I had 2 working parents and a community. The perceived safety and walkability of an area has a lot to do with it. My parents weren't worried if they didn't see me from morning until dinner time (and obviously they had no way of getting in contact with me other than maybe phoning all the other parents - assuming we weren't off in a field somewhere).
If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.
> If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.
This is exactly it. The mental health we're looking for is the byproduct of a childhood spent with regular access to hours-long, adult-free peer time. It also reduces parenting from the stupidly impossible amount of hours we have now.
The community part we're trying to replace with religious spaces was when kids grew up surrounded by multi-generational households. Until the 1st ½ of 1900s, it was what we could count on neighborhoods, villages, settlements, etc being built out of.
Religion can't replace that. I know because my kids grew up in the ideal the author is has in his head.
> Maybe cities could extend outwards instead of making existing BY hellishly dense?
This is what we have been doing. It's not working
> What about the investment in the house and the quality of life of those having the BY?
As the neighborhood gets more dense you'll probably hit a point where the value of your land gets to a point where you can move somewhere slightly out of the city and have a chunk of money in your pocket.
> hellishly dense?
I dont see why you equate density with hellishness, with density comes more services, entertainment options, (ideally transit options) and unless you sell your land is still your land. And generally we're not talking about turning your suburban neighborhood into Manhattan usually more something akin to a european neighborhood.
On the density point - the natural observation is that most people tend to live in high density areas, because that is where most of the housing is. It is possible to have "hellish" density (the worst of a slum somewhere like Hong Kong), but most of the time dense living is simply the standard human option.
I’ve mostly seen chips treated as a unit-less or self referential unit: white is 1, red is 5, etc. 1 or 5 <whats> is irrelevant if you’re playing tournament style play. At the end the top x% of players get a scaling percentage of the actual monetary pool. Now if you’re playing where you can cash in and out at face value at any point then using chips in a 1:1 mapping to currency would make sense, but it should still probably be fixed rather than each chip being able to change value based on number of players or the size of the pool.
The EU has consent elections, it's just a proportional representation forces people to work together to get anything done, so you end up with a lot of relatively uncontroversial work happening. There's also little point in trying to score points as you will never have a majority
The EU parliament is elected every five years, and while most of the member countries elect during the EU parliament term and so it's election year somewhere in the EU every year, national elections usually have negligible impact on the European level (outside of dramatic swings like in Poland or Slovakia between dedicated notorious pro-EU and anti-EU parties).
In contrast, the US re-elects the whole House and 1/3rd of the Senate every two years which means that the House is basically only at peace to work for a year at a time (first half year is spent on getting the newbies up to speed, last half year is filled with campaigning), and if changing control over the Senate is even possible depends on if the states whose seats are up for reelection are considered swing states or not. The entire way the US Congress works is not incentivizing bipartisan legislation, and it's outright hostile to the idea that there could be more than two political parties.
This is a hot take these days. The world seems to need to take a side on everything and most of the Palestine supporters fail to condemn Hamas and the Israel supporters don't tend to criticize Israel.
Broadly I think Israel has the right ambition (the destruction of Hamas) but are going about it in a terrible manner and it will now backfire on them spectacularly.
The trouble is that Israel government does not really have the ambition to destroy Hamas. Their ambition under ultra conservative lobby is to grab more Palestinian land, using inevitable backlash as an excuse to dismiss any complaints.
If the whole world stepped in, captured every Hamas militant and left, it wouldn't take more than a couple of years and somebody else would take up the arms against the Israeli occupants.
We'd have to do that AND then protect the Palestinians from militant Zionists for half a century at least to actually have any chance to solve the situation.
And since EU doesn't give a shit, US is unable to stand up to antidefamation league, rest of the Islamic countries enjoys blaming Israel but don't actually do anything, Palestinians are good as dead.
> Broadly I think Israel has the right ambition (the destruction of Hamas)
Well a few months ago Netanyahu sent the head of the Mossad to Qatar asking them to fund Hamas ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). So these endless massacres of Palestinian civilians by Israel (and effectively by the USA too) are happening for a pretty capricious reason, if that even is the reason, and I think it isn't.
Counterterrorism is necessarily a difficult and fraught process. Ultimately, it's political; military force is useful only so far as it can convince people there is no better way than your political aims.
Looking at the example of successful counterterrorism conclusions, such as The Troubles in Northern Ireland or Colombia's efforts against FARC, the general pathway to success is to build up successful alternative political institutions that have the legitimacy to disarm the terrorist groups, which also means to a degree making some concessions towards the political aims of terrorists, and perhaps also requires co-opting the more moderate terrorists into legitimate political parties.
Notably not on that list is such things as targeting enemy leaders with artillery rounds. Indiscriminate damage is one of the best ways to fuel an upsurge in terrorist violence; what Israel is doing now looks in many ways like what the British did in Northern Ireland to start The Troubles rather than what it did to end them.
I agree that Northern Ireland and Colombia v. FARC are useful examples. However, they both share one key property that the Israel-Hamas conflict does not have: the international community fully supports the existence of both the UK and Colombia as legitimate nation-states. That is not true for Israel; there is a large and vocal segment of the international community that does not want Israel to exist, and that segment has enough political clout that it cannot be ignored.
The segment of the international community that matters is fully on board with Israel's existence. The largest country to not formally recognize Israel is Indonesia. Largely only Iran is intransigent about Israel's nonexistence; the Arab countries have in the recent past explicitly endorsed proposals to recognize Israel in exchange for durable progress on Palestinian statehood.
(Which, really, is one of the principal causes of the current situation: Netanyahu has in the past sought to undermine the ability of the Palestinian Authority to effectively govern Palestine--including covert support for Hamas--so as to be able to claim that there's no partner for peace to avoid having to make any progress on the statehood issue.)
> The segment of the international community that matters is fully on board with Israel's existence.
I disagree. US policy in this area, for instance, is being significantly influenced by the fact that there are protests at major universities in support of Hamas, and elected politicians who are advocating the same thing. (And by that I mean explicitly supporting the Hamas objective of destroying Israel.)
> the Arab countries have in the recent past explicitly endorsed proposals to recognize Israel
In other words, they don't currently support Israel's existence, but they might decide to if enough of their demands are met. Which concedes my point.
The reason this matters is that the UK and Colombia were only able to even consider the options they ended up taking to resolve their conflicts because they knew that no matter what, their existence as nation states was not in question. Israel does not have that assurance, and that means they do not feel able to consider those kinds of options.
Or, to put it another way, as I have said in several other posts elsewhere in this discussion, this conflict is an existential conflict for Israel. Northern Ireland was not an existential conflict for the UK, and FARC was not an existential conflict for Colombia. That makes a huge difference.
> US policy in this area, for instance, is being significantly influenced by the fact that there are protests at major universities
I'm sorry, but no. These protests have only reached salience in the news because of overreaction from a few university presidents who sent in the police to (in the event) violently break up the protest. I assert there is no influence on the policy being done by these protests. The general stance by the administration has remained the same--the Biden administration remains firmly pro-Israel--and to the extent that it's changed, it's been prompted by frustration with the continued inability of the current Israeli government to actually listen to the administration's points about "what the hell is your day-after plan?"
> in support of Hamas, and elected politicians who are advocating the same thing. (And by that I mean explicitly supporting the Hamas objective of destroying Israel.)
I'm not going to deny that there are people among the protestors who support Hamas and maybe even want to see Israel cease to exist. But it's definitely far from the majority of the protestors, and I've never actually seen any statement by anybody involved that would place them in that category.
The thing is, there's this persistent tendency I've seen where people try to twist any criticism of Israel or its government into support for Israel's nonexistence. No major world power today has disestablishment of Israel a policy goal, nor is any of them close to having that policy. But I do worry that if Israel continues on this path, then it may in a few decades' time become a murderous genocidal state... and that very well could have the superpowers pushing for Israel's destruction.
Even though Israel is unarguably the state that faces the greatest existential threat, it's policies can still be (and indeed probably are) counterproductive to combating that.
Like you would any other crime. Investigate, insert moles, offer "extremely large" bounties + protection for arrests leading to conviction, and so on. The current situation is not only an ineffective means of combating Hamas, but is likely growing their numbers. The reason these sort of conflicts never end is because each time you bomb an area with innocents, you may or may not kill your target, but you definitely just turned all the friends, family, and so on of the innocents killed into new "real" enemies.
The criminal model does not work for war. This is a war.
> each time you bomb an area with innocents, you may or may not kill your target, but you definitely just turned all the friends, family, and so on of the innocents killed into new "real" enemies.
So when Hamas fires rockets into Israel, killing innocents, or sends a terror squad into Israel, killing innocents (and kidnapping others), it makes more Hamas enemies. Yes, indeed.
These same proposals were given decades ago when it was the PLO Israel was having to deal with. Israel followed them, at the behest of the international community. They didn't work--we know this because it's now decades later and the same problems still exist. Isn't the classic definition of insanity trying the same thing over and over again but expecting different results?
It's pretty well established that tactics that produce widespread civilian casualties just create the next generation of insurgents. In that respect, Israel's current actions seem to match the definition of insanity.
In the sense that Israel failed to reach a stable endpoint to this conflict once before, in 2009, yes, I suppose this is true. They should have destroyed Hamas then, and they didn't. Which would suggest that Israel should finish the job this time.
I mean they're all terrible at this point, but Israel has been digging this hole for a while, it's not going to be easy to get out. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying to stop digging.
No, Israel has been trying to defend itself against Hamas, a terrorist organization which has explicitly declared that its objective is to destroy Israel. What options does it have to do that that would meet with your approval, or even grudging acquiescence?
There is no stable middle ground here. That's what much of the commentary on this situation seems to be missing. This is an existential conflict between Israel and Hamas (note that I said "Hamas", not "the Palestinians"--they're not the same): the only stable endpoint is that one or the other ceases to exist. And Hamas is the side that chose to make it that way. So I'm really struggling to see what possible options Israel has other than what they are doing.
That would be the end of Israel as a functioning state (Jewish or not)
You really think a country can double it's population overnight bringing even more division without it crumbling? You'll just end up with another Lebanon.
A two state solution is the only thing that can make sense short/medium term. Longer term after decades of peace you can open the borders and create perhaps a union of sort.
A one state solution is detached - it's just not a viable option, and even if you believe it's the right thing to do it just doesn't seem wise.
A single state solution is the only long term solution. Unless we accept that ethnostates are good for everyone. Israel will have a hard time bringing in the Palestinians, but the US created reservations and the native American population isn't trying to kill everyone else. Israel needs to learn by doing it that diversity is their strength.
Prosperity can do a lot towards killing the shared stories that cause people to want to go kill the people in the neighboring country. Grandpa's story about losing his home won't be as stirring when you're not being bombed and starved by the same group of people who stole Grandpa's home. Especially when they give back Grandpa's home.
I'm all for prosperity, which is why I think trying to merge two cultures over overnight will just result in chaos and violence. Especially since the groups are around the same size and the territory is tiny - if you actually think about the practically of such a solution you'll realize it's not viable.
Do you really think the new nation wouldn't just delve into chaos Lebanon style? Might as well just sentence everyone to eternal conflict.
How is starting with two states and later on creating a union type entity not better for everyone?
Let's say you had to approach this as an engineering problem of merging two very different branches/companies/etc, how would you approach it?
And re US, they basically committed genocide and ended up absorbing a minority, the situation in Israel is different as it's similar sized populations on a fraction of the land.
> which has explicitly declared that its objective is to destroy Israel
This is not a serious argument. Israel has arguably the strongest military in ME. Forget the ragtag Hamas, no country in ME - including Turkey - can destroy Israel. Israel has nukes and Hamas has hand gliders for airforce. Hamas rockets are like glorified firecrackers.
There are crazies all over the world with all kinds of crazy manifestos. That is not a license to kill and starve civilians en masse.
Oct 7 was a serious security lapse on the part of Israel. It is clear that the guilty are busy distracting the population from an objective investigation and trials to punish people who are responsible for the lapses, just like what happened after 9-11. Doing that improves Israel’s long term security. But it is unlikely to happen.
Which genocide? The one that parts of Israel, mostly Likud, wants and isn't doing a very good job of (I was told millions would have starved by now), or the one that Hamas emphatically wants, and is supported by the vast majority of Palestinians, but they are technologically incapable of performing?
Plenty Israelis want a two state solution where Palestinians are not harmed. How many Palestinians want a two state solution where Jews live free? Why don't Palestinians get visibly upset when a Hamas rocket meant for Israel blows up Palestinians?
Bibi should rot in prison. So should the leader of Hamas. But who is willing to run Palestine without shooting rockets at Israel, and how long will they stay in power before they are overthrown by people who want to go back to shooting rockets at Israel?
There can't be a peace as long as Palestinians want the eradication of Israel, much as there can't be peace as long as Likud wants to eradicate Palestine. But if we tell Israel it can't do anything, but do not limit Hamas in the same way, all you are doing is allowing Israelis to die for the convenience of ignoring an actually difficult geopolitical problem.
"Just stop shooting at Palestinians" will certainly end the suffering of Palestinians, but is objectively trading 30k Palestinians dead now with a few Israelis dead every year.
And this isn't even getting to the insane levels of Anti-semitism that hide themselves under a cloak of "just supporting Palestinians". If you know any jewish people who aren't evenly Israeli, ask them how safe they feel nowadays.
> "Just stop shooting at Palestinians" will certainly end the suffering of Palestinians, but is objectively trading 30k Palestinians dead now with a few Israelis dead every year.
There's shooting and there's shooting. 30k Palestinians in Gaza Strip are in the war zone so in a way it's not a much surprise they're dying, but there are Palestiniani on the West Bank, who are being murdered by Israeli (settlers backed by IDF). Last I checked the death toll is around 500 (https://apnews.com/article/settler-attack-palestinians-west-...), which puts it within the ballpark of 7 October Hamas' strike.
I will remember the small town next door that put out a star of david to celebrate Hanukkah and got a pile of death threats for supporting Israel.
Do you remember the teens at a concert for peace for Palestine that died on Oct 7th? IE, people who literally were pushing for Israel to unilaterally get it's hands out of Palestine, the exact thing people are marching all over the world for.
Hamas literally targeted them. Why? Why kill the people doing exactly what you claim to want them to do? Their deaths and rapes were intentional.
I want to make it very clear that I hold no qualms or malice towards people who want a unilateral ceasefire from Israel and damn the consequences of that. Hell, even a lot of Israelis seem to hold that opinion!
But I only want to ask: how many Israeli people have to die before that is obviously not a solution? How many Israeli deaths per year before "okay maybe going to war with Palestine" becomes acceptable?
that's right! Hamas broke the ceasefire on October 7th, and if the Israelis laid down their weapons, they would be slaughtered. they can't afford to leave Hamas in charge. they don't want control of gaza, but it doesn't seem like there's any alternative to military occupation if they want to stop the incursions for good.
I agree that Israel is going about it in a terrible manner but I also do not think that the destruction of Hamas is a reasonable goal. How can you do that without genocide?
Okay, say Israel enters Rafah, do whatever they want in there. Say they do a whole another pass over Gaza.
Do you think the rest of the population just stands by? You can't treat people like Israel treats Palestinians and not have terrorism. It's really that simple. Any serious plan by Israel to achieve peace of any sort with Palestinians involves massive concessions compared to the actual state of things and I can't imagine for a second anything like that would happen.
It's almost like we're stumbling into how this is one of the trickiest geopolitical issues in the last hundred years...
There's an inverse to what you're saying (which I don't disagree with) which is that if Israel does nothing in response to Hamas aggression, and just lets Hamas + it's allies keep bulling, Israeli's will die and their citizenry will be radicalized to do something in response.
This has been the pattern in this region since literally day 1 of Israel being acknowledged as a country. It's two irreconcilable groups locked into a situation where neither can meaningfully (or "safely") de-escalate; a clean solution is really unlikely to emerge.
But you have to acknowledge, if these actions are not actually going to fix the problem, then they are actually psychopathic in nature. The "Well I have to do SOMETHING" rationale works when the "something" doesn't involve killing tens of thousands.
Also, it's not like the other option is "doing nothing", but acknowledging that a way must be found to return to the pre-2005 state of things. There must be a Palestinian governance with a degree of sovereignty and the settlements have to be removed. These are evident steps towards deradicalization but steps that the Israeli right in general is not keen on, in fact they would rather do the complete opposite.
What they "have to do SOMETHING" about is deal with a threat that aims to kill tens of thousands (more if hamas had their way) of their own, so I don't think you can just say that doesn't apply here.
It would be nice if one side could break the cycle of responding to violence with more violence, but that seems unlikely to happen, especially when one side is essentially defined by their intent of violence towards the other.
Israel backing out (removing settlements) and allowing for Palestine self governance isn't going to magically make hamas be nice. Israel would only agree to that kind of measure if they got to maintain some amount of influence over the region so that they could have some reasonable confidence that they can at least assess active threats against them. And suddenly we're back to 2005 Israeli disengagement, where they did withdraw their settlements in gaza and reduced their physical presence instead opting for trying to influence "remotely" while allowing Palestine to self-assemble it's governance. Turns out doing that is actually really hard, hamas took over anyway, and it landed everyone in the current mess.
Suggesting that they just do it again but trust me bro this time it'll work, or suggesting that what they really need to do is also relinquish any influence they have over the region is just not an idea that is going to make it off the ground. Some compromise related to it is probably what will happen, and we can all set our watches for the next iteration.
Again, it's almost like we're stumbling into how this is one of the trickiest geopolitical issues in the last hundred years
>And suddenly we're back to 2005 Israeli disengagement, where they did withdraw their settlements in gaza and reduced their physical presence instead opting for trying to influence "remotely" while allowing Palestine to self-assemble it's governance. Turns out doing that is actually really hard, hamas took over anyway, and it landed everyone in the current mess.
Yes, because Israel delivered the entire region to Hamas on a silver platter, having absolutely no coordination whatsoever with Palestinian authorities. This was in a time in which the majority of the population there supported a peaceful relationship with Israel. A massive blunder that Israel seems content with paying in Palestinian blood but not concessions of their own, it's insane to me that this ever became a talking point to defend Israel's actions.
>Suggesting that they just do it again but trust me bro this time it'll work, or suggesting that what they really need to do is also relinquish any influence they have over the region is just not an idea that is going to make it off the ground. Some compromise related to it is probably what will happen, and we can all set our watches for the next iteration.
>Again, it's almost like we're stumbling into how this is one of the trickiest geopolitical issues in the last hundred years
Sure, it's incredibly complex and yeah, I hope that's what happens in the end, thing is for all the deep this hole is, Israel doesn't seem interested in stopping digging, from their actions the trajectory seems set towards escalating the conflict up to a breakpoint in which they can end up better off, since they are very clearly in the more powerful position.
The Palestinian authorities were in the midst of an election, and the coordination with them that took place was in the form of US/Israel interference of the election to try and prevent Hamas from winning. Hamas won anyway. Fatah resisted in Gaza, and Hamas ended up taking over by force anyway.
So what should Israel have done to not hand control over to Hamas on a "silver platter"? They + the US tried to keep Fatah in power, that was everyone's preferred outcome where some stability could've emerged. That failed due to real Palestinian support of Hamas, as well as Hamas' military force.
Israel's options were basically to intervene militarily, overriding the results of the election; or "accept" the results and deal with/ reduce Hamas' military ambitions (which is what they've tried to do ever since). Both options put Israel in a losing situation. Override the will of Palestinian elections and you're denying them their sovereignty, interfere with the obvious military threat, and you're doing apartheid. Lose lose.
> Override the will of Palestinian elections and you're denying them their sovereignty, interfere with the obvious military threat, and you're doing apartheid.
So it is decided that it will do both. Maybe, just maybe, reconcile? No. Acknowledge the right to return and pay reparations? No. We will run apartheid and blockade sea, air and land. And the Egypt border will be controlled by way of a trilateral treaty. Increase illegal and immoral settlements in West Bank? Yes. Shield and promote settler terrorism? Yes.
Brother, how and why are you trolling around this thread 3 days after the link was posted?
In lieu of just matching snark with snark, I'll just suggest you take 5 minutes of self reflection to ask yourself if you're maybe being over-reductive of the situation, if you're really considering what reconciliation (+ it's risks) means to people who live in Israel/Palestine, and what a practical solution might actually look like.
Hey there! I'm really sorry if that came as snarky, but didn't mean that way. But you have to see that most of the comments are just plain disinformation and just could not let them hang in a no-way-out situation. I hope there would be a way out, without harming the people born into it. But I believe that has to come without this overpowering and dehumanising by those who definitely have the upper hand. This place does have all it takes to be a unifying idea for the vast majority of the world, and I sincerely hope peace prevails. You have a nice day too!
So what should Israel have done to not hand control over to Hamas on a "silver platter"?
In terms of preventing the Hamas-Fatah war and the initial takeover of the Strip -- there probably wasn't very much it could have done.
But after that juncture -- perhaps if the Prime Minister did not have an explicit policy of keeping them in power for 14 years (in order to "smash the vision Palestinian state into two pieces" as he would boast of his genius plan), backed by allowing $1.8 billion in transfers of Qatari cash from 2012 to 2018 -- that might have helped turn the tide.
That's a fact that's backed up by multiple polls and occurrences of what I describe. I didn't use any slurs. Can you please explain what is wrong with this so I can follow the rules better in the future? Thanks.
do you know of any protracted war where this hasn't been the case? or even any urban war where the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants is as low as this current war?
The two of you got into just the sort of flamewar that commenters are asked to avoid here, and most of all on a divisive topic like the OP. We have to ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before, btw.
The two of you got into just the sort of flamewar that commenters are asked to avoid here, and most of all on a divisive topic like the OP. We have to ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.
The motives don't always have understanding of the root cause however. We knew that eating raw meat was unsafe even though we didn't know about salmonella.
That's exactly my point. This whole conversation is about whether beer was drank because water was unsafe. Understanding what their understanding of "unsafe" was, and what they considered the remedy, is central to this discussion.
I would suggest your personal experience is not representative of what billions of people are living e.g. in Nigeria and most of tropical Africa and India.
What a tedious over-inflation of personal significance. It's utterly depressing that literate people such as yourself could be so unimaginative as to presume the representative significance of your own experience.
Although they're less common among the insufferably narcissistic rich, diarrhoeal diseases account for 1.5 million deaths, annually ranking them as the 8th leading cause of death globally.[0]
Your personal experience must invalidate large parts of the diarrhea filled lives many others before you have lived and died. Thanks for chiming in, wise one.
All security boundaries are "incidental" in that sense, though. Virtualization isn't a "purpose-designed" security boundary either, most of the time it's deployed for non-security reasons and the original motivation was software compatibility management.
The snobbery deployed in this "containers vs. VMs" argument really gets out of hand sometimes. Especially since it's almost never deployed symmetrically. Would you make the same argument against using a BSD jail? Do you refuse to run your services in a separate UID because it's not as secure as a container (or jail, or VM)? Of course not. Pick the tools that match the problem, don't be a zealot.
> All security boundaries are "incidental" in that sense, though
X86 protected mode, processor rings, user isolation in the multi user operating systems, secure execution environments in X86 and ARM ISAs, kernel and userspace isolation, etc. are purpose built security boundaries.
Virtualization is actually built to allow better utilization of servers, which is built as a "nested protected mode", but had great overhead in the beginning, which has been reduced over generations. Containers are just BSD jails, ported to Linux. This doesn't make containers bad, however. They're a cool tech, but held very wrong in some cases because of laziness.
The motivation for MMU hardware was reliability and not "security". Basically no one was thinking about computer crime in the 1970's. They were trying to keep timesharing systems running without constant operator intervention.
Yeah, but that's not an incidental property of *namespaces* (of which cgroups is only one isolation axis), that was the requirement when namespaces were designed.
Yeah, I know. Namespaces are pretty cool outside containers too.
My comment was more of a soft jab against using containers as the ultimate "thing" for anything and everything. I prefer to use them as "statically linked binaries" for short lived processes (like document building, etc.).
But, whenever someone abuses containers (like adding an HTTPs fronting container in front of anything which can handle HTTPS on its own) I'm displeased.
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