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For extra fun, "flang" actually refers to three different projects, one of which also completely rebuilt its frontend, so there are four separate "flang" frontends to LLVM. And I know of at least one proprietary LLVM-based Fortran compiler that's not based on any of the flags, and I suspect there are a few more lurking about.

The short answer as to why there are so many different LLVM Fortran frontends is that open source community took a long time to find someone willing to commit to a Fortran frontend to LLVM, and even when that happened, the initial results weren't particularly usable--it's not until I want to say late 2020 or early 2021 that there's an in-LLVM-tree flang project, and the exe isn't renamed from flang-new to flang until 2024.


A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.

The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."


Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.

I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.


The problem is that work does its best to capture all of my daylight hours.

Does the night belong to the day it follows or the day it precedes?

Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at midnight?

This is all convention and not something that can be decided objectively.


I think that midnight should be around current 4AM because that's the brief moment when party people already sleep and work people aren't awake yet.

No, I hate standard time, because in winter the sun sets at 4 or 5, when it could set at 5 or 6, i.e. daylight when leaving work.

I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.


You are not alone according to polling in BC.

I think fundamentally it comes down to energy for me. I have very little energy in the morning so I am not going to harness the pre-work daylight hours to do something outside like taking my dog to the park, biking, or running. For me I don’t actually start feeling energized until maybe 9-10AM.

After work however, I have much more energy to do things outside with the daylight.


The main driver of people wanting year round DST is so they can have sunlight after work in the winter. Those late sunsets in the summer are awesome too though.

> which doesn't get you all that much

After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.

I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.

I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.


Despite all this I am a permanent DST fan. However I’ll be happy with permanent anything over the current madness

So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.

Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

> Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

I find it highly probable that the negotiation for the rights to adapt for the screen included contractual agreements for him to do so to prevent them from hiring someone cheaper who would screw with his intended vision. He had leverage to ensure this outcome. They didn’t pay him a great deal more than they could have paid some unknown name because they are nice and friendly.


Maybe it would have encouraged him to write the last books and thus have an ending

First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered in 2011.

Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).

So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?


Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the novel without paying royalties. 2027?

According to the regime this thread is discussing (in observationist's post upthread), 2037. This seems more than fair to me.

Of course it seems fair to you, it's not your IP that's being stolen before you were able to extract all it's worth from.

It’s not being stolen because he would have published it knowing the copyright laws. Also even with copyright laws as they are, selling unlicensed copies isn’t theft. It’s illegal but no stealing is involved.

You've completely misunderstood the social contract inherent in copyright. There's no theft in adaptation. Copyright is an intentional trade-off by society to incentivise the creation of new works for society's benefit by giving authors a temporary monopoly. Perpetual copyright would obviously maximize the incentives for authors, but harm society by precluding the creation of new works based on the original. Instead, society chooses a limited period where authors can get most of the benefit while trying to keep the period short enough that works remain relevant.

Saying it's all theft entirely misses the point.


[flagged]


In a world of print media and books, 20 year copyright makes sense; it gives the media time to disperse through the population, saturate, have whatever impact it will on the culture, and throughout that time, the originator can profit.

In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.

Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.

The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.

There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.


The ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect creators from the rapacious publishing industry. Now, it doesn't do a good job of it, in large part because the publishers have twisted it to mostly be a tool for publishers attacking publishers rather than creators to retain their rights.

But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.

> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity

Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.


Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."

> I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario.

What are the motives? Follow the money? Who profits most might give an indication of who is more likely wrong.


Don’t underestimate the capacity of feelers to be wrong for free.

As I understand it, the IGRC doesn't particularly rub happily with the clerical council, and it's not entirely clear to me who will win that the power struggle.

But the ultimate loser of the power struggle is clear: the Iranian populace at large, as all of the viable factions are quite committed to consolidating their power by repressing the population. The most likely situation, I think, looks a lot like Libya.


Where did you hear that? The IRGC is the creation of the revolutionary clerical movement. It exists specifically to prevent outcomes like Egypt, where a powerful national armed service operates as a check on political Islam.

Islamic societies seem to be unable to form stable institutions. The recipe seems to be unable to synthesize this, no matter how many ressources are available and how benign the conditions. As a result the biggest formable state-institution remains the family clan and the family clan just does not cut it in preventing civil war. At best you get a clan-coalition masquerading as a military government with some democratic pets - at worst you get libya.But i guess after 52 countries, the results are in and the fact that other - non western powers are colonizing islamic countries now (china, russia) and everyone is scrambling for nukes post trump - the displayed weaknesses could end the region.

The Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years with only one major civil war, a feat not matched by any major Christian European country. England faced 3½ civil wars (counting the Hundred Years War as a ½ civil war here, because while it is essentially a dynastic dispute, it's not a dynastic dispute over England itself but rather English holdings in France) in the same timeframe. And this despite the Ottoman successor law being essentially "battle royale among eligible candidates" whereas standard European succession by this time is the seemingly clear "eldest son" yet somehow creating endless succession disputes.

Those "battle royales" were the reason for the stability. The process selected for sultans (or, occasionally, mothers of sultans) who were most effective at building a backing coalition, and generally ended in the killing or at least exile of all pretenders to the throne. The disruption the process represented also helped quell the willingness of factions within the government to try and repeat it too often.

The well-established succession processes practiced in the West guaranteed that at any given time, not only was there almost always at least one person who would benefit directly from the ruler's demise, there were often individuals for whom the ruler's premature demise was required for them to be inline for the throne. If you're the King's brother, for example, under male-preference primogeniture you need to make sure your brother doesn't have any kids.


“ the biggest formable state-institution remains the family clan”

This is not at all how Irani society is structured.

The rest of your comments generalizations are weak and ill-supported as well, at best they only apply to a subset of Arab countries in the Middle East.


How about Indonesia?

Arms control treaties are effective only if they are banning weapons that aren't useful. The problem is that landmines are incredibly useful weapons. What that means is that every country that has signed up to the Ottawa treaty either expects never to get into a major war again, is planning on relying on its allies who haven't signed the treaty to deploy landmines for them, or is planning on ignoring the treaty and using landmines anyways if it gets into another major war again.

In that vein, the Baltics withdrawing from the Ottawa treaty is commendable because they've stopped lying to everybody about what they're going to do come wartime.


> Arms control treaties are effective only if they are banning weapons that aren't useful. The problem is that landmines are incredibly useful weapons

There is not a single doubt in my mind that mines are useful. As are executions of people suspected of collaborating with the enemy. As is instituting precautionary concentration camps to round up folks who might have some bond with the enemy. The utility of dropping atom bombs on civilian centers is probably extremely high in negotiating with the enemy. But, like mines, these things are unconscionable, and when you start using these highly effective means, you should really ask yourself: "am I the good guy in this conflict?"

For me, the answer is no. I don't think we should commit war crimes, which somehow has become a controversial opinion.


War crimes are bad, but using ATP land mines is not a war crime by itself.

For example ATP land mines with reliable self-destruction used properly are OK (yes, some failure rate will exist - in case of war you rarely have 100% sunshine and rainbows solutions).

While dropping randomly land mines over city to target civilians is bad, evil, war crime and terrorism.

Yes, in case of war it is very likely that murdering soldiers of other side will become necessary. It does not make executing PoW acceptable, but guns/mines etc will be used.


One core principle behind determining whether the use of a weapon is a war crime is seeing if it can be used discriminately, i.e., if it can be targeted. So for example, the use of guns (though awful) is not a war crime, because using it requires you to point it at something and pull the trigger. You are in control of whether you shoot an enemy who is actively engaging, an enemy who is retreating, a field medic, a journalist reporting on the scene, a civilian who was not able to flee the area. With for example mustard gas, you cannot make this choice, and that's one of the two major reasons why the use of mustard gas is a war crime.

Even if you build in a self destruction mechanism to landmines(1), this indiscriminate nature remains.

On top of that, you mention something about peppering cities with land mines not being ok (and it wouldn't be), but I'm not convinced that anyone's doing that. And still civilians make up 90% of the victims.

Of course, there's another thing playing into that 90% figure, which is that, by and large, mines are not very effective against military tartgets because they have ample means to dispose of them. Given the fact that our target here is Russia, and not some poorly funded guerilla outfit, I think this should be taken into consideration.

Pairing their war crimey nature and their low efficacy (2), I personally cannot get behind withdrawing from the Ottawa treaty.

There is much more to say about this, and much more has been said about this. I would recommend giving

https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/en/landmines-can-no-lo...

a skim. They give alternative, more effective, less inhumane, solutions to the problems that mines try (and largely fail) to solve.

(1) Which is ultimately a bit of a hypothetical exercise, because the nations that left the treaty, well, left the treaty. They didn't propose an amendment allowing for temporary mines, they left the treaty. And on top of that the failure rate for such smart mines is like 20%. You get 1/5th of a war crime I guess.

(2) Earlier I said something to the effect of "I'm sure they're effective". At the time I hadn't read up on the actual effectiveness of mines, because to me, the effectiveness of a method plays no role in whether it should be allowed in combat. I've since read up on that part too, and I'm reasonably convinced they're not very effective in our current context.


Modern mines have programmable target discriminators that use multiple sensor modalities in addition to a programmable self-destruct. A cow or a goat herder usually won't set these off.

Many types of sophisticated mines cannot be trivially cleared with line charges or engineering vehicles. Soviet style mines can be cleared this way but aren't the only kind that exist.

This tech isn't sophisticated but it costs money and requires maintenance. Many militaries don't use them because they want weapons that can sit in a warehouse for 50 years with zero maintenance.

The military purpose of mines is not to kill anyone. It is to deny use of space in order to shape the battlefield and trap the adversary in areas where they are exposed to other weapons. Mines are highly effective at this purpose and will be for the foreseeable future against almost all adversaries. This is not controversial.

The "expert" in the linked article has no background in mine warfare, only EOD. This became obvious when I was reading the article because it presented an unexpectedly naive understanding of mine warfare. That perspective might make sense if your only experience is clearing old Soviet mines and IEDs but it doesn't generalize.


I wonder how those sensors detect a retreating enemy. And again, a failure rate between 6% and 20% is not acceptable. A bit of mustard gas is still mustard gas. And the baltics left the "all mines" treaty, not the "smart mines" treaty.

> but I'm not convinced that anyone's doing that.

You are underestimating what kind of evil things people had done and will do. This was in fact done.

> Even if you build in a self destruction mechanism to landmines(1), this indiscriminate nature remains.

Would you claim that dropping bombs from planes is also war crime? Because if mines are placed in exclusion zones or deployed directly in front on enemy charge then mines can be as discriminate as alternatives.

> Of course, there's another thing playing into that 90% figure, which is that, by and large, mines are not very effective against military tartgets because they have ample means to dispose of them. Given the fact that our target here is Russia, and not some poorly funded guerilla outfit, I think this should be taken into consideration.

In Ukraine mines were in fact effective, both against Russia and Ukraine.

> because they have ample means to dispose of them

Main benefit of using mines is slowing down enemy and forcing them to deploy means to dispose them

It drastically lowers speed of advance, even if mines harm noone in the end.

> And on top of that the failure rate for such smart mines is like 20%.

I heard about much better failure rates. Do you have a reliable source for that 20%? I would be happy to educate myself (and maybe change my opinion)

> I would recommend giving > https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/en/landmines-can-no-lo... > a skim

I did, and their claim of "Minefields can now be breached in minutes, using armoured engineering vehicles and explosive line charges." is highly misleading.

For example Russia lost piles of tanks and other combat vehicles around Vuhledar, large part of them to remotely deployed mines.

For other side, Ukrainian summer offensive failed in large part due to massive mine fields (there were also other factors like insufficient supply of armoured engineering vehicles and explosive line charges and Russian helicopters sniping ones that were trying to breach minefields).

If you restrict claim to ATP mines - they are still useful and they are nightmare to advancing military. Yes, after war they will be also horrible for civilians if not cleaned up.

Manipulation/mistake in quoted source is that any military thing can now be breached in minutes or faster, at least in some cases with proper tools deployed in proper position. The trick is that it is not reliable, you may lack this tools, you may miss window for deploying them, they may be opposed or stopped.

Yes, sometimes mines can be defeated quickly, mines are not win button, mines will not solve all problems. It does not change that mines are extremely useful and side not using them (or giving up ATP mines) is at huge handicap.

> I'm reasonably convinced they're not very effective in our current context.

I am not, at all, and as far as I know this is widely shared opinion among people who are actual experts in military matters. (I am not one)


Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.

The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.


Honestly, I don't think any autopsy of Fry's Electronics can be complete without explaining why MicroCenter didn't follow Fry's in falling under. It seems that every story discussing the impeding end of Fry's had half of their comments be either "Fry's failing? How's MicroCenter doing?" or the reply "they're still doing gangbusters." And all of the easy exogenous factors that a simple analysis suggests (e.g., the rise of online retailing) should also hit MicroCenter equally well, but, well, MicroCenter isn't a failing company.

For my own speculation, I think one of the key differentiating factors is that every MicroCenter I've been to has always felt like it was slightly too small, and that probably helped insulate it from the empty store effect that seems to have hit Fry's hard.


When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.

> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.

Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.


The only clarity here is in the eyes of those who made their decision in advance and are cherry picking. Yes- There have been quite a few incidents but the percentage is still small. There were also many friendly fire incidents. All of these happen in every war. The difference is this war is being put under a microscope and there are powerful actors trying to push a narrative.

It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here and the consequences. Not the "instilling via training".


> It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here

When the bad guys use human shields, it’s on the “good guys” to somehow resist the “good guy” urge to blow the whole city up.

Hamas has killed something in the order of 800 idf soldiers during this conflict, if we exclude the ones killed on oct 7th. In that same time at least 75,000 palestinians have been killed - most of which were women and children. So, unless you’re saying this is a justified collective punishment for oct 7th, what on earth are you possibly referring to? Hamas isn’t “waging war” in any real sense.


I think he's saying that this is par for the course for asymmetric conflicts with deeply rooted insurgent groups.

So if you are going to say the handling of this conflict has more to do with Israeli training/mindset/etc and is not related to the type of conflict, do you have other armies in mind that have fought similar conflicts and done better?


Battle of Fallujah? The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?

Before the most recent invasion of Gaza started, there was an interview with an Israeli general about the imminent invasion. And when the question came up about what lessons Israel was drawing from other urban conflicts like the Battle of Fallujah, the response was a very indignant we-don't-need-to-learn-anything. Small wonder that the IDF claims to have achieved unprecedentedly low civilian casualty ratios in their invasion of Gaza when in reality, they're commensurate with WW2 ratios and well above the urban assaults of the US's Iraq War.


> Battle of Fallujah

Which one? There was five, and they generally were pretty bloody.

For the second battle of Fallujah (seems like the one you are talking about), US estimated that most civilians had already left the city. However that is somewhat disputed with some people claiming usa used that as an excuse to claim everyone left in the city was a combatant.

To quote the guradian:

> Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They leveled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population".

Another guardian quote:

> "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."

> The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?

So according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Iraq_(2013%E2%80%932017... there was 200,000 killed and 5 million displaced.

To quote from the human rights section of the article "Iraqi government forces and paramilitary militias have tortured, arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and executed thousands of civilians who have fled the rule of the Islamic State militant group", which doesn't sound great.

So i think it raises the question of if the Americans were really better than the Israelis or just better at the PR game.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

> the single deadliest conflict for journalists in all known conflicts in the history of the world, according to the Costs of War Project

Does that sound like “par for the course”?

By that measure, every other army in every other war prior has done better.

This “war” (genocide) is not normal.


This list seems to include people who were journalists but weren't killed while acting in the capacity of a journalist (as far as i can tell). If this is how you define journalist then world war 2 was certainly much much deadlier for journalists. To put it bluntly, i have my doubts that its making an apples to apples comparison with other conflicts.

The nature of journalism has changed since ww2, but the comparison isn’t ww2 vs gaza - it’s EVERY SINGLE WAR SINCE.

So unless you have some clear evidence that the definition of journalist is different in other conflicts, you’re just making excuses.


The post used the phrase "all known conflicts in the history of the world". Is world war 2 not a known conflict?

I do not know how many journalists were killed in most conflicts. I do know more than 242 were killed during world war 2, so on its face the claim seems false that it is the deadliest war for journalists in the history of the universe.

The only way their claim can possibly make sense is if they are using different definitions between wars. I'm assuming that to give them the benefit of the doubt. The only alternative explanation i can see is they are straight up lying.

I don't know enough to verify related claims, like deadliest for journalists post world war 2. However given the source seems to be blatently incorrect, i'm not really inclined to believe them on related claims.


It takes like 30s of reading to figure out their criteria: an average of 13 journalists per week. That is the number they are usung to compare conflicts. Do you know how many journalists were killed on average per week of ww2? Because unless you know, you are just denying based on vibes i guess? When I google it the number that comes up is 69 - so unless ww2 was a lot shorter than i remember, fewer than 13/week seem to have been killed - at least by the records we have.

I said that the nature of journalism has changed since ww2, because there’s a lot more citizen-journalism - which probably means there are more journalists around to be killed today than during most conflicts in history. So it doesn’t actually surprise me that the highest number would be from a conflict post-2010.


Yeah - for example Abdullah Ahmed Al-Jamal was killed because he was holding three hostages in his apartment, yet he was included in the list of "journalists killed" anyway.

That’s not quite right.

There were three hostages in his father’s apartment. He was also staying there, but the home belonged to his father.

But ok, have a look at what went down that day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuseirat_rescue_and_massacre

> the Israeli military killed at least 276 people and injured over 698

Or if you don’t want to believe anybody but the IDF, “The Israeli military acknowledged fewer than 100 Palestinian deaths”

In order to what? What was the cause of the murder of 276 (or 100) people?

To rescue 4 hostages.

Well, I should say more likely in retribution for the holding of those hostages… the air strikes that killed the majority of people appear to have happened AFTER they had extracted the hostages.


The 276 figure is a claim from Hamas. I don't think they regularly make up casualty numbers, but they certainly did in the Baptist Hospital case, where they initially claimed Israel killed "at least 500" before it became clear it was actually a PIJ rocket. It's highly plausible that they made another exception to their usual casualty reporting process for this embarrassing incident.

Even if we accept the claim at face value, it's just a total. It includes Hamas fighters who were trying to kill fleeing hostages and their rescuers, and anyone killed by them.

In any case, Israel has a responsibility to try to rescue its citizens that were kidnapped. The moral culpability for collateral damage lies with the terrorists who kidnapped and held civilian hostages, and then fought to prevent their rescue, not with the rescuers.

If some terrorists kidnapped several American citizens on US soil, and the US determined that any rescue plan would risk disproportionate harm to the country that kidnapped them, would you expect the US to just give up and ignore the hostages?


> The moral culpability for collateral damage lies with the terrorists who kidnapped and held civilian hostages, and then fought to prevent their rescue, not with the rescuers.

So, if your neighbour kidnaps a canadian citizen, and mark carney blows up your entire neighbourhood - that’s on your neighbour? Really? You believe that? Like, yeah - we would all wish our neighbour hadn’t kidnapped someone, but i’m pretty sure the moral culpability for murdering an entire neigbourhood is on the ones who sent the bombs.

But ok - the moral culpability is on the kidnappers. Let’s roll with that. So by that logic, it seems like israel is responsible for everyone who was killed on oct 7th. I mean, they were holding thousands of palestinian civilians without charges prior to the attacks. That seems like, again by your logic, that it justifies the killing of israeli civilians

So pick one: oct 7th was israel’s fault and hamas is culpable for the deaths that have followed, OR oct 7th was hamas’ fault, and israel is culpable for the deaths that have followed.

Oct 7th and the deaths that followed both being on hamas is not a logically consistant position.


> if your neighbour kidnaps a canadian citizen

In this scenario it would not be some random Canadian doing the kidnapping, it would be a team of soldiers under official orders from our president. So Carney can't collaborate with Trump to surgically rescue the Canadians, because Trump was the one who had them kidnapped in the first place, and is actively holding them hostage.

In that case, yes absolutely, I'd put the blame squarely on Trump if Canadian rescuers operated in my neighborhood, and it got destroyed during the fighting as US soldiers tried to prevent the hostage rescue.

> holding thousands of palestinian civilians without charges

Every country on the planet detains suspects before formal charges are filed. But sure, we can assume Hamas had some valid casus belli, it doesn't really change things.

> it justifies the killing of israeli civilians

Nothing justifies targeting civilians. Hamas didn't incidentally harm some civilians while attempting to free prisoners, they went out of their way to systematically kill, rape and kidnap as many Israeli civilians as possible.


> Nothing justifies targeting civilians.

Well I am glad we can agree on that, at least. When the israeli missles were aimed at the apartment blocks, during the raid we are discussing, that was quite literally targeting civilians. And I agree it was un-justified. As was the distruction of all the hospitals in gaza. As was the attacks on clearly marked aid convoys. As was the numerous air strikes on tent cities. Because all of these are targeting civilians, quite literally putting them in the cross hairs and firing, and as you said - nothing can justify that.


> that was quite literally targeting civilians

So Israel carried out some airstrikes at the same time that Hamas fighters were trying to kill the fleeing hostages and their rescuers, but you're claiming that the two were unrelated? Israel wasn't targeting the terrorists trying to kill them, but murdering unrelated civilians just for fun in the middle of the rescue operation? Any evidence behind this extraordinary claim?


Flagrant disregaurd for human life.

We only have their word they were “under fire”, and no idea if the shots were coming from in the building.

Like the journalist and his family who were killed. Did they have weapons, were they a threat to the soldiers in any way when they were killed? Afaik the idf doesn’t even claim any about that. For all we know they were also being held there against their will - unlikely, but why would i carry water for a gov that’s shown it doesn’t mind killed 100-300, including 3 of their own, to extract 3 people.


> There were three hostages in his father’s apartment. He was also staying there, but the home belonged to his father.

Does it matter who owns the apartment? It seems likely based on this description he could be deemed as participating.

Like in normal domestic law, if someone is kidnapped, and the fbi raids the apartment where the kidnapped person is being held, i imagine everyone living in the apartment is going to jail. Who owns the apartment isn't really relavent.


You’d turn your own father in?

Maybe he deserved jail. Maybe he didn’t. We’ll never know because he was executed by special forces.


> Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise

All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.

I'm trying to say this dispassionately because I'm aware that people get defensive, but lets say that you have to fight some enemy but they present as the most vulnerable of a population, how can you fight them without looking awful?

Though "it's complicated" is not, by itself, a conclusion - and neither is "better training" a sufficient answer to a problem this structurally difficult."


> All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.

So let me check this reasoning: if there was a single US soldier in the WTC towers, the 9/11 attacks were justified because the soldiers were hiding among the civilians?

Or if Hamas killed a single israelian soldier in their horrendous attacks in private homes, then it's justified because there were soldiers in those houses?

Or if the israelian reservists have their weapons at home and can be called upon directly from home to action, does that mean Iran or Hamas are justified at flattening residential buildings in Israel because those could host soldiers?


You've collapsed two meaningfully different things into one: 'soldiers exist near civilians' and 'soldiers deliberately operate from within protected populations as a systematic tactic.' Your three examples all illustrate the first. I was describing the second. These are not the same argument, and treating them as equivalent doesn't advance the discussion.

I have conflated those two, but my main point is the monstrous, one-sided destruction Israel has caused in Gaza is a clear proof Israel has gone way, way, way into the genocide territory and not just into the "hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians and after considering the international laws for such cases SOME civilians were killed".

Israel demonstrated complete disregard for human life for the sake of expediency to say in a gentle way, but in a harsher way, you could say the aftermath and details that are emerging point to malicious collective punishment.


The scale of the destruction doesn't retroactively validate the tactics that made it more likely. 'It got very bad' is not a justification for abandoning the framework that might have contained it.

If anything it's an argument against it.


Also trying to speak dispassionately: If your enemy presents as the most vulnerable as the most vulnerable of a population, shouldn't that be an indication that you're colonizing? That you're squeezing so hard, oppressing so vehemently that an entire people become your enemy? Or the entire people were your enemy the whole time.

How could Israel be "colonizing" Gaza when they've repeatedly tried to hand it off to other governments? They offered it back to Egypt after the six-day war (Egypt refused), and included it in several offers which would have created a new Palestinian state, and finally failing that, unilaterally withdrew in 2005. They removed all Jewish settlements, which is literally the opposite of colonizing.

Think of another conflict like that and you’ll have an answer.

the Taliban are an occupying force that do his.


Israel knows that full well. One of prominent figures of the Zionist movement wrote all this back in 1923:

https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot

"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority."

"My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage."

"Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators."

"This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine. ... We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies. To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system."

"All Natives Resist Colonists. There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised."

"This Arab editor was actually willing to agree that Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding"."

"This statement of the position by the Arab editor is so logical, so obvious, so indisputable, that everyone ought to know it by heart, and it should be made the basis of all our future discussions on the Arab question. It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.

"Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed. "

"We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."

"In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just ,or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative. We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality."


The right wing went full censorship and surveillance long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Anyone who believed that the right wing (or the left wing, for that matter; let's not pretend that censorious dipshittery is not bipartisan) was honestly promising freedom of speech as opposed to merely freedom of speech they like and censorship of speech they don't like was at best willfully blinding themselves to the actual actions of politicians.

  > long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. 
True. The free speech narratives are mere tools against opposition by promoting the most childish and stupidly rigid interpretations thereof, not something they really believe in. The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.

  > or the left wing, for that matter;
Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure, but a) far left is very fringe, and b) lets not equate them with a well funded actual insurrection of oligarch and white nationalists with a paramilitary.

> > or the left wing, for that matter; > Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure

How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.

I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.

> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.

I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.

Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.

Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.


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