Gaza is the the grave yard of not only Palestinians, but the lie of a rules-based international order. Israel has been allowed to get away with - the backing on it's western allies - flagrant legal violations of international law, alongside accusations of Genocide by the ICJ.
Well, that's because the premise of actions or policies being "right" or "wrong" is very simplistic.
Both sides are active in the PR front, you think those "free palestine" rallies organize themselves?
I think that is probably an exaggeration. I don't see a lot of reason to believe they have the most advanced machine and I don't buy that their PR machine exists to ameliorate ethical lapses. PR/Propaganda is power and all regimes want power.
I've seen incredible amounts of (justfied) anti-Israeli action press, so I don't particularly believe they have a wildly successful PR machine either.
China, the US, and Russia are all clearly advanced. Facebook alone got significant press for weighing in substantially on elections across the world. Twitter, before Elon, was used to coordinate against despotic regimes all over the world. Hollywood alone has incredible soft and hard power.
NSO group's Pegasus, and their selling software to despotic regimes so that they can find and torture/murder/scare journalists is much more telling of Israel's ethical core, as is their bombing of associated press offices.
Seeking power is not mens rea, directly harming those who would report your misdeeds is.
Countries can change wildly in a generation. They don't get a good behavior pass for historical dates when different people were in power or even alive.
So as long as Israel is jewish we should let it do whatever it wants? What exactly would Israel have to do to the Palestinians before they cross the line in your opinion?
No, I'm not saying you should let it do whatever it wants. I'm saying you shouldn't have a double standard where only Israel's victims get you exercised and not those of China[1], Russia[2], Syria[3], Sudan[4], Pakistan[5], Turkey[6], Yemen[7] and more.
This isn't whataboutism. This is asking about a double standard. The world failed to get anywhere near as excited about the other cases. If that applies to you as well, I'd love to hear an explanation why that doesn't include the J-word.
I agree with you. Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians should stop and the mistreatment those countries do should also stop and I don’t think we should let any of those countries do want they want with the excuse that some other country is also doing a similar bad thing.
I also think that when criticizing China we don’t need to bring up criticism of Israel in some kind of “equal criticism” principle to avoid offending China or visa vera.
Genuinely asking you. Why do you think only one of these conflicts triggers protests around the world? The first protests even before Israel fired a single shot?
> “This level of organization only exists on one side of the conflict,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a former cyber policy adviser to the Defense Department who studies disinformation and propaganda campaigns as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It exists for pro-Israel voices, and it exists because there are government ministries in Israel that support these tools and encourage their use.”
> Brooking and other experts said they aren’t aware of any similar tools for Palestinian supporters.
Because most of the Muslim world shares false propaganda against them, and they are billions of people against ~10 million?
Why does tech used have any effect on what is true? If you don't fear the truth, you should be happy that the minority has the tools to get more data out.
Israelis on TikTok and Israeli leadership make the best case against Zionism. They’re openly racist and genocidal. As someone who’s not religious it’s clear the Palestinians have the moral high ground by a long shot.
Palestinians have the moral high ground because it was their land that was invaded in 1948 and they been oppressed by Israel ever since. The “rapes” have been discredited over and over. One of the many things Israel does that is very obvious to outside observers is to lie constantly in the most obvious of fashions.
Not going to engage in a discussion about valuing human lives, but what are you suggesting? The attacks on ships should be allowed to continue because the conflict?
I was pretty young when I was taught that two wrongs don't make a right.
If the US strong armed Israel into a cease fire and to open the blockade on Gaza, two things the US could do if it had the political will, this would stop the Houthi's from attacking ships in the Red Sea. They claim to be fighting against nations supporting the genocide. Seems like they are rational actors even thought I disagree with their methods. Why not deescalate the situation in Gaza and kill two birds with one stone?
Maybe? I guess people just aren't giving the right signal? Generally the attacks are wildly disconnected, though on Dec. 12th a Houthi leader did claim they would only attack ships bound for Israel.
3 shortly after:
"On 12 December 2023, the Houthis launched an anti-ship cruise missile attack against the Norwegian commercial ship Strinda, an oil and chemical tanker operated by the J. Ludwig Mowinckels Rederi company, while it was close to the Bab-el-Mandeb. The Strinda was on its way from Malaysia to Italy (via the Suez Canal). The attack caused a fire aboard the ship; no crew members were injured.[72][73] The ship was carrying cargo of palm oil. "
On 13 December 2023, Houthi rebels attempted to board the Ardmore Encounter, a Marshall Islands-flagged commercial tanker coming from Mangaluru, India and en route to either Rotterdam, Netherlands or Gavle, Sweden, but failed, prompting a distress call from the ship. They then targeted the tanker with missiles, which missed. The USS Mason responded to the tanker's distress call and shot down a UAV launched from a Houthi-controlled area. The Ardmore Encounter was able to continue its voyage without further incident.[74]
On 14 December 2023, a Houthi-launched missile was fired at the Maersk Gibraltar, though it missed its target.[75] On 15 December 2023, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sarea claimed responsibility for attacks on two Liberian-flagged vessels identified as MSC Alanya and MSC Palatium III. The Houthis fired naval missiles at the ships as they alleged they were traveling to Israel.[76]
On 15 December, it was reported that the Liberian-flagged Al-Jasrah, which is owned by Hapag Lloyd, caught fire after being hit by a Houthi-launched projectile while sailing through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.[77] On 16 December 2023, Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond shot down a drone over the Red Sea while it was targeting a commercial ship.[4]
> If the US strong armed Israel into a cease fire and to open the blockade on Gaza, two things the US could do if it had the political will, this would stop the Houthi's from attacking ships in the Red Sea.
This is advocating that two wrongs can make a right, which I fully reject. The degree to which the human suffering happening in Gaza should be stopped is in NO WAY impacted by more malicious harm being caused to other groups. It only creates a situation in which multiple actors are causing harm to innocents - two situations that need to stop.
> They claim to be fighting against nations supporting the genocide.
Do countries in Africa support the genocide because they import grain shipments from America in order to have a food supply?
Saying that supporting a government which has made dozens of public statements that convey unambigious genocidal intent with the actions that seem in line with this intent is one wrong.
Taking military action to apply pressure the first group to stop is not considered an equal wrong by governments which represent approximately 96% of people on earth.
If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?
I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms or if there's some kind of special pleading going on here. It doesn't seem to be a logically consistent position to me, and since that's also the position of an overwhelming supermajority of people who have reviewed public statements made by Israeli decsionmakers, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.
> If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?
Easy - I don't think that, so it's not justified. The opinions of "the vast majority of humanity" are not part of the decision making process that has resulted in this situation.
> I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms
I don't wonder, I believe it is! These are the (simplified) axioms along which I form my opinions about not only this, but all geopolitics in general:
- Actions that cause human suffering are bad.
- Actions that reduce human suffering are good.
- Innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable.
- Force will be required; conflict is inevitable; the world is imperfect.
- The use of force is righteous or not depending on how the resultant innocent suffering is accounted for before, during, and after.
I believe that my opinion is completely consistent with these statements. You asked if using violence to stop other violence is wrong, and my answer is "it depends". If the Houthis were taking action against the those actually committing the atrocities, we'd probably not be having this conversation. Deliberately causing harm to innocents is never acceptable, never right. This is terrorism as a tactic.
If you think that second order violence IS an acceptable course of action, where do you draw the line? How much societal disruption in countries with less food security are we willing to induce?
As you said, innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable. Is the logical axiom that international shipping which is connected to the US and Israeli economies is more innocent than Palestinian children? Is any cargo ship crew more innocent and less culpable than say, an infant?
If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.
> If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.
This is an absurdly bad faith interpretation of what I've said. You and I agree on the conflict in Gaza. The only opinion that I've offered is that terrorism isn't an acceptable response from a third party.
If you agree that there is too much collateral suffering in Gaza, but you're happy with a course of action that is deliberately inflicting more collateral suffering, then you're a moral hypocrite.
Comments like these operate from a premise that the UK/US are some kind of global Empire that is picking and choosing where it gets involved. In some ways, that's actually true. But not true enough, unfortunately in my opinion, for your comment to accurately describe the decision making process going on within UK/US leadership circles.
I genuinely wish it were so that the US were powerful enough such that some junior staffer in the State Department could snap his or her fingers and end the conflict in Gaza.
Are you saying that Israel has received less military and economic aid since? Are you saying that President of the United States is unavailable for some reason? Or are you saying that the newspaper article from 42 years ago is false or misleading?
As someone that’s generally pro Israel on most things, they are literally massacring men, women and children. They’re culling them like sheep. The response to freedom fighters mounting a resistance shouldn’t be genocide.
It seems like people wake up when it is about Israel but nothing is commented about other athrocities. Double standards are more a mirror about the people. It is not about the issue itself but about the obsessive focus on one topic. If you look at HN most articles pro Israel are flagged while anti-israel does not.
There is a double standard but it's not the one you think.
Israel is the only state that can get away with such behavior without a single sanction. Russia is under a severe package of sanctions for doing something that is not fundamentally different.
Israel is also a particular focus in the West (and especially in America) because it's done with US support (in the UN) and US weapons. So, yes, people are talking about it more than, say, the situation in Myanmar. Note that there are also sanctions against Myanmar, among other things a ban on military sales to them for what they are doing; so can we now similarly ban the sales of weapons to Israel?
I think a lot of what Israel has done is hard to defend, but it is all very much unlike what Russia has done. An organized military organization didn't invade Russia from Ukraine and kill hundreds upon hundreds of civilians, face to face, and then return to Ukraine vowing to repeat the attack. That did in fact happen to Israel.
They don’t offer exemptions on human rights if you have the right motive. Human rights are supposed to be kept regardless of past wrongs. So what happened to Israel prior to their violations of international agreements is irrelevant. The double standard here is that both Russia and Israel are guilty of breaking human rights but instead of ordering sanctions against Israel, many nations offered them more weapons to double down on their atrocities. And in fact Israel’s crimes against humanity far exceed those of Russia. So the double standard is even amplified.
Sorry, I’m not that good at making my argument clear.
What I’m rebutting—or rather making a poor attempt to rebut—is your hinting that the international double standard doesn’t exist, or at the very least is understandable. The interviewee in the al-Jazeera interview makes a much better argument for the existence, the importance of recognizing, and the inexcusableness of this international double standard, better than I ever could.
This particular criticism is not directed at Israel, but at countries supporting Israel, such as the USA and the UK. The point is that human rights violations are enabled and even supported by third countries when Israel is the perpetrator, but not when Russia is the perpetrator.
Again: the situations are not comparable. Russia was unprovoked and has a stated objective of annexing a sovereign country. Israel is in fact under military threat (was, in fact, attacked, gravely), from territory it has occupied since 1967. It is unsurprising that the international responses are not equivalent.
A short way to sum this up is: regardless of the distaste many in the west (myself included) have for the means by which Israel is pursuing it's goal, the west is unanimous in support of that actual goal: no western state believes Hamas should be left to govern Gaza, even as many probably do quietly hope to haul Netanyahu to the Hague (if the Israelis don't imprison him first).
Meanwhile: every western state actively, viscerally opposes Russia's goal.
Again: When it comes to crimes against humanity, that doesn’t matter. Signatories to the Geneva convention convention are expected to uphold international humanitarian laws even when greater crimes are committed against them. The same applies to the Genocide convention. The international community is supposed to punish signatories which violate these convention, and in the case of Israel, they routinely don’t.
No, I'm saying that military aid to Ukraine and Israel are orthogonal to international criminal concerns about the way both conflicts are being prosecuted.
Everything you wrote following the word "should" was abusive. Please don't write things like that; I've done nothing to merit incivility from you.
> Israel is also a particular focus in the West (and especially in America) because it's done with US support (in the UN) and US weapons.
You are nitpicking historical events. It's critical not to view events in isolation, they are deeply linked to the past, rather than being a series of unrelated incidents.
In 1948, following the UN Partition Plan of Palestine approved the creation of two states (this decision was made by the same United Nations to which you referred) Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq attacked Israel (yes, Israel because it was approved as a new country by the UN in the same way it happened to other nations).
US did a weapon embargo [1] that no benefited Israel (and the five other attackers). In this conflict, Israel was in a defensive position and Israel won that war without US support. The history is fluid.
Also, at that time Iran mas a monarchy and in 1979 after the Iranian revolution converted into a theocracy. Iran uses proxies for igniting more fire into the region. Not an opinion.
We can talk in the future again once Iran, probably, converts into a nuclear power.
In response to the straw man that people who criticize Israel never do so based on principles they apply to everything else as well, which warrants no response at all. It's not even worth taking note of at this point, it's just a square on a bingo card that got real old real quick.
I was just saying that there is no such thing as an insufficient counter-argument to something that can't even stand on its own. "People who say X NEVER say Y" is just.. nothing.
And when I "apply logic to the human world" there is not an instance in which I'm not fully "inside" the human world myself. Logic isn't some magical outside thing, and like conversation it doesn't have to be a means to an end.
What does "war" have to do with dropping 2000lbs bombs in one of the most densely populated areas of the world, bombing refugee camps, stripping people in the streets, sniping a 70 year old women with a white flag and fleeing with a child, destroying streets just to make Gaza unlivable, singing about how there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, spraying demented graffitis in the homes of Palestinians that are either racist or religious zealotry? Politics? All that stuff is a result of personality disorders and group dynamics between people with personality disorders. The incapability to have empathy and the inability to reflect, the positive NEED to deflect every single time, talk about the other, talk about something else, is the one constant.
So you can't answer the question, instead of making it about me. Called it?
So, are you denying it? Here's IDF dancing chanting genocidal stuff. And what they showed is nothing compared to what's out there. As the SA legal team said, the refrained from shock value. Let me know if you need more.
(isn't it "funny" how like 1% of the Western Channels that reported on Israel's "defense" didn't say a peep about the day before that? That's a matter of record now, too, another thing that won't be forgotten nor forgiven. The casual treatment people in Palestine like vermin, if not just collateral, was heard around the world. The people who are already tired of hearing that are in for such a rough ride.)
There's taxis and busses with genocidal slogans driving around. This goes way deeper than the prime minister, countless other ministers and Knesset members, IDF generals and IDF soldiers.
> The US and UK are bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, so that Israel can continue its genocide and mass displacement of the Palestinian people in Gaza without disruption. That's the reality we're in.
While Jason Cameron can't answer the question if turning off water is a breach of international humanitarian law because "he's not a lawyer".
> 3. South Africa has come to this Court to prevent genocide and to do so in the discharge of the international obligation that rests on South Africa and all other States under the Convention. The consequences of not indicating clear and particularized, specific, provisional measures - and not taking steps to intervene while Israel disregards its international obligations before our eyes - would, we fear, be very grave indeed: for the Palestinians in Gaza, who remain at real risk of further genocidal acts; for the integrity of the Convention; for the rights of South Africa; and for the reputation of this Court, which is equipped with and must exercise its powers to afford an effective realization of the rights under the Convention.
> 4. That means, we respectfully submit, indicating the provisional measures being sought by South Africa, as well as any others in addition which the Court might deem appropriate. Justice, and equal respect for the rights of Palestinians, points overwhelmingly in favour of these critically required provisional measures.
----
(Oh, and also I'd like to add that I had no idea who Jason Hickel was, just had seen that tweet and agreed with it.. but I checked him out since and I wish I could edit that quote out, because that man is terrible)
1. It's not clear what that expression actually means; how is the population of Gaza used as "human shields"?
2. Even if it was true, does that then justify murdering them? When there is hostage taking in, say, a supermarket the police tries their best to stop only the hostage taker(s) and not their victim(s); they certainly don't bomb the entire supermarket from the sky causing 500 casualties.
Many Western countries have had brutal acts of terrors committed against them, they didn't raze the entire neighborhoods were the perpetrators lived.
Accenture and other large SI firms are responsible for the majority of public and private sector complex and large software delivery projects. Many of them are resoundingly successful and deliver a great deal of value to businesses and their end users. Some do go wrong due to poor management and individual failures, but it would be unfair to tarnish entire industries based on these isolated incidents (full disclosure: I've worked for several consulting and SI firms in the past).
I worked for Accenture's previous encarnation (Andersen Consulting) in the early 1990s. It was my first job, I was a staff consultant. I obviously was not privy to the higher levels of the project and I left after a year for a better opportunity, so I also don't know how the project ended up. But everything seemed well run (if heavyweight on staff) and we delivered well tested code that worked.
I work in management consulting and design and assure complex IT systems for large public sector organisations, acting as an intermediary between business stakeholders and technical teams. The work requires strong communication skills, stakeholder management, commercial awareness, and technical skills. Solution architects typically have a background in software development and have extensive experience working in a variety of industries and technical domains. It's massively unfair to suggest that Solution architects just "talk about" things as suggested by another commenter. In the public sector especially, problems are big and unwieldy (think legacy systems, poor interoperability, multiple stakeholders, regulatory requirements, multitude of use cases, technical governance etc.).
Imagine a company with say ten people. Five do customer service. One writes the Android app, one writes the iOS App. Two of the others are technical cofounders and wrote and maintain the servers, as well as design the products. What do you see yourself doing with those skills as the tenth person?
If a startup needs those skills, it's not really a startup anymore.
Wow. It’s a relief to know that you only need 11 employees or a some customized installs for your company to be established. VC really is a racket, I guess.
In any case, I’ve seen that role as Sales Engineer at enterprise startups in the 50-100 employee range, but haven’t focused enough on that space to offer more specifics.
If nobody else replies constructively here, I’d start by looking for the appropriately sized enterprise startups on Crunchbase or LinkedIn and see what you can notice about their titles and org structure.
Startups rely on building an ensemble team that covers all the needed responsibilities with the minimum cost in staff. So the way those responsibilities get sliced depends on whose already involved.
If you're ready to explore smaller, earlier-stage teams, you can just pitch what you might contribute and see how well it fills a whole in the ensemble. Often, you'll be able to negotiate for a title that fits your own career trajectory, since titles are pretty much BS in that world.
Anecdotally:
I was once hired as CTO where the founding team consisted of high profile non-tech professionals who knew their industry and had connections to mine for sales/fundraising/partnership. And my own preference in that role is to not code as I find it hard to settle into the deep creative flow of my coding process amidst a lot of more piecemeal tasks and meetings.
I've also seen and passed on CTO opportunities where the founder was (say) a young MBA with some family wealth to seed the earliest days. That's often a more skeleton crew deal at that point, so the CTO may even be the only developer for a while.
Classic Sonic games are based on momentum and not speed. The aim isn't to run through the level as soon as physically possible; speed is only one (small) attribute to the games overall qualities.
