That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action is target selection, not weapons choice.
I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?
Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.
But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.
Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties" established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll tell you a similar story.
By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today was probably weirdly humane.
I wonder what modern humane outcome plays out to a tiny nation state surrounded by arabs they're engaged in these kind of hostilities with. It seems this balance depends on large imbalanced external support, which will be called into question more and more as the USA loses global grip.
It was astonishingly humane especially considering how effective it was:
1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the garbage).
2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer this to them being dead.
3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't trust anyone in your organization either.
I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and effective and incredibly precise this attack was. Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose, and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while still maintaining its correct operation), but that doesn't take away from how much better this is for all the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties in Gaza.
The peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations, and when it is breached it is usually condemned.
> peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity. That is a cornerstone of international relations
The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later Russia the explicit right to intercede (i.e. invade) to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
Historically there has never been any such moral consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back millennia — since long before Hezbollah or the modern state of Israel even existed.
In a comment by _alphanerd_ in this subthread he points out that problematic states such as Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Australia are in the Eurovision.
Maybe Israel's neighbors object to that?
Or maybe they can't find bad enough musicians to get an entry together and are afraid of losing?
Lebanon’s objection is specifically due to Israel’s participation, according to Wikipedia:
> Lebanon has never participated in the Eurovision Song Contest. The country's broadcasting organisation, Télé Liban, was set to make the country's debut at the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 with the song "Quand tout s'enfuit" performed by Aline Lahoud, but withdrew due to Lebanese laws barring the broadcast of Israeli content.
According to what _Bentley_ posted it sounds as though there is a moral signal: some states that object to Israel consider it to be beneath their standards to participate in the Eurovision. This implies that those that do participate have no problem with what Israel does. That includes the Australians and the others mentioned earlier by _alphanerd_. Otherwise they too could just not participate.
For context: In addition to supporting the idea of contact between America and Easter Island this is being presented as a rebuttal of the idea advanced in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" that there was a population crash.
Also: what do we know about the people and institutions developing and promoting these standards and implementations?
We've seen the appointment of people with biographies suggesting affinity with US interests, for example Katherine Maher to the Signal Foundation (and the departure of the Moxie Marlinspike.)
I see a members list for the board overseeing the spec for Matrix, but does anyone know who they are[1]? And the spec is one thing, but who controls the development of the actually used clients and implementations?
Please note I am not imputing anything w.r.t. Matrix/Element etc, but if we're bothered to put effort into E2EE then it is probably worth thinking about this aspect in addition to whether the technical basis is sound. The historical record is clear on government attempts to influence things from that end.
I have the same sort of worries about GnuPG (and the SPoF that is the hard-working maintainer.)
Maybe E2EE is not of concern to the OP, in which case disregard the above.
It's much much more than that. For example in nl ppl in electric wheelchairs/microcars can use bike paths to drive slowly and safely to their destination. Also due to higher density they aren't far from either shops, cafes, other stuff they may need, everything is close-basically they can live relatively normal lives without relying too heavily on others
We also raised a child without a car -- in North America. It is much more possible than most people claim.
I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical.
The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future.
> who could live closer to work with a smaller living space
If that’s the necessary tradeoff, of course you’re seeing failure of adoption.
Also, would they need to move every time they change jobs (or husband & wife can no longer work on opposite sides of town to continue their careers from before marriage)? Logistics need thought through to be feasible policy.
Yes, you are articulating perfectly why the pampered, irrational and entitled Western middle-class are and will fail to meet any of the real world challenges we now face.
Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.
Awesome. On the bikes. There's plenty of variants, not just the regular city bikes or cargo bikes, but also push bikes for adults, here's one German pensioner who actually made a startup out of this and his bikes are also useful to people with certain disabilities https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/
Your statement seems very strong. Is Mac OS X not based on Darwin? Are you defining "lineage" in some way to only mean licensing and exclude the shared ideas (a kernel manipulating files)? Thanks for the "carcinisation" link.
To be more precise: this simplified history suggests a shared "lineage" back to the original UNIXes of all of BSDs (and hence Darwin and OSX) and of the GNU/Linux and other OSes https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/3202
So, "zero shared lineage" seems like a very strong statement.
