Comment by cassepipe
1 year ago
EDIT: The title has been changed since and the discussion has been unflagged
The problem is that this is such a partisan issue than partisanship can be perceived in the smallest of details.
As someone who was staunchly pro-palestinian but as of recently came to have a more informed and I hope a more nuanced view of the whole situation, I can't help to see the title as potentially misleading :
Is the ICJ saying to prevent the Genocide (i.e recognizes that a genocide is happening) or to prevent a potential genocide (that is it believes the situation could escalate towards a genocide) ?
From what I have read this is the second option, so I believe the title could be misleading. The more a topic has a loaded emotional and symbolic value, the more careful the wording must be.
Also I remember how annoying it was that people did not share my indignation and how I perceived such carefulness as a form of voluntary blindness.
Isn't this the kind of discussion we should be having though? Why flag it?
I definitely think this is a discussion we should have and I am actually pleasantly surprised by the kind of comments I have read so far in that they are not unhinged even though I may disagree with some of them.
I have not flagged it personally but I understand why someone would. I was just responding on "Couldn't this be the one discussion ?" and I think it's not, for the reasons above.
This is Hacker News. Technology, science, business, not politics and certainly not geopolitics.
There are many discussions worth having, not all discussions worth having should be on HN.
This of course comes up a lot, but the answer has been stable for many years. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146184 for more information.
I find this topic relative to both tech and business because so many venture capitalists have taken a very vocal and militantly pro-Israel position. People have been fired from our industry for speaking out for Palestinians and the guy who first created this site has taken immense heat for his pro-Palestine statements. I don't know that any other geo-political situations have quite had the impact to tech that this has, mostly driven by the VCs.
>> not politics and certainly not geopolitics.
Ages ago I had a job working in online advertising. My comment a the time was this "Advertising is worse than porn, but working here I can go home to my feminist girlfriend and not get shit for it."
Technology and politics have always had an intersection but unless it was part of your job, it was somewhat avoidable.
This is no longer the case. The simple word "alignment" means that these sorts of classical political issues have direct impact on tech, platforms and what they do. We, as a group, who has a unique view of what freedom means (speech, software and that intersectioN) should be acutely aware of the chilling effect we're living under on this topic. Even here where the discourse remains (mostly) civil there are those who will attempt to just shut it down.
I would be keenly interested to see how heavily this gets flagged and how that compares to other topics. I doubt dag would tell us but I could hope!
To answer your question though. It’s neither. The court found that allegations of genocide are plausible.
That is, especially some of the statements by senior officials could be understood as genocidal.
What I gleaned from reading blogs: It is likely that the actus reus for genocide is there but intent will be very hard to prove if it exists