other commenter probably simply didn't know how many active soldiers Hamas had and how few some developed European countries have.
There are areas where Hamas was stronger and areas where it was weaker, as is true in any military comparison.
Hamas was no rag-tag militia. It was also a government organization which spent billions building a military tunnel system that was longer, better and more effective than any European power has today. They had tens of thousands of soldiers. They could reach into the deep pockets of Iran and Qatar, and diverted billions in international aid. They had tens of thousands of rockets, most inaccurate, but all with real explosives and predictable trajectories. They also developed a unique warring strategy where they put their own population at risk by firing rockets from schools, storing weapons in children's bedrooms, and so on. Hamas was a formidable army in 2023. Where we perhaps can agree is that now, after two years at the wrong end of the IDF's military capabilities, they've become a rag-tag militia.
No, they are not stronger in any area. Any European country could hand out AKs to the population and instantly have more men on paper. They don't, because that's not what makes a strong military.
Hamas' strategy was in no way unique. They are a militia fighting an urban guerilla war. What was nearly unique in the modern world was the absolute brutality with which Israel fought an urban guerilla war. They decided to level everything. Imagine if the British had leveled all of Catholic Belfast in response to the IRA. It's a level of contempt for the local population and cynical justification of mass murder that is rarely seen from "civilized" countries.
The Israelis think they can solve their "Palestinian problem" with pure violence. A terrible irony.
It's true that when studying a foreign language, learning to read too early can harm your pronunciation. However, it is very difficult to learn new sounds that have no equivalent in your native language, and some languages have very restrictive phonology (like Italian and Japanese requiring a vowel at the end of every word) that their native speakers struggle to break out of.
That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.
The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.
There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).
Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.
And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.
American English isn’t the only spelling of English.
There are exactly two ways to write license. What you're proposing is that there should be 20 different ways to write it, depending on what particular dialect of English you speak.
We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.
The Chinese have many good arguments for keeping their characters, which go far beyond mutual intelligibility.
But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.
> English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.
Here's the future you want:
"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."
How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?
If you listen to the oral arguments, this issue was discussed at length.
There are two reasons for this distinction:
1. That's what congress decided. They get to determine tariffs, not the president. If the president doesn't like the law congress passed, he doesn't get to just ignore it.
2. Congress is very jealous of the right to tax and spend. They do not want to hand over this power to the president. Tariffs are taxes. If the president can just impose whatever tariffs he wants, he can raise revenue without asking congress for permission. That would grant the president enormous power to go around congress. Banning imports from a country does not bring in revenue for the president, so it doesn't pose the same risk to congress' power.
Trump has been trying to create a situation in which he can both raise revenue (through tariffs) and spend it however he wants (e.g., through DOGE's arbitrary changes to government spending) without ever asking congress. If he succeeds, the balance of power will be completely destroyed. The president will rule alone.
Auto tariffs are currently keeping far less expensive - yet much more advanced - Chinese EVs out of the US market, costing American consumers thousands of dollars on every car purchase.
While not allowing an entire industry and supply chain to die. One of the last heavily industrial and manufacturing industries left in the US at any decent sized scale.
You need such things for national security, so it's very likely "worth it" even all the way down to the American consumer level.
Look at the shipbuilding industry if you want to see what happens to that capacity without it. Due to the lack of commercial shipbuilding in the US, we can't even keep up with building for our Navy during peacetime. If a war ever were to attrit naval forces to any meaningful degree there would be zero hope of scaling up that supply chain in a relevant timeframe.
Arguments could of course be made if the auto manufacturing industry (and it's suppliers) are useful in an actual hot war, but I think without them we'd be in even heavier dire straights in that regard.
The US ship building industry is barely kicking along .. by intent, for whatever reason the US is not competing for the 90% of global commercial ship building demand currently met by China, Korea, and Japan.
This does not mean there is zero hope of scaling up should wartime demand come into existence.
Although U.S. shipbuilding is greatly diminished today, it is not the national security concern many would lead us to believe. America’s rapid expansion of ship production during World War II serves as a reminder of what allowed America to increase its ship production historically. Orders surged from the US government and other allied nations for commercial ships. Companies converted capital and entered the ship building business to meet the orders; Henry Kaiser built a shipyard in Richmond and got it operational in 78 days.
You could make a rational argument for short-term protectionism if the US government were simultaneously pushing the domestic auto industry to modernize, but the government is doing the exact opposite: it opposes electric vehicles.
The large American manufacturers are able to keep on selling technologically outdated, overpriced vehicles in the US, because they have a captive market.
When the Chinese imposed protectionist measures in the auto industry, they were aimed at allowing Chinese domestic manufacturers time to catch up technologically, and they were scaled back as that happened. Any international car manufacturer can now set up shop in China and compete directly with the local brands on an even footing. But the US has imposed drastic protectionist measures with no end-game (worse than that: US policy is backwards-looking and intended to maintain an old technology). It's just a permanent state of affairs.
The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.
Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.
All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.
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