Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit.
"This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not."
pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important."
And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hype turned out not to be even remotely important, and so yes, maybe Israel is using phosphorous, or maybe the whole thing is staged to make Israel look bad, or maybe....! My point is, you can't know the whole truth, so please post this to some other community that values importance over intelligence!
I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about it here too.
As for the claim that this should be killed because it's a crap link, it definitely seems over the threshold for that. It's not just a bunch of random, biased bystanders who are making this accusation, but the UN (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html). So it is at least something that has to be taken seriously.
Clearly it is not more important now than it was then. I am all for a broad spectrum of topics covered here on HN, but this is just a controversial topic that is useless to discuss here.
There's a difference between things that are interesting to the intellectually curious, and things that are interesting to hackers. This topic provides a good example.
The economony is a big, somewhat hackable system. We elect representatives to steer it and shape it. When a big, important system's performance starts to degrade, that attracts the attention of hackers.
The Israel/Gaza war is much less hackable seeming. Important, appalling events are occurring, but to my mind they are not hacker news.
It's a subjective call. This is your site, and of course you are entitled to decide what is Hacker News.
[edit] Politics and wars are also hackable, in some sense, so maybe this distinction is less crisp than one would like. But there does seem to be a difference between using this site to talk about economics, and using it to talk about conflicts between nations or political parties. In the case of entrenched conflicts, discussion is very unlikely to change anyone's model of how the world works. The thing I like about discussion here is reading it and participating in it supports the evolution and refinement of my model of how the world works.
Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.
"... and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza."
I care a lot about certain political issues but I would not try to talk about them on HN, and I bet you wouldn't either.
It seems weird -- almost sycophantic -- to so readily apply a different standard to Paul Graham. The only way I think one can attempt to justify a different standard for him is by invoking the American (only?) expression, 'his house, his rules'. In this way of thinking, he built the site, and we are his guests. But even this seems like a pretty attenuated rationale, to me.
Yeah, there's an element of 'his house, his rules'. But mostly it's just too taxing to continue caring. If he wants one high-quality political article on the site, fine, it doesn't really matter. The site didn't explode as a result. And there are a lot of interesting things to do besides trying to win a debate. Right now, you could be conversing with someone through a Mac Mini: http://coworkthailand.com/say/
I'm also tired of coming off sounding like a negative person. "you support a political submission!" "stop group-downvoting this guy for his opinion!" "we can't click through a killed submission!" "you disabled someone's account for possibly dubious reasons!" -- these are not my issues, and it's hard to feel like any of them actually matter in the big picture, and if they don't matter, why care? And it feels against my character to speak like that anyway.
So I've decided to find out where the site will steer us rather than wrestling to steer the site.
The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced.
This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are:
- You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship.
- After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated.
- No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal.
Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet?
On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.
Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior.
But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.
I was pretty sure it was, but I could have been mistaken. Is there a difference between "dead" and whatever happens when enough users flag a submission? If so, it could have been the latter.
It's probably worth noting, now that this story has been on here for a few hours, that it has produced very little worthwhile discussion - just one mention of some interesting facts about white phosphorous weapons, and a bunch of flame wars about whether this topic is appropriate for HN. Imho that's a good indication that this topic was in fact not appropriate.
Perhaps the users value their karma points too much. A lot of votes are based on whether the user agrees with the post, and not based on the value it brings to the discussion.
I'd think that the lack of discussion is more because there's not much to be had. There's the anti-Israeli bigotry and the pro-Israeli bigotry, and beyond that there's not much else. You can't debate if it's right of them because most of the end results will be the same (Geneva-convention, no-they-didn't-sign-that-part-of-the-convention, I-still-think-it's-wrong, then the conversation ends). There's nothing much that civilians can discuss here, because none of us are in positions of big know.
That's why I'd prefer the discussion focus on other things. Not because these things aren't important, but because the userbase is more interesting discussing other topics.
I'm not supporting Hamas and am not supporting any attacks against civilians from either side. But you also have to look at what has happened the last 60 years. Israel is not without blood on their hands either.
Let's face it. The last 60 years have been a disaster for the Middle East, and any action from either side can be "justified" with pointing at something the other side has done.
There have been attempts to make peace, but there have been too many demands that the other side can't accept. This can only be solved by one of the sides letting history be history and try to make a real attempt at peace. I think Israel, as the dominant party, should withdraw to the borders of 1967 and that the Palestinians should accept a multi-national peace keeping force that would stabilize the region and prevent further attacks on Israel.
It might take a couple of generations for the two sides to forgive each other, but it is worth a try.
Look, my point is not one way of the other (although I do have strong opinions on the matter.) My point is that when you mix politics and controversy in an anonymous public forum, you get a lot more heat than light.
I'm amazed that this story hasn't been killed yet (it really seems to go against a lot of previous editorial decisions here, which I thought were a really good idea.) Can you imagine a story about Hamas using human shields on the front page? it would be nuts, whether you think it's an important issue or not. These kinds of stories are a magnet for trolls.
Just as you can run across a busy highway once, twice, or ten times and come out fine, doesn't mean that's it's a good idea, so allowing one story like this won't cause much damage, but as an editorial policy is a disaster.
I think the fact that this thread has 70+ comments, yet has not turned into a political flamefest, but rather an intelligent discussion on whether it belongs, is an almost unbelievably strong testament to the quality of the HN community.
I say this as someone who has very strong views on the topic, yet hope and pray that issues this divisive will not be allowed to sow seeds of disunity in an otherwise harmonic and well functioning community.
White Phosphorus is not a banned substance, nor is there anything obviously illegal about Israel's use of it in this conflict. It's certainly not a chemical weapon or any other sort of WMD, despite what some of the more breathless reporting would imply.
The only international convention which may regulate the use of White Phosphorus is Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, however as WP is designed primarily to be used as a smoke-generating agent it falls under Section 1(b)(i) of the Protocol for most uses, which states:
(b) Incendiary weapons do not include:
(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants,
tracers, smoke or signalling systems;
If used as an incendiary weapon, other restrictions in the Protocol might apply. These include a prohibition on using WP as an incendiary weapon directly against civilians or by air-dropped shells against military targets in heavily civilian areas. But again, this does not apply when WP is used as a smoke-generating agent and it's perfectly legal to use WP as either a smoke-generating agent or an incendiary weapon against military targets if they are not located within heavy concentrations of civilians, such as in an open field.
Israel (along with the US) is not a signatory to Protocol III of the CCW and so it's not subject to its restrictions in any case, but the IDF's military manuals instruct its soldiers to abide by its restrictions voluntarily. Thus far, there hasn't been any evidence that Israel has used it as anything other than a smoke-generating agent, which is absolutely necessary in this kind of urban fighting, or that it has intentionally been used as an incendiary weapon against civilians. In fact, the particular shell Israel uses (the US-made M825A1) is remarkable for having a much slower fall-time through the air than WP weapons of old like those used heavily in WWII, so it provides sufficient time for people to get out of its way and makes it a lot less effective as a weapon.
So all indications are that Israel's use of White Phosphorus is well within the accepted and legally-permissible bounds that govern its use. That does not mean that groups like HRW should not keep a strict eye on the IDF's use of it in case there are transgressions and targeted attacks on civilians, but it does mean that we need to stop this ridiculous tendency to regard any use of WP as an illegal and barbaric action. It's a legitimate weapon with legitimate uses and NGOs and the media should recognise that.
As an aside, the International Solidarity Movement used as a source by the Guardian is hardly an impartial source, having long been linked to Hamas and supportive of that organisation. Any video, witness interviews and photographs released by the ISM should be regarded as immediately suspect unless corroborated by other sources.
You would have an excellent point if the practice of using phosphorus flares was what was being reported. Unfortunately, the issue that's most heavily reported on is use of phosphorus-based artillery. I invite you to explain to me how reports from UN staff that WP-based artillery shells where used on several warehouses of aid supplies in the midst of a UN compound doesn't constitute use of WP as an incendiary against heavy concentrations of civilians. While you're at it feel free to discuss how WP artillery shells can be deployed in an urban environment without affecting "heavy concentrations of civilians".
> WP as an incendiary against heavy concentrations of civilians. While you're at it feel free to discuss how WP artillery shells can be deployed in an urban environment without affecting "heavy concentrations of civilians".
The rule isn't against the use of WP where there are heavy concentrations of civilians, it's against using WP as an incendiary where there are heavy concentrations of civilians. Using it as a smoke-generating agent where there are heavy concentrations of civilians is perfectly okay.
FWIW, the "laws of war" (and this isn't one as far as Israel is concerned) are a tit-for-tat thing. Unless Hamas has agreed to them as well, they're not relevant.
And, it's kind of hard to argue that the concern is about "bad acts" when comparable acts by Hamas don't rate a mention.
And yes, I'm looking forward to the discussion of proportionality.
"The rule isn't against the use of WP where there are heavy concentrations of civilians, it's against using WP as an incendiary where there are heavy concentrations of civilians."
Classic military-industrial double-talk. WP doesn't come equipped with a non-incendiary mode.
If you're going to claim a violation of law, surely the actual law matters. Then again, we seem to be ignoring whether said law applies to Israel and we're ignoring whether the other side bothers with such things. (Those laws also ban certain uses of civilians that Hamas does regularly.)
FWIW, I note that folks who rant about the "military-industrial" from Eisenhower's speech never seem to be concerned about the stronger warnings that he gave about "scientific-technological elite".
> WP doesn't come equipped with a non-incendiary mode.
That's like saying that metal doesn't come with a "non-hammer" mode. WP is a component. How it is packaged and what it is combined with significantly affect its effects on impact.
It was intended a constructive addition to the debate; whether it's constructive or destructive to this particular article's premise is neither here nor there.
And I disagree with your interpretation of my post as a monologue, obviously. A monologue implies a one-sided stream of writing or speech to which any other views are given little to no opportunity to respond. Many blogs are an example of this sort of thing. But this is HN: There's no restriction or limitation on anybody writing a response to my post that's equal in status, relevance and visibility. That makes it a dialogue.
To be honest, I also have reservations about these kinds of stories appearing on HN, but since this one's already here and still active I wanted to enhance the dialogue by providing more information about the legal background surrounding WP's use. If you're unhappy with the submission then flag it as unsuitable, but don't try suppress actual discussion on the subject if it gets underway.
Over-analyzing smart-ass comments leads nowhere... I wasn't putting down your comment, I was putting down the equally smart-ass "look, there's useful discussion here" comment that was addressed directly to me.
"Sweet, let's start discussing whether white phosphorous could be a good basis for an online start-up."
O give me a break - so it's perfectly fine when you make a smart-ass comment, but there's something wrong when I do?
Fine, if this type of article elicits that much emotion from certain members of hacker news, then I'll try not to upmod / participate in the discussion in the future.
Personally since I can detach myself from, obj analyze & discuss controversial topics (rampant piracy, totalitarianism, torture, the conduction of 'reverse-genocide') regarding my country of origin; I just thought the overwhelming maj people here can do the same. I'm beginning to feel I'm somewhat wrong
"A woman described how on Tuesday Israeli forces "started to fire phosphorus bombs against the people"
Please. Since when is a civilian woman a reliable source of information on weaponry? Gimme a break! Bad journalism. What else could one expect from the Guardian?
Forget civilian women. Doctors from the Red Cross, the Doctors without Borders association, the UN, and others in Gaza providing aid have described the burns on the affected victims, many of which arrive at the conclusion that these burns can only be had as a result of white phosphorus.
Israeli bombing with bombs of white flames.
Children’s playing with the phosphorus fires from the bombs burning.
Women speaking about the bombs being dropped and the burns it has caused.
Young man with burnt wounds.
Man in hospital.
Doctor Medhath Abbas speaking.
Israeli bombing with flames.
Marc Garlasco speaking about the use of white phosphorus.
Voxpops.
Wide view of bombs bein used.
Women crying.
Fumes from the bombs dropped.
Children playing with the flames of phosphorus.
Aymen Mohyeldin PTC
A small nitpick: Al Jazeera isn't biased any more than mainstream American networks are biased. In fact, many right wingers in the Arab world call it a mouthpiece for the west.
Quite. WP weapons are very distinctive; the explosion they make doesn't look like anything else and they leave chemical traces. It would be easy for any investigator to bring back conclusive evidence if there were any.
I have seen photos of WP being used against enemy soldiers in Vietnam. It's quite a unique explosion, indeed. Interesting that WP was used in GW1. Hadn't WP and Napalm been banned before 1991?
I will believe in newspapers when they produce photos of WP being used against civilians in Gaza. Until then, it's nothing but fog of war, bad journalism and propaganda to me.
Indeed. Note that I am not making a comment either way on whether WP was used; my problem is the sloppy journalism. Esp. from the Guardian, which has a reputation for anti-Israel bias - they need to be meticulous in their reporting from there to escape those accusations, and they're not being at all.
I don't doubt that it is important. It still doesn't belong on HN. There are many issues that are important that don't belong on HN. If HN becomes a general news source, it will lose its usefulness for me, and no doubt for others.
Sometimes stories become big enough that they spill out of their ordinary stream. For example, there is a stream of news about Ebola fever that under normal circumstances is read mainly by infectious disease specialists. But if there is a really big Ebola outbreak somewhere, that starts to be relevant to everyone. What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.
> What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.
Serious things have been happening in that part of the world for more than 2000 years, and will continue to happen long after we're all dead. I think they are given ample coverage on other sites, and there are plenty of other forums to discuss them on the internet.
Or, put another way, say this site had some hawkish Israeli users and some Hamas-oriented Palistinians. Wouldn't it be nice if here, they could just stick to peacefully discussing the things this site is about, rather than getting sucked into an endless, fruitless discussion, which is what 99% of discussions about that area are?
Serious things have been happening in that part of the world for more than 2000 years, and will continue to happen long after we're all dead.
Your argument seems like "This is not my problem, Why do i care" kind of thing. It is very important for smart people to bring out a solution to this serious conflict which has continued for almost 60 years. We can clearly write it off as an conflict which cannot be solved and it will continue forever. I am pretty much sure there is a solution to this conflict and it has to come from a bunch of smart people who want to change world in a good way, HN community looks like that group.
I think they are given ample coverage on other sites, and there are plenty of other forums to discuss them on the internet.
There are tons of sites to discuss Ruby, Python, Erlang etc and there are bunch of other sites to discuss Google, Yahoo or the current Economic Situation. Why should that news even be discussed here? The answer is in HN, we get a different and rational perspective to certain news stories unlike other places. I would pretty much like to say, any news which is serious and impacts lot of people or a region should be discussed here for finding peaceful solutions.
'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing' - Edmund Burke
Okay guys, listen up. I think azharcs is on to something.
SwellJoe, you're in charge of making contact with the Palestinian leadership. unalone, you'll be writing excellent-yet-slightly-sensational articles that will shake the belief system of the zealots perpetuating this conflict. stcredzero's job is to apply Buddhist techniques to invoke a general aura of well-being and connectedness. pg, you're going to set up an Arc-powered community for Israelis and Palestinians to have constructive dialogs about the pros and cons of calling a truce. And if you rename Arc to Ark then we can use the tag line "drowning hate, one comment at a time".
By our powers combined, we can end this conflict once and for all! Let's do it, people!
When i said we can bring a solution, I certainly didn't keep in mind Power Rangers or Captain Planet. It was more like, why be a pessimist, when you can be optimist about things around which are not right.
Yes, but you didn't say "be an optimist" - you argued that I don't care, because I don't want to discuss it on this site, which is a bad argument. There are plenty of issues that I care deeply about for which this site is not an appropriate forum.
> 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing' - Edmund Burke
Discussing the issue on internet forums is so close to "doing nothing" as to be virtually indistinguishable.
Discussing the issue on internet forums is so close to "doing nothing" as to be virtually indistinguishable.
I don't think that's true. People are very much influenced by things other people say, and there is nothing magic about the web that makes this stop working online. I've often been influenced by things I read in forums.
And in this specific case, you're particularly mistaken, because the situation is so much influenced by public opinion. If everyone in the world was talking now about what's happening in Gaza, the Israelis would have to stop.
At the very least, rational U.S. taxpayers may start looking askance at why their money is being conscripted to support this slaughter.
I know some here may take exception to my description of what going on here as slaughter, but all I see is the abridgment of human rights and respect of life on the basis of tribalism,mythology, and a past criminal genocide that the victims being attacked here played no part in. This should not be interpreted as hate or anti-semitism, as it is grounded in the basic respect for all human life. I don't wish to start a flame war here, but feel free to post responses.
> At the very least, rational U.S. taxpayers may start looking askance at why their money is being conscripted to support this slaughter.
Slaughter? If any European country (or the US) had been on the receiving end of the Hamas rocket attacks, Gaza and the surrounding areas would have been smoking piles of rubble years ago. And yes, Israel has the capability.
As to Israel's sins, they pale in comparison and they don't have a history of doing everything that they can to wipe out the Palestinians, something that is within their power. Meanwhile, Hamas' "kill all Jews" charter appears to be representative.
Interestingly enough, it's not just Jews. The reason why Arab countries don't allow significant numbers of political Palestinians has nothing to do with Israel.
The "plight of the Palestinians" is almost entirely self-inflicted. Israel was able to "make the desert bloom" without local help so it's absurd to claim that Israel is keeping the Palestinians down.
> And in this specific case, you're particularly mistaken, because the situation is so much influenced by public opinion. If everyone in the world was talking now about what's happening in Gaza, the Israelis would have to stop.
For values of "world" that equal "United States". It's quite a hot topic over here in Europe, and public opinion is certainly not in favor of Israel. But that's par for the course, and it's the US that doles out the cash, as 'homme' points out.
Also, in terms of postings really influencing things... well, yes, ideas are ideas and can have influence, but on the other hand, some ideas are discussed endlessly without anyone changing their positions much, which would point to the futility of the discussions.
Am I the only one who played Deus Ex through to the end? You know, the whole "manufactured crisis, anticipated reaction" scenario? In other words, what if it's the EXACT opposite?
What if it's only happening to the extent that it is BECAUSE we're all sucked into watching/discussing it? What if the war is not so much on Palistinean civilians, but rather on OUR sense of balance, well-being, confidence about humanity, etc.? What if we're all being psychologically conditioned into a passive, regressive child-like state of mind via the various horrors we're witnessing so that we can be made to wait for some strong, daddy figure to save us all - like when Bush saved us all from the evil terrorists in Iraq? What if this is just one massive, sophisticated psy-ops operation?
Before I get downvoted to Hacker News sub-hell, just ponder this as a possibility, no matter how seemingly absurd. I find the whole situation disgusting for reasons that span the spectrum of "sides" and "issues". But I find myself creeped out as I wonder how I went from being suspicious about the UN after reading 1984 as a kid to now find myself secretly wishing it would "take over" the middle east.
We're being reduced to emotional wrecks by people who seem to be, like some sick experimenters, trying to figure out exactly what reduces the most people to emotional wrecks the fastest. And what's happening in the meantime? For starters, this country's economic infrastructure has been wrecked to well, so quickly that we've gone from object of jealousy to object of ridicule and derision.
The 'ol "watch the horrors in the front while we attack the rear" distraction.
Snap out of the bee-hive mentality. The more we're all on the same frequency the easier we are to control. "But I caaaaare!" Then stop doing the anticipated (caring) and venture out into the chaotic: start a forum calling for the blowing up of the entire middle east.
Go to some embassy and burn Israeli, Palistinean, U.S. and Russian flags. Confuse them.
Gather all your jewish friends and have them wear t-shirts that say "Jews for Hamas", then gather all your arab friends and have them wear "Arabs for Zionism" t-shirts. Call CNN and tell them that if they don't cover your stunt you'll decapitate 50 kittens and post it on YouTube.
Start a cult that promises to sacrifice the first alien that lands on earth to some ancient Chinese deity.
Wear t-shirts that say, "Me me me! Money money money! To hell with the third world! Me me me!"
Do anything but for humanity's sake, break out of this resonance conditioning.
Your "caring" is being used against you. Stop caring every time a kid, whether Israeli or Palistinean, is blown up and my hunch is that "they" will stop resorting to this nonsense to get on CNN and in your living room.
In other words, if WE alL agreed that poetry was a sign of moral correctness, I guarantee you Israel, Hamas and the UN would be flooding YouTube with their top writers trying to outdo each other in poetry.
But precisely because we get sucked into this crap by design we get more and more "Oh no, look at all the children suffering."
If this internet forum existed in when I was an undergrad and I knew about it, the information and conversations shared back then would certainly have shaped my life direction.
I share your fears on the flame war types this can attract, but we weathered a few hundred submissions on economics, libertarianism, etc ok, so maybe this area can be explored with rational, cogent dialogue.
I agree that the Gaza events are very serious and deserve to spill out, but this article isn't particularly good. It's a rather low quality mainstream media article, quoting very biased sources without any mention about who these people are. It's not something that any specialist would read under normal circumstances.
not everything on yc is just startup/business centric; that ended a while back.
That's why its named changed from startup news into hacker news (I still remember complaining to pg about the name change - though now I've changed my mind)
What's wrong with discussing a chemical? We've been doing that a long time already on hacker news
one more edit: another thing that hacker news brings is a dif perspective on an issue (as opposed to just flame wars like on other sites - I guess I am an idealist at heart)
I think a lot of the value of HN is the perspective that the community here applies to stories. While the story itself may not be specifically about startups or hacking, the perspective that people bring to bear is almost always informative and thought-provoking. Something may not be Hacker News, but that something may also turn into a great hacker conversation in the course of a thread.
I feel that with HN it's really about the evolving dialogue moreso than the news itself- the news is just a conversation starter.
While I agree with you in general, in this case I don't think there's a whole lot of insight to be had, other than "is this illegal?" or "is this immoral?".
A good "standard" for Hacker News material might be "would Hacker News users bring a different/better perspective than the average [relatively intelligent] person?"
There can be no useful and constructive dialogue on this topic, and therefore, whether or not it is called Hacker News, it is pointless to post it here.
It's important, certainly, but do you really think anyone here is not aware of what's happening in Gaza? So then, the only value of reporting this would be to create an interesting discussion - but on a topic so politically inflammatory no useful discussion will come out of this community, and no one will alter their behaviour in a way that will make any difference whatsoever to this conflict.
I don't completely agree with you, from the current discussion on this thread, I found Maktab comment interesting.. There were also interesting link to the wired article on the point of view of the UN, a link to the use of White phosphore during the irak war.
And, most importantly there wasn't any flame war (except between maybe between those who think that there can't be any constructive dialogue and those who think that there can be)....
Now, of course, I'm usually more interested in articles about startups, software, business and science but I also like Hacker news because I find the discussion interesting and the people well read. And reading the different points of view of people here on such a topic is interesting (as long as we don't get articles about Gaza every day, it's nice and as said it _is_ an important topic)
"This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not."
pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important."
And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hype turned out not to be even remotely important, and so yes, maybe Israel is using phosphorous, or maybe the whole thing is staged to make Israel look bad, or maybe....! My point is, you can't know the whole truth, so please post this to some other community that values importance over intelligence!