israel does not have a plan in Gaza and is trying to maximize civilian casualties.
To be clear, these are OP's words and represent their opinion; neither part of this sentiment is in the memo or article.
The Dutch embassy also noted that the IDF applies “elements” of the Dahiya doctrine - a strategy first used in the war in Lebanon in 2006 which "intends to deliberately cause massive destruction to infrastructure and civilian centers" while taking large numbers of civilian casualties for granted. That violates the laws of war, the memo states.
The Dutch Defense Attache at the embassy in Tel Aviv believes Israel is trying to destroy Gaza's infrastructure and civilian buildings and doesn't give a shit about the civilians that will die as a result, not that they're "trying to maximize civilian casualties." And that is a plan, it's just that the plan is horrific and the Defense Attache believes their goal is unachievable:
According to the Dutch embassy, Israel’s stated goal of “a clear military victory over Hamas” is impossible to achieve. Even if Hamas is almost completely destroyed, the fundamentalist movement’s ideology will live on. “There is no military answer to this, this is a political issue.”
Yes and no. It's fairly certain the Dutch embassy would object strongly to OPs summary. The difference between targeting civilian infrastructure with no regard for civilian lives is very different from actively targeting civilians, even though both are deplorable.
It's important not to simplify these things. By exaggerating and wrongfully quoting people you open up for a pedantic debate about differences in nuance, distracting from what is really important: They are targeting civilian infrastructure, not giving a shit how many civilians they murder in the process.
Personally I think warping people's word for no good reason other than to simplify things to better fit your own interpretation of reality is a pretty shit take, but each to their own I guess.
Clarifying purposefully obfuscated phrasing is hardly “warping”, and your assumption of narrative intent on OP’s part is beneath you. How many of those politicians even remotely connected to that certified release above do you suppose even know your name, much less give two soggy shits if you exist? Don’t bootlick, and don’t pontificate. 🤷🏼♂️
Israel “intends to deliberately cause massive destruction to infrastructure and civilian centers” while taking large numbers of civilian casualties for granted. That violates the laws of war, the memo states.
I guess you’re arguing the memo only accuses them of intending to destroy “civilian centres”, not civilians. But "“taking large numbers of civilian casualties for granted” is part of the intent. Israel is the arsonist who knows there are children sleeping in the house.
My view is that the Dutch are, in diplomatic language, saying that.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t supposed to put anything outside of the main article in the body, I thought this only applied to the title. I have slightly added parts of different stories I didn’t link above
This Dutch newspaper article is my source about the Defense minister being furious about this internal memo being leaked
(original NRC article is pay walled so this one will have to do) “In de rapportage staat volgens de krant dat de Israëlische politieke en militaire top >>>geen duidelijke strategie hebben.” (they have no clear strategy)
The maximizing civilian casualty stuff is basically what the article is about though. The israeli strategy seems to be do as much damage as possible to the Gaza strip in the hope Gazans will flee into Sinai and thus permanently evict them from Gaza.
What I meant by “plan” is that there is no “plan” to do get rid of Hamas or restore peace in Gaza, the only “plan” israel has according to this leaked memo is to ethnically cleanse Gaza by pushing the populace into Egypt. Which is very contradictory to what israel has been proclaiming the past few weeks.
Also if they target infrastructure they target civilians. Are the people of Gaza supposed to magically live without food water and medicine? They’re not plants that live on rainfall and sunshine.
I thought the F 35 was kind of a flop. Not doubting you. I don’t keep up with modern military stuff (more of sword nerd) and I just remember hearing it was a money pit
The Dutch minister of Defense is furious about the leaking of a memo that confirms israel does not have a plan in Gaza and is trying to maximize civilian casualties.
Seems like they should be more furious about the fact that a supposed dear ally is trying to maximize civilian casualties. But I guess when you live in the upside down it’s the whistleblowers who are actually the villains.
The Netherlands is currently making good money selling F35 parts to Israel to repair their bombers with. The PM Mark Rutte is trying to become the next head of NATO. Stop trying to ruin his future please.
There are poor F35 farmers that need this money to feed their families.
Not really surprising. Putin hat a lot of fingers in fringe politics in Europe and the US in order to destabilize them. He spent a lot of his oil- and gas money on such projects, and has found a lot of ways to channel this money into political campaigns.
I'd say Putins biggest successes so far were Trump in the White House and Brexit. A lot of the right-winger parties in Europe have dubious money sources, some of them pointing to Russia.
And keep in mind how much he had spent in the Ukraine to get his puppet president elected. Which actually failed, so he had to revert to good old plain robbery. Hats off to the Ukrainian people to opposed the political scum bought with Russian money and vote one of their own people into power.
Those who choose the bike path must adhere to a speed limit of 20 kilometers per hour.
Thank goodness. Some of those e-bikes are becoming a serious menace on the bicycle paths these days. There’s a growing trend where especially fat bikes get modified to go faster than their original speed and without having to actually pedal. I wonder how they’re going to enforce this though.
They're the Dutch, so there probably is going to be little active enforcement. Because bike riders and car drivers are not a different species of animal and sound, effective methodology to traffic enforcement is the same for both.
They'll just design bike paths that make you feel uncomfortable if you are going significantly beyond those speeds in areas where it is important to keep people to those speeds. They'll signal with clear design what speeds you should be going.
Relying on enforcement for traffic rules is not an effective strategy. Engineering is the only thing that really works -- and the Netherlands is the case study proving that point.
Though personally, the evidence suggests it is below about 20mph/30kmh where the risk of serious injury drops off in a collision. I wish they'd be targeting 25 or even 30 as the max speed instead of 20. 20kmh/10mph is a speed a non-ebike operated by a reasonably fit person can be moving.
I doubt they’re going to introduce a lot of new infrastructure from the beginning. It’s probably going to be signs and new regulations at first. Like when they restricted mopeds from using the bicycle lanes.
Maybe I’m mistaken though. I’m not a resident, I just work in Amsterdam.
The problem about speeds is not so much how serious an injury you get when you have a collision, but more how much damage you cause to others. Especially during rush hour, the lanes can be crowded with people going to work, kids going to school, etc.
As long as everyone cycles at about the same speed, it’s not that much of a problem. But those bigger e-bikes are way faster (and heavier) and can cause quite a bit of damage when they hit someone. Preferably they should create separate lanes for faster cyclists instead of forcing them on the motorways.
Anyway, if you’re interested I did a quick search about the problem and got you a translated link to a recent article about the problems.
Shell's kind of got a point that the purpose of the shareholder meetings isn't to create a forum for political activists, but to report to shareholders how the company is doing. I mean, it's going to be disruptive to them doing that, because they've got a finite amount of time for that.
If you buy a share of an oil company specifically because you don't like oil companies and want to show up at the shareholder meeting and complain about oil companies, the shareholders who are interested in the thing as a business probably aren't going to appreciate it much.
If shareholders were saying "I don't agree with the CEO pay package" or something, okay, that's within the realm of the company's operations.
I'd also add that if you don't want oil extraction, Shell isn't the party to talk to, even via another route than shareholder's meetings. Shell is gonna do what regulators permit if it makes financial sense for Shell. You aren't gonna convince Shell otherwise. If you want to say "no crude oil extraction", then you want to talk to regulators and lawmakers, not to the companies operating within the bounds that they set. Hell, even if you did convince Shell, it'd just mean that another oil company would step in to do the same.
If crude oil extraction causes problems to people other than Shell or Shell customers, then that's an externality, and internalizing that is what regulators are there for. That's not the job of companies.
Again though, Shell aren’t going to push for that. Their beneficiaries aren’t either, unless the rest of us make it untenable for legislators to fail to ban such donations.
I’m not sure if we are on the same side, and honestly in this case it doesn’t matter, since you are right: a corporation only has to care about the externalities as much as they are forced to and not even an inkling more than that.
People who think that an enterprise in a free market will respond to any other force than economic force are wasting activism time that could be better used elsewhere.
If you want a corporation to stop performing a socially harmful business, you need to make that business unprofitable.
I agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn’t call activism (and especially not journalism) a wasted effort in that regard. Bringing issues to light is the first step in creating a visible dent in the balance sheets. Public perception shapes consumer behavior to some degree and can put pressure on lawmakers to introduce legislation against harmful conduct. On the other hand, if the general public only hears the company’s side of the story underlining how clean and ethical they are, there will never be any pressure for change.
It reminds me of the case in NY where they charged someone for murder because they caught his license plate while he was driving near a shooting with no evidence whatsoever other than being near the shooting.
Great, for added big brother points, the government could literally listen to every conversation on every street corner…
Edit. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why the police having live recording microphones everywhere is a good idea, generally you’d need a warrant to record citizens.
But sure, this is just for loud exhausts and has no other possible uses. Lol!
I always ask myself with these sorts of things, what would the CCP do?
China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.
Have you been sleeping under a rock for the last 15 years? If the government wants to listen to you, they’ll just use the microphone in your pocket. Or better: they don’t listen to your incoherent ramblings and go straight for your search history, which is much more interesting than what you are generally talking about.
I don’t know if you know this, but it’s pretty easy for someone to make private their phone, search history, etc. You just need to be a little dedicated and sacrifice some usability.
You cannot do the same with microphones listening everywhere that you do not own.
Unless there’s something beyond switching DNS, using a VPN and your own router/modem. It’s maybe 100$ up front and ~3-5 per month to be able to circumvent any telecom.
You mean the VPN advertising everywhere, who gives out the user data whenever a goverment agency knocks on the door? Or the other big name VPN, where the company owner has another business that makes money by selling users internet data?
Yeah, i’m sure they will bend over backwards and file lawsuits to “protect your privacy” for $5/month…
Switching DNS does jack squat for your privacy. Any telecom worth their salt can read all DNS requests no matter which DNS you talk to. They only don’t filter content on alternative DNSes because they don’t care about filtering/blocking in general unless forced to by law.
Using a VPN doesn’t add privacy, it just swapps out who is monitoring your traffic. Many VPN services are actually owned/run by secret services or cooperate with them (like NordVPN). Others are directly run by criminals who use them to steal data or inject malware. Also, VPN providers also have ISPs that reside in countries. In the very best case it’s not your ISP spying on you, but the VPN’s ISP. In the worst case, you now have an ISP and a VPN provider spying on you.
Your own router/modem again does nothing at all for your privacy.
That’s what I mean: people think they are doing privacy enhancing things, but actually what they are doing isn’t helping at all.
As someone who knows a bit more about privacy in networking than watching the sponsored bits in YouTube videos, I agree with the examples you posed, but there are other technologies to fix your DNS leaking to your ISP. One of them being DNS over HTTPS. It’s default in Firefox, and pretty hard to crack just like any other HTTPS query. All your ISP can know is that you’re potentially making a DNS query. Another option is a local DNS server cache. Choose some domains you wanna be able to access, and diligently update your local cache using HTTPS from existing DNS servers every fortnight. Your DNS queries will never escape your LAN.
DoH is an actual improvement, that’s true. But at the same time it’s a meaningless one, since the ISP can just do a reverse DNS lookup of the IPs you are contacting, and there isn’t really an option to hide the IP, unless you are using TOR or a VPN, but TOR sucks in real-world usage (and can also not really be trusted) and VPNs have been discussed before.
I worked on the “evil” side for ~7 years, in a company that made internet monitoring devices. Originally I was told it’s only for debugging ISP network problems, but after a few years, when I was trusted enough in the company, they told me that a significant portion of our customers are actually secret services all around the world.
The foreign ones usually wouldn’t just say that they are secret service, but they’d buy through other companies, which lead to some weird requests. For example, one time a small little British bakery asked for network monitoring equipment for their business. But they wanted the solution to be able to handle ~100 TBit/s, which was at that time roughly the total bandwidth of the whole UK plus some margin.
Some secret services, though, talked to us completely openly.
I’ve been at one ISP quite a few times at the department that handled secret service requests. I asked that guy what they do with our products, and he showed me the full suite that they are using. He entered a random phone number into the system, and an overview over the last year’s activities of that guy showed up. It had a list with timestamps of every site he accessed. It had all emails (of his ISP account and also emails that were sent unencryped) and SMS that that guy sent and received. It had a full movement profile of that guy for the whole last year, including his visits to other countries. The system allowed the operator to easily find contacts of that guy, even through the movement profile. So you could e.g. list all users that were close to that user at a given time, or all users that are frequently close to that guy.
Well yeah, you cannot completely cut deduction off the table. Not even in the real world. The fact though that the internet makes it easier is of course true. Even Tor is vulnerable to deduction-based MITM attacks using nodes that log activity. Nowadays though I think it matters less and less what you access, since everything in the internet has been reduced to a handful of huge websites (fucking SEO). If you’re in one of them, I doubt DNS info are going to be much of any use, apart from them having accessed Facebook, or YouTube. When I’m doing stuff I want hidden though, tor and DoH are a must.
Well, centralized services make it easier, not harder. Now secret services can just call up their contact at Facebook or any of the other services and they can not only monitor metadata but get content as well.
All of those things are within the dedication to privacy. A lot of upfront time commitment but near effortless after the fact. On desktop it’s even easier.
That’s not the point. The point is we shouldn’t have to.
Mics can collect voiceprints. It’s like the police dusting for your fungerprints wherever you go. Which, if they had a warrant and cause, fair enough, but everyone 24/7? Seems like a privacy invasion to me.
This can be done without constantly recording or transmitting what the microphone perceives. It can simply start recording sound and picture when a noise is detected that is loud enough / matches the pattern we’re looking for. This can be done just on the device. No big brother tech needed.
None needed, but that doesn’t stop autocratic regimes from doing mass surveillance.
China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.
A system like this isn't any less harmful to privacy than speed cameras, is it?assuming it's not implemented with a bunch of other non privacy friendly features (which I'd argue isn't an issue with the microphone)
One microphone would be like having 1 ear. If you’ve ever known someone who is deaf in 1 ear, they have trouble locating the direction sounds come from. IIRC, the implementation involves something like ~50—100 or so microphones. If you have a lot of noise entering your house you can point the thing towards a window and it will generate a heat map image showing red color where the noise is the highest.
My favorite television show is ruined. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t even happen next year. And it’s all thanks to the fucking EBU for making it the chaotic mess it is.
Eurovision should have been removed after Ukraine won the year Russia invaded. They continue saying they’re apolitical, but that year was very clearly politically motivated. It’s gone down hill since and will not recover.
I think this year was way more politically motivated than 2022, due to the fact that Israel, despite breaking quite a few of the EBU’s rules, didn’t get disqualified. Thankfully they did not win and Switzerland won instead. Hopefully the current executive supervisor resigns and we can get Israel out of here. Oh, and Azerbaijan too, they’re known to cheat in this competition.
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