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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • People seem to still be struggling with the Israeli strategy. Like many previous genocides, including the Holocaust, which the term originates from, hunger is a primary weapon. The Ukrainian holodomir, the Irish potato famine, the Armenian genocide, the goal is to save ammunition and simply remove the infrastructure of life from the target group. Israeli attacks have destroyed the water, power, administrative, and health care of the population. The issue now is that while the people are dying, international aid is mitigating the effectiveness of destroying infrastructure. A strike like this is so blatantly targeted because it’s a signal. With 3 weapons they have shut down a channel that could provide critical nutrition to tens of thousands of borderline surviving Palestinian people every day. It’s meant to have a chilling effect on relief efforts. Combined with the slow border checks, the political efforts to defund UN relief agencies, it helps accelerate the goal of removing the population from Gaza. It’s not an accident, earlier strikes on UN relief warehouses and personnel weren’t accidents, and the killing of around 100 journalists and many of their families weren’t accidents. They’re messages, get out of the way.








  • That’s the whole problem, Epic hasn’t approached the situation with the intention of being good faith competition. They have instead attempted to exclude competition by paying for platform exclusivity. That’s anti-consumer. As a consumer that annoys me. GOG is competition for Steam, they offer a genuine value via DRM free versions of the same games ALSO available on Steam. That leaves the choice in the buyers hands as to which platform offers a better value. It’s a big difference in my opinion.









  • It is definitely true that the numbers are unlikely to be exact. That is both for the reasons others have noted, propaganda is definitely at play on both sides of any conflict. A second reason for the likely imprecise number though, is that many casualties are probably uncountable currently as numerous buildings have collapsed under bombardment. Fully surveying those sites for bodies is difficult with continuing combat in the area. We know the buildings are destroyed due to surveillance and other intelligence sources, but can’t yet know how many people were killed and injured during the destruction.

    There are also reasons that the UN and other international organisations take the figures seriously. This is primarily because of historical accuracy, this is not the first occasion of strikes in the area and surveys in the aftermath of previous incidents have generally shown reasonable reporting accuracy from the Gazan health authority. Additionally there are other international organisations on the ground and reporting corroborating evidence of mass collateral casualties. UNICEF has supported the reporting on the 3700 children killed so far, inclusive of civilians on both sides. Recently Doctors Without Borders here in Canada issued a plea to our government, based on their presence in Gaza, calling for ceasefire directly because of the unreasonably high number of collateral casualties.

    At this juncture it doesn’t seem likely that the numbers are precise, but even a much more conservative estimate would be quite shocking and aligns with action in the Syrian civil war (for example) much more than with action in western invasions or Ukraine. That suggests that, at the very least, insufficient effort is being put toward limitation of collateral casualties. It’s also important to remember that while the three-to-one rule of casualties in war is very loose, we are likely looking at much higher numbers of wounded than killed. That is badly complicated by the blockades, lack of power and water, as well as current military operations against the remaining hospitals in the area.

    Just my thoughts, not an expert.


  • Israel is making things difficult. The number of civilians killed is 10000+, that’s very uncomfortable for our governments. It’s also not like our countries can just quickly say, “whoa, those are blatant war crimes you’re committing with our weapons!” It’s impossible to pretend that we couldn’t know what the IDF would do with them based on the ongoing history of the conflict. In the end it’s a situation similar to Yemen, Iran and some others feed support into one side and atrocities are committed. The west feeds weapons into the other side and atrocities are committed. At this point the only thing that makes our ethical situation tenable is if everyone would just ignore it. Hence, no protesting please, you’re pointing out some deeply shameful policy, please stop.