This is good to keep in mind in general although I’m not sure how it’s relevant here. In fact, there are the definitional points from Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide quoted by the order in the body of my post. The point of this ruling by the International Court of Justice is that there is a credible case for genocide here according to the definition of Genocide which Israel explicitly agreed to.
There’s no doubt that the ICJ has well-known limits in the enforcement of its decision, and countries have ignored ICJ rulings in the past (notably the US, as you mentioned). This to me is not a failing of the idea of international law regarding the prevention of genocide but a failing of nations who would rather exist in a world absent of law since they are able to use violence to inflict their will on others. The problem as I see it with this line of thinking is that abandoning the pretense of international law rather than attempting to bolster it as an international community makes all people in the world vulnerable. The status of nations who violate ICJ orders do not exist in a permanent state of their relative power and could suffer the consequences of a lack of international law when situations change and once-invulnerable bodies become vulnerable. I believe in the basis of the legal prevention of genocide by the international community.
This being so, I believe that there are other consequences for nations found plausibly guilty of heinous crimes in an official international court of law pertaining to laws partially written by the state of Israel itself. Israel depends a great deal on its international reputation. A reading of its history of strange bedfellows reveals this desperation. Being plausibly guilty of genocide is not good for Israel’s relationships or economy. If Israel is concerned about outside threats, scuttling itself in the name of persecuting Palestinians is not a reasonable path. Only the far-right sensibility that Palestinians are inherently unworthy of sharing a country with European colonists keeps Israel from ending apartheid and granting Palestinians full rights as citizens of a unified state.
This tech issue might be over my head. I would try a different browser to see if the problem persists but honestly at this point it’s going to be a troubleshooting process.
This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.
It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I can’t imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individual’s interpretation of it. The solution can’t be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.
Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editors’ biases, the advertisers’ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they aren’t covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.
It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We weren’t built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.
Roya Heshmati likened her punishment to a medieval torture chamber. She revealed her quiet act of rebellion during the actual lashing, where she whispered a song symbolic of women’s struggle for freedom....
74 lashings is insane. Whips cause some of the most severe acute pain which is possible to experience with 10 lashes often being lethal from just the shock. Hopefully the Iranian people can overcome this and take back some control.
I understand that a lot of “moral” crimes in Iran are like how Americans used to regard pot, something that is illegal which most people are fine with even though you would never want the police to find out if you had done it. Alcohol is easy to find in their public markets, for example. Hopefully this egregious event attracts some support from people who hadn’t taken it as seriously.
And fuck. I really miss plex. I’ve had Netflix and Hulu forever as family won’t let me cancel. Decided to sign up to Paramount + for some Trek. Twice in lower decks it didn’t save my watched episodes. Doesn’t mark episode as watched if you exit during the credits. And multiple playback issues....
There are steps to piracy which cost time and effort. For most of the media I consume that time and effort cost is significantly less than the time, effort, and capital I would need to invest in a paid service. However, the time, effort, and capital I spend to play videogames has been less than piracy would cost for me for decades. Being able to effortlessly get those games running on a mobile steamdeck is orders of magnitude cheaper than what it would have cost me to set everything up myself even if I’m not paying for software and my costly version wouldn’t be nearly as smooth. This quote would be true enough even if a counter-example didn’t exist, but Steam and GOG are pretty clear demonstrations of the kind of service the average person is satisfied with even if they still have some real issues.
I was expecting Isreal to brush off the ICJ charges in contempt and ignore the process entirely like the US always has and would help them to do as well. It’s interesting to see how their PR has shifted recently from " It’s not a genocide when we do it" to “We’re not doing what we’ve been saying we’ve been doing for many decades.”
The girls – who were detained in shopping centres, classes and street markets – were accused of “spreading and encouraging others to wear a bad hijab” and wearing makeup....
The lesson we Westerners can learn from this and some action we can take right now is not to support the establishment and proliferation of far right-wing extremist religious organizations anymore. The action we should not take is to get involved with Afganistan’s affairs and make the problem worse than we’ve already made it.
Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users? I’m not advocating for cutting off the existing communities, rather adding in a few walled gardens? That would filter out anyone who doesn’t want to bother explaining why they value what Beehaw is and include anyone curious enough to create a Beehaw profile to see what the less active but more Beehaw communities are like. Something like “The safest space” which is going to respectively attract and deter the people you would want.
As for having to deal with what y’all deal with at all, which the above would do nothing to diminish, I have thought for a while that y’all need more help. You guys are doing a ton of work and in my opinion a little too much work each. I don’t want y’all to get burned out and not be able to continue at all. Maybe an appeal to the community that y’all can’t continue like this without more help would encourage those with the ability to lighten the load?
I see you only read one out of the two sentences I wrote above. I addressed this in the second sentence which was in parentheses because I predicted that my comment might be confusing to some. To be fair, my comment did assume some knowledge regarding the 2024 DNC primary which has been structured in such a way that no candidate but Biden, a pro-war candidate, could possibly win. Hope this helps.
What a coincidence, here in the US we banned all our anti-war candidates from the presidential election too! (Yes, I know dnc primary candidates aren’t literally and legally banned).
I’m drunk. My partner deleted what I originally wrote. It was about how fallible we humans are to put it nicely. Regardless of our failings which we know we have, I really wish y’all as great a 2024 as we can manage. At the very least I hope we can have a better year. I won’t be forgetting any auld acquaintances. Have a...
Protecting mass shooters is a right wing thing, which their right wing may or may not do as a consequence of this. Mass shootings themselves outside of terrorism were first popularized by the Columbine shooting which inspired many copycats hoping to become as notorious. Thankfully the article calls this POS “the gunman” instead of giving them the infamy they may have wanted.
I specified non-political mass shootings by individuals, not mass killings in general. Obviously mass killings in general existed prior to that, and there were a few mass shootings prior to them becoming extremely common. The event that caused them to become common was Columbine, not the Charles Whitman mass shooting or any other historical mass shooting which had occurred rarely and sporadically until that point.
I’m not sure you’re understanding me, so let me try my best to clarify what I’m saying. Please approach my arguments in good faith rather than assuming I’m automatically wrong because I hold a motivation you’re assuming I have. Most mass shootings in history have been done for political reasons. Most of the time it’s the government acting through use of their militaries against other militaries and often against civilians, and also often by individuals or non-government groups committing acts of terrorism to affect some kind of political change. Some mass shootings, such as the one committed by Charles Whitman, were committed for other reasons but did not inspire others to follow their example.
The Columbine shooters were inspired to commit an act of violence by Timothy McVay not because they agreed with the radical libertarian political ideas he committed his act of terrorism for, but because they saw it made him notorious in the media. The Columbine shooters were inspired mainly by their desire for infamy and fame. This is clear from mountains of evidence of the shooters claiming that this is the inspiration for their act of violence. Since the Columbine shooters, an additional category beyond political violence has become common for mass shootings which is the desire to become infamous. Since Columbine this category of non-politically motivated mass shootings has been significantly more common than prior to Columbine mainly in the United States but also elsewhere such as Australia. There may have been mass shooters with the Columbine shooters’ motivations prior to Columbine, but they were rare and did not inspire the trend which Columbine inspired. It is extremely likely that since Columbine, the desire to become infamous is the motivation of a mass shooting which is committed for non-political reasons.
Media groups including the BBC have decided no longer to name and reveal information about mass shooters to deter this inspiration from possibly being fulfilled, hence why this article gives no details of “The gunman.” I am relieved whenever I see this and support it.
The US right wing protects mass shooters which the Australian right wing did not which is among the reasons why Australia does not have the same amount of issues with mass shootings as the US does. Because the Czech Republic has a strong right-wing element it may be possible they take measures to protect future mass shooters as the US has.
I live in a red state. At a certain point it just comes down to what people want to believe regardless of outside information. This isn’t going to change any minds who associate with Zionism, but it could be another straw for people whobare reasonable but are bombarded 24/7 with state propaganda and don’t know what to believe.
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...
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.
Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire (apnews.com)
Here is a pdf of the ICJ’s Order of 26 January 2024....
alternative to trees (feddit.de)
How much should I care about news? (www.theguardian.com)
I read this article recently and I was just thinking about my news consumption and how much I want to be affected by it....
Iran, 33-year old women received 74 lashes for “not wearing the hijab" (www.niacouncil.org)
Roya Heshmati likened her punishment to a medieval torture chamber. She revealed her quiet act of rebellion during the actual lashing, where she whispered a song symbolic of women’s struggle for freedom....
PC died. Trying the legal options.
And fuck. I really miss plex. I’ve had Netflix and Hulu forever as family won’t let me cancel. Decided to sign up to Paramount + for some Trek. Twice in lower decks it didn’t save my watched episodes. Doesn’t mark episode as watched if you exit during the credits. And multiple playback issues....
Israeli prime minister says “no intention of permanently occupying Gaza” – as it happened (www.theguardian.com)
Afghan girls as young as 16 arrested in shops, classes and markets in Kabul by the Taliban, who labelled them ‘infidels’ for wearing ‘bad hijab’ (www.theguardian.com)
The girls – who were detained in shopping centres, classes and street markets – were accused of “spreading and encouraging others to wear a bad hijab” and wearing makeup....
Thinking about the direction of Beehaw
Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally....
North Korea ramps up preparations for war with US (www.newsweek.com)
A good grade at parties (startrek.website)
Many hostages released by Hamas still being treated for trauma (www.theguardian.com)
Head of psychiatry at Tel Aviv medical centre says hostages have undergone worst abuse she has witnessed
Russia bans anti-war candidate from challenging Putin (www.bbc.com)
Happy New Years ya jerks
I’m drunk. My partner deleted what I originally wrote. It was about how fallible we humans are to put it nicely. Regardless of our failings which we know we have, I really wish y’all as great a 2024 as we can manage. At the very least I hope we can have a better year. I won’t be forgetting any auld acquaintances. Have a...
Biden says Netanyahu must change, Israel losing global support (www.reuters.com)
Prague shooting: Gunman dead after killing more than 15 at Charles University (www.bbc.com)
Outraged family buries hostage killed by IDF, vows to 'shake the country' (www.usatoday.com)
On TikTok, the war in Gaza is a game (english.elpais.com)
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...