donuts @ donuts @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I’m not talking about the law. Laws change over time.

I downvoted you because frankly I think that is a dumb and irrelevant thing to say. The world doesn't work based on your, or mine, or anyone else's personal sense of justice, nor should it. That's why international law exists.

Under international humanitarian law, Hamas using sick people as a human shield is giving the IDF every excuse and legal justification they need to counter-attack the hospitals that they are using to state those attacks. Period.

I would vastly prefer if Hamas didn't do that. I would vastly prefer that the IDF didn't have legal justification for attacking hospitals. But what I prefer doesn't mean shit.

But I guess when you can't argue against the substance of what I'm saying you can only make embarrassing claims about the timing of meaningless internet points.

Oh well, whatever. Have a good one.

So in your own personal sense of justice, is it just to wage militant attacks from hospitals and other civilian resources?

Personally I think it's wrong to use sick and injured people as human shields.

Sadly I think there's just an overwhelming tendency for bias to make people think "everything my side does is right and everything the other side does is wrong".

Random people on the internet, many of whom are mostly (if not entirely) detached from realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and may only just be learning about it for the first time from social media, have now formed ranks and picked a side that feels right in the moment. I'd ask people to resist the urge to do that, and instead take some time to read into the complete history of the region and the conflict, but I think it's much easier to go along with what other people on the net/TV/radio/etc are shouting.

People should keep in mind that there's a 3rd side to every conflict: the side of the innocent people who have found themselves caught in the middle of an armed conflict that they never wanted or asked for. The Israeli student who was shot to death at a festival, the old Palestinian woman whose family were buried alive in a knocked-down building, the young child who was taken hostage by Hamas scared and alone, and the Gaza teenager who has lost all possibility of the normal, peaceful life and education that so many of us take for granted. Their side is the only side that anyone should be on. And it's those very innocent civilians who Hamas are knowingly putting in danger by treating them as human shields in a way that openly invites retaliation.

When you stop to think for a minute about what's really going on here, and when you've taken even the bare minimum amount of time to read up on the history of this conflict (one of the longest-running geopolitical conflicts in modern history), it's not hard to understand that both sides really do have blood on their hands. There are no "good guys" other than the people who have managed to stay innocent, and as the conflict goes on and the desire for revenge burns in people's hearts, eventually some of those people will become "bad guys" too.

And that's just a very sad thing, because if nothing else it means that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Sadly, that's wrong. According to established international humanitarian law, it is justified to counter-attack hospitals in the event that they are used to gather recon or stage attacks. https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during-armed-conflicts-what-law-says

That's why staging attacks or garrisoning troops at hospitals, thus turning the sick and injured into human shields, is not only a horrible and inhumane thing to do, but also a war crime.

At some level Hamas knows this, and so the question is why they would do even do it? Is it because they think that using human shields is an effective deterrence? Or is it because they want to provoke an IDF counter-attack against a hospital so they can use it in their propaganda? Either way, it's a war crime on Hamas' part and generally terrible for the innocent people in Gaza.

To be clear, staging militant attacks from a hospital is a war crime.
To make matters worse, it opens up the likelihood and justification of counter-attacks against that hospital and the people in it.

According to international humanitarian law (IHL), health establishments and units, including hospitals, should not be attacked. This protection extends to the wounded and sick as well as to medical staff and means of transport. The rule has few exceptions.

Specific protection of medical establishments and units (including hospitals) is the general rule under IHL. Therefore, specific protection to which hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used by a party to the conflict to commit, outside their humanitarian functions, an "act harmful to the enemy".

Medical establishments and units enjoy protection because of their function of providing care for the wounded and sick. When they are used to interfere directly or indirectly in military operations, and thereby cause harm to the enemy, the rationale for their specific protection is removed. This would be the case for example if a hospital is used as a base from which to launch an attack; as an observation post to transmit information of military value; as a weapons depot; as a center for liaison with fighting troops; or as a shelter for able-bodied combatants.

Source: The International Committee of the Red Cross

Nobody should beat around the bush here. Hamas are using injured civilians as a human shield to stage attacks, and in doing so they are inviting retaliation and suffering under well-establish terms of international law. There's not really any particular gray area here. It's horrible, it's unethical, it's criminal, and it's just plain wrong.

I have a Steam Deck and I don't even own a PS5, so I'm probably way outside of the market for the Portal...

But I'm really finding it hard imagine this device finding a broad audience, since even in a hypothetical best case we're talking about a subset of a subset of PS5 owners. From what I understand the new PSVR sold pretty badly despite being a pretty solid piece of VR hardware, this feels like a very niche and underwhelming piece of hardware and so I really can't imagine it performing any better.

Someone will buy a PS Portal, and hopefully they like it, but when the smoke clears I don't see it being a big hit.

The Steam Deck OLED on the other hand, I suspect will sell out fast. It seems like there is a pretty big chunk of people who were interested in the first gen Steam Deck but opted for the wait and see approach, and I can imagine a lot of those people jumping on the Steam Deck OLED now that they know the device has lasting power. Personally I probably can't justify the cost of upgrading from the LCD model right now, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to...

This thing is gonna flop hard.

Really driving the point home that he's a fascist for the slow learners in the back.

I was actually talking about DeSantis, but you're 100% right and I have defamed Meatwad's character.

Imagine spending $10,000,000 of someone else's money to maybe win a distant second place in the Republican Primary against a guy who can only be described as a meatball on stilts.

The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

A real hadith quote from Hamas' founding charter, Article VII (1988)

Let's be totally real here, for most of their short history Hamas has been deeply committed to carrying out a genocide against the Jewish people for a mix of reasons including politics, religion and race. Over the last 4-5 years Hamas have made an effort to moderate their language around this topic, but judging by recent events they have done very little to moderate their actions and ideology.

It's a shame, but considering that Unity is deep in a hole of unprofitability coupled with high interest rates across the globe, I can't say it's surprising.

Plan A was to rip off all of their users and Plan B seems to be to downsize. I wonder if it'll be enough to right the ship...

Say what you will but she was right.

It was proven during Charlottesville, again during January 6th, and many more times between and since.

Anyone who still supports Trump, considering everything he's said and done, is deplorable.

I really like it. Admittedly it falls apart a bit towards the ending...

What a plan, inflating one of the tires on the bike...

Ah shit, here we go again...

• Cowboy Bebop (Cool, classic, phenomenal and diverse soundtrack, well told story.) 24 eps
• Samurai Champloo (Same director as Bebop, great characters, killer hip hop soundtrack, not a single bad episode.) 24 eps
• Neon Genesis Evangelion (Gripping story, extremely unique and influential, weird and edgy ending(s)) 24 eps
• FLCL (Superficially crazy but with layers of depth. Great soundtrack by the Pillows. Top notch animation throughout. Totally unique.) 6 eps
• Redline (Great characters, top notch animation, fun story and setting. A cult classic.) movie
• Akira (One of the greatest animated movies of all time. Cool cyberpunk setting with an epic ending.) movie
• Death Note (Gripping detective and antihero story about supernatural murder powers and justice.) 37 eps
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Great characters, interesting story, lots of cool episodes) 52 eps
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (Epic combining robot adventure of a grand scale. Great characters and animation.) 27 eps
• Trigun 1998 (Great cast of characters in an interesting world. Awesome soundtrack.) 26 eps
• Macross Do You Remember Love (A classic robot anime at its best!) movie
• Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin, Jigen, Fujiko, Goemon and Zenigata in a film by Miyazaki.) movie
• Paranoia Agent (One of the great directors, Satoshi Kon, with a twisting and turning thriller series.) 13 eps
• Kaiba (A strange and complex transhumanist story in a cute child-like art style.) 10 eps.

Yes, in fact I do. Are you suggesting she was somehow tricked into attending a Russian propaganda event?

Try harder.

There's a very easy way to not end up sitting a dinner table with murderous dictator war criminals and traitors: don't go to dinner with them in the first place.

This isn't exactly rocket science.

She's literally sitting at the same table as Vladimir Putin. You think that have open seating at these events? Fucking Gorbachev was at that dinner and wasn't even at that table. And yes, this all took place after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.

If you're gonna advocate for Stein you're going to have to come up with something a little bit more convincing.