This has been my guess from the beginning, the only logical final objective solution was annexation. If you’re gonna drive everyone living there out and level the landscape it’s obvious you don’t intend for the original people to come back. I said this back in the beginning of November, come 2025 Gaza will just be a normal annexed portion of Israel.

Barak replied “It’s already been known for many years that they have a bunker that originally was built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa,” which was used as a “command post” for Hamas and as a “junction of several tunnels”

“I don’t know to say to what extent it is a ‘major.’ It’s probably not the only…command post. Several others are under hospitals or in other sensitive places.”

…

Barak, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1999 to 2001, responded, “decades ago, we were running the place, so we helped them.” The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since 2007.

“It was many decades ago…that we helped them build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of these compounds.”

But Is he a good boss and is he a good person?

If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.

What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video

when better candidates are clearly available for both demopublican parties has to some other reasoning

You’re absolutely right, but if it comes down to Biden vs Trump at the general election, who are you going to vote for?

Does anyone actually care what New Zealand thinks? If New Zealand cares so much they can start taking more people in. From what I understand New Zealand is one of the few countries that takes more quota refugees than asylum seekers. That means they take in less asylum seekers than the UN mandated quota of refugees. The UN quota is 1500 per year so their total intake per year is less than 3000 people.

I wouldn’t say New Zealand is xenophobic, but they are extremely restrictive on immigration, asylum seekers, and refugees. I play a lot of Path of Exile which is based out of New Zealand and they’ve stated that to get a job there you have to move to New Zealand because New Zealand law prohibits companies from hiring from outside of New Zealand unless the company can prove that the needed job can’t be filled by a New Zealander.

The standard of living in New Zealand is fairly high, but it’s mostly because they are NIMBY and I Got Mine.

In all honesty, if this wasn’t serving as a proxy war that might have been possible, but I think with China, Iran, and Russia squaring up to support Palestine there’s no way we’re going to cut off Israel. From a big picture perspective Israel is the only real ally the US or western powers have in the middle east and even if we dumped them for the crimes they commit it would ultimately hurt the US and western powers to abandon or sanction them.

I saw an article saying that Belgium is considering sanctions against Israel, but Belgium is also a NATO country and only has 24k active troops with an additional 6k in reserves. In 2022 Belgium had the third lowest % GDP military investment out of the NATO countries.

Whether we like it or not the big players in the game aren’t looking at the atrocities Israel commits in Gaza, they’re looking at whether they will have a foothold and ally in the middle east if we have a World War.

We as individuals can take a stance on the conflict without considering the geopolitical outcomes, but to be able to do so we should admit that we are in a place of privilege. I imagine that if news came out that Ukraine blew up a school Poland still would still support Ukraine, because they’re right next door.

At the same time, countries which don’t meaningfully contribute to their own defense should recognize their privilege when it comes to the world stage.

EDIT: Had accidentally called Ukraine Russia, fixed now.

Hell we would probably have deployed troops to Gaza and also to stand by in case of actions from Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, or Syria.

I kinda wish there was more discussion about the long term outcomes. I personally don’t think a two state option is going to work, especially those that hinge on control of Jerusalem. An independent Palestinian state could be established, but would almost certainly be controlled by Hamas or other like minded groups.

Hamas believes in a two state solution so far as it gains territory, but I think that as soon as that is accomplished the long term plan would be to eventually destroy Israel and make a Reunified Palestine.

If this is true then there will never be peace until either Palestine or Israel is utterly destroyed.

Conversely, if Israel doesn’t just take over Palestine completely things are likely to continue as they have since the 60’s. Hamas does a terrorist attack, Israel responds by blowing up a school, rinse and repeat forever because the groups in control of each side are fucking extremist conservative monsters that believe their magical space daddy is right.

I’m not making excuses for the atrocities committed by Israel or Hamas, I’m just laying out the road map for the next 100 years. If you had to pick between Hamas (or Hamas like) controlled Palestine or Zionist controlled Israel which would you prefer?

I guess there is a third and fourth option, the third option is to have no opinion and whatever happens happens. The fourth option would be to, somehow, maintain the status quo and wait till a time where both sides stop believing in the extremist religious dogma. The fourth option could be something like a UN occupation of Israel Palestine to prevent the two sides from killing each other?

EDIT: Also, if you look at the proposed maps for a two state solution you should already know that a two state solution wouldn’t work, it’s like if Cold War Germany had a baby with the Michigan UP and somehow the offspring was even worse.

I have Windows 10, so things may be different for 11 or whatever version you’re on, but can’t you just uninstall OneDrive without specifically closing it? I feel like that’s what I did when it was default installed.

Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.

I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.

Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?

Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.

Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.

Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.

Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.

When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.

1.) Presented with sources, definitions, and a fairly detailed description of war crimes.

2.) Presented with third party sources about claims.

3.) Clearly told that the person they are arguing with doesn’t support the IDF

4.) Uses strawman attacks on the person they are arguing with

5.) Provides no real source, argument, or rebutall

6.) Says they refuted my argument

7.) Puts words in my mouth

8.) Calls me a genocide apologist when I clearly am not

You’re clearly a troll and I’m done feeding you

It absolutely 100% is.

The Geneva Convention disagrees: “Geneva Convention IV: Article 28 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV provides: ‘The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.’”

“Additional Protocol I: Article 51(7) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I provides: The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations”

Which Israel doesn’t do either, not even close

That’s not true, obviously Israel is using the principal of proportionality or else they would have just leveled the entire place. Whether this constitutes a war crime would be if their level of response was appropriate enough, that’s why people say it “may” constitute a war crime. The truth is that this is a subjective argument that would need to be determined in an international court of law to be certain of.

Which we only have the word of a notoriously dishonest government that there always is

Amnesty International reported the same in 2014 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summarily-killed-by-hamas-forces-during-2014-conflict/) and the Palestinian Health Ministry in 2009 (www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3668018,00.html).

You mean like when Israel told Palestinians to go somewhere and then bombed them as they complied?

Maybe you should actually check the news, Hamas leadership has been telling it’s people to stay and, while you don’t believe the IDF, they have satellite and surveillance footage of vehicles and barricades to block travel in Gaza. Also, reporters inside of Gaza are reporting that Hamas is shooting evacuating people.

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryjyna7qa

You can try all the whataboutism you’d like to excuse the atrocities of the apartheid regime but, apart from the fact that the atrocities of Hamas doesn’t justify any of those of Israel, most of the time the IDF have done the same thing (including for example using human shields) or something even worse.

I’ve not tried to excuse any atrocities, I’m clearly pointing out that the term “War Crime” has a specific meaning of which you have twice incorrectly used. Throughout our discussions I have used a number of reasonable sources and references. It funny you accuse me of an argument I haven’t made and for using whataboutisms, but the only whataboutisms have come from your own post. I don’t like what the IDF is doing either, but you can’t call things war crimes that would literally take a prolonged international league case to determine (principle of proportionality). Likewise when something is very clearly defined as a war crime, you can’t say that it isn’t (perfidy). Also, it’s a really poor argument to say that sources (albeit biased) are illegitimate because they came from Israel (I showed that an outside entity and the Palestinian Health Ministry backed up the IDFs claims a decade earlier).

This response is the equivalent of a child saying nuh uh and walking off. Also, no one said that it did excuse the war crimes committed by the IDF. The problem I have is that you’re clearly misrepresenting Hamas as innocent.

Oddly enough it’s not a war crime to attack a military target that is using a civilian population as cover. The military action has to use the principle of proportionality to limit risks to civilians, but doesn’t ban the attack. Attacking such a site would only be a war crime if there is no valid military target.

The use of a civilian population as soft cover (as in not actively being human shields, but not getting out of the way) could be a war crime depending on the amount of obfuscation the hiding party is using. In the instance of Hamas they built their bases directly under hospitals so I’d say that meets the bar for war crimes.

Also, the current news is that Hamas is blocking evacuations from this region. So that moves it from soft human shields to forced human shields.

Um, you’re wrong, it’s known as Perfidy and is a violation of Protocol 1 Article 37 of the Geneva Convention

1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:

(a) The feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;

(b) The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;

© The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and

(d) The feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.

Yeah, I remember an article from 2016, they were interviewing a college kid and asked who he supported, he said he supported Bernie Sanders. When asked how he felt about Bernie losing the primary he said he felt guilty because he had forgotten to vote.

I don’t think that was his point. He’s simply saying that the benefit of reach and leverage makes it so that equally skilled and unarmored combatants would make it so you need 2 swordsmen to reliably fight a spearman.

That being the case doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have multiple weapons for multiple circumstances, and it doesn’t mean that the appropriate armour wouldn’t impact it.

Finally, battlefield usage is a totally different situation as you have regiments with mixed skill levels.

I think the only thing he was trying to say is that if you have two guys with similar skill and fitness, unarmored, the guy with the spear has a large advantage.

Also, I think he’s a bit more than an Enthusiast. His resume is fairly impressive (https://www.matt-easton.co.uk/about).

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