You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause.
or when the Army denies government and media stated incidents making people believe they were false flag operations to justify further destruction of a ethnic people.
Hamas and Palestine are two different entities. Considering a march for Palestine as support for Hamas is a big stretch. You wouldn't consider a protest in support of Israel as backing Likud would you?
More like Afghanistan and the Taliban. Wanting the US out or Afghanistan didn’t mean you were a Taliban supporter, even if that was always going to be who stepped in to fill the vacuum.
If majority of Palestinians support Hamas[1], it isn't that big of a stretch to say Palestinian should pay the price for Hamas' crime. If majority of Israel supports Likud then yeah it is not wrong to blame Israel's people for his action.
Same goes with Russia. I don't have any sympathy for them if Putin is popular and make decisions like Ukraine invasion.
The problem with this rhetoric is that bad people have a strong incentives to let others think they have strong support. Unless you are living in the area and can talk to citizens directly, it's going to be damn hard to make any informed decision about that fact.
E.G:
In the link you cite, the numbers come from "the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research". Researching how reliable this source is is a huge and hard work I'm assuming most HN users have neither the resources nor the skill to do. Medias outlet and politicians from all sides have demonstrated little benevolence or competence so trusting them to do that is also a stretch.
Even in France, I'm distrusting statistics from INSEE (!) now because it's so hard to verify neutrality. Condemning people to death based on those information is unwise.
Even if the data is true, where does that lead you? American have elected Bush which lied about WMD and went to war with Irak against the vote of the UN, killing thousands of civilians.
Do Americans deserve to die?
In which case which people from which country would be absolved from that judgement?
Dude. I lived in Ashkelon for two years. In this time I worked with people from Gaza too. There's no nuance there. Whoever talks about it has no clue. Antisemitism for these people is not a curse word. It's a society that similarly thinks about women as lesser, less deserving beings for example, without any reservations.
To them Jewish lives aren't important. And the fact that Jews are allowed to tell them what to do generates explosive righteous indignation.
Imagine yourself being ruled by chimpanzees. It wouldn't matter to you how benevolent they are, whether you have food or roof above your head. You'd feel like it's absurd, and whoever drove you into the situation where an ape tells you what to do must be brought to justice. This is how the average Gazan feels.
That's a more interesting comment than most things I've heard or read on the topic. But again, given I have no experience and I've never been there, it's almost impossible for me to be confident in forming a decent opinion.
> Head pollster Khalil Shikaki, who has been surveying Palestinian public opinion for more than two decades, called it a “dramatic” shift, but said it also resembles previous swings toward Hamas during times of confrontation. Those all dissipated within three to six months as Hamas failed to deliver on promises of change.
It's like when George W. Bush had 90% approval in the US after 9/11; it doesn't really fairly reflect normal opinion.
This is one of the many downsides of democracy as a mandate for governance. If you don't like war or violence, "You should have voted harder". Specially prepared polling statistics or the misleading premises of democracy can be used to conflate the state with the populace. Personification of the state is another common trope.
The concept of 'total war' follow from the above. It is a foregone conclusion from democratic premises and the incentives of officials.
That's kind of an interesting analogy, since DC itself is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. They themselves would love to be rid of Republican leadership, who have a strong influence on city policy via Congress. They did not select them; they were sent from elsewhere.
If you offered to blow up the city in order to take out Republican leadership, more than a few would at least be willing to consider that tradeoff.
It absolutely would be wrong to blame the anti-war anti-GOP anti-neocon people who opposed the war vehemently and protested on the streets in opposition against that war. It would also be absolutely wrong to kill such anti-GOP people via indiscriminate bombing.
It's not an individual blame, but sometimes innocent suffers the decisions of the leader. Like I am not sympathetic to Russia at all regarding sanctions even though I know not all Russians support Putin's plan.
And American's absolutely do suffer from their President's actions(although not that much).
So ... if the majority of Israelis support the IDF, then that makes then they should pay for the crimes of the IDF? Yeah, I am not really sure I would want to go there.
> The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.
So the other 47% are culpable? The vast majority of people are victims of their own governments. Indiscriminate war is unconscionable- the biggest losers are always the little people.
Problem with this kind of thinking is that you can always blame the other party. But blame will not solve the issue. Both parties, Hamas and Isreaeli government do bad things. Staying into "blame" thinking will not change the situation.
Dead civilians are always a tragedy, if they are Israeli or Palestinian. Only if and when peope are tired of killing, will this come to a stop.
Yes, I would say that that US should be blamed. As a country, the leader represents the people unless it has been forced like North Korea. For all we know Palestinians had power to replace Hamas if they didn't liked them. If someone blames Americans for say Vietnam war, it isn't undeserved even though not all Americans supported it.
There is basically no other option if you think about it. Either we should be fine palestianians choosing Hamas or we can force Palestians to not have a choice in leadership. Second is more violent but that is what is done now.
Exactly this. Nobody seems to talk about the other half of Hamas. I deplore what the military side did, it's not okay in any case. But it's not so cut and dry.
There's so much nuance and complexity with this topic that online discussion is so tiring to read. People take two points out of twenty and make sweeping judgements and generalizations without having the full picture.
There is no "other" side of Hamas that doesn't want to kill all the Jews. This is a delusion of someone unfamiliar with situation. They may differ in methods. The side that does fundraising in Western countries knows that being openly anti-Semitic will negatively affect their fundraising activities... so, they aren't that stupid. They want the money / resources and they will pretend for as long as necessary to get those sweet donations. They will promptly give those donations to the other side though.
Lol, on what grounds don't you agree? Do you know these guys? Have you talked to them?
In my very brief military service, as part of the (Israeli) army jail punishment I was sent to guard "camp 16" ("makhaneh shesh-esreh"). That's one of the facilities where IDF puts Palestinian terrorists. So, I've seen and heard some.
In early 2000's (I think it was 2003) I worked as a waiter in Caffe Hilel in Moshava Germanit district of Jerusalem. It was the one which was blown up by a dude from Eastern Jerusalem who worked there in the kitchen. The guard died and another waiter died. It was right before my shift, so I didn't catch the event itself, I came right afterwards. There were about a dozen of people wounded because the glass at the entrance shattered by the explosion and spread all over the place.
Anyways. I knew the terrorist guy from work, obviously, ad well as I knew plenty of other Palestinians both from the occupied territories, from Gaza, from Eastern Jerusalem or somewhere inside Israel, like Ramle / Lod.
And here's the hard truth about it: unless you are someone educated, someone who got to travel a bit, speaks English to a degree that you can independently read / watch the news, you are the terrorist material. And that's the vast, vast majority of population of Gaza. They don't know any better, and they live in the world that westerners cannot even imagine. They have no idea humanism was invented. They have no idea human lives in general are worth something. They really think that westerners are stupid and weak because they care so much about their lives. The feeling is compounded by disgust, because from their perspective caring about one's life or well-being more than caring about some absurd superstition is an affront to their understanding of modesty.
These people live in a hierarchical world where boundaries are set by gender, nationality, religion. Your worth is determined by you being born into a particular nationality, beside other things. Jews are simply inferior in their world view. The fact that they even aspire to be on the same level with Arabs is an affront to those traditional Arabs. It's like a torture to them to have a Jewish manager, or to comply with what a Jewish police officer tells them to do.
This is not about religion. Arabs living in Gaza, for example, wouldn't recognize Jewish converts in the US as Jews. It's about ethnicity. It's not about anything you can consciously change about yourself. Even if you were a Jew who converted to Islam, you'd still be inferior in their eyes.
So, do they want to kill all Jews -- you bet they do! They wouldn't bat an eyelash telling you how that would be a miracle from god if all Jews died a painful death, all at once. I mean, unless you are talking to someone who was exposed to the idea that killing people based on their ethnicity is bad. Most of them either genuinely don't know it, or despise people who think that way. Not everyone would take up arms to do it, but in their world view, anyone who does it is like a saint...
And yet neither could exist without the others, and all three are effectively governed by dudes like Ismail Haniyya relaxing safely in Qatar.
Furthermore: there haven't been elections since 2006 - there are people at fighting age in the entirety of Palestinian Territories who have never seen a voting booth in their life.
After the elections in 2006, which were not permitted again by Israel, Hamas said they would accept a two state settlement. They have reiterated this many times, and still stand by that, so there's absolutely an opportunity to negotiate with Hamas.
What two-state settlement are you talking about? Seriously? Hamas is one of the biggest "from the river to the sea" apologists... How deep do you have to stick your head in the sand not to notice that.
I mean, there are many things that could be done to help Palestinians to live a better life. Supporting Hamas is definitely not one of those, not by a large margin.
Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation.
And so do you.
Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others.
So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions:
Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example.
Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious.
Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel.
The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives.
The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash).
So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance.
There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs&q...
There hasn't been an election in Gaza in like 18 years, not counting municipal elections.
Besides I don't exactly get the feeling here that Hamas would be all to happy to have a peaceful election and step aside if they lost.
Allegedly (and who knows, it may be Israeli propaganda), the rockets they launch are made by pulling up the water pipes.
And to clarify: I don't side with Israel. I just don't think Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians. I know Nethanyahu is not on the side of the Israeli people and ben-gevir basically shares hitlers pov about Jews marrying non-Jews, which should pretty much prove how much he is not on the side of the good guys.
> You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause.
How so? Western nations are full of wackos and nutjobs. Someone protesting does not necessarily mean anything needs to change.
> Durov argued that Telegram was different from other platforms because it doesn’t use algorithms to promote content
Is that fair? Is an algorithm the equivalent of an editorial line? And what counts as an algorithm? It seems like there's a continuum from something simple like "most recent posts at the top" to "+5 bonus to Elon's tweets".
"Following" is such a misnomer and it's a word that should be banished from the realm.
I had joined the two Hamas telegram channels to see what the org was saying. I'm as much a detractor of the org as anyone, and am quite pleased to see their annihilation (though it is incredibly unfortunate that civilian Palestinians pay the greatest price). Their channel has been an exercise in cope while their narrative shifted quickly from arrogant, untouchable boasting about the things they did, to now being effectively a pathetic desperate pleading.
Watching this play out on Twitter has been interesting. For days after the attack, there was almost unanimous support for Israel. Then the Harvard letter came out saying that the blame was entirely on Israel, infuriating most of Twitter. But then over the next few days, a steady stream of posts have been bubbling up which all carry the theme of making the reader question whether Israel is justified in its reaction.
Telegram has been a source of war content, both for the Ukraine conflict and this one. I’m not sure why it’s so much more prolific than Twitter, but it definitely is. It might just be a difference of public vs private. Watching the Telegram rooms, you get the impression that someone is reporting to you directly, and that there’s no chance the videos will suddenly disappear. You had to opt in to the room to see it at all. Whereas a bunch of videos were made inaccessible on Twitter when the accounts that posted them got suspended — videos that bubbled up onto the “for you” feed algorithmically, rather than being shared in a private curated channel.
It’s fascinating watching from a distance. Everyone likes to feel the social media forces can be controlled or shaped. To an extent they can be, but most of it is just chaos on both sides. Telegram shows that people will tune in to private channels, though their reach might be limited compared to default-public mediums like Twitter.
One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.
I've seen some of the videos published by Hamas. Some of them are literally filmed with "gopro" or similar cameras during their attacks.
Generally I don't recommend watching these. These kinds of videos are incredibly disturbing.
--- Trigger warning: violence.
One thing that struck me is how horror-like all of it seemed and how invisible the opponent in such an engagement is. The invaders would often not see where the defenders were and would get shot seemingly out of nowhere. Vice versa they would shoot into small nudges and windows here or there and its often unclear whether they hit anyone or not.
My cousins who fought in Bosnia would often tell me similar stories. Their enemies were invisible most of the time, while sometimes someone would get hit on their side.
For reference: I once watched Full Metal Jacket with one of my cousins and there was a scene where suddenly, out of nowhere, the protagonists would get attacked in an urban area but they couldn't even see their enemies, just flashes of rifle fire here and there. He said: "This is exactly like war."
---
I don't know what to make of it. It all just feels like pointless horror.
There's certainly other forces at play, but having participated in one, I tend to view the main reason that war is traumatic to the individual is its depersonalized (and in modern times, mechanistic) nature.
A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably.
So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.
61 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadSame goes with Russia. I don't have any sympathy for them if Putin is popular and make decisions like Ukraine invasion.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8...
E.G:
In the link you cite, the numbers come from "the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research". Researching how reliable this source is is a huge and hard work I'm assuming most HN users have neither the resources nor the skill to do. Medias outlet and politicians from all sides have demonstrated little benevolence or competence so trusting them to do that is also a stretch.
Even in France, I'm distrusting statistics from INSEE (!) now because it's so hard to verify neutrality. Condemning people to death based on those information is unwise.
Even if the data is true, where does that lead you? American have elected Bush which lied about WMD and went to war with Irak against the vote of the UN, killing thousands of civilians.
Do Americans deserve to die?
In which case which people from which country would be absolved from that judgement?
To them Jewish lives aren't important. And the fact that Jews are allowed to tell them what to do generates explosive righteous indignation.
Imagine yourself being ruled by chimpanzees. It wouldn't matter to you how benevolent they are, whether you have food or roof above your head. You'd feel like it's absurd, and whoever drove you into the situation where an ape tells you what to do must be brought to justice. This is how the average Gazan feels.
> Head pollster Khalil Shikaki, who has been surveying Palestinian public opinion for more than two decades, called it a “dramatic” shift, but said it also resembles previous swings toward Hamas during times of confrontation. Those all dissipated within three to six months as Hamas failed to deliver on promises of change.
It's like when George W. Bush had 90% approval in the US after 9/11; it doesn't really fairly reflect normal opinion.
The concept of 'total war' follow from the above. It is a foregone conclusion from democratic premises and the incentives of officials.
I would still say it's not wrong to blame American's from Bush's action.
If you offered to blow up the city in order to take out Republican leadership, more than a few would at least be willing to consider that tradeoff.
And American's absolutely do suffer from their President's actions(although not that much).
So the other 47% are culpable? The vast majority of people are victims of their own governments. Indiscriminate war is unconscionable- the biggest losers are always the little people.
Dead civilians are always a tragedy, if they are Israeli or Palestinian. Only if and when peope are tired of killing, will this come to a stop.
It is as simple (and as difficult) as that. You're going to have to sell that to at least one side, probably both.
Let's say 51% of the U.S. voted for a crazy President from party "X" who became a dictator (illegally), and did terrible horrible unspeakable things.
And, let's say the 49% of the U.S. that didn't support said nutjob President, vehemently protested and did everything they could to oppose him[0].
Now, let's the say the rest of the world unites to defeat the U.S. that had gone crazy.
Would you still advocate that "Americans should pay the price for X's crimes against humanity"?
Would you advocate for the collective punishment of Americans, including those who abhor and hate X's actions (and who even attempted to resist X)?
This is the problem with collective punishments. QED
[0] Keep in mind the extreme difficulty of revolting against a government that has the most technologically-advanced military in the world.
There is basically no other option if you think about it. Either we should be fine palestianians choosing Hamas or we can force Palestians to not have a choice in leadership. Second is more violent but that is what is done now.
There's so much nuance and complexity with this topic that online discussion is so tiring to read. People take two points out of twenty and make sweeping judgements and generalizations without having the full picture.
In my very brief military service, as part of the (Israeli) army jail punishment I was sent to guard "camp 16" ("makhaneh shesh-esreh"). That's one of the facilities where IDF puts Palestinian terrorists. So, I've seen and heard some.
In early 2000's (I think it was 2003) I worked as a waiter in Caffe Hilel in Moshava Germanit district of Jerusalem. It was the one which was blown up by a dude from Eastern Jerusalem who worked there in the kitchen. The guard died and another waiter died. It was right before my shift, so I didn't catch the event itself, I came right afterwards. There were about a dozen of people wounded because the glass at the entrance shattered by the explosion and spread all over the place.
Anyways. I knew the terrorist guy from work, obviously, ad well as I knew plenty of other Palestinians both from the occupied territories, from Gaza, from Eastern Jerusalem or somewhere inside Israel, like Ramle / Lod.
And here's the hard truth about it: unless you are someone educated, someone who got to travel a bit, speaks English to a degree that you can independently read / watch the news, you are the terrorist material. And that's the vast, vast majority of population of Gaza. They don't know any better, and they live in the world that westerners cannot even imagine. They have no idea humanism was invented. They have no idea human lives in general are worth something. They really think that westerners are stupid and weak because they care so much about their lives. The feeling is compounded by disgust, because from their perspective caring about one's life or well-being more than caring about some absurd superstition is an affront to their understanding of modesty.
These people live in a hierarchical world where boundaries are set by gender, nationality, religion. Your worth is determined by you being born into a particular nationality, beside other things. Jews are simply inferior in their world view. The fact that they even aspire to be on the same level with Arabs is an affront to those traditional Arabs. It's like a torture to them to have a Jewish manager, or to comply with what a Jewish police officer tells them to do.
This is not about religion. Arabs living in Gaza, for example, wouldn't recognize Jewish converts in the US as Jews. It's about ethnicity. It's not about anything you can consciously change about yourself. Even if you were a Jew who converted to Islam, you'd still be inferior in their eyes.
So, do they want to kill all Jews -- you bet they do! They wouldn't bat an eyelash telling you how that would be a miracle from god if all Jews died a painful death, all at once. I mean, unless you are talking to someone who was exposed to the idea that killing people based on their ethnicity is bad. Most of them either genuinely don't know it, or despise people who think that way. Not everyone would take up arms to do it, but in their world view, anyone who does it is like a saint...
Furthermore: there haven't been elections since 2006 - there are people at fighting age in the entirety of Palestinian Territories who have never seen a voting booth in their life.
I mean, there are many things that could be done to help Palestinians to live a better life. Supporting Hamas is definitely not one of those, not by a large margin.
Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation.
And so do you.
Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others.
So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions:
Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example.
Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious.
Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel.
The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives.
The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash).
So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance.
There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs&q...
Besides I don't exactly get the feeling here that Hamas would be all to happy to have a peaceful election and step aside if they lost.
Allegedly (and who knows, it may be Israeli propaganda), the rockets they launch are made by pulling up the water pipes.
And to clarify: I don't side with Israel. I just don't think Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians. I know Nethanyahu is not on the side of the Israeli people and ben-gevir basically shares hitlers pov about Jews marrying non-Jews, which should pretty much prove how much he is not on the side of the good guys.
They are human beings and deserve to be judged by their individual actions.
How so? Western nations are full of wackos and nutjobs. Someone protesting does not necessarily mean anything needs to change.
> Durov argued that Telegram was different from other platforms because it doesn’t use algorithms to promote content
Is that fair? Is an algorithm the equivalent of an editorial line? And what counts as an algorithm? It seems like there's a continuum from something simple like "most recent posts at the top" to "+5 bonus to Elon's tweets".
The left pane is a list of "channels" sorted by most recent updates. The right pane are the updates from the specific channel, sorted by most recent.
I had joined the two Hamas telegram channels to see what the org was saying. I'm as much a detractor of the org as anyone, and am quite pleased to see their annihilation (though it is incredibly unfortunate that civilian Palestinians pay the greatest price). Their channel has been an exercise in cope while their narrative shifted quickly from arrogant, untouchable boasting about the things they did, to now being effectively a pathetic desperate pleading.
Telegram has been a source of war content, both for the Ukraine conflict and this one. I’m not sure why it’s so much more prolific than Twitter, but it definitely is. It might just be a difference of public vs private. Watching the Telegram rooms, you get the impression that someone is reporting to you directly, and that there’s no chance the videos will suddenly disappear. You had to opt in to the room to see it at all. Whereas a bunch of videos were made inaccessible on Twitter when the accounts that posted them got suspended — videos that bubbled up onto the “for you” feed algorithmically, rather than being shared in a private curated channel.
It’s fascinating watching from a distance. Everyone likes to feel the social media forces can be controlled or shaped. To an extent they can be, but most of it is just chaos on both sides. Telegram shows that people will tune in to private channels, though their reach might be limited compared to default-public mediums like Twitter.
Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation a few days ago: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk...
One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.
Generally I don't recommend watching these. These kinds of videos are incredibly disturbing.
--- Trigger warning: violence.
One thing that struck me is how horror-like all of it seemed and how invisible the opponent in such an engagement is. The invaders would often not see where the defenders were and would get shot seemingly out of nowhere. Vice versa they would shoot into small nudges and windows here or there and its often unclear whether they hit anyone or not.
My cousins who fought in Bosnia would often tell me similar stories. Their enemies were invisible most of the time, while sometimes someone would get hit on their side.
For reference: I once watched Full Metal Jacket with one of my cousins and there was a scene where suddenly, out of nowhere, the protagonists would get attacked in an urban area but they couldn't even see their enemies, just flashes of rifle fire here and there. He said: "This is exactly like war."
---
I don't know what to make of it. It all just feels like pointless horror.
A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably.
So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.