>a small village less than three miles from the Israeli border which had turned into a battlefield during Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024.
Classic New York Times style writing. This sentence should say “Israel attacked this village as part of its invasion of southern Lebanon and Hezbollah defended it”
Imagine if this whitewashing were done to Russia: Karkiv, a small city 10 miles from the Russian boarder which had turned into a battlefield during Russia’s campaign against Zelenski in 2022”
Well, Hezbollah is not defending anything, all they do is shoot rockets and lately fly drones. That's because they don't really have the capability to do anything else, they're a militia up against a fully modernised army and they are forced to fight in an asymmetric manner and so on. One does not simply "defend" territory with irregulars.
I understand that they are in a difficult position for a force that wants to place itself as the legitimate resistance to an invading army, in fact that's the same situation that Hamas finds itself in but with a more obvious occupation (it's not clear to most people that parts of Lebanon are under Israeli occupation, or at least contested).
But what's the end result of fighting? Death and ruin. Nothing else. For Hamas, they had their little "triumph" in October 7 23 and then they lost half of Gaza and the other half is a wasteland. How is that "defending" anything, either the territory or the people? The same thing is happening in Southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah are just as incapable of doing anything to stop the IDF advance as Hamas were in Gaza. They can't defend a thing.
If we are to have any sympathy for the cause, if not the tactics or the ideology, of terrorist resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, we have to also understand that their struggle is hopeless. Violence is clearly not the way for them to win, because the force they are fighting has all the violence. Non-violence is also not an answer because the force they fight has all the violence. They're screwed, quite bad, and there's no way out.
I think it's clear they don't fight to defend anything, just because there's nothing they can do and they might as well go down fighting, or they'll go insane. Or more insane.
I just wanted to clarify the above comment so I'm not misunderstood: no, I have no sympathy for Hezbollah, or their cause. I think they're bloody idiots who have caused untold death and destruction, and now the loss of South Lebanon, for entirely ideological reasons, and for no practical purpose.
You write well and you mean well but what's actually hopeless is trying to use logic with the people who post these kinds of articles and crawl out to comment on them. They're never going to view these conflicts dispassionately, seek out or absorb objective facts or explanations that challenge their preconceptions. They're motivated by an animus toward Israel they nearly all seem to lack toward any other country, they hold Israel to a standard that no other country is actively held to, and yet their worst nightmare is being called antisemites.
Also to be even more clear: while I recognise that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists I am not on the side of Israel, either. Israel is a militaristic, belligerent nation that seems to have convinced itself that the only answer to all its problems is to be in a constant state of war against all its neighbours. Prime Minister Netanyahu recently compared Israel's future to Sparta; I'm from Athens. And I'm a peacenick and an anti-nationalist on top of that. The ideology promulgated by Israel's ruling class is against everything I stand for, everything my history and my culture has taught me is sane, and reasonable, and productive.
Anyway when two people (or more, as the case may be) are fighting a war, the last thing that those who wish for peace must do is take a side. Taking a side can only encourage the belligerents to fight even more, because now they have supporters for their cause (safely, from a distance, without skin in the game, but supporters). Again, war is against everything I am for, and so I must stand against war and not on the side of anyone fighting a war.
As to being antisemitic or holding Israel to a special standard, we can talk about Iran, and Russia, and the US, and China, and Darfur, and Nigeria, and everything else that's rotten and makes me angry in the world right now if you want, but of course this discussion is about Israel's use of technology in its current campaign in Lebanon.
The day after October 7th, Israel was attacked from Lebanon. Israel has every right to do what it is doing to secure its northern border. Any country on earth would do the same.
Hezbollah at least recently was much stronger than Lebanese army and even nowadays Lebanese army afraid to challenge Hezbollah. Concept of a powerful non state actor is something many people in the west refuse to acknowledge.
Mainly because Lebanon is a failed state with arguably non state actors (Hezbollah being an Iranian proxy) doing the "defending". Which is not real defending but pestering Israel with attacks and drawing more punitive action.
It's a country with two power centres and two national armies. Thus, "divide and rule" politics works exceptionally well there and no one should be surprised their lack of political unity is working against them. While the Lebanese army has no love for the Israelis they are acting under US pressure and advise to not get involved as Hezbollah is taking the brunt of the attack, which the US and some Lebanese political actors hope will hope weakens it enough and eventually lead to its merger / absorption. It's an idiotic way to think of, ofcourse, because there is no guarantee that the US and / or Israel are likely to stop the war (or their ethnic cleansing / genocide), or stop making political demands on Lebanon once the Hezbollah is gone. The loss of Hezbollah fighters will mean Lebanon's military actually becomes weaker.
> Beirut (the parts where Hezbollah has the biggest presence, granted) is bombarded every few days
Not in the way it would be if Lebanon declared war on Israel.
> Lebanese people seem to view that differently
Lebanon is uniquely diverse. The Lebanese I know absolutely see it this way, and with justification. (To be clear, that doesn’t make them peachy towards Israel doing the same.)
> with regards to the wars, there is little the opposition would do differently
Oof, I suspect you’re right. A unilateral course, then: the LAF disarms Hezbollah and then restores the Lebanese state’s monopoly on violence within its borders. Ideally timed to a change in political winds for Tel Aviv in America. Possibly with Turkish or even Saudi support. (Not holding my breath for the EU.)
The problem I see: Even if Lebanon did that, there is still no guarantee that Israel would retreat from the areas in the south they occupied. Or even just that they'd stop with the airstrikes (they didn't stop during the previous ceasefire).
The political climate inside Israel seems to become more fundamentalist and belligerent, not less.
So there has to be an outside force that applies pressure to Israel. The only state able to do that is the US - but the US don't seem to be willing to do it.
Same with the Palestinians. Disarming Hezbollah would - very conveniently - remove one of the few remaining protective forces the Palestinians still have. So what would remain then?
They're not defending anything, not even their families. They're only struggling in an ideological war. Randomly firing missiles at Israeli civillians and drawing punitive action from Israeli leadership, which is all too happy for another reason to blow them up and invade.
> There is bipartisan agreement on the first point.
I don't see how this can be true. The last initiatives to stop weapon sales all died in the House (although with shrinking majorities). Meanwhile weapon sales, military and intelligence cooperation and diplomatic protection continue with no change.
By now a majority among the US population has changed their mind on Israel - but the actual decisionmakers haven't and I don't see that they will in the future either.
> And we should pass into law a process, subject to judicial oversight, that bars even weapons sales to countries systematically engaging in war crimes.
Are you saying that Israel intentionally targets civilians? As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, Israel is obligated to protect civilians and civilian populations from all dangers arising from military operations, and Israel is prohibited from direct attacks on civilians. The IDF must distinguish between civilian and military objectives and take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental loss of civilian life. Civilians lose protected status only if they take a direct part in hostilities.
As someone who has lost family and continues to. Have you not been paying attention to what has happened in Gaza? Conservatively.. Well over 20,000 children killed in Gaza alone. What would you call that?
I also recommend looking into an Ai system developed by the Israeli's called "Where's Daddy". Admittedly used during the the Gaza campaign by IOF themselves.
>Are you saying that Israel intentionally targets civilians?
Yes.
>As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, Israel is obligated to protect civilians and civilian populations from all dangers arising from military operations, and Israel is prohibited from direct attacks on civilians.
They dont do it.
>The IDF must distinguish between civilian and military
> We requested a security incident report from the ethical hackers as proof
So instead of paying him a fair bug bounty, they demand that he write a formal report for them and prove to them that there is even a problem.
Totally unhinged, but it gets worse:
> the response was a demand for money for the report, which confirmed our suspicion that this was a ransom-related incident.
Wow. So when the security researcher informs them that he would be happy to do some consulting work for them and informs them of his rates, they flip out and accuse his initial good samaritan decision to inform the company of the issue of being part of a plot by him to hold the company for ransom?
Whoever thought this is both totally delusional and a complete jerk. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.
So do you oppose DACA? That was the executive deliberately refusing to enforce the law as passed by congress.
Edit:
Here’s what a federal judge had to say in 2023:
"The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation ... The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void."
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199428038/federal-judge-agai...
> Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
Obama deported more people than Bush or Clinton, but chose to deprioritize (defer action) on the most sympathetic and focused more on troublemakers. Some might call that pragmatic use of limited resources.
And - crucially - did not have indiscriminate sweeps or raids. The number of false positives, people deported or arrested who had a legitimate right to remain, was nowhere near as high.
Almost everywhere has immigration enforcement. Most of those will do the occasional raid on homes or workplaces. Very rarely do you see the kinds of conflict that ICE is (IMO intentionally) causing.
I'm reading through the Wikipedia and you'll have to explain this because it looks like that version of the federal government respected injunctions that were issued. Or we can drop the pretense that you want to start a discussion in good faith with this whataboutism, that's fine with me too.
Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
Its remarkable to see the propaganda shift from “these are unarmed protestors not terrorists with guns” to “they are terrorists and they should have had more guns”.
I’m just glad President Trump didn’t start Iraq War 2.0 with this unrest as his WMD excuse.
That isn't what was said though. Rather that perhaps if the protestors had been armed they wouldn't have been massacred so easily.
Do I become a terrorist if I defend myself against government agents who are attempting to murder me? Certainly said government agents would label me as such but hopefully a neutral third party wouldn't.
Ahh yes. France’s investment in replacing carbon free nuclear with… carbon free intermittents. Fortunately that hype-driven waste is not stopping France from building out new EPR2 reactors.
No, what you are saying is a bunch of nonsense. If germany had simply kept its nuclear plants running and replaced its remaining coal with new nuclear back in 2000 instead of going with wind and solar it would have as low emissions as france by now. The decisions to go with wind and solar instead if nuclear meant keeping fossil fuels on the grid
"remaining coal",This sounds as if nuclear did produce the majority. But it never produced more than 30% of the electricity in Germany. In 2000 it was 60% fossil fuels and 30% nuclear. Renewables today produce 60% and fossil fuels are below 40% (coal only 20%). Of course, Germany could have decided to build more nuclear. It could have also decided to build renewables faster. Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked. The result is that there are now immense investments into renewables worldwide.
> Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked
Never worked? How do you explain all the countries in the world with large low carbon nuclear fleets and reasonable electricity prices? Like France, Japan, Korea, Russia, China, the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine etc? Everywhere large nuclear fleets have been built with a dozen or more reactors the per unit costs have been affordable.
None of that really matters though because when you look at the full system cost of intermittent renewables, they are an order of magnitude more expensive than the marginal cost.
Well, the only real downside to this is that energy is a bit more expensive and emissions won’t go down significantly for an extra 15 years or so. Depending on your preferred social cost of carbon that could not matter to you.
I highly doubt german reactors were designed to only last 35 years. Most gen II light water reactors in the US are expected to operate for 60-80 years.
Edit: ah i reread and see what you meant but my point still stands that 45 years is abnormally short for the type of reactors they had
That's also not what I said. Germany was aiming for 45 years initially (likely planning for overhauls + recertification then, rather than shutdown). Instead they shut down at 35.
However if left as is, all of those shut down in 2011 would have been shut down by ~2020 anyways.
Many reactors can be updated to last longer than their initial design lifetime. This is usually far cheaper than building a new reactor. I expect that if the political environment in germany was more conducive to nuclear, that is what they would have done.
No, they could all have gotten 20 year extensions and operate until 2040. Nuclear reactors should be run for as long as possible because they cost so much to build but are very cheap to operate.
Classic New York Times style writing. This sentence should say “Israel attacked this village as part of its invasion of southern Lebanon and Hezbollah defended it”
Imagine if this whitewashing were done to Russia: Karkiv, a small city 10 miles from the Russian boarder which had turned into a battlefield during Russia’s campaign against Zelenski in 2022”