I hate how all the top google results these days are the self contradicting ramblings of LLMs.

Okay there are more than 2 sides.

Personally I am on the side of civilians whether they are Israeli or Palestinian or Druze or Bedouin. I am also on the side of the doctors, nurses, and humanitarian aid workers. These are who I consider the Good Guys. "Look for the helpers." - Mr Rodgers.

But to cover your question, there's two separate issues here:

• the claims of the belligerents

• feelings about what is happening now in the Israel Gaza war

The past claims of the belligerents

I'm not going to go into this, but but it goes back to history and it's where the side-taking on the sides of the belligerents mostly comes from, because different people have different interpretations. Legally speaking Palestine is occupied by Israel (West Bank) and blockaded by Israel (Gaza). No one can get in or out, it's effectively controlled by Israel.

What is happening now

What is happening now is a "war" between the IDF and Hamas. People like me, who are rooting for civilians are upset about:

• proportionality (so far about 33,000 Palestinian deaths vs 1,400 Israeli deaths)

• mortality (currently over 1.5% of the population of Gaza have been killed)

• civilian mortality - high numbers of children being killed (according to aid agencies, one is killed or injured every 10 minutes)

• high numbers of humanitarian workers and medical staff being killed

• inappropriate weapon choices (hundreds of 2,000lb bombs are being dropped, for reference the US used just one in its war against Isis.

• widespread infrastructure destruction, particularly of hospitals and other important buildings

• mounting evidence of starvation in the civilian population due to blockade of aid

Personally I am against anyone treating a civilian population like this for any reason, and I believe it amounts to war crimes. I was against the killing of civilians in Myanmar, Rwanda, East Timor, and I am against it now.

Side note: The median age in Gaza is 18, meaning literally half the people in it are still children.

Edit: I haven't given any sources cos lazy. I am happy to give them to OP or anyone in good faith (there are probably a bunch on the post history of my main which is livus@kbin.social). However, I do not speak sealionese.

It's not a weird conspiracy though. It's just that dragging the US into protecting Israel from Iran has the effect of halting US criticism of the Gaza genocide.

Another man is seen carrying a 5-year-old girl named Sally Abu Laila, who is bleeding from her head and surrounded by people trying to help.

Her mother Sabreen told CNN her daughter was in her arms when Israeli soldiers shot at her. They had attempted to cross into the north with Sabreen’s husband, but the soldiers turned him back, leaving her and her four children to face the journey alone.

I hope this is being documented somehow.

Even if it takes 40 years for the perpetrators of these war crimes to be brought to justice, as in some other cases, it still should happen.

It's also pretty obvious he cheated, though.

He clearly had a good phone, phone plan, and secure comprehensive healthcare.

No nation on Earth would have reacted any differently.

I see this canard a lot, and it's simply not true.

There are plenty of nations that don't have track records of ignoring international law and committing egregious human rights abuses, including during armed conflict.

It is simply not reasonable to assume those countries would start a campaign of massive civilian slaughter.

And the amount of resources going into genociding people, the high tech drones, the 2,000lb bombs, the surveillance and AI - it's horrific.

Leaving aside the fact that it's not the volume that defines genocide, what you're saying doesn't seem to take into account the way that genocide ramped up from a lower initial death rate. The Nazis weren't killing anything like that in the first 6 months.

• Aid agencies like UNICEF are saying that at the moment a child is wounded or killed every ten minutes in Gaza.

• In 0.5 years the Gaza genocide has already killed about 1.5% of the population. By comparison the Bosnian genocide killed 3% of the population over 2 years.

The tiny angry girlfriend who is also killing children and old people in her basement?

titled “God Hates Pride”

Wtf is going on over there? This sounds like Westboro Baptists have gone mainstream.

When I first read The Handmaid's Tale in the 1990s it read like an interesting thought experiment, not a prophecy.

Seems straightforward:

Unlike other issues related to Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives and displaced more than 85% of the population amid widespread destruction, the human-made famine occurring in the Palestinian territory appears more straightforward.

While the question of civilian casualties from specific attacks and from the wider policy of bombing will need to be tested against highly contested notions in international humanitarian law such as proportionality and necessity in conflict, the war crime of starvation is simply and clearly defined.

Underpinning the allegations is the fact that as a belligerent occupying power in Gaza, Israel is legally responsible under article 55 of the fourth Geneva convention for “ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population”, which requires the occupier to “bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate”.

Depends on the genre.

BRB just off to write my bestseller Financial Secrets: How To Get Rich From Being A Stepdad

I'd never heard of Ed Zitron but this is the second good blog I've seen by them this week.

Everything will have extra fingers.

Seriously tho I think there will be a flight to intricacy.

Probably.

I know it's realpolitik but it's still mind-blowing to me that this guy is in the middle of fighting against an aggressive occupation of Ukrainian land with elements of ethnic cleansing, and simultaneously takes every opportunity to align himself with Israel, an occupying force.

As @cyd@lemmy.world says, it's creating real dissonance outside of the West.

It's nice that you visited, but I believe people like Desmond Tutu, who actually lived through Apartheid in South Africa..

There's a reason why South Africa are the ones with the case against Israel in the international courts. They know what this is.

they could sedate him, clean the wound, and administer antibiotics for just over $2000

OP I don't know how long it will take you to get the money but please clean the wounds as best you can yourself in the meantime.

I remember someone in your other post said it's probably dog bite abscess. I have cleaned those before. You will need warm water, put a little betadine iodine in it and use soaked cotton wool to very gently "lick" the wound as if you are another cat.

Wrapp the cat's body securely in a towel first.

I would phone another vet and ask for a quote as what you have been quoted sounds insane to me especially since they didn't even tell you what the wounds are.

What a sociopath.

Having spent ages trying to adopt it and failing like 20+ years ago it's just crazy to me that every time I give it another chance, it still doesn't have non destructive editing and is still a non-intuitive UI from hell. It feels like they want it to be like this.

Probably both. The circular logic and redundant headings scream AI but presumably a human compiled it together and may have written what they thought were bridging sentences.

It's only "remarkable" if you don't know anything about the economic and political history of the region.

Anyone in their right mind would reject this thing after seeing the so-called benefits of the United Fruit Company, or the invitation of American plantations into the Kingdom of Hawaii.

In the actual real world, investment is only good if it's beneficial to the populace and doesn't undermine its sovereignty. Getting, say, the British East India Company interested in your country was a curse not a blessing, same as having these clowns interested now.

What country are you in and how well-regulated are psychiatrists there?

Have they told you what the medicines are? With psych meds sometimes they have to build up in your system and it can take a few weeks. But one-off injections sound a bit odd.

You should be able to look up the treatments on drugs.com or wikipedia.

That's putting the cart before the horse. You can't say "you have to have conducted a general election before you become a nation state."

That would be like telling a slave they can't become a free person unless they've already got a job that pays them direct wages.

At this scale that's Ethnic Cleansing.

UNRWA also said that its staff had been detained while carrying out their duties in Gaza, being held in the same conditions as the other detainees.

They were interrogated about their work and threatened to make false confessions about the UN agency, including that it had links with Hamas.

Among the forms of torture the UNRWA staff were subjected to were severe beatings, being forced to strip naked, threats of rape and electrocution, threats of violence and murder at gunpoint, attacks by dogs, and threats against the lives of their families.

I don't think you have to "listen to Iran" to know Israel attacked their embassy compound.

Yeah, they do. Some more than others.

The idea that all war happens outside of international law and is always breaking the Geneva conventions is false.

It's something war criminals and their appeasers pretend, to excuse their own actions. Kind of like those rapists who say all of us would rape people if we could get away with it. No, no we wouldn't.

People only think "settler" is some kind of benign word if they grew up being told that colonization by settlers was somehow okay.

Settler colonialism has been brutal everywhere it was carried out. The difference here is they use modern tech - and modern media means we get way more details than in the 19th century.

This news isn't as good as it first appears unfortunately:

State attorney Aner Helman told the court that 700 inmates had been moved to Ofer military facility in the occupied West Bank, with another 500 set to be transferred in the weeks to come. Around 200 detainees will remain in Sde Teiman, said Helman

So, they're not even shutting down their Abu Ghraib in Sde Teiman, but they're moving the bulk of it to a detention camp called Ofer. Except:

Last week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said the military launched a probe into the allegations of mistreatment at Sde Teiman, as well as at Anatot and Ofer

In other words Ofer's already a shit show of human rights abuses as well. They're just shuffling people around their various camps.

The UN officials aren't saying any of those things. Here's a tldr of the issue

• The platform is meant to be in Northern Gaza where the worst of the starvation is

• Israel wants it to be moved south to an Israeli choke point

• Israel is about to close the crossings in South Gaza so it can attack Rafah

• If the tiny amount of aid that can come in is able to be diverted to South Gaza then Israel may face less international condemnation over this phase of the Gaza genocide.

Please help me understand why delivering food and medicine to Gaza is bad.

If there is a starving child and you can choose to deliver them the nutrients they need but instead you choose to give them half a peanut instead, in a really theatrical way, that's obviously bad right?

That's what's happening here.

no good guys

Yes there are. Hero doctors and nurses who risk their lives to save civillian patients. Aid workers. World Central Kitchen workers.

That's the side we should be on.

Someone that acts confident when they shouldn’t, is colloquially known as a “conman”.

No, that's incorrect.

A "con man" aka Confidence Trickster is a grifter who gains your confidence in order to scam you.

Having false confidence in itself does not mean someone is necessarily a swindler. It could just be that they are delusional or misinformed.

To answer the first question, sorry I keep breaking it into smaller components but again, separating it out makes it clearer. If we look at:

• what the IDF intentions are

• what their actions are

• what the effects of their actions are

What people think kind of depends on how well we think it matches up and whether we think the first one is actually an okay justification for the third one.  Like when is it okay shoot when you can see there's someone in the crossfire.

What their intentions are

The IDF and mainstream Israeli politicians publically stated intention is to "destroy Hamas" in order to protect the safety of Israeli citizens both in Israel and in the part of Palestine that Israel is occupying. Hamas is a broad term encompassing both militant (eg militant) and civil (eg Health Dept) organization. Some politicians have gone a lot further and said their intention is to remove most Palestinians from Gaza. Some have said that no civilians are innocent, but these are minority viewpoints.

What their actions are

This is where it gets tricky, and some of it is contested. What is common ground is that  they have chosen to use an unusually large number of bombs in a built up environment full of civilians, using huge bunker buster bombs, and drone bombing of targets suggested by AI. It also involves a ground offensive, and there appear to be "kill zones." The IDF has set itself numbers for "acceptable" number of civilians per kill, which may be high, and also permits itself to bomb hospitals and schools. Here is an article which covers some of the AI concerns. They also keep tight control of humanitarian aid and limit what enters. There are allegations that are disputed, of widespread deliberate killing of wounded and civilians and children. We may find forensic evidence in the mass graves. The IDF dispute it.

The effects of their actions

• I've covered this already above, but what stands out is the unusually high number of civilians and medics being killed, compared to other modern wars that involved urban warfare. To put the total mortality into perspective, during the Bosnian Genocide 3% of the population were killed over a 2-year period. 1.5% of the Gaza population have been killed in 6 months. The mortality statistics we have are for known deaths, those still buried in rubble are extra.

• Using satellite images of before and after, analysts estimate 57-60% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed, rising to 75% in Gaza City. We also know the hospitals were bombed.

• During the current war monitoring of humanitarian aid entering Gaza has drastically reduced the amount going in. (Before this war, Gaza did not function self-sufficiently.  A significant part of the population (many were refugees) relied on humanitarian aid.

• NGOs on the ground report that the current numbers of starving people will meet the technical threshold for it to be designated famine, by May.

For many of those who are on the side of civilians, there is no possible justification for killing this many people to get to each millitant. International law (eg Geneva Conventions) specifies how to treat civilian populations, and many international experts think that these rules are being breached. Moreover, the blocking of humanitarian aid is problematic, whatever the rationale.

Most of us live in civilisations where we do not find it acceptable to kill innocent people as way to also kill guilty people.

We will never even know if anyone in Guantanamo is even a terrorist though.

You just assume they are because that's what Rumsfeld and Cheney told you.

But without due process there's no actual way of determining it.

It's a point that only makes sense if you don't pay attention to international geopolitics.

Small countries have a vested interest in the upholding of international law because they are vulnerable, so they quite often stick their heads up above the parapet for it. E.g. when the Rohingya Genocide occurred in South East Asia a small country in West Africa, The Gambia, are the ones who took them to the ICC.

As for South Africa, it has a very long history of criticizing Israel for its apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu made international headlines by calling it an apartheid after his visit to Israel and Palestine. Moreover, during Apartheid South Africa era, Israel was one of the big weapons suppliers to the Apartheid regime (which was at war with its neighbour) when many countries were boycotting it.

The entire African Union are quite sensitive about what Israel does.

If you know anything about history, it makes perfect sense that South Africans would be leading the charge here (which they have done consistently).

They're being a bit futile. If your default sort is active it doesn't hide any downvoted comments.

And if you're on an instance like Kbin or Beehaw, downvotes don't even affect vote count because the downvotes are not federated.

This. Medically speaking it probably still counts though.

Sure, explain to me!

My guess is that it could be some kind of opportunistic rise of theocratic fascism that has been empowered by the weakening of the social order and social institutions by the clash of disaster capitalism with the old establishment?

It's very disconcerting.

Doesn't matter. Human rights are inalienable.