Everything is weaponized, whether it makes sense or not. They’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and these things take a life of their own
If you're referring to the "International Association of Genocide Scholars" (IAGS), all it takes to join that organization is $30 and self identifying as a genocide scholar. Furthermore the resolution was passed with a total of 129 voting members, and about 107 voting in favor, out of over 500 total members.
Here's a letter from 514 verified scholars and legal experts calling on IAGS to retract their resolution, along with their rebuttal of the substance of the resolution:
> If you're referring to the "International Association of Genocide Scholars" (IAGS), all it takes to join that organization is $30 and self identifying as a genocide scholar.
They have certainly had some interesting members[0].
The ICC did no such thing, you're probably thinking of the ICJ, which also did no such thing according to one of the judges that ruled on that decision:
“I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa” she told the BBC show HARDtalk.
“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” Donoghue said. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
“It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide,” she added. “But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”
Donoghue’s term on the bench expired a few days after the court delivered its initial ruling on Jan. 26.
It is interesting to me that all this sweat and tears are spent deliberating over the use of a word in faraway courts while all of us can see with our eyes the horrors Palestinians are subjected to by the occupying IDF. "We didn't say there was a genocide! We acknowledged the plausibility of the possibility that potentially maybe an investigation might perhaps occur into the possibility of maybe Palestinians being able to experience a genocide by someone."
It reminds me of a conversation I had with an Israeli a few weeks back. He asked me, "if what Israel is doing is so bad, why does nobody stop it?"
A great question. I don't know. And the bodies of children continue to pile up.
If you want to redefine genocide to mean "a very bad thing" then go ahead, but doing so would hollow out the term.
There's nothing stopping people from discussing the events in Gaza as a tragedy and a war crime, but activists are intent on attaching the word genocide to this. Referring to it as a genocide has become a litmus test to be considered pro-Palestinian.
To be fair, the UN working group that declared it genocide was completely precise in how they defined it and the criteria they used. Totally fair to disagree either with the existence of that working group, their definition of genocide, or with the facts they cite as evidence, but to pretend it’s just a bunch internet activists playing rhetorical tricks is clearly subterfuge.
are you referring to "UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory"? Their report came out 10 days ago. This has been referred to as a genocide far longer than that
People say Hamas is inherently genocidal. Some believe the state of Israel to be inherently genocidal. I’m not responding to those claims. The thread was discussing the recent UN report, and that was the context of my comment.
Nobody stops it because it's not worth it, for whatever you want to measure "it" by.
Israel-Palestine used to be really important, because it was a surrogate conflict for Western vs Arab control of the Middle East, and what that is really about is of course oil.
The Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s/1960s were direct conflicts, but it became apparent that the West wouldn't let Israel lose because Israel represents the latent threat of Western invasion if the Arabs ever really turned off the oil spigot.
So the Palestinians became the thorn for the Middle East to keep Israel at bay, so you get strange bedfellows of Iran and Qatar (Sunni and Shiite) funding them, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But a funny thing happened over 75 years of relative stability of borders and global trade: the status quo established itself, oil price and supply was managed and stabilized, security agreements established and backed up (with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait). Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in fact are effectively allies against Iran and Turkey.
And the US has its own supply of oil with Dakota shale oil. A FUCKTON of it. So strangely, the Arabian peninsula isn't afraid of the US. They are afraid of Iran and Turkey. And who has the best army to counteract Iran and Turkey?
Israel.
The Palestinians don't have a geopolitical use anymore. The Palestinians used to number around 400,000. Now? They number 4,000,000. That is ... not good. The Palestinians have no economy, and rely almost entirely on external aid. So the scope of a humanitarian burden on Arab sponsors has risen from 400,000 people to 4,000,000 people. AGAIN: the humanitarian burden has risen by a factor of 10, while their geopolitical value has DECREASED, almost evaporated.
And that is without the decreasing value of oil from EVs/alt energy and the long term specter of global warming.
The answer is simple - racism, same reason the Brits gave them the land in the first place when they knew it already had brown people on it that had been living there for almost a thousand years. How many deaths did it take for most Westerners and Western governments to start caring about Ukraine and start moving towards action? Barely a handful if any. How many deaths has Israel racked up since 1948 while the self-appointed human rights arbiters of the world wring their hands and say it's just not quite genocide yet?
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) is not a legal body, which would be the sort of body that is able to make a genocide determination. It also does not speak on behalf of the UN, given that it an independent commission of inquiry.
I am curious to see what the ICJ ruling in South Africa's case will be. That would be an actual legal body charged with making a genocide determination.
There's nothing proven about the genocide libel. That BBC article is about an association (IAGS) where anyone with $30 can join, whether they are a scholar or not. Twitter/X had a fun time with that over the last week, signing up as genocide scholars under ridiculous names. Furthermore IAGS has around 500 members, and only 129 of them voted with 86% of those supporting the resolution.
“Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence. It dishonors the memory of past victims, misleads the public about present atrocities, and obstructs efforts to avert future ones,” the Friday statement said.
I am not very interested in debating with a genocide apologist the finer points whether bombing hospitals, starving children and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population has to be approved as genocide by 98% or 99% of experts.
There are people up to this very day who deny the Holocaust happened as well and call it a libel. Hitler was stopped regardless, the same will happen to the genocider Netanyahu. Its "Never again", not "Again, but this time we are doing it to others".
I had a tough time even with PF. I got a basic config going for my network by copying stuff from the book of PF. When I tried to go beyond that things got frustrating. I think I was trying to set up a VPN which, I know this is a famously frustrating task, but I was hoping that PF would be somehow more legible or less opaque. There was nowhere to reference for the syntax and what it’s capable of.
I was hoping it was like a nice programming language whose internal structure made sense to an experienced developer. Where I can incrementally build things up and log things to the console as I go along and troubleshoot. But it turns out that setting up a vpn involves a big bang config with a dozen lines and it’s unclear which of them is broken.
It’s a DSL and not a programming language and often there is very little you can do to troubleshoot that’s short of reading the source code, the protocol spec, and firing up wireshark.
I found various configs on random websites or in the openbsd manual, but none seemed to do the trick. I gave up and installed Tailscale.
This isn’t a knock on PF. But years of reading glowing comments like this gave me some false hope that I could finally grok this stuff and maybe do some creative projects with it.
Seems like this should have been obvious to someone on the iOS team, no?
Like, "hey we need a way to trigger springboard UI events.."
"ok let's just use this unauthenticated bus and have springboard subscribe to it"
Something like that? Only thing I can think of is that this line of code was written so long ago and it's way at the bottom of the abstraction stack, so no one had a look
You can get pretty good results by copying the output from Firefox's Reader View into your project, for example:
about:reader?url=https://learnxinyminutes.com/ocaml/
Very cool. Anyone know more about this: "This discovery opens the door for researchers to begin dissecting the genes that could play various roles for cellulose biosynthesis in the plant"
ie. how does this let them find the relevant genes? Knocking out likely candidates and then do an image?
It’s a big jump to assume competence in targeting half of all science funding. As you saw in my link above they eliminated an entire graduate class of biomedical researchers. That’s a few dozen lifetimes of research that won’t be done now, delaying breakthroughs
What’s the alternative if you believe we can’t sustain the funding? Who is competent enough to decide whether “a whole class” of biomedical researchers are worth spending public money on or not? These aren’t easy questions with happy answers.
And if I am tuned in at all enough to take a guess at the impetus, it would be “why are we giving exorbitant grants to academic institutions where 90% of the money goes to support their administrative process instead of actually fund grad students doing research?” And the message from the government might be “cut the fat” and the response from the academic institution is either “no” and the students are collateral, or it’s “yes” and the college, not the gov’t, decided the specific grad program wasn’t valuable or important enough to retain.
This is happening concurrently with a 2.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class. So if your concern is with the deficit then maybe reconsider doing that.
The basic science research that’s being cut is responsible for the US being at the technological forefront. Cutting that pipeline will mean that industry will fall behind.
The administrative costs allow researchers to focus on research and not on administration. Also if that’s your issue then maybe don’t pull the rug from these institutions by canceling grants that were already approved. The financial urgency does not warrant it. You can have a conversation about admin costs that takes place over a year or two. That’s not what’s happening here.
The head of OMB pretty much directly said that science backed departments, like the EPA, are being destroyed/hamstrung so that they can't regulate industry, like our energy sector.
But that doesn't mean the administration is anti-science. It means they believe the situation is dire enough to justify drastic cuts. And that is a policy call regardless of your scientific beliefs.
In other words, one can reasonably take a position of “don’t publicly fund addressing an issue even if research supports it existing and even if that same individual espouses the conclusion of the research and might fund it privately”.
Call that what you want, but it is not a grand scheme to undermine science and replace it with fake propaganda.
The science projects are a tiny fraction of the budget. Cancel all of them and you won't make a dent in the deficit.
Add to that the administration's deliberate rejection of climate science and putting an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, and there is no way to avoid the straightforward judgment of "anti science". This is ideology and nothing else .
Specifically pages 10-14 for an intermediate summary, or pages 29-30 for a shorter one, with chapter 1 providing the full details.
Curious to hear your thoughts if any