Is the newsworthy event Israel opening an investigation? Is the BBC reporting that the IDF is doing an investigation onto an event (and that the context of the investigation is that they are examining why a soldier murdered a medic)?
Or is the newsworthy event that medic Mohammed Award Allan was murdered in an act of state violence and state-backed terrorism in an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank (and the IDF has investigations open in this matter)?
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
I feel bad for cops sometimes, honestly. Trying to de-escalate a confrontation proactively is exactly the alternative to busting heads most of us want to see, but preemptively arresting someone when no crime has been committed isn’t legal. Yeah, their hunch was probably correct that the guy was going to go stir shit up, but until he does they have no right to detain him.
The solution is that they should learn from actual deescalators. A lot of protests I see now have folks in safety vests who cool things off and separate people when someone tries to stir up conflict. But I think it takes an emotional tool kit that isn’t currently common within police training.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement condemning sanctions on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after a report surfaced claiming that the Biden administration is set to blacklist a unit for alleged human rights violations in Gaza....
This article is missing some very notable context.
First, this battalion is a Haredi battalion. The Haredi are Orthodox Jews: they’re very far right, and also highly unpopular within Israel because they’re exempt from the draft. Every other Israeli is required to serve, but the Haredi get exempted and supported by government incomes to just study torah full-time. They are not even allowed to work.
Anyway, the court just ruled that IDF can’t keep exempting them from military service, and they are pissed. They are threatening to collapse the governing coalition over this, and Netanyahu cannot stay in power without their support. Against this backdrop, there is this battalion in the West Bank that is set up to accommodate Haredi volunteers’ ultraconservative lifestyle which is supposed to be the model for integrating them into the army. However guess what? It turns out that a military regiment staffed entirely with far right religious zealots who volunteered to “secure” occupied territory is liable to do exactly what their religious education dictates, and the old testament does NOT conform to modern rules of war. Back then, rape and genocide was de rigueur.
However unlike sanctions against random settlers, this means something: Antony Blinken has been bending over backwards to bury any requests for investigations into war crimes by the IDF, because it’s actually against the law for him to supply them with weapons if he knows about atrocities.
If the US sanctions a battalion… that opens the door to some big shit. Once you recognize that SOME of the IDF is violating international law, it gets much, much, harder to legally justify arming them. Restricting weapons to a single battalion is not unusual within US military aid, but in this case it’s not a small step. It’s a potentially seismic shift in US policy.
I will say something I haven’t said in months: this is good news. This is the first time I can think of that Biden is actually doing something that could make a difference. It’s not enough. We need far more. But this is actual, serious progress.
I don’t think anyone in this thread has “cheered for Islamic terrorist groups”.
The factual statements people have made are true: Iran has been the more restrained actor. Israel’s aggression has been alarming. The US govt’s position has prioritized an alliance far past our national interests. It’s any of this incorrect?
I don’t like the Iranian govt. I don’t like the current Israeli gov’t. I’m not thrilled with America’s gov’t. I love my country (the US), and I like most Israelis, Palestinians, and Iranians. Is that really hard to reconcile? It seems like the majority opinion.
I disagree, but it would be a waste of words to bicker over it.
What matters is fostering security and peace in this moment.
I’m glad Iran says that they’re not counter-attacking. I think the US should curtail providing weapons until we’ve established a shared strategy with Israel. I think we should pursue a strategy with Iran in which we create some incentive for them doing what we want them to do instead of just trying to destabilize a major regional power.
Overall, I think Biden and co are on the complete wrong track, morally AND strategically when it comes to the middle East, and according to polling, not many people disagree with me.
It’s often no reason. The head of domestic security, Itmar Ben-givr was convicted of incitement to violence in 2005, and routinely says that all Arabs are terrorists and should be killed, imprisoned, exiled, and tortured.
It’s pretty brutal. He’s advocated for executions without trial and death sentences over social media posts. The man was rejected from compulsory service by the IDF over his extremism, and now he’s in charge of the national police.
I mean, good for him, but I think it’s pretty clear that she’s not opposed to fascism.
When people like Greene decry Nazis, they mean something different than we do. We mean “Nazis”: violent white supremacist nationalists.
She just means “nazis”: our ultimate national enemy. And her audience understands her perfectly well.
She could be like, ‘We must protect our home-grown historical demographics by any means necessary, and seek out a final solution to do so, or the nazis will make Christians servants by replacing us with inferior people trafficed across the border.’ And her constituents would say, ‘Obviously! Yes, we must.’
Just read my comment again. I think there’s an important point that more people need to internalize.
People joke about how Trump constantly declares himself a lover of “law and order”, but is a flagrant criminal, for instance. But he’s not just being randomly hypocritical: his definition of “law and order” is different from ours. We think of law as immutable rules that apply to all. He thinks of it as state power wielded by those who deserve it. Laws applied against him aren’t laws, and extrajudicial violence by his supporters is. Same with order. It’s not quiet, peace, or calm. It’s a privileged group who the law protects but does not bind and a tier of others who the law binds but does not protect.
Greene isn’t lying, she’s speaking loud and clear in another language, and we need to learn to translate it and listen to what she and the whole Christian Nationalist movement are increasingly saying out loud.
Hindu nationalism, once a fringe ideology in India, is now mainstream. Nobody has done more to advance this cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of India’s most beloved and polarizing political leaders....
We had some issue with the SSD pool that our Pictrs image storage runs on, which required some server restarts and a recovery of the Pictrs postgres database from backup....
I just finished re-reading Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted which was my favorite from the first time I read the books awhile back....
Also, you didn’t mention the date it was published, but reading it I immediately thought of Kurt Vonnegut and assumed it was probably about fifty years ago. I just checked, and it was published in '87. So I was off by about a decade, but not too far.
I’m going to go find a copy. I’m excited to read this.
That’s not conspiratorial thinking at all, that’s just geopolitical literacy. Your assessment is correct: Iran planned this carefully to avoid causing any major damage. This was pro wrestling.
Which honestly makes it sad to consider that Iran has become the more restrained, rational actor here. The US needs to put Netanyahu on a short leash. He is not worth this.
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but this comment reads like you didn’t read the article and have no idea what it’s about.
The guy accused of rape sued a news channel for reporting that a woman claimed she was raped without specifically naming him because it was easy to infer he was the guy who did it. And then a judge ruled that it wasn’t defamation because he clearly raped her.
I’m pretty critical of the media, but in this particular case, they didn’t do anything to this guy, this was all on him.
I think you’re confusing it with some other magazine. The Atlantic is for neoliberal centrists. It’s modestly liberal in the way The New Yorker is, but it’s for old, wealthy New England investors.
If I’m mistaken, someone please correct me, but it sounds like you’re just reading my own description of Atlantic readers back to me.
Granted, I think Atlantic readers are more likely to vote for Kerry & Obama than Bush. But economically, their policies are only subtly different from the perspective of the investor class. They’re all supply side economics guys.
One of the other devs asked about the description of the “Independent States of America” in the following passage. They asked if allowing for a southern succession was offensive or inappropriate. How does this read to others?...
I think that the complicated, messy aspects that you mention describe my general approach to this kind of writing, so I think it’s okay, then.
In my reading of it, it’s not in any way a justification for the original succession attempt. The intent was to describe how the US – the world’s premier empire and hegemon – transitioned into the status of a former world power (as every other world power eventually has), and this version of a breakup seemed believable. I think it works, but I’ll keep looking at comments and see if there are any suggestions for how it might be amended.
I generally agree. Is there anything in specific you might suggest that would improve the writing?
I’m not sure if it matters, but the events described above occur (in the game lore) around 50 years into our future, and 50 years before the time at which the game takes place. So by the 2120s, all of these territories have open borders. Their distinctions exist primarily in the form of cultural identities and the legislative structure that exists at the organizing level between province governments and planetary/interplanetary governance.
If that stills sounds like bullshit to you, you should know that your attitude is a mainstream political opinion within the game. But as it applies to the writing, let me know if there’s any specific change you think would improve the passage above.
I don’t think this is a terribly big departure, honestly.
First, regarding the American south: I think there was a miscommunication somewhere. The game definitely doesn’t imply that the actual Confederate States of America reconstitutes itself. It just says that during the 70s, the US broke apart, and the result was a handful of regions that adopted their own identities with various levels of cooperation between themselves and other regions. The overall post was meant to ask if the language and the grouping of the south felt too similar to the historical civil war. But to be very clear: the southern states are still assumed to be democratic and pluralistic.
Second, this all happens about fifty years prior to when the game takes place. It’s mostly intended as historical context for what happens between our present and a future in which state power is far weaker everywhere than it is now. Borders are described as very permeable in the game, and far less defined. They exist primarily as a tool of distinguishing who is responsible for maintaining and supporting the health and protection of a territory.
It’s definitely not fully post-state. But the game is meant to be a flexible template. If you wanted to take a version of it and add to it the assumption that state boundaries were dissolved you could.
Also, dissolving state power completely is described as a central goal of the in-game Anarchist movement. I think it’d be interesting to describe one or more nations within the world adopting the anarchist position fully, and dissolving their own state. It’d be particularly interesting, I think, to envision how that would play out in a world where they’re the first (or second or so on) to do so, but they have neighbors who haven’t.
Anyway, I like all those ideas. Even if they’re not directly contained, the visions you’re describing seem to me to be a demonstration that the book is a useful prompt for brainstorming. I take it as a given that a lot of the ideas it inspires are based on noticing where the imagination of the world falls short. So I think this section is largely serving that function well enough that I’m happy to say it’s good enough as is.
It’s 12 minutes long, and in it Katie Halper points out that it’s been labeled an Apartheid state by Zionists and Afrikanners for decades. Israeli prime ministers and Nelson Mandela, academics, and human rights groups have been saying this for generations.
If you want to call it something else, feel free. But whatever you call it, it needs to end.
Also: they don’t “rough up” protesters. They disappear them. They throw them in prison and torture them. They take them away from their families indefinitely without charges or kill them for posts on social media. This is not minor ethnic repression. The head of police, as I mentioned, is a convicted terrorist.
I will acknowledge that when I describe the Israeli system as Apartheid, I’m using it in a colloquial sense, not a legal sense. Which I think is appropriate, because my purpose is to characterize the severity and urgency of the situation rather than prosecute the case in international court. But I can accept that it might fall short based on legal definitions (in part because Israel is familiar enough with international law that they usually take care in developing policy to try to avoid when possible making their violations easy to prosecute).
It’s a bit long, but the feature I think is useful is summed up here:
“If the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the crime of genocide and South Africa for that of apartheid, then the crime against the Palestinian people must be called the Nakba.”
The thesis, at least in my understanding, is that the situation is unique enough to fit poorly into the major categories we use for describing atrocities, and that it requires that we recognize it as the primary case for a novel form of ethnic oppression that incorporates elements of genocide and apartheid, but operates in a way that is ultimately unique to the specifics of this situation. I’m curious what you might think of that argument.
Honestly, I have a bone to pick with legal language.
I think it puts the cart before the horse. Law as a concept is an incredible invention, but I think we in our present often forget that it IS an invention: it’s a technology that was developed to systematize our ability to limit and remedy harm.
However we frequently ignore the fact that people will always shape their behavior to avoid consequence while looking for ways to serve their interests at the expense of the public good. And then when they do, we often act as if law is itself a kind of natural law, and if we can find no category for the behavior we abhor, that means that we must accept that they have some right to do it, as thought it’s out of our hands.
This situation is a profound demonstration of all of it. South Africa’s system of apartheid is a very useful framework for understanding the systems used to maintain Palestinians as a permanent underclass unable to gain meaningful political agency. This fact – that apartheid is a useful framework for examining the Israeli system and determining what to do about it – is true regardless of whether the system in question fulfills a definition. The definition is supposed to be useful. If you don’t think the term applies, that’s just a reflection that the definition apparently needs to be updated, because the thing the definition describes exists regardless of whether our language presently communicates it.
Language – like law – is a man-made tool that is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
West Bank: Israel investigates after volunteer paramedic killed (www.bbc.com)
The Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) said Mohammed Awad Allan, 50, was shot while treating people who had been injured by Israeli settlers....
On a mission to make Deus Ex a popular topic on Lemmy. (lemmy.world)
London police apologize after threatening to arrest ‘openly Jewish’ man near pro-Palestinian protest (www.nbcnews.com)
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
Netanyahu's outraged response after report of pending US sanctions on IDF (www.newsweek.com)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement condemning sanctions on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after a report surfaced claiming that the Biden administration is set to blacklist a unit for alleged human rights violations in Gaza....
Iranian foreign minister says it will not escalate conflict and mocks Israeli weapons as ‘toys that our children play with’ (www.nbcnews.com)
In an interview with NBC News, Hossein Amirabdollahian refused to acknowledge that Israel was behind the recent attack on his country....
"If you are concerned about fascism, you would wish to halt Russia": Historian Timothy Snyder blasts U.S. Republican Lawmaker Green of her accusation of Ukraine being a 'Nazi state' - (video, 4 min)
Cross posted from: feddit.de/post/11273444...
Once a fringe Indian ideology, Hindu nationalism is now mainstream, thanks to Modi's decade in power (apnews.com)
Hindu nationalism, once a fringe ideology in India, is now mainstream. Nobody has done more to advance this cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of India’s most beloved and polarizing political leaders....
SLRPNK unscheduled service disruption on 2024-04-17
We had some issue with the SSD pool that our Pictrs image storage runs on, which required some server restarts and a recovery of the Pictrs postgres database from backup....
“Reprehensible”: Fossil fuel industry infiltrates civil rights convention (heated.world)
The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted has more in common with FA! and similar works than I remembered
I just finished re-reading Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted which was my favorite from the first time I read the books awhile back....
U.S., Not Israel, Shot Down Most Iran Drones and Missiles (theintercept.com)
The United States shot down more drones and missiles than Israel did on Saturday night during Iran’s attack, The Intercept can report....
Tesla is reportedly laying off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce (www.theverge.com)
Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
Britain Is Leaving the U.S. Gender-Medicine Debate Behind (www.theatlantic.com)
Southern succession in Fully Automated: problematic?
One of the other devs asked about the description of the “Independent States of America” in the following passage. They asked if allowing for a southern succession was offensive or inappropriate. How does this read to others?...
U.S. Intel Warns of Imminent Iranian Strike on Israel: Report (www.thedailybeast.com)