It'd be nice if Israel would let UN fact-finding missionaries or other independent research teams into Gaza to find out (in addition to not barring and/or killing humanitarian aid workers)
It’s perfectly normal for militaries to have press restrictions in conflict zones, for opsec among other good reasons. No one bats an eye when Ukraine does it for example.
1. Ukraine’s media restrictions are virtually non-existent when compared to those enforced by the Israelis in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of media offices. Keep in mind that Hamas has repeatedly called upon Israel to allow foreign press and NGOs to visit and see what’s happening on the ground.
2. The Ukraine war is a conventional war between sovereign nations with standing militaries with equivalent capabilities (air force, anti-air defenses, armored vehicles, bomb shelters, etc). The Gaza genocide is an onslaught by a sovereign nation with a well equipped military against a militant group in a dense urban area. Leveling entire city blocks when fighting against an opponent that has no air force or anti-air capabilities is not only unimpressive, but also breaks the principle of proportionality.
1. It's pretty much the same - no press in dangerous areas unless invited and escorted by the military. The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
2. You're making a bunch of separate accusations without connecting them to the topic at hand, which was press restrictions.
No, they’re not the same, and (2) is very relevant.
Let me reiterate: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with a sovereign military that has the ability to enforce restrictions within its own territory.
To bring your bad analogy more in line with reality on the ground, imagine if Ukraine was still part of/occupied by the USSR/Russia, and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory during a Ukrainian insurgency. However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
> The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
But Israel never allowed press into the strip, even during “ceasefire” periods - like right now! This implies that Israel is not somehow paternalistically concerned for press safety; it simply wants a media blackout.
So no, this “major difference” is irrelevant when comparing restrictions between the two conflicts.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Universally, modern militaries don't like journalists wandering around near their assets.
> and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory
Your analogy isn't very different from reality. Russia does enforce press restrictions near military assets, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
> However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean and not because this hypothetical Ukraine had launched tens of thousands of rockets at them. But I'm not sure what it has to do with press restrictions.
> even during “ceasefire” periods
The ceasefire was pretty much dead once Hamas attacked IDF soldiers in Rafah. Now it's just a lower-intensity conflict. Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> it simply wants a media blackout
This is a funny explanation because there are millions of cameras in Gaza anyway, and this is the second most covered conflict (by metrics like article count) in all of human history. Not much of a "blackout" at all.
Alright, your good faith arguments have convinced me! To summarize:
On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.
On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.
Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
You're just changing the topic with unrelated accusations. How nice or mean you think a military is irrelevant to the fact that they don't like random journalists tweeting photos of their military assets.
Gaza population September 2023: 2.3 million. Gaza population September 2025: 2.1 million.
Hamas casualties make up only a portion of palestinian casualties; palestinian casualties make up only a portion of excess deaths; excess deaths make up only a portion of total deaths.
The next census will be in 2027. No one knows the population until then.
It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.
As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
You are the one who proposed birth estimates and casualty claims suggest population increased. How do you think population estimates work?
There is no census scheduled for 2027. Gaza (much like Israel) does not conduct full censuses on a regular schedule. Neither Gaza nor Israel have scheduled their next full census at this time. The most recent census for Gaza was 2017 (for comparison Israel's most recent was 2008). All population numbers of relevance are determined by statistical methods. For large numbers, this is perfectly adequate.
> As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats.
Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats. The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals. These health professionals are the same ones giving the birth rate estimates.
> Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
That's not what one significant digit means. That is an order of magnitude estimate. I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands. 1 significant digit would indicate how many tens of thousands. For example, death tolls for Mariupol range from between 20,000 and 90,000. Estimates for Gaza range between 60,000 and 100,000, or roughly half the band for Mariupol. Note that Ukraine does not have access to Mariupol to investigate, as the war is still ongoing, whereas we are several months past the ceasefire in Gaza. Based on pre-war numbers, natural deaths unrelated to the conflict should be a rounding error at this resolution.
Certainly the claim that the population increase is proof of anything is absurd.
2027 is the expectation, since it's supposed to be at least every ten years.
> Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats.
Unfortunately they are. [1] was based on messages in "X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram". An example of content they scraped is [2], but they also included non-public chats in WhatsApp etc.
> The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals.
This isn't the case even for GHM's official counts. Anyone can report a Gazan "martyr" or missing person on a web form right here [3]. Those get included in GHM's counts, if they pass basic checks like the existence of that name and ID.
> That's not what one significant digit means.
I think the concept still applies, though I should have said zero significant digits, since "tens of thousands" implies an exponent but zero digits of the mantissa. But my point is that responsible estimates involve acknowledgement of uncertainty.
> I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands.
Most of Israel's critics are not satisfied with Hamas' ~70k casualty figure, and seek out higher estimates like the aforementioned one that used WhatsApp chats. For example, a HNer yesterday wrote "They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now."
Estimates of birth that rely on the mid-2023 figure and deliberately ignore Israel's systematic dismantling of the health and food systems in Gaza and the drop in fertility levels.
>the casualty count that Hamas claims
The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate, but mostly by people who don't refer to it with a dogwhistling caveat.
>you assume I fall into some political bucket, when I almost certainly don't (I am not American and I don't follow American media). I don't use any social media other than HN and a couple private group chats.
This is pretty meaningless; one can share an ideology with an official they did not or even cannot vote for, and can do so even if they don't have Twitter.
Are you implying that because I am pointing out how the HN guidelines state crime and other topics that trample curiosity are off-topic, I share some ideology with some American official that condones child porn?
Whatever the guidelines state, those other topics are frequently discussed without much rancor which you refuse to confront. But anyway, all I was saying is that that specific line item is a non-sequitur.
> without much rancor which you refuse to confront
I was responding to the "why is this post flagged?", and you changed scope to "justify all moderator decisions across the platform". Consider that you may have a sensitivity to certain topics that I do not. It seems like you see something I don't.
I'm not condoning all moderator decisions. I'm not remotely familiar with all posts on HN. I'm only considering this one post and acknowledging how this topic is clearly trampling curiosity and that it seems reasonable to me that it's been flagged given the spirit and word of the HN guidelines.
Of the posts I am familiar with, there have been several cases when a thread was flagged that at first seemed on-topic but after reflecting I realized the comments had gone off the rails and that's why it was flagged. This decision seems very much in line with other cases I've seen, but I can't justify all decisions nor am I position to even judge them.
> But anyway, all I was saying is that that specific line item is a non-sequitur.
It actually wasn't, though I could have been more clear about why it was relevant. Where people get information and what tribe they feel they belong to changes how they interpret new information. The reason I brought it up is because I was getting the sense from multiple replies to my comments that some people were assuming I (and the moderators) wanted to censor the underlying concern about Grok as if I was a part of the American culture/political war. I was just trying to clarify I am not a part of that and want nothing to do with it.
>I was responding to the "why is this post flagged?", and you changed scope to "justify all moderator decisions across the platform".
The actual question in the top-level comment you replied to is "why is this post, and other posts that discuss potential malfeasance from X/Grok regularly flagged?" It is implicit from follow-ups that appealing to the guidelines does not wash except as a thought-terminating cliche. In that sense I guess you are right, the topic can derail intellectual curiosity.
> I was getting the sense from multiple replies to my comments that some people were assuming I (and the moderators) wanted to censor the underlying concern about Grok as if I was a part of the American culture/political war.
The current iteration of techno-optimism characteristic of a lot of this site's userbase may have originated in SV, but it isn't the exclusive province of Californians. That's most likely what is being referred to.
The GP's accusations of gatekeeping and dishonesty led me to deduce he was making assumptions about political leaning rather than a more respectful interpretation being to protect intellectually curious dialog.
Then parent made a comment about how political categorization doesn't matter when I can share an ideology with a political official out side of my jurisdiction.
So I think I reasonably asked a clarifying question about whether I was being assumed an ideology for my stance of the interpretation of HN guidelines. I asked this because I couldn't see any other reason why parent would have brought up ideology or made that comment.
This is certainly not sealioning. I am not trolling, I am not harassing, I am not demanding evidence or attempting to disrupt dialog. I was only trying to clarify parents point and reason for introducing ideology into the dialog.
If I zoom out and look at the whole thread, I can take a more generous view of your criticism and acknowledge that I could have been more direct rather than leading through questions. I still don't think that's sealioning, but I wasn't as clear and patient as I could have been or want to show up here. I am doing my best and trying to get better.
The issue I think is that the HN guidelines have two different sets of criteria for on-topic and off-topic. With a bit more time to reflect, it seems like the people who think this submission is on-topic are only looking at the on-topic criteria set and not really considering the off-topic criteria set.
They also aren't considering the spirit of the guidelines to foster intellectually curious dialog and avoid topics that derail it.
The comment two up from the one you replied to was not my best and does warrant some criticism, and I think that's the one that probably triggered you to make the sealioning accusation, even though I disagree with that particular classification.
> The idea that it does not foster curiosity comes from a very particular place
Spell it out for me please. What exactly are you accusing me of? This entire thread has been hostile to me but keeps beating around the bush. Are you saying that HN mods and I are protecting Grok in a biased way?
> This post is bullseye dead center in bounds for a HN post.
It definitely isn't, as it hits multiple criteria for off-topic as stated clearly in the HN guidelines.
> They also aren't considering the spirit of the guidelines to foster intellectually curious dialog and avoid topics that derail it.
Yes they are. We considered it and came to a different conclusion than you. We believe that this topic does foster intellectually curious dialog and your insistence that we don't is frustrating.
> Not if the topic consistently devolves away from intellectually curious dialog. There are clearly a lot of charged emotions and strong opinions across most of these comments.
IMO, this is the core problem. Charged emotions and strong opinions are not the opposite of intellectually curious dialog. An insistence that conversation play out like an abstract game separated from all feeling is anathema to useful communication, in my opinion. People are not better, smarter, or more interesting by being dispassionate. Especially when the topic is wide scale mass abuse and harassment. Feelings are not bad.
Okay, well my goal here was to communicate a benefit of the doubt most respectful interpretation of the moderators decision, and how it can be justified by the official HN guidelines.
While I could have been a lot more clear from the start, I think I've done my part. You can disagree with me and assume bad faith if you want. That's your choice.
It's revealing that you're repeatedly framing your decision as someone else's. Did you not see the flag button that you yourself pressed? And I'm assuming you did press it, because you so vehemently argue in favor of flagging this submission.
> It's revealing that you're repeatedly framing your decision as someone else's
Yes it's revealing that I was confused about how HN works.
I did flag it, and I don't deny that. I explained in another comment how I thought it was 70/30 off/on topic. However my confusion stems from the fact that I thought moderators made the final decision to flag a submission. I just read about it and now realize that users drive flagging which alerts moderators and then they choose whether to set it as dead. At least now that's how I think it works.
So yes, a lot of my comments didn't make any sense. All of my interpretation of the guidelines I stand by, but my misunderstanding about the flagging mechanism totally skewed a bunch of my comments and I no longer agree with them. If I could, I would edit them.
I feel pretty silly about all of this. Part of the reason I was so adamant about my stance is that I've had comments flagged in the past, which at the time I felt wasn't appropriate (I really thought fell within the guidelines) and I mistakenly thought the moderators had done. So over time I adapted my interpretation of the guidelines, which is what I was representing here.
Now I realize I was being censored by who knows who based on their interpretation of the guidelines, or who knows why, not the people who run this site. Worse, I let it bias how I use the site and now propogated that pattern out on to others.
I really don't know what to think about all this as there is a lot to unpack and reflect on, but I've unflagged this submission.
Thanks again for clarifying how flagging works for me it's made a big difference.
I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
This clarifies things, thank you. I've gotten the impression that Masad doesn't have a very coherent worldview so I doubt he has given this contradiction much thought.
Both sides of...what? I'm confused. Is the idea "all these people have a lot more money than I think they'll ever need and it makes me mad"? Me too. Just don't see how it's relevant.
The idea is that as money gets so concentrated, so does real political power. And with that concentration of political power comes extreme disregard for the opinions of the masses. I think it's a fair argument that the world has always catered to the will of rich people, but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich, and so much wealth is concentrated in so few.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
> “There was an aspect of, like, ‘Fuck the system,’” Masad said. “‘We need to remake civilization.’”
No matter what the political views, running into "real" money radicalizes most people and gives them the impression that they reached a superior evolutionary stage that uniquely entitles them... no, demands from them that they bend society and human civilization to their will, reshape it in their image, make it better because they are better. A sort of messianic complex.
This is the famous horseshoe paradox that says extremes are closer to each other than to the center. They might look completely different in their views but in reality they're back to back in the same place. 2 sides of the same coin. Different imprint, same value.
> but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich...
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
> How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
It's like defining Germany as "a state that genocided various groups", or defining Irish nationalism as "a movement characterized by terrorist attacks against British civilians". Whether or not those claims are accurate, they're not defining features of the things we're trying to define.
And sure, most Zionists are not Jews because the Jewish population is too tiny to be a majority in almost any political category. Similarly most people who support Somaliland independence are not Somalilanders, but probably Indians or Chinese or something.
The zionist movement has never been peaceful, it has always aimed for violent expulsion of native populations from Palestine. One might argue that socialist or liberal zionism is not overtly jewish supremacist, but in practice they always were so I'd contest that. Unlike the irish they also did not have a reason to exterminate the palestinians specifically, whereas the irish have good reason to resist british influence.
So you agree that zionism is a movement mainly consisting of christians, you're just not aware that both christian and jewish zionists prefer to paint the movement as a jewish underdog and distract from things like the nukes and nuke carrying backers and the genocide and so on.
They have been reluctant to give up their homeland, you mean. Yes, resistance to occupation and genocide is usually to some extent violent, because the occupier is extremely violent to begin with.
They never actually had sovereign control over the land. It was controlled by Romans and then by the Turks and then by the British and when the British left it was basically up for grabs.
Sharing the land with european colonists that used terrorism and ethnic cleansing to remove and to a lesser extent subjugate the native population? Why would they?
If you're suggesting that a peoples' right to live in their homeland is forfeited as a result of immigration, terrorism or ethnic cleansing, that would be bad news for Palestinians. Gaza and WB Area A are Jew-free zones, and there were around 30k rocket attacks from Gaza alone.
Quite the opposite, I'm suggesting the palestinians still have a right to their homelands even though europeans have settled, terrorised and displaced them.
Yeah, what about "rocket attacks"? Are they somehow more devastating than the US-israeli armory? If someone spits in front of my feet, then I can have them watch while I beat their family to death?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/national/etc. battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which side of which battle you are or aren't on.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/national/etc. battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which side of which battle you are or aren't on.
More accurately, a Zionist descendant of Raphael Lemkin was working with Zionist organizations to abjure their characterization of the Gaza genocide as a genocide.
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