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Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

theguardian.com

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Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#351

Post by tacticalturtle »

bigyabai wrote: post #223
pvg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not some theoretical 'divisive', you can read how these threads go yourself, including this one. The meta discussions also make these a lot worse so it's hard to blame this on some 'small number' of people.

A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone. I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic…

I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.

Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.

The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#352

Post by jakelazaroff »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #346
jakelazaroff wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another comment I left in response to this same person (YZF) [1] with 13 examples of Israeli MKs and other government officials declaring their intent to kill civilians. Many of these are explicit calls for genocide. That was in December 2023 , after two months, when the death toll was only around 17,000 [2]. It's now been 19 months of near constant siege; if you check Wikipedia, as of today the official count…

The point is that what you are describing is not genocide. "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that. Russia does do that to the Ukrainians. Putin thinks Ukraine is not a real nation and he thinks the Ukrainians are not a separate genus. That is why Ukrainian children are getting…

> "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that.

Israel "does not do that" only if you ignore remarks by IDF members, MKs and the Prime Minister himself explicitly saying they are doing that.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#353

Post by TiredOfLife »

rich_sasha wrote: post #260

Offending or over-accusing sides of this conflict is a very asymmetric risk. Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously. Misrepresent Israelis negatively and you get very powerful and well-organised protests. BBC is sadly doing the rational thing of staying clear of suggesting Israel may be doing some bad things. It is a…

BBC had to hide and never release the report that found that they constantly paint Israel as much worse than they are. Also they publish Hamas press releases as facts while everything from Israel as claims. My favorite was when BBC said that "IDF went into hospital and targeted arab speaking doctors" that they later corrected to "IDF brought to hospital multiple arab speaking doctors"

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#354

Post by parineum »

somename9 wrote: post #302
parineum wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't politicians care about their kids and why do monarchs not care about money?

I never said either of those things. By progeny, I meant both the heirs of the king and the common race of people belonging to the kingdom. Kings were the head of different races of people and as the head, they looked after their people (if they were a good king). For example, a good king wouldn’t import millions of people who are different from those in his kingdom for economic reasons, and you don’t see this in his…

> a good king...

Now compare a good king to a good politician.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#355

Post by smaudet »

Aeolun wrote: post #165
smaudet wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improving at...what exactly? Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds. It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives... Maybe…

Well, for one thing, neither me nor my son work in coal mines. We don’t have to breathe any of the sooty gases that coal burning spews forth, and can turn on airconditioning in summer when it’s hot. Also, heated toilet seats in winter.

Both of which are improvements not unique to even the past 10 years - even if you only recently experienced these improvements, that merely makes you "late adopters".

You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#356

Post by leereeves »

mondojesus wrote: post #314
somename9 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It could be because your comment is too vague, personally I don't understand what you mean. Who are the ownership/leadership of media companies?

I saw this in a comment here recently and thought it was informative about this topic:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-19-oe-stein...

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#357

Post by Supermancho »

philipallstar wrote: post #287
Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. pointing out genocide, attacks that kill hungry or starving people trying to get food is not some special unusual mean thing. It's something that all decent peoples should be against. I'm against all attacks on the innocent. It doesn't need to be repeated, but I'll do it - I was against the attacks by Hamas on Israel too.

Even calling this genocide is biased. Going into a country to kill the people from it of a race, and then texting celebratory texts that you killed some of that race, and capturing people of that race, is at least attempted genocide, if not completed. Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.

> Even calling this genocide is biased.

I do not agree. Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed. Some were captured, some were used as labor or for experimentation. Some started a new state! If a sustained campaign is not successful in killing every single individual, how many before you might call it a genocide? This is a poor metric. If the borders of a country are eliminated (first politically, then practically), alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths targeted by culture/location/race, and confiscation of their property, there has been a genocide as far as most of the world is concerned. These are elements of culture and they can only be recreated or replaced or lost to time.

> Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.

The retaliation sped up the ongoing genocide as a pretext. Each side has wrongs they are retaliating from. The hostages are a justification to do what was already an official state goal. Complete annexation of Palestine. Imagine if any US state (or country) was slowly swallowed by a neighbor encroaching with violent and disposable settlers, the violence would be the same. This is the state of modern warfare demonstrated repeatedly over the last 200 years. Further imagining there is a moral actor, is arbitrarily picking a side.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#359

Post by yieldcrv »

drc500free wrote: post #107
jjangkke wrote: post #71

"To know who rules over you, simply notice who you are not allowed to criticize" - Unknown

That’s not “unknown”, that’s an antisemitic quote from neo-nazi Kevin Alfred Strom.

Oh that’s hilarious because it has been misattributed to Voltaire and TIL it was from 1993

Wtf, I hate that quote now! Just kidding its still accurate: In the East you don’t criticize the party, in the West you don’t criticize one particular designated genocidal foreign army. Easy enough to follow.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#360

Post by dlubarov »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #335
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can see how it’s read that way but people really do seem to forget that billionaires buy media companies as an investment. It’s not a strictly financial investment, either; they get to shape public opinion with them. How many people know that Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post ? How many people know that MSNBC is owned by Comcast? How many people know that Fox News , The Wall Street Journal , and The New York Post…

Why would Bezos / Washington Post be an example of pro-Israel bias?
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