I was in 12th grade and I remember my English teacher was weirdly prophetic about it. He told us that it would be the worst pandemic in decades, and this was before the US had its first case. Looking back, he was the only teacher I had who mentioned anything about it
This is a direct consequence of two things: Hamas not wearing uniforms in combat and their tendency to use suicide bombers. They are told to undress themselves before processing - they don’t stay that way.
How would any of the people criticizing this deal with a large group of fighting age men in a war zone?
No, it’s based on safety. You can’t give them their own clothing back, because this would require you to check each and every item of clothing for weapons. They are being transported to a processing location, given clothing there. Temperatures were around 20° C (68° F) there when these videos and photos were taken, so it’s not like they were freezing.
You may not want to “check for weapons” a suicide bomber who’s just waiting for you to come close to turn you both into tiny chunks of meat.
What you want, is to threaten them with a weapon from a distance, have them take off any clothes that could contain explosives (that includes socks and briefs), and throw them far away from you. They could still hide some C4 up their ass, but that’s a risk you might have to take.
The correct thing would be to subsequently provide them with pre-checked clothes, like an orange jumpsuit… so if they didn’t, that’s where we may agree it starts being abusive (although unfortunately in line with what many countries routinely do to their prisoners).
I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).
Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.
They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”
The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”
The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.
Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.
I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…
I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.
This was far down in the story therefore many of you may have missed it…
We do know that some of these men were released after having been detained initially. One of Hani’s cousins was released after a couple of hours in detention. So it may be that many of these men that we’ve seen in these videos have since been released by Israel…
This is northern Gaza we’re talking about. They were given an evacuation order, and it might be that the Israelis feel anyone who remains poses a threat because they didn’t leave.
The IDF spends a lot of time trying to jam Tiktok because unlike an American-run company it’s not so easy to pull down everything supportive of Palestinian rights. I’ve seen more first-hand footage from the people being ethnically cleansed on Tiktok than anywhere else. Tiktok had live updates of the infants suffocating to death after they cut the power from Al-Shifa hospital and their generators ran out, and it was Palestinians themselves reporting on the situation moment by moment. That would not be allowed on Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, or Instagram.
I think it’s moreso that TikTok’s algorithms, whatever that black box may contain, are far better for discoverability than those of all the other platforms.
It’s guided by what each individual viewer wants to see (or hates to see, if they can’t resist interacting with videos they hate), so small media bubbles are created for better or worse, but Tiktok will hand on-the-ground news reported by Palestinians to people who want to see it without those viewers having to look for it or know it’s there to be looked for.
By contrast, if you go to youtube, you might see whatever shows up in the general “popular” tab, or you might enter a search for Palestinian news (which requires you to be actively looking for it in the first place vs just there and able to be shown it) but you’re likely to get mainly clips from major US news channels, with their framing of the situation, and maybe some Israeli ones. Not the heaps of videos by random individuals that you’ll find on TikTok. Even if that type of video is uploaded, youtube won’t recommend it if it’s from a new channel and doesn’t already clock a bazillion views. But TikTok can make a little video from a random person go from zero to everywhere very quickly.
TikTok in general is just better for finding “man on the street”/“what is it like to be there right now” reports from affected individuals. As well as for finding other own-voices type videos by individuals who aren’t media stars or news reporters or the hosts of big youtube channels, but who are the ones most directly in a situation.
Of course there is bias or outright misinformation on the platform too. It is best approached with caution and media literacy, but one need only look at U.S. media’s coverage of the current situation to see that is the case for mainstream news organizations too.
TikTok is a master example of enshittification, which consists in:
Offer users a good experience to hook them up
Introduce advertisements to hook up advertisers
Have hooked up advertisers bid against each other for a place in a users feed
Increase user engagement by showing them both what they like and the opposite
Tease users with a chance to earn money (taking just a 50% cut), so they get to compete against the advertisers, and each other, for a place in other users feeds
The discoverability on TikTok is abysmally bad, all you will ever find is either paid content, or content made by users trying to outdo each other in a race to attract/outrage (aka: increase your engagement).
Only thing you can easily discover on TikTok, is the most polarizing content possible, there is about exactly zero chance to get a realistic view into anything through TikTok; not even by averaging the extremes, which are custom tailored to your personal love/hate triggers.
@ninjan Clearly not, lol, not at all. The guy is not a newcomer in politics, either. He's previously served as a prime-minister until 2014 and then has been the President of the European Council, so I'm not seeing him go anywhere close to Donald Trump, unless I'm missing something.
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