Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media, like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to 'suck up' to the government because at the end they are business, they need to be in good term with ruling class.
you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that because no one has the time to fact check everything.
One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone can actually look for real information, but even in russia people have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.
Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream media and they enforce the government narrative, you can't speak there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe the government propaganda, your arguments won't be heard at all.
The more i think about it, the less difference i see.
Although not even close in number and punishment the US government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.
I think we do have a much better system because we are aware of these cases, you can speak out about the issue, and our court system can rule against the current admin.
What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.
That is more and more often not happening recently, because courts are not involved. If they are and explicitly request planes to be turned around and people brought back - they're ignored without repercussions.
This part is not settled yet.
As I understand it, they requested that USGOV "facilitate" the return which is much weaker than the "effectuate" in the original court order; ie giving USGOV wiggle room rather than compelling them to undo the harm.
But discussions on the internet seems to be with lots of people who have only a shallow understanding of the balances involved and low historical context
Shallow understanding is a valid issue but that's what discussions are for
Each side is using different tactics to fit the strength of their positions and how well various messages resonate. “They are the same anyway” is useful for a side who wants people to be inactive, it’s not some universal benefit to both parties. Instead each side wants different people to be engaged vs apathetic, which hardly unusual.
Same way you can build a wood or brick home, historically which people chose had a lot to do with local materials.
This isn't then your previous comment that the results are similar.
Goals aren't nearly as important as results.
Also, to dive deeper, what goals and how many are similar, and how similar?
If you mean they are both supporting Israel, then yes, but the Democrats exert more control over their actions. For example Biden was limiting the bomb size that Israel could purchase and Trump removed that.
So if you want to help the Palestinians one side is the better than the other. It doesn't matter if the goals are similar or even the results. There's still a difference and as you can see voter apathy only helped Republicans
I have been talking about the propaganda from each sides of the current conflict in Palestine. I thought this make that clear “in this conflict so it’s really interesting to see how each side is using propaganda” but I may have misunderstood what you meant by supporting Israel.
> This isn't then your previous comment that the results are similar.
To be clear I’m noticing similar goals combined with something (diminishing returns?) yield similar results. Hell, it could also be a form follows function kind of thing, I’m noticing the results not doing a research paper.
> what goals
When I say they have similar goals I mean they are both trying to sway public option to support their agenda.
There’s a bunch of different kinds of kind of propaganda. If one side was doing a call to action for their supporters like “Buy war bonds!” then I presume the results wouldn’t seem so similar.
Ok, but that's every politician (and many people as well). What their specific goal is matters. If one political party supports Israel 40% [4] and the other 80% then there's a difference. It's possible to support Israel and the Palestinians at the same time as well so it's not a clear "this or that"
>yield similar results.
If you are saying something like "Israel is still attacking Palestinians no matter who is elected" yes but to the same extent? What about aid to Palestine?
In 2018 Trump cut $200m worth of aid to them [1] then in 2021 Biden restored it [2]. I can understand if the issue is that neither party are going as far as you might want but that doesn't really make them same and not voting [3] doesn't make sense if you care because it can only make things worse for the Palestinians
Your argument reads like a general frustration with politics, which I get, but it still exists and will always exist. Not participating is the worse option imo.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-cuts-more-than-2...
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210407-us-restores...
[3] Not accusing you here
[4] Just a made a fake scale of support from 0 to 100 for the example
I am not referring to US politicians here. This has nothing to do with republicans and democrats. I am referring to what propaganda from Israel and Palestine directly + groups paid and unpaid supporting their agenda.
> Ok, but that's every politician
Politicians don’t just talk about the same thing one may highlight poverty and another jobs etc.
Here each side (Israel, Palestine) is taking about the same topic (location, war), trying to gain sympathy by talking about bad things that happen to specific people recently, etc
> Your argument reads like a general frustration with politics
If I was equally uninterested in politics and everyone was always talking about the deficit I might feel the same way. But this really does seem unusually similar.
As opposed to non-free-speech cultures like Russia and China where people have absolutely no say in whatever their leaders do? Because that's inevitably what happens when you give people in power the power to restrict speech: they restrict any speech critical of them. We're even seeing this in developed democracies like Germany where a journalist was recently fined for posting a meme online of a politician holding a sign saying "I hate free speech".
The US has a higher threshold, but it’s clear those standards mean many people are duped by “obvious” lies. It’s kind of an arbitrary line, but ignoring the dumb feels like a mistake to me when dumb people are active in society, still vote, etc.
Someone can be persuaded by an argument they heard once, but can’t per persuaded by an argument they never hear. Thus blocking speech by preventing any kind of speech including paid speech is problematic.
Ideas don’t need to win on day one, if it takes 30 years that’s still plenty useful.
Kids who grow up watching commercials start distrusting them. Free speech is not about any one issue but all topics. In many ways curating so people see the kinds of things they agree with is vastly more harmful than propaganda.
Doesn't this lead to a situation where only bad actors exist?
It people are so savy because of advertising why did tens of millions believe the election was stolen?
Everyone doesn’t fit those criteria. Motivated reasoning exists with and without propaganda. The specific words used may end up mimicking “a message,” but you can find millions of disgruntled people after any election.
There’s a great deal of talk around how much social media etc changed the landscape but American politics looks basically the same before and after Facebook.
Trump and MAGA Republicans lie more openly than traditional Republicans. American politics are not the same.
Here's an easy exercise.
This is a post from MGT. Show me anything even close to this insane from an elected person in high office (house, senate, president) in the last 50 years
https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/styles/scale_w1024/s3/st...
In terms of lies here’s one that was a central tenant of the part of the party line for decades. Social security isn’t an income tax because we have a tax called the income tax.
> Social security isn’t an income tax because we have a tax called the income tax.
I took too long to be able to edit my other comment but I should have asked who said this? Because "social security" isn't a tax at all. In my other comment I assumed you meant tax we pay to fund SS but this still leaves me confused, can you provide me with a quote that shows the lie?
>Social security isn’t an income tax because we have a tax called the income tax.
SS tax is a tax on your income, "Income Tax" is a type of tax. Both are true
2. Politicans want money and power. They have no issues lying or manipulating people to get it
3. In a country like Russia the government can counter any information with widespread arrests and fear.
4. In a country with free speech there is little to no recourse.
Meaning that Russia, China, etc can use misinformation against us and we can't do anything. On the other hand we can try the same but they can simply use authoritarian tactics to supress it.
5. Trump has shown that the threshold for lying was set artificially low by past politicians. His success while lying about events that are easily disproven multiple times is evidence for all future politicians to lie.
Which is different than asking if voting fraud changed the outcome and more importantly different than asking which side benefited. Someone who calls targeted overly aggressive culling of voter registrations fraud has something of a point, even if that’s a long way from stuffing ballots or meaningful changes in results.
#--------------------------------------------------------
A 2023 poll found that 71% of Republicans believe the election was illegitimate. [1]. The exact question in the poll was "Thinking about the results of the 2020 presidential election, do you think that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency, or not? Do you think there's been solid evidence of that, or is that your suspicion only?"
All - Note legitimate Solid + suspicious = 38%
Republican - Not legitimate: solid evidence - 41% suspicious only - 30%
1. Democrats or liberals (poll allowed for either) who didn't vote for Trump or dislike him are going to say the election was legitimate regardless of evidence and outcomes of investigations. This is why I only use what Republican voters think (about 2020) as an indicator of public stupidity *
2. This poll was in 2023, after court cases and numerous state investigations/recounts. Therefore saying it's "suspicious" is as stupid as saying there is "solid evidence".
If you have a suspicion a crime occurred, then multiple investigations find nothing or show the evidence your suspicious were based were fake, and you don't change your view that's stupid.
> Which is different than asking if voting fraud changed the outcome...
That's what Trump and many of the key players on his side claimed.
> Someone who calls targeted overly aggressive culling of voter registrations fraud has something of a point..
No, they don't. They are misusing the term "fraud" in an election situation (a.k.a "election fraud) [2]. Voter/Election fraud is clearly defined by the US government [3]. Voter suppression through a legal action isn't fraud. You can claim that it's "wrong" or "immoral" but not fraud.
#--------------------------------------------------------
The difference is clear if you look at something as either an opinion or fact. An opinion is not falsifiable.
"Widespread election fraud is why Trump lost the 2020 election" - This either happened or it didn't. It's not an opinion/judgement. [4]
"Aggressive culling of registrations caused a candidate to win/lose" - Since culling of registrations legally happens [5] whether or not it's aggressive is a judgement because "aggressiveness" is subjective.
> even if that’s a long way
It's not on the same scale because one is a crime. I think I need more to understand why you want to merge different accusations of fraud or suppression when discussing different elections.
#--------------------------------------------------------
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans... [1 Poll Document] - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23895856-cnn-poll-on... Page 49
[2] Wikipedia's article on Election fraud describes it better.
"Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. "
[3] https://www.usa.gov/voter-fraud
[4] You can say "I believe X happened" which is an opinion however this is a judgement that needs a factual base. If the evidence is fake, doesn't exist, or you were lied and you are aware of this, then you're lying about the basis for your opinion which invalidates it (imo)
[5] I'm assuming you meant legal culling
* There's similar high numbers for Democrats talking about Trump's win in 2016 though most polls ask about Russian interference helping him, which is a judgement not a lie since this did happen, but it could also be an indicator. The 2020 situation was just much more obvious because the claim by Trump is of cheating NOT influence. The lie is that Trump was directly involved and to a high degree but blah blah complicated.
Hardly, I find quantum mechanics suspect without having a better option. I’m not saying there’s any kind of conspiracy or anything and sure it fits the experiments we have done. Yet, I suspect most people who actually learn the details have similar reactions it doesn’t fit our experience. Sadly the universe doesn’t care it it seems consistent to us.
There’s a deep cultural divide in the US to the point where people have trouble remembering how close support is for each party. Because politics is so regional it’s easy for each side to overestimate how popular that side is. Imagine living in a county where 80% are voting for one side and almost all roadside posters are supporting one candidate. Suddenly the other side winning just doesn’t fit everyday experience.
When either side wins a huge number of people will find it suspicious, that’s just how our heuristics and pattern matching work. A historian looking back on 2020 and 2024 isn’t going to find the election results odd because wider forces definitely favored the winning side in those elections, but people today don’t have that separation. Thinking there’s widespread and obvious fraud is different.
I agree it’s better that we don’t yet see individuals directly punished at scale for dissent.
But if this is all we settle for we’re like dogs fighting for scraps.
Who is settling for this? It's just one battle when multiple battles occur at the same time and we don't stop fighting.
Are you saying too much is being focused on this issue? I think it's something that if we don't do that then it will only get worse.
The fact that they still hold all the power is proof that, consciously or not, enough people are still settling for scraps. You may not be, but many are, and that’s part of the problem.
Not really. Estimates for the number of people in labor camps, labor colonies and prisons are all over the place, but based on their own fragmented records reached about 2 million by the end of 1938. That doesn't count pretrial/administrative detentions or the hundreds of thousands that were simply executed that year or all the people exiled to inhospitable settlements. And of course, the mortality rate in their penal system was extremely high.
> In the Southeast United States, incarceration rate of the Black population is 7%
Nowhere in the US is there anywhere close to incarcerating 7% of the black population.
That said, the US incarceration rate is ridiculously high and we should be ashamed of it.
That was certainly false if you look at the late 40s (not by much, only 2x or so though..)
However if you actually think (since you post nonsensical “statistics” that’s unlikely) about it the mortality rates in soviet concentration camps were massive, especially in the 1930s or during the war which significantly decreased the incarceration rate.
Can’t have a huge prison population if you just murder or starve everyone to death..
I am 100% sure that support of terrorist orgs can invalidate your green card.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-claims-palest...
> According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
> "Regardless of his allegations concerning political speech, Khalil withheld membership in certain organizations and failed to disclose continuing employment by the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut when he submitted his adjustment of status application. It is black-letter law that misrepresentations in this context are not protected speech," the government said in the filing.
Most of these things are not black/white. We should wait for all the facts to come out.
Oh? Before they deport him? If the courts didn't intervene, initiated from his side, he would be gone
Like indefinitely? Trump’s administration is ignoring the courts and there is no real oversight. Also whatever facts come out they will be drowned by all the other insane idiocy that the US government is doing so nobody will pay attention anyway..
When they start sending US citizens to El Salvador nobody is going to care about some guy whose green card got revoked.
What’s the alternative? Regardless of what Israel did or did not do Hamas could have ended this “war” at any moment they wanted to. None of their actions were in any way remotely in the interest of the people of Gaza. Providing them [Hamas] material or other support only prolonged it..
In case you're commenting in good faith and genuinely don't know this, "Do you condemn Hamas?" refers to a pattern in media interviews from the earlier days of the holocaust. The interviewer would simply ignore what the interviewee said and repeat "Do you condemn Hamas?" until the interviewee answered with a boolean, at which point the interview was over. No discussion was allowed. You either support everything Israel is doing (boolean true answer) or you are a terrorist (boolean false answer). No nuance allowed. No debate allowed. No facts allowed.
Besides Belgium (and that’s nowhere close) there are hardly any successful democracies that were evenly split primarily on ethno-religious grounds and didn’t entirely collapse on the first opportunity.
US and Israel started the Lebanese civil war and the enmity between the Christian and Muslim populations?
Well in a way.. at least the Palestinian refugees were a huge shock that shifted the scales. But the balance was very tight and the country would have blown up eventually anyway.
You can’t build a democracy when each half of the population hates the other half and considers that their ideological views and their ways of life are incompatible. Even US is learning that the hard way (again..)..
You and I both know that isn't true and repeating that doesn't help anyone but further implant in people's minds that the other side is completely irrational and cannot be reasoned with.
No, the US government is deporting people for supporting terrorist organizations, something that's always been a disqualifying position in US immigration law. You'll get your visa denied, or even your entry denied for holding such positions, let alone maintaining an active student visa or permanent resident visa. That has always been the case and simply enforcing laws already on the books does not change that.
> What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.
Equating Russia and the US is an extreme take.
Has it deported anyone voicing support for the Israeli Defense Forces or any of the other Jewish supremacist terrorist organizations currently terrorizing Palestinians? Regardless, your claim that Khalil would have offered material support or even voiced support for a terrorist organization is baseless. Not that it matters either because saying "I love Hamas" is free speech and covered under the First Amendment.
Perhaps currently. How long do you think we should wait until we can start doing that? At the current pace probably a year or two?
I mean.. Putin wasn’t that bad in the early 2000s, nazis or fascists weren’t that awful in the 20s or 30s either (in relative terms compared to everyone else at the time) either. Waiting until its too late do change anything is maybe not the smartest thing, though..
It is in Germany and also in the USA. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the government on this point or not, because the government are the ones with the legal right to lock you up.
please don't falsely conflate opposition to the ongoing genocide of palestinians, with support for hamas
Of course, this means that the reporting isn't very good at addressing its blind spots–i.e., most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites. And I say this as a member of that same class. Most of the political perspectives in my life are completely unrepresented in the opinion columns, which generally tend to pander upwards rather than downwards.
I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-bia...
And from the BBC itself: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d4egk17l2o "Questions still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary"
https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/skcfkb1iyx "From bias to blunders: The BBC’s anti-Israel shift since October 7"
We can fix this by forcing Hamas to release the hostages, surrender, and end this war. Could have happened a long time ago if the pressure was on the right side.
You can't get a picture of reality through anecdotes. In every war you can cherry pick any narrative. For what its worth I've spoken to soldiers who fought in Gaza and they maintain they hold high standards and the incidents you hear of are outliers.
I think it's an interesting question of how we measure bias.
For me, as an Israeli (who hasn't lived there for decades), who has some first hand knowledge of the situation, much of the reporting appears to be extremely biased. I know there are claims from the other side the bias goes in the other direction. What's the ground truth? I think using AI to crunch the large amount of data is a decent first order approximation.
Ofcourse bias depends on ideology. For some people if a Palestinian guns down an Israeli in a Tel-Aviv bar simply reporting this fact is biased towards Israel. And I mean, from their position that is understandable. And indeed we can see some media outlets that would not report these events at all, which I would consider an anti-Israeli bias.
How much are they going to tolerate narratives that go against their financial interests?
The GGP comment said that journalists conspired with the country's leaders, not business.
You can't trust the main stream media, the legacy media is lying, etc
Why would they do this it the media is controlled by them?
All I can say is I hope we see a real economic policy response from democrats in congress, and fast. They seem to be fishing around for ideas in all the wrong pockets (foreign interests, domestic private interests, namely not the daily interests of the majority of their constituents).... but even rhetorically, it would be a start.
Is this AI?
Where can we see evidence of what you claim?
What do you claim Kahn has done? Do you have evidence? The NY Times regulary publishes news critical of Israel.
Children and parents, siblings, etc. disagree, sometimes extremely, regularly. Children and parents disagreeing is one of the most common stories in humanity. Should Joe resign because of dad's activities?
Before the leak there was already data-driven analysis about coverage that, in aggregate, shows imbalance. [2]
This is not only a reasonable question, but it is a good one, too. Unfortunately, the line beforehand:
> Just rumors and conspiracy theories.
...makes it seem like you've already made up your mind, and makes it difficult to interpret your post as a good-faith attempt on your part to learn something new from someone.
First term was fine, he was mostly harmless and made the libs cry every day with fake culture war stuff.
In 2024 I get the impression people were voting for a repeat of that, not some crazy reconfiguration of the entire economy. Trump ran on "they're making your kids trans and the Somalis are eating dogs", not "we will end global trade and deport anyone who criticizes Israel".
And stopping outsourcing was #5 on Trump’s platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
This is a conspiracy theory - they are secretly conspiring. Do you have evidence of this conspiracy actually happening on any scale?
Many attended the same universities on all sides of politics and issues. The universities are big places that have been operating for generations. Ask someone who went to a university - do they know and agree with everyone else who went there? It's absurd.
> most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites.
You need to do more than throw around stereotypes. Give us some evidence.
> I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.
Who asked permission?
Doesn't meet the criteria of what people typically call a conspiracy theory. It's easily verified or debunked by amateurs with publicly available information, it doesn't seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than those of association (certainly none of blatant felony, coup, or world domination).
You mean that you find it credible. But we need evidence; human intuition of truth has led to 9.x thousand years of pre-science.
> It's easily verified or debunked by amateurs with publicly available information
If there was a specific factual claim - about who and what associations - it would take a mountain of research to explore it across the very many people involved. But there's not a specific claim - like most conspiracy theories.
And the implications, the only things that matter here, are unspoken conspiracy theories - again unspecified.
> it doesn't seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than those of association (certainly none of blatant felony, coup, or world domination).
You know what claims it implies; otherwise it would be meaningless.
Yeah but that’s how modern conspiracy theories work. They have evolved beyond the old staples like flat earth and moon landing stuff which make clear statements. They instead just insinuate. And that’s enough to achieve the intended effect: to move your predispositions, while remaining immune to debunking because they haven’t made any specific claim.
That is indeed how modern conspiracy theories work. They make outlandish claims that aren't supported by scientific fact, that some shadowy group controls the world through improbable means, and offer no evidence.
"Hey, these two groups are awfully cozy together" just isn't even close to being anything like a conspiracy theory. You've stretched your fallacious counter-argument too far.
- "You’re not arrested for posting this"
For what it's worth, it's widely reported that ICE is trawling social media to find targets (targeted for their speech/viewpoints). HN itself is one of their known targets.
His coworkers at SentinelOne (almost certainly most of who are citizens) also had their clearances revoked, despite never speaking out on the topic, purely as a North Korea style "punish the whole family" approach to strike fear into people of guilt by association, so that those who have spoken out in any shape or form become social pariahs.
Citizens having their career taken away for saying an election wasn't rigged, or for happening to work at the same place as someone who said this.
If you think the status quo hasn't yet changed to "In countries like China, Russia and the US, speaking out against the government puts both your livelihood and that of those in your vicinity at serious risk", you're dead wrong.
There is a list of things
Instead of just making accusations, back them up.
However many of my issues with CISA are based on my own professional work in security, and that of accomplished professors like J Halderman & M Blaze saying our election infrastructure is insecure.
We’ve been saying the same thing in hackerdom for 30 years!
If my career has been completely about the security of federal & military systems, then some lawyer like Krebs saying our infrastructure is secure when it’s running Windows 7 is a giant slap in the face, particularly given all of the censorship.
You wanted evidence. Here goes:
The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.
At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.
This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.
Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
- The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems, highlighting risks in swing states. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-systems-u...
- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]
- The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...
- The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns about phishing and identity theft. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-record...
- Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-arent...
- Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...
- CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-how-voting-...
- ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be hacked, especially in close elections, with malware erasing itself post-attack. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-russia...
- The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/elect...
- FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001
- Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-machine-hack-demonstra...
- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
- PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-migh...
- Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-decrepit-vot...
- PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-electi...
- Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-elections-hacking-...
- Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-voting-system...
- Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and passwords. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-the-...
- NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack election systems, potentially targeting ballot programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-voting-machines-...
- HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-hackable_n_59...
- Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and paperless machines. https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-democrac...
- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]
- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-syste...
You are a random person on an internet forum, the onus is in you to provide data to back up incredible claims.
The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.
At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.
This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.
Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
- The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems, highlighting risks in swing states. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-systems-u...
- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]
- The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...
- The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns about phishing and identity theft. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-record...
- Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-arent...
- Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...
- CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-how-voting-...
- ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be hacked, especially in close elections, with malware erasing itself post-attack. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-russia...
- The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/elect...
- FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001
- Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-machine-hack-demonstra...
- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
- PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-migh...
- Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-decrepit-vot...
- PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-electi...
- Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-elections-hacking-...
- Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-voting-system...
- Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and passwords. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-the-...
- NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack election systems, potentially targeting ballot programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-voting-machines-...
- HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-hackable_n_59...
- Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and paperless machines. https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-democrac...
- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]
- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-syste...
Considering how Republicans control all three branches (to an extent), the "2020 election fraud" was a key talking point of Trump, and how stealing an election would be a historic crime in American history....the justice department has done nothing so far.
The Republican House spent a year or so investigating Hunter Biden to obtain a gun plus tax charge (also with the hopes of tying Biden to a crime) but not trying to find who stole the 2020 election?
To that end, I am quoting a portion of the text on the WH at the end of my comment here.
Anyone would be right to question CISA’s misallocation of resources to narrative control, and little emphasis on actual cyber security work. That CISA was getting in bed with former IC folks doing Censorship Ops, not computer security, is a very bad look.
There is a reason CISA is viewed as a joke with the federal space and it has everything to do with the lack of performance for a 2-3B dollar agency.
“ Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority. Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic. CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Krebs, through CISA, promoted the censorship of election information, including known risks associated with certain voting practices. Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines. Krebs skewed the bona fide debate about COVID-19 by attempting to discredit widely shared views that ran contrary to CISA’s favored perspective.”
Maybe I'm just a dumb one that speaks up, everyone else has gone dark forest.
You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2 CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.
This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good about this once great country.
I hope every single person responsible for the many crimes they have committed (and they have committed crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next one.
Oh, that feels good to get off my chest.
IME the authoritarian politics had much more support here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then took office.
But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has long been largely silent on the social and political dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That would include especially disinformation and misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also the power of social media. Those are what makes it impossible to do anything.
When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in darkness, I've heard.
The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.
Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.
This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.
The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.
Not very surprising given the current political environment.
HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.
You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.
If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.
What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?
Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.
Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?
> Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.
> Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper.
> Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.
IMO both approaches should have been more measured, but who do you think will propose the ceasefire agreement?
I think the anti-mask people had some valid points, but they sank their own boat by ranting about 'masktards' and 'face diapers' while also demonstrating callous indifference to the large number of deaths.
https://www.charliekirk.com/news/georgia-data-scientist-prov...
If you check their work based on the publicly available data, you find that based on their logic there was a clear case for Trump cheating. Right wing media reporting the story, of course, did not.
No they weren't
Not in the amount of court cases, elected politicans stating the view, and January 6th
When a few Democrats starting objecting to the 2016 results. Joe Biden, in congress during the certification, slammed the gavel down and said "it's over"
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-democrats-...
To even compare the two situations it's insane.
People can take any relativistic position they want, but that difference is essential to anything and everything: The truth about database i/o performance is essential to your project; the truth about climate change is essential to preventing catastrophe; the truth about Covid was essential to saving millions of lives - and many died and much blood is on the hands of the liars.
But the liars were not, and shouldn't have been, arrested, deported, extorted, threatened, etc.
Did anyone have their, and their coworkers', security clearance revoked just for saying either of those? (There are other activities that could have been taken by people saying the election was rigged that could have led to a loss of security clearance, but I don't think that just the statement did it.)
Large swathes of people were first identified for being antivax when they self-registered under the religious exemption scheme and then were harassed and fired. It was cunningly done with the media paying no attention.
Same thing with Covid. Nobody was mad if you thought masks were stupid. They were mad if you didn’t wear your mask, putting immunocompromised people at risk for your own selfish reasons.
There’s a difference between speech and actions. Doing things that actually, literally, kill people is a problem.
Which is a long way of saying the executive can blackhole anyone it wants to a foreign country and no one is going to do anything because god forbid we step on the executive's role to give up people in our country to other countries.
Do you have examples of the executive doing this to citizens or are you being hypothetical here?
Countries generally grant far fewer rights to non-citizens. Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
But how can this judiciary enforce anything, or the legislative for that matter?
The executive branch is obeying the courts, with some pushback.
Language is important from leaders. So is consistency and some degree of integrity. Even disingenuous cowtowing to appearances and political norms constrains power and abuse.
Because if enough people chant that, then it will become a real possibility.
I take this as "Just ignore the rhetoric and threats from Republicans because they are empty and you're helping them spread the hate which gets more them support"
>Because if enough people chant that, then it will become a real possibility.
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you provide an example?
No, you need to stop them. You need a plan for victory. Testifying that they have unstoppable power is an indulgence in cowardice. At halfime, do athletes say 'we can't possibly stop them!' It's just someone acting out their fears.
Who is doing that?
The only way to stop them is to vote.
> Mr Garcia, a Salvadoran
It doesn't matter anyways because the government admitted he was deported due to a administrative error and because they actively undermined and sidestepped the courts authority on several occasions, there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full blown citizens. Honestly, it sounds like it's just a matter of time if this keeps up.
I'm not sure why there's a need to mislead when what's actually happening is bad enough.
You're arguing whether a car wrapped around a tree has a bad alternator. Surely a fact useful to someone, somewhere, and worth knowing. But also certainly not the reason there's a problem.
>"The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. " From https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
I suspect that is one of the main reasons behind the order. It's very obvious that citizen vs legal resident matters very little here, if due process is not given.
She says only the most violent dangerous criminals -- although I feel like we've heard that line before...
At this when they say something absurdly unhinged and unthinkable and if you still don’t believe they will try it.. well.. maybe you’re in the market for a bridge?
Less than 25% of people who were eligible to vote voted for him.
Yes, he won the election and was the most popular candidate.
That doesn't mean "half of America wanted him".
It’s still ~45% now when in any sane world it would be in the single digits..
You seem as if you're trying to leverage that to actual citizen rights... "look, he could be a citizen someday, so that means he has these same rights reserved to citizens". But it does not work that way.
>there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full blown citizens.
Be sure to raise the alarm when they do. I'd be curious if it ever got that far. I think that some on the left worry that it might not, because if they don't have the absurd slippery slope argument then many people would never be concerned about this at all.
All people in the us, legal or illegal, citizen or not, have fourth amendment protections, and if you strip those rights from anyone, you remove them from everyone.
The supreme court has upheld many many times that the fourth amendment applies to all people within the borders of the US.
One might think that the only process due to such a person would be the opportunity to contest that they were a citizen and to provide evidence to that claim. Was he denied this? Did they slap a muzzle on him as he tried to scream "but my birth certificate's in the sock drawer, just take a look!"? If the agents who detained and deported him ran any sort of check that would have discovered his citizenship in time to prevent a deportation (had he been a citizen), this seems about all the process that could or should be due.
PS Am I the only one that notices how the news media always describes him as "from Maryland" when he wasn't born there, didn't attend school there, etc?
They should have the due process to prove they are here legally. And yes, they were denied that.
Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only, you can't prove citizenship status without due process, so it has to be given to everyone.
Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming you're not a citizen and shipping you off to El Salvador. How would you prove otherwise?
This sounds like a nonsense statement. Non-citizens are only ever here legally at the pleasure of the United States. If we allow them in for 2 weeks, or 3 months, or whatever on a visa... we can change our minds and cancel it early.
The idea that they can have some absolute temporary right to be here ignores what it means to be a non-citizen. You have no right to be here, just a temporary privilege that can be revoked at any point for entirely arbitrary reasons.
>And yes, they were denied that.
I've heard no evidence that this was the case. "Due process" rights are, in many cases administrative. No trial, no judge.
>Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only,
I did not say this, and I do not imagine it. I just happen to know what due process rights actually are.
>you can't prove citizenship status without due process,
Was he denied his opportunity to prove citizenship to the agents who detained him? Did he try to get them to look in his wallet for papers, but they ignored that? Did he beg them to just look in his closet and see his birth certificate? That would be denial of due process.
>Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming you're not a citizen
So you claim. But it's absurd to think that will happen. If you believe it will happen, then just wait and sound the alarm when it does. I'll be genuinely surprised.
Really? The things that are happening now are so absurdly insane that nobody could have imagined them just a few years ago, and you are still gullible enough to say something as silly like that...
> sound the alarm when it does
The loons will just move the goalposts yet again. So what would that achieve?
It's absurd that people who aren't citizens would be sent back to their home countries? This is the sort of attitude that makes it impossible to come to any common ground with the left. Do you even know why you want to let those people come here? Do you know why you want to let them come here but only unofficially... I mean, you could pass laws that just grant them citizenship at the door. It wouldn't be wise, but you could've done it at least in more Democratic-dominant times. But instead, you just want them to have these quasi-legal statuses that piss everyone off. It's downright weird.
I contend that there's no chance of me ever being deported. I don't have dual citizenship. My grandfather's family got here in the 1830s. The rest of my family got here so much earlier I can't even figure out which boat they came across in. I only speak English. I have all the documentation one could need of citizenship. And if ICE did detain me, I wouldn't start growling at them like a rabid leftoid and calling them Nazis, I'd smile and explain it to them. And they'd go "oh shit, we thought you were someone else" or something like that, and it'd be settled.
>The loons will just move the goalposts yet again.
Hope so. I sincerely hope that the level of unease you feel right now continues until 2029 and beyond.
I’m obviously referring to everything the current administration is doing not this specific case.
> common ground with the left
I’d consider myself a moderate centrist. Maybe mildly center-right.
> Do you even know why you want
If the only way of stopping them from coming is to surrender democracy to an authoritarian government staffed by exceptionally deranged and incompetent individuals, well.. let them come then..
> I contend that there's no chance of me ever being deported
Probably. As long as you don’t burn down any Teslas or say nasty thing about the president it’s very unlikely..
> of unease you feel right now continues until 2029 and beyond.
So you are willing to give up democracy and the rule of law (and economic stability for that matter..) just to get rid of some immigrants you don’t like?
That's not due process. Due process rights do not guarantee you any sort of court hearing or trial. It does not require a judge. 90% or more of due process is administrative in nature. The bureaucracy infringes your due process rights when they don't "go through the motions" of how to handle a particular situation. How should they handle deporting someone? By checking that they're not deporting a citizen. If they failed to check, if they failed to give him the opportunity to prove citizenship, they denied his due process rights. Did they do this?
>It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the other room. Without due proces
You miss the point. I wasn't asking if his birth certificate was there or not. I'm asking "did they give him the chance to claim as much, and did they follow up and make sure it wasn't there". If they didn't give him the opportunity to make the claim, if they ignored such a claim, this is a denial of due process.
And there was no denial. If you had more than a second grader's understanding of due process, you wouldn't be so confused here.
> What are you gonna do? You don't get due process,
"Look Mr. ICEman, you're making a mistake. We can clear this up in minutes, pull my wallet out and take a look at my identity documents, some of which indicate I'm a citizen. It'll only take two minutes to reveal me as a liar if that's not the case."
And if they refuse, then my due process rights have been denied.
>Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here
He showed up without such permission, then weaseled his way into getting contested permission after the fact. Which was always the case under previous policy, there was no practical way to send them back if they made it 100 yards across the border.
Well a federal judge thought otherwise. The government ignored him and did what they wanted anyway. That’s your definition of due process?
> Am I the only one that notice
So your comment is actually sarcastic?
And on top of that this case should be horrifying to anyone regardless of whether they want to split hairs because:
A) they admitted he was deported in error
B) they are now effectively trying to argue there is no way to get him back
So even if you believe they would never knowingly do this to an actual citizen they are only one slightly different mistake from disappearing a citizen, whether or not it has happened yet.
Nevermind the fact that Trump himself has repeatedly floated the idea of deporting citizens: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/10/trump-...
And then lastly and most importantly IMO it is wildly un-American to believe anyone (regardless of citizenship or legal status) is not entitled to due process.
He was granted "withholding of removal" status in 2019, which protected him from deportation to El Salvador (for fear of gang violence/extortion, which is why he came to the US).
The current DOJ acknowledges that at the time (2019) the "[first Trump admin] government did not appeal that decision [to grant withholding of removal], so it is final". It also seems like they never previously made any allegation that he was a gang member, and that they don't have any solid proof now that he is (other than supposedly one informant who incorrectly claimed Garcia lived in NY, so basically no credible evidence whatsoever).
By jumping the gun on deporting Garcia without due process, the current admin seems to unwittingly be forcing the issue to the Supreme Court very soon. (UPDATE: SC has just ruled unanimously 9-0 that the admin must try to release Garcia.) Looks like the SC's going to be very busy this May-June.
[*] Withholding-of-removal is a pretty rare status, rarely granted by court (>99% rejection rate), much rarer than Green Card, and applicants have to demonstrate credible fear. [0] This procedure is defined in INA § 208 (INA = Immigration and Nationality Act) [1]
As of 12/2024 there were over 100,000 individuals (from Cuba, China, Venezuela, Mauritania, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.) with orders of removal remaining free in the US due to various special interest statuses, including withholding of removal, according to a report from FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). [2]
(Does anyone have stats on what historically happened to people in withholding-of-removal (what % became citizens, what % got GC, what % voluntarily left, what % got deported, what % moved to a different status etc.)?)
[0]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/reference-materials/ic/chapter-...
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/legislation/immigratio...
[2]: https://www.fairus.org/news/executive/new-data-show-over-100...
[3]: https://time.com/7276642/kilmar-albrego-garcia-error-deporta...
>> The [District Court] order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
The only question at this point is how detailed in demands the District Court can be.
The administration attempted to push the boundaries of executive power and lost in court, as has been happening.
Turns out, conservative justices with lifetime appointments aren't too legally thrilled about an unbridled executive either.
> The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.
Which is such a ridiculously bullshit line of thought. This wasn't some person who willingly went to some random country, this is someone the executive illegally put there against the person's will in coordination with said foreign government. I can guarantee you that any order with teeth will be struck down by SCOTUS on this line of thought.
The court is obviously saying that (1) it's correct and necessary to bring him back but that (2) the District Court doesn't have unbridled authority to order any foreign policy-influencing remedy it wants.
I.e. a US court couldn't order a president to sign a treaty
If the administration tries to foot drag further, the Supreme Court will likely order more specific remedies.
By not taking the L here, the administration is just burning whatever conservative goodwill they might have started with on this Supreme Court.
What makes you think the administration cares about goodwill after that? Disobeying direct court orders is crossing the Rubicon. There's no going back to the illusion that judicial judgements will be respected by this administration.
They tried to weasel around the verbal vs written order, and the consequences of that are still being worked out.
They then appealed the order to immediately bring him back, and the Supreme Court paused that while it decided.
The decision then directed the District Court to clarify the how of what it was demanding.
So "somewhat" and "no": they haven't directly ignored the Supreme Court.
Unless you'd care to cite a specific case and quote from a ruling?
> Disobeying direct court orders is crossing the Rubicon.
Appealing a decision is different than ignoring.
And like the multiple other times it historically happened? https://www.fjc.gov/history/administration/executive-enforce...
On numerous occasions (not just the one you mention), they did not obey the direct order by the time specified, meaning they directly disobeyed the court. For example, post-supreme-court-order, they were obliged to provide the lower court with a status update of the victim, and a list of things they've done so far to retrieve them. They directly violated that court order.
It's important to draw a bright, flashing distinction between:
1. Arguing that you think you should not have to comply with an order, but then complying if you don't receive a ruling in your favor in time.
2. Directly violating a court order, and then tossing out a cynical pretext as an excuse which hasn't been preapproved by the judge (they're called that for a reason).
Unless a stay is placed before the deadline, you must comply with every single court order, by the court-ordered deadline, no matter what you think.
At least, that's how it was before. Now the USA has crossed the Rubicon, with the government itself ignoring court orders at will, in order to imprison political enemies.
It was a decent liberal democracy while it lasted.
All John Roberts is doing is asking Trump to go further next time. Whether it's intentional or just cowardice on his part doesn't really matter to the rest of us.
A long game player might even say Roberts is angling for that, by tailoring consensus opinions that nonetheless leave room for the administration to demonstrate further stupidity.
If non-citizen have been human trafficked without due process, what additional protection against it is provided to citizens? Where is that stated?
"Do you have examples of this severity-11 CVE being used in the wild, or are you just being hypothetical here?" It's a horrifically exploitable bug, were it left unpatched.
It's not some fringe conspiracy theory that this is how the law works and how the law would work on contact with US citizens; the Garcia SCOTUS concurrence explicitly underscored this perversity,
- "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens [sic!], without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene... That view refutes itself."
Feels like moving the goalposts. First they were going to clear out "illegals" by any means, now the line includes any non-citizens. Granted maybe you personally didn't say both though.
> Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
Is it meaningfully different from allowing citizens to "spread discontent"? Why not just start taking everybody's 1st amendment rights, by the same logic? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there's long precedent that non-citizens are granted most of the same rights, including freedom of speech and assembly.
If non-citizens are being supported, instructed, etc by their government in spreading discontent, there are probably laws like espionage for that; you don't have to take away everybody else's freedom to stop them.
The most powerful person in the country lied and still is lying about elected fraud, undermining the basis for our Democratic system and was rewarded with a 2nd term.
However the current administration is explicitly considering the idea of deliberately deporting citizens: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl...
The attempted framing is as government oppression by "the elites", but half the country - the regular people - they're all for this.
However then buried in the article is something like they overstayed their visa, etc. Take a sibling comment's link to an article with a "second student arrested" in the title. As in that seems like there isn't a "large number". This is nothing like the reports of arrests in Russia. Especially as some of these pro-Palestinian protestors advocate violence or intifada pretty freely. I've seen that with my own eyes.
If I were a foreign national protesting and advocating for violence against any other country or people group I'd expect to be denied a visa or possibly deported for participating in such events. It'd be arrogant not to expect that outcome IMHO.
Visa applications in European Union countries often include things such as "indicators of good civil behavior". Take the quotes from that sibling comment's linked BBC article:
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution. > She had previously been arrested in April 2024 for taking part in protests at Columbia University, according to DHS. > "It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America," said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a statement. > "When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country."
Nor did Rasha Alawieh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Rasha_Alawieh
Full disclosure, i’m not arguing in good faith. As a Canadian I don’t believe the US has a future, so I’m merely highlighting an argument which is symptomatic of the country’s downfall.
Also I’m more likely to be arrested and deported for silently praying in the UK.
However there’s also political tactics of “look at that poor student being deported” when said student was calling for jihad, intifada, and antisemitism and violating visas on top of that, which was sort of my original point.
Heh and is Canada fairing any different? Remember when Trudeau froze bank accounts for truckers protesting Covid lockdowns or whatnot. Maybe Trudeau shutting down parliament to seemingly avoid scrutiny. Hopefully it’s just news sensationalism and not the downfall of Canada.
> “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
---
You have to say "No" loudly and clearly at the _first offense_, and not wait until it's too late.
> A boycott sign posted on the display window of a Jewish-owned business reads: "Germans defend yourselves against Jewish atrocity propaganda. Buy only at German shops!" Berlin, Germany, April 1, 1933.
It seems that a number of these students have been participating in events and protests calling for violence. After all there’s probably 10’s of thousands of student protestors, and likely many of them foreign students too. So it doesn’t seem like a “deport all Muslim students” either.
Peaceful protests are one thing, but I’ve seen some of these protests in person and it’s clear they’re not all peaceful demonstrations. Also supporting Hamas and Hezbollah is not supporting peaceful innocent freedom fighters. Both groups are clear and open on their stance for genocide against Israelies.
However we shouldn’t deport students who are peaceful and haven’t called for violence against others. It’s great that those cases are being called out and publicly criticized . But not every one of these cases are an innocent student getting caught up either. What is happening is Gaza is terrible all around. It shouldn’t be used as an excuse to call for more violence against Jews or Muslims.
The there’s the question of private ownership of the platform. You certainly can’t say whatever yiu want on YouTube, for instance.
as a person of jewish faith, I ask that you please not falsely conflate these two completely different concepts
someone who opposes jewish people in general is bad, but someone who opposes the ongoing genocide of palestinians is good
your usage of "or" here would indicate that the above good person is grouped together with the above bad person
> If anything some of those pro-Palestinian protests were more reminiscent of the 1933 “German Firm” boycotts
structuring your metaphor like this, strikes me as an example of DARVO [0], considering what is being done to innocent palestinians. how many israelis patronize businesses based in palestine? how many such businesses do you patronize?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-mar...
Also the US is hardly unique in deporting extremists: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/06/16/france-to-deport-n... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy48v8n389ro
How is this argument over right or wrong? The US has a unique system of rights and the first modern Democracy.
>They're American citizens and our problem to handle and tolerate?
Why can't it be our problem to tolerate and handle green card holders, students with Visas, etc
I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from USA as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and please trust me I am not exaggerating here.
I would have laughed at this until pretty recently. How wrong I was.
But the people doing the doxxing complain that any criticism of Ire* for their war crimes makes them feel like there is no place they are safe, I don't buy it but the complainants have a lot of allies.
Michigan-based attorney Amir Makled [a US citizen] was detained by federal immigration agents while returning home from a family vacation
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5357455/attorney-detain...
(Not saying it's good or anything - just not new).
And Israel, where a history teacher was arrested for making a post on Facebook:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/magazine/israel-free-spee...
America is changing. What was true before isn't necessarily true now, and may get worse, depending on election outcomes.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54123/were-over...
(many links in the responses and comments, eg: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-... - " 625 arrests were made for alleged section 127 offences in 2010 " just in london)
I can't tell what you mean by this? Is it sarcasm? Is there another group who is like this?
But back to my original point. A few days ago, I happened to come across some pro-Israel propaganda, and honestly, I was stunned. It was just an Instagram profile claiming to be part of a pro-Israel lobbying organization, but the content was deeply disturbing. They were pushing a heavily distorted narrative, even going so far as to post photos and names of students, accusing them of supporting terrorism. It was all incredibly manipulative. The presentation was slick and more polished than rusias work of course, but the whole thing strongly reminded me of their methods.
The "end of history" theory today comes across, if not arrogant, then at the very least deeply naive.
The western endorsement of the genocide in Gaza has been some of the best PR Putin could ever have hoped for.
It simultaneously underlined the viciousness, the lack of moral credibility and extreme hypocrisy of western leaders in the eyes of the nonaligned world (e.g. the global south), none of whom sanctioned him.
I don’t understand why we keep forgetting that authoritarianism is a slippery slope.
It's almost as though the framers of the Constitution foresaw the possibility of the two elected branches of government (executive and legislative) being monopolized by the same group, at some point.
And that the very flexibility of regular, open, direct elections also required a check to protect the fundamental rights of all people in the country.
The prevention is literally in the Constitution! Do you think other branches of government would be deferring to the Supreme Court if it weren't spelled out that they must?
This has been going on for decades.
> Have you not heard of the arrests and recent deportations of student protestors?
The legality of which will be decided (hopefully) by the courts. If this turns out to be legal, the fault doesn't lie at the hands of Trump and his cronies, but at a broken system we've had - for decades. Getting rid of him won't solve this. Having checks and balances will.
Much of his and Elon's actions are within the power that has been legally granted to them. And that is the problem. Congress is not limiting those powers. Voters are another part of checks and balances, and they happily wanted to give him those powers.
The problem isn't Trump. It's the country. Been broken for a while, but it took time for someone to clearly demonstrate how broken it is.
I do not know what the state of free speech in Russia is, but that explanation is not credible.
People often think that bot farms are only from Russia and China, but on the other side, paid commenters are also used. Unfortunately, it will only get worse with modern AI.
Your funds might be cut off though: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/07/trump-...
Or your president might declare a wartime law to deport all the immigrants: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp34ylep987o
Or you, a honors student (but not a citizen) might find yourself in an unmarked van if you dared to question the powers that be. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrn57340xlo
Sure it happens to immigrants only for now, brings memory to this poem:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
... and they're trying to end birthright citizenship. I.e. people who are literally not immigrants (were born here and perhaps have never lived anywhere else) are already being lined up for this.
The president's literal argument for doing it is that the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
I'm not a big fan of either side's rhetoric, but clearly the horseshoe has become a ring.
Either side? Tell me which "side" does that sound like?
- hostility towards non traditional sexuality
- immigration being used as the scapegoat for economic problems
- strong feeling of national exceptionalism
- assault on women's productivity rights
- politicizing of science
- deportation for political reasons
- "Roman" salutes
It brings parallels with some things happening in Europe some time ago.
> activist groups are coming for all of American life.
I wonder who's actually going for all of American life though. Let's take Birthright citizenship, which has been established in 1868. Is that American life enough for you?
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
And guess who goes against this American way of life value? An orange grandpa married to an immigrant. You really can't make this up.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-bir...
Up until you got to the "Roman" salutes, it sounded like both sides in the US.
Or rather, it will sound like whichever side you aren't. That's the point.
But using "Then they came for the Jews" when you're discussing deportation of these particular people is perhaps a new level of absurdity in the discourse.
The liberals / Dems can barely organize a picnic. They can't agree on anything. There is no Fox News, there is nobody they bow down to. The obsequiousness to Trump is unprecendented.
Birthright citizenship was to ensure freed slaves could not be denied citizenship.
It's served its purpose and we can repeal it and join the vast majority of nations that don't have this pathway.
If a president stretched the limits of executive power to go after guns, half of the country would cheer for it.
The Constitution is a living document, and the line is constantly pushed back and forth on its interpretation and enforcement.
That's speculation about specuation about an undefined interpretation. We are bounded by law, including by the Constitution.
> The Constitution is a living document, and the line is constantly pushed back and forth on its interpretation and enforcement.
There is variation in interpretation, but within bounds. If you want to eliminate Constitutional gun rights, you would need to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
> The president's literal argument for doing it is that the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
What is American life? Why can't people criticize whatever they want - that is American life.
> "Then they came for the Jews, and the administration finally deported the people who were coming for the Jews"
The vast majority of antisemitism is on the right. The administration does nothing about it (and supports and legitimizes much of it).
Also, the Jews will be next. By attacking critics of Judaism, they are entrapping Jewish people (and others) in legitimzing this oppression, and in making themselves into targets of hate. Then when the white supremecists turn on them, and say Jews are conspiring to control American, what will these Jewish supporters of arrests, oppression, and deportations say?
Most of the pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist content I see is denouncing Israeli war crimes and genocide. No one is bashing Jews because of their ethnicity or religion.
Also a lot of this comes from the Jews (who are then attacked for being confused or..... antisemitic)
We're not at the point of people hunting Jews because they're Jews. We are at the point when opposing targeting/killing medics, press, children or hospitals may result in being kidnapped from the street and either locked up without charges or trafficked to the torture camp.
I do not disagree with your comment in general, I disagree with you putting "Judaism" while the almost all the critique and rebuke is aimed at the Israeli war crimes or the Zionist supremacy ideology.
Unfortunately for those of us in the diaspora, Israel has really muddied the waters by convincing people that anti-Israel = antisemitism, because it's given real antisemites cover. E.g., like when the ADL came to Musk's defense after his Nazi salute because he officially supported Israel.
- The Zionist project is an ethno-state, just like those groups want for their countries. This also echoes the Zionist-nazi collaborations before WWII to move jewish population out of Germany to Palestine.
- Israel works as an spearhead of the global imperialism configuration, if you support imperialism on the Middle East -as those groups and their bourgeoisie do- you must support Israel.
- European neo-nazi groups are militant against immigration, and a big chunk of that immigration to their countries is muslim, so they are more than open to the Israel narratives against the muslim world... even the most extremist ones that de-humanizes Gaza children ("those children are future terrorists").
It's good that you brought this up!
It's a common right-wing tactic to conflate themselves with the purest version of something that is highly regarded and hide behind it. E.g the Nazis conflated themselves with "pure" Germanness, the fascists in Italy conflated themselves with "pure" Italianness, the same way now Israel conflates itself with Judaism/Jewishness. Then it naturally follows that if you attack Israel's genocide of the people in Palestine, you are attacking Judaism/Jewishness. If you question Netanyahu's genocidal ultra-supremacist ideology (which many Holocaust survivors, Jewish themselves, have done repeatedly), you are anti-Jewish, and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OdkaTqmDs
A similar thing is happening in the US where the current administration is trying to position itself as America-first, so naturally any critique on them must be anti-American, right? You will find that this playbook is always the same. First will be immigrants, then non-traditional sexual orientations and women's reproductive rights, then the press and universities and finally just whoever they feel like.
Fortunately, if history goes to show us anything, it's these hate-fueled-orders always end up imploding.
That's taking the 'in the long run' analysis to an extreme.
In WWII, after hundreds of millions died - including over 10 million murdered by the hate-filled - major parts of the world were devestated, and the free world united in a massive war, the hate-fueled were stopped. They didn't implode.
The idea that they will implode is a common fantasy that you (and many others) won't have to do anthing, face their fears, fight an uncertain fight. If you really believed they would implode, the fight would be certain. They won't stop until you stop them.
And the same way now progressives conflate Zionists with White supremacists / Nazis.
American life is defined by the acceptance of dissent and the encouragement of even distasteful free speech. If that's not American, what even is American?
It's like watching the rebels and the Empire shoot at each other, and saying "There's no difference, because they're both violent."
For non citizens, regardless of length of time or legality, this is the case right now. For birthright citizens and full citizens it will be the case very soon
Is there a difference?
So far a judge has blocked it when he tried the first time
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5270572/birthright-citi...
But deporting lawful residents? How dare you, America? This is definitely the beginning of the end.
This was so, is so and will always be so, everywhere.
But but but… details matter. A lot.
The west has traditions how and when to apply power, which is distinctly different from Russia.
I hand-pick two illustrations of Russia:
1. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/moscow-police-accu...
> Officers “beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in his anus,” according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.
2. Bald man claim to power was accompanies with mysterious explosions of apartment buildings after which Chechens were declared enemies and war started.
Some interesting bits from wikipedia:
> Three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police.[6] The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the incident in Ryazan had been an anti-terror drill and the device found there contained only sugar, and freed the FSB agents involved.[7]
And
> 13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about the bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that only takes place three days later
> 16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 17 are killed, 69 injured
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombi...
cherry-picked, actually
1. Almost exactly the same incident happened in the USA, NYPD sodomized Michael Mineo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_alleged_police...
None of the NYPD officers didn't have any sentence for this
2. That's an old conspiracy theory, even the Russian opposition (at least the reasonable part of it) doesn't support this theory. There are plenty of publications about it in Russian, and if you will do some effort you will find why
Do you mean the guy who died relatively recently in Russian prison? Or his colleague who was part of prisoner exchange
> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy (generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation),[3][4][5] when other explanations are more probable.
Evidently, different people assign different probability to security chief thinking “while real bombings are actually exploding each week and whole cities sleep outside to avoid death, let’s plant a fake bomb and see what happens”
The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.
I wish we were neutral on this issue. As an American, it is not my business. I am in no position to justly arbitrate between them. But our politicians are whores, our Zionists have deep pockets, and they're not afraid to empty them out for the cause, so it looks like America's taxpayers are all on Team Zionist, whether we like it or not.
Good for you that you started to realize how corrupt the Western media is.
This is more subtle. I have a lot to say about Israel, and I do post occasionally on Facebook, but I tone it down a lot because I have a few high profile people in the industry and academia among my Facebook friends (not actual friends). If I were to post what I really think, this would have serious career repercussions for me. People would brand me as an antisemite (they don't know that my grandfather is Jewish and he practically raised me).
Can you compare this to Russia? Well, I am Russian and I live in the West, so my choice of living here gives an answer to this question. I'd be in jail in Russia if they read my Facebook posts about the war in Ukraine. Yet, I'm now disillusioned about the Western liberalism, all thanks to Gaza war.
You might consider trying not to view the world entirely in black and white then.
This sort of sentiment is not particularly productive especially in times like this..
Whenever this topic comes up, the government just nods at the document, as if it had any relation to the real world.
Social media is not even 20 years old but it’s a tall order to deny it mainstream status since the younger generations get their news from scrolling TikTok and not cracking open the daily broadsheet.
Legacy media has been sourcing from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for years. They’re as mainstream as AP and Reuters but without the reputation or the credentials.
Facebook, the tent-city of media, actually it would kinda work if only the platform wasn’t centrally controlled.
It's time to revoke section 230 for any social media network that amplifies or buries content with a non-transparent process.
In this case it isn't even merely an algorithm designed by humans. They have LITERAL human editors choosing which stories to put on the front page, just like the NYT, and they should be held liable for the content on their platforms just like legacy media is.
Stanislav Markelov & Anastasia Baburova – Human rights lawyer and journalist, shot in Moscow (2009).
Boris Nemtsov – Opposition leader, shot near the Kremlin (2015).
Denis Voronenkov – Former Russian MP, shot in Kyiv (2017).
Nikolai Andrushchenko – Journalist, beaten to death in St. Petersburg (2017).
Alexei Navalny – Opposition leader, died in prison after previous poisoning (2024).
---
The difference is that they murder their political opponents for show to make their people be afraid of dissent.
You comparing it with some (disgusting, vile) social media company (which would improve the world immensely if it disappeared) is completely inappropriate.
I have no idea how to talk equality to speak of whether they are comparable or not, but I do think people are seeing a different atmosphere.
Julian Assange says hi.
Putler is an established dicktator with a long list of killing his own citizens with impunity.
Give trump a couple of years. He can't do it overnight, he needs to cook the Americans slowly. Hitler didn't turn the Germans into Nazis overnight either.
> mainstream media, like facebook
Facebook is in the 'mainstream media'? That's a first in my experience. 'Mainstream media' usually describes established journalism organizations such as CNN, Fox, the NY Times, the WSJ. Facebook is universally grouped with 'social media' in my experience.
> Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media
In fact, most people go on social media. The 'mainstream media' is losing audience rapidly.
> you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends
I'm a bit confused here. Facebook complying with ... which government? The Israeli government has very little power over Facebook - Israel is a tiny market.
Meanwhile, Trump has been calling the 'mainstream media', the 'enemy of the people' - because they constantly report what he doesn't like.
Since the November election, many have shockingly capitulated but many remain. The NYT, for example, publishes negative news and criticisms of Trump and Israel daily.
> The more i think about it, the less difference i see.
You haven't established much of anything. Much of the comment doesn't make sense. Where is the Russian NYT? Which American journalists are in jail?
I could go on.
Life expectancy. Chronic disease rates. Suicide rates. Depression rates. Violent crime rates. Marriage rates. Home ownership rates. Education rates. Debt rates. Labor participation rates. Wealth inequity.
No one metric is a complete picture but together they tell a story. If America was a product and the above was on a dashboard, you would fire the CEO.
As for America, it is very debatable.
FWIW, the dashboard idea...was on the 2020 Presidential Candidate. Andrew Yang's platform.
Unfortunately for Americans, it's not the CEO at fault here actually, it's the middle class and left-leaning/progressive that are directly responsible for many of the problems here. The funny thing is that Republican Party being in complete power with Trump would be more similar to the CCP than the Democrats or Progressives. Suppressing dissenting voices like Pro-Palestine in order to force national homogenity is a big part of that.
And I say this as someone who supported Biden and Kamala, but these left-wingers or libertarians who are so vehemtly opposed to the US Gov but then simp for China are just being childishly incoherent.
In the Bay Area the median response to petty crime is zero consequences for the criminal. This is because in practice criminals are not caught or punished.
If the cost of having laws enforced is that we need better surveillance (read: more security cameras) then guess what? We are already heavily surveilled.
So please let me know how locking up more people and paying an economic underclass to clean our streets will help us achieve all those goals? Crime, I get it, but how is what you claimed going to solve our health and financial issues?
USA is totally way better than China here!
50th vs 70th
https://index.goodcountry.org/
Both the US and China score surprisingly bad on everything listed here.
I do prefer the way janalsncm described quality of life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43659542
Is there an index for those some place?
Can you share some of that evidence? My impression from the SCOTUS case is that the government only alleged it could happen, not that it was happening. So I’m a bit surprised to see someone so confidently assert it is happening.
> more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation
I think a lot of people have been looking. For years. Yet you admit there is no smoking gun. Perhaps if we look in the right place we will find Russell’s teapot orbiting Jupiter as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
IMO, it's been obvious that the danger seen in TikTok is that it's a propaganda tool out of USA's control. If it was really a national security danger, USA could simply ban it instead of fighting so hard to own it.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/social-psychology/artic...
Please show this "ample evidence" because it seems you (or "we" - whoever that is) have something the rest of the world doesn't.
we should be looking to stop all manipulation, whether from a state or billionaires. this kind of manipulation is awful no matter what the source is.
i have a hard time understanding why so many are terrified of tiktok yet turn around and seem eager to suck from twitter or facebook’s firehose.
Regarding your specific claim, here’s the most recent poll I could find. In june, 61% of Americans opposed sending military support: https://theintercept.com/2024/09/10/polls-arms-embargo-israe...
Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that. I would expect there to be quite a lot of incitement to violence related to that. I would expect the israeli government to be mostly concerned with incitements of violence against its citizens. In the context of this conflict i would expect such incitements to be mostly be made by the demographics cited in the article due to the nature of the conflict. The article seems like it could be entirely consistent with take downs being used appropriately. It needs more then this to prove its headline.
Heck, from this post we dont even know relative numbers. How does this compare against take down requests from other groups?
In other words, for people who assume rule enforcement is supposed to be fair, they see unfair enforcement as hypocrisy. However, if you just see enforcement as another tool to wield against enemies, hypocrisy is irrelevant. What matters is power. It’s my basketball, I make the rules.
I'd agree. Is there any evidence that that is happening here? The article reports on israeli take down requests but does not report on take down requests from other groups. Meta could very well be using the same rules against pro-israel groups, we just dont know because the leak didn't include that information.
> Governments and organizations, on the other hand, have privileged channels to trigger content review. Reports submitted through these channels receive higher priority and are almost always reviewed by human moderators rather than AI. Once reviewed by humans, the reviews are fed back into Meta’s AI system to help it better assess similar content in the future. While everyday users can also file TDRs, they are rarely acted upon. Government-submitted TDRs are far more likely to result in content removal.
Meta has overwhelmingly complied with Israel’s requests, making an exception for the government account by taking down posts without human reviews, according to the whistleblowers, while still feeding that data back into Meta’s AI.
> "A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta’s moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel."
Its also really difficult to draw any conclusions from the HRW study due to selection bias issues. The sample was sent in by users instead of being chosen randomly from censored posts. Even assuming you agree with HRW's assesment that the posts were peaceful, there is no way to tell from the study if this represents the 0.00001% most "peaceful" of all censored posts or if its the average censored post, and i think that makes a big difference when evaluating this situation. The experimental design of the HRW study is just rather poor, and i think you could use such a design to come to basically any conclusion you want.
They are enforced with neither human nor AI review, so the reality is that we don't know. They are enforced by virtue of who submits them, with no question on whether they are valid or not.
Having heard from friends the kind of censorship they face on the topic on Facebook and Instagram when discussing the topics at hand, I know of plenty of situations where people were censored without breaking any rules. They're a small sample of course.
> A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta’s moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel.
> Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that.
Sorry, but this is already part if the narrative. (Or rather the implication is that this would justify everything because wars seemingly have different rules. But if course only for one side) It's a "war" were one side inflicts 100 times as many casualties on one side than the other and still has no intention of stopping.
Generally though i do think its legit for facebook to take down posts advocating for violence and terrorism. Devil is in the details.
I'm not saying there aren't other possible motivations. Indeed, i'm sure Israel would love all its PR problems to go away.
My point is, that if we assume for the sake of argument that Israel isn't doing anything sketchy, i would still expect the stuff in the article to be true. Therefor it is very bad evidence of Israel doing sketchy stuff, since the article contents would probably be true either way. My argument is not that Israel is pure of heart or anything, only that we should judge based on publicly available evidence, and the evidence in this article is extremely weak.
The issue is that we are not talking about posts which would normally be taken down by Facebook.
you should also consider the sequence of events before using such grave accusations.
The Israelis also actively prevent any aid from reaching gaza, including going so far as to attack and destroy the aid.
Maybe YOU should think before spreading Zionist(read: terrorist) propaganda.
Then why is there so much aid in gaza? Israel controls gazas borders. If they didnt want aid in gaza there wouldnt be any. I just dont see how you plan to convince anyone when the thigns you are claiming are so obviously untrue
[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/smotrich-says-not-even-gr...
What's the solution now though? Let them literally employ mass starvation (another one of their well documented war crimes) while the world watches?
The ICC issued a warrant against Netanyahu citing "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" with [0]"starvation as a method of warfare" as a main point. Starvation as a method of warfare is consistent with an act of genocide [1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court...
Starvation is not consistent with an act of genocide even as per your source and there is very little evidence of starvation in Gaza except for the Israeli hostages.
It is actually pretty easy to view the endless stream of videos coming out from gaza, some even show obesity
I see properly fed people in every search for photos/videos from the war, unless if I specifically try to search for starvation, and even then there's not much variety and these repeat
A short-lived attempt to reboot the process after Arafat's death happened in 2007 between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, which was aborted when Hamas won the Palestinian elections and triggered a Palestinian civil war. There were again direct talks in 2010, which ended when Hamas (who by then fully controlled Gaza) said they wouldn't accept a peace deal and would continue attacking Israel; from the Israeli perspective there was no point in continuing land-for-peace talks if the other side was firmly refusing the "peace" part.
Of course the Palestinian situation is quite sad. But that is in large part a consequence of horrendous leadership that has repeatedly insisted on maximalist territorial demands and refuses to give up hope of destroying Israel and ruling the region in its entirety; they have been offered many options over many years that are far better than their current semi-state and refused them, since they would need to give up on destroying Israel. Even blaming "horrendous leadership" is a bit generous... After all, Hamas was popularly elected into power in part based on their claims that violence could extract territorial gains from Israel. Just as Trump couldn't have done much without being elected by his massive MAGA base, Hamas couldn't have ruled Gaza without their large Palestinian base that voted them into power — and Hamas continued to be extremely popular in Palestinian polls until late 2024, when the consequences of their actions began to become clear even to their ardent supporters.
The present day "Middle East" (a colonialist term) is carved out by european colonilism through sykes-picot.
The plan to occupy Palestine started way before 48.
Can you read?
The end goal of the Zionist project has always been the complete expulsion of Palestinians. That's intent.
BTW the five acts are: killing — typically systematic, targeting civilians rather than militants; bodily/mental harm (e.g widespread slavery, systematic rape); deliberately inflicting conditions meant to destroy the group (e.g. mass starvation); forced birth control e.g. the Uyghur genocide; or forcible transfer of children outside of the group. If any of these things had been systematically happening for 77 years straight as you claim, the population would not have grown: it would have been demolished, like in every other case. That's the whole point of the term genocide, vs other, lesser terms. If the group wasn't meaningfully destroyed, it's pretty unlikely there was a genocide.
Even if it were true that the end goal of Zionism has always been the complete expulsion of the Palestinians — which isn't the case, and in fact many early Zionists advocated for peacefully living together, as do plenty of modern ones — expulsion is not genocide, or else India and Pakistan have been committing genocide against each other for even longer. Even with that steelman you're still wrong!
Check, check and check. And Zionism has always been seeking to expel Palestinians, despite your dubious claims to the contrary. Success is not a requisite as written in the genocide convention. Your population stats are irrelevant.
Try this: go on Israeli politicians twitters. Read the Hebrew language ones and translate them to English. Report back.
If it was actually "check, check, and check" for 77 years, the population would go down, obviously, unless you believe Palestinians are each the second coming of Jesus Christ and can return from the dead at will. No serious academic scholarship agrees with you, and common sense is that you're wrong too. A genocide involves actually attempting to destroy a lot of people systematically, not periodic violence over land squabbles in which neither side is significantly reduced.
There is certainly debate over whether the current war — starting on Oct. 7th — has devolved into genocide, although there isn't scholarly agreement on that (nor legal agreement, as the international courts haven't issued rulings yet; they've only declined to dismiss the case). But a 77-year genocide is a fantasy, in order to avoid thinking deeply about your preferred side's complicity in this endless conflict — and indeed in the current war, which they started, and in which they committed numerous war crimes (and continue to commit war crimes).
As you can see, it's been up and to the right this whole time, for both groups.
Unless you think that India and Pakistan have been committing genocide against each other for the last 78 years, neither Israel nor Palestine have been committing genocide against each other for the past 77 years. They had a land dispute, which Israel agreed to split via the U.N. partition plan, and which the Palestinians rejected in favor of a war which they subsequently lost. Just like the current war, in which you passively claim they're "getting bombed," as if nothing had happened to trigger the war — in fact, the government of Gaza (Hamas) invaded Israel, killed over a thousand people and took hundreds of hostages, including civilians, sparking a war in which Gaza has now gotten bombed.
People fleeing a genocide and being refused return is genocide. Don’t try to rephrase this is as “conflict”. Nor equate the history of other regions as equivalent to this one.
And of course you can compare conflicts in history to each other. Why wouldn't you be able to? Literally the same thing happened with India and Pakistan, at almost exactly the same time, except that Pakistan agreed to the partition and didn't try to invade India. Many people were displaced, or fled, and there were even some border conflicts. But Pakistan and India both accepted partition in general in 1947, unlike the Palestinians who invaded Israel instead in 1948. In fact many more people were displaced or forced to move during the partition of British India into India and Pakistan: 15MM people, vs 900k during the 1948 war.
If you didn't consider that genocide, neither is the latter.
For instance, a woman wrote “Freedom for Palestine” in Gaelic on LinkedIn, prompting a group of Israelis in a WhatsApp chat to actively coordinate efforts to get her fired.
The General Manager of Wix, Batsheva (Levine) Moshe, responded in a WhatsApp chat saying:
“Hi yes we know. Being taken care of since it was published. I believe there will be an announcement soon regarding our reaction.”
Wix were orderd to pay €35K for unfair dismissal.
ref(s):
https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...
The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.
Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.
You are the one who seems to be uptight, bringing up the topic of bombs (?!), and scolding me to relax. Maybe you should relax.
P.S. for those wondering, my flagged comment simply asked why Jews would come up as a topic at all on a local Bangladeshi group. The irony of it being flagged in a post about censorship is piquant.
For a start, I don't outright deny that. Personally I haven't come across a lot, but there are different kinds of people and commentary on social media, so I won't be surprised if a fraction of them are indeed doing so.
Even if they do, Facebook is evidently maximizing resources to moderate calls for violence against Jews/Israel. Which I personally applaud. Palestine is a complex issue that cannot be fixed with violence. It's just that I'd appreciate if Facebook did the same level of moderation when Buddists in Myanmar were doing the same. Otherwise in plain and simple view it seems Facebook does not bother when victims are of certain group.
Remember that Bangladesh is a Muslim majority country (85%+). So naturally there is popular support in favor of Palestine and strong anti-Israel sentiments.
What's really happening is that people are organizing procession and demonstration in support of Gaza, and when they try to organize and communicate online on Facebook and other platforms about this specific issue, their posts are getting moderated out of existence.
Now if you ask whether should people organize in support/against either Palestine or Israel, that's a whole different issue and not what we are debating here.
Further, FB found it necessary to stop discussions about Jews on that group. Now, we can cook up any number of conspiracies about how any mention of Jews is like discussing fight club, or the Illuminati, and that's why FB instructed the group to stop discussing it. Or we can deduce the obvious. That the group, that would normally not be expected to be discussing Jews, had some fairly distasteful discussions about Jews.
FB is not a model of good moderation by a long shot. But given the strangeness of the topic in a local neighborhood group, we can deduce that FB probably got it right in this case.
They’ll do anything but leave.
Could you give a little more detail about what that means?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-...
Not sure why you're downvoted. This is all true.
Then again, the overwhelming majority of people talking about Israel not having a right to exist are advocating for the violent overthrow of it that by when you're repeating their slogans, you're not advocating what they're advocating.
Also, while there are some valid reasons for the idea that "Israel doesn't have a fundamental right to exist" (like if you think no state has a right to exist), if you only think this about Israel, then it's very likely an antisemitic argument.
That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't". Israel is legal abstraction, not human life and as such has no "fundamental rights" whatsoever. Humans have fundamental rights, however, and those rights always trump the non-rights of state entities.
You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
I think I made it clear that I don't think parent post was saying that.
> Israel is legal abstraction, not human life and as such has no "fundamental rights" whatsoever. Humans have fundamental rights, however, and those rights always trump the non-rights of state entities.
I don't know what any of that means. Does the US have fundamental rights? When it was attacked by Japan in WW2, did it have a right to defend itself? What does that even mean if "the US" has no fundamental rights?
(You could mean a lot of different things with this statement, hence my asking for a clarification. But there's a lot of history and philosophy about these concepts, and just FYI I believe you are stating a very minority view on how to think about countries.)
> You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
No, the reason Zionists "harp on" about Israel's right to exist is because so many people believe Israel, uniquely among countries, doesn't have a right to exist. For the first 30 years of its history, this included most of Israel's neighbors, who didn't just abstractly believe in Israel not having a right to exist - they went to war with Israel several times with the aim of getting rid of it.
Even today, some of Israel's neighbors insist it doesn't have the right to exist, including Iran, which is a hair away from having nukes, and which has spent billions of its people's resources to try and destroy Israel. This is not an abstract debate, its a very real threat to the lives of all Israelis.
> I think I made it clear that I don't think parent post was saying that.
You did not. You associated them with people who are advocating for a violent overthrow of the Israeli regime and with those who think Israel is the only state without a fundamental right to exist.
> I don't know what any of that means. Does the US have fundamental rights?
No, because fundamental rights are rights derived from natural law, roughly equivalent to the UDHR: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... Did the Soviet Union have a right to exist? Did its dissolution by its leaders violate its fundamental rights?
> > You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
> No, the reason Zionists "harp on" about Israel's right to exist is because so many people believe Israel, uniquely among countries, doesn't have a right to exist.
No. They do it because in 1948 and 1967 Israel conducted ethnic cleansings of Palestine and drove out its native inhabitants to create a Jewish supremacist state with a Jewish majority. Zionists can't (for now) argue that ethnic cleansing is alright, so instead they argue that if the victims of those cleansing were allowed to return, Israel would no longer be a Jewish-majority state and that would somehow violate Israel's fictive "fundamental rights". E.g., the Palestinian majority would probably prefer if the name of the state was changed (back) to "Palestine" rather than "Israel".
In the 1990s there was a British boxer who suffered severe brain damage during a fight and was paralyzed. So he sued the British boxing federation for medical negligence since there was no ringside doctors present. The compensation the court awarded the injured boxer was so heavy that the British boxing federation had to sell everything and eventually it went bankrupt. Did the verdict violate the British boxing federation's "right to exist"?
1. Unfortunately, antisemitism is alive and well.
2. It is an unfortunate reality that Jews in particular have been persecuted throughout history. But I think it's true that most people want a state of their own, to protect them and to live in the way that they want to live. This is the source of most modern countries/states - some ethnicity with on some specific land deciding to turn it into their state.
The only reason Jews were different was because they were ethnically cleansed by the Roman empire from their own land, and dispersed across the entire Jewish diaspora. This made their situation worse than most ethnicities, made them even more in need of a land to call their own.
> The diaspora also deserves safety, with or without an Israel.
Of course. Everyone deserves safety. I wish everyone got what they deserved.
But we don't get rid of the police force because "no one deserves to be murdered". The world doesn't run just on what people deserves.
Israelis like you tell themselves this, but you don't speak for the diaspora. I personally feel that Israel makes the rest of us less safe, not more.
To sum up a long and fascinating lecture, he makes the case that the Jews of the US diaspora are the few Jews who managed to find a country that actually took them in and treated them as equals, which is almost a complete aberration.
Whereas Israeli Jews are largely the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust- those Jews who learned the hard way that much of the world wanted to kill them, and that they couldn't trust any country to take them in.
Israel's population was largely made up, in terms of numbers, of people either fleeing the Holocaust, or Holocaust survivors who were displaced persons and literally had no other place to go - no country wanted them.
It’s a radical statement that effectively denies the rights of millions of people to exist and is especially problematic given the historical context of the establishment of Israel.
The statement gets thrown around so much in certain circles that it’s gotten normalized. You’ve apparently lost sight of or never stopped to think what actually means, to the point where you’re providing it as an example of an innocent statement that got you banned for no reason. Taking this statement out of radical activist circles and into the real world won’t go well.
Take some time to educate yourself and reflect on what it actually means.
The context of the establishment of Israel is also the mass expulsion of Palestinians, terrorism, the murder of British soldiers trying to keep peace, biological warfare with the poisoning of wells with typhus, etc.
In international law afaict existing states have a right to exist - yes, almost circular. It's not endorsement of them as good or ok; it's recognizing reality and it's considered absolutely essential to maintain peace - otherwise everyone could attack almost anyone else, because if you're going to start deligitimizing states based on their bad actions, including in their formation, there's going to be a long list.
But beyond that, I don't even know what it means for state. Beyond any doubt, the humans in Israel and the occupied territories all have a right to exist.
Maybe the dissolution I'm hoping for will actually take the form of Israel codifying a constitution finally that grants equal rights to Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.
>Beyond any doubt, the humans in Israel and the occupied territories all have a right to exist.
I certainly agree here.
All the time? You had to go back to the 1940s and 1990s to find examples. Per Wikipedia, though I wouldn't trust it completely, there have been only three new countries since 1994 - South Sudan, Kosovo, Montenegro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da...
(skip down to Sortable list and sort by "Acquisition of sovereignty")
Same thing happened during 9/11. Muslims saw suppression, bullying by the police and no one covered it. Then the tables turned on maga republicans after j6.
My understanding of Hamas is that they are not considered a legitimate army, but if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable number of war crimes (not unlike the IDF as many would say). Showing support for such things is beyond reasonable accepted discourse in my home country.
Any excuse is good when you have power and want to justify repression. For example they tried to claim that the slogan "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free" is genocidal. Quite a jump. (Meanwhile, the Likud's platform says "from the river to the sea there will be only Israel" but that's fine).
> if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable number of war crimes
They killed much less civilians than the IDF did, and they are not invaders nor illegal occupiers of someone else's country. What is acceptable or unacceptable is decided by those who are in power, and they are currently protecting a country whose prime minister in charge is wanted for crimes against humanity.
There is no other meaning. The slogan is a call to kill every single Israeli. That is literally what it means. Where will the israelis be when palestine is free from the river to the see? The hamas charter still to this day calls to kill every single israeli. This is the problem. You yourself dont even know what it is you are calling for, then you get mad when others point out that you are using slogans that call for a genocide. For the record I think Likud is awful as well, but at least in the US there are no serious israel supporters using the israeli version of the slogan.
As far as counting deaths that doesnt work because Hamas is getting their own civilians killed on purpose while israel is doing the opposite. If hamas had a nuke it would wipe israel off the map, israel does have nukes and the palestinians are more numerous than ever. The palestinaians are deeply oppressed, but theyre also raging assholes who would love nothing more than to not just oppress but kill every isreali. Being oppressed doesnt make them right.
And Hamas 2017 charter does not hace that language
Straight from the 2017 version, calling for the genocide of israelis. I think the israeli version of the slogan is genocidal too, as I said originally.
Oh well, this is just unbelievable. So by your logic the Likud platform, where it claims Israeli sovereignty over the whole Palestine ("from the Jordan to the sea") is a call to kill every single Palestinian? So Israel is ruled since thirty years by a genocidal party? And have you denounced this left and right?
> For the record I think Likud is awful as well, but at least in the US there are no serious israel supporters using the israeli version of the slogan.
I register that when you talk about a protest slogan calling for "freedom" you call it "genocidal"; when talking about the governing party in Israel, whose leader is under arrest order for crimes against humanity, it's just "awful". So is Likud, Israel's ruling party, genocidal or not? Does that make Israel a genocidal state or not? Does it make the US politicians that support the current Israeli government genocidal or not?
By your logic the proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip, made by Trump and endorsed by Netanyahu (or more probably the other way around), is also a call to kill every single Palestinian in it? And this is not a slogan, it is literally a proposal by the president of the most powerful country on earth. Did you denounce it?
But you logic is flawed.
What if Israel is dissolved and becomes a different state and Jews and Arabs are both unharmed and free to live in it? Wouldn't then Palestine be free, without the need to kill anyone?
> The hamas charter still to this day calls to kill every single israeli
This is a mystification. Even the original Hamas charter (the one that was replaced by a much tamer one) explicitly said that under the protection of Islam, Muslims, Christians and Jews would be free to leave in peace with each other.
What if pigs fly? You know this was the original plan they tried right?
> is Likud, Israel's ruling party, genocidal or not?
I think they probably will be in the future, but right now they could be enacting a genocide and they are not. Hamas is unable to enact a genocide and empirically it really seems like they would do it asap.
> proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip, made by Trump... genocide
Obviously but just like most of the shit he says its just a distraction, not something he actually meant. Not that thats a good thing, it just is what it is.
The problem with the "freedom" desired in the slogan is that it is the freedom to kill every israeli. You can pretend that Hamas wants peace with israel or would be open to a one state solution that gives the jews any amount of power/freedom but we both know that is not true. The same is true of the Israelis with respect to the palestinians. Everyone in this conflict has acted horrendously and nobody has any reason to work with anyone else so it does unfortunately seem to me that at least cultural genocide if not full blown racial genocide will be the eventual resolution here. The big question is which group will the genocider and which the genocidee. I wont lie, the Israeli cultural values align more closely to my own so not so hard for me to pick a side. Of course Id love a peaceful resolution but it really seems impossible to me.
Oh why, do you think that people living together in peace and freedom is as physically impossible as pigs flying? Guess what, most people disagree with you, and that's why the protesters chant what they chant. And now disprove this.
> I think [Likud] will probably be [genocidal] in the future
So you tell me, pacific protesters chanting "from the river to the sea" are genocidal, while the party that has the same in its platform, has bombed tens of thousands of civilians and is colonising the West Bank, isn't?
> Obviously but just like most of the shit he says its just a distraction
So you tell me, pacific protesters chanting for freedom are genocidal, the prime minister bombing his neighbours and the president of the most powerful nation in the world declaring they want an ethnic cleansing do so just as a distraction?
Listen, are you for real? Because if you're not purposefully being dishonest, then there's some serious cult shit going on here.
Anyway, that's the end of the conversation for me.
And the protesters are naive idiots, which is why I called out the original comment.
> protesters chanting "from the river to the sea" are genocidal, while the party that has the same in its platform, has bombed tens of thousands of civilians and is colonising the West Bank, isn't?
Likud could be committing a genocide right now but they are not. Thats why I dont consider them genocidal right now, pretty simple. The side that actually uses the river to the sea chant with any regularity could not commit a genocide right now.
> So you tell me, pacific protesters chanting for freedom are genocidal, the prime minister bombing his neighbours and the president of the most powerful nation in the world declaring they want an ethnic cleansing do so just as a distraction?
Yes? Not sure why this is so hard to understand. Trump loves attention. When he isnt getting it he just says random shit that comes to mind until its back on him. The israeli government has not in any way endorsed trumps plans for what thats worth.
It’s actually just German for “The Bart, The”.
It's taking it way to far to suppress speech - political speech, the most important speech - for slipping in the 'wrong' slogans.
> My understanding of Hamas is that they are not considered a legitimate army, but if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable number of war crimes
While Hamas commits many horrors and is oppressive and awful, I don't think the ligitimate army argument holds water:
If Hamas acted like a legitimate army under the laws of war, they'd be massacred in an instant. It would require them to dress in uniforms so they can be identified, and only fight against the enemy's military. Hamas has some rifles and RPGs and a few rockets. Their enemy has tanks, fighter planes, etc etc etc. If Hamas wanted to be a legitimate army, their only option would be to immediately disband.
The laws of war seem written by large powers to protect their interests. There are legitimate 'freedom-fighting' insurgents out there who also are limited in their ability to be a 'legitimate army'.
> (not unlike the IDF as many would say). Showing support for such things is beyond reasonable accepted discourse in my home country.
So can people show support for either Israel (it's not the IDF, it's a political entity - Israel) or Hamas (also a political entity)? How do they talk about the war?
Yes the respect Fatah has. Look at the strong words of condemnation from world leaders for the daily pogroms Palestinians are subjected to in the West Bank. Look at the apartheid being enforced there, look at the demolished houses and villages, at the hundreds of illegal settlements, at the ethnic cleansing going on by the day.
Hamas is an excuse as good as any. In fact, given its overwhelming power and impunity, Israel makes and chooses its counterparts. If a Palestinian leader looks too good, they can kill him. If the protests are too peaceful, they can shoot a few people until they turn a bit violent. Hamas was promoted to weaken Fatah. And so on.
Hamas has proposed multiple times long term ceasefires (10 years) and has recognised the 1967 borders. All these proposals went completely ignored and mostly unmentioned in the Western media because that's not useful to Israel.
Israel has broken every ceasefire, though US media tends to treat Israeli attacks as hiccups and challenges to ceasefires involving Israel and those on the other side as more serious. This is similar to the way that the same linguistic cause/effect separation (sometimes termed the “exonerative tense” or “exonerative mood”) frequently used to deflect responsibility for domestic police violence to Israeli military actions, but not to their opponents on any side.
Violence doesn't win political credibility when you're extremely weak, and not in control of the media narrative to manufacture consent or justifications for aid and arms shipments.
That's what the Axis of Evil says and actively tries to convey: inevitability, despair, etc. It's basic propaganda.
Interestingly in WW2 a lot of Germans helped to save Jews. Exactly zero gazans helped to save an hostage. Some civilians even held hostages at home themselves.
What is that based on?
Hamas is very different than the Nazis. They are holding hostages in a war - they want the hostages to live or the hostages have no value. The Nazis were trying to murder as many people as possible.
Do you have any credible source for that?
> And hamas promised to kill all jews, not only in israel.
When? And whatever your theory, what I said is what actually happened.
Surely the burden should be on the censors to establish clearly that something is in fact incitement to violence, rather than on external reporters to magically show that content which has been taken down is not incitement?
Except in this case, the accused are the ones who have all the logs, all the records, all the database entries, etc. They are in fact in possession of the complete and perfect means to prove or disprove these allegations, and their choice not to use this data to defend themselves (i.e. by not showing that the posts were in fact harmful or inciting violence, etc) lends credence to the allegations.
Second, you write: > [...] their choice not to use this data to defend themselves (i.e. by not showing that the posts were in fact harmful or inciting violence, etc) lends credence to the allegations.
This article is from yesterday. I don't think it's fair to call not responding a "choice", surely you would expect it to take some time to actually respond. I might have missed it in the article, but did they reach out to the Israeli government or to Meta to ask for a response (as is normal journalistic practice)?
Third, it's possible that some of the material is things that cannot be publicized. I have no idea if this is the case (and I personally doubt it's the majority of takedown requests), but if, for example, some of the requests were to remove e.g. images of abused Israeli hostages, bodies, etc, this might be material that they won't release, because the whole idea is to stop spread of such images. Of course, they can still describe the purpose of the various takedown requests.
The accusation that Palestinian voices were suppressed by social media companies has been being made for years. It's not a new revelation.
> or the Israeli government
Israel is the originator of the requests, not the one who is being accused of improperly complying (Meta), so why would they help or respond at all?
> it's possible that some of the material is things that cannot be publicized
Even the kinds of images you describe can be shown censored, in order to show the content being present without revealing sensitive material.
But the journalists seem to be doing a decent job of announcing and describing the data they have, and confirming it with multiple sources within Meta. They're engaged in a seemingly earnest and forthright effort to make the case. And to the degree that it's limited, it seems those limits are due to Meta itself.
Meta, on the other hand, excepting these whistleblowers, makes very little information available about their take-down actions both at the level of individual cases or at the level of their systematic responses to governments. The whistleblowers claim that Meta regularly took down posts without human review when requested by the Israelis. That's the exact opposite of the high burden of proof that you're asking for.
In terms of the implied proposition that israel is intentionally using the take down process to shield itself from criticism. I just dont think the evidence in the article supports that proposition. I would expect the stuff mentioned in the article to happen both in the case Israel is trying to get criticism taken down and in the case Israel is only interested in having "kill 'em all" type posts taken down. So i don't find the article very compelling.
It has been since restored, after a predictable twitter storm.
On the one hand there are comments from users that want to “turn Gaza into a parking lot” or worse and were not removed because they don’t violate the community guidelines.
On the other hand there are people posting educational explainers about Palestinian human rights censored under hate speech or dangerous individuals rules.
> A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta’s moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel."
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
> While “hate speech,” “bullying and harassment,” and “violence and incitement” policies[74] were less commonly invoked in the cases Human Rights Watch documented, the handful of cases where they were applied stood out as erroneous. For example, a Facebook user post that said, “How can anyone justify supporting the killing of babies and innocent civilians…” was removed under Community Standards on “bullying and harassment.”[75] Another user posted an image on Instagram of a dead child in a hospital in Gaza with the comment, “Israel bombs the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City killing over 500…” which was removed under Community Guidelines on “violence and incitement.”[76]
"A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News."
The government of Israel does not want anyone to see photos of war victims, yes that's correct.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/human-rights-watch-took-...
[2] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1700763578-human-...
[3] https://www.memri.org/reports/raven-project-leaks-alleged-qa...
The Israeli government also helped facilitate Qatar's support for Hamas[0], what's your point here?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Isra...
Qatar however is a supporter of the islamist Muslim Brotherhood ideology behind Hamas, financier and a host for most of its leadership.
Furthermore involved in other terror financing in the region such as the Taliban, IRGC and Al-Qaeda [1][2].
My point here is the HRW has shown before to be corrupted and flexible with their ethics in relation to the middle east, and there is evidence it took money from Qatar, a country deeply involved in this conflict and in the past used bribery in corruption to influence western politics [3]
[1] https://thearabweekly.com/ahmadinejad-reveals-qatar-paid-ran...
[2] https://www.iar-gwu.org/print-archive/an-analysis-of-qatari-...
[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-qatargat...
Horseshit. Israeli support for Hamas increased as the PLA/PLO became much more moderate and looking for peaceable solutions.
Arafat and those organizations were absolutely responsible for many violent, reprehensible, terrorist acts.
For whatever reason, they became more willing to sit at the table and work toward reasonable peace.
To the Israeli hard right, this was an awkward position to be in. Because now they'd be seen as the intransigents, the unmoving, the ones unwilling to work toward peace.
So they started supporting Hamas, directly and indirectly, because Hamas did take a harder line, and was a more easily denounced group, much as the PLA/PLO of old.
This PR spin that "really, we hoped that Hamas wanted the best for everyone and they betrayed us all" is complete garbage.
I think this is an extremely simplified look at the last two decades. Israel withdrew from the Gaza strip and removed all its settlements under a Likud government, was that also a conspiracy to strengthen hamas?
What actually happened is that Israel did not want the Gaza strip, or to manage any of the millions there, so it withdrew.
However, Hamas being hamas continued firing rockets at Israeli towns, which required going to war to protect these.
This left Israel in an awkward situation of having to reoccupy the gaza strip with the thousand dead gazans that will die in the process (a lesser version of what we see now) and having to occupy the strip back.
Because no one wanted to do that, together with a negligent leadership, this system of half-operations started, where every two years they would bomb and sign a cease fire. Enough to stop the rockets for a while but not enough to anger anyone internationally. Later on culminating in actually allowing Qatar terror money, in order to keep the quiet.
Ironically half of the reason of reaching to the point where so many people had died in this war, is the international community sensitivity to casualties, very similar to pre-ww2 appeasement. Where it is only accepted for Israel to destroy such an organization is after it already conducts its mass killings (and even that is apparently contested)
The approach over the last decade or so was to keep that border quiet. Usually through economic means, the belief was the naive capitalist notion that lack of money creates evil (crime, war, etc)
Contrary to the popular belief, Israel as evident in the multiple operations l/wars over a decade, did not want to capture the strip. It was obvious that fighting an enemy entrenched in tunnels/hospitals/schools will lead to mass civilian death and IDF soldiers (overstated though). However, in hindsight this also made things worse once that was made inevitable.
You can see it in the Qatar money, agreeing to let dual-use materials that had been used to build tunnels and to allow gazans workers to work in Israel, as recent as just before October 7.
Regarding whether Israeli officials pleaded for that money, that is not an accurate representation, you can read about it here [1]. The reasons include US pressure and cutting funds from the PA to Hamas, and wanting to keep the quiet.
It is also stated they wanted to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state through counterweighting Hamas and the PA but I think this is a later exercise. This deal was highly unpopular in Israel and was regarded as what it is, protection money
Also, cult, really? Are you always this offensive or only with regard to this topic?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-fu...
> Also, cult, really?
Considering your arguments will boil down to: UN is wrong, all human rights groups are wrong, all health agencies are wrong, the people living in Gaza et. al. are wrong, all of the media is wrong, all of Israel's neighbours are wrong, and that the only one who is right is the hyper-corrupt genocidal Israeli cabinet, then yes it's either a lack of knowledge or being part of a cult.
[0] Look, an actual Israeli source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-chief-top-general-visit...
The nonsensical references to Qatar and Hamas while pushing conspiracies around a human rights group are standard Hasbara talking points.
From Wikipedia:
> NGO Monitor is a right-wing organization based in Jerusalem that reports on international NGO (non-governmental organisation) activity from a pro-Israel perspective
<wikipedia page goes in lot more detail>
I'll trust HRW on this one. No thanks.
“I feel this organization is biased against the Nazi party” is essentially the same sentence.
Not beating the allegations.
"You shouldn't trust the internationally-recognized and acclaimed and trusted Human Rights Watch, here are some opinions pieces that tell you the REAL truth!"
Also I've provided more than ample evidence that HRW is deeply compromised on this issue and has been for many years: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/29/human-rights-w...
> Elie Wiesel, Prof Alan Dershowitz, R James Woolsey, Elliott Abrams, Tom Gross, Prof Judea Pearl, Douglas Murray
Hmmmm, none of those people are famously biased towards Israel....
Also, you are misusing Credentials Fallacy to dismiss the difference between factual reporting and opinion. If I dismissed a peer-reviewed study you posted by saying that YOU aren't a scientist/expert, THAT would be Credential Fallacy. It doesn't just mean that you have to accept all sources and claims as equal. "You just dismissed my Infowars link without even providing a detailed refutation, and just trusted the CDC instead! Fallacy!"
If any source is deserving of a comparison to InfoWars here it's HRW itself. You can't unilaterally smear every right-of-center source as completely untrustworthy and expect to stay on the side of reality for long.
> Israeli strikes on Gaza kill 32, mostly women and children (Apr 6)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-new...
> An Israeli strike hit near a charity kitchen in Gaza as Palestinians gathered for food (Apr 7)
[2] https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-new...
> Palestinian teenager who died in Israeli prison showed signs of starvation, medical report says (Apr 6)
> Starvation was likely the leading cause of death for a Palestinian teenager who died in an Israeli prison, according to an Israeli doctor who observed the autopsy.
[3] https://apnews.com/article/autopsy-palestinian-deaths-israel...
Or how about Business Insider?
> Israel's 'Where's Daddy?' AI system helps target suspected Hamas militants when they're at home with their families, report says
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-dadd...
The Georgetown Security Studies Review?
> The Dehumanization of ISR: Israel’s Use of Artificial Intelligence In Warfare
> “At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said, an anonymous IDF soldier. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one—we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”
[5] https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2025/01/09/the-d...
Is there any news source apart from Netanyahu himself that you would accept as true for showing that the IDF was not taking measures not to kill women and children in Gaza?
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4519187-who-radicalized...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/flashback-former-associated-p...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/board-member-of-politico-owne...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/jewish-group-sues-ap-for-prov...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/terrorists-themselves-former-...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/ap-hits-new-low-with-charisma...
And, what are the point of your links? Isarel accidentally kills civilians, which is virtually unavoidable in urban warfare. Hamas hides behind civilians in order to increase civilian casualties because they know the far left news will report on it to their favor. And, they purposely kill Israeli civilians because they are terrorists. One side is pure evil. The other is doing better than just about every nation in the world in fighting a just war.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-kidnaps-tortures-and-mu...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/idf-reveals-terrorists-brutal...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/yarden-bibas-describes-hamas-...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/american-israeli-hersh-goldbe...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-leader-using-at-least-1...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/hamas-loves-dead-palestinians
Ah, so now you're just pivoting to "left-leaning means untrue/ propaganda".
And since you just ignored BI and GSSR, I assume you don't have anything to counter that.
In the end, you're nothing but a propagandist pushing pro-Israel narratives through opinion pieces and actual propaganda sites like Daily Wire.
No allegations beaten, as usual.
> Isarel accidentally kills civilians, which is virtually unavoidable in urban warfare.
Israel's false narrative of civilian casualty minimization has completely collapsed (not least of all because they have now cut off all supplies for 2 months, and publicly discussed removing all Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing), and the international community is wise to it, which is why Israel is now having to literally paint anyone and everyone from the UN, the ICC, HRW, the Red Cross/ Red Crescent, food aid programs, news orgs from every country, people from every end of the political spectrum, and just literally anyone who questions their narrative, as liars and propagandists. Look at the comments here if you doubt that people have wisened up.
No, I said far-left goes hand-in-hand with being ant-Israel. Do you know what words mean? I actually do think the far-left is wrong about just about everything, but they do often mix falsehoods with things that are true, so of course not everything they say is untrue.
> And since you just ignored BI and GSSR, I assume you don't have anything to counter that.
No, I'm just not going to take the time to address every article in particular, which you have no room to complain about, given you completely ignored every article I linked.
Looking at the BI article, for instance, they talk about "proportionality", which is a completely bogus and corrupt idea of warfare. You don't fight to respond proportionality; you fight to win and to win decisively. I have no interest in kowtowing to morally bankrupt leftwing morality.
> In the end, you're nothing but a propagandist pushing pro-Israel narratives through opinion pieces and actual propaganda sites like Daily Wire.
Every pro-Hamas rally is filled with people who hate America and the west. I know I am on the side of good and you are on the side of depraved evil, and I will fight to defend what is right.
> and publicly discussed removing all Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing)
That's not what ethnic cleansing is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
There has to be intent to make the area homogenous. The people of Gaza voted in Hamas and have been working to destroy Israel ever since. It is well within Israel's right to remove them, and I fully support them if it comes to that.
> Look at the comments here if you doubt that people have wisened up.
I actually I saw other comments, that were not downvoted, of people explaining how HRW is biased and conflicted. And, HN has always been deeply-left leaning. I'm happy to trade away some karma to speak the truth to people like you.
Well, they're not very good in preventing civilian casualties. I'm pretty sure they rank pretty fucking high on the list of causing civilian casualties, actually.
Most other nations don't need any such measures implemented since, you know, they don't commit genocide.
"You should be happy we didn't kill more people, because we could!" is not a particularly good argument for your cause.
Reality isn't politically neutral.
https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...
On the face of it, Twitter itself is suppressing in line with Donald/Elon's agenda, and running hate/love bots.
Also saw another BSky poster showing a horrific anti-immigration post on Twitter getting spammed by love-bots.
Facebook has some rules and community guidelines, the Israeli government recognized some posts that violate those and asked for them to be taken down, and Facebook complied in accordance to their own rules.
That is an absurd statement.
Almost every platform has mechanisms for taking down content, for good reason. Is asking to take down copyrighted content "inherently wrong"? Is asking to take down illegal content like child pornography "inherently wrong"?
What about someone publishing the name and address of a pro-Palestinian activist and saying "let's get together and kill him"? Would taking down that be wrong?
Without knowing the actual content that was asked to be removed, we can't judge whether it made sense or not.
> They are demonstrably censoring pro Palestine content without any regard at all to pro Israel content, or even pro Israel content that incites or calls for violence
Is this demonstrated in the article? I might have missed it but I didn't see any comparison to how pro-Israel content is handled.
“ Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger founded Onavo in 2010. In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. Since the acquisition, Onavo was frequently classified as being spyware, as the VPN was used to monetize application usage data collected within an allegedly privacy-focused environment.”
That Meta considered his questionable ethics a feature not a bug, and repeatedly promoted him, is very problematic.
The parent post explicitly makes two separate statements - 1. that he's an Israeli citizen, and 2. that he has questionable morals. I don't necessarily agree with the second statement, but it's explicitly not saying he's immoral because he's Israeli (guilt by association).
“ Onavo, which allowed the company to read network traffic on a device prior to its being encrypted, thereby giving the company the ability "to measure detailed in-app activity" and to collect analytics on Snapchat app usage from devices on which Onavo was installed.[12] It did this by creating "fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis."[13] The program, which was named "Project Ghostbusters" in reference to Snapchat's ghost-shaped logo, was later expanded to include Amazon and YouTube”
“ On January 29, 2019, TechCrunch published a report detailing "Project Atlas"—an internal market research program employed by Facebook since 2016. It invited users between the ages of 13 and 35 to install the Facebook Research app—allegedly a rebranded version of Onavo Protect—on their device, to collect data on their app usage, web browsing history, web search history, location history, personal messages, photos, videos, emails, and Amazon order history. Participants received up to $20 per-month to participate in the program, which was promoted to teenagers via targeted advertising on Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook Research is administered by third-party beta testing services, including Applause and BetaBound, and requires users to install a Facebook root certificate on their phone. On iOS, this is prohibited by Apple's Enterprise Developer License Agreement, as the methods used are intended solely for use by a company's employees (for use cases such as internal software specific to their environment, and internal pre-release versions of apps)”
I don't always agree with these assessments, and I even less agree that this means you can point to people at various positions in these companies and call them "immoral".
Some people will consistently hold the belief that anyone working at Facebook, or Google, or whatever, are immoral. Most will inconsistently hold that belief - if they're arguing against someone, they'll use this kind of reasoning, but not in general. I'm mostly against this line of thinking in general.
Look - In some corners of HN, having worked with or served in the US military in any capacity is enough to make someone immoral. In some corners, working at a gambling company in any capacity makes you immoral. In some corners, being a doctor in any way related to performing abortions is immoral. In others, taking part in the capitalist system in any way is immoral. I doubt you or anyone agrees with all of these positions - so I think the general rule is that just being associated with something that some portion of people think is immoral is simply not enough to consider someone immoral.
(There are of course things that almost everyone considers immoral, and being associated with them could be enough, though even that barometer is sometimes wrong.)
Yes, the Israeli citizen comment. Obviously the comment is meant to criticize Rosen. Being an Israeli citizen is only a criticism by some conspiracy theory or guilt by association.
Currently the GGP comment says, "with a strong pro-Israel bias". I don't think it was there when I commented or I wouldn't have said what I said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b...
Noam Chomsky is a national treasure.
When a former Netanyahu adviser and Israeli embassy staffer seemingly has the power to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on Meta platforms [3], nobody should be surprised.
If you're a US citizen who is a journalist critical of a key US ally, that ally is allowed to assassinate you without any objection of repercussions [4].
This is also why Tiktok originally got banned in a bipartisan fashion: the Apartheid Defense League director Jonathon Goldblatt said (in leaked audio) "we have a Tiktok problem" [5] and weeks later it was banned. Tiktok simply suppresses pro-Palestinian speech less than other platforms.
[1]: https://chomsky.info/consent01/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0
[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...
[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/16/israeli-forces-kil...
The government got so comfy it really got to be that easy:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... (Aug 27, 2024)
> White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”
> The officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company didn’t agree, he said in the letter.
Sorry if I got your sentence wrong, but terms like these are routinely used by some truly awful anti-semites, and I sincerely hope Pro-palestinian folks stay clear of those people and their vocabularies.
I don't know how you scale that up to make it easy for everyone to find "disappeared" content on any platform. Maybe some kind of peer-to-peer system where everyone's browser cache basically acts as a searchable archive, with a browser plugin that inserts a button into web pages to show disappeared content.
(It's also worth noting that probably a lot of content that was removed by moderators was removed for a legitimate reason. So, ideally you'd have some sort of crowd moderation to get rid of the stuff that really is spam or hate speech or whatever.)
So this person is actively thinking about a Palestinian revolutionary that was assassinated by Mossad over half a century ago, and is using their position to push for internal censorship of him accordingly.
Imagine if a Palestinian employee at Meta suggested censoring mentions of past members of Haganah.
I will expect to be downvoted to hell for this.
What makes you say that? Plenty of people express support for the Palestinian people, including plenty of governments and heads of state, etc.
I personally think that being pro-Palestine means you should be anti-Hamas, since they are a brutal dictatorship that's plundered its people's resources to engage in a war with Israel that has destroyed their lives.
The main worrying thing is when someone is not pro-Palestinian, they're either pro-Hamas or anti-Israel.
As for the first para, I have very close friends who have been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a university student in the US today and said exactly what I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-sympathizer. I have been downvoted to hell on reddit and elsewhere for putting it as mildly as I did here.
I agree with the sentiment, but I wouldn't go quite so far, neither in the goals nor the tactics. Also, "Israeli leadership" is a pretty broad term - there are specific very bad actors, but the most extremist actors are largely a minority (with, unfortunately, far more political power than their minority support should give them).
Hamas is bad - current Israeli leadership is bad. But there are degrees of badness and I don't think it's correct to equate them.
It's also, tactically speaking, a pretty bad way to discuss these things, as most on the pro-Israel side will not really be receptive to arguments made from people who equate the two. Assuming your goal is to actually persuade people on the pro-Israeli side.
> As for the first para, I have very close friends who have been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a university student in the US today and said exactly what I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-sympathizer.
That's pretty awful that that's the case. What can I say? I'm against it. Both in the broader sense of supporting free speech, and in the specific case here in which statements in support of the Palestinian people are obviously totally fine (and, IMO, the only moral stance).
Personally, I don't use Reddit much, but this is definitely not the sense I get from seeing reading e.g. Twitter, in which there are plenty of extremely anti-Israel voices.
Remember - we're all seeing our own personal echo chamber of content.
The most common comments used to drown out actual criticism of israel and how to address its actions are actually the "aren't you glad we didn't vote for biden because he was bad for palestine" type. They will often be 4-5 of the top comments. Similar tactics are sadly used when discussing the crimes of the attack by emphasising the vileness of the acts in detail (despite both groups having plenty, and the world knowing both) and twisting the knife to make it too painful for people to engage with the discussion to exhaust them.
Let us not forget Israel has had a citizen driven hasbarah app which gives citizens "goals" (pre pasted propaganda messaged they are expected to post on their accounts) every morning to carry out online for over 7 years (reported by haaretz) https://youtu.be/iYzVOlcENZ4?si=IrN3FALmKVvIYkNJ I imagine it is much more discreet and efficient now.
There is also an easy but not perfect way to check, you look at the account age and post history. If you check a normal user account like mine you will see it ha many years long, that I post say on average 3 comments a day, some days nothing and maybe soem days more. That I also have low activity and different sections like Star trek, or some video game I was into at that time, or soem TV show, With paid accounts they are all very new, they all post on the same topic like defending Ruzzia or Israel, they are very active only on this topic.
Also there is known that Ruzzia and Israel have paid cyber worriors so for sure they have scripts that will alert when something about their regime is posted and they worriors will pop up and repeat their propaganda to excuse the war crimes.
In other words, you assume that people that disagree with you must be bots or paid trolls? That certainly explains why you think Reddit is full of them :)
I will often write stuff that you would probably consider pro-Israeli. I'm not a troll and don't get paid for it. Do you simply dismiss anything I say because you assume I'm either a bot or a "Israeli paid cyber warrior"? That makes you wrong, and makes you unable to ever learn new things or new perspectives.
(I'm not disputing, btw, that there are a lot of trolls. From my perspective, 90% of people posting anything about the conflict, including some major accounts, are absolutely trolls - they have no skin in the game and little real knowledge of the situation, and simply want to post provocative things, whether pro or anti, to get engagement.)
Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old, do you only post about Israel? do you comments appear super fast in response to my comments like it was triggered by alarms? If those are yes then you are a bot, can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
You're putting a bunch of barriers between hearing someone else's opinion and accepting it as valid.
> Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old, do you only post about Israel?
In my case, no and no.
> do you comments appear super fast in response to my comments like it was triggered by alarms?
I do what plenty of other HN users do - I use a 3rd party service that notifies me when someone replies to any of my posts.
> can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
Which is exactly the problem with your approach. You can write off anyone, including me, as "well they are actually being paid". How can I prove that I'm not?
Also, most Israelis between the ages of 18-21 are doing their mandatory military service, that in itself isn't a reason not to listen to them.
Btw, military service is not unpaid; IDF soldiers receive a salary, though it's much lower than almost any market wage.
But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something bad about Israel?
OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime. Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime . The assholes denied it until video evidence was shown. (very , very shitty behaviour, the same like Ruzzian bots claiming the Azerbaijan airplane was downed by birds and still denying until today that it was Ruzzia).
This is other clue to detect a paid bot, denies evidence until their Mistry pof Invazions confirm it with a spin why it was not them or it was a excusable .
No. I'm not trying to prove myself to you - I'm sure that someone is actively monitoring mentions of Israel, though I doubt the Israeli government particularly cares what happens on HN - it's fairly niche.
I do sometimes search for mentions of Israel in HN search, sometimes including comments, but I don't do it that often.
> OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing civilian including children a war crime.
I think any decent person mourns innocent people being killed, on either side. I personally also mourn for non-civilians being killed - it's not like Israeli soldiers trying to defend their country are people that should be killed, and it's not like most Hamas militants who (in their mind) are defending themselves from a foreign occupier deserve death either. I have far less sympathy for the leaders who know better.
But to your question - killing civilian, both morally and in a legal sense, is not in general a war crime unless those civilians were directly targeted, or unless their targeting was disproportionate to valid military aims.
Whatever you may think of Israel, Hamas has custom-designed their war to make it extremely difficult to rescue Israeli hostages, and extremely difficult to get to Hamas, without killing civilians. Btw, the more "evil" you think Israel is, the more evil and cynical this makes Hamas - since they knowingly protect themselves with the lives of the civilians under their care.
So Israel killing civilians is not, in itself, proof of a war crime. It's a sad fact of reality that civilians die in war. Especially ones in which one side is exploiting their civilians to save themselves.
That all said, there is no doubt that many war crimes have been committed. Some are documented and Israel has investigated them and taken steps to stop the people committing them. Some are swept under the rug. I imagine many are never reported. I don't think Israel is especially moral or especially immoral - this is just true of any war.
> Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again) is not a war crime .
I don't have all the facts and neither do you. From what we've seen so far - it definitely seems like a war crime. I reserve judgement because I have some faith in the IDF - you rush to condemn Israel for the opposite reason, I imagine. I've also seen many stories turn out to be far more complicated after investigation than any immediate, attention-grabbing headline would suggest.
In any case, I think this should be investigated and, if it was a war crime, for the perpetrators to be prosecuted.
What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is real, then they claim that for sure there must have been some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
I have an issue with extremists too.
> What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is real, then they claim that for sure there must have been some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
I'm sure there are plenty of bots/trolls/whatever. There are also a lot of genuine people who are pro-Israelis who will reflexively just not believe any video or reporting at first. It's unfortunately true that there have been many cases of bias against Israel and misreporting; but it's also true (and frankly undeniable) that war crimes have been committed by Israel.
This goes the other way - lots of pro-Palestine (or just anti-Israel) people will just answer any statement made by Israel with "Zionists always lie" or various memes to that effect.
I wish I were as confident as you that these are all bots; I think my (far more pessimistic) belief is true though, that many of these are real people just posting reflexively without thinking anything through.
> Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
First, genocide does mean killing, or at least acting to make a population disappear via other means. And for the record, I completely disagree with categorizing the Gaza war as a genocide. It's a horrible war, but not at all a genocide, by any definition that any real person uses.
Their plan could be ethnic cleansing, depending on whether the eventual plan is to forcibly remove Gazans from Gaza, or whether it's to allow Gazans to leave on a voluntary basis. Of course, I don't think there's any way for Gazans who choose now to be doing it voluntarily - since Israel has destroyed much of the physical infrastructure of Gaza, and the war is still raging.
Needless to say (or maybe not needless nowadays), I'm against ethnic cleansing. I think the morally correct thing is for Israel to allow any Gazan that wants to leave for the duration of the war to do so, but make real assurances that they will be allowed to come back at the end of the war. That way the war could truly be against Hamas, and not against the Gazan population that is living through hell right now.
This is what happens in every other conflict btw - the world urges the combatants to allow civilians to flee and they become refugees, hopefully returning one day to their home.
Other than that, I think that long term, Hamas must be removed from power, and unfortunately given the current reality, no one is going to do that except for Israel. Until Hamas loses power, the Gazan population will continue to suffer, and Israel will continue to be attacked, as Hamas has made clear. I don't know who could plausibly rule afterwards, probably the PA, and of course I support an eventual two-state solution to the conflict.
Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-censoring which is reprehensible.
The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.
Here's is one example from 1954 when Israel did not control Gaza or the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%27ale_Akrabim_massacre
"The Ma'ale Akrabim massacre, known in English as the Scorpions Pass Massacre, was an attack on an Israeli passenger bus, carried out on 17 March 1954, in the middle of the day. Eleven passengers were shot dead by the attackers who ambushed and boarded the bus. One passenger died 32 years later of his injuries, in a state of paralysis and partial consciousness. Four passengers survived, two of whom had been injured by the gunmen."
Palestinians are largely in the reality they're in due to the violence.
The plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return. Zionist military units possessed detailed lists of neighborhoods and villages to be destroyed and their Arab inhabitants expelled.
This strategy is subject to controversy, with some historians characterizing it as defensive, while others assert that it was an integral part of a planned strategy for the expulsion, sometimes called an ethnic cleansing, of the area's native inhabitants.
Israelis and Palestinians are largely in the reality they're in due to the violence.
Parent claims the violence is simply due to:
"The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals."
This is not true. And this is what I'm addressing in my reply.
We can litigate 1948 as well. Plenty of Palestinian violence pre-1948. Their refusal to accept the UN's partition plan (which was a lot more generous than the two state solution people are talking about today).
EDIT: Also I hope you're not trying to say that Israel's actions during the war in 1948 (even if we accept they were in the wrong, which I do not) justify boarding a bus and slaughtering civilians 6 years later.
Your last statement I guess is true but not helpful. Plenty of violence to go around.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/03/israel-gaza-...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-human...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-hu...
From the CNN article btw: "The soldier said that he and his comrades refused to carry on with the practice after two days and confronted their senior commander about it. Their commander, who first told them not to “think about international law,” saying that their own lives were “more important,” ultimately relented, releasing the two Palestinians, the soldier said. "
This goes to show you to what degree Israeli soldiers do consider the international law and these sort of moral questions. They would rather risk their own lives. But yes, over a long war of this kind the threshold is going to become lower. It's the Hamas choice to keep fighting the way it does (booby trap every civilians building e.g.).
Now find me the Hamas "soldier" who refused to carry out orders to murder civilians or refused to hold civilian hostages and got their commander to free them. Let's see where's the moral equivalence.
> “They dressed us in military uniforms, put a camera on us, and gave us a metal cutter,” he said. “They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels. ‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”
I know this is a tough one but the question is what are the norms. One anecdote (including one unit where this is practiced) doesn't answer the question. The anecdotes are just that. This practice could have happened 10 times out of 100K, could have happened 100 out of 100K, could have happened 1000 out of 100K.
I'm pretty sure this is not the norm. I.e. that all/most/many IDF units advance in Gaza by capturing Palestinians, putting them in IDF uniforms, and sending them in the front. Very very far from it.
I would rather we had zero stories like this one.
War crimes happen during wars. The French, the Americans, the British, The Australians etc. etc. have all committed war crimes in all their wars since WW-II (and before, that concept didn't exist). In terms of accountability in those militaries it's O(0). The IDF has on many occasions put soldiers on trial for violating rules of war. It's a core value in the IDF to fight morally. And yes, in today's Israel and today's war it's not the same as it has been but relative to western armies it's within the practiced norms. Relative to Hamas whose strategy and tactics are one big war crime there's no comparison.
Uday Rabie was taken last week by dozens of armed fighters with Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, his brother Hassan Rabie told CNN on Tuesday." - https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/middleeast/uday-rabie-palesti...
And by the way, while they do have uniform, they don't wear them when they fight. Only for celebrations like their marching of civilian hostages. Gaza also has a higher proportion of structures used for military purposes (like all of them?) then Germany in WW2. There have been cities in Germany during WW-II that have been completely destroyed - we can pick that as a comparison. Picking entire Germany vs a tiny area is not reasonable.
The situation is completely different. One action is a defensive response and the other was an offensive initiative. There is no reality in which the Hamas attack can be framed as defensive or justifiable by any western values. The IDF response however is very much in line with what western nations have actually done, e.g. the US response to 9/11, the response to ISIS, WW-II or any other war you can think of.
The US went to the other side of the world to get the people it thought wanted to harm it. There wasn't even any real threat to its territory or people. It was simply about deterrence and getting even and it was significantly more heavy handed. Similarly other western powers that went after ISIS. Israel to contrast is facing an existential threat and parts of the country are/were unlivable because of the threat of attacks. It has no option other than the complete removal of Hamas from Gaza (and Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon which has largely been accomplished).
There's nothing defensive about embarking on a self-described colonial endeavour.
I don't know where you live, your nationality or heritage, but you're likely more of a colonizer than any Israeli. Since most are. I'll bet you think you have the right to defend yourself, your family, your nation.
EDIT: Also I should thank you for saying that. A lot of people try to pretend that if only Israel behaved differently then everyone would live happily ever after. Most do not even understand what "Palestine" is and what "Israel". Where's the West Bank and where's Gaza. But the Palestinians and the Arabs believe the Israelis are colonizers (of the entire region) and invaders and therefore they have the right to kill them, civilians or otherwise, until they repel them out of the region and Israelis do not have the right of self defense. This is of course absurd and would discourage many people from supporting their cause so they try their best to not say this outwardly. The truth is that if the Palestinians and the Arab countries recognized the Jewish people's legitimate rights in the region and were looking for peace we'd have peace a long time ago.
That's crazy because Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, definitely defined it as a colonial endeavour.
You should read his book: "The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question", it's quite enlightening on exactly where this movement began and its historical motivations, which is absolutely the same MO as modern Israel.
Also the notion that people who are over 1000 years removed from a piece of land coming to violently remove current residents from their homes and massacre and imprison them for over 70 years isn't colonialism is absolutely ludicrous. Please seriously think about this sentence again. Think about it hard, like, harder than you've ever thought before.
>Arab expansion in the middle east is a colonial endeavor.
It's clear after you typed these first two sentences that you're probably a genocidal maniac, like approximately 57 percent of the Israeli population who believe that the current amount of force used is still not enough.
>Arab countries recognized the Jewish people's legitimate rights in the region and were looking for peace we'd have peace a long time ago.
There is absolutely zero legitimacy to the Zionist regime.
I mean he must just love the Jewish people. Lovely guy indeed.
Just to name a notable event amongst many.
Many of the masterminds of the early Zionist insurgency later became top Israeli government officials.
Sad to think that Jews and Arabs lived ok side by side. Right wing radicals realized their destiny could only be completed with Palestinian displacement.
The King David hotel was the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces. They were also warned to evacuate and this was a splinter group that executed the attack not really representative of the majority of the Jewish population.
This attack for the most part is relevant in the context of the British occupation of the region. Current day Palestinian narrative essentially puts the Jewish people as British agents who are colonizing Israel. Total nonsense.
You're not wrong that figures like Begin and Shamir eventually became the government though that was decades later. Shamir was one of the first Israeli prime ministers to try and seek a peaceful solution during the Madrid Conference: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1989-1992/madrid-confer... [EDIT: And Begin promised to give Palestinians autonomy as part of the peace agreement with Egypt]
It's the Palestinians who are creating the Israeli right wing radicals. It's the Palestinians who are creating a situation where the only way Israelis can live in peace is by displacing the Palestinians. It's the Palestinians who are playing a lose-lose game instead of a win-win one. You could see that in 1948 when they attacked Israel. You could see that when Israel left Gaza in 2005. You could see that in the suicide bombing campaign of the early 2000s. And you can see this right now with Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.
Jews and Arabs lived ok side by side only when the Jews "knew their place" or when the Jews had power. There is no precedent for anything else. The Israeli right wing extremism is more or less a mirror image. They used to be outlawed and have risen as a result of a campaign of violence against Israel. There is no example since 1948 of when Palestinians came and said we are going to stop violence and settle things through negotiation. They've always negotiated out of one side and murdered civilians out of the other. And here we are.
EDIT2: It's worth noting the British prevented Jewish people from immigrating to Palestine which sealed the fate of many to death in WW-II. They also put illegal immigrants in camps and mass deported them back to be killed in Europe. They also hanged and imprisoned quite a few Jewish people during the British Mandate period. They hanged quite a few Arabs as well. That said the majority of the Jewish community did not support violence against the British. It's worth noting the mandate given to the British was essentially to establish a Jewish state in that region (initially including Jordan).
Shelomo Dov Goitein admits that the Jews lived best when they lived with Muslims (and under their protection). This "knew their place" is not true, go talk to Syrian Jews (there's an interview with one on youtube) on what it was like before the brits made israel.
Who gave the british the right to declare who has the right to live in land they stole? The whole thing is insane when you think about it.
It’s nuts, I agree. But it has to be understood that such authority is assumed, it isn’t granted, and the only way to refute it is to refute it. If nobody does that, the assumption of authority persists.
It is the basis for international relations. Authority is assumed under duress, it is never granted unless under duress.
- The Palestinians are not "defending themselves".
- Your statement about the Jews in Arab countries is patently false. You're just repeating propaganda. Jews were discriminated and persecuted against everywhere when they lives under Arab and Muslim rule. You should talk to Jews whose families come from Lebanon or Syria. Do you know how many Jews are left in Syria? The Palestinians and Arabs boast they treated them better than the Europeans that massacred them or forced them to convert to Christianity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Musl...
The fact of the matter is that Arabs living in Israel under Israeli rule have the most freedom of any other Arab in the middle east. They're also amongst the most prosperous. To contrast in all Arab countries Jewish people have been ethnically cleansed.
It wasn't just the British who acknowledged that Israel is the home of the Jewish people. It was the league of nations and later the UN. I.e. everyone. The Jewish people were forced off this land (including by Arabs) and their right trumps the right of the Palestinians. Those that came there before 1948 (and during Ottoman rule) joined Jewish people who have lived there forever, are legal immigrants, and had to buy their land back (including places like Hebron or Jerusalem) where they were forced out. There was also a Jewish community in Gaza by the way, also ethnically cleansed.
Who gave the Ottoman's who came before the British any rights? Why aren't you challenging the right of the British to give Jordan to the Hashemites who came from Saudi Arabia? Or any of the other countries that France and Britain carved out? Why shouldn't the Kurdish people have their own country? Or the Druze? But OK. The white people from the Americas can return to Europe (+ all the more recent immigrants from everywhere). Same for Australia and New Zealand. The Arabs can return to Arabia. The Jewish people will return to their home in the middle east. And then according to you everything is now "correct".
EDIT: One should also point out that it's extremely well documented that this is the historical homeland of the Jewish people. I.e. whoever lived there knew that. Everywhere you dig you find synagogues, coins with Hebrew writing, and other artifacts. The Palestinians have zero documented connection to the region other than the fact that they happened to live there in 1948 (which I am not disputing). I'm sure there are also Palestinians with lineage going back to the Israelites. There are also immigrants etc. That doesn't really change anything. The claim by Palestinians that they are descendants of the Canaanites or the Phoenicians is a joke. Clearly in 1948 they were Arabs with the same identity as people living in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. No national identity whatsoever and no particular connection to the region we call Israel. Generally speaking. (I'm sure some had stronger connection to the region).
The other thing is this really doesn't matter. Today Israel exists. Israelis are not going anywhere. If you want to fight for justice go fight for the aboriginals to get Australia back or the first nations to get Canada back. That's a real story and your chances of success are better. Palestinians need to change their thinking here if they want an end to violence. Which apparently they do not.
His family was forced off their land and prevented by force from returning through the ages.
It so happens to be Passover now. Do you know how many time each Jewish person mentions returning to Jerusalem during the Seder every year?
His right to live in his ancestral homeland, just like the right of native in Canada or Australia or the US, never expires. The only way to settle his claim is through mutual agreement, like treaties in Canada.
Islam is very well known to protect the rights of minorities under it, especially the People of the Book: the Jews and the Christians.
By the way, what does the word "Hebrew" mean? Those that crossed the river ;) So someone lived there before the Jews - the Caananites, i.e. the Palestinians. The same people who became Jews and Christians, then Muslims.
Arabs and Muslims did not force anyone off their land. Ottomans did not kick out anyone under the ruling of Islam. The Ottoman Caliphate was an Islamic rule at its peak, not an ethno-rule as some like to falsely claim. Muslims preserve the local culture - this is why Islam spread. And that is why you will see Kung Fu styles adapted by Muslim rituals like Wudu'. Islam does not erradicate the local culture, people accepted it because of the positive interactions they had with Muslims. This is why most Muslims are not Arabs.
When pan-turkism and pan-arabism did arise (due to several reasons, but also instigated by the west, the story of Lawrence of Arabia is well known), that was a big reason to the decline of the Ottoman Caliphate, of course other factors played a role, but it was against the teachings of Islam.
There was no "Saudi Arabia" back in the day lol.
Yes, we reject all of the european colonialist projects and fake borders in the ME. Post WWI european colonization has caused nothing but destruction everywhere it touched, including India - that's why they sought liberation. Divide and conquer is the name of the game. The established view in Islam is that all Muslims are one people, and no borders between us, from Indoesia all the way to Mauritania. Bilad Al-Sham are one, not the sykes-picot borders that they carved out.
Edit: why are they allowed to do this: https://x.com/trackingisrael/status/1911148565692362904
Covering own asses is natural enough. War crimes and crimes against humanity are serious concerns with serious considerations, yet what if we cannot ourselves be trusted by the very nature of our self lies?
Nice to see Zuckerberg taking free speech as seriously as he claims.
Full transcript of his remarks can be found here: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-anno...
At this point, anyone with even an ounce of awareness & empathy should realize that international law is dead until further notice.
It's really hard to keep this kind of rhetoric going when we have the internet showing us videos of hospitals being bombed. That's not defense.
Plenty of people that aren't Muslim would like to see the bombing of hospitals to stop. Plenty of people that aren't Muslim would like the ceasefire to actually be respected. Plenty of people that aren't Muslim are upset about the tens of thousands of children that have been killed in Israeli strikes.
I think we need a rethink of freedom of press laws in the age of international monopolies.
They are literally arresting and deporting people for suspected thoughts.
Student visas are being denied based on social media posts.
This is fascism.
Do you have a link to what you are referring to?
"Rubio said that while Khalil's “past, current or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful," the provision allows the secretary of state alone to “personally determine” whether he should remain in the country." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mahmoud-khalil-deported...
The article is a day old, the judges just affirmed that Rubio is allowed to do this today
That's how it always worked? This idea that someone is entitled to a student visa is just odd, and I am speaking as someone who had a variety of different visas, including two student visas. You're really at the whim of the state department. It just takes getting notice, a minor infraction, not submitting a renewal on time, or lying on a form and you're done. Lawyers may helps there is some way to appeal but it's an incredible uphill battle.
Not really. Yes, the state department has always been the say on who gets visas.
But the Supreme Court has also previously ruled that non-citizens enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens, and that includes free speech. No other previous administrations have been so blatant about revoking visas simply for the "crime" of voicing one's opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The case of the Turkish student who was abducted in Massachusetts is particularly egregious, because as far as anyone can tell all she did was right an op ed, and not a very controversial one at that.
We're in uncharted waters here because previous administrations have generally followed constitutional norms when it came to making visa decisions.
They don’t see it as a free speech issue. They are not imprisoning the person but “simply” sending them home.
> We're in uncharted waters here because previous administrations have generally followed constitutional norms when it came to making visa decisions.
Not really, they specifically ask about membership in various parties, namely the communist party. This is nothing new at all. Any student coming say in the 80s and starting to show up at pro Communist party protests would have been just as easily kicked out.
A visa like J-1 can be revoked for non-criminal reasons. They don’t see a student visa validity as a free speech issue. It has never been and won’t be until the law is changed.
The most important thing to point out is that "the judges" in this case was actually a single immigration judge. Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, not the judiciary. I agree this law that says that the Secretary of State can essentially just deport anyone they want can't be squared with the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and due process. But that wasn't really this immigration judge's determination to make, i.e. questioning the constitutionality of the law that Rubio is using to deport Khalil. There is a separate case going on in federal court that should address that topic.
This article has more info: https://archive.vn/D890d
Didn't realize that the judge in the linked one was an immigration judge and not a judiciary judge thanks for the clarification
In this other case, the administration flat out admitted they made a mistake and that he shouldn't have been deported. So they ship him to this notorious prison and then just do an "oopsies, our bad, he's gone now." Not only do I not see how the administration's stance is defensible, why would you even want to defend it, especially if you actually agreed with their overall stance of wanting to increase deportations of "bad guys". The administration said outright he is not a bad guy!
I simply can't understand it outside of a "the cruelty is the point" framework, but even in that framework the cruelty is normally directed at "bad guys". Now folks are OK with cruelty to random people that was the result of an admitted error. WTF happened to our country?
Sadly but nobody is entitled to student visas. They never were. It's mostly at the whim of the state department and they may revoke it for a variety of reasons. Minor misdemeanors or getting caught with DUI would also lead to losing a visa. It's really a "walk on eggshells" kind of situation. Yeah, in some cases appealing and finding a lawyer may help but it's huge uphill battle.
The western delusional denial about the realities of the ground when it comes to multicultural societies (think Beirut) shouldn't pave the way for more murder and atrocities as it already did.
Concerning...as another billionaire would say
-- original reply: --
I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation practice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.
Threads like this, at best, waver on the edge of a hell pit. If it plummets in, the discussion won't stay on HN's front page anyhow. Title de-baiting is a way to support having a discussion that doesn't completely suck, to the extent that this is doable.
I'm sorry, but that's not true—quite the opposite.
If you guys had any idea how next-to-impossible it is to host substantive discussions about a topic like this, you should recognize that you're getting what you want (frontpage attention for this story) instead of complaining about a secondary detail (the title edit).
A title edit like that is not making a statement about the underlying story, and certainly not trying to suppress any aspect of it. The article is one click away for people to read and make up their own minds about. This thread is filled with comments about the detail that I took out of the title; no one is missing it.
Rather, what I did was bog standard HN moderation, the sort of thing we've done thousands of times on hundreds of topics over 15+ years, purely for the purpose of supporting a substantive discussion of the article that you (I don't mean you personally, but the set of commenters who have been complaining about this) want to be discussed in the first place. From my point of view, that amounts to demanding 100% instead of saying yes to the 90% that you're getting in this case. That's not a realistic assessment of the tradeoffs with a thread like this.
Edit: I'm sorry if that sounded tetchy—I certainly understand the feeling you're expressing and why it feels that way.
I have been hanging out on HN since 2009 and I truely appreciate your dedication to keep this site civil and it definitely is one of the very few that did not degenerate over time. That's the main reason why HN is in my bookmark bar. I appologize if my comment triggered you, and I totally understand where you are coming from as well. If it was my decision, I would keep politics out of HN as I never saw anything fruitful come out of these posts and stresses out moderators as they have to police the thread and find themselves in the way of fire.
Our focus is shifting towards the news aspect rather than the hacking aspect, which is the primary reason for my presence here.
Not that it helps, necessarily, but the people who have the opposite preference to yours are complaining loudly about how much they feel the current affairs stories are being suppressed on HN.
Re tags: I've always resisted the idea of adding it to the core HN site, but I do think we can do more to support alternate front-ends to HN. With any luck, we can publish the next version of the API this year, which should make that a lot easier.
I appreciate your response and the work you continue on the front ends. I obtain political news content from other sources, so my cumulative content feed contains a significant amount of duplicate content.
"Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram"
@dang IDK if this matters, nor when the title was changed (from submission, to now). Just an FYI.
I think some of you are overly focusing on the title instead of the overall effect of the moderator interventions here, which is that the article gets more attention and the story more coverage. In that sense, I'd think it would be in you guys' interest to take yes for an answer, much as zzzeek has here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657317.
Posting this not to argue about your decision but to describe the impression I formed from reading the title.
Rather than taking on the task of manually editing headlines to be more sympathetic to Israel perhaps the site could implement a filter that disallows the word from being used in titles or posts altogether? If that is the aim, it would save you time having to answer questions about it.
There's no contradiction. The rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
Nor is there any attempt to steer discussion away from the subject of the article. That would have been a hapless attempt, had it existed, since the thread is filled with such discussion.
> I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title
Your goal was to “reduce the flamebait effect” without having any impact on the discussion? Those two sentiments are contradictory.
> That would have been a hapless attempt
No argument there, it actually makes the whole endeavor of manually inventing an Israel-friendly title to substitute a neutral and factually accurate one even stranger.
The goal here appears to be to make it seem as though a campaign to remove pro-Palestinian content simply happened on its own, which only works if the title that you wrote successfully dissuades people from reading the article. It looks like all this choice accomplished, though, was raising some eyebrows where you’ve now had to post several times to defend it, with little to no impact on the quality of the discussion of the topic. That being said, the fact that it was a half measure doesn’t provide adequate cover for the obvious intent in this particular editorial choice.
So again, why even bother with the half measures? If any mention of Israel lowers any topic below the community standards for discussion, you can simply outright ban mentions of Israel and any Israel-adjacent topics rather than manually intervening to write bespoke, more positive headlines for the country to suit any mention.
That's not steering away from the subject of the article—it's steering toward it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: We've already had to ask you this more than once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42742340 (Jan 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36577854 (July 2023)
All you need is to check the miles-long list of antidemocratic coups d'etat organized by - or with the critical support of - the US, and what the press or the public thought at the time if you asked them if the US was doing that.
But after those actions, that's what many people wanted after simply reading/listening to some words.
Even if you say what the US is disseminating is not "true" (or misleading), it is debatable that truth matters more than the people's "preferences".
And it's debatable that other country's preferences matter more than the US people's. What's wrong with the US spreading it's view of morality (such as human rights)?
The US is the greatest country in the world. I learned that in school and don't need to worry about whether it's true. Now and when the time comes, I will be a good citizen.
I almost wonder if your comment itself is Israeli propaganda.
You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, but it's not ok to attack others (for example).
This is really important, because the impact of doing this evokes worse from others in a fruit-of-the-poisoned-tree sort of way. It's not a surprise that your comment here formed the root of such a terrible subthread with so many comments breaking the site guidelines at least as badly.
>a country populated by, or dominated by the interests of, a single racial or ethnic group:
Yeah, that sounds like Israel to me. Does that not sound like Israel to you?
Boycotting israel over their continued occupation and genocide is illegal in most US states now.
Might want to tell them that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_...
You’ve shown less than 10% of the Knesset is “Arab” (for Israel’s peculiar definition of “Arab”), whereas 20+% of the population is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return
I know an American Christian family of Palestinian origin that proved their home had been in the outskirts of Nazareth (5 generations back, with concrete proof) that were denied a visit to Israel because they are not Jewish. It is shameful and repugnant. While anyone can visit Israel in theory, the gov will deny you entry if there is connection to the land that precedes Israeli settlements. And of course, the law of return is exclusively for Jewish people
We are in a thread about how pro-Palestinian posts are being suppressed. You seem to be under some illusion that people who disagree with you are unaware of how content affects them. But what you're proposing is being a contrarian. I am not going to drink lead paint because the social media tells me not to.
That Israel gave another state perfect ammunition to demonize them does not make what Israel's doing any less real. That's just a dumb mistake they made. I can monitor what content is making its way to me, because I don't trust Iran either. I am aware that things will be exaggerated and misreported. But I am going to evaluate evidence, not throw everything out the window.
This is one of the most disgusting, vile statements I've seen on hacker news.
Only if you completely misread it and conflate the Israeli government with people living in Israel, which is a good way to misrepresent what I'm saying.
A government using a terrorist attack to justify its already rapid military expansion? Unheard of.
If you're disgusted by this sentiment, it means you have more good faith with the Israeli government than actual Jewish people, which is really sad. What's antisemitic is telling other Jewish people that they are self-hating when they don't clap for hospitals being bombed and children burned with white phosphorous. If you don't find this [1] vile, you are not a person who can judge morality.
And you were in this thread calling everyone who disagreed with you an Islamist cabal before you were flagged. Not sure I care about the opinion of such a blatantly brainwashed person.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legiti...
That's 0.1%. The Indians and Chinese immigrants cover a much larger percentage. Does that mean that Meta is controlled by India and China?
This is the opposite of innocent until proven guilty, it is up to the accuser to present evidence not the other way around.
No one is stating they are guilty, but serving in the IDF gives reasonable grounds to suspect someone could be involved in violations of human rights. This military's main task is to maintain an illegal occupation over millions of people. When you apply for a UK visa, for example, you do have to answer questions whether you were involved in war crimes, so it's pretty standard.
> it is up to the accuser to present evidence not the other way around.
I think you are confused, the context of this conversation is hiring for companies, not a court hearing. This principle does not apply here. If they cannot reasonably convince they didn't abuse Palestinians, they just don't get considered, that's it.
> their quoted propaganda articles
Their comment is now flagged, but from memory the articles they linked were factual. You can label them propaganda all you want, this does not change the truth.
Sources Declaring Israel's Practices as Apartheid:
1. UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Michael Lynk's report concludes that Israel's practices in the OPT amount to apartheid [3][9][12].
2. International Court of Justice (ICJ): Found Israel responsible for apartheid in its advisory opinion [1][7].
3. Amnesty International: Describes Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, a crime against humanity [2][5][10].
4. Human Rights Watch: Concludes that Israel's policies constitute apartheid and persecution against Palestinians [4][5].
5. International Commission of Jurists (ICJ): Denounces Israel's system of apartheid against Palestinians [8].
6. B'Tselem: An Israeli human rights group that has also described Israel's practices as apartheid [9].
7. Al-Haq and other Palestinian organizations: Submitted reports to UN bodies arguing that Israel maintains an apartheid regime [4].
---
## Sources
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/experts-hail-icj-declara...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apart...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/israel-opt-is...
[4] https://www.cjpme.org/apartheid_list
[5] https://www.caabu.org/issues/international-human-rights-orga...
[6] https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Full-R...
[7] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
[8] https://www.icj.org/un-icj-denounces-israels-system-of-apart...
[9] https://bdsmovement.net/UN-Special-Rapporteur-Confirms-Israe...
[10] https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-jerusalem-israel-race...
[11] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/02/israel-opt-pa...
[12] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-y...
[13] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/world/middleeast/israel-a...
[15] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/israel-opt-la...
[16] https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/a-discussion-of-the-un-rep...
[17] https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/20727.html
[18] https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/17012.html
[19] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/report-of-the-special-co...
[20] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/05/does-israels-treatment-p...
[21] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/top-un-court-says-israels...
[22] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
[23] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/apartheid-is...
[24] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
[25] https://fathomjournal.org/how-ngos-fabricate-the-legal-defin...
[26] https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid
[28] https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/amnesty-internationals-cruel...
[29] https://ips-dc.org/human-rights-groups-agree-israel-is-pract...
[30] https://www.amnestyusa.org/campaigns/end-apartheid/
[31] https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/apartheid-report-2022/
[32] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-must-e...
[33] https://ngo-monitor.org/report-category/apartheid/
[34] https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/1077291879/israel-apartheid-s...
[35] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-on-th...
This is a leap in logic. You have no idea that they would know they would do this.
They’re nowhere near as large as the Chinese and Indian population but probably close to third place for largest foreign born tech worker populace in SV.
You might think: Well, what does that effect the world if a tiny country flattens an even tinier other region. Then have a look at how Netanyahu for decades pushed for US wars in the ME and is now pushing for the US starting a war against Iran.
„ LEAKED AUDIO OF CEO OF AIPAC Rubio, Stefanik, Waltz … they all have sth in common ... relationships with key AIPAC leaders"
Ratcliffe, one of the first candidates I ever met as an AIPAC rep ... he took the oath as CIA director, for crying out loud https://x.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/1910101143268508094
- Israeli snipers shot a large number of protestors
- 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,000, including nearly 8,800 children have been injured
- 81% of the gunshots were to the legs
- 122 people had one or both their legs amputated (including 20 children)
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-iopt/report2018-op...
Also, what kind of peace Israel wants when they let their settlers attack Palestinians in the West Bank, aided by the Israeli military, and without consequences? All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. Maybe they should start dismantling those settlements first?
If Israel wants peace, they should accept the two-state solution and let the Palestinians have self-determination, instead of making their life hell on earth with their apartheid regime.
Israel offered Palestinians a two-state solution multiple times. During the Oslo accords Israel allowed Palestinian leadership to return and established the Palestinian Authority and gave it control over many areas as a path towards peace and a two state solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
It was Palestinians who through a wave of suicide bombings made sure there's no chance of any solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_suicide_attacks#Ba...
Your so called march was an attempt of Hamas to break the blockade. Similar to events that happened prior to Oct 7th to get Israel to drop its guard. Israel was justified in blockading Gaza as long as it was under Hamas control. Hamas fired numerous rockets at Israeli cities throughout the period since it took over the Gaza strip by force from the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians didn't need to march to remove the blockade. All they had to do is remove/disarm Hamas.
Most Palestinians do not want a two state solution. They want Israel removed, all the Jewish people removed from the middle east, and one state in its place.
I'm not going to defend settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. It's not ok. But that is a relatively new phenomena that is a result of extremism in Israel due to decades of indiscriminate Palestinian violence against civilians. Before the first Intifada there were generally peaceful relationships (and a lot less settlers/settlement).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
So, if Islam’s view of things is similar, I don’t think this would be a refutation?
(Now, to be clear, I believe that Islam is false. But I’m not convinced that “bad things are happening to them” is something they would have reason to conclude is good evidence for it being false. Of course, one could just see this as another instance of the question of theodicy (“Why does God allow bad things to happen?”), and I’m not sure this instance of it makes the question particularly more difficult to answer? Though I suppose if Islam includes claims about like, always winning or something, or always winning conditional on X,Y,Z when X,Y,Z are true, then it would contradict that.)
Although did not quantify
I think it isn’t helpful when Israel designates all teenager and older males in Gaza as Hamas militants, even their own hostages because of the shares phenotypes, heritage, genetics
Makes consensus impossible
[1] https://www.hrw.org/financials
[2] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/human-rights-watch...
Project Raven, a UAE offensive cyber operation has leaked a document by the Qatar government concerning financing of HRW [2][3]
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/human-rights-watch-took-...
[2] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1700763578-human-...
[3] https://www.memri.org/reports/raven-project-leaks-alleged-qa...
"Critics describe MEMRI as a strongly pro-Israel advocacy group that, in spite of describing itself as being "independent" and "non-partisan" in nature,[5][6][7] aims to portray the Arab world and the Muslim world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it re-publishes."
"co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997"
I think there is a deep irony in using MEMRI publications as evidence that a human rights watch org has ideological bias.
I would hardly describe it as a nothingburger for human rights organization ethics, but that's only me
However, I am calling that impartially into question due to evidence pointing otherwise
If you are alleging that Qatar is motivating the ideology of a human rights organization, I don't think that's true at all.
Please make your substantive points without attacking others. If someone else is wrong or has a bad argument, it's enough to post correct information or a better argument.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090722190606/http://www.hrw.or...
Apologies for missing the mark there.
This is a good thing. Posts like your comment here break the site guidelines badly*, and the users who flagged it were quite correct to do so, regardless of your (or their) political opinion.
* for example, this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.", and this one: "Don't be snarky.". Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing those things? We'd appreciate it.
Basically I'm saying: Nobody has a right to free wide distribution of their thoughts on social media anyway, and also, those who provide these free ad-supported platforms have many reasonable motivations to remove content -- including the belief that the speaker is wrong/spreading lies and propaganda. That doesn't 'silence' them any more than not letting them into my house silences them.
I disagree with you though. These global social media platforms have an incredible amount of sway over our society. As long as they have that reach, they should not be allowed to distort and silence.
Almost none of my other connections post anything, though there are occasional exceptions.
Try Signal instead perhaps?
Apparently there are some that even say the Palestinian flag itself is a "terrorist flag" and anyone flying it is also a terrorist.
In the case of a story like this, which has significant new information (SNI) [1] on a major ongoing topic (MOT) [2], and at least some hope of a substantive discussion, moderators sometimes turn off the user flags on the story [3] so that it can spend time on HN's front page.
In such cases, we usually adjust the degree to which we turn off the flags so that the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags isn't affected too dramatically. Usually the best way to support a substantive discussion is for the story to remain on HN's front page, but not in the highest few slots, where it would burn much hotter.
Since upvotes and submission time are public data but flags aren't, it can appear like a story is being downweighted when in fact the opposite is the case, as with this thread. That's not a rule, though—we do also downweight stories sometimes. That's why the FAQ explains that you can't derive rank from votes and time alone.
The reason moderation works this way, btw, is that HN is a curated site [4] (and always has been—here's me explaining this when I took over HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621).
Moderators' job is to jiggle the system out of the failure modes [5] it would otherwise end up in if the software were running unattended. Turning off flags on certain stories, and adding downweight to other stories, are two examples. The goal is the same: to support substantive discussion on interesting stories, and (as a necessary condition for that) prevent the site from burning too hot if we can.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system, you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can represent Jewish history. It's clear to me why this happens, but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely difficult.
But even beyond that, I think engaging in censorship to hide an ethnic cleansing is an affront to humanity.
* Here, I'm taking Zionism to mean to be in support of the way Israel has formed and continued to form in the past 77 or so years. I am aware that there are many different interpretations of Zionism (to illustrate the breadth; Noam Chomsky considered himself a Zionist), but this particular interpretation is the one that is relevant to this conversation.
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-e...
PS. I am not on the "side" of israel or palestine, if Israel were to have these numbers and systemic colonialist oppression I would jump to supporting them and pushing for humanitarian support. I just recognise the moral reality of the situation. Me, and most people like me, are on the side of humanitarianism, because all lives are equal, and so are all deaths.
(I think that you can only comment on a new comment after a couple of minutes)
It's pretty amazing how much bs you're willing to believe about Israel, yet not a single critique of the perpetrators of this attack or their supporters. Sounds to me like you're just set on condemning Israel no matter what the numbers say, no matter who attacks who, no matter if rape happens, children get kidnapped. It's weird.
Your classic claims of "un bias" "kangaroo court" and "world is biased against israel" have been proven wrong a hundredfold, and are stale and archaic by this point, and people will never stop supporting palestinians, because people who know they are moral and are set on being moral won't be put off, no matter how much you try and twist the knife. you wont silence morality, equality, or humanity, no matter how much you try to to help your narrative.
There is only one colonialist expansionist force in the region.
False. False. False.
‣ re: genocide [genocide Gaza](https://www.google.com/search?q=genocide%20gaza) ‣ re: ethnic cleansing [ethnic cleansing](https://www.google.com/search?q=ethnic%20cleansing%20israel) ‣ re: apartheid [apartheid `Israel`](https://www.google.com/search?q=apartheid%20israel)
What does it say about your view of the world that what you claim to be nonsense are in demonstrable facts of reality?
I'm not going to spend half-an-hour posting and explaining each and every link from pages and pages and simple Google searches. To summarize:
(1) The architecture of oppression in that part of the world has been characterized as apartheid [“Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief”](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/israel-imposin...) by many many many individuals (both Israeli and non-Israeli) and organization. You say there's no apartheid and yet a former Mossad chief says there is.
In order for there to be an apartheid there must be an architecture of oppression. `Israel` is intent on resolving the conflict arising directly from this oppression by removing the source of the problem, that is to say
by (2) ethnic cleansing which is why the Naqba, the forced expulsion of ~750,000 people with no right to return in contradistinction to the so-called "right of return" worldwide Jewry with no links to the land beyond ancient ancient religious history,
and (3) it tuns out now as we can all see with our very own eyes that `Israel` is now also willing to take the ultimate step, they are willing to commit genocide. They told us they were going to commit genocide. They then proceeded to carry out a genocide (which they paused and restarted) and they boast about committing a genocide. The ICJ rules that what `Israel` is in the process of carrying out what conceivably amounts to genocide and the ICC incredibly announced arrest warrants for the European-born Benjamin Netanyahu (sorry, I mean Benzion Mileikowsky) and Yoav Gallant. The horror we've witnessed on a daily basis and you deny reality to its face.
> If you read about the history of the conflict, every single time Israel has defended itself against Hamas (Israel has responded 100% defensively)
False.
`Israel`, with the backing of the USA, is an occupying power. By definition an occupying power is an oppressor. Every people have a right under international law to resist oppression, to resist occupation. If and when they do resist the occupying power is not "defending itself" the occupying power seeks to perpetuate the architecture of oppression.
> it's been called a genocide. [every single time Israel has defended itself it's been called a genocide.]
False.
I want to point out that even though what you're saying is false† … even if it were true (which it is not†) … it doesn't negate that what is presently taking place in Gaza is tantamount to genocide. That's a transparent fallacy. Say I went around calling every animal I saw a cow. I see a cat and call it a cow. I see a dog and call it a cow. You get the idea. I'd be misclassifying animals, right? (Misclassifying them as cows). Now let's say that I then see a cow and called it a cow. Just because I had up to this point been misclassifying animals (as cows) it doesn't then follow that cows are not cows. That's how unsophisticated your argument is.
> Even the blockage was called a genocide.
blockade‡ False.
Gaza is under an air/land/sea blockade which is illegal under international law. The blockade has not been in any remotely widespread fashion called a genocide.
> Also the pager attack, which was the most targeted attack in history, has been called a genocide. This nonsense has to stop.
False.
Perhaps they were to some degree but not a all widely and not by prominent voices.
> Also yes, anti-zionism is anti-semitism.
False.
categorically and demonstrably false … take [Betar Worldwide](https://betarus.org/) … on their homepage they say “WE ARE BETAR: LOUD PROUD ZIONIST ACTIVISTS WE STAND STRONG JEWS FIGHT BACK LEAD PROUD FIGHT ANTI SEMITISM” … loud proud Zionist activists” (got that?) … this is the same org who on who have posted three times on April the 5th (2025) that “They are all Nazis.” with an image with the text “THERE ARE NO INNOCENTS IN GAZA” [They are all Nazis.](https://x.com/Betar_USA/status/1908369503630606404) … not to mention the actual government of Israel itself* [“THERE ARE NO INNOCENT CIVILIANS THERE.”](https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1802832054280950263) and I'm presuming the government of Israel is Zionist – given that Zionism in its present form is a genocidal movement criticism of Zionism cannot be antisemitism. We must be able to criticize genocide. Saying “anti-zionism is anti-semitism” is a false equivalence and tries to use cancel culture tactics to silence dissent. It's a disgusting underhanded maneuver.
> Zion is a mountain in jerusalem, mount zion. Jews gravitate towards Jerusalem and "Zion" in the same way Muslims gravitate towards Mecca. It's like if I wanted to destroy Mecca, but said I'm not anti-muslim. It's a ridiculous argument.
Huh? So what if that is where the Zion in Zionism/Zionist originates from. What a nonsense (to use the categorization that you employed) argument.
You made at least eight factually incorrect claims in the space of 123 words according to my word count. That's a factual error once every 15 words. To me nowadays that is what Zionism is; it is counterfactual to its core and has become pro-genocidal – in fact in hindsight the genocide was built into the ideology.
† as in, it is false that whenever `Israel` responds to Palestinian resistance that said response is consistently deemed to be genocide – I've been following the `Israel`/Palestine so-called conflict for all of my adult life and this present horror that is being unleashed in Gaza post Oct. 7th is the first time many and multiple serious voices have called what Israel is doing genocide.
‡ [Blockade of the Gaza Strip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip)
Second, apartheid are a set or racist laws within a country. There is no apartheid in Israel, every citizen has equal rights including the 2 MILLION muslim arabs living there. There are Arabic political parties, Arabic supreme court judges, there was actually an Arabic supreme court judge that sent an Ashkenazi president to prison! That's not apartheid, this would never have happened in South Africa.
Genocide when you try to kill an entire people. Here is the definition "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." How is 50k death, with about half of them being Hamas genocide? It's laughable. Israel, as they've stated many times, are after Hamas. If anything you need to re-examine your perspective. Hamas is who committed genocide, they were just too weak to pull it off.
It's funny that you mention "The Nakba" and you don't even know what it means. For starters the "catastrophe" isn't the displacement. What people mean by it is that they failed to destory Israel. Second, it didn't happen in a vaccuum. It was part of the larger context of the Arab Israeli war, where 5 countries, including many people residing in the region attempted to genocide (your favorite word) the newly formed Israel. Also, literally every history book that isn't 100% one-sided will show you that it was a mix of reasons for the 700,000 people that were displaced. Many, if not most, were urged to leave by their leader who told them they would annihilate the Jews and they could go back, some left out of fear, since war was coming, obviously, and some were driven out, which makes sense. If you attack a people, they will drive you out. Another thing that isn't mentioned there which IS an ethnic cleansing, is the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arabic countries during that same period. If you look at the population of Arabic countries from 1948 and now you will see a stark stark difference. You definitely won't see something like 2,000,000 Jews living in these places.
What is Israel and the U.S. occupying this is a nonsense argument as well. People who claim that, think that somehow the entirety of Israel is occupied. More nonsense.
The blockade is not illegal, if it was it still wouldn't matter as no country can be expected to absorb terrorist attacks. Funny how the focus is always on Israel and not Egypt, who has a "blockade" as well. Btw, these did not exist until the Intifadas. They make sense.
The pager attack, was the single most accurate military attack in military history.
Writing "false" on my arguments doesn't maks you right. You are just spreading propaganda, and I urge anyone reading this research this on their own. You are both extremely uneducated on this and need to read books not do Google searches.
Conflicts are always terrible, and the Eurasia / Africa region countries are particularly brutal.
Every citizen of every country has a human right (in a civilized civilization / society) to live a life that does not involve violence. A life where they are not worried about RPGs, bombings, (etc,) or military invasions.
Some sources of conflict involve places which various (different) religions hold as sacred / holy. Those sites should become UN world heritage locations and be managed by the UN in ways that only allow non-military peaceful access for any who want to visit.
With respect to Gaza my personal opinion remains unchanged. Both an innocent civilian people who suffer, and a terrorist government, remain in that region. The civilians should be evacuated. The terrorists who remain after (or whom are caught and found guilty in a trial) should be purged. The country should then be cleaned up, rebuilt, and returned to the innocent people along with a training-wheels UN supported government that brings stability, peace, and prevents a resurgence of hate and terrorism. In a few generations the country can grow more stable and graduate from the guided government structure.
That would be not just a two state solution, but a two states and global peace sites solution.
I'm reading Ireland between the lines. There is zero similarity.
A two state solution is not possible because most Palestinians do not want that solution. They want Israel erased and Jews "erased" from the middle east. Offers were already on the table and refused and the Oslo peace process was killed by Hamas violence.
But also, one of the most important.
[1] The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
[2] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Kahlidi
Most recently in 2008, Israel made exactly such an offer and was rejected.
"Abbas has since confirmed that he turned down an Israeli offer for a Palestinian state on nearly 95% of the West Bank. In September 2008, Olmert had presented him with a map that delineated the borders of the proposed PA state, for which Israel would annex 6.3 percent of the West Bank and compensate the Palestinians with 5.8 percent (taken from pre-1967 Israel), which Abbas stated he rejected out of hand, insisting instead to demarcate the 4 June 1967 borders of Palestine. He said that Olmert did not give a map of the proposal and that he could not sign without seeing the proposal. Abbas also said that he was not an expert on maps and pointed to Olmert's corruption investigation (he was later convicted).[68][69] Abbas said in October 2011 that he made a counteroffer to let Israel annex 1.9% of the West Bank."
Sadly, English wikipedia has a lot less information on this than the Hebrew wikipedia, but maybe turn your translation software to this: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97%D7%95%D7%AA...
Hamas has always been an extreme organization, they executed a bunch of Fatah members by throwing them off buildings when they took over gaza, not exactly a fun loving bunch.
Sure Netanyahu didn't exactly help to see the least, but saying he is somehow solely responsible for Hamas is pretty biased.
Agreed. And Israel have annihilated over 50,000 Gazans. Not exactly a fun loving bunch.
The truth is that there are zealots on both sides.
Was this before or after Fatah lost an election and then refused to step down, instead staging a violent coup?
And that's putting aside whether what you said is right or wrong (which I'm sure you'll get very different answers from each side)
Wrong, they accepted the 1947 partition plan and agreed to the Oslo accords
Whether the 1947 partition was accepted as a final state depends on who you ask, it's fairly clear that prominent figures viewed it as a stop along the way to a more comprehensive settlement. Take Ben Gurion ("After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.") or Chaim Weizmann ("partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years"). Menachem Begin's Herut continued to use the slogan 'Both banks of the Jordan River", and this language is reflected in Likud's founding charter.
When did Israel worry about this, when it comes to Palestinian civilians? This accusation from Israel supporters makes no sense because Israel has never cared about killing Palestinian civilians.