@crashglasshouses@birwin@luckytran Telling that you have nothing to say about Hamas, the “ruling class” [sic] that actually instigated this round of conflict.
@CosmicTrigger Another meaningless talking point. War isn't a boxing match or a matter of simple retribution, and "proportionality' in war doesn't mean "I get to kill this many of your people if you kill that many of mine". By your logic, the American response to Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war was also "disproportionate", given the lopsided death ratios achieved by the end of 1945.
Open letter from members of the Australian Jewish community:
We as Jews in Australia, living on unceded First Nations lands, are still processing the grief, shock and trauma of October 7 and the weeks since. Many of us have lost loved ones, still fear for those held hostage, and all of us are mourning the atrocities committed by Hamas. Yet the violence that has continued to spill forth from that day, and the tragic murder of thousands of Palestinian civilians, is not, and will never be, the answer to our grief.
We as Australian Jews are calling for an immediate ceasefire. We demand that our Jewish communal organisations do the same.
Once violence enters into the world it can not be put back. It seeps into our minds, scars our bodies, and poisons the earth. As many of us know, we carry it for generations. The fundamental goal of this moment should be Pikuach Nefesh – the preservation of human life. We must have compassion and empathy for all victims of violence, not just the ones we know. There is no violent resolution to this conflict. There is no violent pathway to ensuring Jewish or Palestinian security.
@timhollo@OrenLewLev How can you say this with a straight face, given the reality that it was precisely such violence that worked against similarly genocidal regimes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? The exact same justifications could have been given to do nothing then as well (as indeed they were). You mistake your own preferences for reality - sometimes violence is necessary to forestall even greater violence.
People spend hours in line for some bread, braving the hellfire of Israel's warplanes. Flour has run out in the south. Everything has changed, and life has reverted to a state of bare existence
@mondoweiss The same picture could have been taken in Germany in January 1945, and by the "reasoning" displayed here, that would have rendered the Allied insistence on continuing to pursue total victory immoral. The current government in Gaza is similarly genocidal in outlook, and only recently its spokesman has said many more slaughters of Israeli civilians can be expected until they are "annihilated", so how can say what was right in 1945 is wrong today?
@luckytran Imagine replacing "Gazans" in the above with "Germans" or "Japanese" in 1944, and making the same demand for a "ceasefire". Unthinkable, isn't it? So what makes Israel's case different, other than the surfeit of attention-grabbing images in our day? The ceasefire you demand on "humanitarian" grounds ultimately benefits mostly Hamas, by allowing it to use Gaza's population as a human shield.
@thomasfuchs You do realise that the same line of critique you make here could have been made to lambast the Allied war against the Nazi regime? How many Brits and Americans did the Nazis kill, and how many German children were killed in return? War isn’t a gentleman’s game where children can always be cleanly separated from their fighting parents, and no sovereign nation can be expected to tolerate a belligerent neighbour that acts like Hamas.
A lot of takes that Prigozhin signed his own death warrant via this deal, which, ironically, is exactly the opposite of what he just did, which is to get his literal death warrant officially unsigned
@Pwnallthethings He may have gotten Wagner’s death warrant as an organisation temporarily delayed, but Prigozhin himself is now a dead man walking. He won’t make it to the end of the year unless someone takes Putin out first.
I'm a self-taught high school dropout and still writing php.
I've grown a lot as a dev the past few years and the current state of all my projects sometimes makes me feel like a failure, like I should be better, faster and following current trends.
The fast growth of fedi made this worse, but I'm committed and just saying this brings some relief
@dansup Source code comes and goes, but what really matters is the vision and drive that wills a project into existence and gets it momentum. You’ve clearly demonstrated that, so you have nothing to be embarrassed about. How well do you think the original code written by Bill Gates would stand up next to that of even the most junior hires today? The sooner you get your code published, the better your odds of building on your current momentum.
Astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held their "Great Debate" over the scale of the Universe #OTD in 1920.
Curtis argued that our Milky Way was one of many galaxies. Shapley, on the other hand, claimed the Universe was just one galaxy, with our sun far from its center.
@mcnees Looking back over the history of questions about the size of our universe, a consistent tendency has been to wildly underestimate its extent. While this can be justified as erring on the side of the evidence, I am doubtful that even our most up-to-date estimates come anywhere close to comprehending how big it really is.