...and destroying or damaging >2/3rds of all structures in Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians with airstrikes isn't?
Obviously yes, Hamas and Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel consistute war crimes. I assume you must agree that Israel's systematic targeting of schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps would also qualify?
I'm claiming there is a reason that Israel destroys buildings you neglect to mention. Recognizing that reason strongly undermines your assertion of systematic targetting. There is a fog of war, and war is messy, so a charitable outlook should exclude blase confidence about the matter.
You're mixing two different things with the civilians in buildings. The mass building destruction we see is done on buildings after evacuation to dismantle booby trapped buildings. Israel does frequently do strikes on buildings or infrastructure that contain civilians, but that is a different kind of action with different reasons and circumstances (e.g. collateral damage of strikes on military targets, etc.)
I love how confidently you reply in a way that makes you think Israel just has a right to do it. Like they have a right to just level buildings because they think it's booby trapped.
You're someone that has deepthroated the Israeli narrative, with no critical thinking whatsoever. I hope, for your own sake, you start to see more of the reality, as defending a violent regime like this can have an impact on ones soul, which will affect - if not already - other areas of your life.
Did I say Israel has a right to do all these things? No, I did not. I described the situation and their reasoning. Now Israel does have a right to defend itself. Hamas, the government of Gaza, forfeited their relatively peaceful situation when they openly attacked Israel. That doesn't mean everything Israel does is unquestionable. There is plenty open to criticism. There is also a fog of war, and much is unknown now that will be revealed as time goes on. But that also doesn't mean that we should dismiss everythjng Israel says just because they say it. A little more nuamce and curiosity is the most ethical approach to this inherently morally bankrupt conflict.
The mere existence of a state per se is violent, and given that both Israel and Palestine insists on having mutually incompatible states over the same territory, there is no other option but endless bloodshed until both sides commit to a conciliatory settlement. Until that day, a day which may never come, since everyone is hellbent on egging their respective favored side on, things will simply continue as is until one or both sides are destroyed. Since Israel unquestionably has more power, it will likely survive. There is no morally unquestionable option, but I think anyone who has a stake in the livelihood of Palestinians would be interested in stopping the conflict as soon as possible and making a settlement, even an imperfect one. In such a quandry, the only ethical option is to remain open and curious, be willing to look at facts and evaluate claims instead of jumping to conclusions, and refrain from asserting an uncertain narrative as fact when there are competing narratives and counterexamples.
If you assert this, it is a open attack against the rule of law. Society requires peace, and peace requires deterrence and enforcement. Feel free to feel morally righteous, but recognize that your opinion on moral righteousness condemns all people to live the rule of the jungle.
It is pretty trivial to look up recent sattellite imagery and find undestroyed buildings, but that takes more interest in facts than finding youtube videos
As you're well aware, simply dismissing these as random "youtube videos" is disingenuous. The footage is sourced from the Associated Press (AP) which you have no doubt heard of. It has 235 news bureaus in 94 countries worldwide, and has been around for ~180 years, also having won 59 Pulitzer prizes for its journalism.
Your claim that buildings are being destroyed because they were "booby trapped" comes from a partisan source (the Israeli Government/IDF), which is an active participant in this conflict. Their claims are a liability limiting exercise and it's in their best interests do downplay destruction they have caused.
Statements from a government at war regarding their own military conduct are basically a PR exercise unless they have been independently verified. Plus independent verification is quite hard, as the same partisan source has prevented independent media from gaining access into the strip which stops independent verification of both side's claims.
Do you have independent sources for the booby trapping other than IDF or news organisations repeating their press releases? Basically anything from international NGOs / neutral observers that confirm that houses are booby trapped to such a scale that it necessitates the flattening of entire residential blocks?
While you say it's trivial to find a house with no damage, that was not my point. My point was from viewing the drone footage - that's view covers entire suburbs - there is not one single intact building in all 3 separate videos.
But since you mentioned "recently satellite imagery", lets look at the actual data provided by experts who analyse it.
The United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), released its Comprehensive Damage Assessment in late October 2025. So it's 3 weeks old. Completely fresh and up to date.
* It uses high-res imagery from as recent as 11 October 2025
* It tracks damage over time rather than just a before/after assessment
> According to satellite imagery analysis, as of 11 October 2025, approximately 81% of all structures in the Gaza Strip are damaged. Among the damaged structures, UNOSAT identified 123,464 destroyed structures, 17,116 severely damaged structures, 33,857 moderately damaged structures, and 23,836 possibly damaged structures for a total of 198,273 affected structures. Compared to the 8 July 2025 assessment, this corresponds to a 4% increase in total affected structures, and an 18% increase in destroyed structures, indicating worsening damage. An estimated 320,622 housing units have been damaged, 12% more than on 08 July 2025.
Their satellite analysis shows:
* 23,464 destroyed structures
* 17,116 severely damaged structures
* 33,857 moderately damaged structures
* 23,836 possibly damaged structures
* A total of 198,273 affected structures
It also shows the destruction of housing / infrastructure has been both systematic and continual over the past two years.
Having 81% of all structures damaged (and 320k housing units) puts extreme doubt to the claim that it is "just making it safe from booby traps".
Obviously a large proportion of buildings are destroyed. My point was that your question and framing were disingenuous. It is trivial to select a sample especially an extremely limited and biased one (which is a limitation of the kind of data video can capture and has nothing to do with credibility of a news organization) that a video can show, and ask a misleading question. I could take a video in an undestroyed part of gaza and ask the opposite question, which would be similarly misleading.
Hamas members themselves have said they have trapped structures [1]. I don't think it is unreasonable that many buildings were trapped. There are also other causes of destruction, like bombing.
It is also a war crime to carry out what is known as the Nakba - ethnically cleansing and displacing hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.
It is a crime illegally occupy land that does not belong to you.
It is a crime to maintain an apartheid state.
It is a crime to hold 'prisoners' without any charges
It is a crime to rape said prisoners. It is also disgusting to have a society that riots when said rapists are called out for their actions.
It is a crime to continually bomb and kill Palestinians for just existing.
It is a crime to continually kill Palestinians for no reason via 'mowing the grass' exercises
It is a crime to crime to kill Palestinians when they peacefully protest
It is a crime to indiscriminately bomb Gaza because some Palestinians have had enough of being subjected to sub-human conditions.
So if you say 'any and all means are justified to prevent that', then any and all means should be justified to prevent the above, right?
After WW2 Germans were literally removed from certain territories and the land given to Poland. It's honestly not much different from the Nakba. I find an immediate refusal to address points of history like this and hide behind accusations of bias to weaken your credibility.
War is a horrible and inherently immoral thing. We do no favors to our humanity or othercs by pretending it's a simple black and white matter when it is really not.
The "legal way to wage war" is only relevant when you are waging war against an army. Hezbollah is not an army, it's a terrorist group. It attacks civilians. It doesn't wear uniforms. It ignores the laws of war.
“The IDF attacks civilians. It uses perfidy to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of its enemies. It, too, ignores the laws of war.”
There is no way to continue justifying acts of terror being committed by your in-group, without also become equivalent to the terrorist of your out-group.
It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
It's pretty close to one. Having all your games in a single digital library along with cloud saves and achievements for those games in a single place is a real benefit that would lead to a monopoly.
>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share
Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.
Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.
Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."
Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.
If competitors offer passable services for selling indie game developers, then indie game developers would be able to earn more money (due to competition).
This is why developers are hopeful for alternative services.
And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
I see people using DAWs, even "pro" ones made by companies presumably interested in their bottom lines. In all cases I have no idea how to use it.
Do I complain about intuitiveness etc? Of course not. I don't know how to do something. That's my problem. Not theirs.
> And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
Well, if people fail at that first five minutes, the subsequent thousand hours most often never happens.
Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything.
There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true.
I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly.
GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI design on forums like this and I think it is pretty unfair. It is a pretty good program comparatively. If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess.
> Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint.
This is just straight up not true. You're only saying this because you, presumably, have used Photoshop.
It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain.
Maybe you disagree. Okay. Pick a different example. 3D Max? Why aren't studios using Microsoft Paint 3D instead of 3D max?
"It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain."
See this is the thing that software devs don't "get" about UI design.
It's the exact thing the original author is trying to communicate.
You CAN have a powerful tool. And still have it be user friendly for normies!
You hide away it's complexities. So it's not INDTIMIDATING for new users.
You know what. I'm going to reinstall gimp. Just to prove my point.
Let's compare photoshop with gimp.
Before I begin, let me preface. Modern photoshop is an enshitified piece of garbage. I would never use it.
But this is nothing to do with enshitification. That's a whole different thing.
Ok let's start:
- I grab a random image from imgur. Copy paste. Ctrl-V. Both apps passed the test. I was a little worried gimp couldn't even do this.
- GIMP is ugly as fuck. It looks outdated. There's information overload on the left side. Too much shit happening. Too much text squashed together. INTIMIDATING.
- In contrast, photoshop has a more minimalist look. There is a "Layers" window on the right. New users don't need to touch it.
- There is a "Size & Position" window. This is key. Notice how there's only 3 things inside that window. Notice how it's not squashed with all the other shit on the left. Think about that. Why did the designer do this? Because those 3 things are what 90% of normies are looking to do.
- This is exactly what the original author was talking about, with the TV remote. The most common operations should be sectioned off at the top of the remote. Similarly, the most common operations in photo editing should be sectioned off, in clear view.
Ok, Step 2. Let's try and crop this image. A common operation:
- Photoshop. Click the crop button. Shows you a bit more complexity in it's settings. You don't have to touch it. It gives you a helpful grid UI: https://imgur.com/a/tLjL6en
- And then it has a blue "Done" button at the bottom. Finished easy.
- GIMP. We start with a brush by default??? Whoops I accidentally drew on the picture. I didn't want to do that. Thank god I know ctrl-Z.
- So it's that cross thing right? That's the move button. Nope that's not what I want to do :(
- It must be the one next to it. The rectangle. Ok, some random corner thingies appear in the corners. I click on one of the corners. The image gets split into two. But now what? WTF do I do now: https://imgur.com/a/f7TTHJs
I can go on and on and on and on, criticizing gimp's terrible UI design. I hope, the little I have demonstrated, is a tease into what UI design is really about.
Any and all means are and will always be justified to prevent that.