>There are multiple charges of corruption against him, which he is probably guilty of.
For anyone who is not following the trial, as soon as the prosecution's case-in-chief was over, the judges publicly notified the prosecution that they should drop the bribery charges as they are unlikely to be able to prove them.
The prosecution case for briberty was built on a hypothesized meeting in which Netanyahu supposedely instructed the director general of the ministry of communications to serve the interests of Elovitch.
During cross examination, the defense managed to prove conclusively that such a meeting, as described, could not have occurred. They also showed that the presocution had the evidence to show it could not have occurred.
Don't assume guilt or innocence based on heavily politisized reporting.
after how many years in power one can assume that the prosecution is simply ineffective in uncovering something resembling the truth when it's directly about those in power?
Why are people getting in the weeds about these specific cases? Isn’t, you know, all the genociding a good enough reason for us to want him to be imprisoned? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread.
I am learning this. And to think I thought this place might be better than some other notable forms of social media. People need to remember what they do and don’t know about and learn not to comment so strongly on things they know nothing about…
Why you were downvoted for this is beyond me except in assuming this site to be full of fanatics for defending anything Israel's government does regardless of rationality or moral reasoning. I've long defended Israel's right to exist and defend itself, but when those policies mutate into deliberately starving a tiny, poverty stricken and crowded strip of land until you're knowingly causing the deaths of who knows how many little children and civilians through essentially deliberate starvation, it becomes a deeply, grotesquely criminal act. This deserves legal punishment, however unlikely that seems to be given the Israeli government's powerful backers and their absurd stubbornness in justifying monstrosities.
the 20 years leading up to trump, calling every republican a nazi, has completely destroyed the meaning of the word. trump is actually doing a lot of fascist leaning stuff this time around, and you could possibly use that word appropriately but it is currently meaningless.
"flippantly tossing words around devalues them and debases the conversation." Agreed- and that's exactly what you are doing with the word, "no."
Soldiers are murdering an entire population- or as many of them as they can, seemingly- for political purposes that desire that population to simply not exist anymore. To say that is _not_ a genocide devalues the meaning of the word.
They're not "murdering an entire population"; although many thousands of Palestinians have been killed, it's still a tiny percentage of the total population.
But it's not necessary to murder an entire population for it to count as genocide. Any attempt to destroy a people counts, including forced sterilization, re-education, mass deportations, etc.
But it's also clear that Israel has explicitly targeted civilians, help workers, journalists, refugee camps, food distribution, and I've even read about them shooting people hiding in churches. None of those are valid targets.
* Hamas keeps its missiles, arms and other military equipment inside or underneath schools and hospitals
* UNRWA was functioning as an arms dealer by putting arms inside of bags of flour or other food items
* Hamas generally has its fighters not wear uniform, but instead wear civilian clothes or even niqabs (where only the eyes are visible). Making it extremely difficult for the IDF to determine who is a combatant and who isn't- and guaranteeing mistakes will be made.
* Hamas also uses child soldiers or orders children to throw stones at IDF soldiers - again ensuring IDF soldiers have to always be afraid the person in front of them is going to kill them and that they have to make split second decisions on what to do about it
Ah yes, the human shield argument. Like the "tunnels" and graphics provided by the IDF. Convenient isn't? Every hospital, apartment block, school and refugee camp has hamas in them, so everything is fair game.
ya it's pretty FUCKED UP that HAMAS does that, and Iran funds it, isn't it? or do you think Israel just wants to slaughter people weaker than them because they can? if that was their aim why did they wait until 10/8 to start doing it? they could have done it any time in the last 30 years.
> seemingly something happened by the democratically elected government of Gaza on 10/7
Gaza doesn't have a democratically elected government, and one of the reasons Palestine (of which Gaza is a region) does not have a democratically elected government is that Israel has exercised its power as an occupying power administering large parts of Palestine directly and controlling the rest indirectly to prevent elections which have been jointly agreed on by the two main factions.
And they’ve done that specifically to maintain the current violent and divided status quo, which they leverage as pretext to continue their long policy of genocide.
I love how no one mentioned trump or nazis in this immediate thread but the fact that you brought it up unprompted paints a perfect picture of exactly what kind of person you are. I don’t need to call you any names, you’ve outed yourself all by yourself.
It's genocide. And the reason we were using the word nazi for twenty years was to try to warn everyone what was happening, but nobody listened, and now you got nazis.
Calling everyone Nazis wasn’t to warn everyone. Fairly sure it was mostly just virtue signalling. Everyone using the word wasn’t around when WWII happened.
The result probably just desensitised people to what was going on since every little infraction the right did seemed to make them a nazi.
The current campaign against Gazans satisfies the criteria for genocide.
Here is the UN definition for genocide. While you normally can't prove a negative, each jot and tittle of the definition is clear in the Gazans' case, so I leave it to you to figure out why you're so cautious to call a spade a spade and call a genocide a genocide.
> The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.
> Genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Convention has been ratified by 153 States (as of April 2022). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law. The ICJ has also stated that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (or ius cogens) and consequently, no derogation from it is allowed.
> The definition of the crime of genocide as contained in Article II of the Genocide Convention was the result of a negotiating process and reflects the compromise reached among United Nations Member States in 1948 at the time of drafting the Convention. Genocide is defined in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 6), as well as in the statutes of other international and hybrid jurisdictions. Many States have also criminalized genocide in their domestic law; others have yet to do so.
> # Definition
> Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
> ## Article II*
> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> Killing members of the group;
> Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
> *Elements of the crime*
> The Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The latter is less common but still possible. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide.
> The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
> 1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
> 2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
> 2a. Killing members of the group
> 2b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
> 2c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
> 2d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
> 2e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
> The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.
> Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Read. Note that numbers don't matter, intent does. Kidnapping a single kid can almost be genocide and an attack with 1000 civilian victims can fail to qualify as a genocide. Now go and google "Hamas charter" and read. Intent is pretty damn clear.
Israel is not intending to destroy an ethnic group. They're simply not. Hamas, in contrast, is. The organization's entire existence is centered around their intent to commit genocide.
This is also the reason Russia's actions in Ukraine, meant to destroy the Ukrainian nation and identity, ARE warcrimes but Ukraine's (much more limited) actions inside Russia don't qualify. Despite the fact that Ukraine is killing people in Russia. Of course propaganda bots are trying to confuse both issues.
So in other words, by the UN definition, by the ACTUAL criteria:
1) Israel's war in Gaza is NOT a genocide.
2) Hamas' attack on 10/7, intended to wipe Israel off the map by killing Jews, was genocide.
3) a whole number of Hamas' actions outside of the 10/7 attack ALSO qualify as genocide, as the intent is clear (such as their actions when they got elected, to give an example of something that DOES qualify as genocide against Palestinians ... but of course committed by Hamas)
The simple fact is that Hamas, and frankly a lot of Palestinians, just like Russia, want to commit genocide. That is what makes the difference according to the criteria.
You've posted several comments in this thread that are inflammatory and outside the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that continue to post like this. Please read the guidelines and observe them in future, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Sure, openly written documents can help with evaluation of intent, but how can we ever define someone's intent (something that is only in people's hearts)? We know of many legal cases where the intent is obvious but not easily provable.
Isn't intent usually decided by a jury/court, taking the actions of the alleged perp into account? Most law breakers won't just admit their guilt, and most legal systems don't let defendants unilaterally declare themselves innocent.
> Hamas explicitly states that committing genocide in Palestine and Israel against Jews and "Palestinian traitors" ... is the start. They clearly state their intent to do so worldwide, on essentially everyone, as that will bring the islamic second coming. Yes, really, that's what it says.
Nice, it's like the "preventive" strikes of Trump on Iran. Israel is basically committing genocide on Palestinians so ...Palestinians don't do genocide on them AND the world? Thank you Israel, for saving the world, by committing untold atrocities, a genocide and ethntic cleasing (in the name of good, of course).
Again, I will reiterate: Israel currently does to Palestinians what answers ALL criterias of a genocide. Is it a genocide? Yes. Can we call it a genocide? Yes. Would we continue calling it a genocide and compare it to what Nazis did to the Jewish population? Yes.
That's rich coming from a defender of Israel, the apartheid state that indiscriminately kills children and does a genocide on a whole population. What's even richer is that Israel is the one known for doing so:
Besides, two wrongs don't make a right. And it's Israel occupying another country, not the other way around. It's also Israel who killed 20x more innocents in the last years.
Israel also attacked 4 countries: Syria, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon in just the last 2 years, yet somehow those genocidal warmongers are allowed to have nukes?
Nah, the ICC has issued an arrest for Netanyahu because of his war crimes, and there IS genocide in Gaza. Go cry somewhere else, you won't take the world's eyes away from this Nazi style genocide.
What Israel is doing checks the first and third items in your list. They kill members of the group, and not just in Gaza; in the Westbank, it's common for illegal settlers to attack Palestinian towns, including killing people. The IDF does nothing to stop them, but if Palestinians try to defend themselves against this aggression, IDF shows up to stop that.
The wall separates farmers from their land, and has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to live their life, to go to work, etc. And Gaza is a ghetto; an open-air prison, with way too many people, and no way for them to build a normal life. Israel has also kicked Palestinians out of their homes in order to give them to Jews.
I'm not denying that Hamas is also genocidal; they clearly and openly are. And probably more so in intent, but a lot less so in capability. Israel has been killing and disrupting a lot more Palestinian lives than the other way around.
Do you think these are all accidents? Read what I wrote. The intent is clearly there.
If Hitler said "I'm not going to kill any Jews" while murdering a million Jews, would you believe he didn't have the intent to kill them? And there's plenty of people in Israel who do talk openly about destroying Palestine, destroying Gaza, killing or deporting all Palestinians, and even arguing that Palestinians aren't a real people (like Putin does with Ukrainians). All of that shows intent.
sometimes people who operate within rules-based systems mistakenly project those same rules outside of the same systems which they are operating within
Without commenting on your characterization of what is happening as "all the genociding", I want to actually answer your actual question - why are "we" talking about the weeds of this case.
There are a few completely separate issues here. GPs comment is talking about the internal-to-Israel, state-level trials against Netanyahu. These have been ongoing, started several years before the Gaza war, and are being adjudicated in Israeli courts right now. These actually have the power to force Netanyahu out of office or actually make changes to how he behaves - because they are internal to Israel, and if the court decides something, presumably the police and military will follow the courts. (Unless there's an actual coup and Israel stops being a democracy - which I don't think is even remotely likely, btw.)
There is no ongoing trial within Israel against Netanyahu related to the conduct of the war. In general, Israelis view the current war as being fought legally.
Regarding what you call "genocide" or other accusations of war crimes or illegal conduct in war - that's something that gets adjudicated by international courts like the ICC and ICJ. The ICJ has a case open against Israel, claiming it is committing genocide, and the ICC has a warrant out against Netanyahu for war crimes. Those are completely unrelated matters. They also have less immediate impact - because there is no real way to force Netanyahu to comply with those warrants.
I was speaking more to the desire for him to be put away, rather than the practical means of how to get there, but I appreciate your comment regardless.
In the 1970s both my parents were programming computers professionaly.
Computing was already a huge industry. Just IBM's revenues were in the multi billion dollar range in the 1970s. And a billion dollar in the 1970s was A LOT of money in the 1970s.
Bayesian models are working fine when you have few datas, and I have used the last conclaves ballots number to "train" that.
It was mostly a toy project to understand better how a Bayesian model is working.
A very rudimentary process for a conclave election can be modeled by a geometric distribution. So using a bayesian model to estimate that can be appropriate. Of course, if you want a better estimation you need a more complex model, but I repeat, for a toy project it would be interesting.
Anyway, at least the real election at 4th ballot was inside the confidence interval predicted by my model.
I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.
To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.
There are tons of things I miss about Notes email almost daily when I use Outlook. I supported Notes though, so I actually knew how to use search and agents and stuff that most of the people that whine about Notes never learned to use correctly. It's funny how all the companies that ditched Notes end up rewriting all the same applications in Sharepoint and then again in ServiceNow. The industry eats and regurgitates itself every couple of years without actually improving much.
Switched from notes to Microsofts cloud thing and Lync, notes was better. We also had hundreds of not thousands of small apps in notes. Supposedly Microsofts solution was going to be much cheaper if everyone got off notes, but we were given to time, budget, framework or even guidance when it came to the apps. Several years later they still paid a lot for notes.
Still in use in many places for some ungodly reason.
At my previous job they had been using Notes since the company was founded in the early 90’s, meaning they lived through it being Lotus Notes, then IBM Notes and now HCL Notes.
Everything was deeply entrenched - email, warehouse inventory, ERP system, all documentation made in the entire company… just everything.
And this is for a scandinavian company manufacturing high tech devices for telecom and aviation, among other things.
It was… an interesting nightmare, constantly got in the way of any sort of productivity. Definitely contributed to me leaving early
F5 to close Lotus Notes. On every app including MS Outlook, F5 was to refresh / fetch the new email, except in Lotus Notes. In Lotus Notes it just means “lose your work”. Can’t believe it didn’t start as an April Fools, like Gavin Belson’s Signature box.
Yeah it was sort of cool. There were entire software products built on top of Notes and its forms and workflow.
I never had to program any of that, so can't speak to that side of it, but where I worked we used Notes to quickly build a lot of internal forms and workflows, and had some internal discussion forums and documentation in it, it all worked pretty well as I recall.
The one weird thing was we had to run it on OS/2. The only OS/2 machine in the server room.
My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through that system too.
Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it working pretty well for that purpose back then.
> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
The full quote extends that to adderal. To be clear he said the wellness farms would be for those who want to go, and he's describing a massive undertaking that you'd see coming before it was implemented.
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
Keep in mind he's also a guy who, contradicting all the available evidence, is saying incorrect things about the nature of adhd and dips heavily into moral issues when discussing medical problems. So any facilities related to his ideas are unlikely to provide actually care.
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Are you trying to claim that all users of Adderall have ADHD? Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall", but that conflation is objectively untrue. Countless people without ADHD abuse adderall / ritalin / etc.
In fact, people without ADHD are much more in need of an intervention if they are abusing adderall than someone who has ADHD, wouldn't you say? So the much more reasonable interpretation is that he is talking about those people, not people with ADHD.
> Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall",
No it's not the only way, because he's also talking about SSRIs, which have only medical uses (no abuse potential really). Therefore it is reasonable to argue he is also talking about Adderall's intended medical use against ADHD rather than its abuse.
No, you can't put words in his mouth. He said Adderall, not ADHD.
Yes he said SSRIs, but SSRIs are not for ADHD, so that has no bearing on whether or not he said "people with ADHD should be sent to camps", which he just... did not say.
This shouldn't need to be stated, but I personally think RFK Jr. is a nutter. That doesn't mean you can stick words in his mouth or imply things he didn't actually say.
That's all nice and well, but he also did say "psychiatric drugs", as if those were somehow generally bad and appropriate to reference in the same breath as illegal drugs.
Maybe, had he not said that bit as well, I'd agree with you. He could be talking about Adderall purely in a sense of misuse.
But he included psychiatric drugs, and that (and the SSRIs) makes his statement ambiguous enough that I'm comfortable interpreting it as including ADHD patients.
(And, just purely for vilifying psychiatric drugs, the threshold for intolerance [which must not be tolerated in order to achieve a tolerant society] is crossed. Lots of people have mental health issues and need treatment, including with drugs.)
I think you and plenty of other people on this thread are missing the point. As I understand it, it's not "round up people with certain conditions and stick them in camps" (is this not obvious?)
It's to provide people a path for getting off of all manner of drugs that are difficult to get off of. That could be heroin, or it could be Ritalin or some SSRI. It's basically socialized rehab based on some model that RFK seems to favor.
From what I've read (and seen in friends and family), the system is really good at getting people on pharmaceuticals. It doesn't seem to give much of a shit about helping them get off when they choose to do so.
I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a focus on misuse or abuse. Someone could have used the drugs exactly as directed and now doesn't want to use them anymore, and is running into an inability to do so on their own.
You could make the exact same argument about his mention of SSRIs. "Oh, he just means all the people without depression, who are abusing SSRIs."
No, you're being intentionally disingenuous here. Obviously, he dislikes the fact that these drugs are being prescribed to patients, and he would prefer it if they were not. I'm sure he imagines that these "farms" would be a better treatment for depression than SSRIs are, and likewise for the other drugs and conditions.
The idea is a place for anyone to get off any kind of drug they want to get off of. Note the "they want" part. Who are you to fault someone for deciding they no longer want to take a substance but need help doing so? Or someone trying to help that person?
If the parents went with the child, and stayed with them, then maybe.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
Perhaps, but I have family going through this and it just makes you so mad. I'd pay to send him to a camp where he's beat with a bullwhip every day if I knew it could cure him.
Perhaps it clouds my judgment a bit, but the alternative is just watching him die, which I'm not stoked about.
The profit margin on drugs is good. I think it would take about zero days before "remote location" is programmed into the Google Maps of several local dealers.
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
Not just parents. Its a method that actual addicts employ. I have heard this not only once. "Moved a few months to a rural place where I had no access to the stuff to get my system clean" is a tactic that people turn to. Heck, one example I am thinking of even moved from the USA to Europe in the 90s to get rid of his crack addiction.
This actually resonates a bit with my own thoughts from these comments.
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
What makes it so that some people/cultures seem to value age over anything else? If their lives continue to be miserable, broken inside, violent temper thanks to being treated like a slave, a long life to me sounds more like a punishment than a goal.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
Your thought experiment, the drug dealer being universally doomed, the only consequence being a state of slavery for a finite time, etc has no relation to reality.
He has no heart. He is cruel, as he subscribes to the idea that a disease isn’t something you get because you rolled the dice wrong, but something that can be avoided by being “pure”. For him, pure health is never systematic or unlucky; the person is at fault.
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
Before downvoting, do look at many available yt videos about his views of mental health. He puts that into much nicer words, but the comment is a good summary.
I had a drug problem once, and di something like that. It helped a lot. If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
> If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
Or the fact that you're not longer in the environment with its stressors that cause you to seek out drugs in the first place? Lots of people sleeping rough go for drugs of any kind just to be able to put their mind to rest.
Finland shows this with its "housing first" policy, giving people a home is a relatively easy way to get them off of drugs.
would you, in the context of fascist Germany or other totalitarian regimes with concentration camps, not understand the quoted text as cynical euphemism for such camps?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
It's not after that fact, or any euphemism - this is the exact way the regime tried to pass them off at the time. Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds. The reality was much different as we know. They did have a small pool on the grounds for show.
Your source for this is an article that takes down a description from a book that was written in 2010. Not sure if you quite caught that on your thorough reading of it.
I just wanted to find some supporting information, what I know about this I know from visiting the camp myself so I didn't have an amazing source at hand.
Good for you! If only things like this were taught in schools so that by the time people find Hacker News, they'd already know about them. We would be having entirely different conversations.
Seems like a waste to update the curricula every few years to include, for example, some random lady who published a holocasut denail book in 2010 as referenced in that source. Doesn't seem very useful pedagogically!
this gets me the wrong way. see, I live in Nuremberg, Germany. I went to school here, "higher education". I've learned a lot about fascism, how it lured voters into electing them, how they grabbed and secured power, how they introduced concentration camps ("animal protection" legislation, prohibiting kosher butchering, introduced the camps as punishment for those insisting on kosher law. twisted)
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
AFAICT, this wasn't actually how the Germans framed the concentration camps at all. The article you responded to is about how a woman described them in 2010.
What about this article from AP, Monday, April 24, 1933, doesn't say wellness farm, but it also isn't very accurate. Was a cursory search of contemporaneous articles and that popped up, probably not impossible to find more with similar descriptions. Enough to at least understand the message at the time was much softer than reality.
> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.
> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."
> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.
> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:
LOL yeah this really paints them in a positive light. If this is the best resource you have for how the Nazis propagandized their concentration camps (this is literally right after the earliest ones opened so you would expect whatever propaganda to be as strong as possible then) as “luxurious” then I’m going to land on that not being the case.
> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.
It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.
My "LOL" is at people condescendingly trying to prove things like "Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds" with sources which repeatedly don't do that in any way.
I guess anything we don't agree with can sound condescending but I assure you I thought I was relaying accurate information gotten at the place the things happened. I saw the pool and the guide had a whole bit about the Germans doing news stories there to prove how good it was. Maybe the guide was politically motivated, I guess, and I was just gullible, but the second article I shared definitely seems to paint a much rosier picture of the camps than starving people fighting for survival every day. And it doesn't sound surprising to me that people would lie about it being nicer? Is there maybe some deeper point that is annoying you in this imprecision that I'm missing?
there was "exemplary" KZ Theresienstadt which was used to pretend these camps were educational facilities, quite successfully so for some period of time.
Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.
>> I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
I only have nightmare memories, I was way too young to process what I saw :-(
I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.
I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
If RFK’s comments were made in isolation, I wouldn’t be so worried.
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
I like that you scrolled past the relevant paragraph here and then quoted a different thing that he said as proof that the paragraph that you ignored didn’t exist. I’m curious as to why you would bother including a real quote from the article? If your starting point for crafting a post is “Nobody will read the article I’m talking about” the sky is the limit, you could say he said anything you like.
Well, all I am going to take from this after reading some of the replies is that there is a slight change that the Brainwormguy is going to send the Rocketmann to a farm upstate. I can live with that.
Considering he has been a lifelong addict to various drugs, with endless wealth to be sent to "wellness farms", I'd take his opinion on how to treat any disease with the same perspective as I would any other drug-addled, brain-holed, rich narcissist, that caused his wife to commit suicide.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
Yes and some of the links to the “traumatizing” deportations are for people who are clearly in violation of their visas.
I had a friend deported from Denmark when he overstayed his visa and it was basically the same thing.
Some of these look really bad and could be sensible justification for the proposed boycott/cancellation (see French scientist eg) but a lot of it looks completely hysterical.
I don’t quite remember and would have to ask. I think he was detained for 5 days, maybe?
> Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
> That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
Again, I agree that there are a few stories of deportations that are legitimate causes for concern about hosting a conference with internationals in the US. But if you use people getting deported for overstaying their visas as a part of justifying that concern, then that is hysterical. It conflates issues that are effectively totally unrelated to one another.
It would be like claiming it’s not safe to travel to Italy because the local justice systems will charge you with trumped up charges and quote both the Amanda Knox case as well as cases where Americans actually broke the law and got charged justly. Only the Amanda Knox case is actual justification for the claim!
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
Correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying that inefficiencies due to incompetence are exempt from criticism.
It should go without saying that detaining innocent people is BAD, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence.
I’m not saying it’s exempt from criticism and honestly I don’t know how that could possibly be an interpretation of that. I’m literally calling it incompetent which is clearly criticism. I’m saying that a 2wk detention due to glacial pace of our shitty bureaucracy isn’t really “fishy” about anything.
And to be clear, they aren’t innocent in the referenced example. They were breaking the terms of their visa.
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bugs.
> If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bug
And that's why a lot of us are pushing to change the system by eg. making it use a memory safe language. Otherwise it's gonna keep producing more bugs than it should :).
I've known people get caught up for months in immigration detention over simple snafus. I've also known several people who were literally just turned around at the gate and shoveled straight onto the next flight home. There are thousands of border points, and thousands of border agents, so I'm guessing there is an element of luck depending on where you appear.
All of those things look like they’re about being detained for several weeks when trying to enter the US? Why wouldn’t they just refuse you entry instead?
Yeah, why detain and treat people badly when you should just send them back home on the first available flight and then ban them from using the ESTA program? The pointless and expensive cruelty is the issue.
Often used by people who are American (from the Americas) but not from the US. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, and the rest of North and South America.
Let's change the name of America to the United States of America and move it from the front of drop down lists to the end.
Many years ago an Australian show famous for comedic Vox Pop street interviews had a hilarious run on "Asking Americans to name a country that started with the letter U".
I mean, sure, but you've also got "United Mexican States" for Mexico and "Republic of China" for Taiwan or even "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" for the UK.
Nobody in their right mind calls any of them by their full names. The rules are more-or-less consistent, it's just pedantry to complain about "America."
It's accepted by all on planet Dirt that they live on planet dirt.
Elsewhere, others living on orbiting aggregates with surface soil like to occassionally disambiguate.
Naturally this seems insane to the exceptionalist denizens of Dirt.
Mexico alone is clear, a Mexican is a citizen of the UMS. The UK is equally clear.
Outside of the United States, particlularly with other American, North, South, or Central ESL speakers, it's not so clear.
This is why the practice arose many years past, why the BBC once had clear style guides on not using "American(s)" in any articles until after the full name United States of America had been used to establish context for which Americans wre intended.
> it's just pedantry to complain about "America."
Being clear isn't a complaint. It's taken as such by the small minded with a horizon limited by a halo about their head.
I'm not complaining about clarifying. I'm complaining that the meaning of the word is obvious from context in almost every case and this is a really annoying form of pettiness which is hardly being applied evenly.
I don't think I have EVER seen "American" used to refer to "North and South America" outside of geography. That goes for when I'm outside the US, too. It's certainly not what reasonable people would assume you're talking about.
This discussion is really unproductive, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.
> I don't think I have EVER seen "American" used to refer to "North and South America" outside of geography.
I'll refrain from reproducing the OED 2nd Edition entry for American unless you really want it, there are three uses as a adjective, five as a noun, the Adjective Use 2, variation c is "United States specific", ( 1.a is "Belonging to the continent of America. Also, of or pertaining to its inhabitants." )
So, you know, a few hundred years of printed use, with citations, says that others have seen it used more widely than yourself.
To be fair, that's all an aside to me .. what has caught my eye in the past few months is a few commenters on HN getting quite upset at "USAian, USofAian, etc" variations appearing here. Clearly this is new to some, others have seen such contractions about forums for four decades.
It follows from pre 2000 (ish) BBC and other style guides that eschew using "Americans" to refer to US citizens until after the context has been established, leading to older BBC articles and broadcasts opening stories with "In the United States today .... Americans reported ...".
From that, in (say) forums discussing i18n and|or l10n (the usual contractions for Internationalization and Localization) with Koreans, South Americans, various Commonwealth types etc. USian became a short fast way to specify which group of North Americans reference might be made to.
This seems straightforward, reasonable, non evangelical, and something a majority immediately "got" w/out batting an eye .. certainly causing less fuss than using "i18n" and other contractions.
I have to agree with you that the meaning of "Usian" is obvious from context in almost every case and it is a really annoying form of pettiness that makes a song and dance about it in protest every time it appears.
Calling the USA just America is like if Taiwan called itself just China. Yes it's common within the USA, but for the rest of the people who live in America, it seems strange.
"American" has been used by English speakers to refer to residents of the US for 3 centuries.
To change it now (why? to avoid hurting the feelings of people, most of whom do not even speak or read English?) would be harmful. "Harmful" is a strong word, so I will explain.
I don't hate Russia, but if I did, I would like it if the Russian people somehow stopped being able to continue to use the main word they've been using to refer to themselves for centuries. It would make it slightly harder for Russians to have conversations about themselves as a social and political entity and to understand old books about their ancestors.
Web sites influence human behavior by making some operations slightly more difficult than others. E.g., the "Accept all cookies" button is a prominent color whereas the "Reject all cookies" link is less so. The point is that a "trivial inconvenience" that is encountered often (i.e., whenever anyone tries to start a conversation about Americans) might have a significant effect over future decades in making Americans feels less united with their countrymen and discouraging discussion of American identity (because for example "USian" is more awkward to use in a spoken conversation than "American" is).
> "American" has been used by English speakers to refer to residents of the US for 3 centuries.
Sure, US citizens are, after all, a subset of North Americans and are Americans just as are South and Central Americans.
English speakers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have indeed written many texts and articles in which they discuss the United States of America, events in the USofA, and then move to talk about Americans .. having established the context of which Americans they refer to.
This was explicit in BBC guidelines and UK newspapers of note until perhaps the 1990s.
> I don't hate Russia, but if I did, I would like it if the Russian people somehow felt unable to continue to use the main word they've been using to refer to themselves for centuries.
It's not clear how this comes into play here. If Russian speaking ethnically Russian non citizens of modern Russia refer to themselves as Russian after their family ties to the former Russian Empire then surely anyone in the Americas can equally be referred to as an American.
> "USian" is more awkward to use in a spoken conversation than "American" is).
I've not heard it used in spoken conversation. In text forums where I've seen it used since the 1980s it's shorthand to contract first saying "United States of America" and then referencing US citizens as Americans.
Doing a bit of digging online, while there is evidence that /some/ people use it, it appears to be very limited. I understand the desire some people have for an unambiguous English term to refer to things from the US separately from those of the Americas in general, and see the value in doing so. Personally, as a native English speaker, I find USAnian to be clunky - maybe someone has thought (or will think) of a term that feels more natural. It feels analogous to the push from (largely English-speaking) activists in the US to use the term "latinx", much of the intended audience doesn't run into issues with the current terminology and aren't looking for a new term, and the term doesn't feel natural to existing speakers.
You can say what you want, whether or not people will understand what you mean or interpret it the way you intended is the more relevant question, in my opinion.
In English, American means from the US, and there's no word to refer to an inhabitants of the Americas (both continents combined). You can say North American or South American if you want, though. Since those are continents.
You won't find "USAnian" in any authoritative published dictionary, not even the OED:
And anyway, official dictionaries are largely historical records, not authoritative sources for living languages. Words mean what people who use them intend them to mean.
By your definition of dictionary. Again, words mean what people who use them intend them to mean. Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary are both dictionaries as far as I'm concerned.
The digressions started with the first mention of the term in question by SSLy, not just the descriptor you mentioned. That user was probably pointlessly baiting, knowing that the nonstandard term would set someone off, which has led to the digressions that followed.
I've been using that term on and off. This was the first time someone came forward saying it's incorrect. I don't disagree with your assessment of my intentions, but it wasn't that usage, it was the politics part.
I think he means specifically (and sardonically) a neodemonym for the the United states of North America. For most of its inhabitants, America is the name of the continent, not a single country.
The "clock" does not start when the invention happens, which is anyway a very hard thing to pin down. But as you say, it creates very counter intuitive results.
I haven’t looked at the patent documents, but I’d bet money it’s not the same. The later US patent is probably for an improvement on the original device.
For anyone who is not following the trial, as soon as the prosecution's case-in-chief was over, the judges publicly notified the prosecution that they should drop the bribery charges as they are unlikely to be able to prove them.
The prosecution case for briberty was built on a hypothesized meeting in which Netanyahu supposedely instructed the director general of the ministry of communications to serve the interests of Elovitch.
During cross examination, the defense managed to prove conclusively that such a meeting, as described, could not have occurred. They also showed that the presocution had the evidence to show it could not have occurred.
Don't assume guilt or innocence based on heavily politisized reporting.
https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/local/409910/ (use Google Translate)