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I suspect that many of these characters used both creative arts and psychoactive substances as a way of coping with or processing intense and difficult feelings.

Well put. The step to AI is a little like the step to using an IDE. It simplifies and automate a various bottlenecks. But when the IDE starts randomly failing, you need to call on that guy that knows how to work without the IDE.

This webpage has a pretty good rundown on the status of Arab Israelis: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-know-about-arab-citiz...

An example of implicit discrimination is Israel's ban on family unification with Palestinian spouses: https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/511


The linked article is also blaming socioeconomic differences on Israel. But by many metrics Israeli Arabs are doing better than Arabs in other Arab countries. E.g. life expectancy for Israeli Arabs is higher than the Arab average, and higher than Jordan or Egypt.

Similarly for income. While Israeli Arabs on average earn 65% that of Jewish Israelis at $2,400 vs $3,750, the average income in Jordan is $865, and Egypt $235.

But differences in socioeconomic status between groups exist in every country.


The question is whether Israel treats its Arab citizens fairly. Not whether they fare better in Israel than other countries by some metrics.

If you’re going to look at differences between groups, you can’t apply causality and accusation unless you account for other factors.

Now do Jews in Muslim countries. Or in areas under control of the PA.

Imagine you're a parent explaining to a kid why it's not right to punch other kids. Do you accept "but they punch other kids too" as an excuse?

Imagine a parent introducing some special rules to protect a kid that’s being punched, like having them sit at the front, and the bullies start crying why they can’t sit in the front.

The Israeli occupation of Palestine is nothing like a teacher sitting some kids at the front.

You choosing to zoom in and crop the picture shows a level of disingenuity likely due to ulterior bias.

The area under control of the PA is ethnically cleansed from Jews, with an ongoing apartheid where, for example, selling property to Jews is punishable by death, and they have government issued bounties for the killing of Jews.

So Israel has restricted marriage visas from that location. The law still applies to every Israeli equally - Jews also cannot bring in people from that area on a marriage visa.


Banning the eating of fish on Fridays discriminates against Catholics, even if the ban applies to everyone.

> not expelling Ukrainians to resettle the place with "ethnic Russians"

The similarity might be stronger than you suspect. Russia abducts and transports Ukrainian children to controlled territories [0], and actively encourages its own citizens to relocate to captured Ukrainian areas through economic incentives, subsidized housing, and aggressive long-term repopulation strategies.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7g5xnvl2eo

[1] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russias...

[[ Edit - added references in response to flagging ]]


Kidnapping and moving children to new parents also counts as genocide under the convention on genocide.

Ukraine is my pet war. I really hope we don’t get caught in the genocide-debate tar pit as well.

What’s happening is evil. That’s relatable, both in the problem and potential solutions. Whether it’s genocide under some international convention strikes me as a counterproductive distraction that replaces something horrifying with something boring.


I condemn the terrorist that stands behind a hostage; I condemn the sniper that takes the shot anyway.

what if the terrorist is repeatedly launching rockets?

Arguably, incidental civilian deaths are morally permissible if they constitute the only effective way to achieve reasonable military objectives. In this specific case, the objective is something like "disable Hamas' capacity to attack Israel". It's dubious whether this is achievable with the methods Israel has used so far. By most accounts Hamas is just as large as ever, is reasserting control over Gaza, and is likely to be rebuilding its stockpile.

There is a severe lack of construction materials in Gaza. My guess is that Hamas has a choice between using what's left for tunnels, or losing the war.

That's a slight mix of cause and effect. There is a shortage of construction material because Hamas uses it not for the wellbeing of the citizens of Gaza, but for the construction of border crossing tunnels into Israel.

Sure, that's Israel's purported reason for all of its blockades. The result, as in most cases in history, is that civilians bear the overwhelming brunt of the impact while the military resistance digs further in, switches to guerilla tactics, and becomes increasingly popular amongst civilians.

Regardless, my original point stands that Hamas do not have the means and resources both to build public shelters for everyone and to continue its military efforts.


> In October 2025, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion [wikidata] finding that Israel's claims that UNRWA had been infiltrated by Hamas were unsubstantiated. The advisory opinion also said that Israel's decision to end cooperation with UNRWA and restrict humanitarian aid to Gaza breached its obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. It furthermore found that Israel's Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not an adequate substitute, noting that more than 2,100 Palestinians had been killed near its distribution points and that conditions in Gaza had deteriorated to the point that international experts declared a famine in some areas in August. The ICJ further held that the mass transfer or deportation of civilians within occupied territory is prohibited, citing Israeli measures that forced large populations into overcrowded areas and severely restricted UN access. It also ruled that the two Knesset laws ending cooperation with UNRWA in the occupied territories were unlawful, noting that 360 UNRWA staff had been killed during the conflict. The court concluded that Israel, as an occupying power, had unlawfully impeded aid delivery, used starvation as a method of warfare, and failed to respect the immunities of UN personnel and premises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA_and_Israel#International...


the UN claimed that the UN agency was just fine... no s**.

The ICJ is legally and structurally independent of the UN. What specifically do you disagree with about the advisory opinion?

"The International Court of Justice (ICJ; French: Cour internationale de justice, CIJ), or colloquially the World Court, is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations (UN)"

"The Court is composed of a panel of 15 judges elected by the UN General Assembly and Security Council for nine-year terms"

Literally, from the first few paragraphs of wikipedia. People don't read these days.

If the UN general assembly (mostly anti israel) selects the judges how is it "structurally independent of the UN"?


I've often heard defenders of Israel crap on the UN General Assembly like it's some woke antifa type organization, but it's one representative per country, chosen by the country's government. If almost every country in the world is constantly officially condemning you, perhaps they are not the problem.

Well, given that between 2015 and 2024 alone, the General Assembly adopted 154 resolutions against Israel. That's more than Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Russia, China *combined*, I find it a bit ... unfair, wouldn't you say?

More than 14,500 children were killed by Israel in that period.

14,500 / 154 = more than 94 children per resolution. Seems fair.

How many children did "Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Russia, China combined" kill in this period, I hear you whatabout: Highest reasonable estimates are ~5,000–10,000 children.

... So, no. I don't think it's unfair.

Now let's compare how many sanctions have been inflicted on each country above. If you measure by number of sanctioned individuals/entities, a rough ranking would be:

1: Russia. 2: Iran. 3: North Korea. 4: Sudan. 5: China. 6: Israel.

... So if you're trying to hint that the whole world is only against genocide because they're antisemitic, the facts you're referring to don't really seem to back you up. At all.


Again, children got killed because their school was used as a ground base to fire rockets from. Do you expect Israelis to allow Hamas rockets to fall in Israeli schools? That's not a reasonable expectation.

The choice hamas forces israel to make is cruel and inhuman, that is direct consequence of their radical islamic belief of martirdom. They do not see death like the same way as the west. To them (and I'm not talking about all palestinians, for sure, only Hamas senior leadership which governs Gaza) dead children is a weapon against Israel. In light of this, all their actions finally make sense:

1. No civil defenses, or shelters - just tunnels. 2. Firing from schools and hospitals, as well as hiding weapons and ammo in those places. 3. Arming and sending children to fight

That's the most reasonable explanation (which many palestinian extremists have even voiced themselves)


> children got killed because their school was used as a ground base to fire rockets from.

I don't really know how to talk to people who think killing children - by the tens of thousands - is ever justified, but maybe this will help you: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t-mMt3c3ngQ


Well, I presume you never had to make the choice between just living with rocket barrages as a daily routine, this is something that’s incredibly hard to fathom. For years and years.

Golda Meir once said that peace between Israel and the Palestinians will come once the Palestinians will love their children more than they hate the Jews.

Here is perhaps something that could sway your opinion https://youtu.be/g-xfCH3PQT0?si=aQ3O6g_0v_-2mzf_


Memri TV is well known for using mistranslations and selective quotation in order to portray Arabs as anti-semitic and extremist: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/may/15/arabic...

For all I know, this is the equivalent of filming Westboro Baptist Church members and framing it as the average American's views on homosexuality.


Did you encounter any mistranslation here specifically? it's pretty easy to translate the video with Gemini or a different AI tool. I did it - I ran it through ElevenLabs transcription and GPT5.5 based translation of the transcript, this is what I got:

00:00:16,479 --> 00:00:34,520 [Speaker 0] And I pray in every prayer — every prayer, every prayer — that I, your father, your sisters, girls and boys, all of you, will be martyrs for the sake of God. When death comes to us, may our whole family be martyrs for the sake of God. And of course, I am proud of Muhammad. I am proud, praise be to God. I mean, praise be to God, praise be to God, all my children are religious and good.

00:00:34,520 --> 00:00:34,919 [Speaker 1] God has willed it / God bless.

00:00:34,919 --> 00:00:49,959 [Speaker 0] And I, praise be to God — by God, by God — my children and my grandchildren, and all of their family, if all of them were martyred for the sake of God, I would be happy. I mean, praise be to God, I love this path. I mean, I feel that this path is salvation.

Clearly, there's no mistranslation here, the intention is very clear.


> and selective quotation


It’s disingenuous to pretend that the Middle East conflict does not align people according to tribal, religious, and political groupings, as well as international alliances.

Given that Jews are 0.2% of the world’s population, in contrast to a very large population of people openly biased against Israel, it’s no surprise that when you take a global popular vote that Jews will lose. The UN is not a neutral institution.


Sure I understand how Arab or Muslim countries might vote against Israel reflexively, but it's not just them, it's almost the entire world.

Go look at this list of Israel related General Assembly resolutions in 2025:

https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...

The typical vote is like 142-6. The Israeli claim is that almost the entire world are a bunch of anti-Semites that hate them for who they are. Perhaps it's not who they are but what they are doing.


There are roughly 50 to 57 countries where Muslims make up the majority of the population. Add the countries that are heavily dependent on them, and you end up with a game that is often decided before a single ballot is cast.

From your link: “From 2015 through 2024, the UN General Assembly has adopted 173 resolutions against Israel and 80 against other countries.”

Do you seriously think that throughout this time Israel has been that much worse than all other countries?

There are many other indications that the UN is biased about Israel:

Only one country has its own permanent agenda Item 7 in the UN.

Palestinian refugees have their own organization vs refugees from all over the world, with almost 10x the budget per person.

In the UNESCO description of Jerusalem it says “The Wailing Wall delimits the quarters of the different religious communities”.

There are many other examples like this.

Not a single country in the world opened its doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. So the majority of the world can absolutely be wrong.


> Not a single country in the world opened its doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

Not one except USA.

And Sweden, Dominican Republic, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Bolivia, Spain, the Soviets and all the other countries that allowed safe crossing. Even Italy hid Jews... so what history books do you studied?.



> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Personally, I find the political machinations around this conflict particularly interesting.


Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.

In my mind "complacent" means the opposite of "pro-active" - not taking actions or decisions in the face of an issue. That could be because of feeling panicked or uncertain. So I was also surprised by the "smug" and "self-satisfied" parts.

I don’t get the smug. But complacent has always has the “self-satisfied” and “a bit lazy”. Not exactly what is in your comment, but someone that is rooted in his behavior, but not for stubbornness or arrogance, just “it is ok that way because I’m happy and there’s no reason to change”

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