A bit of reflection and reevaluation

So, for the past month, I've started writing several articles, and envisioned several more. I started writing Ethics Part III, and envisioned using it as a springboard to talk about the Police State and what has been happening in Ferguson, New York, and across the country. I've had some new insight on a theory I call Wealth-Energy Equivalency, and the economic implications of it, and I have been wanting to do an article on it for a long time. I've had idea after idea, but I've also had some other, more personal things on my mind which have stopped me from putting them into article form. Mostly, because I have become aware of an issue in my own writing and communication style.

I've always known that I have a tendency to be 'wordy'. Brevity is not my forte. As a result, I will often go back over whatever I write and 'trim the fat' to make it shorter and more concise – with varying degrees of success. But I have recently discovered some things about myself, and about other people, which have brought to light a deeper issue. People, by and large, do not think the way I thought they did. And, more specifically, they don't think the way I do. I'm not merely saying that other people have different opinions, values, experiences, aptitudes, and perspectives than I do. That should be obvious to anyone, because everyone is different. I'm saying that the way I file and process information in my mind, the actual mental functionality, turns out to be markedly and fundamentally different from the way most other people do, and I was never aware of it. And this, of course, has been reflected in my communication style. I made the faulty assumption that other people did, or at least could, digest information in more or less the same way I did.

Please don't misconstrue this as a snobbish statement. I'm not meaning to imply any superiority or inferiority here – only difference. There are advantages and disadvantages to this difference. And the basic difference seems to be in the role of the subconscious. I have learned that many people, seemingly the majority, do most of their thinking in subconscious leaps and connections. It seems to be the 'default' way that people think. I... don't exactly do this. My thinking process tends to be very conscious, very systematic, and very detailed. I make intuitive leaps, but even these are very conscious and deliberate things, and I can easily follow and cross-examine the reasoning associated with them. However, this also means that thinking about anything, for me, requires intensive levels of concentration and can be quite demanding of my attention. If brains were cars, the average brain would be an automatic transmission and mine would be a stick shift.

Because my brain tends to be conscious and meticulously systematic in its processing, the way I see things can be very different. Specifically, my idea of simplicity is very different from other people's. If someone were to ask the average person for the simplest possible definition of a car, they might say something like "A machine that people use to go from one place to another." That's very simple for most people. It isn't very wordy, it uses simple language, and it gives the big-picture idea of what a car is. But for me, this isn't simple at all. To me, the above is so ambiguous and frustratingly complex as to not even qualify as a definition of a car. The word 'machine', for instance, is so general that it can refer to just about anything, from a wheelchair ramp to robot. And does a car cease to be a car if it isn't being used to go from place to place? Is it is what it is because of what it does, or because of something intrinsic to it? And this is not even touching on details like how it moves, what it's made of, how if functions, etc; which are all essential to defining a car and contrasting it from other things such as a chariot or an airplane.

Please understand, this is not me overthinking the statement. This isn't some way that I choose to view it. This is how my brain processes information. It is the only way I know how to think. I now know there are other ways that people process information, and I can sort of emulate them indirectly (at least well enough to come up with the above example), but I'm overall not very good at it (it took me an entire days worth of pondering to formulate and settle on the above example). My brain simply does not subconsciously make many indirect or generalized connections the way other people's brains apparently do, but it is in turn great at consciously making direct and logical connections and refining out the details and patterns that other people have great difficulty with.

I understand things from the bottom up, taking the details and the simplest equations from which the whole is fractally derived and using them to piece together the larger picture. The 'big picture' way that many other people seem to see things is extremely difficult for me to wrap my brain around. When I see the 'big picture' it is indirectly as a fractal of the fundamental details. That is to say, to use an analogy: I cannot see the forest, but I can see the trees, and I can understand the forest only by observing the trees. And, more importantly, I see the minute and exact details which define a thing, from which the whole is derived, as being of crucial significance. And this has been the crux of my own difficulty. Because, as I have learned, others often do not. Such detail, to them, is boring, trivial hair-splitting that seems irrelevant to the 'big picture' idea. "Who cares if that tree is a conifer, it's a forest!"

And so, my attempts at communicating ideas, I have realized, are not always as effective as I'd like them to be. I look back over this very article as I write it, and I see within it many examples of this. If I tried to fix them, I would end up trashing the whole article, rewriting it a million times, and failing at it in the end (a process I have often gone through). And it is for this reason that I feel I need to reevaluate. I'm not quitting the blog (though posts may be more infrequent), or withholding commentary elsewhere on the web, but I know I need to find a better way to convey ideas to people so they are easier for them to digest, even if that means using a different medium. This will be a learning curve for me. And, by the way, I always welcome feedback.

Ethics Part 2 - Rights and Responsibilities

If you haven't read Ethics Part 1 - The Non-Aggression Principle, I recommend doing so before reading this.

The Non-Aggression Principle is, arguably, the most basic ethical statement anyone can make. Any sane ethical system starts with this simple idea that using violence to get your way is wrong. However, for many people who understand the NAP, this seems to be where it stops. I have even heard statements to the effect that the NAP should be the only law in existence. I take issue with this notion.

Please, don't construe anything I'm about to say as an attack on the NAP. I'm not saying that the NAP is flawed or inadequate, because it isn't. But it can be taken out of context, twisted, and abused until it has been turned entirely on its head. I have even witnessed the NAP be used by certain idiots as a justification for violence against entire groups of people, in the name of 'defense'. I have also heard statements like "I owe you nothing, except non-aggression", and have encountered people who are so fiercely individualistic that they would say it's okay (or at least, there should be no forced consequence) to knowingly letting someone starve to death on their doorstep, when they themselves have abundance.

Again, this is not a problem with the NAP. This is a problem with crappy, narrow-minded thinking. To understand the NAP, you must understand some other basic principles as well. Without them, serious problems can come up when applying the NAP to real life. Let me propose a dilemma to illustrate:

Let's say a man is lost in the desert. He has no food and no water, and the sun is beating down on him. Without finding water soon, he will die of thirst. The only things he has in his possession are the clothes on his back and a loaded gun. He happens upon a vendor selling water, but the vendor is charging $10,000 per bottle. The man has no money, and the vendor will not take anything he has in exchange for the water. He only accepts cash. There is no other water to be had in a hundred mile radius. This creates an ethical problem for the thirsty man. Either he uses his gun and initiates violence against the vendor and take his water by force, or he dies. He must choose between acting ethically and forfeiting his life, or preserving his life and making himself a criminal. And for argument's sake, we will say that he has done nothing negligent or stupid to end up in his situation, life has simply thrown it at him despite his best preparations. So, what should he do?

Most of you, I suspect, would say he is perfectly justified in taking the water by force, up to and including the use of deadly force if necessary. Or, at least, you would excuse him if he did so. But, why? The only way, according to the NAP, that such a use of force could be justified is if it is a defensive act. So if we say that this is a justified use of force, then we must conclude that it was a defensive act. And if it is a defensive act, we must conclude that the vendor acted aggressively – that is, his refusal to give the man water or to sell it at a reasonable cost was a violent and aggressive act.

But how can that be? The water didn't belong to the thirsty man, it belonged to the vendor. He pumped it out of his own well, on his own property, using his own resources. He bottled it with bottles he bought himself, with money he earned himself. He loaded it into his own truck by his own effort and drove through the burning hot desert using fuel he bought with his own money. He doesn't owe anyone anything, does he? And if it weren't for his efforts the water wouldn't have been available at all. The product wouldn't have existed where it was needed. Yet many of us just justified killing him, and called it a defensive act. I've heard this same dilemma used before to try and discredit the NAP. Does it really show that the NAP is inadequate or inconsistent?

Hardly. Rather, it shows us that there are other consistent principles at work. A helium balloon floating into the sky does not disprove gravity, it merely proves buoyancy. And, gravity and buoyancy do not contradict one another, but rather they complement one another. And in the same way, the Rights-Responsibilities Duality complements and balances the Non-Aggression Principle.

What I call the Rights-Responsibilities Duality is the basic idea that for every right exercised there is also an equal personal responsibility that accompanies it. Or, as Spiderman's Uncle Ben put it, "With great power comes great responsibility."

We don't live in a vacuum. What we do affects other people, directly or indirectly, whether we intend for it to or not. We live in a universe where energy is a conserved value. In any given system at any given point in time it is finite. A world where the only types of human interaction are voluntary is unrealistic, even where everyone follows the NAP, because, unless the population density is incredibly low, human interaction is inevitable. What we do will always affect other people, for better or worse. And to exercise our rights in a way which inhibits others from exercising theirs is wrong.

Everything that we have was given to us. Either at the moment of our conception, during our development in the womb, or some time afterwards – even those things which we have earned through work were ultimately earned using energy which was given to us. We cannot claim that we have the right to receive from the universe those things which we need to survive. We can’t claim things like food, water, shelter, and medical care as rights. If we did, the universe would simply laugh at us and keep going on as it always has, regardless of what the little hairless talking apes on the tiny speck of a plant say, and we would get what we would get.

But it is the right of every person to seek those things out which they need or want. And it is our responsibility not to inhibit others from doing this, say, by hoarding resources to make them inaccessible to others. This is not a 'collective responsibility' that necessitates a massive centralized regulatory system, forced taxation, and entitlement programs. It is an individual responsibility for which we are individually accountable, though one can certainly argue that it is more efficient to carry it out as a (voluntary) collective effort. And the degree to which we carry this responsibility depends on how we exercise our rights, that is, how we influence the world around us and what resources are available to us. It also depends on what falls within our reach to do. To whom much has been given much should be expected, and to whom little has been given little should be expected. But, failure at this responsibility is negligence, which is violence, and should be dealt with accordingly.

There is a little more to it than this. For instance, it would be easy to surmise that we also have a responsibility to those who can't meaningfully exercise their rights to seek after what they need, such as the physically or mentally disabled, the mentally ill, children, and the elderly and infirm. Some might also say that we have a responsibility not to commit things like animal cruelty, which causes undue suffering on creatures that can clearly experience suffering. I would be inclined to agree with both of these statements. But before we can get much further down that rabbit hole, we need to understand a bit more about rights, what they are, and where they come from. And that deserves its own article, and a few other things should be addressed before that happens.

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Why I'm not voting today.

It's November 4th, time for everyone to go do their civic duty and vote for who they think should be allowed to use violence to enforce their agenda for the next several years. And that is, in a nutshell, why I won't be doing so myself. Because my vote is simply: no one. No matter how good and noble your intentions are, how brilliant you are, how solid your values are, how spotless your integrity is, or how nice a person you are – you have no right to use violence to make me or anyone else do things the way you want them done. I don't care how many people vote for you.

If a gang of thugs surrounds you in an alleyway, demands your money, and threatens to shoot you if you don't give it to them, that's called robbery. If the gang first holds a vote, gives you a vote in whether or not they get to take your money, and then wins because they are majority and majority rules – news flash, that's still robbery. No matter how much you dress it up, or how many layers of civic pleasantries you hide it behind. Calling the gang government, giving them official titles or badges, expanding the voting pool to millions of people, calling the money taxes, creating an elaborate structure of laws, 'checks and balances', and other such things doesn't change the underlying reality. Initiating violence against peaceful people is wrong, no matter who does it, what their intentions, or how many people support it. Period. Violence is only justifiable when it is necessary for defense of one's own natural rights or the natural rights of another party. That is, when someone else has initiated violence against you or someone else, and you have to fight back to stop it.

That's not my opinion or political preference. It is the most basic, fundamental, and self-evident ethical statement that can be made. I defy anyone who wishes to dispute it. And without that simple principle as a foundation you have no ethics, no morality, no principle that isn't arbitrary self-righteous nonsense. (And, my fellow Christians, if anyone wishes to argue against that on a Biblical basis, that principle is clearly implied in the Greatest Commandments. Love does no harm to its neighbor, and is therefore the fulfillment of the Law. So unless you want to toss out the Greatest Commandments your argument, whatever it may be, is invalid.)

Please understand me. I'm all in favor of participatory government. I'm totally down with using voting as a method of participation (though not the sole method). And while I frequently argue that the voting system itself is broken, using the failtastic 'first-past-the-post' method, and that our government is not participatory enough but relies too much on indirect representation and centralization, neither of these are, in and of themselves, a good enough reason not to vote. Though they certainly don't lend any legitimacy to the whole system.

The reason I will not be voting, the reason I am boycotting the vote indefinitely, is because the only options on the ballot are to hand over the 'right' to initiate violence over to various candidates campaigning for that 'right'. Which is no right at all. The only meaningful vote that I can cast is not to cast one. I vote no confidence in the system itself, because that system is broken beyond repair. No amount of voting will fix it. The problem is rule-by-violence, and voting who gets to rule by violence only perpetuates that problem. You are voting for the problem to continue. It doesn't matter if it's the Democrats, the Republicans, the Libertarians, the Greens, or whoever else. The underlying paradigm doesn't change. And I will not lend legitimacy to such a paradigm by casting my vote for it, because rule-by-violence is inherently illegitimate.

If you would say, as some do, that I have no right to complain because I don't vote, I would respond with the opposite: you have no right to complain, because you voted for the situation to continue. You voted for someone to have the power to use violence to enforce their agenda on you. You might not have gotten the person you wanted, or the agenda you wanted, but you certainly got the system you voted for. I don't consent to such a system. I won't vote for it to continue. And I look forward to the day it collapses under its own dead weight. In the mean time, I will happily gripe about violence being used to force other people's agendas on me until others get it through their heads what the problem really is, and realize their own role in it.

If you choose to go vote today, I'm not judging you. If you feel it's the right thing to do, go and do it. I've voted in the past, largely because I didn't understand the problem. In hindsight, I regret casting my ballot, but hindsight is always 20-20 and I probably wouldn't have realized the truth of the matter without voting in the last major election, and the bad taste it left in my mouth afterwards. But I do strongly encourage anyone who understands what I'm saying here to consider boycotting the vote yourself. The less legitimacy this corrupt and violent government can claim for itself, the closer we are to real change. I vote No-Confidence 2014.

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I'm still here.

I just wanted to post and let my readers (all two of you) know that I haven't been sucked into a black hole or anything, nor have I forgotten about this blog. I've actually had several articles planned, but due to having a lot on my plate and no reliable internet connection, I have failed to finish any of them thus far. In the past, I have forced myself to push through an article and get one out, but for right now, I'm taking my time to get my ducks in a row, work on some other projects (namely, a novel I've been meaning to sit down and write), and deal with other more mundane issues that are competing for my attention at the moment. I've also been spending some serious time and debt-based fiat currency in the area of prepping, something I've been meaning to do for some time. And no, Ebola didn't inspire me, I actually started before all that came to the forefront. I may do an article or two about that in the not-so-distant future.

I do, however, now have a semi-usable internet connection. It's slow, spotty, and occasionally just doesn't work, but it means I can actually get a few things done online. So, in honor of being mostly back up and running out here in the sticks, I thought I'd share a couple thoughts.

Thought #1
I rub elbows with several members of the tinfoil hat community online. I don't always agree with their take on things, but many of them are quite perceptive, catch things other people don't, and most that I know hold themselves to a decent standard of intellectual integrity. They make me think about things from a different angle, and that's a good thing. So, when I say what I'm about to say, I'm not saying it in application to everyone. Technically, I fall into the tinfoil hat category myself on some issues. Like 9-11.

But, some of the people in the conspiracy theory community are just plain nuts. It's fine to use inductive reasoning, intuition, and imagination to hypothesize about fringe possibilities. In fact, it's a good thing. Because sometimes those fringe possibilities turn out to be the truth. The problem comes when a hypothesis, because it sounds so good to you and there is some shred of evidence that correlates with it, becomes fact in your mind and is henceforth purported as such. If you have a hypothesis about lizard people, mind-controlling nanobots, alien overlords, or plans to massively depopulate the human race – well, awesome. All of those things, while they strain the bounds of probability and reason, still fall within the realm of plausibility.

If someone is interested, there is no harm and much good that can come from investigating these possibilities and discussing it with others. But when you start to declare something as fact (or worse, as a pre-assumed fact which goes without question), provide only shaky and circumstantial evidence, and label those who call it into question as 'sheeple' or 'asleep'... well, at that point you have lost my attention. I will entertain almost any idea, no matter how crazy. I learned from 9-11 not to dismiss something just because it 'sounds crazy'. But in the same way, I won't accept something just because it 'makes sense'. Before you can call something a fact, you must first eliminate the possibility that it is not true. And on that note...

Thought #2
We, as a society, have an addiction. And I blame the Ancient Greek philosophers for it. They did us a great disservice in that they ingrained into our culture a terrible, horrible concept called two-valued logic. For those not in the know, and too lazy to read the linked Wikipedia entry, two-valued logic basically means a logic system where a given statement can either be true or false, not both, and not some other third option. Everything is a zero or a one.

This works great in computer science, where everything is a zero or a one. But for the real world... not so much. We have to deal with things called unknown variables, which result in uncertainties, probabilities, and such. So from any individual's relative position there is inherently a third option besides 'true' and 'false', and that is 'indeterminate'. Someone will argue, "Hurr-durr, its still true or false, u jus dont know witch cuz yer igner'nt." Which makes me want to drop a crate of physics textbooks on their head. Three-valued logic is inherent to the universe, and one needs to look no further than quantum mechanics to see that. There, you find uncertainty encoded into the most fundamental mechanisms of the universe. In other words, the universe runs on three value logic, the same way a computer runs on binary logic. And all of you black-and-white, true-and-false determinists can get just over it. Because there is nothing you can do about it.

It is okay to be uncertain. It is okay to not know all of the answers. It is okay for your worldview to have unanswered questions, tricky conundrums, and loose ends that haven't been tied up. You will never have all of your ducks in a row. Your ideas and logic will never be perfectly watertight. No matter how hard you try, no matter how many lifetimes you spend, there will always be indeterminates, unknown variables, and unknown unknowns. That just comes with the territory of being a mere mortal.

But this makes many people very uncomfortable. We have been taught that, if an idea has loose ends or unknowns attached to it, it must be wrong or worthless. And we feel very uncomfortable when we can't put all of our observations and experiences into a neat box, because then we feel like we aren't in control. Which is okay, because we aren't. People, you need to let it go. (No singing!) In most cases, 'indeterminate' or 'I don't know' are just as acceptable answers to a question as 'yes' or 'no'. It doesn't mean the person saying it is stupid, or incompetent, or whatever. And if you don't know, it doesn't mean you are stupid or incompetent. We need to learn to live with uncertainty, to be honest about it with ourselves, with each other, and accepting of others (and not dismissive of their ideas) when they admit they are uncertain. False certainty is the fundamental unit of willful ignorance.

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The Waves

I write this now sitting on a wooden balcony of sorts, overlooking the branch of the Lake of the Ozarks that snakes out around the edge of the little community I call home. The sun is setting, insects buzz in the thick green woods that surround the lake, and while the air is warm, the breeze is just a bit cool, just enough to make the temperature very pleasant. I see only a narrow strip of intermittent clouds in the sky, darkened by the way the light is hitting them, with a pink haze beneath them and a clear blue expanse above them which grows darker as it approaches the zenith. Only a few evening lake-goers can still be seen on the lake, and even they appear to be inching closer to the docks, their boats leaving long wakes that fan out into waves which ripple slowly across the water.

Ah, the waves. While there is no shortage of beauty to be seen from where I sit, it is the waves that captivate me more than anything else. As the wake from one of the boat continues to engulf the lake, changing its entire landscape with even, parallel lines that slowly inch towards land, I see another line of waves push back the opposite direction and begin to engulf the first set of waves until they are canceled out. Then the more subtle natural wave pattern of the lake soon becomes apparent again, flowing at a forty-five degree angle to the waves left by the boat. And all this time the smaller little waves could be seen lapping up and down, entirely indifferent to the larger waves with their greater wavelengths and lower frequencies. One does not affect the other as far as I can tell. And these little waves, rippling through the lake, seem to be random and yet in perfect harmony. If I cared to, I could probably time them and measure their frequency, and it would probably be the same no matter which point of the lake I picked to observe. I sit here from my vantage point watching all of this as the sky begins to grow dark, and I realize I am seeing the universe.

The lake is, indeed, an image and archetype of the universe itself at all scales, from the smallest quantum scale to the scale of multiple galaxy clusters. Waves flowing, crossing, merging, canceling, pushing, and pulling on other waves. Waves made of particles, which are made of waves, which are made of particles, which are made of waves, which continue down until you reach the smallest possible thing, which is both particle and wave, quantized and discreet yet flowing and amorphous. Bound by frequencies and amplitudes, yet clumped into coherent units, creating a tension which is both quantifiable and unpredictable. This is the palette of mathematical color from which the universe itself is painted by its Painter, skillfully and carefully mixed into photons and electrons, quarks and gluons, stars and galaxies, summer breezes and sunsets.

I look at the lake and see the story of everything. I see a narrative of all that has happened and will happen being told by the water in its silent voice. I hear the whisperings of every joy, every tragedy, every solemn occasion, every blissful moment, and I think to myself that if only I knew what the water knows, perhaps I could influence that narrative in some way and make the story a little bit better. Perhaps I could create waves of healing which flow opposite waves of tragedy, matching their frequency and wavelength, and canceling them out. Perhaps I could learn to paint with this palette of waves as a painter myself. For, in fact, I already am a painter, as is every person whether they realize it or not. But we are not always lucid as to what we paint, whether our waves make the story better or worse. This is not always our fault, because there is so much we don’t yet know and don’t yet understand. But, all too often we think we know, or rather, we pretend we know. Or we simply cease to care. We stop looking at the waves and look only at ourselves. We cease to learn or to observe the wake we leave behind as it ripples through everything around us. And such willful ignorance inevitably results in terrible chapters to this story we are all writing within the waves of the universe.

It’s now nearly dark. The lake is still visible but the I can no longer make out the waves except in the brightest spots. I know that while the light, itself waves that mirror the nature of the water, has crept away to shine on other parts of the Earth, the waves on the water still continue unseen, telling their story to whoever can perceive them and understand what they are saying. I hear their message, and I will keep listening until I understand. Because I want to make beauty like they do, that someone else might some day look on and take from me what I now take from the lake.

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Israel and Palestine - Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

So, I want to address a very specific argument I am seeing a lot of from the side supporting Israel's actions in Gaza. It's the 'human shield' justification, which says that since Hamas is hiding behind civilians, using civilian facilities, etc; Israel is justified in attacking civilian targets, and not responsible for the civilian deaths. Those deaths are on Hamas.

Now, I have heard counterarguments against these allegations that Hamas is using human shields, including evidence that Israel is fabricating evidence to that effect. There is the claim that Gaza is so population dense, that the people have nowhere to go. And there is the whole question of whether or not someone should have the right to order someone else out of their own home so they can drop a bomb on it. But, the pro-Israel side will no doubt have counterarguments to these counterarguments, and trying to sort out the fact from fiction in the midst of all the propaganda is a massive and knotty task. Inevitably, both sides present their 'evidence', reject or explain away the others' evidence, and end up in a stalemate of butthurt.

Therefore, for the purpose of this discussion, we are going to make some assumptions for the sake of argument. I am not implying that any of these assumptions are actually true or false. I simply want to isolate the human shield argument and judge it by its own merits, without getting distracted by extra variables. So, for this article, we will assume:

1. That the State of Israel is legitimate in every way, has the right to exist where it is, and has the right to defend itself when attacked.

2. That Hamas is a real threat, its activities pose a significant danger to the civilian population of Israel, and Israel is completely justified in defending itself against that threat with deadly force.

3. That Hamas is, in fact, using human shields purposefully, storing weapons in civilian buildings, hiding behind women and children, and forcing or tricking people to remain in areas that are going to be bombed, for the purpose of producing dead Palestinians that can be used as propaganda.

So then, assuming all of the above is true – if you are Israel, what do you do?

Let's start with an analogy. If you are in your home, and there are crowds of people on the street outside your house, and someone in the crowd starts firing gunshots into your window (and there are no police that can be called), what do you do? Well, what you don't do is pick up an automatic weapon and start firing into the crowd. It doesn't matter if the shooter is purposefully hiding in the crowd and using them as a shield. Your right not to be assaulted does not trump the rights of the people in the crowd not to be assaulted, and neither do theirs trump yours. You are equal, and writing them off as collateral damage does not magically change this, or justify taking their lives.

"Well, warn them to disperse first!" someone will say. After all, Israel is supposedly warning the Palestinians to get out of an area before bombing them. Forget that this would, of course, give the shooter time to disperse too. But now, let's say that this crowd is actually in a fenced area. Their small neighborhood has been boxed in from all sides by a tall electric fence topped with barbed wire, and they have no way out. Nevermind that you built the fence and guard the only exit, that's not important. Thanks to this fence, though, the crowd has nowhere to disperse to. They can shuffle a bit, and maybe leave you a few empty holes to fire your automatic rifle down. But if you start sweeping side to side, they have nowhere to go.

"The crowd should just turn in the shooter! They know who it is, they should grab him and hand him over!" Except for, you know, the shooter has a gun and all. Remember that the crowd has been living with this shooter in their midst for a while now. They are scared of him. They don't want to get shot, either by you or him. They are afraid to criticize him, lest he retaliate against them. He's got friends, after all, and their little gang is rather rough. The crowd is caught in the middle, scared of both sides, with nowhere to run to, and no way to defend themselves against either one. And, for some reason, they don't entirely trust you either.

That is, they are hostages, and essentially being held hostage by both sides of the conflict. Coming to this realization should start shedding some light of perspective on the situation. Because in a hostage situation, great care is usually given to protect the lives of the hostages while taking down the hostage-taker, even if the hostage-taker is hostile and aggressive.

So, what should Israel do? If this is a hostage situation, and they are partly responsible for keeping those hostages, step 1 would be to release those hostages. The absolute first step in dealing with Hamas should be the immediate end of the Apartheid against the Palestinians. Open the fences and let them out. Give them back the freedom to move and live where they choose. Let relief and supplies in. That would be a great start.

But then, you still have to deal with Hamas, and if you release the Palestinians then you let Hamas out as well to tromp through Israel causing havoc. This is an inky problem, but so is any hostage situation. Going after them must be handled with care, just like you would when dealing with a criminal who has taken hostages. I can't give a detailed step-by-step guide on how to do so, but I'm sure there are plenty of hostage negotiation experts and tactical experts who could. Hamas could be hunted down and systematically eliminated in such a way that minimized civilian casualties, despite their human shields, with a bit of patience and tactical forethought. You cannot convince me that the mighty IDF would have any problem doing this.

Would there be mishaps, perhaps a stray Israeli bullet here or there that might claim a civilian life? Probably. Mishaps do happen in difficult situations like this, even when the utmost care is given. It's not okay, but it is a far cry better than dropping bombs on a civilian populated area. And when you value the lives of those civilians, view them as hostages to a militant organization, and make preserving their lives and dignity as much a part of your mission as protecting your own people, then you will make every possible effort to prevent civilian casualties. And, in a war zone, that is often the most and the least that we can ask.

In short, the human shield argument, even if it's valid, does not justify the bombing of populated civilian areas like we are seeing in Gaza. It doesn't justify over a thousand civilians killed since the beginning of the attack, including many women and children. These are real people, individuals with names, faces, family, friends, hopes, and dreams. Now they are dead. I've said before, and I will say again, that I fully support the right of the people of Israel to live in the land peacefully, and I fully support their right to defend themselves if attacked. But I cannot support what the State of Israel is doing now, or its continued Apartheid against the Palestinians, who also have those same rights. There is no way to justify it.

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Thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Best laid plans have a way of going awry. I had planned on doing several articles on the situation in Israel and Palestine. The first was going to go over the basic facts and statistics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, its history, and some verifiable sources to back up those facts to help everyone get on the same page. The second was going to address the current situation, concerning the bombing of Gaza by Israel and the ground invasion, which is now currently underway. The third was going to go where angels fear to tread, and tackle the religious aspect of this issue – not concerning Judaism or Islam, but concerning the Christians who back whatever actions Israel takes, regardless of their inherent moral repercussions, and justify this based on Scripture. I intended to examine the merits of this position from a purely Biblical perspective.

Well, I never made much progress on these articles, primarily due to spending time working on the house I just purchased, which doesn’t have internet, to make it livable enough for my family and myself to move into it. It’s a 45 minute drive from my current residence, and between that and work, I have gotten little done on anything else. I still might do the first and third articles at a later time, and Awakened Citizen and StormCloudsGathering both did excellent articles which cover the second topic well, so there is no need for me to restate what they have already said. But I wanted to at least make a few comments of my own on the situation.

On the topic of ethics, I believe in the Non-AggressionPrinciple, the inherent Natural Rights of every person, and in the inherent personal responsibilities that come with those rights. In that regard, I stand with the people of Israel and their right to live in peace where they choose, to organize their own society in a self-determined and peaceful way, and to defend themselves with force against any aggressor when necessary. For the same reasons, I also stand with the people of Palestine and their right to do the same things – to live in peace where they choose, to organize their own society in a self-determined and peaceful way, and to defend themselves with force against any aggressor when necessary.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a wedge issue. It’s not simple, straightforward, or easily solved. And people are angry about it, and I understand their anger. Innocent people are dying, and I’m angry about it, too. Over the course of the past week I have seen innumerable Facebook fights, arguments, and angry words over this issue from both sides. I have heard many claims and counterclaims, backed by many different sources of varying reputation, which only add to the confusion and fuel the fire of both the conflict and the heated debate surrounding it. I have admittedly, so far, had a difficult time sorting the facts from the fiction.

But, in my searching, a few thing have become abundantly clear. The first, is that there is innocent blood on the hands of both sides. To what degree and in what ways are obviously up for debate, but both sides have killed civilians, children, and otherwise innocent people. The second is that the Palestinian people, especially those in the Gaza Strip, are living in squallor in what can only be described as the world’s two largest concentration camps. Walled in by fences and troops, there is tight control over who and what enters or leaves, and this greatly limits economic development of any kind, and has even hampered relief efforts. Third, is that such conditions of great poverty and oppression, coupled with dogmatic thinking, create a ripe breeding ground for violent extremism. It does not excuse or justify such extremism, but it does provide fertile soil for it to grow in. And fourth, this back and forth, retaliatory violence is not solving anything, and is not going to. It's only making things progressively worse.

Can this conflict ever be solved? Can the senseless violence ever come to an end, and if so, how? I don't have an easy or definite answer to that question. But I firmly believe it's at least possible. But if it's going to happen, it is going to have to start with at least one of the two sides putting their foot down against the elements within them that support aggressive violence and holding those elements accountable. That, of course, is no guarantee of peace, but it is the only path that can lead to it. Either side can choose to make this step, but given that Israel is the more powerful of the two sides, and exerts the most control over the situation, they are by far in the better position to make this move and have it be effective. They have the most power, and therefore, the most responsibility. They are in the unique position to relieve the Palestinian territories of their concentration-camp-like qualities and end the Apartheid.

I have no illusions that, if they did this today and quit the Apartheid cold-turkey, it would somehow magically and instantly end the violence. Not by a longshot. But someone has to take the first step, and that someone will probably have to take the first several steps. Then, eventually, the other party will have to start taking steps, too. And they can only do this if enough people on either side choose to. And I have it on good authority that there are many, on both sides, that do want actual peace. I stand with those among Israel and Palestine who want to see real peace, for both sides. And I stand firmly against aggression of any type, and condemn the killing of innocent civilians, whether by airstrike, by rocket, by gun, or by suicide bomber. That includes these airstrikes by Israel on the densely populated Gaza strip.

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See also: Israel and Palestine - Part 2