FishFace @ FishFace @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Terrible analogy. There is a mental component to the crime of murder, but without the mental component, the crime is manslaughter.

It's more like the difference between "possession of a firearm" (legal, under some circumstances) and "possession of a firearm with intent to cause harm" (illegal, in the UK for example)

I have no reference for the relative difficulty of languages to master, except that I know that all languages are incredibly hard to master to the level of a native speaker.

I think people are wary of systems where you assign a relative score for good reason. Is my favourite party twice as good as the major party that kind represents my views, or is it only a little bit better? It's kind of impossible to make those judgements well IMO. In STAR in particular, what you actually want to do is rank your preferences, but if there are many candidates are forced not to because you only have five scores available.

Also you seem to have replied about STAR to just about every comment in the thread... maybe chill? lol...

In practice the spoiler effect is far smaller and harder to take advantage of than it is in FPTP. So unless you think another system has a chance where you are, it makes sense to support a switch to IRV if it's on the cards.

No, Arrow's impossibility theorem says that all voting systems have flaws, if you agree with the things it defines as flaws.

The most doubtful of the flaws is the "Independence of irrelevant alternatives" criterion, which says that: if you run two elections in which voters change rank candidates A and B the same with respect to one another, the elections will both rank those candidates the same.

The problem with this is that if voters change their ranking for some other candidate C it can end up affecting the outcome for candidates A and B, when arguably it shouldn't. But this makes less sense if you realise that aggregating voter preferences can end up implying that candidate A is better than B who is better than C... who is better than A. This setup makes it impossible to maintain the principle.

I mean yes it's a bit under-nuanced to describe any language as "easy" or "hard". The single biggest influence is whether you're already familiar with a similar language. English is going to be much easier if you already know German; Japanese will be much easier if you already know Okinawan. And as you say, written and spoke language can be quite different.

That said, I don't think it is the case that all of the different factors trade off against one another perfectly. I would expect them to trade off against one another to an extent though, because I would imagine there are forces which cause overly complex languages to become simpler, and more simple languages to become more complex. (One aspect of complexity comes through redundancy, such as requiring agreement between inflections of words when the inflection only conveys information already imparted from the rest of the sentence. But extra redundancy can aid in understanding because the listener generally doesn't hear everything perfectly)

But yeah, some languages just have incredibly complicated and picky grammar, whilst others have relatively simple grammar. As an English speaker, Japanese grammar has lots of unfamiliar features but could still be simpler than Finnish, which also has lots of unfamiliar grammar but which is very complex.

Probably nothing - though I do think it's worth remembering that renewables were much more expensive in the past than they are now. It's one reason why government action has been so slow - other reasons apply to nuclear power. I think people who are switched on to the crisis are all too aware that renewables are now easily the best source of power, but forget too easily that it was only through significant investment that we've ended up here.

English is easy. The hardest part about it, which some other languages also feature, is a poor correspondence between the written and spoken language.

Aloof would not involve caring about whether and why I care.

We were talking about power strategies from the 1980s and the person above said it would just be the "cheapest". If countries really were just building the cheapest, it would not have been renewables back then.

We were already talking about a counterfactual.

"Ranked choice voting" is a misleading term for Alternative Vote or Instant Runoff Voting. There are many ranked choice voting systems and the most important is Single Transferrable Vote, which is a popular system of proportional representation.

In the alternative universe we'd have been building fission power for decades when it was cheaper than renewables, and it would still be running today.

So you've retreated from "War crime, dipshit" to "flimsily veiled warcrime, plus the IDF make aggressive statements", and silence on the "wrong country". That's progress, given the context in which most people think any use of white phosphorous is a crime.

Why do you care what hill I die on? Being pedantic on the internet is my hobby.

I have. Feel free to point out the clause which states that using white phosphorous as a smoke screen is ever illegal. If you don't think this use was as a smoke screen, then I would like to see evidence before you go around calling people "dipshit".

the wrong country

Hezbollah has been fucking with Israel since October the 8th.

superhuman self-control, and not an indiscriminate attempt to murder and generally fuck with as many Muslims as possible.

You know, there are acts in between "superhuman self control" and "genocide", which is the accusation you're making here. If Israel actually wanted to murder "as many Muslims as possible" you would not be seeing tens of thousands dead. Israel could carpet bomb the Gaza Strip and kill all 2 million inhabitants. You would not be seeing a couple of smoke shells being shot into southern Lebanon; you'd be seeing Bint Jbeil and other southern towns flattened. No, the IDF is not exercising "superhuman self-control" (I never said that, so maybe consider why you mentioned it) but they are exercising some level of restraint.

Let met first deal with your last paragraph, because it exposes a general attitude.

There’s no ambiguity here, but let’s put the cherry on the genocide cake, shall we? Here’s an ICRC rundown on indiscriminately cutting food and water to civilian populations being a warcrime (see the fourth Geneva convention) in a way that’s descriptive of Israel’s actions. More warcrimes - they just can’t help themselves… certainly not when it would stand between Israel and genociding Palestine.

Yes, cutting off water to cities is most likely a war crime. That's not relevant to the case in the article. Are you of the opinion that any person who says "that is not a war crime" must think that the person, group or country accused of war crimes hasn't committed other war crimes? Do you think it's unimportant to legally defend someone who's been accused of assault just because they have been found guilty of assault before? Do you think it's unimportant to know the truth of such situations? Hopefully when expressed in such a stark way it's obvious that attitude, which you seem to have, is wrong.

On to the technical details.

it is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack

For it to be a war crime under this clause, the civilians themselves or their homes or farms must have been the object of the attack. Do you have evidence it was? This is a crime with a component of intent, and Amnesty has not proven it.

It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

Air-delivered weapons are bombs from an aircraft or rockets, and do not include artillery. This was an artillery shell.

It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons

I don't know the legal arguments about what constitutes a "concentration" and whether sparsely populated farms (see the video) would constitute a concentration, but it doesn't matter that much because you also (cynically, it seems like) skipped clause 1b of protocol III, which I already referred to, and which states:

(b) Incendiary weapons do not include: (i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

White phosphorous used to make smoke or a signal is not categorised as an incendiary weapon when it is used as such. So Amnesty is (dishonestly) declining to make explicit a claim that they don't have evidence for and which must be true for this alleged war crime to have been committed: The IDF must have used white phosphorous with the intent of using its incendiary effect and must have intended for it to fall on a civilian area. (And that area must count as a "concentration".)

The article and Amnesty's accusation propagates the falsehood under which you too are labouring, that use of incendiaries is a crime with a purely behavioural element: "did the soldier or commander do the thing which is prohibited", when there is a mental component to this war crime (and many war crimes): "did the soldier or commander do the thing with the intent that it would bring about a certain prohibited circumstance?" To be clear, this could still be the case, but a few videos are insufficient to even make the argument, never mind prove it.

Given your final paragraph, I suspect that you are not reading the convention with the care required because you are of the opinion "the IDF is a bunch of war criminals anyway, I just need to find how they also broke the law this time."

Amnesty has made the accusation that it's a war crime, but Amnesty gets things wrong, and above all they're calling for an investigation:

One attack on the town of Dhayra on 16 October must be investigated as a war crime

They then said why:

because it was an indiscriminate attack that injured at least nine civilians and damaged civilian objects, and was therefore unlawful

The IDF's indiscriminate attacks are the ones in Gaza where they kill hundreds or thousands of Palestinians at a time, not where a couple of incendiaries land on some houses amid some fields and injured nine people. Amnesty is also wrong here (and they absolutely know the law, so I would say they are lying) - injuring civilians and damaging civilian objects is not unlawful in war; doing so deliberately or negligently is unlawful.

I am not making excuses for war crimes "my guy" and if you don't like it when people get technical with the law then there are better complaints to make.

Did you see the video? This strike landed on farms in Lebanon, not cities in Gaza.

Furthermore, it's legal to target people, but not civilians and also not civilian objects or forests. It is legal to use it as a smoke screen, for signalling or for illumination regardless of where it is used.

The only reason this is reported on and talked about specifically is because people think white phosphorous is illegal and immoral to use, which is based on a terrible understanding of the laws of war.

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