The topic of one's own hardships vs other people's hardships is frequently on my mind. My stance is that "your biggest problems are your biggest problems". For most people, there will always be someone else with bigger problems and that's not a good reason to invalidate yours or to somehow expect you to feel better about it.
I think of them when it feels like times are tough. The pandemic. The cost of living crisis. Job loss.
It's tough.
But it's nothing.
Not really.
Not in comparison to the circumstances some people find themselves in.
Not in comparison to the circumstances other people make it through.
Imagine being born in a bomb shelter.
Imagine giving birth in a bomb shelter."
As tragic as it is, yes, there's probably someone worse off than that. Does that make this tragedy any smaller? I don't think so. Especially the part "But it's nothing" is so dismissive, I can't really get behind it.
Well, that's true, but some people also have an attitude of "if it didn't happen to me, it didn't happen".
Your grandparents went through the Spanish Flu? Well, Dad, we had Covid.
Your parents went through the Great Depression? Yeah, well, we had 2008.
Your parents had World War II? You had to worry about being sent to Vietnam? Yeah, that's nice, I guess, but we had 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I'm not just mocking the youngsters. The things that happened to other people are less real to us than the things that happen to us.
The Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II were objectively worse than Covid, 2008, and 9/11/Afghanistan/Iraq. Far worse, in every case. But most of us didn't live the worse things. At best, we've heard about them. The more generations removed from them we are, the less the stories seem real.
I disagree. It lends perspective if you know that other people made it through worse times. Especially if those other people are your family or, in this case, ancestors. It makes your own problems and challenges look smaller, which lends you courage (for lack of a better word) to tackle your own challenges.
* I can't find a better English word for the Afrikaans "moed" which refers to not only courage, but something a little bit bigger and more holistic than courage.
I agree with you. For one, job loss can be pretty dramatic, nothing to joke about or disregard.
However, for less extreme situations I find this can be helpful. From a recent personal experience I felt that acknowledging the potentiality of being far worse, and thinking about the situations of people who actually are, it helped putting things into perspective and helped me deal with a personal "difficulty".
This is anecdotal of course, but at my lowest point my problems felt all encompassing and larger than me, something I really didn't believe I could overcome.
On a friendly advice, one day I did some dissos (K). I didn't expect it to do anything, but turned out that true detachment from my problems was quite the foreign feeling. Suddenly the true scale of my problems became apparent. Nobody else told me this, I myself came to conclusion about my problems that "it's kind of nothing". And it wasn't dismissive, it was actually a comforting thought because it made the problems less intimidating, something I could work on rather than feeling defeated about.
I didn't really get a dismissive tone from this article, but I think if I find the same conclusion to be helpful when it comes from within but dismissive when it comes from someone else, that's a little egotistic and counter productive.
I completely agree. By that logic, no one but a single person is allowed to complain about their own problems. Which I kind of understand, as "shit happens, get over it and keep going" is life's mantra, whether we like it or not.
> Especially the part "But it's nothing" is so dismissive, I can't really get behind it.
Yeah that's bullshit. Some poor bastard has it worse than you. That doesn't mean your problems aren't real and you don't have to deal with them. It's good to try to keep perspective on your problems but that doesn't mean you need to just dismiss them.
OP here. Thanks everyone for your reflections on this. I must admit, I'm not sure whether the point I made was a good one. I wanted to write what I know of my grandads story but didn't plan a specific point - this just came out. So probably a reflection of how I was feeling at the time and something deeper. But whatever the case, I'm pleased it led to some healthy debate, and I'm going to reflect on what I can really draw from his story. Thanks again.
You and your partner might find yourselves giving birth in a bomb shelter. We tread on thin ice daily, an ice sheet formed atop the worst of human experiences—brutality, war, and disaster.
Daily, we witness how this fragile ice could crack at any moment. The war in Ukraine saw potentially 75,000 lives lost in Mariupol alone. The Palestine-Israel conflict escalates with over 1,500 civilian fatalities. Turkey's earthquake claimed 50,000 lives, upending millions more.
Here I am in central Germany, grumbling about waiting an hour for a doctor when my son had a fever. I won't stop complaining—that's not the point.
The point is to recognize the fragility of our peace and figure out how to reinforce it. What are we doing to prevent these tragedies? And if they do happen, how do we lessen their blow?
Let's approach it like Silicon Valley would with a datacenter outage: You don't just thank your stars it didn't blow up. You dissect the issue and outline measures to prevent a recurrence.
And by "correct" data, you mean data that comes from Hamas and is politically tinged, rather than data that comes from the numerous non-aligned/independent sources?
Don't think what you're doing isn't transparent to anyone who has spent even a modicum of time becoming informed on the topic.
>anyone who has spent even a modicum of time becoming informed on the topic
WHO, UN and other entities furthest away from being "politically tinged" consider the numbers "credible", "accurate", "reliable". I guarantee you what you are doing is very clear also, parroting literal propaganda points. And it's awful to see discussions on specific numbers numbers when any single loss of life is tragic.
>New York-based Human Rights Watch also says the casualty figures have generally been reliable, and that it has not found big discrepancies in its verification of past strikes on Gaza.
>"Those numbers are in line with what one might expect, given what we're seeing on the ground through testimony, through satellite imagery and otherwise," he told Reuters.
The photos and videos of 3500 dead Palestinian children speak for themselves.
Anyone who is interested in the truth and “has spent even a modicum of time” would condemn the killing of innocent children and demand an end to their continued killing and suffering.
There have been so, SO many Syrian conflict videos passed off as Gaza recently. There are also legitimate videos of terrible events occurring in Gaza.
All I ask is that people apply some scrutiny to the sources and don't trust that just because something went viral on Twitter with a caption saying it's from Gaza, that it is. There are incredible numbers of bad-faith grifters who thanks to Elon now have a monetary incentive to spread bullshit for "engagement" and a lot of if has gone viral with millions of views despite being verifiably false with a simple reverse image search.
If that's the case, it's important that you are pointing that out. My intention wasn't to perform an analysis; I lack both the education and the data to do so. I just wanted to get my point across.
Calling Israel defending itself from hostile invasion a genocide is the sort of thing you’d think this wealth of information would prevent, unfortunately it seems the Internet did not shepherd in an informational utopia after all.
No, he’s justifying killing the monsters who go out to murder and wipe out families, then put other families deliberately in the line of fire to try and get the opportunity to do it over again
So you just kill the entire neighborhood? Ok
And after you killed thousands of kids and families because you're targeting the terrorists, what's the status right now? Did you wipe the terrorists? What is the "good" outcome?
This results of this barbaric strategy don't look good from any angle. Is there a problem with the intelligence? It's been a month I think
You do your best to kill as few people outside the terrorists as possible, accepting that because any military is not all-powerful and the terrorists are incentivized to and do put civilians in the line of fire, you will not get it 100% right and civilians will be killed unintentionally.
Not even that, he's just presenting the other side of the scenario, in a probably honest attempt to balance the perspective so one-sidedly presented by the flamewar, pre-digested parent comment.
a thought exercise for you – two blood thirsty maniacs sit in a house, in which, possibly, several people reside. You have warned the people in this house, yesterday, that maybe the terrorists will come to use their house as a base and suggested a way out. In the hands of the maniacs is also a machine gun and they are shooting at a school full of other kids and successfully kill them one by one. Your only weapon is an RPG – should you blow up the terrorists?
> a thought exercise for you – two blood thirsty maniacs sit in a house....
We can already see the outcome on the ground, the response have led to more casualties than the maniacs ever did, and still failed at eradicating them.
Now the question, what would you do in this situation? When you find you've killed and caused more damage than the criminals. And worse, the criminals are still there.
If I was a police chief in that position, and a decent human being, I'd resign for failing to do my job and hand myself for prosecution for killing all these families for nothing.
The story below was on purpose too, just like hundreds more you can find online. And it's been going on for decades. What point is there in trying to one-up OP? And your usage of "by accident" in this context is loathsome, there is nothing accidental about it.
>Israeli settlers in Palestine used petrol to set fire to Palestinian homes in the village of Duma on Friday, burning to death 18-month Ali Dawabsheh and critically wounding and maiming four members of his family.
The settlers are a great injustice. That being said, part of the truth is acknowledging that Israel removed their settlers from Gaza and the situation became worse. There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that any other concessions will make a difference either.
The incident you mentioned is in the West Bank of all places. It is almost like arguing for Pakistan due to an incident in Bangladesh.
Israel may well have toppled Bibi and his far-right policies but Hamas had different plans.
why are those people called refugees 3 generations later and their proper neighbourhood a refugee camp? that's also an issue... the fact that they're use just in a political game by either Arab countries or their own leadership.
The fact that there were military installations below the "refugee camp" (which actually is a legit, permanent city, not a tent city as the name suggests) places the war crime on Hamas - it is forbidden under international law to place military targets near civilian installations, and yet Hamas keeps doing this all over again and then goes crying about war crimes.
So your strategy is just to wipe the entire place?
Interesting, do you have a court system in your country or do you follow similar strategy in internal affairs?
The legitimate and legal (under international law and the articles of war) way is to weigh the military objective against the civilian damage and casualties and decide if this is still a viable target. E.g. it might be legitimate to flatten a house with one civilian and a hundred soldiers in it. It would be grossly out of proportion to kill a hundred civilians just to kill one soldier. Everything between those extremes will be decided by maybe a war crimes tribunal, public international opinion, the conscience of the warfaring parties, circumstances, propaganda, etc.
And there is no possible comparison between the usual peace-time internal court system and international law and wartime law. Those work in completely different ways. International law and articles of war are basically only applicable if some party makes them applicable by force. E.g. if the victor or a sufficiently mighty third party creates a war-crimes tribunal. In all other cases, those are mere "guidelines".
I can't speak for everyone, but in my country the military tries not to create legitimate military targets in the middle of our cities, so it's not really something we've had to deal with.
If you were to carpet bomb, lets say, all the car factories in Detroit, which is a perfect dual-use target, how much of the city would be left?
The more appropriate question would be, imagine a group of American terorists staged a 9/11-equivalent in China. Imagine 4000 people died and that militarily China has an upper hand.
Would carpet bombing Detroit be the right thing to do in responce?
Do these terrorists also happen to be the elected American government (like Hamas is in Gaza)?
Is there a history of America bombing China (like Hamas is doing in Israel)?
Is the US government in fact firing rockets at China at the very moment when China retaliates with the bombing?
Are the Chinese bombs in your scenario actually carpet bombing or are they bombs or missiles directed at specific military targets that America happens to build below hospitals?
> also happen to be the elected American government (like Hamas is in Gaza)?
> military targets that.. happens to [be] below hospitals?
It is tragic that folks in the Anglosphere do not realise how this sounds to someone from a neutral country, say India.
Surely a rational person cannot believe that hamas uses babies as human shields, but at election time they are virtuous and organise free and fair elections?
Unless you also believe that Russian referendum conducted in Crimea, at gunpoint point, was free and fair?
When Russian military would bomb a school, they would also do a press release about a bunker under than school. I think this is copyright infringement
I am not defending Hamas or saying the government is legitimate. Quite the opposite. I am attacking the analogy with China. I wanted to emphasize that China attacking a US city due to the actions of some American terrorist citizens is a flawed
analogy because the terror that is coming from Gaza is not just some citizens but it‘s state sponsored, by the Gaza government and of course also by Iran. A better analogy would be a hypothetically powerful former government of Afghanistan attacking the US in 2002. But it‘s also flawed since the roles as partially reversed. So not good either.
Regarding Russia bombing a school … the Russian government lies whenever they open their mouth. It is far beyond what we see from other governments. Of course they would lie about bombing a school. And their weapons are not great so of course they will hit it by accident. Compare with Israel: They have much more precise weapons, are far less likely to miss and have much more information and intelligence from Gaza. Still they will make mistakes. But those mistakes were also made when fighting ISIS. Many civilians died. Consider this: Nobody protested like they do now.
Regarding the fair elections, well the elections in 2005 were probably fair.
Being German myself, please allow me a comparison to 1933. The Germans elected their dictatorship. Very quickly, within a few months, that government started to dismantle democracy and resistance became very risky very quickly. Certainly that did not absolve the Germans of their responsibility and it does not absolve the Russians of their responsibility right now regarding Ukraine and it does not absolve the people of Gaza of their responsibility in electing Hamas in the first place and supporting them (for those who do, which is not everyone).
That being said - I made a different point. Hope that's clearer now.
that's a big size actually. and let's not pretend they're doing due to lack of space. you don't put your HQ under the biggest hospital due to lack of space. you don't stash your rockets under a school due to lack of space. they know exactly what they're doing and civilian casualities is just another weapon in this conflict. for one side at least.
As we speak Israeli warplanes have just targeted a convoy of ambulances carrying patients too critical for Gaza's hospitals to cope with and who were on their way to the Egyptian border for treatment abroad. The convoy's departure time was announced to the IDF and the world but the IDF added them to the death toll regardless.
But we've already established we're talking about underground facilities. They're largely underground in the city as well. I don't see what the need to farm has to do with anything.
> So your strategy is just to wipe the entire place?
No one but some fringe elements of the Israeli far-right are calling for flattening the Gaza Strip ffs.
What I'm calling for is for a joint Western occupation of Palestine, the sooner the better. Enforce laws, prevent the rebuild of tunnels and Qassam rocket factories, and get rid of an "education" system that teaches Palestine children from an early age that Jews are to be exterminated.
Like the 28-year British Mandate which gave birth to the "state" of Israel as an extension of British colonialism led by terrorist thugs such as Moshe Dayan and David Ben Gurion whose avowed intent was to expel all Palestinians? That turned-out well, didn't it?
I agree, British colonialism and their incompetence in dismantling their empire was and is responsible for a lot of issues in a lot of their former colonies - but the idea of a nation of Israel primarily came to be as a direct learning of 1933-1945.
We are told that the instructions for executing 10/7 were quite specific. Has a convincing reason been given for why on earth anyone, whatever their final objective, would want to proceed in that way? And what did they think the result would be? Appalling civilian atrocities abound in history (Dresden & Hiroshima to pick from an immensely long list) but the morality of these actions aside, they had a definite purpose. Whence the purpose in 10/7? Are we seeing the desired result now?
