Here’s an idea: if the US wants a say in the ICC, maybe they should sign the Rome Statute.

True, except the difference Israel is still taking occupied land and building settlements, and excluding the people born there from them.

The government at least needs to pick one of the two options to move forward (as well as acknowledging and making reparations for those with traditional connections to the land who were affected by past injustices):

1. The two state solution: Palestine is a genuinely separate sovereign state, with a right to self determination, airspace, control of their territorial waters and so on. Israeli government representatives only enter Palestine on invitation from the government. Anyone born on Palestinian land, even on a former settlement, is a Palestinian unless they find another state to accept them and renounce their citizenship. Palestinians have equal protection of the law, and are expected to follow Palestinian laws on Palestinian land, or face the Palestinian justice system. If they renounce their citizenship, they are subject to Palestinian immigration law and might have to leave Palestine.
2. The one state solution: The entire Israeli occupied ‘river to sea’ area is one state, and everyone born there is an Israeli citizen, with equal rights under the law, power to vote, etc…

The problem is the current right-wing extremists in power in Israel do not want either solution; they want to have it both ways - when it comes to ownership and control, they want to deny the existence of a Palestinian state. But when it comes to citizenship, they want to claim everyone born on the land they occupy is not Israeli so they can deny them rights and exploit them. Their life is substantially controlled by the Israeli state, but they get no say in the leadership of the state - undermining claims it is a democracy. They don’t have equal protection under the law - Israeli authorities protect settlers taking land against people with generational connections to the land.

None of this is new in history, as you point out. Most of the Roman Empire, most of the former British Commonwealth, etc… had similar things in the past, with massacres of the native people, lands confiscated, native people been treated as having fewer rights than the colonialists, etc…

What is different is that those are all past atrocities (although fair reparations have still not been paid in many cases, at least further atrocities are generally not continuing to anything like the same extent), while Israel continues to commit the same atrocities to this very day.

Or use it as a Progressive Web App. This could be a good thing for awareness of PWAs and for them being seen as a killer feature that people won’t buy a smartphone unless they support them well. A transition away from app stores to PWAs can only be good.

If they are doing TikTok, maybe they should do Facebook, Reddit and YouTube next.

While Milei doesn’t have a lot going for himself, in this case it could also be that the companies supplying the fuel have some US component / have more to lose from not having access to American markets than they gain from supplying that airline, and it is the US government to blame.

The US blockade of Cuba is, of course, very hypocritical; there have been human rights abuses in Cuba relatively recently (e.g. the crackdown on peaceful July 11 2021 protestors), but if that is grounds for continuing sanctions of an unrelated industry for links to that country, then if there wasn’t a double standard the US should firstly be sanctioning Israel for years of brutal repression and apartheid in Israeli-occupied Palestine, and secondly be sanctioning itself for the police crackdowns on protestors calling for righting the wrongs in Palestine.

And also the videos were being used to incite people to retaliate. Immediately after the attack, a rioting mob seeking vigilante justice surrounded the church, trapping the paramedics (who were treating the assailant) and the assailant inside. The mob apparently injured dozens of police, damaged about a hundred cars, including writing off a number of police cars, and some people armed with illegal weapons climbed a ladder to try to get into the church.

I haven’t seen any source suggesting it was a pen. Several sources, such as https://www.aap.com.au/news/police-powers-bolstered-as-terror-attack-probe-widens/, describe the weapon as a “flick-knife”. Other sources say that the bishop victim was “seriously injured”, and the assailant was injured in the attack and his own finger was sliced off with the knife.

I think you are right that no one died, but wrong that the weapon was a pen - this was a serious attack with an actual knife.

I wonder if this is social engineering along the same vein as the xz takeover? I see a few structural similarities:

• A lot of pressure being put on a maintainer for reasons that are not particularly obvious what they are all about to an external observer.
• Anonymous source other than calling themselves KA - so that it can’t be linked to them as a past contributor / it is not possible to find people who actually know the instigator. In the xz case, a whole lot of anonymous personas showed up to put the maintainer under pressure.
• A major plank of this seems to be attacking a maintainer for “Avoiding giving away authority”. In the xz attack, the attacker sought to get more access and created astroturfed pressure to achieve that ends.
• It is on a specially allocated domain with full WHOIS privacy, hosted on GitHub on an org with hidden project owners.

My advice to those attacked here is to keep up the good work on Nix and NixOS, and don’t give in to what could be social engineering trying to manipulate you into acting against the community’s interests.

Most of mine are variations of getting confused about what system / device is which:

• Had two magnetic HDDs connected as my root partitions in RAID-1. One of the drives started getting SATA errors (couldn’t write), so I powered down and disconnected what I thought was the bad disk. Reboot, lots of errors from fsck on boot up, including lots about inodes getting connected to /lost+found. I should have realised at that point that it was a bad idea to rebuild the other good drive from that one. Instead, I ended up restoring from my (fortunately very recent!) backup.
• I once typed sudo pm-suspend on my laptop because I had an important presentation coming up, and wanted to keep my battery charged. I later noticed my laptop was running low on power (so rushed to find power to charge it), and also that I needed a file from home I’d forgotten to grab. Turns out I was actually in a ssh terminal connected to my home computer that I’d accidentally suspended! This sort of thing is so common that there is a package in some distros (e.g. Debian) called molly-guard specifically to prevent that - I highly recommend it and install it now.
• I also once thought I was sending a command to a local testing VM, while wiping a database directory for re-installation. Turns out, I typed it in the wrong terminal and sent it to a dev prod environment (i.e. actively used by developers as part of their daily workflow), and we had to scramble to restore it from backup, meanwhile no one could deploy anything.

Unfortunately a probe by Israel will likely result in: “We’ve investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”, no matter what. These are people who deliberately bomb and kill hundreds of civilians for one suspected militants, and who are creating a famine affecting an entire population mere kilometres from places with abundant food through their deliberate policies on aid. Killing people trying to help the people they are genociding is by design in the eyes of the far right extremists who are running Israel at the moment.

Update: It looks like quite a few stories are paraphrases (AI rewrites?) of CNN stories, so the site might just be an attempt at SEO, rather than psyops.

CNN seems to be contorting themselves to not say anything too negative about Israel’s far-right government, hence the bias coming through on other sites based on it.

The history of that site is very interesting, leading me to suspect some kind of psyops operation.

The domain name was registered on 2021-06-13, but until at least 2024-01-01 it was a rather basic Indonesian language news site, with no English content - https://web.archive.org/web/20231228131909/https://www.infoterkiniviral.com/.

The domain name was updated on 2024-03-22. Their sitemap has content going back to 2024-03-09. Old URLs that existed back in January now return 404 not found.

There seems to be no attribution (e.g. who owns the site). It is using Hostinger for DNS, with PrivacyProtect used for WHOIS privacy, and is hosted on GCP.

That said, I haven’t found evidence that the less controversial stories (which psyops likely add to lend credibility to any propaganda by blending it in with real news) are word-for-word copied from anywhere. This could mean they have invested in writing them by hand, or maybe they are AI generated as a paraphrase from another news source.

I’d bet there might be a whole series of them if they are taking this approach, but they seem to have tried to make them hard to link them together.

the most voted for parties

Simple ‘first past the post’ systems like they have in the US are flawed. The biggest problem is that clones (candidates or parties with similar positions) split the vote. For example, suppose 10% of the population wants Evil Dictator, but the other other 90% each want one of 18 different candidates as their first preference, evenly divided on first preferences (so 5% on first preferences), but rank any of the other 17 higher than Evil Dictator. So Evil Dictator has 10% of first preferences, but is the last preference for 90% of the population. The other candidates have 5% each.

First Past the Post would elect Evil Dictator in this circumstance. Better electoral systems (e.g. the Schulze method) would elect one of the other candidates.

This applies still if you elect a plurality of people - e.g. there could be two Evil Dictators, who 90% of the public oppose, but who have the highest vote because there are fewer of them to split the vote. Better systems like the better STV variants ensure proportionality (it avoids a landslide where the same voters determine all the representatives in a winner takes all approach). A larger parliament means more representation of the perspective of smaller minorities - so they are at least heard.

A “score” based voting system, if it is just a ranking of parties, could work like this. But if you are suggesting adding up the votes (so, for example, a 5 is worth 5x as much as a 1), the problem is tactical voting. People will, in practice, vote to make their vote count them most.

Let’s say, for example, there are three candidates, Racist Evil Dictator, Racist, and Progressive. Let’s say we know for granted almost everyone is going to score Racist Evil Dictator as 1. If a progressive was voting honestly, they might vote Progressive as a 5, and apart from the racism Racist might have been doing well, so they’d get a 3. The racist supporters, however, if they were being honest, would give Racist a 5 and Progressives a 3. Let’s say there are 1000 progressive voters, and 600 racist voters. If voting honestly, the scores would be Progressive = 5 * 1000 + 3 * 600 = 6800, Racist = 5 * 600 + 3 * 1000 = 6000, Racist Dictator = 1 * 1600 = 1600. Now the problem is, you can’t really get people to vote honestly. So let’s say Racist riles up their followers to instead vote Progressive as a 1 to, even if they don’t really think that. Now the scores are Progressive = 5 * 1000 + 1 * 600 = 5600, Racist = 5 * 600 + 3 * 1000 = 6000. Racist wins.

In practice, when a system allows people to vote tactically and have an advantage, it becomes a race to the bottom. That’s how you end up with dynamics like the two-party system. A good voting system works by removing incentives to vote tactically - if you put your true preferences down, you will not be disadvantaged in your influence on the election, even if other people attempt to vote tactically. That means that genuine third parties have a chance if the people like them, even in the absence of coordination.

I don’t think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.

Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.

Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.

A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is… it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.

However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody ‘think global, act local’, or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?

That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.

That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I’d consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn’t interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc…), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I’d want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).

I think putting one’s viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.

I think it is a positive sign - although obviously hypocritical when they are providing lethal aid to the Israeli government while it’s controlled by genocidal extremist parties like Likud and Mafdal-RZ, who are using it to create the very situation for Palestinian civilians in the first place.

The bombing of civilian homes and infrastructure, combined with shootings and so on has already killed or wounded about 2% of the population in only 5 months. However, a famine could kill far faster than that; to avoid that, the IDF would only need to not interfere with the distribution of aid, allowing NGOs to provide it. Instead, they have interfered with the entry of aid at the Egyptian-Palestinian border, bombed places where aid is being distributed, and shot at civilians seeking aid on the street with machine guns.

So anything that makes that 2% of casualties not grow to 80%, for example, and frustrates the plans of Israel’s far right to depopulate Gaza of Arabs is a good start, but not really enough.

A blood clot doesn’t mean there is no foul play. There are plenty of poisons that cause clotting: https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT000113 - including some that are snake venom components.

It could also be a consequence of prolonged confinement without much movement. It could also be an eventual consequence of the 2020 poisoning (there is no evidence that Novichok specifically or mild poisoning with other acetylcholinesterase inhibitors causes clots; however, severe poisoning causes respiratory paralysis which causes hypoxia, and that can cause platelet and vascular dysfunction/damage that increases the risk of thrombosis. Not many people ever have been poisoned with Novichok and survived, so the exact sequelae are uncertain).

Now, there is a question of whether the FSB would want to do a subtle execution or an ambiguous one. They did attempt an obvious one in 2020, given it involved an agent which is clearly associated with the Russian government (although perhaps if he hadn’t made it overseas, that would have never come out). Since then, perhaps Putin and the FSB have less incentive to be brazen. If they didn’t want to send a message, they could have just kept Navalny alive. But maybe ambiguous was a compromise they wanted - it keeps would-be dissidents fearful, but provides the cover of plausible deniability for those who would criticise the killing of a political opponent.

Taking less from the environment would be better, not taking more - especially if the global population peaks and the population shrinks.

The idea of perpetual growth of finite resource extraction that many governments and corporations try to tell us is good is getting tired. How about we settle for a good enough standard of living, and work on making it more equally distributed and on recycling to reduce / eventually eliminate the extraction of non-renewable resources?

As terrible as Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine is, I think the decarbonisation and transition to renewable energy as a response to it is a very positive thing. The transition to higher percentages of renewables was always going to be painful, but it is one of those things where putting it off because it is perceived to be too hard only makes it harder in the future. Ideally, we should have gone much harder much earlier - we are already locked in for a lot of warming and habitat and arable land lost, but a push now is better than going even longer without solving the problem.

A ‘Treaty of Versailles’ type solution is not a good idea for durable peace though, harsh reparations, despite any sense they might be ‘fair’, seldom lead to both countries returning to be prosperous democratic countries (and to be clear, neither is a capitulation by Ukraine - that would be seen by Putin as locking in its current gains, with no real incentive not to try again for more despite what the treaty might say).

The best outcome for everyone is if Russia ends up being a genuinely pluralistic democracy (i.e. anyone in Russia can have political views, and the public selects its leadership in free and fair elections). Then Ukraine can normalise relations with Russia, and Russia stops being a threat to democratic institutions across the world as a whole.

I think the best way of thinking about it is not that Ukraine has a Russia problem, but rather that Ukraine and Russia have an oligarch problem (with Putin chief amongst them). Therefore, in a fair world, the oligarchs, and not the Russian people, would pay. It is true that Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians in occupied regions) have been radicalised by the oligarchs, so some kind of deradicalisation would be needed even if the oligarchs disappeared.

Solutions that look to negotiate how to reduce corruption and authoritarianism in Russia from the top are therefore the most likely to succeed long term. Shorter term solutions could include a negotiated end to hostilities coupled with agreements for Ukraine to join a defensive alliance that the oligarchs wouldn’t consider provoking - which could be followed up by a carrot approach to easing sanctions in exchange for progressive movements towards genuine Russian democracy. This might give oligarchs enough push to take off ramps to cash in what they have plundered already, and slowly be replaced by less corrupt alternatives going forward.

Recovery from oligarchy for Russia might also by costly for Russia though - essential assets plundered from the USSR are now in private hands through crony capitalism; the best solution would be for many of the major ones to go back to or be rebuilt under state ownership, under genuine democratic leadership. But that is likely easier said than done given the state of Russia.