What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?
The fact is people are unprincipled and will either complain about free speech or will clamor for it, or complain about censorship or clamor for it depending on point of view.
I wish people were principled and stood on principle and not what dog they have in a fight.
Sadly I agree with this. It seems like the best summary of how most people treat free speech is basically:
"If my side is the underdog, talk about how important it is and complain that we're being censored, and if my side is winning, talk about how it's not necessary and those people can go elsewhere"
It was extremely obvious when Twitter was bought by Musk and the rules changed to favour far right wing content and rhetoric. Suddenly all the folks talking about that XKDC comic and no free speech on a private platform had a very different tune once their side was the one getting banned or censored there...
If you disagree with how a platform is run, go somewhere else.
The vast majority of people are principled on outcomes, not the details of how to get there.
So when aiding in an attempted coup or a coordinated effort to manipulate votes to subvert democratic institutions, their principles are focused on stopping that from happening. But we simultaneously admire the founding fathers - who committed a coup and massaged democracy to embed their own power and ideals. And it's regularly asked (though less commonly with time) why Germans didn't just "kill Hitler", by people who would call the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appalling. Because it aligns with their principles for the outcome of "a better world for people", which is what they actually care about.
Being dogmatic on the implementation details is important as a preventative measure for abuse by bad actors later, mostly. But forgetting that the end goal is a more just world is just as deadly, because it can let institutions be warped and abused, even if they technically don't break "principles". Plus, I think the last 100 years have made it fairly clear that the real threats and tyrant don't care, they'll just break your principled rules and just... Do it?
Anyway, I find it curious that you call "being against an active genocide of a race of people, the murder of innocent women and children in their open-air prison" a simple "dog in the fight". As if stopping thousands of deaths isn't worth breaking a principle or two? Now I don't know enough about the situation to say that's what's happening or not, but that's what these people are the very least feel. Try to use that perspective when engaging the discussion.
The platforms are large enough now that there is a public interest in the moderation decisions that they make. Like a utility or a mail carrier or an internet service provider, if you reach a certain size in an industry that tends towards a natural monopoly, then the public has an interest in regulating your behavior towards neutrality.
> What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?
Yes, and it's absolutely still their platform and their rules. And people also have every right to criticize that platform and its rules, as they're doing. What Meta is doing is wrong, but it should emphatically not be illegal.
The very first example in the report is "river to the sea" which is arguably a dog whistle for genocide. Parts of liberal Europe have banned this slogan.
I urge you to look up the definition of a genocide as defined by the United Nations. It's not just an accusation being thrown around for rhetorical purposes. This slaughter meets all the criteria.
It does not. The war is being waged with the intent to destroy Hamas (which has itself stated that its goal is to destroy Israel, if given the chance), not to kill every last Palestinian. See also https://youtu.be/L9n77DPJ7AE
Not a bad video, but I think there is missing context. It also doesn't really "absolve" Israel on what might be a technicality (Genocide vs other Crimes AH).
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
-- Netanyahu, via theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister
You're taking Israeli intent at face value. Anyone paying attention to the discourse in Israeli society and amongst their leadership class will understand that this is a war against the Palestinian people.They have been quite open about destroying systems of life to create a self-sustaining humanitarian catastrophe that will force the relocation of Gazans to the Sinai. And the virtual certainty of eye-watering civilian casualties is baked into their rules of engagement. Kill 300 people to get one Hamas fighter? Sure! They have been coddled and shielded by the United States to the point where they genuinely don't seem to understand that this is a war crime.
Do you have some relatively neutral sources that are reporting on the discourse among the leadership? I've heard bits here and there, and of course Netanyahu is a human piece of shit who is unfortunately still in power.
But most pro-Palestine sources are both-sidesing and merely comparing raw civilian casualty numbers. They ignore the fact that Hamas's intention on Oct 7 was to target and brutally murder civilians, and that Hamas is intentionally making it hard for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as it wages this war.
"People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”"
Per UN definition[1]:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
If what is currently going on in Gaza isn't that then what is a genocide?
Israel deliberately cut off power, water, and all crossings into Gaza for delivering food and aid. Even worse than what Russia did to the power plants. Literal collective punishment, another war crime to add to their list.
I have supported Ukraine in the war for a long time but this claim I do not understand.
Surely a power plant has military value right? If you destroy the power plant, you impact the country's economic and manufacturing ability which would definitely impact the country's ability to wage war.
Obviously it also severely impacts civilians but many other "acceptable" actions in war do the same.
In my head I imagine a war between a military run off of portable gas generators and a military run off of power plants. The difference in capability between the two would be huge!
I’m guessing you haven’t served. The front line military brings its own power, exactly portable gas/diesel generators, to run everything. If there is a usable power line with a transformer to a usable voltage and it hasn’t been yet damaged in the fighting, it’s amazing, but also fragile.
A non trivial chunk of signal corps training is learning the ins and outs of standard generators, conventions and apparatus for distributing power, equipment for converting between various voltages used by equipment 1 to 80 years old, etc.
There is a very high risk of famine[1] and there is already an extreme food shortage. If the Israelis don't allow more food to enter and open more borders/allow see access a famine is guaranteed. The UN resolution that passed yesterday should prevent that but we have to wait and see if Israel accepts it. IMO starving a population is a genocide.
The target is Hamas. Some innocents are dying, but the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening.
1) Israel asked civilians to move south to be relatively safer, some important Hamas officers moved south along with them, and Israel targeted them.
2) The strikes weren't about Hamas officers, but just a deliberate killing of civilians.
If you're saying this is evidence of genocide, that means you're discounting (1) and assuming (2)? Why?
I'm not condoning (1), which suggests IDF is prioritizing its concerns (expediency etc) over civilian lives, but that clearly doesn't meet the definition of genocide.
The article continues to explain that Gaza health ministry casualty counts for past conflicts have been confirmed after the fact by third party international organizations, like the WHO.
The records they release include names, genders, ages and ID numbers of deceased people. If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
> past conflicts have been confirmed after the fact by third party international organizations, like the WHO.
This is not my reading that WHO or any other org confirmed anything.
They say in 2014 both Israel and Palestinians agreed on number of casualties, but this time discrepancy is 10x.
> If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
say they made up some ID, name, gender and age. How exactly I could identify this?
It is estimated that about 70% of killed people (which has gone over 20000 recently) are women and children. Those are not Hamas fighters. Even if you assume that every adult male that has been killed was a Hamas fighter (which is obviously not going to be the case), that is still 70% of people who are killed by IDF being innocent civilians.
> the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening
On the contrary, even the mere evidence in form of public statements by the leaders of Israel strongly suggests intent to harm civilians. The statements suggest that they are pursuing revenge on the whole Gaza strip, and aiming to inflict as many casualties as they can get away with.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble” and invoked the people of Amalek, the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide in the Bible, in a recent speech. [1]
- Defense minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” [1]
- Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said forces would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and admitted that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. [1]
- Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote on X after the Hamas attack: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” [2]
- Giora Eiland, a reservist major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in a popular Hebrew-language newspaper, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” Elsewhere, he specified that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf” and indeed that Israel must demand that “The entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.” Finally, he said that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” [2]
- “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”, IDF general Ghassan Aliyan [3]
- Revital Gotliv, a Parliament member from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” [1]
- Galit Distel Atbaryan, also of Likud, posted on X in Hebrew that Israelis should invest their energy in one thing: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the “Gazan monsters” either to flee the strip to Egypt or to face their death. [1]
The Israelis admitted that they are fighting "human animals" (remember who else used dehumanization tactics in WWII?), and that their goal was "damage, not accuracy".
A couple weeks or so ago after some UN official was in the news for resigning in protest over what was happening in Gaza and called it a genocide, NPR interviewed someone who has actually prosecuted genocide cases and asked him if the UN official was right.
According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
To prove that you need statements from officials that show they intended such destruction, and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction. Prime ministers and generals, for example.
If someone is going after legitimate military targets but a lot of members of some national, ethnical, racial or religious group is getting killed as collateral damage that is not enough to support a genocide charge. You need to statement of intent.
He added that there is a genocide case that can be made in the region--against Hamas. They have stated their intent to wipe out a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and thousands of their attacks on Israel over the last 20+ years have been directed at purely civilian targets.
> According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
That's a different prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was an ICC prosecutor. NPR talked to [1] David M. Crane, who is a founding chief prosecutor on the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone.
So in other words, even experts on this topic disagree. So I don't think one prosecutor saying "no, this isn't genocide" is definitive -- just like another saying "yes, this is genocide" isn't either.
Ultimately we may never know if Netanyahu has sat behind closed doors and has said things about his intentions in Palestine that would meet the UN definition of genocide. So we can only guess based on what we do know and have seen.
FWIW, to me, this feels pretty genocide-y. The funny thing about the bit you paraphrased from Crane:
> and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction
... is that by this definition, I don't think we can classify Hamas as genocidal, as they don't seem to have the war capability to actually "carry out or cause to be carried out" a genocide upon Israel.
If a murderer lives in your house for decades and you knew they were a murderer and were plotting more murders but you did nothing to root them out yourself, maybe you’re an accessory.
It probably doesn’t justify the death penalty, but it also doesn’t help.
I don’t particularly know what to think about the common separation of woman from the population in these discussions.
I understand that Palestine is probably somewhat misogynistic compared to my American sensibilities, so I might be completely off base, but it feels like women would have a lot of political influence, even if it’s soft.
Or maybe they’re just treated like property and don’t know better due to poor educational prospects and tradition.
I would note that no one in Palestine has chosen for Hamas to be there. They are more like a criminal organization with populist propaganda, with a focus on smuggling and sanctions evasion as a business model. Even the election they “won,” they really didn’t in the conventional sense, and there hasn’t been another in 10 years.
I’m not taking sides, as someone raised Quaker and a later life Buddhist, I know everyone killing others is wrong and there’s no excuse for everything horrible that’s happening. But no one listens to the guy in the corner saying “could we just stop killing each other?”
But it’s absurd to say that somehow Hamas is a legitimate democratically elected government and the populace has had any say in the things they’ve done in their name.
Hamas decided to do October 7 assuming Israel would do something awful so they could martyr their own people for propaganda purposes. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to volunteer the lives of the 20,000 people killed, nor the horrors of October 7.
Israel played directly, and in greater magnitude, into their stated goals of inciting Israel into atrocities. The goal isn’t to defeat Israel militarily but to destroy its international standing and by proxy the US. They wanted to end the idea of a two state solution forever and make the only options destruction of Israel or genocide of Palestinians.
The general populace of Palestine has no desire to be wiped out, they don’t want to live like this. They want to live a normal life like everyone does. But they don’t get to choose if Hamas controls their fate. Sitting in a western democracy it seems inconceivable that you can’t choose your government. But most of the world can’t, and they are at the mercy of whoever has the most guns and psychopaths to hold them.
Thank you for the color and the insight. It’s really helpful to remind myself how lucky we are to live in western democracies, a relatively new invention, and how 99% of humans who have ever lived have had no agency in the rules of the world they inhabit.
I am curious what you think should be done in this israel conflict. What are the paths forward?
Hamas is a strategic asset to the current set of hardliners in control of the Israeli government. They are "the town murderer" pointed to by the authorities, but conspicuously done nothing about as a justification of why they are the only sane choice to run things. Hamas and Israel's government are thus in a symbiotic relationship.
So you are saying the ~14,000 women and children killed are accessories, b/c they failed to personally expel Hamas? Do you believe "There are no innocent Palestinians"?
It's also funny how the label "murderer" works, apparently not applying to Israel. Can we at least hold Israel to account for the extrajudicial assassinations conducted by Mossad?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations
"Mossad had assassinated Salameh. However, the blast also killed four innocent bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 other people in the vicinity. Immediately following the operation the three Mossad officers fled without trace, as well as up to 14 other agents believed to have been involved in the operation" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_assassinations_followin...
Expand that a bit, if the murder runs into your house and then uses it as a staging ground to start killing your neighbors, there is a high risk the SWAT team is coming in guns a blazing.
> A lot of Palestinian content descends straight into hyperbole. People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”. This is the consequence of totally unmoderated content.
A genocide is the indiscriminate distruction of a population, that is exactly what Israel (with the support of the USA) is doing to Palestine.
Things like "you americans can't reason objectively" aren't OK on HN; it's no more OK when Americans write slurs about Europeans. You're wading into one of the most contentious and complicated geopolitical conflicts in the world. People are going to disagree with you. If you can't deal with that, don't engage on this topic here.
Words have meanings. You truly think the current targeting has absolutely no distinction from just chunking bombs into a population centers at random.
If you actually want to engage people on this topic, you are going to have to learn to moderate your language. Saying Israel is not using enough discretion when picking targets and the number of civilian casualties is too high, actually invites a nuanced discussion.
...In the same sense that not calling a spade a spade ends up channeling everyone else's energies away from dealing with a spade problem, and into needless quibbling on defintions to provide an aggressor someone might sympathize with some "intellectual cover"?
Is that what you mean by invites "nuanced" discussion?
Because what you're coaching to have happen is not even "nuanced". It's just intellectual judo. If it weren't you wouldn't be refusing to deal with it as is.
Sorry, you can't redefine every word and have useful discussions with people. If you think using the correct terms for things so people can have a better understanding of what you are talking about is "intellectual judo", I don't know what to say.
"People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population is somehow a “genocide”. This is the consequence of totally unmoderated content."
There is a lot of hyperbole and hypocracy, sure, but there are also official statements from israeli politicians and the IDF, to give up all military restraint.
And statements wanting to make Gaza inhabitable.
That goes in the direction of (modern definition of) genozide, when you want to permanently destroy the land of other people, so they have to go away. As they then cannot exist as a culture anymore.
> Frankly, given that there have been actual genocides in the recent past that have gone largely ignored, the over representation of Palestinian views in today’s media is likely the work of bad faith actors ...
This argument is made often on the internet, but the Occam's Razor explanation is that people are paying attention to Gaza because it's much easier to do reporting from Israel than from other conflict zones. Israel is a developed country with functioning airports, communications, roads, and legal protections. It's quite a bit harder to report from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Shan State in Myanmar, or Darfur in Sudan
I read a post a few weeks ago on the Sudan subreddit where an OP asked if people were frustrated with how much attention Gaza was getting compared to the Sudanese civil war. The Sudanese diaspora responses were overwhelmingly happy to see the coverage of Gaza, and they wished they had the same level of information out of Sudan. It's almost impossible to tell what's happening on the ground.
Additionally, people care because America is a party to the conflict by backing the Israeli government. So the conflict in Gaza matters to the international world in a way that other internal civil wars just don't, unfortunately.
The devastation in Gaza is staggering. It is quite a stretch to say that people are paying attention because of bad faith actors instead of genuine concerns. Of course people will care when a war of this size, supported by the U.S., happens in plain view.
You can't dismiss "think of the children" as a talking point when children are actually dying. This isn't FOSTA, this is an actual war with bullets and bombs and dead children on both sides. You should be thinking about the children.
Children have always been treated differently because they are fully and absolutely dependent on their care givers.
A puppy and a grown dog don’t actually apply here because we’re talking about humans and not dogs. It’s not even appropriate to make that comparison here.
You anthroprocentric chauvinist. Just because you've firmly categorized everything else as "an inferior being" with a lesser claim to remaining alive doesn't mean that's actually the case.
It just means you're selfishly unconcerned with the consequences of collateral damage up until it might be something that could figure out a way to waltz over and bite back.
Actually, I haven’t. I said that the comparison of a human child to a dog is not appropriate. Considering that exact language (e.g. “they are animals”) has helped perpetuate a genocide of Palestinians.
I’m not entirely sure if you’re even disagreeing with me here tbh.
You've posted several flamewar comments to this thread already. Would you please stop? It's exactly what we're trying to avoid on this site, and this topic is the worst place to do it.
The reason is you can kill a group of adult males and later claim they were Hamas. This same tactic doesn't work with children (not that it hasn't been tried, "No innocent civilians in Gaza").
> People have somehow been convinced a small amount of civilians being killed relative to the whole population
Nearly 7 times the amount of people than died in 9/11, and using illegal tactics such as starvation, along with hateful/genocidal rhetoric ("We are fighting human animals", "put to death men and women, children and infants").
Is it relevant that there are a lot more Palestinians left to suffer; Or does that make it more urgent to end it?
Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian with 1 being pro-israeli. Then some of the propalestinian post will be calling for genocide or celebrating the massacre of oct 7.
IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.
Twitter has surprisingly become much better since Elon purchased it. The community tags are great and non-partisan, they fairly report on all inaccuracy.
Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.
Worth noting Birdwatch launched alongside the ability to report tweets for misinformation, a feature Elon disabled. For that reason it’s difficult to conceive of Community Notes today as a simple continuation of the Birdwatch effort.
I think he was right to disable the ability for Community Notes to actually report and remove tweets. First, it's a vector for abuse. Second, misinformation is a loaded term and having the context along side the content is more important for an informed public.
Of course anything illegal or against ToS should be removed and only be the purview of Twitter's moderation team (or what's left of it).
I have had the opposite experience with X, I find it hard to escape any cheap rage bait on my feed regardless of how I would tag or hide pages. It’s interesting you have this experience, though.
He praised it many times, but just a few weeks ago was complaining when he posted BS and community notes essentially called him out. In any case, I think it's a good feature and hope it doesn't go away.
Thanks! But I didn't find a clear description there of how this works. What elevates an ordinary comment to a "community note" and what determines whether a "community note" stays up as a sort of verdict on the original post? This seems like a hard thing to get right at scale. If you rely on voting (i.e. likes or whatever), you'll just end up with a parallel comment system, no more authoritative than the original one. So there must be some other process deciding which proposed notes get this special status.
(Perhaps I should add: yes, I'm being lazy; no, I'm not being critical - I just want someone to explain this to me so I don't have to work to find out.)
Be a verified (by phone number, no need to pay) twitter user. Apply to be a Community notes contributor. Wait. If accepted, you start with 0 points. Twitter will start to show you proposed (as opposed to published) community notes. You can vote yes / no. If a note you voted yes (or no) will get enough other yes (no) votes to get published (rejected), you will get 1 point. If you voted "wrong", you will lose a point. After you have a certain number of points (I think 5), you can also write proposed notes yourself, not just vote. If your note gets rejected, you lose 5 points.
But twitter is not only counting the yes / no votes. They need people who have voted differently on some previous notes, to agree in their votes on this note, before their algorithm makes the decision to publish or reject the note.
A lot of proposed notes will never get enough votes to be decidedly published or rejected, so they will linger in the "proposed" stage forever.
Thanks - it sounds from https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... (via your first link) that they have a rating system whereby community members get to vote on which notes they think are true (a.k.a. which ones they like), and some sort of reputation system to compensate for the weaknesses of relying solely on votes. Did they publish the details of these systems?
Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
Then they link to https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/div..., which expands on that. It seems they're basically trying to control for ideological perspective, i.e. to identify signal that doesn't just boil down to "I like / agree with this". I've often wondered if something like that could work.
Pointing out yet again that Community Notes long precedes Musk's purchase of Twitter. It got going in early 2021; I was one of the first batch to sign up for it, although I think it had been in developments for a year or so before that. January 6 rattled a lot of people at Twitter so I suspect that influenced the timing of the rollout.
Perhaps the confusion is that CN was originally called 'Birdwatch' and people don't realize they're the same thing.
Advertisers are fleeing Twitter and nobody knows how much longer Twitter will exist, because, well, they don't want their ads to be displayed next to Nazi content, in any circumstances.
If you find Twitter better, good for you for swimming in that kind of content.
Funny how algorithms work. They make us see the world in binaries and absolutes; of one side being capable of no good and the other side capable of no evil.
I believe you, but it’s important to realize how strong the impulse is to overlook, explain-away, or pretend not to see bad behavior on one’s own side.
If you can’t see bad behavior on both sides when it’s pretty obvious here, I’m not sure it’s worth my time providing specifics. I suspect it’ll just be explained away. “From the River to the Sea,” for example. Just wink nod “that’s not what it means”
> If you can’t see bad behavior on both sides when it’s pretty obvious here
You are making a positive claim that I don't see as obvious. I don't even doubt that there's some calls for genocide, I just doubt it's every pro Palestinian post with more than 20 comments.
> From the River to the Sea
This is actually a good example of a non-genocidal statement being portrayed as one in bad faith. It's true that Hamas adopted this as their official slogan, but ultimately it's meaning goes beyond what Hamas adopts.
Quiet literally, the call is for Palestinians to have a say in government. Or a one state solution. Claiming it means "kill all the Jews" is an extreme stretch. Even in the most extreme views of this, it's a call for the end of the current state of Israel. That does not mean genocide for Jews any more than calling for the end of Hamas is a call to genocide Palestinians.
> Just wink nod “that’s not what it means”
That's the problem, any negative sentiment towards the current state of Israel is portrayed as "this is anti-Semitic". Israel is not jews and jews are not israel. Calling for a system where Palestinians have some say in their own governance is not anti-Semitic.
Further, as you can imagine just because a terrorist organization adopts a phrase does not mean the original or current meaning is what that terrorist organization is implying by it.
So I'll ask again, do you have examples of calls for genocide? Or is this the main one? If you asked 100 people who chant "from the river to the sea" would they all, most, or even many claim they are calling for the death of jews or genocide? I think not. That's a uncharitable view of what that phrase means. [1]
Do you think that when the Jewish voices for peace use the same slogan they are calling for genocide? [2]
I love that you call "from the river to the sea" a creative misinterpretation... then push something that's way more of a creative interpretation of "genocide".
Why is "Amalek" a call to genocide (remove the others from our land) but "from the rivers to the sea" (remove the others form our land) isn't?
Trying to take you at face value, I looked into what Amalek is and tried to find something more unbiased than you seem to be.
"I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.” “Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit."
So Netty says that hamAss is an existential threat? no shit. hamAss needs to be removed? Definitely. No peace as long as hamAss exists. Can't have peace with terrorists.
But is Netty saying to remove ALL Palestinians? remember... Net (as well as others) have tried to negotiate peace with "Palestinians" and have been denied over the years (since recreation of Israel). So Israel has been willing to negotiate while "Palestine" has only been open to solutions that are "from the river to the sea" (read: Genocide).
Infitada and Sea comments are absolutely, unequivocally and undeniably calls to remove Jews from the area.
I love the parallels from 2009 to today... the "overreaction" (read: disproportionate reaction by Israel to a terrorist action of oct 7th) in response to an "existential threat" caused by terrorists killing innocents, hiding like cowards and using human shields.
But I digress. Don't be expected to be taken seriously in your attack on "genocidal" Israel while downplaying and ignoring genocidal hamAss. The war sucks but was started by terrorists and Israel has the right to defend itself from existential threats. No peace as long as hamAss exists.
Netanyahu’s governments coalition agreement explicitly states that the Jewish people have an exclusive right on all the land” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
I would interpret it as a stance and balance it against the fact that Israel - including Net - has been willing to negotiate a 2 state solution in the past. Solutions that "Palestine" refused. Which is why we are in the situation we are in today. Because one side has refused all attempts.
Remember... hamAss'oles were founded with a charter that denies Israel's right to exist and has been designated a terrorist organization by... well... the entire world. Oh, they are in charge of Gaza.
And just FYI... your biased article? laughable. Try something less blantatly biased.
"In a 2022 interview, Netanyahu admitted he was offering Palestinians something far short of political equality. "I don't hide that for a minute. I say it openly," he said. Palestinians are just as open that they aren't interested."
Both sides have to be willing to negotiate... and it's clear that Net has to keep the security of Israel in mind and it's also clear that Palestine isn't interested in solutions. remember - not my words. Clear history.
Also in article: Israel has been working on peace in the region without "Palestine". Was working towards peace with surrounding nations. Also was trying to bring "Palestine" prosperity and it was looking good until Oct 7th when terrorists do what terrorists do.
Now we see the consequences. Do terrorist things and get responses.
>I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
From the book of samuel.
Not coincidentally, putting death to women, children and infants is what they are currently doing - in vast numbers. Theyre fairly open about this, too.
It's pretty clear what Netanyahu means and it's pretty clear that Israel supporters in the United States (mostly older and always on the more racist side) endorse this.
Whereas "will be free" is a call for exactly what it is. Freedom.
"vast numbers" if Israel wanted to kill everyone? They're doing a piss poor job of it. The number of bombs they've dropped vs kill counts are less than 1 death per bomb and they could EASILY do a "better" job if their goal was to kill all "women, children, cattle, sheep".
"they're fairly open" they also drop leaflets, tell people to leave and have given more warning than any other country would do given a remote bombing campaign.
They give more warning than the terrorists did on Oct 7th.
"on the more racist side" "aNyThInG I DiSaGrEe WiTh Is RaCiSt" /eyeroll
People like you are why the claims of "racism" and "nazi" mean nothing. When everything is LITERALLY racism then nothing is.
You're clearly unable to have a real conversation. Freedom will not happen for Palestinians until terrorists like hamAss'oles are removed.
It is clear what Israel wants - safety from terrorists - and they, unlike "Palestine" have in the past been willing to work towards a 2 state solution. We are in the situation we are currently in because "Palestine" refused previous offers and instead elected terrorists into power. No freedom is possible until those hamAss'ole terrorists are gone.
> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.
Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.
This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.
Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.
I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more".
Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.
What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.
> What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other
I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.
>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.
I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve.
Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see".
Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always.
If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them.
It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not.
We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.
I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.
I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.
To push back, it does seem like you care. You've created rationalizations and offer them up unprompted. I think most people would argue for allowing both settings and having the app default to the one the internal research found more preferable and more profitable. Not offering the setting is telling.
I meant I don't care to argue. I've had this conversation too many times, and it does have the setting. You can Google it to figure out how to change it.
I think the point is: were the experiments testing whether people said they liked X better and immediately engaged or were you testing whether or not the user felt good about the experience and wanted to come back long term.
My experience is meta prioritizes instant gratification, which yeah people and their immediate actions says they want. But also I’ve completely stopped using Facebook and instagram because it became clear it’s of limited value to me. Yeah, i might mouse over a piece of salacious content because it’s salacious. But i know it’s low value to me. And most of my peers are in the same boat.
We ran experiments that lasted up to 5 years. People who have ranked feeds self report a better experience after using the product for years, although you have to be careful with these sorts of things because the chronological users are more likely to churn, which biases the results
Were you measuring what users like, or what they "engage" with?
If I see a post on mastodon, it's from someone I follow or a post that someone I follow thought was worth sharing. That's a genuine interaction between humans. I get to decide what's in my feed based on who I follow and the filters I set up. The system is designed only to connect me with people I choose to follow.
Meanwhile, an algorithmic feed with no options is designed for one thing: manipulating users to optimize "engagement". That by definition requires ignoring what users prefer. I really shouldn't have to explain that this is a bad thing.
> Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed.
When those were reverse chronological feeds everyone and their mother wasn’t on these sites. They were smaller groups of people who were mostly younger and the overall traffic was lower. For people who didn’t follow a bajillion people, including people they didn’t know you would feasibly reach the end of the feed. But that’s not how people use the sites anymore.
But even then, if you wanted people to actually see and respond to your posts you’d have to time out when you posted it to hit around lunchtime. No 2AM musings if you expected to have anyone see it. And good luck with having your engagement or childbirth announcements getting to people in a different time zone if your family is international.
I don't use FB anymore, but Instagram has reverse chronological feed as an option if you want to use it. Majority of users prefer algorithmic, so that's the default, but I do tap the chronological feed every once.
"People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."
That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?
If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.
> People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.
People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.
> "People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."
I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack.
I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?
> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.
It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.
And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?
> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.
The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.
Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.
What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.
If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.
> Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian
Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.
"Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said."
But yes, I would have liked to see some concrete examples.
I'm not sure it's possible to look at what Israel is doing and say it's not terror. So, charitably, I guess you're saying the IDF is not an organization?
Countries are careful about calling other countries terror organisations. That's a weak argument. To convince me, you have to argue that their actions aren't terroristic.
Usually, you can argue that a state's actions aren't "terrorism" because most definitions of "terrorism" involve the requirement that the action is illegal. But saying that the IDF is regularly committing war crimes isn't even controversial at this point. So what exactly separates their illegal actions intended to instil terror from all the other terror organizations?
This response is deranged. Human rights organisation have been criticising Israel for its crimes for a long time, even before this massacre. Hell, just look at the list of UN resolutions condemning Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolut...
The only correct thing in your comment is that Hamas is also bad.
Please do research before spreading war crime apologia.
Taiwan isnt a country too? Geopolitics leads to some crazy claims of truth. It couldn't be more clear that there is extreme pressure for states to support Israel, especially due to USA's position. Argument from authority is rightfully considered a logical fallacy
Even the Pope called them terrorists. They were literally funded by two terrorists organizations (Irgun and Lehi). And over the past 70 years their main occupation has been the terrorizing of the few remaining Palestinians. How more plainly terroristic do you have to be?
And now they are here on HN funding posts like yours trying to justify the mass murder of children and women as a form of collective punishment.
Maybe we should call them torturers instead. Maybe that is more fitting.
It is not the words of one "priest", but of all the Catholics in the compound. And I love how you appended "Palestinian" to try to discredit him, as if a Palestinian's word is not worth much, but the word of the IDF, who have been caught lying through their teeth about almost everything that has happened on and since 7/10 is. And you are wrong. The compound hosts more than just Palestinian Christians. Catholics from around the world serve in Gaza.
And how is that justified? The murder of two old women in a Catholic church compound, by a sniper no less. And one of them was murdered while trying to retrieve the body of her mother.
Just as there was no clear evidence that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by israeli snipers before they admitted it many months down the line? There are countless videos and accounts of unarmed old men and young boys being sniped by them.
Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done as much of that, maybe more, than any other single user in this thread. That's not ok.
I realize it's hard to discuss this topic without falling into that, but if you can't avoid it, please stop posting until you can. That goes for everyone else as well, of course.
Heres the vidéo where Netanyahou brags that his strategy is to hurt palestinian (civilians) as hard as possible Into submission, and that hé was negociating the peace accords in Bad faith : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Im not sure what better fits the définition of terrorism for you
At thé end of the day most israelis would be fine with a two state solution. This guy and other religious extremists liké Bennet have taken hostage the israeli people
Israel has repeatedly blocked the 2 state solution. Even Rabin’s stance was “the Palestinians should have something but something less than full statehood”
Israel encouraged Hamas by allowing Qatari support in to Gaza with the intent of keeping Gaza and the West Bank
Finally the Hamas charter was amended and no longer calls for the destruction of Israel.
In any case Israel (with the support of the US) has all the power in this conflict and they are the ones actually killing tens of thousands of innocents no matter what Hamas’ official position is.
> In any case Israel (with the support of the US) has all the power in this conflict and they are the ones actually killing tens of thousands of innocents
What’s happening in Gaza right now? Who is dropping the bombs? Whose army is in Gaza? What is also happening in the West Bank? What about the border in Lebanon.
True there was a terroristic raid into Israel in which 1200 people lost their lives but the scale of power does not compare AT ALL
I find this line of reasoning very fascinating. Is your only issue that one side has a lot more weapons? If they were roughly equal would what’s happening in Gaza be ok?
No. And some argue thats precisely why Netanyahu helped them get financed to have a scary enemy and play the security card while pursuing a territorial war instead of working for actual peace.
The short answer is "we don't know for sure"; it has repeatedly says it does, but some are skeptical they mean it. In the last 15 years they haven't really been given much opportunity to prove it, so ... we don't know for sure. But I think an evolution similar to the PLO would have been possible (too late now).
But we can ask the same about Israel: is Israel okay with two states? Because "just keep building settlements on the West Bank" doesn't sound much like it, or the way it's treated Gaza over the last 15 years, or tons of other actions over the last 60 years. And several of the religious Zionists now in government and holding several ministerial posts have pretty explicitly said they DON'T support a two-state solution, and have expressed views that at best can be viewed as supportive of ethnic cleansing (before Oct 7).
October 7th did pretty notably feature a massacre of young people at a music festival, and some widespread killing of civilians at multiple different villages.
Are you employing some non-standard definition of "target" or of "civilian"? Claiming Hamas didn't do any of that?
Hamas is a terrorist organization and anyone who supports them are also terrorists. You should seriously take a step back and look at the antisemitic Jew hating garbage you just wrote.
> FB blocks any content that promotes violence and terror attacks (on the Israeli side as well).
While I am sure that's the intention, the claim is that this doesn't happen nearly as aggressively for anti-Arab or anti-Palestine content as it does for anti-Jewish or anti-Israel content, and that there are far more false positives.
In the full report (which is admittedly rather long) it mentions that even many neutral mentions of Hamas are removed, and that comments such as "Make Gaza a parking lot" are allowed to stay, which is obviously not just a suggestion for urban planning, or another that supposedly didn't break the rules was "it will wipe Palestine off the face of the earth and the map", and somehow I don't think that was a cartographer disagreeing on the finer points of map drawing.
I don't think this is intentional; "/Hamas/d" is easier than policing that. But that doesn't change the outcome.
I mean, at some point Instagram was hiding Palestinian flags, and mistranslating things to erroneously inserting "Palestinian terrorist".[1] I am convinced this was not intentional and that this is all hard, but again, it doesn't change the outcome.
And to be honest, this also fits my (unscientific) observations over the last 20 years or so. I've lost count the number of times I've seen "Look what the Jews have accomplished! So much! And the Arabs?! All they're good for is bombs, they never accomplish anything! It's clear the Jewish people are just better than the Arabs"-type stuff, and this is often just left standing. Whereas outright anti-Semitic content is much rarer, and much more promptly removed.
No I'm pretty sure that there's some deeper meaning, but I'm not sure exactly what. For example, what exactly is meant by "Viral content? Fuck this"? Is this Guardian article the "viral content"? Or the Human Rights Watch posts? Or what? What exactly is being criticized?
Viral media (videos, memes, etc) are largely propaganda, and they're being used by both sides to encourage and glorify conflict. Conflict, the result of which is dead citizens, many of them children, while those who beat the war drums do so from positions of security while they profit off of the war.
I'm seeing a bunch of techies use terms normally utilized for TikTok dances, and I'm just saying maybe we should stop. What deeper meaning do you need?
Bombing of Palestinian children is what I'm being critical of.
At the beginning of the conflict I noticed my feed was fully leaning towards supporting Israel, even if it was only the posts of 3 people. Somehow the 30+ people demanding the stop to the bombing of civilians didn't really start appearing until late November.
They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.
Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. Your account has a long history of doing this, and we've warned you many times. To continue doing it is not ok, and on this topic least of all.
No, they generally stand down heated topics even when it's something the hive mind would agree with. There are delicate ways of talking about these things that GP and plenty of others have a history of having a hard time employing.
At this point I've been entrenched enough in discussion long enough to appreciate how this place is moderated by dang etc
Then I must disagree with everybody, as I moderate comments from all sides of these. Anyone who looks fairly through my posting history can see that for themselves.
Everyone with strong feelings on a topic feels like the mods are secretly against their view and moderating in favor of the other side [1]. I think it's because we're all hard-wired to notice the things we dislike and to weight them much more heavily [2].
In this context, it only takes 2 or 3 datapoints (actually, it probably only takes 1) of a moderator scolding a comment that you agree with for you to feel this way (<-- I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us). It's hard not to. But of course the people on the opposite extreme of the topic from you are feeling exactly the same way about the mods—they're just basing it on a different 2 or 3 (or 1) data points.
(Btw, pg has had nothing to do with HN moderation for almost 10 years.)
What makes you flag something as flamewar and can you openly show how both sides are affected? Because the feeling of some seems that you are abit biased.
Mostly it's whether I see accounts breaking the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That includes swipes, putdowns, name-calling, ideological/political/nationalistic battle rather than curious conversation, fulmination, cross examination, repeating internet tropes or talking points, and so on.
I don't know what you mean by "openly show how both sides are affected". That's a tricky business. Everyone with strong feelings feels like the mods are biased and few are persuadable otherwise. Most people (with strong feelings) would be satisfied by little less than "promote all the posts I agree with and ban all the commenters I disagree with", though they don't phrase it in those terms, presumably even to themselves. It just works out that way in practice because when strong feelings are involved, all opposing comments tend to feel false and/or trollish and/or abusive.
What I can tell you for sure is that we're moderating all sides of this topic, same as with any divisive topic, when we see the site guidelines being broken, and we do our best to be even-handed about it. That doesn't mean there's no bias (unconscious bias is a thing, and total absence of bias is surely impossible), but it does mean that we work hard and consciously at it, and have many years of practice in doing so.
p.s. when you ask "What makes you flag something as flamewar", I suppose I should clarify that most [flagged] posts have been flagged by users, not moderators. Mods do flag some though.
Thank you for your sincere answer. Yet it would be great to have more lights shed on the administrative decisions in HN, like when replies are flagged or when the algorithm is manually adjusted by admins for some content.
Honestly Dang, just from casual browsing and happening across your "dont do this" responses, it does seem like you chaotically jump in. I can't discern a specific pattern, other than it being a bit too quick on the draw. But that's maybe just me being more okay with flamey discussions.
This is probably because applying the site guidelines involves interpretation, both of the guidelines and of the comments they apply to. Everyone interprets these things differently.
I'm not too concerned when people disagree about particular moderation calls, since that's inevitable, especially in borderline cases. I am more concerned that people understand the underlying principles and try to abide by them.
To be honest this is a unique type of moderation I haven't seen elsewhere. The site owner (or head-moderator?) himself publicly engaging with and spending time and effort on a disbehaving commenter puts a different spin on things when you are on the receiving end. I mean this is very effective, for persuading both the commenter and the bystanders witnessing the situation to behave accordingly to the site guidelines.
I don't think that's fair. dang is a great moderator, and this is a particularly tough subject to moderate - as he says, every side tends to feel that people are biased against them, and to some extent it's true. (If you wonder how people can be biased against both sides - it can be different groups of people. E.g. the UN is biased against Israel, but the US is biased for Israel.)
I don't know if pg is still involved in moderation decisions on HN. He's widely considered anti-Israel, by most Israeli techies at least, but I don't think this necessarily means anything about HN. (And although I don't know pg personally, I'm willing to give quite a bit of benefit of the doubt to him, and I'd bet that his personal integrity would keep him out of directly intervening in moderating HN about this topic.)
Yes... You had plenty of people saying "this is going to be your own version of Afghanistan/Iraq if you decide to do what you want to do..."
Israel wanted revenge, not a solution. Their strategy has guaranteed that there will be another cycle of violence as the kids that grew up seeing their parents blown up in airstrikes are understandably going to be ripe for recruiting into whatever organization steps into power in place of Hamas.
It's simply their strategy, really. Turning Palestinians desperate so they turn to violence ("terrorism"), in order to justify turning their territory into even more of a shit hole, so Palestinians who can't take it anymore will emigrate, until the "problem" is gone.
You compare Gaza, half of the population being children, with Nazi Germany and talk about learning from history? While the IDF is blowing up courts and universities and people talk on Israeli TV about making Gaza "unlivable"?
The Nazis talked about the people they murdered exactly the same way. Himmler and his stuff about the great sacrifice the SS made for the benefit of humanity, all that... they excused murdering children with "international bankers", the same way people excuse genocide in Gaza with Hamas. "No side is innocent, it's all so very complex". Nothing changed.
For sure. And you know what will be disgusting to witness? A lot of the ones supporting this evil, will claim to have been against the injustice all along. Plain lies. Like the German NAZIs did after the Holocaust.
I wonder how that will work out for them, considering the quasi permanent nature of internet history.
Chances are, if something causes rage, the algorithm amplifies it (for you) because it may drive more engagement and increase ad revenue. It’s sometimes hard to know what’s actually happening on social media.
Users are flagging them. I don't think it's hard to understand why: it's a divisive and flameprone topic.
Two positions that people urge us to take (different people, obviously) are (1) treat it as off topic and flag everything; or (2) have no limits, which means letting it dominate the front page. Neither of these positions are viable for HN. For reasons why I say that, see past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... - these are general explanations, not specifically about Gaza, but they apply to that also.
HN has had at least two major related threads so far:
Obviously we want commenters to have thoughtful, respectful, open conversation with each other rather than just fighting a war on HN. Equally obviously, it's pretty hard to avoid the latter. These things can only be 'graded on a curve', i.e. moderation has to shift somewhat, relative to the topic - not to do that would be expecting people not to be human, which is a losing proposition. But that does not mean the rules somehow switch off. Accounts that break the HN guidelines egregiously (such as by getting aggressive or posting in the flamewar style) are going to get warned and/or banned, regardless of who they're battling for or against. More than that, I'm not sure what we can do.
I haven't looked closely, but based on what I have looked at, plus prior experience, I believe that flags of this kind are a coalition between two subgroups of user: those who dislike the content of an article for political or ideological reasons, and those who are more concerned about the content being bad for HN (e.g. because they're worried about flamewars).
I wish HN was more granular about measures for users, e.g. by marking these highly contested topics and just giving people topic-bans. Some people just completely lose their shit, and then other people lose their shit in response, and these people post a million messages by the time the rest of us managed to actually read the article and perhaps some relevant background info. It just craps up everything.
That's what Wikipedia does. Works reasonably well.
I flagged this one, because “discussions” on this topic are mostly hot garbage, they are dominated by extremely motivated people shitting canned flamebait all over the place, especially early on. Indeed by the time I saw and flagged this there were already like four or five people doing exactly that, and by keeping it up, more of this type of users are invited. They are largely flagged by now, leaving an entire page of flagged stuff and more interwoven in the somewhat visible page; must be one of, if not the lowest signal-to-flag stories on HN. I can only see like 20% of 352 comments so far without showdead.
The problem with topics bans is that you can sabotage topics you don't like to silence them. E.g. Rust evangelicals could have been silenced quite easely by flame baiting their posts.
Some people really don't need a whole lot of baiting; for example there's a top-level comment that reads (entire comment): "'peaceful support of Palestine'", without condemning Hamas is still pro-Hamas action in this case."
Never mind the stuff that's just outright beyond the pale.
Thank you dang for allowing this discussion. Our profession needs to wrestle with issues like this openly, and do so in a respectful way in the spirit of John Milton and John Stewart Mill.
Presumably aggrssively calling people names, spamming the replies with insults and trying to provoke others into an argument without actually expressing any ideas.
I posted that one, and while it went somewhat well by the standards of such a controversial topic, it was still contentious and had a lot of bad feeling. I submitted it because there was a nexus to both the dynamics of influence operations and individual movers and shakes in the SV community.
In general I think submitting on a topic like this requires some sort of hacker-specific angle - involving people in the industry, or the impact of technological change, or a new dynamic emerging from some unexpected source (eg cheap consumer-tech drones in the Ukraine conflict).
It's not that other topics shouldn't be discussed on HN, anything sufficiently unusual to be news cn be worth a look. But we should also be mindful that if the community can't provide more than baseline insight/expertise on a trending news topic, the resulting discussion will probably be shallow and have little value.
Because it doesn’t belong here and it’s inflammatory. Also most articles are heavily biased but claim not to be. For example, they trust numbers given by an internationally recognized terrorist organization. But tell me again how it’s not biased.
I've also had my por palestinian posts flagged. the really insane thing is I never call for violence and every assertion I make about human rights violations I make gets backed up with a link to a documentary or news story. I even tryto avoid using aljezeera as a my lone source. Over the last to months I've spent a lot of time researching teh history of the conflict and it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.
Possibly due to the topic attracting emotional, inflammatory responses rather than an objective, on-topic discussion.
Some people can't resist and have to turn every thread into a battlefield as if this achieves something on the ground. (Often citing the exact same disinformation that has been propagating across social media.)
No, actually it is not. Stop with this dehumanization of Palestinians. They are human beings. They are not worth less than you just because they are on the other side of the fence.
> Well yes, but what if they support the initial terror attacks?
Even steel manning your position and assuming most of the women and children being killed (and worse) by Israel cheered the attacks (which we have no evidence is true) , no, actually, you aren't justified in massacring people just because they took pleasure in an evil thing that happened to you.
Summarily executing people for thought-crimes does not strike me as particularly aligned with basic humanistic and liberal values.
And tons of Israeli also support rather distasteful things, including before Oct 7, which has been widely documented. Some of these people are currently ministers (e.g. Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, etc.). And many Americans, and Italians, and $any_other_nationality. I don't want to play "tit for tat" here but only for Palestinians have I ever seen the "well, they support Hamas, so therefore it's not a big deal" line of reasoning.
> Well yes, but what if they support the initial terror attacks?
"What if" is the key phrase there. Can you jump into the minds of every Palestinian and know their likes, dislikes, motivations, level of support for Hamas? No, of course not; none of us can.
> Massacring dance festival attendants and people in their homes is not self defence, it is terrorism.
Absolutely agreed. But I'm not convinced what Israel is doing in Gaza is self defense either. There's certainly a self defense component to it, but cutting off electricity, water, and communications, and indiscriminate killing of non-combatants... well, none of that is self defense; those are war crimes.
Israel certainly has the moral right to defend itself against threats (existential or otherwise), but the response needs to be proportionate. I don't believe what they're doing is proportionate.
It depends on the context. I very much agree, that I cannot take anyone seriously talking about human right abuse and not ever condemning Hamas. But I don't think that one has to say it everytime, when critizing deaths of children. And we don't know the concrete examples in question.
What moral significance does that have? Most of the same people who do nothing but bring out the "but they didn't condemn Hamas" trope have never cared about what the IDF has done to Palestinian civilians. Does that mean the rest of us should not care about Hamas crime or ignore its victims? Of course not, right?
You can't seriously believe that responding to criticism of the undeniable indiscriminate slaughter of civilians with "but a lot of the people protesting our actions have never indicated they condemned the attack against us" appears to the rest of us as a reasonable or credible moral claim.
A mother whose childs have just been killed and who never supported Hamas in any way absolutely has the right to critize the bombings that killed her family, without having to present a working geopolitical plan.
> So the mother should just shut up and accept that her children are not to be spoken about?
for sake of mutual peace and future every human should think hard before talking on sensitive topics. But humans can't, so we butcher each other instead for thousands of years.
I said "think hard", not "shut up", then she may realize that Hamas role in death of her kids is significant, and she is a puppet for Hamas propaganda. The same is relevant to you btw.
I am a puppet for Hamas, because I say killing of children is bad and the IDF should not give up restraint while operating in densely populated ares? Ok then, I got your opinion. But in my world, things are not so black and white.
"Israel's defense minister said he has "released all restraints" on the Israel Defense Forces' troops in their fight "
Militray restrain means watching where you are shooting - and not shooting if the danger of civilian deaths are too high. The IDF officially given up on using restraint - and the number of civilian deaths and among them many, many children show it.
So fighting terror with terror? That's what it seems to me. And being called a puppet for one side, because I critize both sides - is just a very typical thing for this whole debate.
No, obviously not all restraint. They would loose US support if they would.
But the israeli defense minister literally said he ordered the IDF to give up restraint. How much more official do you want it?
And the evidence that they are following this order, is the high civilian death number.
"and if this will be sufficient to defeat Hamas."
And this is the thing - as long as the Hamas leaders are safe in Quatar and being supported by Turkey as "freedom fighters" and others - this is not a fight that can be won with just using more brute force.
To be clear, I do think Israel has a right to militarily target the Hamas - but not palestinian people as a whole. Every innocent child that dies fuels anger and new terrorism.
Even if all of Gaza is cleared and its population send to the Sinai desert - it would not really make Israel safer. It is just a really complicated conflict with very, very old roots.
Don't get me wrong, Hamas is absolutely worthy of condemnation. They're not the Good Guys.
The problem is when people who speak out against the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents are presumed evil terrorist supporters unless they also explicitly condemn Hamas.
All: please do not post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, respectful, open communication here—not political battle, internet tropes, and all the rest of that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This post was flagged, but I don't think it should have been and I hope it stays up. I have been grateful that HN hasn't had the same level of animosity about the conflict in Gaza as other places on the internet. But this news article is about a core issue in tech, and should be discussed on HN. The whole world now uses social media to communicate, which means that when there's a war, partisans of both sides will be motivated to fight out the propaganda war on the platforms that tech built.
I wonder if there will ever be a way for a global-sized platform which uses algorithmic content feeds to convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this. The HRW report has 1,000 examples of peaceful pro-Palestinian content that was removed by Meta. But only Meta themselves has the information to know whether there is systematic bias. So we get a situation where people sympathetic to both sides both come away feeling that the platform is biased. I think the U.S. culture war has similar dynamics.
My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions. Maybe statistics on deleted posts, more legible moderation rules, publicly posted justifications for moderation decisions. Another part of my brain thinks that maybe this is just an unsolvable problem for social reasons in a community that's global-scale. I'm not sure. I do feel like this is still Meta's job, part of their cost of doing business, and if they put something like 5% of their revenue into moderation the situation would be a lot better.
In the meantime I find myself personally trying to cut out as many algorithmic feeds as I can from my life. I prefer the curation of a news website or podcast, small group discussions, or 1:1 communication with people I trust. Algorithmic feeds are easy but so far have never done a good job covering issues where there is real conflict between two groups.
That is "the beauty" of this conflict (if something this heinous could ever have a beautiful side): It poses many interesting technical challenges. But, quite understandably, people everywhere (including HN) are fast to move the "warring" right onto our screens (hence the flagging).
So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].
I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].
Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).
> My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.
Visibility into moderation decisions makes them more gameable/exploitable/circumventable. The whole purpose of moderation is to remove unwanted speech; justifying the fairness of such removal is only secondary, and can be elided if it interferes with the primary goal.
Hence "You have been banned because your posts violate our Terms of Service" messages with no further explanation, and things like shadowbanning. It sucks to be on the receiving end of these things but they make online communities much more pleasant.
Exactly; consider the "censorship" that everyone generally agrees with, spam filtering. If the precise nature of the spam filter is known (keyword lists, etc), then it becomes much easier to design emails that avoid being filtered.
Spam filtering is the opposite problem of people trying to communicate their views on mass killings of civilians in an important respect: In the case of spam, you don't want the spammers to reformulate their message to get past the filters. In the case of mass killings, you do want to allow the social media users to tone down their writing.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice I think you’d ultimately just incentive the kind of behaviors you already see on TikTok: users would just add asterisks to filtered words, instead of changing anything of substance.
This is basically an argument for getting rid of laws and ruling by fiat, with a judicial process that amounts to repeating 'you know what you did' whether or not that is honest.
Communities are moderated based on how good you feel there, if it's the most ad-friendly, how good everyone stays on-topic, or other mostly social & subjective criteria. Judicial systems aren't about any of those things.
I agree. Let's assume that a Social-Media Business (SMBiz) gains sufficient value from hosting topical discussion to want to continue. But there is cost, reputational risk, and lawyers are expensive. How can SMBiz effectively moderate a conversation/debate/flamewar about a controversial event or subject, especially when the SMbiz wants to maximise user engagement while respecting laws and government requests?
Like it or not, that's the business reality. People who want a truly neutral discussion platform that operates with transnational freedom and total personal freedom will find that their ideals alone are not enough to sustain the business.
Prior Art: People often say that HN's Dang and Slashdot's moderation system are the best examples of "effective moderation" that we know. If the moderation is effective, it means SMBiz is attentive to topics and comments and discussion is insightful and interesting; it isn't overwhelmed by frivolity, falsehoods, defamation, and death threats (FFDDs). If the job is done well, SMBiz may even receive accolades. See Reddit's recent experience with its moderators for a negative example.
Here are some of the rules that will need to be applied, in stochastic FIFO order. Items are lettered for reference.
a= At all times, keep a clear eye on the business equation. Effective moderation will have a significant cost. At any scale!
b= Seed the discussion with verified accounts/users. Reputation must be earned and maintained. See Prior Art.
c= Rate limiting, especially for controversial topics. No short, stupid Reddit posts. People must weigh their words. Sometimes, the microphone must be disabled.
d= No flamewars, no propaganda, no falsehoods. See Prior Art. Lock any discussion that achieves high FFDDs. Throw away accounts, ban offenders. Make it sting.
e= No anonymity unless a verified account/user has sufficient reputation to post in anonymous mode. But it costs in ReputationCoin.
f= No bots, no bridages. See Prior Art to estimate workload and infrastructure.
g= Enable and reward trusted moderators. See Prior Art.
= = = Final Notes
> My engineer brain wants to solve this
I get that you are very interested in the Moderation Problem, but I think this wording wins no support. Backers will say that you are way out of your social depth, and people in the debate will dismiss your intent as naivety or bike-shedding (frivolous or misplaced optimisation) or a combination of the two.
One important reason why HN succeeds because Dan G (who is indeed attentive, and principled) rejects the most ungovernable type of conversation: flamewars.
> convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this
There is no neutrality, of course. SMBiz can state its bias and interests clearly. But it will be hard to make a profit from achieving neutrality because strident factions in polarised debate do not want neutrality.
Are you saying that changes on Israel's part could cause Hamas to stop their aggression? That seems very unlikely - Hamas doesn't even pretend to be open to peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.
Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically it would probably take generations for sentiment to change. It would be hard for Israelis to just accept that they will be attacked for generations, with increasing sophistication (mainly thanks to Iran's support), with no response.
This is greatly complicated by the fact that Israel materially supported Hamas and saw it as useful.
Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.
On the other hand, Israel is not facing good geopolitical headwinds. As Yemen demonstrated, they are extremely vulnerable to a blockade. One day, in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.
So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.
It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli. That of course doesn't justify Hamas's inhuman war crimes, but acting as if war is unprovoked is not consistent with reality - Israel has never, by the definitions in international law, stopped actively waging war against Gaza.
I agree Israel ought to be able to prevent similar ground invasions, but what about rockets?
The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.
Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.
How would guidance systems increase the destruction? If anything, history has shown that precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties - there isn't much of a point building a single precision guided missile, instead of 100 imprecise dumb rockets, when your goal is terror bombing (the calculus is slightly different for bombs, however).
> Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.
This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.
Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.
Hamas doesn't have an ability to respond in an effective way either, yet here we are. If anything, it's far easier to get supplies and engage in terrorism in the West Bank than it is in Gaza.
> precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties
Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.
If all you have are unguided rockets, you're going to point them wherever they're most likely to hit something. If/when you have guidance systems, you can afford to be selective and concentrate on high value targets. That's how it goes in asymmetric warfare.
Given Hamas' explicit genocidal goals, I think we can expect some portion of their strikes will simply aim to maximize Jewish deaths, even as others may target specific military assets.
See for example Russia's recent Hroza strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hroza_missile_attack), which killed 59 at a memorial service. Hamas can't really do strikes like that today; they would just miss with overwhelming probability. I think that will change soon if they remain in power.
The Iskander missile has a 1500lb warhead. Compare the number of deaths it causes to the number of deaths a single unguided Israeli bomb causes in Gaza when it hits a populated building, and you will soon realize that the guidance is not the determining factor here, it's just the mass of explosives.
Because people left. Of course, if you bomb an empty building few will die. We're not looking at averages here, we're looking at single incidents that caused many deaths.
No. In asymmetric warfare civilians are targeted partly for animus but mostly because of accessibility. Poorer security places extra pressure on the enemy government which makes it easier to destabilize over time, in theory. In the case of unguided missiles it's natural to point them at wherever the infrastructure is dense.
If you have the resources to be selective, it's much more attractive to hit specific targets like military facilities or political figures/institutions. Terrorist attacks are more often perpetrated against civilians nowadays because political/military targets are so hardened that assassinations are difficult.
That makes no sense. If all you had were unguided rockets, where else could you possibly aim them? There is no other target where they would have any effect at all, because all high value targets are too small to be hit a +/- 500m weapon.
If your goal was just to hit a population center, I fail to understand the point of guided rockets. Seems much more effective to just make more dumb rockets. Even compared to targets like hospitals, you'd still do more damage with more dumb rockets, especially due to saturation.
I disagree that dumb rockets are more effective. Hamas, PIJ, etc. have only managed to kill 28 after launching something like 20k dumb rockets. There are many examples of modern precision weapons causing more deaths with a single strike.
That is mostly because the rockets are small and largely intercepted. The examples you have of modern weapons causing mass casualty events are of weapons with warheads 50+ times the size of those in a Hamas rocket, and there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities.
Also, you need compare the deaths with the number of rockets that aren't intercepted to get a baseline of effect.
ChatGPT estimates around the total warhead sizes of rockets from Gaza to Israel at around 200,000 kg. Maybe that's off but let's say 100,000 kg, and say 10,000 kg of that wasn't intercepted. Still seems like significantly more than the 500~700 kg warhead which killed 59 in Hroza, for example.
Looking at this another way, if Hamas could target things like nightclubs, wouldn't those have something like 50x the population density of the general area?
> there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities
Even when fired from distances on the order of 70km (the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv)? Aircraft using dumb bombs tend to get a lot closer to their targets.
> Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.
While there were gigantic failures that no one denies, possibly to the level of gross incompetence, Israel is also fighting against a real enemy, not some cartoon. Hamas is also smart, is increasingly well-armed, and can wait many years until the next attack. It's not clear that Israel can defend against every conceivable attack that Hamas can mount, and staying completely vigilant all the time is very costly economically, too. (I'll note that Hamas puts a lot of money and labor into these attacks, but they are pretty freely stealing from their people; the Israeli government can't do the same.)
It's true that, on its own, Hamas can't actually conquer Israel. But it can clearly carry out massive attacks that kill thousands and completely upend all life in Israel, and it's possible that they can keep doing this every couple of years.
> So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.
Actually, Israel is on relatively good terms with all its Arab neighbors (relative to the past), and was on the verge of formalizing those good relations with Saudi Arabia. That's one of the reasons for this Hamas attack - to try and stop the Israeli-Arab peace process, because they feel (very likely correctly) that it leaves the Palestinians in a worse situation.
> It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli.
Well, they did elect Hamas and fairly quickly start to shoot rockets at Israel. And by that token they are also at war with Egypt.
Gaza isn't a fully independent country, obviously, but it's also not under full military occupation like it was before. People insisting on one or the other usually have a point that it helps them prove, but reality is more complicated.
I do believe that it is directionally true that Gazans could've made far more of their situation once Israel withdrew, and Hamas has basically squandered that opportunity by turning to violence.
>in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.
The US + Israel + allies can/will absolutely level these countries if necessary. Both history and current events demonstrate that. Do you really think they are at the mercy of what Yemen does?
Life is not a video game. The US and Saudi Arabia already spent 7 years trying to level Yemen to stop them from firing cruise missiles everywhere in the region, and failed. The US didn't managed to stop Iraq from launching ballistic missiles until over a year after the decision to invade was made, and now look at Iraq right now, various militias are still firing missiles at US military bases and getting away with it.
Yemen is just a proxy of Iran, ultimately, and the US has already lost multiple proxy wars against Iran. Invading Iran itself is not a workable proposition, either.
Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?
At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.
> Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?
Israel somehow managed to convince other arab states and the US to make peace after the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty incidents, I'm sure they can manage to find some equivalent forgiveness in their hearts this time around :)
> At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.
Logistically far more israelis have dual citizenship elsewhere than Palestnians, so perhaps they should leave instead?
Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met. They offered only a ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders, not a permanent peace deal.
Anyway, they've shown their true colors at this point; very different statements recently:
> Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.
Anyhow, after Hamas is gone like we are promised, let's see what new excuses crop up (like, 'all Pal civilians are Nazis' is already gathering some steam) to continue the subjugation of the Palestinians.
My statement is from 2023 and is the current state of affairs. Your source from 2021 does not include:
1. An actual statement
2. That was ever enacted
FYI, what you are referring to is actually a proposal from Fatah to hold elections in 2021, and a promise from Hamas not to run. Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run, despite briefly claiming they wouldn't, and according to Marwan Barghouti and Mohammad Dahlan [1], and even Hamas themselves [2], Abbas then canceled the elections out of fear his party would lose. Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced; and regardless, long before the time of the cancellation, Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.
GP started off with something from 2004! Glad we are making progress with timelines here, if nothing else.
Speaking of 2023 statements, the ruling party in Israel democratically elected for 2 decades now, have made it abundantly clear that they'll continue to thwart any attempts at 2SS (https://archive.is/34Sg0) because 'security of the only democracy in the Middle East is at stake'. Apartheid? Yes, for security. Siege? Aiwa, security. Bombing Syria and Iran? Also, security. I'd like to smoke what they are in Knesset to be this drunk on conflict and war. And for the majority to continue to vote them in, because 'security', is telling. The result is, Kahanists are now elected ministers; but God forbid Pals elect 'terrorists'...
> Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run
> Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced
Abu Mazen is a puppet. No reason to believe he cancelled the elections despite ALL other factions (some 25+) wanting one. He most certainly can't do so without the support of whoever funds his little fiefdom. It is a forgone conclusion, as people say.
> Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.
I mean, you state that there hasn't been an actual statement (see below) but also claim it is all a ruse all in the space of 3 paragraphs...
The full minutes of the talks were published in an official Emirati document. In essence, the message of the Hamas leadership was clear: "If you in Fatah are convinced that you can get a state from Israel along the 1967 lines through negotiations, go for it. We will not interfere."
That is not a statement from Hamas, it is the author editorializing minutes from a meeting. The Wikipedia article that I linked shows the actual list of candidates and parties, which include Hamas, as well as sources for them and opinion polls showing Hamas was likely going to win the election. These are just the facts. Feel free to look at the official candidate lists and opinion polls if you disagree. Hamas was running and the opinion piece you posted is incorrect — they were not going to sit out the election.
Here is the direct quote from Wikipedia, since you're claiming it doesn't say Hamas was running:
The March 31 midnight deadline for submissions of electoral lists saw 36 lists officially presented,[69] including:
Fatah, led by Mahmoud Aloul[70]
Freedom, headed by Nasser al-Qudwa and Fadwa Barghouti, the wife of Marwan Barghouti[71]
Hamas (running as "Jerusalem is Our Promise"), led by Khalil al-Hayya[70]
...
I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections, when every source points out that he did, and Hamas themselves say he did and called it a coup by Fatah.
Posting random quotes from Netanyahu that do not reference the 2021 election does not back up your claim that Hamas was willing to sit out the election. I don't like Netanyahu either, but that doesn't mean that somehow Hamas wasn't trying to stay in power.
Hamas (running as "Jerusalem is Our Promise"), led by Khalil al-Hayya[70]
Hamas was in the running in 2021 via proxy (may be because the Western governments labelled it a terrorist group?), driven by their political aspirations as opposed to their military ones: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210324-hamas-is-building...
> I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections
I never claim anything of the sort. Abu Mazen did cancel the elections.
> opinion polls showing Hamas was likely going to win the election
As before, actual Kahanists winning elections is a-okay... but Hamas or its proxies winning democratically scare the hell because... 'security'? The 972mag article specifically calls out that the cancellation of the elections by Abu Mazen as the catalyst for al-Qassam, Hamas' armed wing, to (perhaps foolishly) take matter into their own hands.
> That is not a quote from Hamas, it
What about the direct quotes by Likudniks calling for ethnic cleansing (https://twitter.com/MairavZ/status/1739364199367618871) or more repression? Why do direct quotes from Hamas matter when an official Emirati document points out Hamas were okay with PA leading a political solution towards 2SS (and it is PA that has nothing to show for it 5 years since then).
Just so it is clear, I think Hamas are better relegated to the dustbins of history. They hinder more than they help.
Hamas was in the running in 2021 via proxy (may be because the Western governments labelled it a terrorist group?), driven by their political aspirations as opposed to their military ones: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210324-hamas-is-building...
Literally nowhere does it say that Hamas was only running "via proxy" in the article you linked. Hamas was running in the election as "Jerusalem is our Promise," as noted by Wikipedia and every single major news outlet that covered the election at the time. Just as in the 2006 election (which they won), where they ran using the name "Change and Reform." [1] The name of the list is just how they market their campaign slogan to voters, it doesn't mean they're not running or that it's a "proxy" that is different than them — and it certainly does not mean they're sitting out the election which was your claim. And that is why every major news outlet reported Hamas running in 2021, just as they did in 2006, and why you are continually unable to find sources saying they didn't run and are posting random articles that don't back up your claims.
And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute the undeniable fact that Hamas did actually submit to run in the 2021 election, just as they did in 2006.
Why does an official Emirati document...
You have not linked to an official Emirati document. You have linked to an opinion piece editorializing unsourced Emirati minutes supposedly from a meeting between Fatah and Hamas, that supposedly show a proposal for Hamas not to run in elections — a proposal that in reality was never enacted and an election that Hamas did run in. There are a zillion sources that show Hamas did run in the election and you have been unable to show anything saying that they didn't, and keep posting random right-wing Israeli statements as if that somehow proves Hamas didn't run.
> and it certainly does not mean they're sitting out the election which was your claim.
That was 972mag's claim as a precondition for Hamas to enter PLO post elections (which didn't happen).
1. In 2014, per UAE, Hamas stepped aside to let PA reach a political solution on 1967 borders. PA had nothing to show for that.
2. In 2021, 35 parties alongside Hamas (via proxy or not) favoured elections in WB, E Jerusalem, and Gaza. PA called it off.
In both those cases, doubt it was all Abu Mazen on his own, without the backing of the Knesset.
> And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute...
Two things:
1. You seem to place emphasis on direct quotes from Hamas but dismiss direct quotes from Likudniks (that prove they're no supporters of 2SS, which is why they may have pushed Abu Mazen to prevent elections).
2. Random? That's the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister.
Anywho, it seems we both agree on what happened (sabotage of the peace process) just not what led to it (right-wing Israeli rulers).
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746496, but I detached it from there, i.e. moved it to the top level, because this subthread is better than the surrounding flamewar it was in.)
Maybe because the discussion is not of very high quality? Look how many downvotes there are already, it is an emotional topic and yes, even here people are having problems with maintaining a civil debate about a controversial topic. And others don't want all that flame war here, so they flag it, simple as that.
The mechanism of downvoting is supposed to remove low quality posts. If someone if uncivil, downvote or flag them. Soon enough they'll get the hint or be warned.
> others don't want all that flame war here
That doesn't make sense. If you don't want to participate, then ignore the post. actively preventing others participating is something else - I think "censor" is more appropriate in that case.
the front page isn't limited. Hit "next" and you see as many more posts as you like. Most front-page posts are tech related, we are far from being overrun with controversial posts.
There was a post upvoted highly at the beginning of this current war, by scholar opinions about the situation in Palestine but it was removed completely, not just flagged or deleted. But full removal which I've not observed before on HN.
Barring some rare bug, I can say for sure that didn't happen. Posts on HN are never removed completely, except in cases when the person who posted it asks us to, and even then usually only if there weren't replies. Other than that, the most that happens is that a post gets killed, a.k.a. [dead] status, and any user who reads HN with the 'showdead' setting turned on in their profile can see those.
I'd like to know which HN post you're talking about, so I can say exactly what happened. Whatever post it was, it wasn't from the site opiniojuris.org. The most recent HN submission from that site was 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=opiniojuris.org
I respect that you've commented. It was something I upvoted. I checked through my upvoted submissions at the time and could no longer find it which was a first for me as either would expect it to have been flagged or deleted but shown.
I remember being a little shocked when it was on the front page and shortly after was not. I've checked again from <4 months. Wonder if anyone else can recall the URL - I just remember it was a collective scholarly opinion with condemnation on the situation, it may not have been from opinionjuris but the article was very similar.
I'm pretty sure that the code that decides whether or not to display a [dead] post doesn't consider whether the user had upvoted the post before it became [dead]. Maybe it would be better if it did.
Edit: I can't even click the link on the post you mentioned. Is that normal? That seems especially suspect and somewhat closer to censoring opposing views than I've come to expect from you and HN, Dan.
I don't know but if I had to guess it's because some of these links could be abusive/harmful or spam. I don't think it makes much difference practically in the cases that they aren't since then it's not hard to recover the link with the info left, if you wanted to.
It doesn't address the specific thing but you can see the broader logic here:
One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.
At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.
I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.
For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.
> At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.
Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.
In such a situation, I foresee something more like the splitting of the Roman Empire. There's no reason to stop serving global customers just because the users are separated from HQ. Especially if the servers are already on both sides of the geo-political border.
The Roman empire had a tradition of splitting the control of the areas between multiple people at several points starting from Diocletian's tetrarchy onward.
The last east/west split was different on that it was that last one.
In a way, you could look at the period of absolute control by a single person as an exception in Roman history.
Did many businesses stop operating in russia? Or did many of those shops/restaurants/etc physically located in Russia simply rename and continue operations independent from the parent company?
For example, Mcdonalds is now operated as Vkusno i tochka [1], and has awfully similar menu and branding to Mcdonalds.
I love, in honestly both somewhat sarcastic but mostly very real sense, that hacker news discussion of global thermonuclear war...is how to prepare your database unique ID scheme for unforeseen sharding :->
> For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do
"Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."
In such dire straits as you describe, companies and individuals will likely be forbidden to provide any sort of commercial services to the opposing side.
Censorship has been done to both people with right-wing views and left-wing views. It's not a question of if it's been done.
We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.
There’s a good piece from someone (formerly?) at Reddit about how to do moderation without consideration if content; I’m not expressing a take either way behind it being worth a look.
I'm not sure it's correct to classify this particular instance as either left- or right-wing; additionally, misinformation should be censored.
From the article:
>Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam
This issue seems almost parallel to the paradox of tolerance in that algorithms which promote content at a global scale - largely without human oversight - should not be unregulated.
It is factual to say that human rights violations are occurring in Palestine. It is also factual to say that people have a right to defend themselves, and to recognize that atrocities are atrocious. But to silence the already-oppressed furthers oppression, and Meta is to blame here, again.
We should also consider the potential implications that Meta, with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, has in regard to US foreign policy vis-a-vis support of Israel.
What you've cited is US-centric; it's both reductive and fallacious to categorize this as left- or right-wing, when again, the article states that this phenomenon was observed in more than 60 countries.
Perhaps where you're located it is a predominately left-wing viewpoint, but the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.
The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid being a US right-wing viewpoint is somewhat unsurprising, though.
The majority of the UN has consistently recognized and attempted to resolve what Israel is doing, as evidenced by their voting history in the years (decades?) prior to the events of the last few months.
I didn't downvote you but I can see why you were - your Wikipedia article doesn't support your argument - the strongest point it makes is that the UN HRC has an enquiry into Israel's actions.
There's several references to various NGOs calling for action against Israel but as we've seen recently at the Harvard and other Ivy's, that's deeply murky territory.
That's very, very far away from your claim that the rest of the world generally accepts that Israel is committing war crimes and instituting apartheid. To repeat, its well established that the rest of the world generally (and increasingly) supports a humanitarian ceasefire in the region.
That should be a sufficient sample to show this viewpoint is not isolated to only NGOs or one geographic area, and the variance in time should highlight how long this commonly-held recognition has been stated publicly by elected officials.
Many of these examples have external or ideological reasons to do so though. Criticising Israel has no costs while supporting them has costs, but I would imagine that most of them are not going to put actual policy with consequences with that. If anything, they'd be more than enthusiatic to work with Israel when the question of a trade deal or security agreements come up.
"Criticising Israel has no costs while supporting them has costs"
It often carries a cost in domestic support. It carries trade costs as the US, Uk and others punish BDS, while no Arab countries impose secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Israel (as many themselves do). This is just untrue.
You’re now arguing in bad faith - your original claim was the world generally accepts that Israel commits war crimes and institutes apartheid.
You’ve just posted a bunch of links that reference criticisms of Israel, most of which mention neither war crimes nor apartheid. Every nation has faults and the West Bank settlements are deservedly criticised.
They are neither apartheid nor a war crime, however.
It's not accurate to say that the non U.S. world largely supports Palestine in this conflict. At least the EU seems to lean more towards Israel support.
How is it a fallacy? I mean misinformation by definition; you’re correct that power structures may distort truth to achieve an objective, and that’s not good - that’s the prima facie misinformation I’m talking about here.
I agree it would have been better if news outlets like the NYT didn’t regurgitate things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as factual, but that will happen when the intelligence community is embedded at said news organizations.
The fallacy is that there will be no objective classification of what is considered misinformation. Rather, it will be arbitrary. So you can't censor misinformation. You will censor information.
As someone who professionally dealt in mis- and dis-information, I strongly disagree. It sounds as though you’re bending the definition to your own dystopian ideas.
Genuinely asking… what has worked in getting hostages beyond the temporary peace deal? I saw Israel had already accidentally shot their own hostages who managed to escape Hamas. In a war like that, how can Israel even free the hostages by this dropping bombs method, if the hostages get out they will be shot by their own military?
> I saw Israel had already accidentally shot their own hostages who managed to escape Hamas.
For me, the most tragic aspect is that those three hostages where gunned down while shirtless, in civilian pants, waving white flags, because they were mistaken for three shirtless Palestinian civilians, trying to surrender waving white flags. The execution wouldn't be justified in either case, and is damning evidence of the treatment Israeli forces give Palestinian civilians.
Please. They aren't bombing hostage locations to free hostages. The effort to eliminate Hamas has cost 7000+ children lives. That number won't stop growing when hostages are freed.
Can we stop bringing up the 200 hostages in response to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians? It's a rounding error by comparison and a sad reminder that in 2023, to some, some lives are worth 100 times more than others.
"to some, some lives are worth 100 times more than others."
I feel like that's true for most people/all most everyone ?
You've got the thought experiment of:
How many strangers lives would you trade for a family members well being ?
And on a national scale that's called racism. But fine then - admit you're just another amoral tribalist taking care of your own, and save everyone else the time of trying to determine if you're actually interested in peace or justice.
> 15 seconds of internet for the first things that entered my mind. It's really not that hard.
You know full and well what I’m talking about. Virtually nobody that’s far away from those conflicts posts pro-whatever side content on their social media. Mainstream media basically doesn’t talk about any of those.
My claim was that “nobody cares”, not that “there are no articles whatsoever being written about children dying in other conflicts”.
Two wrongs don't make a right. And Israel's settlement project has repeatedly been judged in violation of international law by numerous distinct international bodies, going back to 1979.
People always talk about ending the killing of children... I think the best way to stop children from being in harm in the first place.
Hamas's strategy of using children as human shields will be validated if they escape destruction, inviting them to do it again and again.
War is hell, in this case I have zero sympathy for the people who have repeatably started war after war after war, condemning the future of their children in the name of religion / ethnicity. 20% of Israel is Arab / Muslim, they are not the bad guys here.
The only reason that strategy is viable is because the Strip exists. Cram 2 million people in 140 square miles, and heavily restrict border traffic, then claim killing children was inevitable when you bomb the place.
They are blowing up courts with no fighters in them, talk on TV about making Gaza unlivable. Netanyahu even invoked Amalek! That's barefaced genocide, against a population half of which are under the age of 15. With extreme military firepower. Soldiers making videos about what they find in private residences, mocking "Arab sluts". Minimum sentence for throwing a rock against a tank is like what, 20 years? They are occupying, annexing, ethnically cleansing guys. But they're "not bad guys" because others are supposedly worse. Right.
Given that, I don't care who you have sympathy for. You excuse bombing a population of mostly children by talking about people who "repeatedly started war after war" (why be content with "repeatedly" or "war after war" when you can just double and triple it and lather it on endlessly).
You will not drag the rest of us along into that monstrous guilt.
And Hamas is not your concern, what the companies and governments you do support and/or are affiliated with are supporting is. Which is genocide.
I don't remember the incident where Israel killed 1200 Palestinians on a music festival with unmarked troops.
I'm sure Chomsky would find some justification for that too, but that's why the only thing I care about he did is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy - from there it's all been downhill, especially in the last few years. Before that it was at least from time to time worth thinking about.
> I don't remember the incident where Israel killed 1200 Palestinians on a music festival with unmarked troops.
You mean 364 on festival?
The final death toll from the 7th October attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.
that’s the cool part about being the hegemon: you get to wear uniforms while doing your atrocities, and you have tanks and planes and ambassadors wielding real power at the UN to prevent consequences.
Just like the US killing hundreds of thousands of people in the firebombing campaigns of Japan was probably a war-crime. We wore uniforms while doing it. What are you gonna do about it? You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
And bombing of Dresden[1] and dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of that would be considered war crimes using the law that was created after world war II but unfortunately not before:
> The Hague Conventions, addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update international humanitarian law to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II.
Hamas could absolutely wear uniforms too. But they couldn't hide behind civilians anymore then and that's their preferred tactic.
There's a reason one of the most important parts of modern international law on wars - which has the primary goal of minimizing civilian deaths - is that all combatants have to be clearly identifiable. If you cannot distinguish easily between both, war gets even worse than it already is. And the current conflict is the perfect example.
What do you suggest the US should have done? Did you look up war crimes Japan did in the rest of the world? Should the US have just let them roll over Asia and rest of the world? During the war, all cities that could be attacked were attacked.
Throughout history, wars were fought between inequal sides. Only a very few times did combatants hide among civilians.
> You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
How? Look up when Japan surrendered.
> that’s the cool part about being the hegemon: you get to wear uniforms while doing your atrocities, and you have tanks and planes and ambassadors wielding real power at the UN to prevent consequences.
Don't nearly all Muslim countries and a majority of the UN support Palestine? Aren't China/Russia on Palestine's side?
Is there an UNRWA for the rest of the world? UN leans heavily towards Palestine and a ton of wealth supports them. Aren't Hamas's leaders billionaires?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 592 ms ] threadThe fact is people are unprincipled and will either complain about free speech or will clamor for it, or complain about censorship or clamor for it depending on point of view.
I wish people were principled and stood on principle and not what dog they have in a fight.
"If my side is the underdog, talk about how important it is and complain that we're being censored, and if my side is winning, talk about how it's not necessary and those people can go elsewhere"
It was extremely obvious when Twitter was bought by Musk and the rules changed to favour far right wing content and rhetoric. Suddenly all the folks talking about that XKDC comic and no free speech on a private platform had a very different tune once their side was the one getting banned or censored there...
If you disagree with how a platform is run, go somewhere else.
I hate that idea but I accept it. If I didn't accept this then I am in favor of random political entities dictating what is accept content.
So when aiding in an attempted coup or a coordinated effort to manipulate votes to subvert democratic institutions, their principles are focused on stopping that from happening. But we simultaneously admire the founding fathers - who committed a coup and massaged democracy to embed their own power and ideals. And it's regularly asked (though less commonly with time) why Germans didn't just "kill Hitler", by people who would call the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appalling. Because it aligns with their principles for the outcome of "a better world for people", which is what they actually care about.
Being dogmatic on the implementation details is important as a preventative measure for abuse by bad actors later, mostly. But forgetting that the end goal is a more just world is just as deadly, because it can let institutions be warped and abused, even if they technically don't break "principles". Plus, I think the last 100 years have made it fairly clear that the real threats and tyrant don't care, they'll just break your principled rules and just... Do it?
Anyway, I find it curious that you call "being against an active genocide of a race of people, the murder of innocent women and children in their open-air prison" a simple "dog in the fight". As if stopping thousands of deaths isn't worth breaking a principle or two? Now I don't know enough about the situation to say that's what's happening or not, but that's what these people are the very least feel. Try to use that perspective when engaging the discussion.
This works at a national level too: "our country, our rules (laws)"
And FB and the like have been found to break a number of laws in the past: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/12-billion-euro-fine-f...
Perhaps alternative planforms would have a better chance if FB played fair?
Yes, and it's absolutely still their platform and their rules. And people also have every right to criticize that platform and its rules, as they're doing. What Meta is doing is wrong, but it should emphatically not be illegal.
The very first example in the report is "river to the sea" which is arguably a dog whistle for genocide. Parts of liberal Europe have banned this slogan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Lega...
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284)
There is a pretty good comment there though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9n77DPJ7AE&lc=Ugxo07TPIYWoI...
I think the quotes there are pretty telling:
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
-- Netanyahu, via theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister
But most pro-Palestine sources are both-sidesing and merely comparing raw civilian casualty numbers. They ignore the fact that Hamas's intention on Oct 7 was to target and brutally murder civilians, and that Hamas is intentionally making it hard for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as it wages this war.
Per UN definition[1]:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
If what is currently going on in Gaza isn't that then what is a genocide?[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Genocide was in Ukraine for example, when Russia targeted powerplants during winter, which didn't have any military value.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fP-J8m-BF0 [NY Times: Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza Civilians to Go ]
Can you give a good, relevant example?
Surely a power plant has military value right? If you destroy the power plant, you impact the country's economic and manufacturing ability which would definitely impact the country's ability to wage war.
Obviously it also severely impacts civilians but many other "acceptable" actions in war do the same.
In my head I imagine a war between a military run off of portable gas generators and a military run off of power plants. The difference in capability between the two would be huge!
Is there something I'm missing here?
A non trivial chunk of signal corps training is learning the ins and outs of standard generators, conventions and apparatus for distributing power, equipment for converting between various voltages used by equipment 1 to 80 years old, etc.
Ok, here is a list of armed conflicts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict... Some are conflicted as being power struggles between groups of certain ethnicities; not all involve ethnic cleansing.
Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war that seems not to have any relation to genocide.
Technically, any "killing a member of a group" would be a genocide under this definition.
Even if someone commits a mass murder against a group, we typically call it mass murder or a hate crime -- not genocide.
So there has to be some idea of what genocide is -- what is the scale, what is the intent? Is it to wipe out a people? Or is it something else?
25,000 death is a lot. I'd say its a war crime. An atrocity, perhaps. But a genocide? Against a population of 2 million? Idk. Maybe?
It seems that we have no common definition of the word
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67799527
What is your proof of the intent?
Hamas, on the other hand, make their genocidal intent very clear, every chance they get. "then what is a genocide?" That is.
to be specific: actual content says Israel asked civilians to move to South Gaza, while claim is that they still targeted targets there.
1) Israel asked civilians to move south to be relatively safer, some important Hamas officers moved south along with them, and Israel targeted them.
2) The strikes weren't about Hamas officers, but just a deliberate killing of civilians.
If you're saying this is evidence of genocide, that means you're discounting (1) and assuming (2)? Why?
I'm not condoning (1), which suggests IDF is prioritizing its concerns (expediency etc) over civilian lives, but that clearly doesn't meet the definition of genocide.
"Two Thirds of Gaza War Dead Are Women and Children"
-- https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...
"The Hamas-run health ministry is Gaza's official source for death numbers"
The records they release include names, genders, ages and ID numbers of deceased people. If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
This is not my reading that WHO or any other org confirmed anything. They say in 2014 both Israel and Palestinians agreed on number of casualties, but this time discrepancy is 10x.
> If you claim the data is fake then you should be able to identify some made-up deaths in it.
say they made up some ID, name, gender and age. How exactly I could identify this?
It is estimated that about 70% of killed people (which has gone over 20000 recently) are women and children. Those are not Hamas fighters. Even if you assume that every adult male that has been killed was a Hamas fighter (which is obviously not going to be the case), that is still 70% of people who are killed by IDF being innocent civilians.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...
> the intent isn’t to deliberately kill them. And there is no evidence any of those other criteria are even happening
On the contrary, even the mere evidence in form of public statements by the leaders of Israel strongly suggests intent to harm civilians. The statements suggest that they are pursuing revenge on the whole Gaza strip, and aiming to inflict as many casualties as they can get away with.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble” and invoked the people of Amalek, the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide in the Bible, in a recent speech. [1]
- Defense minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” [1]
- Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said forces would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and admitted that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. [1]
- Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote on X after the Hamas attack: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” [2]
- Giora Eiland, a reservist major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in a popular Hebrew-language newspaper, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” Elsewhere, he specified that “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf” and indeed that Israel must demand that “The entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.” Finally, he said that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” [2]
- “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”, IDF general Ghassan Aliyan [3]
- Revital Gotliv, a Parliament member from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” [1]
- Galit Distel Atbaryan, also of Likud, posted on X in Hebrew that Israelis should invest their energy in one thing: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the “Gazan monsters” either to flee the strip to Egypt or to face their death. [1]
[1] https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/13/23954731/genoc...
[2] https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23933707/israel-palestine...
[3] https://www.timesofisrael.co...
According to the prosecutor he didn't think a case could be made. The key is that "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" part.
To prove that you need statements from officials that show they intended such destruction, and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction. Prime ministers and generals, for example.
If someone is going after legitimate military targets but a lot of members of some national, ethnical, racial or religious group is getting killed as collateral damage that is not enough to support a genocide charge. You need to statement of intent.
He added that there is a genocide case that can be made in the region--against Hamas. They have stated their intent to wipe out a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and thousands of their attacks on Israel over the last 20+ years have been directed at purely civilian targets.
Moreno Ocampo, the former ICC prosecutor interviewed, actually said the opposite you're claiming. See https://www.aljazeera.com/program/upfront/2023/12/1/former-i...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/21/1214341050/prosecutor-weighs-...
Ultimately we may never know if Netanyahu has sat behind closed doors and has said things about his intentions in Palestine that would meet the UN definition of genocide. So we can only guess based on what we do know and have seen.
FWIW, to me, this feels pretty genocide-y. The funny thing about the bit you paraphrased from Crane:
> and those need to be officials that also had the means to carry out or cause to be carried out that destruction
... is that by this definition, I don't think we can classify Hamas as genocidal, as they don't seem to have the war capability to actually "carry out or cause to be carried out" a genocide upon Israel.
It probably doesn’t justify the death penalty, but it also doesn’t help.
I understand that Palestine is probably somewhat misogynistic compared to my American sensibilities, so I might be completely off base, but it feels like women would have a lot of political influence, even if it’s soft.
Or maybe they’re just treated like property and don’t know better due to poor educational prospects and tradition.
I’m not taking sides, as someone raised Quaker and a later life Buddhist, I know everyone killing others is wrong and there’s no excuse for everything horrible that’s happening. But no one listens to the guy in the corner saying “could we just stop killing each other?”
But it’s absurd to say that somehow Hamas is a legitimate democratically elected government and the populace has had any say in the things they’ve done in their name.
Hamas decided to do October 7 assuming Israel would do something awful so they could martyr their own people for propaganda purposes. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to volunteer the lives of the 20,000 people killed, nor the horrors of October 7.
Israel played directly, and in greater magnitude, into their stated goals of inciting Israel into atrocities. The goal isn’t to defeat Israel militarily but to destroy its international standing and by proxy the US. They wanted to end the idea of a two state solution forever and make the only options destruction of Israel or genocide of Palestinians.
The general populace of Palestine has no desire to be wiped out, they don’t want to live like this. They want to live a normal life like everyone does. But they don’t get to choose if Hamas controls their fate. Sitting in a western democracy it seems inconceivable that you can’t choose your government. But most of the world can’t, and they are at the mercy of whoever has the most guns and psychopaths to hold them.
I am curious what you think should be done in this israel conflict. What are the paths forward?
It's also funny how the label "murderer" works, apparently not applying to Israel. Can we at least hold Israel to account for the extrajudicial assassinations conducted by Mossad?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations
"Mossad had assassinated Salameh. However, the blast also killed four innocent bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 other people in the vicinity. Immediately following the operation the three Mossad officers fled without trace, as well as up to 14 other agents believed to have been involved in the operation" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_assassinations_followin...
A genocide is the indiscriminate distruction of a population, that is exactly what Israel (with the support of the USA) is doing to Palestine.
If you actually want to engage people on this topic, you are going to have to learn to moderate your language. Saying Israel is not using enough discretion when picking targets and the number of civilian casualties is too high, actually invites a nuanced discussion.
Is that what you mean by invites "nuanced" discussion?
Because what you're coaching to have happen is not even "nuanced". It's just intellectual judo. If it weren't you wouldn't be refusing to deal with it as is.
There is a lot of hyperbole and hypocracy, sure, but there are also official statements from israeli politicians and the IDF, to give up all military restraint. And statements wanting to make Gaza inhabitable.
That goes in the direction of (modern definition of) genozide, when you want to permanently destroy the land of other people, so they have to go away. As they then cannot exist as a culture anymore.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-12-21-2023-...
This argument is made often on the internet, but the Occam's Razor explanation is that people are paying attention to Gaza because it's much easier to do reporting from Israel than from other conflict zones. Israel is a developed country with functioning airports, communications, roads, and legal protections. It's quite a bit harder to report from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, Shan State in Myanmar, or Darfur in Sudan
I read a post a few weeks ago on the Sudan subreddit where an OP asked if people were frustrated with how much attention Gaza was getting compared to the Sudanese civil war. The Sudanese diaspora responses were overwhelmingly happy to see the coverage of Gaza, and they wished they had the same level of information out of Sudan. It's almost impossible to tell what's happening on the ground.
Additionally, people care because America is a party to the conflict by backing the Israeli government. So the conflict in Gaza matters to the international world in a way that other internal civil wars just don't, unfortunately.
The devastation in Gaza is staggering. It is quite a stretch to say that people are paying attention because of bad faith actors instead of genuine concerns. Of course people will care when a war of this size, supported by the U.S., happens in plain view.
A puppy and a grown dog don’t actually apply here because we’re talking about humans and not dogs. It’s not even appropriate to make that comparison here.
It just means you're selfishly unconcerned with the consequences of collateral damage up until it might be something that could figure out a way to waltz over and bite back.
I’m not entirely sure if you’re even disagreeing with me here tbh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's impossible for a 5 year old to do evil, so it's universally agreed that even 1 child dying in a war is too many.
At least that used to be the case before this conflict.
Nearly 7 times the amount of people than died in 9/11, and using illegal tactics such as starvation, along with hateful/genocidal rhetoric ("We are fighting human animals", "put to death men and women, children and infants").
Is it relevant that there are a lot more Palestinians left to suffer; Or does that make it more urgent to end it?
Here's one definition of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention It doesn't mention anything about percentages.
IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.
Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.
Of course anything illegal or against ToS should be removed and only be the purview of Twitter's moderation team (or what's left of it).
Gave me some hope that Elon is serious.
How does that work? can anyone post a "community note", or by what process is that decided?
(Perhaps I should add: yes, I'm being lazy; no, I'm not being critical - I just want someone to explain this to me so I don't have to work to find out.)
But twitter is not only counting the yes / no votes. They need people who have voted differently on some previous notes, to agree in their votes on this note, before their algorithm makes the decision to publish or reject the note.
A lot of proposed notes will never get enough votes to be decidedly published or rejected, so they will linger in the "proposed" stage forever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33478845
Edit: this, from https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti... (via your third link) is interesting:
Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
Then they link to https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/div..., which expands on that. It seems they're basically trying to control for ideological perspective, i.e. to identify signal that doesn't just boil down to "I like / agree with this". I've often wondered if something like that could work.
I didn't look into the details myself, but there is a 24-page paper linked from this page:
>Details of our methodology and past findings can be found in our paper.
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/g...
https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...
Perhaps the confusion is that CN was originally called 'Birdwatch' and people don't realize they're the same thing.
Advertisers are fleeing Twitter and nobody knows how much longer Twitter will exist, because, well, they don't want their ads to be displayed next to Nazi content, in any circumstances.
If you find Twitter better, good for you for swimming in that kind of content.
Funny how algorithms work. They make us see the world in binaries and absolutes; of one side being capable of no good and the other side capable of no evil.
You are making a positive claim that I don't see as obvious. I don't even doubt that there's some calls for genocide, I just doubt it's every pro Palestinian post with more than 20 comments.
> From the River to the Sea
This is actually a good example of a non-genocidal statement being portrayed as one in bad faith. It's true that Hamas adopted this as their official slogan, but ultimately it's meaning goes beyond what Hamas adopts.
Quiet literally, the call is for Palestinians to have a say in government. Or a one state solution. Claiming it means "kill all the Jews" is an extreme stretch. Even in the most extreme views of this, it's a call for the end of the current state of Israel. That does not mean genocide for Jews any more than calling for the end of Hamas is a call to genocide Palestinians.
> Just wink nod “that’s not what it means”
That's the problem, any negative sentiment towards the current state of Israel is portrayed as "this is anti-Semitic". Israel is not jews and jews are not israel. Calling for a system where Palestinians have some say in their own governance is not anti-Semitic.
Further, as you can imagine just because a terrorist organization adopts a phrase does not mean the original or current meaning is what that terrorist organization is implying by it.
So I'll ask again, do you have examples of calls for genocide? Or is this the main one? If you asked 100 people who chant "from the river to the sea" would they all, most, or even many claim they are calling for the death of jews or genocide? I think not. That's a uncharitable view of what that phrase means. [1]
Do you think that when the Jewish voices for peace use the same slogan they are calling for genocide? [2]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/river-sea-israel-gaza-hamas-prote...
[2] https://twitter.com/JvpAction/status/1721368469428482523
https://x.com/hgmeryem/status/1739710696693125432?s=20
I see posts like that all the time.
The closest is seeing "from the river to the sea" creatively misinterpreted.
It's not a misinterpretation to take the meaning of the phrase as it's stated and understood.
That's like saying "blood and soil" doesn't mean what it means. Or Intifada. "Oh don't be silly... they don't REALLY mean that."
They absolutely mean it.
You're being disingenuous to deny the commonly understood meaning of a clearly genocidal phrase while defending it.
Then you complain of others being "genocidal/racist". classic.
If you want to see what a call for genocide looks like, listen to the prime minister of israel:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/netanyahu-openly-calls-...
This just scratches the surface of the extreme levels of racism permeating every level of Israeli society and the foreign racists who support it.
Why is "Amalek" a call to genocide (remove the others from our land) but "from the rivers to the sea" (remove the others form our land) isn't?
Trying to take you at face value, I looked into what Amalek is and tried to find something more unbiased than you seem to be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/05/the-s...
"I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.” “Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit."
So Netty says that hamAss is an existential threat? no shit. hamAss needs to be removed? Definitely. No peace as long as hamAss exists. Can't have peace with terrorists.
But is Netty saying to remove ALL Palestinians? remember... Net (as well as others) have tried to negotiate peace with "Palestinians" and have been denied over the years (since recreation of Israel). So Israel has been willing to negotiate while "Palestine" has only been open to solutions that are "from the river to the sea" (read: Genocide).
Infitada and Sea comments are absolutely, unequivocally and undeniably calls to remove Jews from the area.
I love the parallels from 2009 to today... the "overreaction" (read: disproportionate reaction by Israel to a terrorist action of oct 7th) in response to an "existential threat" caused by terrorists killing innocents, hiding like cowards and using human shields.
But I digress. Don't be expected to be taken seriously in your attack on "genocidal" Israel while downplaying and ignoring genocidal hamAss. The war sucks but was started by terrorists and Israel has the right to defend itself from existential threats. No peace as long as hamAss exists.
How would you interpret that?
https://www.axios.com/2022/12/29/israel-netanyahu-far-right-...
Remember... hamAss'oles were founded with a charter that denies Israel's right to exist and has been designated a terrorist organization by... well... the entire world. Oh, they are in charge of Gaza.
And just FYI... your biased article? laughable. Try something less blantatly biased.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/19/1213797712/israels-lack-of-a-...
"In a 2022 interview, Netanyahu admitted he was offering Palestinians something far short of political equality. "I don't hide that for a minute. I say it openly," he said. Palestinians are just as open that they aren't interested."
Both sides have to be willing to negotiate... and it's clear that Net has to keep the security of Israel in mind and it's also clear that Palestine isn't interested in solutions. remember - not my words. Clear history.
Also in article: Israel has been working on peace in the region without "Palestine". Was working towards peace with surrounding nations. Also was trying to bring "Palestine" prosperity and it was looking good until Oct 7th when terrorists do what terrorists do.
Now we see the consequences. Do terrorist things and get responses.
From the book of samuel.
Not coincidentally, putting death to women, children and infants is what they are currently doing - in vast numbers. Theyre fairly open about this, too.
It's pretty clear what Netanyahu means and it's pretty clear that Israel supporters in the United States (mostly older and always on the more racist side) endorse this.
Whereas "will be free" is a call for exactly what it is. Freedom.
"they're fairly open" they also drop leaflets, tell people to leave and have given more warning than any other country would do given a remote bombing campaign.
They give more warning than the terrorists did on Oct 7th.
"on the more racist side" "aNyThInG I DiSaGrEe WiTh Is RaCiSt" /eyeroll
People like you are why the claims of "racism" and "nazi" mean nothing. When everything is LITERALLY racism then nothing is.
You're clearly unable to have a real conversation. Freedom will not happen for Palestinians until terrorists like hamAss'oles are removed.
It is clear what Israel wants - safety from terrorists - and they, unlike "Palestine" have in the past been willing to work towards a 2 state solution. We are in the situation we are currently in because "Palestine" refused previous offers and instead elected terrorists into power. No freedom is possible until those hamAss'ole terrorists are gone.
Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.
This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.
Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.
Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice.
Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.
If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?
Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.
I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.
You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?
I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve.
Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see".
Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always.
If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them.
It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not.
We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.
My experience is meta prioritizes instant gratification, which yeah people and their immediate actions says they want. But also I’ve completely stopped using Facebook and instagram because it became clear it’s of limited value to me. Yeah, i might mouse over a piece of salacious content because it’s salacious. But i know it’s low value to me. And most of my peers are in the same boat.
If I see a post on mastodon, it's from someone I follow or a post that someone I follow thought was worth sharing. That's a genuine interaction between humans. I get to decide what's in my feed based on who I follow and the filters I set up. The system is designed only to connect me with people I choose to follow.
Meanwhile, an algorithmic feed with no options is designed for one thing: manipulating users to optimize "engagement". That by definition requires ignoring what users prefer. I really shouldn't have to explain that this is a bad thing.
You're wrong about the design of algorithmic feeds. I worked on them, that's not how we designed them.
Also, 20% of people is hundreds of millions of people.
When those were reverse chronological feeds everyone and their mother wasn’t on these sites. They were smaller groups of people who were mostly younger and the overall traffic was lower. For people who didn’t follow a bajillion people, including people they didn’t know you would feasibly reach the end of the feed. But that’s not how people use the sites anymore.
But even then, if you wanted people to actually see and respond to your posts you’d have to time out when you posted it to hit around lunchtime. No 2AM musings if you expected to have anyone see it. And good luck with having your engagement or childbirth announcements getting to people in a different time zone if your family is international.
That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?
If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.
People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.
I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack.
I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?
It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.
And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?
The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.
Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/facebook-new...
What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.
If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.
Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.
As for Threads, both are common.
But yes, I would have liked to see some concrete examples.
Usually, you can argue that a state's actions aren't "terrorism" because most definitions of "terrorism" involve the requirement that the action is illegal. But saying that the IDF is regularly committing war crimes isn't even controversial at this point. So what exactly separates their illegal actions intended to instil terror from all the other terror organizations?
The only correct thing in your comment is that Hamas is also bad.
Please do research before spreading war crime apologia.
"Shock and awe" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe#Civilian_casua...
IDF is a real military with rules of engagement and target selection. If you say indiscriminate bombing, no this is not. WW2 and Korean War was.
Maybe we should call them torturers instead. Maybe that is more fitting.
And how is that justified? The murder of two old women in a Catholic church compound, by a sniper no less. And one of them was murdered while trying to retrieve the body of her mother.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I realize it's hard to discuss this topic without falling into that, but if you can't avoid it, please stop posting until you can. That goes for everyone else as well, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For the IDF not being one: literally no country, not even Iran, has declared them as one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...
Im not sure what better fits the définition of terrorism for you
At thé end of the day most israelis would be fine with a two state solution. This guy and other religious extremists liké Bennet have taken hostage the israeli people
More context: per some video from 2001 according to translation from Turkish regime propaganda broadcaster.
> At thé end of the day most israelis would be fine with a two state solution
Is Hamas Ok with two states?
Israel encouraged Hamas by allowing Qatari support in to Gaza with the intent of keeping Gaza and the West Bank
Finally the Hamas charter was amended and no longer calls for the destruction of Israel.
In any case Israel (with the support of the US) has all the power in this conflict and they are the ones actually killing tens of thousands of innocents no matter what Hamas’ official position is.
What happened on Oct 7 then?
True there was a terroristic raid into Israel in which 1200 people lost their lives but the scale of power does not compare AT ALL
Anyway it fits what you can read in more reputable sources such as https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/12/oslo-i... (litteraly written by an osraeli)
> Is Hamas Ok with two states?
No. And some argue thats precisely why Netanyahu helped them get financed to have a scary enemy and play the security card while pursuing a territorial war instead of working for actual peace.
Thats not my opinion. Thats what she israeli left wing is accusing him of : https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-11/ty-article/.p...
The short answer is "we don't know for sure"; it has repeatedly says it does, but some are skeptical they mean it. In the last 15 years they haven't really been given much opportunity to prove it, so ... we don't know for sure. But I think an evolution similar to the PLO would have been possible (too late now).
But we can ask the same about Israel: is Israel okay with two states? Because "just keep building settlements on the West Bank" doesn't sound much like it, or the way it's treated Gaza over the last 15 years, or tons of other actions over the last 60 years. And several of the religious Zionists now in government and holding several ministerial posts have pretty explicitly said they DON'T support a two-state solution, and have expressed views that at best can be viewed as supportive of ethnic cleansing (before Oct 7).
Words truly have no meaning if you think a democratic society like Israel is a terror org.
Hamas is classed as a terror org.
Israel is not. No matter how many tiktoks you view.
I also don't really get convinced by comments which just say "no you're wrong" without elaboration, maybe try a different tactic.
But not by deliberately targeting civilians.
Are you employing some non-standard definition of "target" or of "civilian"? Claiming Hamas didn't do any of that?
I think majority of pro-Palestine people want peace. Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion there.
While I am sure that's the intention, the claim is that this doesn't happen nearly as aggressively for anti-Arab or anti-Palestine content as it does for anti-Jewish or anti-Israel content, and that there are far more false positives.
In the full report (which is admittedly rather long) it mentions that even many neutral mentions of Hamas are removed, and that comments such as "Make Gaza a parking lot" are allowed to stay, which is obviously not just a suggestion for urban planning, or another that supposedly didn't break the rules was "it will wipe Palestine off the face of the earth and the map", and somehow I don't think that was a cartographer disagreeing on the finer points of map drawing.
I don't think this is intentional; "/Hamas/d" is easier than policing that. But that doesn't change the outcome.
I mean, at some point Instagram was hiding Palestinian flags, and mistranslating things to erroneously inserting "Palestinian terrorist".[1] I am convinced this was not intentional and that this is all hard, but again, it doesn't change the outcome.
And to be honest, this also fits my (unscientific) observations over the last 20 years or so. I've lost count the number of times I've seen "Look what the Jews have accomplished! So much! And the Arabs?! All they're good for is bombs, they never accomplish anything! It's clear the Jewish people are just better than the Arabs"-type stuff, and this is often just left standing. Whereas outright anti-Semitic content is much rarer, and much more promptly removed.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37946080
Bombing of Palestinian children is what I'm being critical of.
They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460722 (Jan 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33209948 (Oct 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32922335 (Sept 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31010834 (April 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927198 (July 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089584 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857484 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21875867 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15143690 (Aug 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At this point I've been entrenched enough in discussion long enough to appreciate how this place is moderated by dang etc
Everyone with strong feelings on a topic feels like the mods are secretly against their view and moderating in favor of the other side [1]. I think it's because we're all hard-wired to notice the things we dislike and to weight them much more heavily [2].
In this context, it only takes 2 or 3 datapoints (actually, it probably only takes 1) of a moderator scolding a comment that you agree with for you to feel this way (<-- I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us). It's hard not to. But of course the people on the opposite extreme of the topic from you are feeling exactly the same way about the mods—they're just basing it on a different 2 or 3 (or 1) data points.
(Btw, pg has had nothing to do with HN moderation for almost 10 years.)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I don't know what you mean by "openly show how both sides are affected". That's a tricky business. Everyone with strong feelings feels like the mods are biased and few are persuadable otherwise. Most people (with strong feelings) would be satisfied by little less than "promote all the posts I agree with and ban all the commenters I disagree with", though they don't phrase it in those terms, presumably even to themselves. It just works out that way in practice because when strong feelings are involved, all opposing comments tend to feel false and/or trollish and/or abusive.
What I can tell you for sure is that we're moderating all sides of this topic, same as with any divisive topic, when we see the site guidelines being broken, and we do our best to be even-handed about it. That doesn't mean there's no bias (unconscious bias is a thing, and total absence of bias is surely impossible), but it does mean that we work hard and consciously at it, and have many years of practice in doing so.
p.s. when you ask "What makes you flag something as flamewar", I suppose I should clarify that most [flagged] posts have been flagged by users, not moderators. Mods do flag some though.
I'm not too concerned when people disagree about particular moderation calls, since that's inevitable, especially in borderline cases. I am more concerned that people understand the underlying principles and try to abide by them.
I don't know if pg is still involved in moderation decisions on HN. He's widely considered anti-Israel, by most Israeli techies at least, but I don't think this necessarily means anything about HN. (And although I don't know pg personally, I'm willing to give quite a bit of benefit of the doubt to him, and I'd bet that his personal integrity would keep him out of directly intervening in moderating HN about this topic.)
Israel wanted revenge, not a solution. Their strategy has guaranteed that there will be another cycle of violence as the kids that grew up seeing their parents blown up in airstrikes are understandably going to be ripe for recruiting into whatever organization steps into power in place of Hamas.
The Nazis talked about the people they murdered exactly the same way. Himmler and his stuff about the great sacrifice the SS made for the benefit of humanity, all that... they excused murdering children with "international bankers", the same way people excuse genocide in Gaza with Hamas. "No side is innocent, it's all so very complex". Nothing changed.
https://twitter.com/Lowkey0nline/status/1711865833121521939
I have seen this with around 4-5 threads personally and who knows how many I missed
Two positions that people urge us to take (different people, obviously) are (1) treat it as off topic and flag everything; or (2) have no limits, which means letting it dominate the front page. Neither of these positions are viable for HN. For reasons why I say that, see past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... - these are general explanations, not specifically about Gaza, but they apply to that also.
HN has had at least two major related threads so far:
The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)
'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1309 comments)
Here are some explanations I posted the last time this question of flags came up, in case helpful at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657829
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527
Obviously we want commenters to have thoughtful, respectful, open conversation with each other rather than just fighting a war on HN. Equally obviously, it's pretty hard to avoid the latter. These things can only be 'graded on a curve', i.e. moderation has to shift somewhat, relative to the topic - not to do that would be expecting people not to be human, which is a losing proposition. But that does not mean the rules somehow switch off. Accounts that break the HN guidelines egregiously (such as by getting aggressive or posting in the flamewar style) are going to get warned and/or banned, regardless of who they're battling for or against. More than that, I'm not sure what we can do.
Huh? I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?
I wish HN was more granular about measures for users, e.g. by marking these highly contested topics and just giving people topic-bans. Some people just completely lose their shit, and then other people lose their shit in response, and these people post a million messages by the time the rest of us managed to actually read the article and perhaps some relevant background info. It just craps up everything.
That's what Wikipedia does. Works reasonably well.
Of course it'd have to be programmed.
What? Do you have showdead on?
I flagged this one, because “discussions” on this topic are mostly hot garbage, they are dominated by extremely motivated people shitting canned flamebait all over the place, especially early on. Indeed by the time I saw and flagged this there were already like four or five people doing exactly that, and by keeping it up, more of this type of users are invited. They are largely flagged by now, leaving an entire page of flagged stuff and more interwoven in the somewhat visible page; must be one of, if not the lowest signal-to-flag stories on HN. I can only see like 20% of 352 comments so far without showdead.
I was joking – "woosh" as I believe the kids say.
And this is why I'd be in favour of a "topic ban".
Never mind the stuff that's just outright beyond the pale.
So we can start with that.
What is the flamewar style?
I posted that one, and while it went somewhat well by the standards of such a controversial topic, it was still contentious and had a lot of bad feeling. I submitted it because there was a nexus to both the dynamics of influence operations and individual movers and shakes in the SV community.
In general I think submitting on a topic like this requires some sort of hacker-specific angle - involving people in the industry, or the impact of technological change, or a new dynamic emerging from some unexpected source (eg cheap consumer-tech drones in the Ukraine conflict).
It's not that other topics shouldn't be discussed on HN, anything sufficiently unusual to be news cn be worth a look. But we should also be mindful that if the community can't provide more than baseline insight/expertise on a trending news topic, the resulting discussion will probably be shallow and have little value.
this is flamebait
Some people can't resist and have to turn every thread into a battlefield as if this achieves something on the ground. (Often citing the exact same disinformation that has been propagating across social media.)
Massacring dance festival attendants and people in their homes is not self defence, it is terrorism.
Even steel manning your position and assuming most of the women and children being killed (and worse) by Israel cheered the attacks (which we have no evidence is true) , no, actually, you aren't justified in massacring people just because they took pleasure in an evil thing that happened to you.
Also, it seems you are shadowbanned. You might want to reread and reflect some of your comments and then contact dang.
Absolutely not. There's no moral justification for murder.
Where is the proof for that?
A tank shooting at houses where enemy fighters were dug in?
On the other side there are lots of videos showing Hamas murdering people.
And tons of Israeli also support rather distasteful things, including before Oct 7, which has been widely documented. Some of these people are currently ministers (e.g. Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, etc.). And many Americans, and Italians, and $any_other_nationality. I don't want to play "tit for tat" here but only for Palestinians have I ever seen the "well, they support Hamas, so therefore it's not a big deal" line of reasoning.
"What if" is the key phrase there. Can you jump into the minds of every Palestinian and know their likes, dislikes, motivations, level of support for Hamas? No, of course not; none of us can.
> Massacring dance festival attendants and people in their homes is not self defence, it is terrorism.
Absolutely agreed. But I'm not convinced what Israel is doing in Gaza is self defense either. There's certainly a self defense component to it, but cutting off electricity, water, and communications, and indiscriminate killing of non-combatants... well, none of that is self defense; those are war crimes.
Israel certainly has the moral right to defend itself against threats (existential or otherwise), but the response needs to be proportionate. I don't believe what they're doing is proportionate.
You can't seriously believe that responding to criticism of the undeniable indiscriminate slaughter of civilians with "but a lot of the people protesting our actions have never indicated they condemned the attack against us" appears to the rest of us as a reasonable or credible moral claim.
One should propose plan to solve problem without those deaths, or his words just become propaganda.
A mother whose childs have just been killed and who never supported Hamas in any way absolutely has the right to critize the bombings that killed her family, without having to present a working geopolitical plan.
How about on the other hand, the IDF does care again, where their bombs explode?
"Israel's defense minister said he has "released all restraints" on the Israel Defense Forces' troops in their fight "
https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-wa...
for sake of mutual peace and future every human should think hard before talking on sensitive topics. But humans can't, so we butcher each other instead for thousands of years.
Well, it surely is possible you did not read it, but just look above in the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746724
"Israel's defense minister said he has "released all restraints" on the Israel Defense Forces' troops in their fight "
Militray restrain means watching where you are shooting - and not shooting if the danger of civilian deaths are too high. The IDF officially given up on using restraint - and the number of civilian deaths and among them many, many children show it.
So fighting terror with terror? That's what it seems to me. And being called a puppet for one side, because I critize both sides - is just a very typical thing for this whole debate.
But the israeli defense minister literally said he ordered the IDF to give up restraint. How much more official do you want it?
And the evidence that they are following this order, is the high civilian death number.
"and if this will be sufficient to defeat Hamas."
And this is the thing - as long as the Hamas leaders are safe in Quatar and being supported by Turkey as "freedom fighters" and others - this is not a fight that can be won with just using more brute force.
To be clear, I do think Israel has a right to militarily target the Hamas - but not palestinian people as a whole. Every innocent child that dies fuels anger and new terrorism.
Even if all of Gaza is cleared and its population send to the Sinai desert - it would not really make Israel safer. It is just a really complicated conflict with very, very old roots.
and not acting also fuels terrorists."
So killing a child or not killing a child has the same outcome?
I don't think so, but I also think this is going nowhere.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
"Yes yes etc but do you condemn hamas"
Literally the meme
The problem is when people who speak out against the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents are presumed evil terrorist supporters unless they also explicitly condemn Hamas.
All: please do not post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, respectful, open communication here—not political battle, internet tropes, and all the rest of that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I wonder if there will ever be a way for a global-sized platform which uses algorithmic content feeds to convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this. The HRW report has 1,000 examples of peaceful pro-Palestinian content that was removed by Meta. But only Meta themselves has the information to know whether there is systematic bias. So we get a situation where people sympathetic to both sides both come away feeling that the platform is biased. I think the U.S. culture war has similar dynamics.
My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions. Maybe statistics on deleted posts, more legible moderation rules, publicly posted justifications for moderation decisions. Another part of my brain thinks that maybe this is just an unsolvable problem for social reasons in a community that's global-scale. I'm not sure. I do feel like this is still Meta's job, part of their cost of doing business, and if they put something like 5% of their revenue into moderation the situation would be a lot better.
In the meantime I find myself personally trying to cut out as many algorithmic feeds as I can from my life. I prefer the curation of a news website or podcast, small group discussions, or 1:1 communication with people I trust. Algorithmic feeds are easy but so far have never done a good job covering issues where there is real conflict between two groups.
So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].
I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].
Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673300
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_occupations
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/which-countries-receive-...
Visibility into moderation decisions makes them more gameable/exploitable/circumventable. The whole purpose of moderation is to remove unwanted speech; justifying the fairness of such removal is only secondary, and can be elided if it interferes with the primary goal.
Hence "You have been banned because your posts violate our Terms of Service" messages with no further explanation, and things like shadowbanning. It sucks to be on the receiving end of these things but they make online communities much more pleasant.
Politics are not an engineer’s job, nor is content moderation.
I agree. Let's assume that a Social-Media Business (SMBiz) gains sufficient value from hosting topical discussion to want to continue. But there is cost, reputational risk, and lawyers are expensive. How can SMBiz effectively moderate a conversation/debate/flamewar about a controversial event or subject, especially when the SMbiz wants to maximise user engagement while respecting laws and government requests?
Like it or not, that's the business reality. People who want a truly neutral discussion platform that operates with transnational freedom and total personal freedom will find that their ideals alone are not enough to sustain the business.
Prior Art: People often say that HN's Dang and Slashdot's moderation system are the best examples of "effective moderation" that we know. If the moderation is effective, it means SMBiz is attentive to topics and comments and discussion is insightful and interesting; it isn't overwhelmed by frivolity, falsehoods, defamation, and death threats (FFDDs). If the job is done well, SMBiz may even receive accolades. See Reddit's recent experience with its moderators for a negative example.
Here are some of the rules that will need to be applied, in stochastic FIFO order. Items are lettered for reference.
a= At all times, keep a clear eye on the business equation. Effective moderation will have a significant cost. At any scale!
b= Seed the discussion with verified accounts/users. Reputation must be earned and maintained. See Prior Art.
c= Rate limiting, especially for controversial topics. No short, stupid Reddit posts. People must weigh their words. Sometimes, the microphone must be disabled.
d= No flamewars, no propaganda, no falsehoods. See Prior Art. Lock any discussion that achieves high FFDDs. Throw away accounts, ban offenders. Make it sting.
e= No anonymity unless a verified account/user has sufficient reputation to post in anonymous mode. But it costs in ReputationCoin.
f= No bots, no bridages. See Prior Art to estimate workload and infrastructure.
g= Enable and reward trusted moderators. See Prior Art.
= = = Final Notes
> My engineer brain wants to solve this
I get that you are very interested in the Moderation Problem, but I think this wording wins no support. Backers will say that you are way out of your social depth, and people in the debate will dismiss your intent as naivety or bike-shedding (frivolous or misplaced optimisation) or a combination of the two.
One important reason why HN succeeds because Dan G (who is indeed attentive, and principled) rejects the most ungovernable type of conversation: flamewars.
> convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this
There is no neutrality, of course. SMBiz can state its bias and interests clearly. But it will be hard to make a profit from achieving neutrality because strident factions in polarised debate do not want neutrality.
Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically it would probably take generations for sentiment to change. It would be hard for Israelis to just accept that they will be attacked for generations, with increasing sophistication (mainly thanks to Iran's support), with no response.
Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.
On the other hand, Israel is not facing good geopolitical headwinds. As Yemen demonstrated, they are extremely vulnerable to a blockade. One day, in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.
So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.
It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli. That of course doesn't justify Hamas's inhuman war crimes, but acting as if war is unprovoked is not consistent with reality - Israel has never, by the definitions in international law, stopped actively waging war against Gaza.
The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.
Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.
> Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.
This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.
Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.
I’m fairly certain it’s more an inability to respond in any effective way.
Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.
See for example Russia's recent Hroza strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hroza_missile_attack), which killed 59 at a memorial service. Hamas can't really do strikes like that today; they would just miss with overwhelming probability. I think that will change soon if they remain in power.
Such as places with a lot of civilians yes
If you have the resources to be selective, it's much more attractive to hit specific targets like military facilities or political figures/institutions. Terrorist attacks are more often perpetrated against civilians nowadays because political/military targets are so hardened that assassinations are difficult.
If your goal was just to hit a population center, I fail to understand the point of guided rockets. Seems much more effective to just make more dumb rockets. Even compared to targets like hospitals, you'd still do more damage with more dumb rockets, especially due to saturation.
Also, you need compare the deaths with the number of rockets that aren't intercepted to get a baseline of effect.
Looking at this another way, if Hamas could target things like nightclubs, wouldn't those have something like 50x the population density of the general area?
> there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities
Even when fired from distances on the order of 70km (the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv)? Aircraft using dumb bombs tend to get a lot closer to their targets.
While there were gigantic failures that no one denies, possibly to the level of gross incompetence, Israel is also fighting against a real enemy, not some cartoon. Hamas is also smart, is increasingly well-armed, and can wait many years until the next attack. It's not clear that Israel can defend against every conceivable attack that Hamas can mount, and staying completely vigilant all the time is very costly economically, too. (I'll note that Hamas puts a lot of money and labor into these attacks, but they are pretty freely stealing from their people; the Israeli government can't do the same.)
It's true that, on its own, Hamas can't actually conquer Israel. But it can clearly carry out massive attacks that kill thousands and completely upend all life in Israel, and it's possible that they can keep doing this every couple of years.
> So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.
Actually, Israel is on relatively good terms with all its Arab neighbors (relative to the past), and was on the verge of formalizing those good relations with Saudi Arabia. That's one of the reasons for this Hamas attack - to try and stop the Israeli-Arab peace process, because they feel (very likely correctly) that it leaves the Palestinians in a worse situation.
> It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli.
Well, they did elect Hamas and fairly quickly start to shoot rockets at Israel. And by that token they are also at war with Egypt.
Gaza isn't a fully independent country, obviously, but it's also not under full military occupation like it was before. People insisting on one or the other usually have a point that it helps them prove, but reality is more complicated.
I do believe that it is directionally true that Gazans could've made far more of their situation once Israel withdrew, and Hamas has basically squandered that opportunity by turning to violence.
The US + Israel + allies can/will absolutely level these countries if necessary. Both history and current events demonstrate that. Do you really think they are at the mercy of what Yemen does?
Yemen is just a proxy of Iran, ultimately, and the US has already lost multiple proxy wars against Iran. Invading Iran itself is not a workable proposition, either.
It will likely take forever unless steps are taken to initiate a peace process.
At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.
And honestly where tf is the UN in all of this?
Israel somehow managed to convince other arab states and the US to make peace after the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty incidents, I'm sure they can manage to find some equivalent forgiveness in their hearts this time around :)
> At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.
Logistically far more israelis have dual citizenship elsewhere than Palestnians, so perhaps they should leave instead?
That was 2004. By 2017, their asks, for all intents and purposes, were the same as the PA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
Anyway, they've shown their true colors at this point; very different statements recently:
> Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-is...
India doesn't have peace with Pakistan. Doesn't mean the 2 nuclear powers (similarly partitioned up by the British) are at perpetual war.
Hamas like PA accepts 2SS. It is expantionists in Israel that reject it. In fact, PA concedes to have a state on merely 19% of historic Palestine.
Anyhow, after Hamas is gone like we are promised, let's see what new excuses crop up (like, 'all Pal civilians are Nazis' is already gathering some steam) to continue the subjugation of the Palestinians.
1. An actual statement
2. That was ever enacted
FYI, what you are referring to is actually a proposal from Fatah to hold elections in 2021, and a promise from Hamas not to run. Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run, despite briefly claiming they wouldn't, and according to Marwan Barghouti and Mohammad Dahlan [1], and even Hamas themselves [2], Abbas then canceled the elections out of fear his party would lose. Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced; and regardless, long before the time of the cancellation, Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Palestinian_legislative_e...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210430012358/https://www.times...
GP started off with something from 2004! Glad we are making progress with timelines here, if nothing else.
Speaking of 2023 statements, the ruling party in Israel democratically elected for 2 decades now, have made it abundantly clear that they'll continue to thwart any attempts at 2SS (https://archive.is/34Sg0) because 'security of the only democracy in the Middle East is at stake'. Apartheid? Yes, for security. Siege? Aiwa, security. Bombing Syria and Iran? Also, security. I'd like to smoke what they are in Knesset to be this drunk on conflict and war. And for the majority to continue to vote them in, because 'security', is telling. The result is, Kahanists are now elected ministers; but God forbid Pals elect 'terrorists'...
> Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run
I don't see a single mention of Hamas in the 2021 roster: https://www.elections.ps/tabid/1163/language/ar-PS/Default.a... The Wikipedia page you linked to merely points out a former Hamas leader was running under a new party.
> Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced
Abu Mazen is a puppet. No reason to believe he cancelled the elections despite ALL other factions (some 25+) wanting one. He most certainly can't do so without the support of whoever funds his little fiefdom. It is a forgone conclusion, as people say.
> Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.
I mean, you state that there hasn't been an actual statement (see below) but also claim it is all a ruse all in the space of 3 paragraphs...
Here is the direct quote from Wikipedia, since you're claiming it doesn't say Hamas was running:
The March 31 midnight deadline for submissions of electoral lists saw 36 lists officially presented,[69] including:
Fatah, led by Mahmoud Aloul[70]
Freedom, headed by Nasser al-Qudwa and Fadwa Barghouti, the wife of Marwan Barghouti[71]
Hamas (running as "Jerusalem is Our Promise"), led by Khalil al-Hayya[70]
...
I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections, when every source points out that he did, and Hamas themselves say he did and called it a coup by Fatah.
Posting random quotes from Netanyahu that do not reference the 2021 election does not back up your claim that Hamas was willing to sit out the election. I don't like Netanyahu either, but that doesn't mean that somehow Hamas wasn't trying to stay in power.
> I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections
I never claim anything of the sort. Abu Mazen did cancel the elections.
> opinion polls showing Hamas was likely going to win the election
As before, actual Kahanists winning elections is a-okay... but Hamas or its proxies winning democratically scare the hell because... 'security'? The 972mag article specifically calls out that the cancellation of the elections by Abu Mazen as the catalyst for al-Qassam, Hamas' armed wing, to (perhaps foolishly) take matter into their own hands.
> That is not a quote from Hamas, it
What about the direct quotes by Likudniks calling for ethnic cleansing (https://twitter.com/MairavZ/status/1739364199367618871) or more repression? Why do direct quotes from Hamas matter when an official Emirati document points out Hamas were okay with PA leading a political solution towards 2SS (and it is PA that has nothing to show for it 5 years since then).
Just so it is clear, I think Hamas are better relegated to the dustbins of history. They hinder more than they help.
Literally nowhere does it say that Hamas was only running "via proxy" in the article you linked. Hamas was running in the election as "Jerusalem is our Promise," as noted by Wikipedia and every single major news outlet that covered the election at the time. Just as in the 2006 election (which they won), where they ran using the name "Change and Reform." [1] The name of the list is just how they market their campaign slogan to voters, it doesn't mean they're not running or that it's a "proxy" that is different than them — and it certainly does not mean they're sitting out the election which was your claim. And that is why every major news outlet reported Hamas running in 2021, just as they did in 2006, and why you are continually unable to find sources saying they didn't run and are posting random articles that don't back up your claims.
And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute the undeniable fact that Hamas did actually submit to run in the 2021 election, just as they did in 2006.
Why does an official Emirati document...
You have not linked to an official Emirati document. You have linked to an opinion piece editorializing unsourced Emirati minutes supposedly from a meeting between Fatah and Hamas, that supposedly show a proposal for Hamas not to run in elections — a proposal that in reality was never enacted and an election that Hamas did run in. There are a zillion sources that show Hamas did run in the election and you have been unable to show anything saying that they didn't, and keep posting random right-wing Israeli statements as if that somehow proves Hamas didn't run.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative...
That was 972mag's claim as a precondition for Hamas to enter PLO post elections (which didn't happen).
1. In 2014, per UAE, Hamas stepped aside to let PA reach a political solution on 1967 borders. PA had nothing to show for that.
2. In 2021, 35 parties alongside Hamas (via proxy or not) favoured elections in WB, E Jerusalem, and Gaza. PA called it off.
In both those cases, doubt it was all Abu Mazen on his own, without the backing of the Knesset.
> And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute...
Two things:
1. You seem to place emphasis on direct quotes from Hamas but dismiss direct quotes from Likudniks (that prove they're no supporters of 2SS, which is why they may have pushed Abu Mazen to prevent elections).
2. Random? That's the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister.
Anywho, it seems we both agree on what happened (sabotage of the peace process) just not what led to it (right-wing Israeli rulers).
> others don't want all that flame war here
That doesn't make sense. If you don't want to participate, then ignore the post. actively preventing others participating is something else - I think "censor" is more appropriate in that case.
And some want only technical topics or mainly technical. So "curating" is more appropriate I think.
(But personally I did participate ... so much that I am rate limited again)
It was something like this https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars...
HN claims they are different but they sensor more than Reddit, where at least have to be astroturfed with a majority.
I'd like to know which HN post you're talking about, so I can say exactly what happened. Whatever post it was, it wasn't from the site opiniojuris.org. The most recent HN submission from that site was 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=opiniojuris.org
I remember being a little shocked when it was on the front page and shortly after was not. I've checked again from <4 months. Wonder if anyone else can recall the URL - I just remember it was a collective scholarly opinion with condemnation on the situation, it may not have been from opinionjuris but the article was very similar.
I'm pretty sure that the code that decides whether or not to display a [dead] post doesn't consider whether the user had upvoted the post before it became [dead]. Maybe it would be better if it did.
> I wonder if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38036236? You'd need to turn showdead on in your profile to see that one.
So, what happened?
Edit: I can't even click the link on the post you mentioned. Is that normal? That seems especially suspect and somewhat closer to censoring opposing views than I've come to expect from you and HN, Dan.
I have showdead enabled.
The link in question:
https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potenti...
Very likely flagged dead by users, as most things that show up as [flagged][dead]
Is that normal?
It is for dead submissions. Has been the case for ages.
For those with showdead enabled, why are links on dead submissions broken? Isn’t that the whole point of showdead, to actually show the post?
It doesn't address the specific thing but you can see the broader logic here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.
I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.
For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.
Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.
The last east/west split was different on that it was that last one.
In a way, you could look at the period of absolute control by a single person as an exception in Roman history.
For example, Mcdonalds is now operated as Vkusno i tochka [1], and has awfully similar menu and branding to Mcdonalds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkusno_i_tochka
But beware the big endian insurgency
"Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."
Any global business will arrive in such a war already having split businesses
The Western companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon will all align with the US
The European companies will align with the US as well
The Chinese companies Huwaei, ByteDance, Alibaba will align with China.
We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.
From the article: >Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam
This issue seems almost parallel to the paradox of tolerance in that algorithms which promote content at a global scale - largely without human oversight - should not be unregulated.
It is factual to say that human rights violations are occurring in Palestine. It is also factual to say that people have a right to defend themselves, and to recognize that atrocities are atrocious. But to silence the already-oppressed furthers oppression, and Meta is to blame here, again.
We should also consider the potential implications that Meta, with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, has in regard to US foreign policy vis-a-vis support of Israel.
So Meta is censoring a mostly left-wing viewpoint.
Perhaps where you're located it is a predominately left-wing viewpoint, but the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.
The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid being a US right-wing viewpoint is somewhat unsurprising, though.
The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid..."
The "rest of the world" in general supports a ceasefire in the Gaza strip as evidenced by recent UN votes.
I'm not aware of any Anglosphere, European or Asian nation describing Israel's actions as either war-crimes or perpetuating apartheid.
While I'm happy to be corrected with sources - conflating the two seems like both a extreme reach and needlessly political.
For your situational awareness, sarge - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes
Don’t just downvote; lmk what you think!
There's several references to various NGOs calling for action against Israel but as we've seen recently at the Harvard and other Ivy's, that's deeply murky territory.
That's very, very far away from your claim that the rest of the world generally accepts that Israel is committing war crimes and instituting apartheid. To repeat, its well established that the rest of the world generally (and increasingly) supports a humanitarian ceasefire in the region.
Irish President accuses Israel of war crimes: https://www.timesofisrael.com/with-irelands-sinn-fein-on-the...
UN Representatives from South Africa, UK, and India author report on war crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mi...
Israel's Attorney General accuses state of apartheid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Israel#Accusation...
Then-VP Biden criticizes settlements in east Jerusalem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...
...and similar statements from an EU High Representative: https://www.consilium.europa.eu//uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressd...
US Department of State report on racism / discrimination: https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41723.htm
UK MP compares actions to Nazi Germany: https://www.jta.org/2009/01/16/global/mp-kaufman-likens-isra...
Ergodan describes enacted laws as Zionist, fascist: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
South African cabinet minister "That is what apartheid and Israel have in common": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/06/southafrica.is...
That should be a sufficient sample to show this viewpoint is not isolated to only NGOs or one geographic area, and the variance in time should highlight how long this commonly-held recognition has been stated publicly by elected officials.
It often carries a cost in domestic support. It carries trade costs as the US, Uk and others punish BDS, while no Arab countries impose secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Israel (as many themselves do). This is just untrue.
You’ve just posted a bunch of links that reference criticisms of Israel, most of which mention neither war crimes nor apartheid. Every nation has faults and the West Bank settlements are deservedly criticised.
They are neither apartheid nor a war crime, however.
Misinformation is just information that people in power don't want people knowing.
This is such a fallacy. When the ones in power don't allign with your view, your view will be "missinformation".
The Vietnam war, Iraq war all got started on made up missinformation. Guess what kind of "missinformation" any laws about it would target?
I agree it would have been better if news outlets like the NYT didn’t regurgitate things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as factual, but that will happen when the intelligence community is embedded at said news organizations.
For me, the most tragic aspect is that those three hostages where gunned down while shirtless, in civilian pants, waving white flags, because they were mistaken for three shirtless Palestinian civilians, trying to surrender waving white flags. The execution wouldn't be justified in either case, and is damning evidence of the treatment Israeli forces give Palestinian civilians.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
Please. They aren't bombing hostage locations to free hostages. The effort to eliminate Hamas has cost 7000+ children lives. That number won't stop growing when hostages are freed.
Can we stop bringing up the 200 hostages in response to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians? It's a rounding error by comparison and a sad reminder that in 2023, to some, some lives are worth 100 times more than others.
I feel like that's true for most people/all most everyone ? You've got the thought experiment of: How many strangers lives would you trade for a family members well being ?
https://www.humanium.org/en/south-sudan/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57446154
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/01/1083102
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/06/1137237
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-half-ukraines-chi...
etc. etc. etc. etc.
15 seconds of internet for the first things that entered my mind. It's really not that hard.
The whole business with Ukrainian children being abducted was major news for ages.
Organisations such as UNICEF and War Child exist explicitly for children.
But yeah ... no one cares about children except in Gaza...
You know full and well what I’m talking about. Virtually nobody that’s far away from those conflicts posts pro-whatever side content on their social media. Mainstream media basically doesn’t talk about any of those.
My claim was that “nobody cares”, not that “there are no articles whatsoever being written about children dying in other conflicts”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law_and_Israeli_...
While Hamas' attacks on civilians on October 7 was an atrocity, nobody can honestly suggest Israel has a clean record in this territorial conflict.
Hamas's strategy of using children as human shields will be validated if they escape destruction, inviting them to do it again and again.
War is hell, in this case I have zero sympathy for the people who have repeatably started war after war after war, condemning the future of their children in the name of religion / ethnicity. 20% of Israel is Arab / Muslim, they are not the bad guys here.
Given that, I don't care who you have sympathy for. You excuse bombing a population of mostly children by talking about people who "repeatedly started war after war" (why be content with "repeatedly" or "war after war" when you can just double and triple it and lather it on endlessly).
You will not drag the rest of us along into that monstrous guilt.
And Hamas is not your concern, what the companies and governments you do support and/or are affiliated with are supporting is. Which is genocide.
I'm sure Chomsky would find some justification for that too, but that's why the only thing I care about he did is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy - from there it's all been downhill, especially in the last few years. Before that it was at least from time to time worth thinking about.
You mean 364 on festival?
The final death toll from the 7th October attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.
Just like the US killing hundreds of thousands of people in the firebombing campaigns of Japan was probably a war-crime. We wore uniforms while doing it. What are you gonna do about it? You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
> The Hague Conventions, addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update international humanitarian law to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
There's a reason one of the most important parts of modern international law on wars - which has the primary goal of minimizing civilian deaths - is that all combatants have to be clearly identifiable. If you cannot distinguish easily between both, war gets even worse than it already is. And the current conflict is the perfect example.
Throughout history, wars were fought between inequal sides. Only a very few times did combatants hide among civilians.
> You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
How? Look up when Japan surrendered.
> that’s the cool part about being the hegemon: you get to wear uniforms while doing your atrocities, and you have tanks and planes and ambassadors wielding real power at the UN to prevent consequences.
Don't nearly all Muslim countries and a majority of the UN support Palestine? Aren't China/Russia on Palestine's side? Is there an UNRWA for the rest of the world? UN leans heavily towards Palestine and a ton of wealth supports them. Aren't Hamas's leaders billionaires?
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-...
Oh yes, that's terrorism.
Since we're trading Wikipedia links; I must say some PR, a uniform, and US-backing must help a tonne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine