That’s simply not true. If you hide ammunition, fighters amongst civilians, to use the as meat shield or their deaths as propaganda, they become collateral damage.
It’s horrible, but Hamas is counting on this! They could avoid this, by not hiding behind their own people.
Targeting civilians specificaly is a war crime.
EDIT: please, do explain how it’s ok to hide behind civilians… sorry, this doesn’t help
True, they (israel government) fucked up the place, in so many ways. They’re not the only actors, but they’re the ones with most power and possibilities.
They are still effing up, because we’re talking about men of war with stupidly large guns, afraid (with good reason) for their whole people, who maybe know victims, know a hostage… everybody knows what happens when warriors are mad… so why the fuck poke that bear?
There’s no good move. If israel doesn’t react, hamas will attack again, because hamas wants to exterminate every jew, not peace. If they react, they have to take out civilians because hamas uses them as human shields. And now with all that rage, the most racists and extremists from each side will have a chance to assuage their bloodlust.
Hamas have ruined Gaza’s future in a way that, in almost 3 decades of following this conflict, I never thought would be possible. And the racists in Israels government are living their wet dream.
so if hamas is exploiting civilians for their own protection, they should kill their victims too? cool dude. you’re totally not justifying killing civilians! it’s not technically a war crime, so its fine! fuck. off.
What is it with beehaw users and being super eager to kill kids?
Youre the 5th Ive seen who is just so damn excited to excuse killing civilians. You understand thats not a normal thing for rational adults to want, yes?
oh, sorry, did you not say killing crowds of civilians in the hopes that a hamas member was among them was a totally excusable act, and labelled as just unfortunate collateral damage in war?
I could have sworn you said that, but my lemmy app does bug out sometimes, maybe I clicked on the wrong comment.
So you dont think killing crowds of innocent people in the hope that there might have been a terrorist among them is excusable?
If you hide ammunition, fighters amongst civilians, to use the as meat shield or their deaths as propaganda, they become collateral damage.
Huh. Weird, that looks like your text copy and pasted right here, where you say that killing civilians under the claim of targeting “hidden fighters” among their ranks is excusable collateral damage of war.
Same argument used to defend the atomic bombing of hiroshima, another well known war crime. The city had a well established military headquarters and arms depot, tucked away in the center of civilian housing and business, after all. Just more collateral damage, right?
No, see, cause Im not some sadistic loser, I understand you can address threats in a crowd without killing the crowd.
There are plenty of non lethal incapacitation weapons that are specifically designed for hostiles surrounded by civilians. There are plenty of options for not killing innocent people that arent “guess I gotta die!”
You arent being argued against in bad faith, youre just being argued against by decent human beings. I know, shocking for you, but normal folk arent excited to kill palestinians.
that frankly isn’t the situation that we’re dealing with. the idea that israel either has to let Hamas operate unchallenged or kill civilians is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works, and giving the IDF blanket permission to kill civilians if it also hurts Hamas is fucking monstrous. you suck.
all civilian casualties are inadmissible. its not wrong, its a moral imperative, and one that the state of Israel is blatantly disregarding. the framing that “okay, these civilian causalities are okay” is fucking monstrous, and gives a ready made excuse for Israel to escalate violence in Gaza.
You’re right, the Israeli should just say “too bad guys, they have hostages, we can’t shoot in that direction, check mate” and let hamas slaughter them
the scenario you’re imagining doesn’t exist. this isn’t a rock paper scissors thing, where Israel either shoots through hostages to kill insurgents or dies themselves. if Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, they aren’t attacking Israel, they’re hiding. if they’re attacking Israel, they aren’t in a crowd of Palestinian civilians. the IDF does not need to have a shootout with civilians in the crossfire to protect its people. the IDF does not need to bomb civilian residences to wage war against an insurgency.
you are so willing to conflate the two, assume that Israel must kill or be killed themselves. that is a fucking falsehood. there is so fucking much a military force can do to defend against attack that doesn’t involve shelling apartment buildings, shooting into crowds, and otherwise being monsters.
for what it’s worth i think we’ve about exhausted what can be said on this topic past your own comment; i don’t think further responses between you and @khalic will really go anywhere and i’ve already nuked a bunch of the discussion downthread because it devolved completely.
No one is saying “all these civilian casualties are ok”, stop oversimplifilying the situation.
I know it’s tempting to make blanket statements about moral imperatives from your armchair, religion has been doing that to us for centuries, but it turns out the real world is actually full of moral dilemmas, where there IS no outcome where no one dies, and all you can do is pick the least bad option.
“All civilian casualties are inadmissible” is the coldest of cold takes, right there next to, “well I don’t think anyone should have a war at all!” Like, great, thanks, why didn’t anyone think of that?
i don’t think anyone should have a war at all. there, are you happy? i’m frankly uninterested in litigating what hypothetical circumstances under which it might be okay to kill a civilian.
I would argue a blanket statement of “killing civilians is always reprehensible” is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works.
Yeah, it sucks, war sucks, and it often turns out that the least bad option involves a decision where innocent people die. I know it feels like a hot take to say we shouldn’t give blanket permission to kill civilians, but it turns out no one is claiming that.
This thread makes it clear that lemmy commenters are not equipped to debate the vanilla trolly problem, let alone the Iranian/Palestinian conflict.
“killing civilians is always reprehensible” as a moral statement has nothing to do with the mechanics of conflict. i’m telling you what i believe. giving room for acceptable civilian casualties in a moral framework provides a ready made justification for bad actors, that so long as they present a situation as looking enough like the acceptable kind of civilian casualty then its fine that an innocent person was killed.
i am taking issue with the rhetoric of acceptable casualties. no. there are only casualties, and they are all horrific. rhetoric that is not an explicit condemnation of war can be used as a justification for it.
Anytime you are doing any kind of military or police action within a civilian area there is always the risk of unintended civilian harm.
If police and military forces took this doctorine that any amount of risk is too much then they simply would be unable to operate.
There has to be a certain amount of acceptable civilian risk and that should be proportional to the threat you are attempting to stop.
Just to clarify, I’m not advocating that Israel is taking acceptable risks. But I am advocating that those risks will always exist with ANY police or military action and the primary debate is over where the red line of acceptable/unacceptable is.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, it’s also majority landlocked and has been under a naval and air blockade for nearly 2 decades.
You can make the case about the selection of which some specific civilian areas Hamas utilizes are intended to maximize the outage if struck, but ultimately there is NOWHERE inside Gaza that isn’t a civilian area, period. It’s just a matter of degrees i.e. retail shops vs schools.
Just looked at the gaza satellite map to be sure. There are kms of fields between the border and most cities. They’re cowards hiding behind their people.
Those are literally watched by automated and remote control machine guns, as well as 24/7 surveillance drones.
So you’re military strategic insight is to sit in an open field, just outside of range of the remote control 50 cal turrets, and wait for the drone to drop a PGM?
Feel free to browse my comment history. I’m no apologist for terrorists acts, but I’m also not blind to the realities on the ground, and what obstacles any opposition militant group within Gaza would have to plan around.
No, I’m saying that any military strategy has to operate around it’s own operational and environmental constraints, and the capabilities and obstacles of the opposing force.
Whatever you’re opinions are on any conflict, you should still understand that rational actors will respond accordingly to their constraints.
Rational doesn’t mean moral, it means they have a clear mission and objective, and a plan to achieve it.
You’re suggesting that instead of being combat effective, they should instead suicide themselves by operating in an open field in close proximity, and with no cover, to a vastly superior force. That would be irrational.
Who gives a fuck if it’s combat effective when it kills your people? If you’re not fighting for the lives of your people? What are you fighting for? In the case of Hamas, the answer is in their charter: kill all jews. They admit it themselves ffs.
I’m providing an extremely high level and simplified outline of the operational and strategic constraints for militants operating within Gaza, not moral commentary on it.
If you want my opinions, or moral judgments, feel free to browse my comment history. Jump into any of those conversations if you disagree.
Sorry, I get your point. It’s getting late here, I got carried away. You are right, it’s a tactically valid choice, but I really hope I’d kill myself before I do something like that, but life can fuck you up real bad so who knows…
Hamas could argue that the IDF is hiding behind their civilian population as well. It’s simply not a coherent defense for indiscriminate violence, you can’targue that one side is collateral damage and the other are victims.
Israel claims they are only striking “based on intelligence” but its obvious from the reports inside Gaza that this is not true, they’re bombing at random with the explicit goal of punishing Gazan civilians for being blockaded in Gaza with Hamas.
Obama changed the military’s criteria for civilian deaths so he could pretend his numbers were lower.
I don’t know that I’d call it an opinion. Civilian deaths are an eventuality we have no choice but to accept, especially here in the US, where we’re making war in six, seven, or eight countries at once and it’s normal.
The fact that people don’t understand the differences in style and purpose between fact-based reporting and opinion pieces is a travesty. There is no way this can be anything other than an opinion piece because of its topic and tone. Whether you agree or disagree or find its position to be self-evident is irrelevant. It simply does not meet the standards of traditional fact-based reporting. Which people today don’t seem to understand the value of.
The travesty is how many people are unable to say this out loud. Everyone is stuck in their black & white tribalism, making them blind for their own sides atrocities.
You can be pro Palestine and still condemn Hamas. You can be critical of the Israeli government and still grief for all the innocent Hamas victims. It's not actually that hard to be a decent human being.
I can be pro-palestinian people and still think that after several decades of not being able to suppress the violent factions inside their nation, they should completely bail off from that general area.
All nations are built and maintained by violence, either directly or by threat of it.
It’s a core component of sovereignty. To be able to call your government sovereign you must have the capacity to resist both external and internal actors from being able to overthrow you.
You must also be willing and able to use violence against those under your rule who disobey your laws (i.e, arresting a murderer).
That’s probably the norm. Finland, the posterboy of peace, started its independence with a civil war and continued by joining the Nazis in WW2 against Soviet Union.
Seems to me that there are two kinds of nations on this planet: dead ones and those that were at some point based on violence.
The travesty is how many people are unable to say this out loud. Everyone is stuck in their black & white tribalism, making them blind for their own sides atrocities.
Personally I don’t want to say it out loud because I’m just so mentally exhausted from the screaming. I know (like know, not just feel) that if I say this out loud in a more public space then somebody is gonna scream at me over it. And I just don’t want that anymore. I feel in this instance it’s better to just keep silent because I just hate it when people get so uppity at me over this kind of thing.
I worked in the UAE for a while. It was so obvious that there is effectively a slave class. The Emiratis think they’re gods and look down on everyone else a disposable and subhuman. That entire region is fucked but the West turns a blind eye because of money. FIFA, FIA, etc.
Focusing on passenger cars never will be, as their co2 output is only around 15% of the total in the EU. Every little bit helps, sure, but even getting completely rid of cars wouldn’t be enough.
Except that 15% isn’t nearly enough to even really make a dent into climate change as a whole, and there is no way in the near foreseeable future to get anywhere near “nobody uses cars or anything that causes co2 emissions to move around.”
Even if everyone swapped to electric cars or alternative methods of transport asap, which would cause a huge spike in emissions from their manufacturing (~twice of an ICE car) and all the infrastructure work required to handle their charging and all the extra maintenance of roads required from having vehicles two to three times as heavy as most ICE cars run on them, let’s assume we’d get a reduction of 50% for personal transport - you’ve just spend an absurd amount of money and effort to reduce the overall emissions by 7.5%.
If 7.5% reduction is the goal that would be much cheaper, easier and faster to carve out of the energy sector, which currently accounts for around 70% of total co2 because majority of it is still made using fossil fuels.
We need to do it eventually, sure, and everyone who can afford to get an electric car should do so, but it’s like tackling plastic pollution by removing disposable straws and forks instead of concentrating on the massive amounts used by manufacturing sector - visible and gives everyone a nice fuzzy feeling they are doing something, while not actually achieving much. A good cause, but not the most pressing one by far.
Principally agree. If we want to make a dent we need to be going into carbon capture mode - as most likely we’re already seeing cascading effects from the emissions already caused. Permafrost melting and releasing methane, the ocean warming up and holding less CO2.
But the numbers you use are horrid.
The average EV weighs maybe around 300 kg more than a comparable fossil car. Sure, the Hummer EV weighs a fuckton, but a regular Hummer ICE isn’t exactly a Lotus either.
The other negative trend in weight is the SUV-ification of society, and if you swap a Civic for an iX you get double padding.
Lifetime emissions cast a much bigger shadow than production emissions and most EV’s are climate positive one year in (average driving length, average electricity mix).
All of that said; don’t buy an EV to save the planet. Buy an EV because it’s a better car and better for your wallet. Depending on a multitude of factors these may not hold true for you yet, and you should probably just keep driving what you drive.
People focus way too much on the downsides of EV’s like charging infrastructure issues or waiting to charge.
All vehicles have tradeoffs and just because you’re used to filling petrol doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant activity. I’ve spent way too much time freezing at the petrol pump in the winter.
I actually did the math and found I’ve been spending way too much time at the petrol pumps. Driving electric I plug in at home. Takes a few seconds just like plugging in your phone.
Going out for petrol takes ten minutes. Driving on trips my bladder is still the weakest link, but every now and then charging adds a few minutes here and there, sometimes more.
Estimated net average time savings per year over the last four years is about 3-4 hours driving electric instead of ICE. That includes an hour less filling in freezing conditions.
But I digress.
TLDR; Climate is fucked, but EV’s can be good fun. Don’t feel obliged to buy one just yet, wait until it makes sense.
15% is a significant dent. It's 15%! Even half of that is significant. And I'd sooner say we transition to encouraging just about any other kind of transit via our city and infrastructure design (efforts are ongoing, so it's not like no progress has been made) rather than just encouraging everyone to switch to an electric vehicle, but there are all kinds of benefits to restricting vehicle traffic in city centers besides climate change too, probably helping them to sell this policy. It's still a reduction that helps climate change, but it's one of those ones like straws and plastic bags that are much easier to legislate even if it's not the largest reduction that could be made. I guess I just disagree that anything other than the largest slices of the pie are worth putting any focus on, because if it was easy to reduce those large slices of the pie, we'd have done it. Even those large slices can probably be broken up into smaller slices, of which some may be easy to deal with.
How does this help reducing noise? I think with modern cars, tires generate notably more noise than the engine unless the speed is below 30 km/h. I hear no difference between a petrol car and electric when they’re driving past me at 50-60 km/h.
They make make more noise while accelerating which I would presume would be something that happens often in a city center with lots of stops and starts.
The monthly prices users pay per maid are according to race, the website states – with employers charged less for the services of a black maid. “Filipinas AED3,500 ($952)/month” and “Africans AED2,700 ($735)/month,” it states
The website states that Filipina maids require a bedroom of their own to sleep in, while African maids do not.
Nobody does racist slavery quite like the Gulf Arab countries, do they? I don’t know which is more grim, that or the disclaimer:
“Zero legal liability. Maid stays on our visa, so you’ll never have to worry about any legal consequences. If anything goes wrong (eg runaway maid, pregnancy), we’re responsible to deal with any lawsuits or visits to police stations, not you.”
IE, you can sexually abuse your underpaid migrant worker without fear of legal consequences, and the employer can then revoke their visa. What a great service! /s
The table in the ACLU report is kind of interesting. I mean, I was confused about the could be shared with law enforcement and the could be used to discipline my friends but then seeing the Could be used to identify trans/reproductive health makes those amounts completely understandable as well as the undocumented statement.
I always feel like I’m being watched 32%
How it could be used to discipline me or my friends 27%
What our school and companies they contract with do with the data (such as sell it, analyze it, etc.) 26%
How it limits what resources I feel I can access online 24%
Could be shared with law enforcement 22%
Could be used against me in the future by a college or an employer 21%
Could be used to identify students seeking reproductive health care (such as contraception or abortion care) 21%
Could be used to identify students seeking gender-affirming care (such as transgender students seeking hormones) 18%
Could be used against immigrant students, especially those who are undocumented 18%
How it limits what I say online 17%
Could be used to “out” LGBTQIA+ students 13%
I have no concerns regarding surveillance in my school 27%
`
Source: YouGov. School Surveillance, fielded October 20-26, 2022. Commissioned by ACLU TABLE 1 Students’ Concerns About School Surveillance
Hell, I finished school over a decade ago now, but even as an adult, I feel like I'm being constantly watched. This kind of overreaching, omnipresent surveillance is genuinely not good for individuals and by extension, society at large. Human beings do not act naturally when they feel their every move is being watched. Anxiety, distrust, paranoia, depression, etc. can all manifest, and it scares me to know that this kind of "for your safety" surveillance has become so normalized.
It isn't normal. It is affecting the average person's mental health, even if they don't know it. It is affecting society at a very base level as a result. What a world...
Note: Found the one big thing I wanted in the ACLU stuff but I’m not reading through the Vice News report at this moment: As Vice News reported, “The few published studies looking into the impacts of [student surveillance] tools indicate that they may have the effect [of] breaking down trust relationships within schools and discouraging adolescents from reaching out for help.”83 Ironically, the same tools the EdTech Surveillance industry is promoting as a means for identifying students in need of help may actually be dis-couraging those students from reaching out to school officials and other adults for help when they need it.
theguardian.com
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