BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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To their defense, it's not exactly a safe idea to hold an anti-Hamas rally. Polling, as unreliable as it is in areas like Gaza, generally shows majority, but not absolute, support for Hamas, and it's of course a completely different picture in the West Bank.

To quote the speech that you evidently did not watch or read:

Like so many others, I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life
We mourn every innocent life lost. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.
Yesterday, in discussions with the leaders of Israel and Egypt, I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance from the United Nations to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment, these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.
As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.
Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism, Islamic-phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community and so many others are outraged and hardened saying to yourselves, “Here we go again with Islamophobia and the distrust we saw after 9/11.”
We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.
And here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms, all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

There are dead babies, and you can find the pictures of them if you like. I can't comment on whether their heads are attached to their bodies or not because I value my sanity, but I really don't think that detail matters all that much to the greater picture.

I'm not talking about personal morality, or even making a moral claim. I'm speaking strictly about how international law treats war crimes. You can believe that those rules are morally wrong, evil, or what have you. That's not what I'm talking about.

The counter-argument, if you care, is that if you refuse to do military action because your opponent has endangered a child, that tells your opponent that the only thing they have to do in order to win is to point guns at children's heads, thus only further incentivizing the risk to them. The problem, the argument goes, is that if you refuse to act because a child may be at risk, your position is essentially that someone can do literally any atrocity at all, and as long as they also ensure that a child will be harmed in the response, you won't do anything about it. This allows the behavior to continue unimpeded and will result in net more harm.

Under your framework that killing children must always be verboten, you're saying that the Allies should not have conducted any operations that put children at risk, and that so long as the Nazis ensured that any retaliatory attacks would harm children, they should have been allowed to continue their reign of horror forever.

they are saying when they do that is that they don't mind killing children to get what they want.

Yes, that is what it's saying. It's morbid and terrible to ever have to make the decision, but I think most people would generally agree that there does exist a level of consequence that would justify putting children at harm's risk, but also, that the blame lies with the people that have made the choice necessary to begin with. Just to take the most exaggerated ridiculous example possible, if a rouge terrorist somehow acquires a nuclear bomb, plants it in the middle of New York City, threatens to detonate it and you have the power to stop it by sending a missile to his house which will kill him and the group of kidnapped children he's taken hostage, most people (and I'm not speculating; this has been studied) will say that you would be morally justified in sending the missile, and yes, killing the children. They would say that the blame lies with the terrorist that made the choice necessary in the first place.

I don't want to get into the details of this current conflict because it's just about the biggest geopolitical clusterfuck the world has ever known, but I hope you can at least understand the perspective behind the legal framework here, even if you still disagree with it.

To that end, I think it's probably a reasonable guess that people who specifically avoid red meat are people who are generally more intentional about their diet and eat healthier.

I'm not a doctor by any means, but I also struggle to imagine what the obvious mechanism would be. The fat may contribute to atherosclerosis, but that's not diabetes. Red meat does tend to be prepared in ways that yield relatively high calories, so it could just be a matter of general obesity as well.

I'd really want to see a calorie-controlled study comparing chicken and red meat, but that's logistically not remotely simple.

Edit: Actually reading the article, I see there's apparently a link between the saturated fat and insulin resistance, but I still wonder to what extent that link simply comes from excessive calories and how problematic it is if your diet isn't excessively caloric. I'm seeing that apparently around 86 percent of people with type 2 diabetes are overweight.

I'm dearly hoping, and maybe even optimistic, that Israel will take a lesson moving forwards that, while the violence of two weeks ago was not and can never be justified, the underlying anger and resentment that produced it didn't emerge from nowhere, and Netanyahu did a lot to very directly incite it. Israel needs to show that it will always be welcome towards working with Palestinians that are actually interested in moving towards peace, and actions like settlements in the West Bank and murdering journalists are not productive towards that aim.

You've obviously already decided that anything the IDF says is necessarily false, which I probably don't need to say is strictly irrational.

Yes, the IDF is incentivized to lie, and they have lied in the past. That does not mean that everything they say must be false. Hamas does intentionally conduct military operations from civilian sites, and this is widely recognized. That doesn't mean that you have to trust the IDF when they say it - you actively should not - but it's just as illogical to accept the opposite case as truth.

And if there were, in fact, military operations being conducted at the site, which again is something that we do not know for sure either way, it would be a valid and legal military target, with the culpability lying with the party using the site illegally.

I'm sorry, what?

The IDF pinned it on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad almost immediately, not Hamas. Israel doesn't really care that much about the distinction between Hamas and the PIJ and doesn't gain anything by conflating them. If anything, the PIJ is even worse than Hamas, and they literally have the word 'Jihad' in their name, so if anything, Israel would be incentivized to label more things as self-admitted jihadists.

UNRWA schools have been confirmed, by the UN itself, to store weapons in the past. It's a known technique by Hamas to store military items in civilians infrastructure in order to maximize civilian damage.

So Israel got away with bombing a hospital

If you're going to just lead with things that are, at the very least, not at all clear facts, I'm going to have a hard time taking anything else very seriously.

The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren't enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.

Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don't believe there's an equivalent Lemmy community.

Reddit's massive strength is that it's big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it's easy enough to ignore them.

Executive pay makes up up a much much smaller portion of business expenses than people think. I crunched some numbers for Lowes a while back after they got featured in story about CEO pay, and if you simply vaporized the CEO and redistributed his pay, Lowes employees would get an hourly raise of two cents.

And there are a hell of a lot more YouTubers than there are Lowes workers. Executive pay really is not the unlimited money pot people think it is.

It's always amusing to see people claiming to be these masters of business strategies pushing such excellent advice as "pay money to provide a service to people who supply no revenue".

Don't get me wrong; there absolute is a point where you can be so overly burdensome that you're going to push legitimate customers away and ultimately hurt yourself more than you help, and YouTube absolutely does do some stupid things, but business is so much more complicated than people like to think.

In regards to your first proposal, that was the strategy in 2005. Before then, Israel occupied Gaza in the same way in occupies the West Bank. The Prime Minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, was intending to unilaterally withdraw from all the occupied territories in hopes of pursuing a true peace. The IDF forcibly evicted all Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip, withdrew, and elections were held in Gaza. The winner was Hamas, whose stated aim is the violent destruction of Israel, and they began lobbing rockets at Israel. The conflict escalated, Israel imposed a tight blockade in an effort to prevent the import of weapons (and quite probably motivated by some amount of revenge as well), domestic Israeli support for unilateral withdrawal plummeted, and in 2006, a war between Hezbollah in Lebanon kicked off, whose aim is also explicitly the violent destruction of Israel. Given that this was launched from parts of southern Lebanon that had been occupied by Israel until 2000, when the IDF unilaterally withdrew, Israelis increasingly became of the opinion that any area where they gave up control would simply become a base to launch attacks against Israel.

At this point, the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza is seen as a massive mistake, and Israel is not going to make it again. Moving forward, Israel is not going to be willing to sacrifice its safety in order to offer an olive branch.

That would just shift the fight down a level to removing the Republican House leader and causing a shitstorm about who the replacement would be.

Just wanted to say, having an actual informed perspective here is really appreciated.

Some additional context is that Hezbollah is strongly funded and supported by Iran, who take every opportunity to try to hurt Israel that they get. The Muslim world is also generally united in being opposed to Israel's existence, and Palestine in particular is something of a rallying cry to all of them. This is also something that Iran very directly encourages.

That is patently false. There was a major turning point in 1977 when Likud gained power for the first time. There are major Israeli parties that oppose any future expansion of Israel or further settlements, Labour being the most prominent. It was under Labour PM Ehud Barak that Israel voluntarily withdrew from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation. Ariel Sharon left Likud after withdrawing from Gaza in 2005. His successor, Ehud Olmert, intended to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank until the 2006 Lebanon War dramatically re-aligned the domestic politics, with the Israeli right pushing a narrative that each withdrawal Israel did just led to more attacks.

Israeli politics is much much messier than what you think.

The core point is that he's essentially a moronic propagandist, not an official spokesman making press releases for the IDF.

An Israeli Candace Owens, basically. Yeah, he works for Bibi, but it's not like he has access to IDF intel or is speaking for them.

I've been generally supportive of Israel's actions, but I can also openly state that there is a wing of the Israeli government that has no real desire for actual peace and that needs to be thoroughly excised once the war is over if there's to be any hope of making some progress towards peace.

That said, reading the article, this seems like an asshole attempting to make a crude joke more than an actual legal threat. What he actually said wasn't "If you protest the war, I will forcibly send you to Gaza", it was "If you like Gaza so much, I'll gladly help you get there by offering a bus".