sab @ sab @kbin.social

Quite possibly a luddite.

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2 yr. ago

In defence of the UN, the UN schools in Gaza are rare sites of hope in normal times and invaluable lifesavers these days. And I have friends in the UN who were working their ass off trying to improve the situation even before the war broke out, and who I'm currently trying to convince to get some sleep between turns. The fact that the UN cannot work as a world police (except under exceptional circumstances and sadly so far strictly theoretically) doesn't mean it does not have an important role to play.

It's incredibly flawed, but it's what we got, and at least it's something.

Kind of. It's a rare opening for the use of legitimate force against a sovereign state, but it's extremely hard to use.

Technically, if something meets the definition it would still be genocide even if the Security Council didn't recognize it as such. In practice however, members of the Security Council can always claim the intention to be lacking, rendering it for all intents and purposes limited to political opportunity.

Of course, I'm speaking from a international law/politics perspective. This doesn't falsify the dictionary definition; the word itself simply comes from latin gens, a group of people from a common ancestor, and cide, killing. Using it in that way normal conversation is not at all wrong.

It will, however, land you in frustrating discussions with people who will insist on the UN definition, and who are trained to only use the word genocide when they believe they can truly support it in the strictest sense. Which is why, depending on audience, it's often easier to speak of war crimes and the murdering of civilians. Which should be equally powerful as long as you're not actively making a case for the UN to intervene. And if you are making that case, you should absolutely be aware of the UN definition and its challenges.

The genocide/not genocide discussion risks becoming a distraction, and a lot of bad guys could score an apparent point by experts in the field having to confess that they cannot safely qualify their murdering of civilians as genocide. It doesn't make the actions any less deplorable; it's merely why you're not going to see a lot of commentators use the word "genocide" about ongoing situations.

The UN definition renders it a word that is almost impossible to use, but in turn it's the only concept in international law (at least that I can think of) that opens for the legitimate use of force against a sovereign state outside of war. So there are pros and cons.

Pretty much. Russia could veto intervention in Ukraine as they are permanent members of the Security Council, together with China, France, the UK, and the US. In practice it's incredibly rare for these five to agree on anything in international politics enough for the UN to be anything more than a lame duck.

In reality things are, unfortunately, complicated.

A central reason why genocide is so special is because it could call for UN intervention. Therefore, the UN definition is of some importance, which goes as follows:

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:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Notice that according to the UN, the murder of political groups is not considered genocide. The Genocide convention was signed in 1948, and Stalin was not too keen on not being kept from killing political opponents. You could of course still argue political mass violence to be genocide, it just isn't according to the convention.

There are perhaps two more interesting points that stand out. One is that the likelihood of success is not observed: merely the intention. The lunatic in the US killing a Palestinian child and wounding his mother was genocidal, as his intention was to kill Palestinians in order to rid them off the earth. It doesn't so much matter that one mentally deranged person with a knife is unlikely to have much success in the task.

Intent causes a further problem, which is of course why the UN is not going to intervene in Israel: It's very easy to hide your intentions. There are certainly members of Hamas who speak (or spoke) openly of removing the nation of Israel off the face of the earth, and you could therefore relatively easily label their actions as genocidal before the ICC if necessary.

With Israel it is, of course, more complicated. They are certainly using collective punishment, murdering civilians and children at an extremely high rate. However, they will insist that the intention is not to destroy the national group that is Palestinians: Most of them will argue that that the intention is to fight off Hamas, and that civilian casualties are just an unfortunate side effect of any war, even if just. Some lunatics will claim that they cannot kill off Palestinians as a nationality because Palestine never existed in the first place. The latter group would likely be less successful in the Hague.

If Israel can reasonably claim that their intention is not to destroy a group of people according to the convention, they will always be able to claim it is not a genocide and be at least technically correct.

There are two main implications as far as I'm concerned:

1. The UN will stand by and do nothing as civilians are murdered, just like it always does.
2. Legally, genocide is not a particularly fruitful term to throw about when discussing an ongoing conflict. Targeting civilians in murderous massacres is always deplorable. Endlessly arguing whether or not it formally fits the definition of genocide matters when the UN is considering intervention, but it is hardly relevant when considering whether or not war crimes are okay. These actions are despicable and should be forcefully protested, independently of whether they can be proven to meet the high bar of genocide.

Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I'm checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though - it does seem to flirt more with AI than with transparency, which has me worried.

But absolutely, it's not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.

Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.

I keep the vault in Nextcloud, and use Nextcloud notes for any other platform than desktop. For the most part it's working pretty great.

The fact that you consider yourself unqualified to make an opinion probably makes you more qualified to do so than 95% of the idiots out there whose opinions are already firmly established.

Even if AI magically got to the point of providing accurate and good results, I would still profoundly object to using it.

First, it's a waste of resources. The climate impact of AI is enough of a reason why we should leave it dead until we live in a world with limitless energy and water.

Second, I don't trust a computer to select my sources for me. Sometimes you might have to go through a few pages, but with traditional search engines at least you are presented with a variety of sources and you can use your god given ability of critical thinking.

It's possible to blame both. There's nothing in the comment you're responding to saying Israel is not a terror state or that they're not to blame for things going to shit.

You can absolutely blame Hamas for their actions. And you can blame Israel for Hamas. Responding to completely fair criticism of Hamas by whining that Israel is worse is just whataboutism. They are both terror organizations at this point.

What do you mean? It's a series of tubes.

If you think Hamas does anything but to promote Israels extinctionist agenda by targeting civilians, you are tragically wrong.

It's not that one cannot understand that people in Gaza get desperate and start supporting Hamas - it's equally easy to understand how people in Israel become terrified and support Netanyahu and his allies. It's a death spiral.

Sympathize with the people, not their terrorist leaders. At least the people of Israel got to stupidly elect their leaders only a year ago - the people in Gaza had no such luxury. You can understand where the desperation comes from while also appreciating that it does nothing good to anyone, least of all the civilians in the Gaza Strip currently thirsting under rocket fire and a cloud of white phosphor. The only one it helped in the end are the Israeli far right who want an excuse to "complete the borders" of Israel.

Hamas knew what was coming when they launched their senseless terror. The blood of civilians on the Gaza Strip is on their hands.

Likewise, Netanyahu and his far right government has been provoking this intentionally. He has the blood of Israeli citizen on his. They did not expect an attack to be this successful, but I guaran-fucking-tee you they were waiting for and intentionally provoking an opportunity to strike back.

Both of them intentionally kill civilians. Both can get fucked.

If you're looking for heroes, start with the people working for UN schools at the Gaza Strip.

Yes, your message was clear - there's no mistaking you for claiming Israel's use of it is legitimate.

I remember thinking once this war broke our that I bet they wish they could use chemical weapons, and it seems they've found a workaround.

Chemical warfare is fucking great when you intend to move in after - traditional bombs are too messy and destroy too much property.

The logic is similar to Dead Kennedys' take on the neutron bomb in their aptly named song Kill the Poor:

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home

I honestly think a lot is solved with the new onboarding experience in Mastodon, even though it's controversial in the fediverse.

If the twitter exodus to Mastodon happened today I suspect the main problem, except the servers having to deal with millions of people trying to sign up all at once, would be the lack of quote posts. Which is at least on the roadmap.

Trust me, we'll do the exact same thing again, having learned nothing and with the same exact person on top. Literally the same exact thing that enabled all the fascists some months ago.

It's going to be great this time around!!

Bluesky is spreading like wildfire in academia at least.

And much like wildfire, it's going to be a fucking disaster. I don't understand why people who are paid to be critical thinkers would jump to another platform owned by a centralised actor. It'll be the same shit all over again.

This is a war fuelled by hate. They're targeting civilians.

Hamas needs no further elaboration in that regard - you don't mistake a rave for a military base. On the israeli side, whoever believes 500 targets bombed in Gaza over night equals 500 carefully selected military targets is more optimistic than I am.

The Israeli army shot and killed a journalist doing her job last year. It's hard to claim she was easily confused for a legitimate military target, even for the most terrified racist in the Israeli military.

The new israeli government includes a far-right party (Otzma Yehudit) which spun out of a party that was outlawed decades ago (Kach). They are extremists, and they have been seeking to provoke something since they got in power. What they wanted was an excuse for genocide, and they are too goddamn stupid to understand that it might backfire.

Again, we all know the actions of Hamas are completely deplorable. The Israeli government being pretty damn close to a terror state doesn't justify the killing of civilians - if it did, neither side would really be in a position to complain. Hamas also has the blood of the dead children in the Gaza Strip on their hands.

But both sides killing mostly civilians.