Re: the Hamas killing homosexuals discussion:
This boggles me (many things that people say and do, have that effect, in all fairness). Why would you spend the time and energy to go out of your way to kill some stranger who is neither a threat you and yours, nor an obstacle to providing for you and yours, just on the say-so of some random foreign geezer? What benefit is there for you?
I mean, sure, there is some miniscule increase in the portion of the current stock of material wealth and resources now freed up by their death, but:
A. the odds that those will accrue to you, and not the random geezer leading you around by the nose are, well, risible.
B. any goods or services that the now-corpse would have generated had they lived will, obviously, no longer be available.
This is killing the sheep instead of shearing it. I'm not telling you to like sheep, live with the sheep, be the sheep, or whatever it is that every English speaking country seems to accuse their neighbors of doing with sheep (raises soooo many questions). I'm asking you - what is the point of killing the sheep?
Even the world's favorite hen-pecked pederast didn't kill the sheep - he taxed them. Here's a hint, corpses might vote if they're in Chicago, but even in Chi-town, they don't pay taxes.
What is the upside for you, as the putative killer, here? That is the part that I don't get.
In warfare there are pretty clear upsides - I kill them, they will no longer be able to kill or harm me or mine. Simple, logical, clear and immediate benefit. Even in violent robbery there is a clear upside - I kill them, I loot their stuff. Simple, logical, clear and immediate benefit. Whether it outweighs the risks and costs is a separate discussion, but at least a measurable benefit to the killer exists.
Killing someone for their appearance, accent, or romantic inclinations (as long as they aren't forcing themselves on you or yours) just doesn't have any measurable benefit.
Even the Nazi's at least claimed that slaughtering untermenschen would give them (allegedly) desperately needed living space. This is just killing for the sake of killing.
It really does make clear that Hamas et al are nothing more than a death cult. I get the human fascination with death. The eagerness to experience it first hand seems irrational, at best.
At least Iran is getting something out of this, from their perspective - they're shoring up their domestic position, and weakening opposition to their intended rise as regional hegemon (mind you, the Turks are a bigger obstacle to that goal than the Israelis, but I never accused the hypocrites in Tehran of being strategic geniuses). Hamas gets nothing but the (possibly sexual? there are a lot of repressed young men involved, hence the obsession with virgins, or is it raisins?) "joy" of killing, and now of being killed in turn.
Cost / benefit wise, it just doesn't scan.