2024-03-18

The Purpose of Blogging is What it Does

A point I was trying to make earlier - stated intents and motives aren't as important as results. It's like when the US told Kataib Hezbollah "actions speak louder than words". For reference, Kataib Hezbollah has followed up on their words (from January) to refrain from attacking in order to not embarass the Iraqi government by not attacking despite the US assassinating one of their leaders.

Anyways, the US' constant refrain of Israel having to do more to protect civilians while supplying the very bombs being used to slaughter them is one of those examples of bullshitting about motives. As is just about everything that the IDF and Israeli regime says about protecting civilians.

But a lot of people refuse to believe this. They are the "good guys" - how can they be doing the war crimes? Only other people commit crimes, certainly not the Forces of Justice! I mean, Hamas is a terrorist organization - therefore anyone opposing them has got to be good and incapable of doing anything wrong - right? Of course this infantile moronic worldview is ridiculous, but it is also widely accepted.

Here's how I want to refute it. Facts matter. Results matter. And if you accept that, then there are some important consequences:

According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

Sure "cybernetician" is a pretty wanky word, but the principle here is a pretty good one. Results matter. If a system is doing something - starving children to death for example - then it can only be one of two things - an "unintended consequence" or it is being done on purpose.

With that, let me note the following:

Israel has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) not to issue emergency orders for it to step up humanitarian aid to Gaza to address a looming famine, dismissing South Africa's request to do so as "morally repugnant". 

In a legal filing to the United Nations' top court, made public on Monday, Israel said it "has real concern for the humanitarian situation and innocent lives, as demonstrated by the actions it has and is taking" in Gaza during the war.

Children have been dying of malnutrition for weeks now. Warnings of starvation were issued by international aid groups last year. What has been demonstrated by Israel's actions is that they are starving children on purpose. If this was an "unintended consequence" - they would have changed their approach a long time ago.

Their excuse for this - the only thing they have to explain their genocidal actions other than just pure eliminationist hatred - is that these are collateral damages in their righteous mission to "destroy Hamas". Just so we are clear - the best case scenario, the kindest take you can have to defend Israel's actions - is that they are intentionally starving children to death over the span of months but that these are acceptable losses.

Israel has now killed more children by starvation in the past month than all children killed by Hamas in any way throughout their entire existence.

And it is only going to get worse.

And this is all intentional on Israel's part. It is what they want to happen.

2024-03-15

Two Things Can Be True

Speaking of being late to the party, following is my entry into the "Two Things Can Be True About the Israel-Palestine Crisis" body of work.

  1. Hamas is a terrorist organization that brutally murdered hundreds of non-combatants and violently kidnapped hundreds more - including women, children, and the elderly.
  2. The IDF and the Israeli government are worse than Hamas. By A LOT. It is not even remotely close.
Facts have to matter. Results have to matter. What Israel has done to Gaza since October 7th is at least an order of magnitude worse than everything that Hamas has ever managed in its entire existence combined.

The only argument I've seen that might bring the comparison close is where you start speculating about motives. "Hamas is worse because their intent is worse" - as if the people making this argument had magical mind reading powers. And even here - any fair accounting that doesn't make bullshit excuses for clear statements of genocidal intent from Israeli leaders would get you to about a draw. I mean, it's a qualitative comparison - you can't put a number on "how anti-social are these motives" - it's just "they aren't", "they are", and "holy shit - are they ever!" And both sides are firmly in category 3. So even when you discard actual results and the actual outcomes of actions from either side - at best, the Israeli government is about as bad as a terrorist organization. Hell, even if you give the genocide deniers their special pleading of "but the Prime Minister, President, Defense Minister, and senior military officers don't speak for Israel" nonsense - the fact that Israel is continuing their murderous campaign despite the civilian casualties and destruction - this demonstrates that their intentions are fucking horrible.

But let's not deal with "intent" that you can only demonstrate at this point with indirect observations and speculation. On every quantifiable measure, by any reasonable standard, the government and military of Israel is worse than Hamas - and usually by a huge amount. Let's just consider a few metrics:

  • Number of civilians killed
  • Number of children killed
  • Ratio of non-combatants to combatants killed
  • Number of people injured
  • Number of non-combatants injured
  • Number of hostages taken
  • Duration that hostages have been held
  • Number of hostages or prisoners injured
  • Number of people who have claimed to have been tortured by each group
  • Number of children taken hostage
  • Damage to property and civilian infrastructure

And this isn't even considering the current starvation crisis. Which gets us to the even more damning part - the damage that Hamas has inflicted is basically done - and has been done for months. There have been two attacks by Hamas gunmen outside of Gaza since the original mass killing terrorist strike. resulting in I believe five Israelis killed (one of whom was killed by the IDF). OTOH, Israel's campaign of genocide continues vigorously and with new flavours of war crimes being introduced nearly constantly.

Here's a big part of why Gaza is still a big fucking deal to so many people - the scale and scope of what has happened in Gaza is just unbelievable. It's so much horror and suffering that the murderous attack of October 7 is dwarfed to the point of being round-off error. AND - the destruction of Gaza is still ongoing - it's literally still happening right now.

So yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization that committed mass crimes against humanity - in cold blood with ample premeditation. But as bad as Hamas is, the IDF and the government of Israel is objectively worse - and worse by a huge margin.

Starvation as a Weapon of Blogging

The Flour Massacre on Leap Day was horrible enough on its own. It had been nearly five months of the military operation, with insufficient amounts of food and water getting into Gaza. Especially Northern Gaza which by then had not received any humanitarian aid at all for over a month. There were reports of people eating animal feed and grass. Children were already dying to malnutrition. A slow and horrific way to die - starved while literally thousands of aid trucks are being held up at the fence.

In the backlash to that crime and the mounting death toll of starved children, finally more aid trucks were being let through. Only for the IDF to open fire on these aid seekers too. There have been at least four incidents where aid seekers have been mass murdered by IDF fire since the Flour Massacre. It is almost as if the inability of the international community to punish blatant and obvious war crimes prompts the war criminals to continue doing war crimes.

People trying to get humanitarian aid - food and water to keep their kids from starving to death - what threat do they pose? Even the incredibly immoral and stupid automatic defense of the genocide deniers - the whining of "BUT HAMAS!" is meaningless here. Unless the goal is to starve enough of Gaza that Hamas also runs out of food? This is a clear and obvious war crime - it is not merely collective punishment, but it is such a depraved and monstrous view of the Palestinian people that it should disgust the entire world.

No, obviously this is insane. Hamas is a terrorist organization and they have the guns. The last people in Gaza to starve will be the Hamas terrorist gunmen. Trying to starve Hamas into surrendering means first starving two million people to death.

Perhaps the goal is to discourage starving Gazans from seeking aid? That Israel realizes that they will eventually be forced to allow more aid in - which is very slowly happening now - and that they can maximize the number of dead children by scaring Gazans into not seeking the paltry aid they let through. Even if that's not the intention, it's the result. An easily predictable result. That it continues to happen means that either Israel does intend to frighten starving people away from aid delivery or that they just don't give a shit about children starving to death.

Gaza is facing a man made famine. People have been dying of starvation for weeks now and still the level of aid reaching Gaza is woefully insufficient. What possible explanation could there be for this other than genocide? What possible threat could there be to allowing more food and water in? Not even the most contrived fever dreams of the genocide denialists can justify this.

2024-03-13

The Hamas Blogging Plan

I know I've mentioned this before, but it definitely bears repeating. Quite likely the biggest reason for the scope and extent of the death and kidnapping on October 7th is that the Israeli security apparatus sucks shit at protecting Israelis. It really does. Just so we are clear on how bad they suck, they had Hamas' Battle Plan for over a year before October 7. It's been a while since I noted this, so let me return to exactly how fucking useless and incompetent these assholes are.

  1. Despite the Battle Plan contained sensitive Israeli military secret information, Israeli intelligence dismissed it as being "aspirational". Sure they could steal secret military intelligence from Israel, but surely these terrorist gunmen couldn't, I don't know, carry an assault rifle while riding a motorcycle?
  2. They had reports of dry runs being carried out in the summer. This is unsurprising - the people of Gaza, especially those suspected of being Hamas, are very tightly scrutinized and surveilled. So if a large number of Hamas fighters were doing training exercises, Israeli intelligence would have gotten reports of it. And it turns out that the training exercises matched the Battle Plan exactly. But still, the Hamas Battle Plan was dismissed as not being serious.
  3. October 7 was the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War. And the Hamas Battle Plan was for a surprise attack. It's almost as if someone paying attention could have guessed what the attack as going to be and when it would happen.
  4. The number 4 is unlucky.
  5. Despite all of that - what did the IDF do in advance of October 7th? They literally transferred troops away from Gaza so they could use them to bolster their support of Israeli settler terrorism in the West Bank.
The bullshit nonsense about "security guarantees" for Israel? Quite clearly and obviously, the biggest threat to Israel is the genocidal psychopaths running the country and the fact that gross incompetence results in zero consequences. There's a word that's been getting thrown around a lot - impunity. Mostly in relation to how the US refuses to do anything to hold Israel to account even when there are rampant and blatant war crimes being committed. But that lack of accountability is not solely a gutless American government issue. So much of the world is just letting this slide - just ignoring it completely.

If Hamas is not destroyed, this does not materially harm Israel's security. I know that sounds crazy - but it's the truth. Even if Hamas wants to destroy Israel (and they absolutely say that they do - so we should believe them) - they can only do what they are capable of. Surely Hamas has been wanting to destroy Israel for many years now! And their huge success in mass murdering Israelis would have been prevented if Israeli security wasn't such pure garbage. More importantly - Hamas is not what's causing terrorist gunmen to want to take up arms and commit mass atrocities in Israel. That would be the occupation. An occupied people will want to be free - and the harsher and worse the conditions of occupation are, the more likely it is for violent terrorist movements to come from it. "Destroying Hamas" will not make Gazans suddenly interested in ensuring Israelis feel safe - especially not now after months of the most intense military  siege since World War 2.

2024-03-08

Nobody Needs 5 kg of Blogging per Day

I know I said the starvation stuff was going to get posted on another day, but I put together a pretty good comment on it and thought I'd pop it up here too.

Ryan Grim is usually pretty good, so it's surprising he made this mistake. The capacity of a 40 foot container truck is just about 20 tons. Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy isn't saying that they would eat the trucks - 20 tons is what each truck could theoretically haul.

That said - yes, 5 kg per day is barely subsistence. Because Israel cut off Gaza's water supply, bombed the water mains, bombed the wells, and then pumped sea water into the aquifers and ground water. Hey, a package of dried pasta weighs almost nothing! You can get loads of meals out of a measley 5 kg. Who says you need to cook it? You can probably get even more nutrition by shoving fistfuls of flour straight into your mouth!

5 kg is the weight of 5 litres of water - the UN notes that basic needs for drinking and sanitation is between 50 to 100 litres per person per day. So 5 kg is less than a tenth of the minimum required amount for basic needs. 5 kg per day assumes a continued absence of sanitation and hygiene. In Eylon Levy's opinion, Gazans don't deserve access to showers or toilets or even hand washing. They can wash their hands when they lick the flour off their fingers I guess. But don't you dare accuse him of dehumanizing the Palestinians.

Back to the trucks. Let's say they are hauling MREs. An MRE is between a pound and a pound and a half. 1 MRE is around 1,250 calories - so if you are going through 3 MREs per 2 days you will still be in calorie deficit. Here's an article with a Navy SEAL explaining what to do if you have to survive on MRE's.

"You definitely want to drink water," Smith told Military.com. "Depending on how much you weigh, anywhere from a half-gallon to a gallon a day."

So between the drinking water and the MRE, we're already closing in on 4 kg. That's assuming no packaging weight and never washing anything. Just what gets eaten and drunk on a diet that still results in calorie deficit. For a population where people are already dying of malnutrition. The current top reply to Levy is a doctor who notes that since October 7, Gaza has been short half a million tons of food - so the needs are heightened even more.

This water requirement is probably around right only because it's still winter. If it gets hotter down there in the Middle East, the water needs are going to increase substantially - and that's still assuming no showers or washing or flushable toilets - and it's already been five months of this.

TL;DR: 500 trucks per day would still result in conditions that North Americans would not tolerate in for-profit prisons. But an official spokesperson for the Israeli government wants you to believe that this is extravagant.

The average number of trucks entering Gaza in February was less than 50 per day.

Another Update on How the Blogging is Going

I have a lot to say about all of the intentional starvation and the grotesque kabuki of air drops and a floating pier, but that's going to be a post for another day. I was going to do some SOTU stuff - but I'm kind of torn bout which way to go with it. On the plus side, a very aggressive and confrontational SOTU that directly attacked Republicans and the "predecessor" relentlessly - that's good. OTOH, the stuff about Gaza was painfully bad.

So I will retreat back to playing with numbers.

The IDF claims that they killed 30 Hamas fighters in the past 24 hours. We need to remember that the IDF lies - including about the number of Hamas they kill. Of the 30K official dead, the IDF claims that 12K of them are Hamas fighters, even though some 70% are women and children. It's just not even remotely credible.

Still, let's indulge their fantasy numbers. If the IDF is managing to kill an average of 30 Hamas terrorists per day, how much longer do we have? Oh, I guess we also have to assume that somehow, in the midst of all the fighting, that Hamas recruitment is zero. Also totally not credible. But, we're still humouring the insane fairy tale land of the "eradicate Hamas" lunatics like the Israeli government and people like Joe Biden.

The number of Hamas fighters was estimated at between 20K and 30K before the war. We're also using the obviously bullshit 12K already killed. So there might be as few as 8K left to mop up. Now remember, this is leaning heavily on the scale where we take obvious IDF lies and assume they are true (because that's the standard operating procedure of much of the West) and weight every assumption in favour of the military operation as much as possible.

267 more days. The actual number is probably infinite since the brutal campaign of genocide is obviously creating more Hamas supporters. But even in the world of the genocidal maniacs who think "BUT HAAAMMMAAASSS!!!11!1eleventy-one!" is a full and complete rebuttal to any argument, the killing will go on at least until the end of November.

2024-03-01

When Will It Be Enough Blogging

From the early days of the conflict, the question was asked - how many Palestinians will have to die? We've had some pretty horrific answers, many documented in South Africa's ICJ case - but also answers from the US as well. All of them. Kill them all. You know, your normal every day regular non-genocidal speech. Except for the "non" part.

But it's those patchouli reeking SJWs that ask this question - as some sort of gotcha. Almost as if they don't recognize that there apparently is nothing Israel can do which would justify any degree of Palestinian response - and also that anything Palestinians do is full justification for any measures Israel pursues, up to and including genocide. Under these rules, it's quite simple - just like Michelle Salzman and Andy Ogles have explicitly stated.

Unfortunately for the morality-free assholes who agree to this murderous standard - there are other parties asking. Specifically Israel is asking "how many dead Palestinians will be enough?" Only Israel is asking it like this "is this batch of war crimes enough for you to withdraw support - No? Well how about this brand new batch of war crimes - Are you uncomfortable enough to actually do something or do you kick the can down the road further?

The latest round is the Flour Massacre. The first convoy of trucks headed to northern Gaza in over a month was fired upon by the IDF. Over a hundred dead, hundreds more wounded. Is that enough? Cutting off any humanitarian aid delivery to northern Gaza for over a month, and then shooting people when they line up to get flour?

Every day, IDF soldiers upload videos of themselves committing war crimes - and that has never been enough. Not even when the IDF admitted that they used to run a channel that curated hundreds of these videos, snuff videos captioned with some of the most genocidal language imaginable. That didn't even get any acknowledgement.

So this latest horrific massacre won't do it. It's conceivable that some of the murderous sociopaths running the State Department are delighted with the slaughter - Stuart Seldowitz would have been.

The next round of "is this enough yet?" is coming soon. Children have been dying of malnutrition from this intentional starvation campaign. That's not going to slow down. We've been warned that famine an disease are going to eclipse the toll from violent deaths, with the official count already over 30K. That's now on the horizon, and the reports of the numbers of malnourished children dying is going to start coming in.

Will that be enough? Will that finally motivate the US to stop enabling this genocide?

No. It won't. We've been told how many Palestinians have to die. And if this was wrong - some sort of exaggeration, then there would have been consequences for Salzman and Ogles.