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 do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
With 60-70 Hamas fighters confirmed dead. I am struggling to think of any military action in history whose victims were over 99% civilian. Even the powers they wrote the Geneva conventions over weren’t this ruthless in their pursuit of killing almost exclusively innocent people.
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 think this is the perfect kind of class for undergraduates attending American Universities. A class which directly challenges students’ pre-existing biases and lays out contemporary arguments so that the class can have a shared understanding of what they’re discussing whether they are supportive or opposed to those arguments. I was challenged like this when I was in college outside of class and having to directly consider these ideas among people I really repected helped me immensely in my understanding of American culture dynamics and ability to use reason when facing difficult claims.
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.
Zionists in Mandatory Palestine collaborated with the Nazis just prior to the Holocaust. “They” specifically meaning radical Zionists in Israel. As a side note, Holocaust victims who immigrated to Palestine/Israel were often met with derision because the belligerent Israeli Zionists considered their “weakness” an embarassment to them. I’ve been reading a lot about Zionism recently and the more I learn the further it seems to me from the kind of values I’m familiar with from Judaism. Hopefully the philosophy goes the way of “Manifest Destiny” in the dustbin of history or at least transforms into something that does not require the removal of all Palestinians from their land.
I don’t understand any dialect of arabic. If you are a Palestinian arabic speaker, can you explain how Wikipedia’s direct translation of “from the water to the water” is misleading?
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.
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.”