61–70 of 192 posts
This is totally irrelevant to HN and is one of the issues on the Internet most likely to start a flame war. Flagged. georgecmu you appear to have been around HN a good while, which surprises me as it's more than long enough to know this is totally inappropriate. Go to reddit.com/r/worldnews or one of the other relevant subreddits if you want to discuss this issue.
In my understanding it is in fact both acceptable under the guidelines and especially relevant to hackers and I will explain my reasoning on each point in order.
The post is acceptable under the guidelines because it is factual reporting about Palestine and Israel, which is important information that I do not believe would normally get reported in the US media. I have seen airplay of criticism (demonization even), mostly of the Palestinians but occasionally of the Israeli settlers, but not the facts.
I believe that the reason the facts about Palestine are suppressed is because of organized "Hasbara" (public relations) efforts by Israel's supporters in the USA. (Example link: http://www.hasbara.com/)
(I believe the factual record is one sidedly unflattering to Israel, so I believe that to be the Israeli motive.)
Otherwise I can't explain why there hasn't been more uproar about Israel's killing of US servicemen (Link http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/eedition/ch...)
Israel's attempted sale of US military secrets to China (Links: http://www.bigeye.com/041600.htm http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/motherofallscandal...)
or use of Israeli counterterrorism units against the "Occupy" movement (Link: http://www.alternet.org/story/153307/from_occupation_to_%E2%...)
This is important information because people who knew the facts might choose to act differently, for example in terms of career choice or investment choice.
For example, given the facts that I know about how Israel treats innocent Palestinian civilians, I have an ethical problem with Israel and do not intend to work for Israel, to buy Israeli products, to do business with Israel, to buy stock in companies that make investments in Israel, or otherwise enrich Israel in any way that I can avoid, directly or indirectly. I am not a customer of Starbucks or of Marks and Spencer for this reason.
This issue is particularly pertinent to hackers because startup funding, research and development and technology transfer depend greatly on the military industrial complex - which is particularly developed in Israel and very strongly connected to the US military industrial complex. For example, if one does graduate research in networking or communications systems at Cornell, one's algorithms and work just might end up being used inside Israeli weapons used against civilians. Links: http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/israeli-university-bids-w-corn... http://www.redress.cc/americas/ldavidson20120102
It would be a shame if Hacker News guidelines become warped and misapplied as censorship tools for Hasbara and I am alarmed to see standard Hasbara talking points - such as 'The territories are "Disputed" not "Occupied"' - used to justify such censorship even on this page.
This post is no less informative and no more political than, for example, this post on ACTA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620579 In my understanding it is in fact both acceptable under the guidelines and especially relevant to hackers and I will explain my reasoning on each point in order. The post is acceptable under the guidelines because it is factual reporting about Palestine and Israel, which is importan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just sounds wrong to me. The territories under question are not occupied, but disputed. Each side has legitimate claims to them, and their status can only be resolved through negotiations, which is what the sides themselves agreed to in the Oslo Accords [1]. Furthermore, by what is the claim that Israel smashes every attempt of Palestinian economic development supported? Over a decade, Israel ceded territory and…
The territories under question are not occupied, but disputed. Really? Have you asked the UN? If I come into your house, after living for 2,000 years away from the area, and claim some rooms mine, would you consider them "disputed"?
I flagged this post. It's not a problem to discuss politics, but it should have a value. Do the HN community want to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Fine, submit an article about that. But submitting such an article will only trigger a flame-war. The content of the article is of the kind that triggers 'oh, ass-hole Israeli', and 'oh, Palestinians uses this to kill innocents'. These are details. Not the actu…
Alright, let's do this thought experiment. Replace words like Israel and Palestine in the article with countries in Africa. Something like "Water pumps running off of solar power in Kenya, provided by a German start up are being removed by the local government". Would that be acceptable for HN? I am 80% confident, we wouldn't see all this discussion about how the story should have been flagged and or how it is totall…
I flagged this post. It's not a problem to discuss politics, but it should have a value. Do the HN community want to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Fine, submit an article about that. But submitting such an article will only trigger a flame-war. The content of the article is of the kind that triggers 'oh, ass-hole Israeli', and 'oh, Palestinians uses this to kill innocents'. These are details. Not the actu…
Alright, let's do this thought experiment. Replace words like Israel and Palestine in the article with countries in Africa. Something like "Water pumps running off of solar power in Kenya, provided by a German start up are being removed by the local government". Would that be acceptable for HN? I am 80% confident, we wouldn't see all this discussion about how the story should have been flagged and or how it is totall…
Coincident: A leading human rights figure got a lot of flak for writing a newspaper article saying that our (kenya's) next president will not be from the same ethnicity as the current. Not a wrong fact just a speculative opinion but because people are touchy when it comes to talking(in public only) about ethnicity since the last bloody elections, people were calling that an incitement and (this is now a media buzzword) 'hate speech'. Question is: can we hn-ly discuss a related topic without getting into the touchy and flamey parts? Far shot but if someone noticed something hn-worthy(like a data pattern or a behaviour pattern) in something as off-HN as say lolcats, will it be impossible to talk about it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Not only was the KD hotel a military headquarters Partially true... part of the hotel was used by the British for their offices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel#History >it was supposed to be empty at the time of the bombing. Not quite. According to Wikipedia "Warnings were sent by telephone, including one to the hotel's own switchboard, which the hotel staff decided to ignore, but none directly to the…
Yes the part of the hotel that was bombed was the part of the hotel that was used by the British military thereby invalidating your value judgement that the attack was meant to kill civilians.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes the part of the hotel that was bombed was the part of the hotel that was used by the British military thereby invalidating your value judgement that the attack was meant to kill civilians.
We have justification and apologies for violence right here! This is part of the problem, because similar arguments from the other side will probably be grounds for well, you know what.
Do not put words in my mouth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jews had lived in the region for thousands of years, but there was a Zionist mass migration to Palestine (the Jewish population in Palestine doubled from 1922-1931) that likely increased tensions. There has been violence from both sides of the conflict. On the Zionist side, there's another incident I've never heard mentioned in the media: the 1946 David Hotel bombing in which a Zionist terorist organization bombed a…
> of the first historic examples of terrorism targeting civilians. Not only was the KD hotel a military headquarters, it was supposed to be empty at the time of the bombing. You're either ignorant or lying for some reason.
Perhaps the problem is that the Palestinians are slacking? They should blow up more things, not less...