Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | axus's commentslogin

I think it did a decent job. The key might be how customizable the censorship is.

Article Context: Fun: Die Hard; Is It a Christmas Movie?

Your(my) Comment: The erotic version of Die Hard does involve Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists on Christmas Eve.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film. Results: Revision Requested. This comment would be sent back for revision with feedback.

Revise Low Effort

Comment appears to be low effort

Objectionable Phrases:

"Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists"

This phrase can be seen as sexualizing a character traditionally viewed as innocent and family-friendly, which is inappropriate. Such language can make discussions feel uncomfortable or offensive to some audiences.

Relevance Check On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)

This is off-topic - the comment about an erotic version of Die Hard strays into inappropriate content that doesn't relate to the film's actual story or its production details.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film.


Hehe -- excellent. Thanks.

We want that kind of comment to be "tunable" -- I.e., the blogger who's post one is commenting on could tune for this, and allow more/less sexual innuendo as desired.


Ukraine and the CO2 levels are lucky that Russia pumping less oil is "good for America".

I think a bus could stop in the middle of the street, but a bus stop still removes dependence on a smartphone and protects from the weather.

No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...

I read your comment as agreeing with the article: "Never buy a .online domain".

And Google has the right to publish a list, there should be more lists not less. But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist. Until the article appeared on Hacker News, this was not 0% on Google. A small, correctable mistake, but they deserved a tiny bit of blame.


> But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist.

If all it takes to be taken from the blacklist was to temporarily delete the NS record - the list would be useless against malware.


Not just .online, also any other domain Radix hosts. At least not for anything important.

What stands out to me:

> Earlier this year, Namecheap was running a promo that let you choose one free .online or .site per account.

I wouldn't be surprised if most of Namecheap's customers who used the "register a domain for free" discount were indeed malicious. Without seeing the results of whatever analysis Google did to flag this website, it's hard to say whether Google is at fault here.


That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.

And if it was, they didn't mean it.

And if they did, Gaza deserved it.


and if you don't agree, you're antisemitic

I actually got accused of being racist for saying that anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same thing.

I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.

Do you: 1 - Think that it is something different? 2 - Think that it is, but Jewish people specifically do not have it? (I believe this is racist) 3 - Think that no people have it? 4 - Something else?

If you think that Jewish people have it but just not in Palestine, where in the world do you think they should have had it?


You're wrong on the definition of zionism. Zionism is a European nationalist movement that uses the assumption there is a consensual concept of "homogeneous jewish people" who have the right to self-determination to justify Palestine's colonization.

Anti-zionism is being against the colonization of Palestine and being against nationalism and supremacism.

Anti-semitism is hating someone because of the are jew.


So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist? What is your connection with the Zionist movement that let's you define it?

When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization, in your book?


> So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist?

Yes, they are. Being a European movement doesn't mean non-european cannot be zionist. Fascism is also a European movement as it emerged in Italy.

> When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization

When there are no settlements, no oppression of indigenous people, no land exploitation, no discrimination law made by the colonizer. It's not "in my book", it's in every books not made by a colonizer.


Thank you!

If self-determination means an enthnostate then no people has that right. If every ethnic group had its own state in which it was guaranteed supremacy, the world would be a complete mess. It doesn't work. We are seeing in Israel/Palestine a thoroughly worked out example of why it doesn't work, and what the consequences are when you try to make it work.

How is ethnicity related? Judaism isn't an ethnicity, and there are Jews in Israel from Poland, from Ethiopia and from India. In terms of ethnicity, Israel is probably one of the most diverse places on Earth.

I don't see how Israel/Palestine is any kind of evidence that ethnostates can't work. There are Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades. There are unique historical reasons why there's so much conflict in this region.

> Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades.

when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…


So you don't take the word of the Palestinians who actually live in Israel. Remarkable, but ok.

don't answer a question with a question :)

They have not been living just fine, and Israel calls them a "demographic time bomb".

The Jewish people already loving in Palestine had a right to live there.

The problem is when you try to forcefully displace an entire civilian population to make way for a colonial movement.

In the same way I, as a Finn, would not have the right to take over any region in the Urals and kick out the people who live there, the Zionists had no right to do just that in Palestine since over a hundred years ago.


No one is arguing in support of displacing a population. However, it seems like you believe that everyone should just stay where there are, and no population should ever migrate to any place. That's both naive and simply was never the case in the history of human kind. People migrate, for thousands or reasons, and almost no one leaving on a land on this planet have lived there since the beginning of times.

A piece of land isn't yours because you were born there or your grandpa did. There's one Earth in we need to share it. No one can deny the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, in a same way that no one can deny the connection of Palestinians to the same place. The Palestinians Arab don't need to move back to the Arab Pennisula, where they came from, and the Israelis don't need to move back to Poland, Yemen, Russia, Morocco, you name it. "The times they are a-changin'".


That is not at all what I believe, that's just you extrapolating wildly.

Zionism is the support of the Israeli colonial project. Jewish people have a right to self-determination regardless of Israel's existence; Israel's existence does not determine the right of self-determination for all jews. As such, the two things are not the same.

Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.


Jews don’t have a right to an ethnostate. No one does. Jews have a right to live within any country in the world, but not run an apartheid government or commit genocide.

> I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.

I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.


Interesting emphasis, but I don't see how that changes what I said.

[flagged]


I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel

Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?

Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.

How’s that similar to you?


Look, I don't disagree, but American cities looked pretty fine after WWII, and Germany was rubble. Which side gets pounded more doesn't inherently prove which side was right.

(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)


Germany invaded most of Europe and left much of it in rubble. You're picking a very weird, specific comparison (German vs. US cities) and leaving out the obvious comparison (German vs. Soviet or Polish cities).

Also, comparing Nazi Germany, a massively powerful industrial state, with a tiny, poor territory under foreign occupation by a vastly superior power is insane.


The point is “which belligerent is in rubble” and “which belligerent started shit” isn’t always the same.

No, the point is to justify Israel laying waste to Gaza by equating the Palestinians with the Nazis.

You might wanna take a peek at my other comments on this thread before assuming that, lol.

Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries: more soldiers, more rockets, more war-fighting infrastructure. Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east. It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel. It was a net food exporter.

> Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries

What? You mean countries like Monaco and Liechtenstein?

> more soldiers, more rockets

Simply counting the # of soldiers or rockets is disingenuous when this is obviously an asymmetric war.

It's clear that the method of combatant recognition employed by the IDF is flawed, given they're killing aid workers and people from the UN.

Eg, here is Hamas' bread and butter rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket

There is more technology in a modern rifle round than in those rockets + launch systems (if you even dare call them that).

> more war-fighting infrastructure

Please explain what you mean by "war-fighting infrastructure ".

> Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east

Depends on what you mean by "standards of the Middle East", but just compare Israel($52k) and Gaza ($3455) for 2023:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

> It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel.

"The wealthiest in a poor country have more money than the average in a developed country", means what exactly?

How did you develop your understanding of this situation? And what are you trying to communicate here?


I claimed Hamas had a larger and more powerful military than many European countries. This is a fact.

> What? You mean countries like Monaco and Liechtenstein?

No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.

> Simply counting the # of soldiers or rockets is disingenuous when this is obviously an asymmetric war.

Counting things like soldiers and military arsenals is the standard way to evaluate military strength. And of course there is a force asymmetry, Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world. That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate Gaza's military the way we would any other.

> Please explain what you mean by "war-fighting infrastructure ".

Well, for example, Hamas built the largest underground military tunnel system in the known world, a vast standing army numbering in the tens of thousands, gathered plenty of intelligence on Israel, militarized their population, and has a history of combat, for starters. But it goes way beyond this, and extends to the broad financial and military support they enjoyed from the IRGC.

> "Depends on what you mean by "standards of the Middle East", but just compare Israel($52k) and Gaza ($3455) for 2023:" I'm not comparing it to Israel, which is a standout in the middle east, and among the most technologically developed countries in the world. I'm comparing it to other middle eastern countries. It wasn't exactly destitute, despite its murderous, anti-woman, anti-gay, and antiy-jew jihadi philosophy. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE-xjBRKkPL/

> It's clear that the method of combatant recognition employed by the IDF is flawed, given they're killing aid workers and people from the UN.

Have you considered that the some aid workers were also Hamas militants? Or that the UN, through UNRWA, employed Hamas militants? Many of the so-called aid-workers israel killed turned out to actually have been part of Hamas. There is unfortunately extensive evidence that UN employees participated in the 10/7 attacks and the subsequent fighting. And Hamas uses world central kitchen and other aid organization vehicles and infrastructure, so distinguishing is not easy in the first place.

> How did you develop your understanding of this situation? And what are you trying to communicate here?

I have developed my understanding of this situation from decades of study on this topic, and at least a thousand of hours of research over the past 2.5 years. In the span of 15 years, I've gone from leading so-called pro Palestine rallies to my current positions. What I am trying to communicate is that reality is more nuanced than many (including a younger version of me) like to think. Reality is nuanced, and at odds with the picture you paint.


>No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.

Hamas, who don't even own a single Howitzer. Much less a plane.


They were weaker than most European countries in their air power. Stronger in manpower and in munitions, which included tens of thousands of rockets.

Stronger in munitions? One western artillery shell is worth countless Qassam rockets. The Qassam rockets are largely useless from a military perspective because you aren't going to hit anything with them.

This is an apples and oranges type comparison, except Hamas is stuck with crabapples.


Qassam rockets are not "useless." They've killed multiple people, including kids. They are relatively low-yield compared to later Grad/Fajr/M-75 type rockets Hamas used, but to say they're "useless" is a huge overstatement, and the implication that they represented Hamas's entire arsenal is wrong.

The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).

In addition to the direct devastation the rockets cause, they also force large swaths of the Israeli population into bomb shelters, which has other military benefits for Hamas. It was part of the 10/7 strategy they employed.

People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.


I suggest you look up the concept of CEP, circular error probable. It's a very important measure when discussing weapons like these.

Modern western rocket artillery will strike your target from tens of kilometers away within a circle of a couple of meters.

Your typical Grad will have CEP in excess of 1.5% of range. So at 10KM you'll have only half of your rockets land within 150 meters of your target.

These are weapons where your target selection amounts to "fuck someone in that general direction". Not "better shoot at that guy before he shoots at us". Fundamentally useless for fighting wars.

The Grads can be vaguely useful, but Hamas doesn't have the launch platforms to field them as an area denial weapon as originally intended.

EDIT: and you can probably stop reading right here, I'm mostly just repeating myself after this point.

> They've killed multiple people, including kids

I never thought I'd laugh at the idea of kids being killed, but in this context it comes across as pretty hilarious. This is not a good feature in a weapon of war! In war you typically want to kill enemy soldiers, not kids.

You can point a Gazan artillery rocket towards an urban center, maybe hit someone and kill a kid. It is not feasible to hit a target more specific than that using these weapons.

You can't fire one at a smallish enemy position.

>The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).

Hamas having dozens if not hundreds of M-302s is certainly a claim I'd love to see evidence for, but even if it were true this isn't very impressive at all. These are terribly inaccurate unguided artillery rockets! Western militaries don't really have much in terms of equivalents because they're practically useless.

>People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.

This is a straight up lie. Hamas had a plenty of manpower, but certainly has never had an arsenal to match. Artillery rockets you can realistically only use to indiscriminately strike civilian areas are absolutely useless when fighting a war.


The whole point is that Hamas is an unconventional fighting force that does aim at civilian centers and doesn't particularly care for accuracy. You sneeringly ask me to look up CEP, as though Hamas tries to be accurate and target military installations rather than sewing terror. They know they can't go head to head against Israel militarily, and they do purposefully kill civilians (see: 10/7). I can see you laugh at kids being killed, which is horrifying!

You also scoff at the idea that Hamas had M-302s, but the reality is not only did they have them but they fired them, for example on July 9, 2014 towards Hadera. In March 2014 the IDF also siezed M-302s being smuggled into Gaza. I can go on. Your snarkiness is no substitute for research.

I wrote "people like to pretend hamas was a tiny force" and you say that's a "straight up lie." But people on this very thread have claimed that. Yes, their arsenal didn't match European countries in terms of accuracy, but in terms of raw firepower, they had lots, which is why Israel spent billions developing the iron dome.


> as though Hamas tries to be accurate and target military installations

I think they would if they could; I think Hamas would be much happier to be able to hit Netanyahu or the IDF HQ than some rando. Don't you?

They quite simply don't have the tech. Which is good!


If Hamas had the tech, they'd surely blow up the whole of Israel, including military installations. But they don't (which I agree is good) and their history and words and actions all show a desire to target and kill civilians.

>Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world

If by that you're implying the US has the most effective air force in the world, then you're probably wrong.


The most effective air force in the world is almost certainly the American one. The second most effective air force in the world may well be the American Navy.

I'm curious who you're ranking at the top here.


"Probably wrong"? Who do you think has it?

It was also fully blockaded by Israeli (and Egyptian) forces on all sides? Israel was in full control of what was going in an out of it.

I don't see how that's relevant to the earlier claim, but even this claim of yours is a gross overstatement.

There was a partial blockade, not a full blockade, and this partial blockade came after Palestinians launched the second intifada. Prior to the october 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas and gazan civilians, tens of thousands of gazans were able to travel out of gaza through egypt and israel, where many of them worked. nearly 75,000 truckloads of food and cargo went into gaza from israel in 2022. Gaza exported lots too.


My point is that Israel had full control about exactly what Gaza was allowed to import and export (and frequently used those controls for collective punishment as well)

I don't quite see how under those circumstances, they were able to build "a more powerful army than many European countries", unless you talk about Luxembourg or the Vatican.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip


Yes, Israel and Egypt together controlled what Gaza was allowed to import and export - not as a form of collective punishment, but to ensure its own security. There's a huge difference between that and a "full blockade" (which is what Russia did to Mariupol early in the war), so precision matters.

In terms of Hamas's army being more powerful than that of many European countries, I'll respond to that below.

And the Wikipedia article you cite has been manipulated by a band of ideological editors and is not reliable, and has no value (inverse value?) as a citation.


> not as a form of collective punishment, but to ensure its own security

Top Israeli officials literally said that the purpose of the blockade was "to put Gaza on a diet."


The article currently has 361 references. Also the accusation they use it in arbitrary means, for collective punishment is widely shared, not just here.

Explain to me how continuously reducing the area permitted for fishing is necessary for Israel's security.


Also, why is there a quota system on food(!) at all? How does this aid security?

Why do Israelis always claim the Palestinians launched the 2nd Intifada?

The 2nd Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.


Calling the Second Intifada "sparked by Israeli massacres" reverses the basic chronology and ignores Palestinian leaders' own admissions.

1) Marwan Barghouti (Fatah leader of the uprising in the West Bank) told The New Yorker in Jan 2001: "The explosion would have happened anyway... But Sharon provided a good excuse." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/arafats-gift

2) UK Parliament Hansard (Apr 16, 2002) quotes the semi-official PA daily Al-Ayyam (Dec 6, 2000) reporting PA communications minister Imad al-Falouji: "the Palestinian authority had begun preparations for the outbreak of the current intifada... in accordance with instructions given by Chairman Arafat himself" and that it was not meant merely as a protest over Sharon's visit. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2002-04-16/debates/d69... (search within the page for "Al-Ayyam" or "Al-Falouji")

3) Arafat's widow Suha said Arafat decided to launch it ("Because I am going to start an Intifada") on Dubai TV, per MEMRI translation, quoted by CFR: https://www.cfr.org/articles/arafat-and-second-intifada https://www.memri.org/tv/suha-arafat-widow-yasser-arafat-200...

Also, this is not some uniquely Israeli talking point. Britannica describes the start as Palestinians erupting into violence after Sharon's Temple Mount visit: https://www.britannica.com/place/Israel/The-second-intifada


The chronology is clear:

1. Ariel Sharon staged a deliberate provocation by storming the Temple Mount with hundreds of policemen.

2. Palestinians protested, and Israeli forces shot live ammunition at them, killing four Palestinian civilians. Within weeks, riots had broken out and Israel had killed dozens of Palestinian civilians.

Israeli actions were the spark, not some planned Palestinian operation.

The long-term cause of the 2nd Intifada was Israeli refusal to carry out the Oslo Accords in good faith. The Palestinians recognized Israel and agreed to give up the armed struggle for their freedom in exchange for a set process by which Israel would rapidly withdraw from the occupied territories and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. The Israelis repeatedly reneged on that throughout the 1990s, and by 2000, the Palestinians were completely disillusioned with the so-called "Peace Process."


This mixes up the first 24 hours with who launched the Intifada as a sustained campaign.

Even if you think Sharon’s Temple Mount visit was provocative and Israeli police used excessive force on Sept 29, senior Palestinian figures later said the uprising was coming anyway and was planned, and Sharon was a convenient trigger.

1) Marwan Barghouti told The New Yorker: the explosion would have happened anyway; Sharon provided a good excuse. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/arafats-gift

2) PA communications minister Imad al Faluji: this intifada was planned in advance since Arafat returned from Camp David. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/02/21/history-matters/

3) Suha Arafat said Arafat decided to start an intifada (MEMRI translation; CFR discusses it too). https://www.memri.org/tv/suha-arafat-widow-yasser-arafat-200... https://www.cfr.org/articles/arafat-and-second-intifada

Also, it is not just Israelis saying this. Mainstream sources record these admissions and describe the outbreak as Palestinian violence following the visit.

On Oslo: it was an interim framework with later permanent status talks, not a guaranteed rapid withdrawal and state. The PLO letter explicitly renounced terrorism and other violence. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/oslo https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-107hr3743ih/html/B...


You've actually hit on the most important point: Although Oslo was sold as a two-state solution, the Israelis never agreed in writing to a Palestinian state.

The Israelis showed an incredible amount of bad faith. Rabin said in one of his last speeches that there would never be a Palestinian state - only a semi-autonomous entity under Israeli control. The Israelis never halted settlement construction. After Rabin was assassinated by the Israeli Right, Netanyahu deliberately sabotaged Oslo for years (which he brags about today), refusing to withdraw from the occupied territories as agreed.

After 7 years of this, with a Palestinian state no closer at all, a top Israeli politician (soon to become PM) staged a deliberate provocation, and Israeli forces began massacring Palestinian civilians.

Of course there were thoughts in the PLO about the possibility of future armed resistance. They would have been crazy not to think about that possibility. But they preferred a negotiated two-state solution, and they tried to get it for 7 years. After the Israelis started massacring Palestinian civilians, it would have been impossible for the PLO to keep a lid on the violence.


You are switching topics because the original claim does not survive contact with the record.

You said Israeli massacres sparked the Second Intifada. Your own timeline does not name any massacre that happened before it began. The first deaths were in the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is tragic, but it is not some prior massacre that supposedly set everything off.

The US-led Mitchell Report is explicit: Sharon’s Temple Mount visit did not cause the Intifada. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/mitchell_plan.asp

And Barghouti later said the eruption would have happened anyway and the visit was just a convenient excuse. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/arafats-gift

Also, your Oslo framing is backwards. Oslo did not promise a Palestinian state or rapid final withdrawal. It is an interim framework that explicitly defers permanent-status issues like borders, settlements, and Jerusalem to later negotiations. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/isrplo.asp

A politician visiting a holy site under police protection is not a massacre and not a justification for launching an intifada.


Switching topics? We've been discussing the reasons for the 2nd Intifada. The Israelis reneging on Oslo was the fundamental reason for it.

> Your own timeline does not name any massacre that happened before it began.

Huh? I've mentioned the massacres that Israeli forces carried out in the aftermath of Ariel Sharon's storming of the Temple Mount several times now.

> The US-led Mitchell Report is explicit: Sharon’s Temple Mount visit did not cause the Intifada

You cite the Mitchell Report when it agrees with you, but ignore it when it disagrees with you.

The Mitchell Report explicitly states that the PLO had no premeditated plan to unleash violence.

In fact, it says that the proximal cause of the 2nd Intifada was the massacre that Israel carried out on 29 September 2000 against Palestinian protesters. Those protests were in response to Sharon's storming of the Temple Mount.

The report says that after that massacre, neither side showed restraint, which caused the violence to escalate.

So the report that you yourself are citing as an authority turns out to agree almost 100% with what I've been telling you all along.

> Oslo did not promise a Palestinian state or rapid final withdrawal.

Actually, Oslo II lays out a very specific timeline for Israeli withdrawal, to be completed within 18 months (by mid-1996!).

More generally, the Oslo Accords were sold as a rapid path to a two-state solution. If the Accords weren't about a two-state solution, then the Palestinians were completely swindled by the Israelis.


Nice try, but you are rewriting your own claim.

You opened with: the Second Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres. Now your alleged massacre is Sept 29, the first day of the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is not a prior massacre that precipitated anything, it is the opening confrontation itself, and you are laundering it with a loaded word.

On Oslo, you did not even mention it until your massacre story fell apart. And your Oslo summary is wrong on the text. Oslo II explicitly defers permanent-status issues (Jerusalem, settlements, borders, refugees, etc.) and excludes them from PA jurisdiction. The 18-month line is about phased interim jurisdiction, not a guaranteed state or full withdrawal. This was also obvious to everyone alive at the time and was widely reported. It's only now that people like you are attempting to rewrite history. https://www.peaceagreements.org/agreements/410/

Read the Mitchell Report you keep invoking.

- It describes Sept 29 as large demonstrations where Palestinians threw stones and Israeli police used rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition, killing 4 and injuring about 200. Calling that a massacre is absurd. It was an armed clash, premeditated and planned by the palestinians, so not only was there no massacre, but the Palestinians themselves say armed clash was premeditated and Sharon's visit was just a pretext.

- The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Source: https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/13561/mitchell-repo...

Also, Sharon visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Mitchell even says holy places must be accessible to all believers. The choice to turn that into an uprising was a choice.


> You opened with: the Second Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres. Now your alleged massacre is Sept 29, the first day of the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is not a prior massacre that precipitated anything, it is the opening confrontation itself, and you are laundering it with a loaded word.

Those are the exact same thing. The "clashes" you're describing are Israeli forces firing live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in the wake of Sharon's deliberate provocation.

You pulled out the Mitchell Report as an authority on the subject, and it turns out that the Mitchell Report backs me up.

> Calling that a massacre is absurd.

Police opening up with live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators, killing 4 and injuring 200 is not a massacre?

> but the Palestinians themselves say armed clash was premeditated and Sharon's visit was just a pretext.

No, no one said the September 29th clashes were premeditated. How would the PLO even be responsible for Israel deciding to open up with live ammunition on a crowd of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators? Did the PLO use mind control on the Israelis?

> Also, Sharon visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Mitchell even says holy places must be accessible to all believers.

The Mitchell Report says that Sharon's visit was a deliberate provocation. He wasn't just a random believer visiting a holy site. He was a top Israeli politician (on the verge of becoming prime minister) and a notorious general with a long career of slaughtering Palestinian civilians (including in Lebanon, where he let fascist Christian militias carry out a massacre in a Palestinian refugee camp). He stormed the holiest Muslim site in Palestine with hundreds of police officers. It was a political stunt intended to spark a reaction. One would have to be incredibly naive to think otherwise. Sharon knew that his actions would spark a massive outrage among Palestinians. Or are you claiming that Sharon had no idea what he was doing?

> The 18-month line is about phased interim jurisdiction, not a guaranteed state or full withdrawal.

No, the 18-month deadline is explicitly about full withdrawal of all Israeli forces from virtually the entire West Bank (including Area C) to specific military bases. Israel just completely reneged on that. Netanyahu has boasted about torpedoing Oslo by reneging on that specific requirement.


> Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries

This is such an insane statement that you instantly disqualify everything else you say.


It's hard to believe the earth is round, but it is.

As I mentioned above, Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing. They also had tens of thousands of rockets.


I would gently suggest that the relative quality of the soldiers and their equipment is not something you can dismiss here.

A handful of Delta Force in Mogadishu shot hundreds (at least) of armed assailants, for example.

Hamas certainly doesn’t have the Leopard 2 tanks and F-35s Denmark has. Which is pretty important for the “more powerful” assessment.


Look, I'm obviously not saying that Hamas is stronger than all European countries in every metric, and I already did mention their lack of an air force. All I'm trying to say is that by some standard ways to judge military force (e.g., number of active soldiers) Hamas surprisingly is ahead, which gives lie to the idea that it's a small force. Your position has some nuance, which I appreciate, but another commenter in this very thread wrote "This is such an insane statement that you instantly disqualify everything else you say."

It's obviously not an insane statement, given that we can debate things like the accuracy of their munitions and the lack of air power. the other commenter probably simply didn't know how many active soldiers Hamas had and how few some developed European countries have.


No airplanes. No tanks. No armored vehicles. No howitzers. Just AK-47s and homemade RPGs and rockets.

Comparing them to any European military is crazy. We're talking about a rag-tag militia here.


There are areas where Hamas was stronger and areas where it was weaker, as is true in any military comparison.

Hamas was no rag-tag militia. It was also a government organization which spent billions building a military tunnel system that was longer, better and more effective than any European power has today. They had tens of thousands of soldiers. They could reach into the deep pockets of Iran and Qatar, and diverted billions in international aid. They had tens of thousands of rockets, most inaccurate, but all with real explosives and predictable trajectories. They also developed a unique warring strategy where they put their own population at risk by firing rockets from schools, storing weapons in children's bedrooms, and so on. Hamas was a formidable army in 2023. Where we perhaps can agree is that now, after two years at the wrong end of the IDF's military capabilities, they've become a rag-tag militia.


No, they are not stronger in any area. Any European country could hand out AKs to the population and instantly have more men on paper. They don't, because that's not what makes a strong military.

Hamas' strategy was in no way unique. They are a militia fighting an urban guerilla war. What was nearly unique in the modern world was the absolute brutality with which Israel fought an urban guerilla war. They decided to level everything. Imagine if the British had leveled all of Catholic Belfast in response to the IRA. It's a level of contempt for the local population and cynical justification of mass murder that is rarely seen from "civilized" countries.

The Israelis think they can solve their "Palestinian problem" with pure violence. A terrible irony.


It's been years of missile strikes. No diplomacy worked. "Israel shouldn't exist, period". Then 7/10 happened.

What else should've Israel wait for? Dirty bomb? Nuclear attack?


Israel wasn't bombing those neighborhoods for revenge, they were doing it because Hamas build militarized tunnels under dense civilian neighborhoods.

> Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?

I'm not pro Israel, especially not after this report, but your point is silly. The US has sold billions in defense weapons/tools to prevent rockets from hitting Israel. Gaza did not have access to the same defenses. That is why the outcomes look different.


> That didn't happen.

Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.

Your comparison fails at the first step.

> And if it was, we didn't mean it.

And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.


[flagged]


Good thing one can be anti genocide without being pro hamas

[flagged]


Great news then, there are no conspiracy theories here. Just claims supported by the UN Human Rights Commission. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...

[flagged]


Would you care to provide specific critique of the report or just ad hom the authors?

Regardless, no further comment. You’re clearly an ideologue.


The UN isn't a man, it's an organization, and as shown, a deeply compromised one.

[flagged]


[flagged]


I don't open links to CSAM sites

So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer.

I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.


Qualitatively, I now have access to ChatGPT.

How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.


Great, you have access to a hallucinating chat bot. The rest of us are losing access to basic computing and entertainment thanks to skyrocketing prices so that these companies can create more refined bots for you to chat with.

While ChatGPT is a partial substitution for a college education, it doesn't satisfy the other needs I listed. I do think in the long term we'll get there, but the current situation matters.

For how much longer?

its only going to get cheaper.

Not for a while.

The AI companies are hemorrhaging money. The hardware to run these models is not cheap, nor is the costs for electricity and water to run and cool it.


And I would estimate 30% of people using tax shelters are underpaying their taxes. If there's profitable work to do for tax auditors, hire more auditors and cover both problems.

I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions.

And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.

BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.

Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.


It's very easy to lock up alcohol/cigarettes, a child should never have access. Internet usage is more like broadcast media, a child should have regular access.

The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not enough.

We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass education about the dangers is a good baseline.

EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to alcohol!


Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with a parental filter option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a parent through setting up a system if they want something more custom.

If people want to push, they should just push to make these set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And perhaps fund some advertising for these features.


Router parental filters are accountability sinks. They don't actually work, and they can't because we spent the last 20 years redesigning network protocols to prevent middle boxes from tampering with connections.

In what sense? DNS blockers work generally do they not? Adguard also censors google search results.

I don't see why your kid should be browsing reddit.

I mean even only allow whitelisted sites. As I say this can be standardized further.

These measures I truly believe do not need to be 100% foolproof so long as the hurdle is high enough that children give up it's fine. And these measures could potentially notify a parent of a suspected breach or attempt to game it, without intruding too much into the child's privacy.


DNS blockers only work if the device/application is not adversarial or if you also have a smart enough firewall to block DoH, which is designed to blend in with web traffic. Once ECH is widespread, you'd likely need to MitM the device (so you need to install your CA, which is intentionally made very difficult and you might not even be able to do across all apps anymore on mobile devices? At least without enterprise MDM. And as was observed elsewhere[0], apps like spotify can contain a web browser), or perhaps use DNS requests as a trigger to briefly open a default deny outbound firewall.

Things have definitely been converging toward making it impossible for non-corporations to manage the devices they own, the network they run, etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069


This is very interesting thanks.

I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices.

On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate? Are we talking about children or black hats?


The black hats in this case are the software vendors. If your software prevents any ability to inspect any of its traffic (so you can't use external filters), and the OS doesn't offer ways to override/hook into that, and if the inbuilt parental controls are insufficient, you can't do much.

What are you going to do when every application (including web browsers) simply ignores and bypass your DNS filtering "for security" and every site is opaque (e.g. wikipedia looks just like pornhub to your router and every site is using one of a small number of major frontend proxies like cloudflare that's actively specifically working toward traffic opacity)? It happens that every major commercial non-server OS vendor (except Redhat?) is an ad company now, so they all have a reason to block your ability to filter traffic/restrict your configuration to only what they allow. And they're all working toward that.


Good point well made.

This is where Apple, Microsoft and Android need to step up. Indeed they already have in many ways with things being better than they used to be.

There needs to be a strict (as in MDM level) parental control system.

Furthermore there needs to be a "School Mode" which allows the devices to be used educationally but not as a distraction. This would work far better than a ban.


I dunno man. IMHO, kids should not have access to devices of any kind until the brain develops. Im not sure what that number is, but lets say its 15. At that point, we as parents need to be role models and let kids make mistakes. There is this whole idea that if you focus too much on security, you open the door for increased risk. I feel this applies to this situation[0].

When I was a kid, when I reached a certain age, 13 I think, there was nothing my parents good could do to stop me from learning from my own mistakes. I think using blanket laws and tech to curb internet behavior is just going to backfire.

[0]: https://news.clemson.edu/the-safer-you-feel-the-less-safely-...


Microsoft has done a good job with Microsoft accounts and Microsoft Family Safety. It's about as user-friendly as you'll get outside of Apple, though the speed could be improved. And this only covers PCs, Android 's system is less good.

Even with this, the problem requires more than pushing a button. Time, thought, and adjustment are needed. Like home maintenance, its necessary but not everyone can do it without help.

Getting AI assistance is good advice.


They could provide all the tools in the world. Unless there’s legislation change to what children are allowed to consume legally, everyone will largely ignore it.

Ironically, the government that is pushing this only set a drinking age just a couple of years ago (as in the last 10 years). In case you believed this was actually about kids.

Agents are a "self-driving car for the mind". I don't enjoy or dislike driving, but lots of Americans love to drive. In the future they will lament their driving skills' decline.

We as the general population have consistently lost lots of skills from just 200 years back. Most likely we will not miss them (though coding used to be my hobby).

Though if apocalypse happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issu.


>Most likely we will not miss them

given that we've also lost the faculty to look at the past with anything other than contempt most people wouldn't even know what they miss. The little problem with losing the 'general cognition' department, just like broad social or cultural decline is that you lose the ability to even judge what you're losing, because the thing you just lost was doing the judging


Though if ~~apocalypse~~ war happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issue.

A lot closer than you think, too


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: