In this specific case it is something interesting to follow and to analyze. This will definitely have consequences on Russian-Ukrainian war too. UN overall is powerless - there are 7000+ UN peacekeepers in South Lebanon right now. What are they doing there?
The deliberate destruction of a group of people and its culture (completely or partially).
This fits the general description of what Israel has been up to in Palestine since 1948, but especially during the past few years.
Indiscriminate killing of civilians. Planned starvation. Poisoning wells. Denying Palestinians the right to return to their homeland. Forbidding the use of Palestinian cultural symbols. Denying Palestinians the right to fish/conduct business. Keeping them under curfew and surveilling their every move, making them as miserable as possible. Mass imprisonment. Denying Palestinians home-ownership.
Systematically destroying Palestinians and any chance for them to thrive/ found a state/ have human rights.
Genocide definition is: the deliberate, systematic destruction—in whole or in part—of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group
Israel most probably did war crimes (white phosphorus usage seems to be confirmed, while IDF says they have not used it), but I don't think that Israeli has intention to destroy Palestinians. The have intention to destroy Hamas or Hezbollah.
2) Israel has had genocidal plans for Palestinians since before Hamas existed (see the Nakba). In fact, Likud brought Hamas to power, because they saw them as a more fitting opponent than other groups (who were less militant).
3) Israeli politicians (not just current ones) have candidly stated they wish to destroy Palestine, Palestinians, and any chance for them to live in theur homeland
For gods sake, educate yourself. One easy thing to look up is a timeseries of deaths/year of Israelis due to Palestinian violence vs. deaths of Palestinians due to Israeli violence. That should do enough to dispel you of the idea that Palestinians are the terrorists in this case
Why not? There is at least theoretical chance to get some justice regarding Benjamin Netanyahu crimes if they are proved. As well Israel is democracy and can be changed. It is not like Russia where people don't have freedom of word.
Well, considering that the odds of a person on Earth not being a descendant of Abraham is practically zero, why not give Israeli citizenship to everyone? Of course, with special protections for the Jewish people. Then, we can be done with the everlasting conflict.
Getting downvoted by all the emotional people here is not worth it; this thread does not welcome a polite discussion especially from the pro-Israel side. Like in any social media with a voting system (terrible idea, I might add), the vocal and active majority wants to disentivise the disagreement.
I don’t see any pro-Israel side commenter here but me at best. IMHO I do my best to keep discussion as polite as possible having in mind the sensitivity of the topic.
The strict definition of the Geneva conventions does not include forced displacement but in some parts of the world that is included in the definition of. And legality is a matter of tribunal and none has been held so far.
why do we care? there are many other countries around the world that are much worse and we are not sending our soldiers to die there or spending billions of dollars bombing various islands and mountains to fertilize them for next harvest season
Hey man I am a Mileikowski, he is a Androvich, she is a Berg, etc etc we are all totally the real ancient keepers of the Levant, trust us. Don't listen to the people already living there for decades and centuries before we landed there from europe a few decades ago.
Imagine russia or china sponsoring and arming protesters in US. The last time US was actualyl attacked it put 120k japanese people into concentration camps just because they were japanese.
It's ironic that a country ruled by a pedophile and mass child murderer talks about how good or bad another country ruling class is. Wtf look at you own rulers and ruling class before worrying about what other countries rulers are doing. Most of you buy the bullshit of you being the good guys vs them being the bad guys there is no such thing.
Yea, I do wonder, why that might be? Why is a country 1500 miles away, that doesn't even share a common border, preoccupied with the destruction of Israel to the point it invested hundreds of billion of dollars in its offensive capabilities and network of proxies on every side of Israel, had a special paramilitary wing (Quds Force) for operations inside Israel, had a public clock counting down the existence of Israel and called for the destruction of Israel on each and every opportunity?
What's the obsession with the destruction of Israel? Could it be related to the fact that an Islamic Republic of (...) could not accept a Jewish rule right in the middle of the great Muslim Ummah?
Well, for starters just today they hit cental, civilian areas of Beirut with 100 attacks in just 10 minutes - killing more Lebanese civilians in ten minutes than Iran killed Israeli civilians in months of war. Absolutely vile, with clear genocidal intent, and with the aim of stealing Lebanese land.
You are ignoring the elephant in the room: Hezbollah was literally founded in 1982 under IRGC direction; 1,500 Revolutionary Guards deployed to the Bekaa Valley to organize and train it. It is arguably the most successful export of the 1979 revolution's "velayat-e faqih" ideology. So Iran colonized Lebanon.
Hezbollah formally accepts Khamenei as wali al-faqih the supreme juridical authority. That's not alliance, that's religious-political fealty to a foreign head of state.
Iran provides an estimated $700M–$1B/year, plus missiles, drones, training. Without Iran, Hezbollah's strategic arsenal doesn't exist.
It operates as a parallel state inside Lebanon (own military, telecoms, social services, foreign policy), displacing Lebanese sovereignty in the south and Bekaa.
The US and Israel have killed over 3,000 civilians in this war, mostly in Iran and Jordan. Iran has killed like 30. Their attacks are literally a hundredth of what they got and we're still trying to portray them as the bad guys. Don't get me wrong, Iran sucks, but not because of this
Iran has killed thousands of its civilians. The only reason it has only killed a few Israelis (excluding Oct 7) is because they can't easily get past Israeli defenses.
If what you said was true, we'd have seen many, many civilian deaths in Israel over the course of the war - there have, officially, been less than 50 (note that in the same time period Israel - which has targeted civilian infrastructure such as hospitals in Iran - has killed over 3,000 Iranian civilians!).
But what you're saying isn't true - any of it! Iran has been hitting military targets. And they've been using MIRVs, not anti-personell cluster munitions (you know, of the kind Israel has dropped over 1M of over Lebanon). MIRVs split into multiple, independently targetable missiles when high above ground near the target zone. Cluster munitions wait until they are only some meters above ground, and then explode into bomblets.
On April 6, as many as 50 sites were impacted by missiles and their cluster munitions.
“Iranian cluster munitions struck roughly 50 locations across central Israel, wounding at least six, including a seriously wounded woman in Petah Tikva and a moderately wounded man in Ramat Gan,”
Iran has focused on using cluster munitions in its ballistic missile salvos since the first two weeks of the conflict. However, the proportion of these munitions has increased. By March 10, Israel’s Home Front Command said that 50 percent of the Iranian missiles contained cluster munitions.
On April 1, The Times of Israel reported that “12 missiles carrying conventional warheads with hundreds of kilograms of explosives […] struck populated areas in Israel, causing extensive damage. There have also been more than 30 incidents of missiles carrying cluster bomb warheads hitting populated areas, with over 200 separate impact sites.” A ballistic missile attack on April 4, which led to at least 10 impact sites, illustrated how large an area can be affected by one missile with cluster munitions.
My uncle has lost 4 Google accounts. Two to password loss, one to a fire, one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.
> one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
What does this "crimes against currency" mean? I live in several countries at once with different currencies, and I never had a problem with this. And top of this, I travel a lot. I have accounts in 5 countries, in 6 currencies. Should I pay attention to something?
I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.
This feels like arguing that people wouldn't object to having a shock collar padlocked around their neck because it's not currently shocking them. You don't have to see very many moves ahead to guess what happens if you don't object.
Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.
So cementing a dependency on paperclip-optimizing foreign megacorps to intermediate all your purchases and communications doesn't allow them to influence your behavior?
So getting shadow banned into a depression spiral that causes you to commit suicide because you think everyone in the world is ignoring you, or locking the account that all your other accounts at all other companies and even government services are tied to with no recourse, or constantly spying on everything you do with all of the corresponding chilling effects... is your point that it's actually worse than a shock collar?
Are you saying there's a threshold percentage somewhere below which you're happy to
A: exclude these people from society or force them to switch to big tech, and
B: accept the consequence where a single other country holds access to everyone's identity information for convenience reasons (because it works for the 99% that are too tech-illiterate to install software that they control instead of the other way around)
We got panels on our house, and a year later I posted the results, costs, savings, etc on the community facebook page.
Tons of people calling me names and saying I’m just virtue signalling.
My reply was that I spend $0, and over the next 20 years I’ll pocket $25k.
Who cares about the environment with free money.
> It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid
There is only one country on earth that can currently build a new nuke in 10 years. They are currently building more than the rest of the world combined.
For everyone else it’s 20 years at the absolute minimum.
There are two types of balcony solar. One is bidirectional power flow, i.e., classical balcony solar, and the other is called "zero export", in which a current flow direction sensor on your mains throttles back your inverter if you start to reverse the current flow and export power.
Where I live, in the US, National Grid is okay with balcony solar as long as it's a zero-export balcony solar. Your power utility may take a similar approach. They might also take a "if it doesn't cross the meter, and we can't tell what you're doing, then we can't tell you not to do it"
Anything that requires an electrician to come and modify your mains connections (followed, presumably by a municipal inspection), defeats the main benefit of balcony solar, which is that it is a commodity unit that can be installed by non-experts without any red tape.
Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.
The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.
The simple plug-in and go balcony solar is going to be constrained in many ways. Zero export solar is more sophisticated, yes, does require electrical inspection, but given that it lets you add extra solar panels, battery storage and keep all the power you produce on the house side of the meter. There is some win there. Additionally, if you live where there is time of day rate changes, you can store up cheap energy at night and use it during the day when it's expensive.
Net metering is common, but not everywhere and frequently there's a pricing differential between what you buy and what you sell. My mother leased her solar panels from SolarCity/Tesla. She buys electricity at $0.12 a kilowatt hour, but sells at $.09/kwh. Some of the regulatory shenanigans I've seen regarding balcony solar include no net metering. If you produce excess power, you get no credit for it.
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