I’m sorry, I did not mean for this comment to be a political point, but rather an observation on how technology is used in mass atrocities. I was hoping to raise a point which I find interesting, which other may or may not agree with. I’ve gotten a couple of excellent replies here raising interesting counterpoints.
After posting this, and reading the replies, I’m actually less convinced about my original point. That is, I’ve learned something.
I believe you, but it's too fine a distinction to make a difference on the important point. Your account has obviously been primarily (even exclusively) focused on this one topic for quite a while now. That's not allowed on HN because if we did allow it, HN would dramatically shift towards becoming a current-affairs site, which is not its mandate.
This is not to say that the topic doesn't matter. Of course it matters, a great deal—more than almost anything that gets discussed here. But that not only doesn't change the above point, it makes it even more important.
As I said the last time I replied to you, I appreciate that your comments have mostly not been breaking the site guidelines in other ways. But the "primarily" rule applies regardless.
I don't want to ban you as you've been here a long time and have used the site as intended in the past. But I have to go quite a long way back into the past before that becomes visible. This is not ok.
One nerd to another, I'm rooting for you here, and just want to write a note real quickly that it's very easy to get sucked into this topic. The dopamine circuit we're playing with is a quirk of homo messageboardicus. A couple days ago I did a bunch of conscious things to keep me away from this topic on HN, and with a day or so of detox I've regained my original perspective that this is a deeply cursed species of HN thread. There's lots of other stuff to talk about!
I got very lucky, and the very next day someone started an argument about the futility and/or propriety of user-mode TCP/IP stacks and WireGuard. I wish for you a similarly irresistible nerd snipe for whatever nerd topic lights you up. Good luck!
That would be cross browser support for MathML, or other tools to get math expressions typeset on the web. Those discussions only pop up like once every six months though.
I’m actually way more of a lurker here. There are e.g. once a month a submission about Bayesian Analysis (and a guaranteed once a year submission about Kalman Filters) which I religiously read but hardly ever contribute to (unless a frequentist is advocating for IQ tests or other psychometric devises; then I for sure contribute; but that can lead to flame-wars easily). Every so often there is a back end engineer with an “opinion” on the front end stack which I sometimes answer for, however that often be a flame-y subject, for some reason I’m less tempted to be sucked into flamewars when the subject is actually aligned with my expertise.
It seems you've been triggered by the mention of the g-word. But when we calmly consider what the commenter is saying:
Israel is using information age technology to commit and propagandize their genocide
It's plainly not an unreasonable proposition, nor does it seem to be intended to engage in battle or provoke. They're simply describing a perfectly horrible situation that happening on the ground (that some recognized experts in the field do consider to be a form of genocide per the UN definition of such) and the fact that modern information technologies seem to be a part of the mechanism that is bringing it about.
The post expresses an opinion, but it definitely wasn't flamebait.
I wasn't responding to any proposition, but rather to the pattern of how the account is using Hacker News over a long stretch of time. That's what the word "primarily" refers to, and it's the most important thing to understand.
Of course I replied to a specific post because any reply has to do that; but I was responding to the account's use of HN over time. That's the issue here.
I wrote the GP in haste and can see how this point wasn't obvious. On the other hand it should quickly become obvious to anyone who clicks on the link I provided (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), which is the purpose of providing the link.
Citing international law, Ms. Albanese explained that genocide is defined as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,” she said.
Furthermore, “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” she continued.
Clearly there are opinions at odds with your opinion.
> the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,
Hilarious considering every conflict has been started by Palestine. Ceasefires broken by Hamas on multiple occasions. And there’s no settler colonial process happening now or in the past.
But let’s continue to blame Israel when Hamas kills people trying to get food or supplies. Or blame Israel when Hamas fires its own rocket at a parking lot and claims 500 dead. Let’s blame Israel for trying to wipe out a terrorist organization that’s sole purpose is to wipe out the Jewish population and wipe Israel off the map.
While Israel is quite restrained. We will keep calling it genocide even tho ACTUAL genocide is happening every day in Iran and China and Africa. It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere so we can focus on Israel and making up things that aren’t happening.
The issue, in this case, isn't opinions nor the other discourse in the thread. Rather, it is the account's comments over a long stretch of time.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I have read the guide, although i appreciate reaffirming it as the source of truth. What’s hard is from a glance at the posters history their comments don’t seem to break the guidelines, but instead fall into the camp of spirited (albeit strongly so) opinions. Are there specific comments made that weren’t in the spirit of the guidelines? It feels “primarily for ideological purposes” is hard to counter in a discussion because “ideological” itself is a murky term at best.
The point is the pattern (I think the person you are responding to is incorrect about flamebait), you'd go look at the topic of their most recent comments - if the vast majority of interactions are to argue X then that seems to fall under 'idealogical battle'.
Moderation replies have to go somewhere! Did you miss my several explanations about how I wasn't responding to the specific comment, but to an overall pattern? Here they are:
I don't see how I could have been much clearer, so if you read those posts and still have a question that isn't addressed, I'd be curious to know what it is.
That is a 14 year old HN post linking to a dead article, the comments on which say things like
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
A lot of people have both mechanisms to record what's happening, and share it.
It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.
One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.
Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.
Those warned us that we westerners are not immune from getting manipulated into engaging in, and turning a blind eye to mass atrocities against entire groups of people. Even to attempts at their eradication. It was a lesson about the west and humanity.
I believe Telegram channels in them self are an enabler in this. Some sort radicalizing, dehumanizing
Radical elements can find each other and (dis)organize between themself and instigate such actions between military groups outside the chain of command.
Telegram is used to for this in other current wars.
The holocaust came of age in the dawn of the information age if you count the radio as information technology, albeit a very one-sided information technology where you had the government giving everyone cheap radios that were only marked to tune to German and Austrian radio stations, unless you dared to go out at night to get an antenna up to receive others. [1]
Just look at how that's evolved into what's now referred to a "talk radio". Only, you have multiple stations available so you can choose your particular firebrand to listen.
This also applies to the Rwandan genocide. A lot of it was perpetrated via mass media, especially radio. But you can also claim that there were Industrialized genocides before the Holocaust, but what sets it apart is just how much it was defined by industrialized processes.
The Gaza Genocide is similar, the use of AI for target selection (or rather generation), the social media campaigns, using drones for killings, etc. We haven’t seen a genocide before which uses information technology to the extent it really defines whole processes of the genocide.
Germany pioneered a lot of modern propaganda techniques in WWII:
The first television broadcast on earth was of Hitler, and his chief propagandist, Goebbles, continues to have significant influence on modern propagandists. For instance, Biden's publicly compared the tactics Trump used in the 2020 "Big Lie" campaign to those of Goebbles. Of course, there was also the Hitler Youth, which was a pretty successful social engineering campaign.
On the computer side of things: IBM mainframes were famously an enabling technology for the holocaust and german war machine.
Its not at all, even if you mean “social media age”, and not “information age”, it's just one of the first (there are other disputed candidates, e.g., in Ukraine) that are getting first world attention other than after-the-fact.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.
I’m thinking in terms of processes and propaganda. While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings. The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones to carry out killings with targets selected by AI.
> While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings.
No, its not. Heck, the Holocaust used information technology for target selection.
> The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones
The genocides in the former Yugoslavia used most of the weapons of then-modern warfare, which may not have included drones but certainly involved plenty of weapons systems that incorporate "information technology" in doing the killings.
I am so sick of the claim that if you criticize Israel you must have something against Jews.
Jews are a loosely-defined, globally-distributed cultural group. Israel is a specific, concrete sovereign country. It is a bit like saying if you criticize Venezuela then you must hate "Latinos".
I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
There are plenty of reasons people care more about Israel's actions than those of any random country that have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is populated mostly by Jews, including:
1. It has historical and cultural ties to Western countries, so Westerners feel naturally interested in what goes on there (see also: why people care more about what's happening in Ukraine than in other armed conflicts around the globe),
2. Israel has a much higher degree of influence over American politics than any other foreign country, which bothers people,
3. It is largely propped up by U.S. aid, so Americans feel responsible for it,
4. Because of point 3., it is one of the only global problems that Americans have a realistic chance of solving by protesting.
> I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict. Though since it's hard to find a protest that isn't pushing for that maybe your right on point 4.
> People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
If I have no conscious negative feelings towards Jews, don’t treat any of the ones I know differently from anyone else (other than maybe asking them curious questions about their culture/religion), and generally don’t have any negative reaction when I find out someone is Jewish, how would you even measure or define this apparently asymptomatic anti-Semitism?
> Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict.
I do not mean that and I think it’s very unlikely the protests will cause that, and to be clear, I think the maximalist demands being made by protestors (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) are too radical, but again, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily motivated by antisemitic feelings. Perhaps sometimes they are, but it’s by no means a logical necessity.
What I think is possible to achieve by protesting is forcing Israel to back down from its own right-wing maximalist posture towards Palestinians and be open to agreeing some kind of lasting peace or at least easing up on the atrocities they’re committing (and I am mainly thinking of the atrocities they’ve been committing since long before Oct. 7th: the indefinite blockade of Gaza and the creeping settlement Swiss-cheesing the West Bank).
But the difference here is that for many in the West, they are seeing their own participation in it (ie USA, UK) with the Germans giving morale support for it. All those American Boeing-made missiles ripping apart and burning alive those little hungry toddlers camping outside in their cold tents… it tends to make people reflect a little more.
I have a different theory. There are tons of wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia vs Yemen, Iran vs Irak, Pakistan vs India, civil war in Syria, civil war in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, and everybody else is fighting ISIS. It’s not like the US/West are not involved or that the conflicts are any less bloody or that the parties have "better reasons" to kill each other. And still, they receive no where near as much attention and criticism as Israel/Palestine. I also don’t think the reason is antisemitism (at least in the West). I think the reason is that the West has to view everything through the lens of the culture war: it’s white vs brown and white is evil, therefore Israel is evil.
Israel has created its own perception of itself to the world. They gave up all sense of humanity to go on a revenge spree and now they don’t know when to stop because the whole world sees them as monsters so they probably think it couldn’t get any worse.
Changing the convo to talk about some other wars than Israel / Gaza is just another kind of deflection technique to avoid responsibility.
If it isn’t the antisemitism card, it’s the deflection card.
I really appreciate the attempt here, but these people are convinced and refuse to yield to logical questions, e.g. What is the evidence for a genocide? Gaza Ministry of Health says there is a genocide. You mean Hamas? The people who organized and filmed themselves murdering and kidnapping women, old people and children. Why do they have credibility? The UN also says there is a genocide. The UN cites Hamas. The BBC, NYT, HRW... ...also cite Hamas. It's Hamas all the way down. Well, it's the best source we have. Israel is biased, and committing genocide...
