[yes_really]

The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".

I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?

[yosamino]

No, the original argument was that Israel - spelled out for you, because you are pretending you missed it - is using these technologies for the brutal suppression of the whole of the of the Palestinian people and that the overt motive of "fighting terrorism" is used as a fig-leaf to hide the ulterior motive of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from their lands.

Your question, which was really an assertion, asking if "it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism" is in bad faith, because you know very precisely that the person you were replying to does not think it's bad to "use technology to detect and stop terrorism", but instead you were using that question as a rhetorical device to assert that all Israel is doing is the overt action "detect and stop terrorism" in an effort to deny that Israel is also doing the ulterior ethnically cleaning.

Whether that is true or not can be debated, but the way you are asking the question is pre-supposing that it cannot be debated, because your assertion by asking that question is that the ulterior motive does not exist and you are trying to create a "gotcha".

You then went on to call the claim that Irgun and Lehi were terrorist organizations and/or the claim that two members of the Israeli government ware wanted for war crimes and/or the claim that the Israeli government might have overt as well as ulterior motives and therefore they might not be trusted on what they overtly say alone, a "bizzare conspiracy theory" about Jewish people in an effort to undermine these claims without judging them based on factfulness or truth.

I hope I cleared that up for you.

I tried to ask an LLM to be an impartial judge and give your comment a hasbara score, but it immediately banned me.

food for thought.

[yes_really]

You are wrong. My question was not "in bad faith". It is unfortunate but multiple people really do believe that it is bad that Israel is able to detect and stop terrorism through technology. There are multiple comments even in this post that openly support terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Instead of assuming you can read my mind and falsely accuse me of saying stuff in bad faith, it would be better if you weren't so arrogant.

To your other point, I called it a bizarre conspiracy theory because it is in fact a quite bizarre conspiracy theory! The comment didn't say that Israel was using the facial recognition for doing X in addition to stopping terrorism. It simply denied that it was even being used to stop terrorism at all ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting").

Again, that's a completely bizarre conspiracy theory. There has been an immense amount of terrorism against Israel (and it would have been much more without Israeli intelligence). If that happened in any country there would be a huge intelligence effort to stop that terrorism and it would be natural and justified. Compare to e.g. what the US did when it suffered 9/11 (why do we need to take our shoes off at airport security?). Yet for the case of Israel the comment implies that somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter, the Israeli people don't care about suffering terrorist attacks multiple times larger than 9/11 and a constant threat to be genocided if another October 7th turns into a full war. What the Israeli Jews really did, according to that comment, is to just pretend to fight terrorism ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting"), to fight some mysterious thing instead! Do you not realize how that's absurd?

[yosamino]

If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about.

The full quote is:

> excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.

That claim is not as as absolute as you make it out. It does not mean "Israel is lying about everything". "Not taking for granted" just means not to assume everything is true without questioning it. It just means, as I put it earlier: there is an overt thing being said, but there is also the suspicion of an ulterior motive.

The comment then goes on to give you a reason to be suspicious which in this case is the destruction of Gaza along with the atrocities the Israelis committed and the well documented dehumanizing rhetoric that points to a hatred against Palestinians as a whole that exists in Israeli society.

That comment doesn't argue that "somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter" - it says, there is more to it than just terrorism.

I am not sure why you are calling this a "mysterious thing" or "absurd" or "bizarre" - if you read any zionist literature or follow any zionist discussions, online or offline, then that viewpoint is regularly being expressed.

Or if you need another clue that technology is used for oppression and not just defense, go look at the West Bank and the land theft that is taking place there and how that is implemented.

Look, if you want to have a good faith political argument you need to consider that the people who you are arguing against are not all just crazy and stupid and that you somehow are in possession of some information that they somehow are not. People have different reasons for arguing different positions.

If you do not in fact actually believe that another person is arguing something crazy and bizarre, but instead you are using this as a rhetorical trick, then that is the almost the definition if arguing in bad faith.

But if you do actually believe someone's claim is crazy, mysterious or absurd, simply because you are refusing to understand their argument, then you are not contributing to discussion, and you need to go back and try to understand how it is possible that someone could come to a different understanding of a situation than you. You don't have to agree with it, you just need to understand it's possible.

Edit: Check how apropos the news is today

> “Destroy the idea of an Arab terror state; finally, formally and practically cancel the cursed Oslo Accords and get on the path of sovereignty, while encouraging migration both from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria,” said Smotrich, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “There is no other long-term solution.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-next-government-shoul...

[yes_really]

> If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about

I literally just rebuked you for falsely accusing me of arguing in bad faith. You now falsely accuse me of failing to read.

I obviously read the comment. I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

[yosamino]

> I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.

I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because you were asking why someone was accusing you of arguing in bad faith. You can do with that whatever you wish.

If you are interested in why it's easy to recognize your way or arguing ( and I just want to note that it was not me who accused you of 'bad faith' argumentation in the first place), I can recommend Schopenhauer's "Die Kunst Recht zu behalten"[0] - your original

> To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?

shows up there as Chapter 7 "Yield Admissions Through Questions" among others.

You will note that I gave you an entire explanation to your specific assertions instead of just pointing to some book.

The thing about that is, though, that it's a bit boring sometimes because It often seems like every thought has already been though before. We humans seem to like to go in a circle. Just like the two us are doing right now.

I hope you have great rest of the week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

[yes_really]

> You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.

You are wrong again. I quoted the comment as "he wouldn't take their word as to whom they're fighting" to highlight how the comment is denying that Israel is fighting terrorism. It is quite simple. There is no crucial information to be left out. Also it doesn't make sense to call that a "straw man argument" given that I simply repeated his comment and highlighted why it was absurd.

> I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because ...

Oh yeah, you were so helpful!

[Matl]

Yes, I do believe Israel is using 'fighting terrorism' as cover for 'changing reality on the ground' (genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and at the very least displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank).

No I do not believe Jewish people as a general group are part of any conspiracy or whatever nonsense you tried to bring up to deflect from addressing the facts I pointed out in my comments.

You then had the meaning of my comments explained very well to you and still refused to address them.

To put it as plainly as possible and beyond doubt, so that even you can understand, when Israel says they're fighting terrorism, it's not that such a thing would be bad, it's that they're doing things that do not fit that metric by any stretch of the imagination, (mass murder of civilians, using starvation as a weapon of war, holding hostages indefinitely without a fair trial, imprisoning children, using area weapons in heavily populated urban areas, appropriating land that is not theirs, assisting Israeli terrorists in terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, attacking countries despite a 'ceasefire' etc,)

The fact that it was you who brought Jewish people into the conversation when they weren't mentioned before, as if either you or Israel spoke for them, shows that your argument was in bad faith.