Moral of the story: get nukes (see also, North Korea)

Also, the US has been regularlu conditioning its weapons supplies to Ukraine on them not being used in Russia proper; while calls to put any conditions on Israel’s usage of them have been a complete non-starter.

Blaise Pascal is famous for 2 things:

1. Pascal’s triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.

This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)

2. Pascal’s wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes “if you believe and god doesn’t exist, nothing happens. If you don’t believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe”

The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal’s triangle.

Edit: gid -> god

Only anti-semite would acuse Bibi of lying.

Just ask the Israeli attorney general who, in 2019, indicted him on bribery and fraud charges.

And Israel obviously has the most moral military in the world. Just ask their minister of national security: convicted criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir. Specifically, he has been convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. He also never served in the IDF, because the IDF thought he was too extreme.

None of which are called terrorists by the BBC.

The BBC has a long standing policy against calling people/organizations terrorists.

Their position in this case says nothing about how they view Hamas. The position of those complaining about it says a lot about how they view the role news organizations.

And Israel has been attacking Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran has been surprisingly restrained in not getting directly involved. However, directly attacking an Iranian embassy forces their hand in a way that retaliating against their proxies does not.

This is not some abstract notion about ethics. It is simply a basic strategic observation. The fact that Iran is attacking Israel directly, is a direct and predictably consequence of an strategic decision that Israel made.

No. It is the equivalent of a PC maker going “yeah. I don’t think we are going to put in a CD drive anymore because the DVD drive we have been including for years can do CDs as well”

That’s illegally discriminatory.

Under what law? I’m not familiar with Australia, but here the the US, transfolk are just piggybacking off of legal protections against gender discrimination; which were never actually intended to protect trans people.

In most cases, that actually works out fine. If you discriminate against a transwomen, it’s because you think they are a man presenting as a women. However, you have no problem with a women presenting as a women, so you are running afoul of gender discrimination laws. Legally speaking, your problem was discriminating against her for being a man.

In instances like this though, that argument doesn’t apply. Once you get to the “you are discriminating against her for being a man” stage of the analysis, the response is simply “yes, and I’m allowed to discriminate against men”.

It seems like Australia would need to have a law that specifically protects trans people for her to prevail here.

I’m not familiar with Australian law, but how do you get to “discrimination on the basis of gender identity” in this case. Wouldn’t the case for that be a trans man trying to join or stay on the app? (Or a cis man for that matter).

It sounds like Tickle’s position is that the app should be discriminating based on gender identity. Her complaint seems more like them discriminating on (vaguely defined policy ammounting to) assigned gender at birth.

Having said that, I suspect their tune will change if a trans man tried joining.

Around 2 years ago, I got an email from a products team asking me for urgent help extending a program in time to make a sale.

I looked over the program and wrote back sonething along the lines of “this program was written almost a decade ago by an unsupervisered highschool intern. Why TF are we still using it?”.

Of course, I ended up helping them, because that highschool intern was me, and I ended up helping because no one else could figure out what highschool me was thinking.

Java did have a Security Manager that can be used to prevent this sort of thing. The original thinking was that the Java runtime would essentially be an OS, and you could have different applets running within the runtime. This required a permission system where you could confine the permissions of parts of a Java program without confining the entire thing; which led to the Java security manager.

Having said that, the Java Security Manager, while an interesting idea, has never been good. The only place it has ever seen significant use was in webapps, where it earned Java the reputation for being insecure. Nowadays, Java webapps are ancient history due to the success of Javascript.

The security manager was depreciated in Java 17, and I believe removed entirely in Java 21.

More aid is irrelevant once you have enough aid. And you can get enough aid in through land. More importantly, we have the roads and trucks to get food in today. We have been using the land route to get food into Gaza for years. The problem is that the most powerful military in the region is blocking the land route.

Now, instead of applying pressure on that military, we are going to spend months building a port to go around them.

By itself that makes sense; except that military is our close ally. We are their biggest shield on the international stage, and biggest supplier of weapons and defensive systems. However, instead of trying to leverage any of that to try and solve the actual barriers to aid delivery, we are going to spend months building a water route.

If this approach ends up working, it would not be because water routes are more efficient. It would ve because the US war ships operating the dock exert enough pressure that Isreal would not dare oppose them.

Of course, even success here only gets food into Gaza. It does not address internal distribution. Ideally, we would use established networks for that. However Israel has running a largly successful campaign to dismantle the only aid network that has been operating at scale within Gaza (unrwa)

When there is a severe shortage of food; any food is at risk of being targeted by desperate people. Food is a tier 1 need. It doesn’t matter if the food is being delivered by land or sea. The solution to this is to provide enough food that people know they are not going to starve to death even without resorting to violence to get what food they can

who will balance Israel’s right to self defence against the horrors we’re all looking at

I really hate this framing. Israel’s response has not been in Israel’s self interest. There is approximately 0% chance they will defeat Hamas, and approximately 100% chance they have hardended militant anti-Israel sentiment among Gazans for a generation. Further, they have alienated all of their potential regional allies (just as relations were starting to normalize), which is terrible for their long term security prospects in general; and their ability to resolve the Gaza problem in particular (since an ally that Gazan’s can trust would be incredibly useful).

Further, Hamas is not Israel’s biggest threat by far. They spent years planning an attack that only succeeded because of a massive failure on the part of the IDF; and only lasted for a day before the IDF completely steamrolled them.

As we can see know (and has been obvious from the beginning), Hezbolla in Lebanon is much greater military threat. Prior to the war, they were constrained by their rational self interest of avoiding a full war with Israel. In the beginning of the war, they made some pro-forma attacks, to which Israel offered some pro-forma responses; but things along the Israel Lebanon border were relatively quiet, because neither sude really wanted a war. However, as Israel continued its operation in Gaza, the political pressures in Lebanon grew, forcing an escallation of the conflict their. At this point, excluding the initial attack most of the damage to Israel has come not from Gaza, but Lebanon; and the IDF cannot just steamroll them.

And Israel is still in the “good case” of escalation. The elephant in the room here is Iran. As far as I can tell, Iran is not happy about this level of conflict, and is actively trying to avoid getting drawn in. However, it cannot simply abandon its proxies without massive loss of regional power. Nor can it be seen to abandon Gaza without significant internal political problems. The longer this war goes on, the greater the risk of Iran being fully dragged into it. If that happens, then everything up to this point will look like childs play. Israel will probably survive, but for the first time in decades, that will be brought into question.

None of this is new. This is the exact dynamic that was in play on October 6, when Israel’s actions were fully consistent with being aware of this dynamic. When October 7th happened, it did give Israel a bit more leeway to operate in Gaza; but that has always been limited, and has been long exhausted. Now, the dynamics are effectively the same as on October 6, but Israel is making the other decision of actively poking the bear of a regional war insted of simply tiptoeing around it as they had been doing. And Israel’s security suffers greatly for it.

As a non-binary person myself, I actually hope the asterisk isn’t meant to refer to me. I get offended enough by the common “women and non-binary” phrasing. But to literally include me as a footnote under “women”? If I was a women, I wouldn’t be non-binary.

Not to harp on KDE too much here. Even in queer spaces, enby erasure is annoyingly common.

But having the US navy run it might. Essentially, it becomes a question of who blinks first. Humanitarian organizations run away scared when the regional power starts dropping bombs and shhoting at them; and Israel knows it.

Picking a fight wirh the US military is a much bigger deal. This is why the US response to conflicts is often just “send in an aircraft carrier to float around near the issue”

The big ship stays in the water, and is used to supply smaller water craft that can ferry them directly to the coast; either by using smaller existing docks, or by simplying beaching on the cost. Unless we are saying that the US military lacks the ability to do a water based ground attack unless the enemy kindly leaves a port for them to use.

That’s not a linear extrapolation…

Because they don’t want to deal with a refuge crisis.

The problem is not a lack of food. The problem is a lack of logistics to get the food to the people. And the cause of the problem is not farmers. It is the regions most powerful military activly blocking aid. Soon it will also be because the government of said country successfully lobbied to defund the aid organization with established networks with Gaza.

The solution is simple. Don’t activly block food from Gaza, and food will appear in Gaza. Almost like magic. If magic was the result of decades of hard work in building a new world order after world war 2.