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I Can't Sleep

blog.paulbiggar.com

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Re: I Can't Sleep

#61

Post by throwaw12 »

becausepc wrote: post #48

[flagged]

> 2. Israel for years had the means to completely exterminate Gaza many times over, but they never did.

  - Russia had the means to nuke Ukraine, but they never did
  - North Korea had the means to bomb and start the war with South Korea, but they are not doing
  - Iran had the means to bombard Israel, but they are not doing
  - USA had the means to nuke Iraq/Vietnam/Afghanistan, but didn't do (even though made a lot of destruction)
Can do, doesn't mean should do. Why did you bring this topic?

> 1. There are very few Jews living in Arab states or in Gaza. Often exactly zero.

They have migrated to the USA, also they lived fine until 1948, right? what happened in 1948? People are not migrating to the USA and claiming that it is their country, they are getting integrated into the country. Can't say same about Israel

Re: I Can't Sleep

#62

Post by nojvek »

Thank you for writing this. It’s somewhat sad that we in US have been divided. I don’t stand for Israel, or Palestinians but for a deeper value of protecting life.

It makes me sad and mad that our tax payer money is used to build missiles and bombs that are dropped onto civilians.

Department of defense is a thin veil on Department of war.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#63

Post by pbiggar »

brettgo1 wrote: post #53
pbiggar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need propaganda. Just look at the death counts: 18,600 in two months.

Paul, tell me how to get Hamas (the terror group) out of Palestine. They killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, wounded 3400, took 100+ hostages including 30 children. What would you do? How can the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, involving groups like Hamas and the state of Israel, be approached to reduce violence and improve safety for all parties involved? What strategies could be considered to address the chal…

I'm not an expert on terrorism, obviously. I just believe that it's immoral to drop bombs on civilians.

Like any other conflict, for a positive end result there has to be a meeting of the minds on both sides, committed to peace.

So this is going to seem very one sided, but if you look prior to Oct 7, you can't have peace where one side controls everything, has all the resources, and uses them to keep the other population "occupied". That is always going to breed resistance.

Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.

The only good neighbour is a prosperous one.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#64

Post by becausepc »

throwaw12 wrote: post #61
becausepc wrote: post #48

[flagged]

> 2. Israel for years had the means to completely exterminate Gaza many times over, but they never did. - Russia had the means to nuke Ukraine, but they never did - North Korea had the means to bomb and start the war with South Korea, but they are not doing - Iran had the means to bombard Israel, but they are not doing - USA had the means to nuke Iraq/Vietnam/Afghanistan, but didn't do (even though made a lot of dest…

> Iran had the means to bombard Israel, but they are not doing

I was not talking about bombardment. I was talking about means for genocide and extermination. Out of your examples, only USA and Russia have the means. Iran is not there yet.

> Can do, doesn't mean should do.

This is ridiculous, I never claimed Israel should exterminate Gaza. I claimed the opposite - Israel never did, thus it will not do that now either. Contrast that with official Hamas 1988 Charter [1] arguing for exterminations of all Jews.

> Why did you bring this topic?

I've brought the topic to demonstrate a way to judge various claims about the war.

> People ... are getting integrated into [USA]. Can't say same about Israel

This is incorrect. 2 million Arabs [2] are living in Israel proper: 20% of the whole population. They are perfectly integrated. For example, Knesset has 10 Arab members. Compare with Gaza before October 2023: 0.0% Jews. Iran: 0.009% Jews.

[1]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel

Re: I Can't Sleep

#65

Post by susanasj »

becausepc wrote: post #48

[flagged]

supporters of Israel's conduct love talking about anything except the thing that is happening right in front of our eyes: mass deprivation and slaughter of Gazan civilians. The reason that you want to talk about something else, like how many Jews live in Arab states, is because Israel's conduct is indefensible and we all know it, including you.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#66

Post by becausepc »

ignoramous wrote: post #60
becausepc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire article seems quite biased. Using footnotes after every sentence doesn't necessarily indicate a well-researched piece. I won't delve into recent events due to the challenges posed by the fog of war effect. A clearer example of Paul's bias is his choice of quotes regarding past events. In reference [19], discussing the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, Paul presents the following quote: "Women and children w…

> This quote originates from a UN report just 11 days after the event, posing two critical issues: firstly, insufficient time for a thorough investigation There is no reason to not trust first-hand testimonies (see also: believe all women ). Of course, investigations did happen, which are a matter of public record, but the circumstances were such that it is hard to prove one way or the other definitively. So, the den…

I am defending no one. Grandparent comment was asking for OP assertions that I find biased. Deir Yassin quote was a one such assertion. Extremely well researched - books have been written about it - but presented in a very biased manner. Paul cherry-picked the worst description of the events.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#67

Post by becausepc »

susanasj wrote: post #65
becausepc wrote: post #48

[flagged]

supporters of Israel's conduct love talking about anything except the thing that is happening right in front of our eyes: mass deprivation and slaughter of Gazan civilians. The reason that you want to talk about something else, like how many Jews live in Arab states, is because Israel's conduct is indefensible and we all know it, including you.

I hate wars, and I would love to see peaceful resolution. But we have a war already, most recently started by Hamas in October 7th. The sad reality is that civilian casualties are unavoidable in a war. Horrendous civilian casualties during American and British bombardment of Nazi Germany didn’t stop Allies during WW2. Israel conduct is nowhere near what Allies had done.

The point of Jew/Arab comparison is to contrast the consequences of two theoretical extremes: Israel victory and Gaza victory. Gaza victory would lead to extermination of Israeli Jews. Israel victory would lead to peace for Gaza’s Arabs.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#68

Post by dang »

asadalt wrote: post #42

@dang is this off-topic or was this taken off frontpage due to high flags? seems like it was.

Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags, but I didn't do so in this case for multiple reasons. The primary reason is that HN just had two enormous threads about this topic:

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1266 comments)

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1669 comments)

There are other reasons why we didn't turn off flags in this case. I'll describe two.

(1) The votes and comments on this thread didn't look organic to our software, nor to me. My guess is that someone was trying to promote this article on HN. If so, I'm sure it was for deeply felt reasons, but it's still not a good thing to do (not to mention against HN's rules, both in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and in practice it leads to a lesser quality of discussion.

(2) If we're going to have further threads about this painful and divisive topic, it's better that the foundation not be an outright advocacy piece. This is not a criticism of the article, nor of the intention behind the article—it's a question of the impact on the thread. You can already see, in some of the angriest comments in this thread, what sort of hell the entire discussion would likely have turned into (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645665 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.

Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.

All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.

Re: I Can't Sleep

#69

Post by dang »

romafirst3 wrote: post #56
asadalt wrote: post #42

@dang is this off-topic or was this taken off frontpage due to high flags? seems like it was.

I've become very concerned lately with the censorship on hacker news. The only way I found this page was by attempting to post the url. It's been essentially banished from the site, without even a comment on this thread about what happened or why. If we are going to censor things, this should be a transparent process not a covert activity where people don't even know they have been censored.

People use the word "censor" to mean so many things that it's hard to track, but in this case was HN working the way it always does and has for many years. It works the same way regardless of topic, and there was no moderator intervention. We sometimes intervene to turn off flags, but this wasn't the right thread for that, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527.

The topic itself just had two massive threads on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675), so I don't think it's correct to call the topic censored.

Re transparency, we don't publish a complete moderation log (I've written about why over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but we're happy to answer questions when people ask them, and believe it's in HN's long-term interest to err on the side of openness. I spend half my days these days answering this sort of question through email. Even when we can't answer a question completely, we can usually at least say why (e.g.: some of HN's anti-abuse software would stop working if we published how it works, so we can't answer that question completely).

If you or anyone still has a question that I haven't answered here or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

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