homura1650

Blinken is releasing the reports thr president wants released. The actual intelligence is provided in classified reports provided to the president and some members of Congress. What gets made public is a policy decision that flows down from the top.

Short term yes, but it is a strategic risk long term.

Part of the reason Democrats are turning on Netenyahu (and, by association, Israel) is genuine policy concerns and grassroot pressure.

However, another part of his problem with Democrats is that he has spent the past decade inserting himself into US politics as a Republican alligned figure. That both makes Democratic politicians more willing to oppose him, and gives the Democratic base a permission structure for opposing him.

This is aid through the Karem Shalom border crossing, which is at the border of Gaza, Egypt, and Israel. Egypt does not, and never has, controlled this crossing. The checkpoint into Gaza is on the Israeli side of the Egypt/Israel border and has always been administered by Israel.

Egypt, of course, controls its borders, and so is able to prevent aid from reaching the crossing through Egypt. However, Egypt has no control over aid that reaches the crossing through Israel.

This is in contrast to the Rafah crossing, which is entirely on the Egypt/Gaza border, and so would require Egypt's cooperation to open. That crossing remains closed.

It is good that Egypt is allowing aid to Karem Shalom; and their refusal to allow it through the Rafah crossing would be a warcrime but for the technicality that they are not a party to the war.

However, the same benefit to this move could be accomplished by passing aid through Israel. Israel is a party to this war, and so is under a legal requirement to allow aid in. US law also requires that Israel do so in order to receive military assistance [0]. Further, Israel is under specific instructions from the ICJ to allow in humanitarian aid. And Israeli leadership is likely to be issued a warrent by the ICC for (among other things) blocking tge delivery of humanitarian aide.

Israel requirement to allow humanitarian aide to Gaza through Israel is not some new concept. Nor is it asking for some unheard of generousity from the Israeli people to their enemy. It is simply their longstanding obligation for waging a war in compliance witg international law. An obligation they claim (externally at least) that they are meeting. So, Egypts assistance should be completely irrelevant to the Karem Shalom crossing.

The reason we need Egypt here is that Israel is not complying with its obligations. Part of the difficulty is a minority of Israeli citizens taking matters into their own hands. To the Israeli government's credit, they are providing some security to protect aid deliveries from Israeli protesters.

To their detriment, this protection is opposed by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, who has also said I am against the fact that they attack and burn trucks, it is the cabinet which should stop the trucks

There has also been reporting of IDF members leaking aid movements to protesters; although I am not sure hiw widespread that is.

[0] A requirement that the US is not enforcing.

We need to fight for a rules based order!

No, not like that!

Seriously, what is the appropriate way for the world to respond to Israel?

Grassroots economic protest (bds) is literally illegal in parts of the US.

Any move in the UN security council is met with a US veto.

An ICJ investigation application is met with condemnation.

An ICC warrent application is met with not only condemnation, but a reiteration of the standing US threat to invade the Hague, or otherwise use "any person described in subsection (b) who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court" [0]. Also the mere issuing of a warrent that will likely never be excersized is already being met with the threat of sanctions.

Is there anything that the US thinks is an appropriate way of opposing Israel?

Yes! After Israel engaged in a clear act of war against Iran and Syria by bombing high ranking Iranian military officials in Syria [1], Iran launched an innefective pro-forma counter attack. The US was very clear on our position. No US military support for an Israeli reprisal. Israel shoul just "take the win" and call it a day.

In Ukraine, a country facing a much more existential threat than Israel [2], the US's position has been very clear: "no using US resources to strike within thrme borders of your attacker".

For all of its rhetoric, the actual position of the US and Israel is clear. The only form of opposition to Israeli action that they will respect is the threat of military violence. [3].

Hopefully the rules based order has enough support to stand up against the US opposition. But it is really not good that that is the conversation we are having.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ206/pdf/PLAW-107publ206.pdf sec 2008

[1] The details of this strike are arguably a war crime. However weather you agree with that assessment or not, launching a missile into another country and killing military leaders is about as classic "act of war" as you can get.

[2] This is not a statement on the morals or goals of Russia compared with Gaza. Simply a statement of their military capabilities and ability to see those goals to fruition.

[3] Of course, following through on such a threat would be met with an in-kind response, but neither the US nor Israel seem to want to be fighting a capable enemy right now.

That's the point. For all of the US's talk about a "rules based order", it is very selective about how it gets applied. When it is wielded against her enemies, it is a great moral triumph, and imperative that we support it not because of the immediate politics, but because we must support the system that is so essential to a good world order.

When that same rules based order is wielded against the US's allies, it is an outrageous exercise of biased politics, and we will use our military might to crush attempts to enforce it.

If you ever wonder why we have problems rallying the world against Russia and China, this is why. For all we talk about acting in the interest of a global rules based order, third world countries look at the situation and think "bollocks, you are all just acting for your own interests, so we are going to do the same and ally with whoever can offer us the most"

It's not impossible, just difficult. Depending on how water free you actually need the result do be, you might be able to get away with just a dehumidifier. If that is not good enough, you can put your entire purification process in a box and flood it with an inrert gas like argon or nitrogen. Storing this is not that difficult, but you need to be sure you are in a moisture free environment whenever you open the container.

Another interesting difficulty is you cannot direct distil it to beyond around 90%, because at that concetration water and isopropyl has the same boiling point. So, you need to mix in another chemical like benzene to distill out the water, then you can distill out the addidive as a second step.

So, what problem does this pier solve?

It gets aid to the border of Gaza. But once that aid is at the border it still needs to be loaded onto trucks and distributed by land.

In contrast, we have been able to get aid to the border by land for decades.

What is the problem that land based deliveries faced, that maritime based deliveries will not?

Same as the last time. The US has been clear that no US boots will be on the ground in Gaza, so we will either: A) wag are finger and request an Israeli investigation if it appears the rocket came from Israel or B) issue a strongly worded statement condemming Hamas for the deliberate attack.

This post is in two parts. The first is my attempt at an objective analysis of what lessons we should take from this.

The second part is my subjective introspection of why I feel the way I do about it. I'm still not sure if sharing that part is a good idea; but I wrote it to gather my own thoughts and feelings, and maybe it can help someone else. Or maybe it is just a giant wall of text that no one wants to look at.

First, the analysis:

The story with the bear hypothetical has almost nothing to do with gender dynamics. Sure, there is a gender politics point to be seen. A lot of women fear men. However, that is not a new insight. That observations has been a major part of the gender discourse for as long as I have. Almost no one is being introduced to that concept through the bear hypothetical.

Having said that, if you, dear reader, are part of todays lucky 10,000, then congratulations! If you are interested in learning more, then I would suggest avoiding anything that mentions "bear", and instead start with metoo. That was another time this type of gender dynamics conversation went viral, and produced a much healthier discourse.

In an ideal world, the bear hypothetical would have been made, and quickly forgotten about; either because someone was venting, or just struck out on a rhetorical point. These things happen. People who hear them see the context in which they happen and everyone moves on.

However, this hypothetical was posted on TikTok. TikTok is an amazing app. An unironic triumph of artificial intelligence. It is capable of turning humans into engagement with an efficiency that we thought was impossible just a decade ago. And this bear hypothetical is great for engagement. Toxic engagement, but engagement none the less. It then spread to other social media, which have similar (although less advanced) algorithms designed to create engagement. I don't think it is a coincidence that the lemmyverse was late to the bear party. Or that when the bear party reached us, such a disproportionate amount of the content has been at the meta level. We do not have the same toxic algorithms here. The meme only made it here as spillover after the big social media sites made it such a huge thing.

Regardless of how this meme came to be so large, is it useful? I would argue not. Look at all the discourse it has generated. How much of it has been productive? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away the lesson you want them to take away? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away that the entire movement you are trying to advance is stupid? Sure, plenty of men understood what you are trying to say; but those are not the ones that you need to reach. The ones we need to reach took away the other meaning. Beyond simply missing the point, many of them are now inoculated against the point.

Now comes the introspective part of the post. This is about how the meme and surrounding discourse made me feel and why. I don't claim to know how it made most people feel or why. This is just one person's feelings, motivated by their specific perspective and lifetime of experience. And that is the first point: there is a huge landscape of possible thoughts someone can have to the meme, of which I had a few. The meme, however, forces me to project all of those thoughts into a single decision: man or bear.

This is not a criticism of the discourse around the meme. The meme itself pushes me to pick a side before I read any of the discourse, before I even think about responding to it, before I even start engaging with it on a conscious level. The first thing I need to do is pick a side, and all of my subsequent thoughts are colored by that initial binary.

I picked man. And that hurts; because my tribe picked bear. And so, I find myself being "part of the problem", and being in the camp that is identified by an ideology that I do not like and is against my values. And that hurts.

I recognized that engaging with the meme was not healthy, but the algorithms are too powerful, so I kept reengaging and disengaging as it kept getting shoved back into my face. And the meme picked at a lot of other scars I have.

Many commentators have described the dichotomy as man=literal thinking and bear=metaphorical thinking. I have nothing novel to contribute to that analysis, but it is a good framing for this point. Growing up, I was very much "literal thinking" kind of kid. I still am a "literal thinking" kind of person, but it is my childhood experience that matters here. It was clear to me from a young age that my kind of thinking was not welcome, and so I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. When I did share them, they were beated down, and I never quite understood why. The discourse around this meme pokes at those old scar, and that hurts.

Growing up, I never really understood this whole boy vs girl thing. Sure, I understood that there were some clear physical differences, and could easily classify people into boys and girls. And I understood that I got classified with boys. What I didn't understand was such a big deal. Why did the girls get one room, and the boys another. Why the girls have their set of cliques and the boys have theirs. Why the girls got to wear nice clothing while I was stuck in a stupid suit and tie. For a long time, I thought everyone was simply acting. That no one wanted to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes. And so, I acted. The few times I tried talking about, the adults would just say that I am trying to "be difficult"; that I do not actually believe what I was saying. In high school, I learned about transgender people. That was enough for me to logically convince myself that gender must be a real thing. After all, if everyone was just acting anyway, why would so many people insist on acting as the wrong one. I never really internalized that lesson, but the logical knowledge was enough to let me compartmentalize it and just go along to get along. Most of the time. This kind of gender essentialism discourse forces those boxes back to being the center of conversation, which pokes at those old scars, and that hurts.

Several months ago, there was a very moving article posted in one of the trans communities. Musings of a trans man wrestling with many of the same issues I talked about. How he had to spend his childhood acting a gender he didn't feel. How the exact same aspects of his self would have been received so differently if he was born a different gender. How he had to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing in, belonging to, and benefiting a movement that is in many ways between oblivious to and hostile of anyone who is not cisgendered [0]. In reading that article, for the first time I can recall, I felt heard. Someone put so many of my own thoughts and experiences down on paper. Someone else read that and thought it was so good that they had to share it with their community. And that community was unanimous in accepting it.

And so, I opened up. I shared my own thoughts. Not all my thoughts. But there was one thread running through all of the original article that really spoke to me that I wanted to crystallize and explore. Overall, I was agreeing with the same piece that everyone else was agreeing with, just doing so through my own lense.

Then, this happened (direct quote from the 1 response I got. Spoilered because even copying it was lightly triggering for me):

I reported that poster. Some time later, I discovered that I was now banned from the server. I had finally found my tribe. The most my tribe of any my tribe I had seen yet. I came out of my shell, spoke a little bit of my thoughts. And I was pushed back down, exiled from the tribe, and told to go back to the others. And that hurt. Also, getting called "cis" as a slur really pokes at the non-binary scar I talked about earlier, and that hurts.

And so, in comes the bear meme. Almost surgically designed to poke at all of those scars. And it hurts

What am I supposed to do when somethings hurts? Do I go to my tribe and vent? I can see a few brace (or stupid) posters in the various comments section expressing some thoughts similar to my own; but overall my tribe was united in saying that those posters were "the problem". And that hurts.

[0] I really do not want to go into the merits of those criticisms, as I do not think it is actually relevant to this post. Also, the original article does it better than I can.

What are these known solutions to domestic violence?

Fully funding shelters is good. However, the victims that reach of point of reaching out to even contact help are just the tip of the iceberg. If your solution doesn't kick in until then, it does not address the other 90%

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.

Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a nobel prize for attempted chemistry?!?