Not going to engage in a discussion about valuing human lives, but what are you suggesting? The attacks on ships should be allowed to continue because the conflict?
I was pretty young when I was taught that two wrongs don't make a right.
If the US strong armed Israel into a cease fire and to open the blockade on Gaza, two things the US could do if it had the political will, this would stop the Houthi's from attacking ships in the Red Sea. They claim to be fighting against nations supporting the genocide. Seems like they are rational actors even thought I disagree with their methods. Why not deescalate the situation in Gaza and kill two birds with one stone?
Maybe? I guess people just aren't giving the right signal? Generally the attacks are wildly disconnected, though on Dec. 12th a Houthi leader did claim they would only attack ships bound for Israel.
3 shortly after:
"On 12 December 2023, the Houthis launched an anti-ship cruise missile attack against the Norwegian commercial ship Strinda, an oil and chemical tanker operated by the J. Ludwig Mowinckels Rederi company, while it was close to the Bab-el-Mandeb. The Strinda was on its way from Malaysia to Italy (via the Suez Canal). The attack caused a fire aboard the ship; no crew members were injured.[72][73] The ship was carrying cargo of palm oil. "
On 13 December 2023, Houthi rebels attempted to board the Ardmore Encounter, a Marshall Islands-flagged commercial tanker coming from Mangaluru, India and en route to either Rotterdam, Netherlands or Gavle, Sweden, but failed, prompting a distress call from the ship. They then targeted the tanker with missiles, which missed. The USS Mason responded to the tanker's distress call and shot down a UAV launched from a Houthi-controlled area. The Ardmore Encounter was able to continue its voyage without further incident.[74]
On 14 December 2023, a Houthi-launched missile was fired at the Maersk Gibraltar, though it missed its target.[75] On 15 December 2023, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sarea claimed responsibility for attacks on two Liberian-flagged vessels identified as MSC Alanya and MSC Palatium III. The Houthis fired naval missiles at the ships as they alleged they were traveling to Israel.[76]
On 15 December, it was reported that the Liberian-flagged Al-Jasrah, which is owned by Hapag Lloyd, caught fire after being hit by a Houthi-launched projectile while sailing through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.[77] On 16 December 2023, Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond shot down a drone over the Red Sea while it was targeting a commercial ship.[4]
> If the US strong armed Israel into a cease fire and to open the blockade on Gaza, two things the US could do if it had the political will, this would stop the Houthi's from attacking ships in the Red Sea.
This is advocating that two wrongs can make a right, which I fully reject. The degree to which the human suffering happening in Gaza should be stopped is in NO WAY impacted by more malicious harm being caused to other groups. It only creates a situation in which multiple actors are causing harm to innocents - two situations that need to stop.
> They claim to be fighting against nations supporting the genocide.
Do countries in Africa support the genocide because they import grain shipments from America in order to have a food supply?
Saying that supporting a government which has made dozens of public statements that convey unambigious genocidal intent with the actions that seem in line with this intent is one wrong.
Taking military action to apply pressure the first group to stop is not considered an equal wrong by governments which represent approximately 96% of people on earth.
If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?
I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms or if there's some kind of special pleading going on here. It doesn't seem to be a logically consistent position to me, and since that's also the position of an overwhelming supermajority of people who have reviewed public statements made by Israeli decsionmakers, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.
> If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?
Easy - I don't think that, so it's not justified. The opinions of "the vast majority of humanity" are not part of the decision making process that has resulted in this situation.
> I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms
I don't wonder, I believe it is! These are the (simplified) axioms along which I form my opinions about not only this, but all geopolitics in general:
- Actions that cause human suffering are bad.
- Actions that reduce human suffering are good.
- Innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable.
- Force will be required; conflict is inevitable; the world is imperfect.
- The use of force is righteous or not depending on how the resultant innocent suffering is accounted for before, during, and after.
I believe that my opinion is completely consistent with these statements. You asked if using violence to stop other violence is wrong, and my answer is "it depends". If the Houthis were taking action against the those actually committing the atrocities, we'd probably not be having this conversation. Deliberately causing harm to innocents is never acceptable, never right. This is terrorism as a tactic.
If you think that second order violence IS an acceptable course of action, where do you draw the line? How much societal disruption in countries with less food security are we willing to induce?
As you said, innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable. Is the logical axiom that international shipping which is connected to the US and Israeli economies is more innocent than Palestinian children? Is any cargo ship crew more innocent and less culpable than say, an infant?
If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.
> If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.
This is an absurdly bad faith interpretation of what I've said. You and I agree on the conflict in Gaza. The only opinion that I've offered is that terrorism isn't an acceptable response from a third party.
If you agree that there is too much collateral suffering in Gaza, but you're happy with a course of action that is deliberately inflicting more collateral suffering, then you're a moral hypocrite.
If you read through the decision, the reasoning is all there, it's absolutely rational. What's _not_ rational is preferring personal anecdotal experience over the aggregate analysis.
While you are correct that "eccentricity" as an adjective is a correct usage, OP used it as a singular noun in the preceding sentence, making it ambiguous whether they are appreciating the British for their eccentricities, or for the particular mentioned eccentricity.
If OP's intended meaning matches the adjective as you describe, then it would be clearer communication to use "eccentricity" in this context.
It's not really ambiguous at all, unless one is being pedantic. "I like the Brits because of their eccentricity" is perfectly normal English, referring to their overall quality of being eccentric.
That seems to be “eccentric” not “eccentricity” (your failure to cite the source of the quoted definition makes it harder to tell, but it is almost verbatim the M-W definition of “eccentric”.)
(Eccentricity, the noun used, is just fine with “the British” if onenis referring to the collective manner in which they are eccentric, the plural “eccentricities” would be appropriate if one was referring to the diversity of particular manners in which they were eccentric.)
You and the person you're replying to are using the word "Sales" differently. GP is using it as "Sales Representative", a la Jim Halpert, whereas you're using it as "Outbound Sales", like Glengarry Glen Ross.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're talking about. But I think it's pretty basic common sense that nobody censoring information will explicitly admit to it.
This is the exact same response you'd get if it had everything to do with ~censorship~ attempting push back on anything that reduces a propaganda vector.
The difference is that in Western society (assume you're Western), we've agreed that people should have the right to think for themselves and decided what is right and wrong- so it should be up to them to decided what is propaganda and what isn't.
> I'm not sure what cities have more crime and violence than Chicago.
Per capita, Chicago is absolutely not an outlier for these statistics. Is there a particular measurement that you're familiar with that ranks Chicago at the top?
If you rank by total murders Chicago comes in an easy first. Comparing a very large city like Chicago to comparatively smaller cities blurs the numbers when you are talking per capita.
For example St Louis is a small inner city surrounded by numerous suburbs cities that have much lower crime rates. Those low crime suburbs don't get counted into the per capita rate. Chicago is large enough of a city that both the high crime and low crime areas all get counted together.
> If you rank by total murders Chicago comes in an easy first
But ranking by total murders is definitely wrong, isn't it?
You can have criticisms of the per-capita rate, and you can argue that the smaller cities should have their suburbs included. But the alternative of just saying "let's look at the raw numbers independent of population and see which one is better" would be even more absurd.
Just as an example here, there are plenty of reasons to be distrustful of the per-capita comparisons of Covid infection across states, or to argue that they don't capture all of the nuance of what's going on. But nobody would ever seriously argue that those problems mean you should stop paying attention to population size when comparing Covid rates between states. Similarly, it just seems really silly to me to argue that missing suburbs means we should stop controlling for total population in crime data.
What about this is blatantly unconstitutional? The linked article isn't particularly specific, "countering misinformation" could mean replying to "misinformation" with debunking facts. Unless there's something else I'm missing, this seems like an overreaction.
Disclaimer: I’m not an American, definitely not a lawyer.
But I agree with your take. The wording in the linked text makes it seem to have much more to do with counter-messaging than preventing or stifling speech in the first place.
> Do you really think the US government should have the power to force you to "debunk" something?
You're the only one suggesting that the government might be forcing anyone to do anything.
Calling this a blatant first amendment violation is an over the top knee-jerk reaction to the headline; it's a hot take that is completely unsubstantiated in the article itself.
> This change only affects newly created repos, how does it create tech debt? I suppose some tooling may need to be updated, but if your tools are to brittle to support a different branch name.. sheesh
This is overly dismissive. Build pipelines that interact with bespoke branches now need dynamism for backwards compatibility; a value that was previously static is now changeable. That doesn't really qualify as brittle to me; that any value in a codebase must be changeable is a ridiculous requirement from a codebase.
I work with build systems in my day-to-day, and I can't remember the last time I worked with something that didn't support dynamic branch names but did support git
But my experience is obviously skewed by where I work.
I'm specifically thinking of git-flow (https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/); every build system I've interacted with has been some flavor of this. The crux here is that there is a single branch that deploys occur from. Not uncommonly, this is the default branch.
But with every build system I work with (which are: Jenkins, Concourse, Github Actions, and Gitlab CI) you can make any branch you want the branch-to-build-on.
I don't mean to say that it's not totally fixable. Up until this change, it was a reasonable assumption for any org to make, that the default branch will be the same for all projects. Now, either the default branch on any new repo must be manually set to the old default, or the build system must be updated to handle non homogenous default branches.
> the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it....I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
I don't feel like we're reading the same thread. There are plenty of reasonable objections in these comments, and dismissing as you do is, to me, as intellectually shallow as the change in question.
I was pretty young when I was taught that two wrongs don't make a right.