I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim.
Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.
I couldn't possibly have given less of a fuck whether Hassan Nasrallah drew another breath; the point is that Hamas and all the regional forces backing it were drastically compromised and/or reduced to their combustion products in the months that followed their May 27 rejection, and they are in much worse shape today. They should have taken the deal in May.
The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.
>We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths
We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18.
:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes...
Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza.
I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza).
I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.
> We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths.
Unfortunately we have.
> Don’t start stupid wars
This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas.
> Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational
Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
> they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it
Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation.
> appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers
Correct. Israel isn't a superpower.
(Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.)
On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't)
> Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win
Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance
even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion.
There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
> the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way
You use it in a way that renders it meaningless. If Israel is a superpower so is Iran, and at that point we’re talking about one nuclear-ambitious superpower encircling a nuclear superpower, a situation that historically justified a whole lot more than bombing buildings.
> he though he had a lot to lose
He was wrong and got killed. Same as Sinwar. The difference is Hezbollah learned quickly; Hamas took longer.
There's an order of magnitude between those two in terms of military power. Iran has little ability to even hit a strategically important target in Israel, while Israel has the capability to destroy anything up in Iran. Comparing those two is as misleading as comparing the Iraqi military to the US right before the gulf war.
> He was wrong and got killed. Same as Sinwar.
The comparison is very poor: not only Nasrallah is dead, but his life's entire project has been defeated: Hezbollah has lost its military power and also its political power in Lebanon, the blow it took was crushing. On the other hand, Hamas still controls Gaza and will replenish its forces easily because they have full support from the population at this point (some sources even suggest that Hamas has gained more militants than it has lost in the war already, and even if it's not yet the case, there's no doubt it will in medium terms at least).
Israel has been unable to convert its tactical victory into a strategic one against Hamas, whereas the defeat of Hezbollah is a strategic one (Jolani put the nail in the coffin by taking over Syria).
11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
> that's not war, thats war crimes
It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.)
The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons.
I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...
Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children.
2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied.
3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then.
The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds.
The dynamics of how they unfold is that I am dropping links from well respected (and frequently Jewish Israeli) institutions and getting bombarded by whataboutisim, misinformation and semantic arguments that interest no one but the commenter.
The dynamics is that one side cares about history and the truth and the other side is a whitewashing campaign for genocide.
"Hamas surely deserves some credit for the deaths" This is literally equivalent to saying the Jews deserved [some credit for causing] the holocaust.
There are people in this thread breaking down the history from literally 139 BC to the current day (although hardly anything before 1920 is actually relevant to the current conflict).
To handwave all the complexity away when it's presented to you in a form that would take only a few hours to fully digest and say "both sides"... it's definitely a choice.
Is Hamas technically at fault for giving Israel an excuse for committing genocide?
I guess, if you think such a thing is even possible.
I'm sure these are beliefs you hold in good faith that you've worked hard to inform yourself about but this comment is a case in point for why I think these threads are cursed. You're convinced there's no discussion to have at all. That's a reasonable perspective to have! But then: what are we doing here?
> wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then
Very difficult to predict. Israel unilaterally rejecting a ceasefire plays very differently in the Congress and Tehran than both sides telling the other to fuck off.
The US administration under Bidden has not shown a single sign they were willing to put pressure on Netanyahu, and regarding Iran Israel has full escalation dominance over them and it's not like they care what the Iranian think of them.
Have you ever been party to or close to an important legal proceeding?
Anything said and documented prior to the hearing will be combed through. Even tiny inconsistencies will be cherry picked and entered as evidence to raise doubt of the claims made.
I'm all for the sentiment behind a CEO addressing ongoing lawsuits candidly, but in reality its just a bad idea. Statements made without being fully vetted by council, with the context of all other statements already made, will inevitably have issues that could throw a wrench in the case.
If the fundamental constants are not constant, why not expect them to change in this galaxy as well? The appeal to "other galaxies" seems suspect to me, a way to evade falsifiability.
"A way to evade falsifiability" is the goal of the statement, given that we've been searching for evidence to the contrary for as long as we've been able. We haven't found any, and we've searched close-at-hand the most thoroughly.
The galaxy is very small compared to the size the universe. If there were observable differences from 100k light years away (so just 100k years ago), the differences across billions of light years should be much more noticeable.
If the constants are the same in distant galaxies, then that's either a massive coincidence or the constants are stable over both time and space (because of lightspeed delay). The further away we look, the more obvious any effect should be.
If we detect a change then it's worth checking if this is also observable over shorter distances and timescales, and at that point we would look at our own galaxy.
If the constants change over very long time spans, we could observe this by looking at distant galaxies from billions of years ago. We don’t have a way to make similar observations within our own galaxy.
What if the constants only changed over incredibly small scales, vibrating back and forth between two very similar numbers like a standing wave with extremely small amplitude and wavelength, such that any measurement done on even small scales has trouble seeing anything but the average?
Let's start with the universe since the ignition of the first stars. Your question is also super-interesting in the context of the very early universe, so I'll come back to that further below.
Depending on the constants, with significant fluctuation of them you'd expect spectral line broadening rather than the sharp lines we see in precision interferometry, violations of local Lorentz invariance, different structures in "stacked" spectra (like the Lyman-alpha forest), and instabilities in Keplerian orbits. Present measurement precision of subatomic transition spectra has really boxed you in on this: many physical constants have relative standard uncertainties on the order of 10^-10 or better.
> any measurement ... [sees only] the average
So you'd start wondering: in the limit of infinitesimal fluctuations, is a fluctuating constant just constant rather than an "effective constant"?
Where's there's still wiggle room is in the exact masses of heaver generation standard model particles (top quark, tau mass, W-to-Z mass ratio for example) and somewhat frustratingly Newton's gravitational constant, all of which have relative standard uncertainties worse than 10^-5.
However, assuming cosmic inflation, one might expect incredibly small scale fluctuations in physical constants to be stretched, just like incredibly small scale fluctuations in the densities of matter and radiation. This could lead to later-universe regions of arbitrary size with a significantly different value for one or more physical constants, just like we see regions relatively stuffed with galaxies (filaments) and regions that are relatively empty (supervoids). We'd expect that when we look at different parts of the sky we'd see differences in things like the Lyman-alpha forest, the population and/or spectra and/or light curves of quasars/supernovae/variables, and so on.
So, in order to have the apparently constant physical constants we observe, while keeping your idea that there are tiny fluctuations in them, you'd have to suppress high frequency fluctuations in the constants in the very early universe, because otherwise you'd have to suppress gross effects like different gas and dust chemistry when comparing one galaxy cluster to another.
(The cosmic inflation epoch predates the "freezing-out" of some of the physical constants, so my thinking is that during inflation there must be some precursor constant(s) that determine(s) the mass of the electron (for example) once there are electrons after the electroweak epoch. Even after inflation the ordinary expansion of the universe can stretch fluctuations enough that (assuming your idea) there is likely to be a directional dependence on precision extragalactic astronomy.)
I do not buy this excuse. One party has no hangups about issuing ridiculous EOs. The other should rid itself of its hangups in issuing rational humanitarian EOs, because that results in the best outcome for humanity.
Ultimately they did not do that because they expect this cannabis inevitability to be disruptive and want the rollout to appease the pharmaceutical companies that donate to their campaigns.
I never understand what people are asking when they debate free will. It's a brain's process. Everybody's got one. Your brain's process isn't necessarily lovely to you, and doesn't necessarily do what you (the brain process) admire, like, or prefer. It's subject to outside influence and isn't perfectly under it's own control, because it's a cranky machine and goes wrong a lot. Some parts of it conflict with other parts. It's slow, and bad at monitoring itself. What do expect, magic? It's still yours, however unfair it may be to be stuck with it. So you have free will, whoopee.
If consciousness (and choices, the output of consciousness) is completely determined by the brain's physical process, then there is no such thing as "libertarian free will" which is what people typically mean when they say "free will".
Metaphysical libertarianism. Yeah, by definition, that's not compatible with the view that everything is determined by physical processes. This is just people freaking out over determinism. I kind of see why. "I am a physical process" sounds like "I am controlled by fate and my choices are pointless". But a person is a process that can't see the future, and a process that experiments and discovers things. Choices are the deterministic process: the person determines things. I could repeat this several times in different words but I'd just be trying to placate a kind of paranoia that happens when people realise they're physical.
Why are you framing this in terms of placating my paranoia? I have no objection to my lack of free will, it does not bother me. It makes me more empathetic to recognize that others lack it as well.
Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.
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