I think the issue is that you are saying things are "normal" without addressing whether or not they are right and good.
I would probably agree with you that it's normal for a country at war to want to control information flow. But that's absolutely a bad thing! Obviously not all "information" is created equal: some of it is high-quality and objective, and some of it is lies (and everything in between). I don't trust pretty much any government entity to be objective about these sorts of bans, though. The ultimate consequence of these sorts of things is a poorly-informed, propagandized public.
To parse your statement we need to understand what genocide means to you. For most it means the systemic killing of every person of a certain genetic identity. Is that what you believe is happening or something else?
If genocide is illegal than covering up would be the only logical move. Therefore it would be normal.
Genocide has a precise definition and has been codified in international law. I believe this internationally recognized definition mirrors what most people mean when they use the term. It does not necessitate the systemic killing of every person of a certain genetic identity.
Genocide is outlined in the Genocide convention from 1948[1]. It is short so I’ll give you the whole definition here:
> 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:
> (a) Killing members of the group;
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide is illegal under international humanitarian law, there is no justification admissible for the crime of genocide. It is not normal to cover it up. Israel is currently being investigated by the ICJ for the crime of genocide. Israel has argued that whatever it is doing in Gaza is not genocide.
I think it's fairly clear that given this definition (which is the same one I always reference), Israel isn't committing a genocide.
If you do think Israel is committing a genocide, I think one thing you have to do is demonstrate how what Israel is doing is different from any other war (e.g. war on ISIS, Afghanistan, Iraq as obvious examples).
The statute makes the difference pretty clear - it's the intent to kill some (definable) part of the members of the group. This is not the case with Israel given its current actions and lack of actions; it could kill far more people if it decided to, militarily speaking. (I say this not because Israel deserves any "credit" for not killing more people, obviously, only to make it clear that the reason more aren't killed isn't because of lack of capability, but because of lack of desire to kill more).
Of course, you might disagree with me. If you don't have some kind of way to distinguish between what Israel is doing and what e.g. the US did in Iraq, you can just bite the bullet and say that all wars are genocide. That would be a consistent POV, but that would also effectively render the concept of Genocide meaningless.
> The statute makes the difference pretty clear - it's the intent to kill some (definable) part of the members of the group. This is not the case with Israel given its current actions and lack of actions; it could kill far more people if it decided to, militarily speaking.
This logic is one-dimensional and flawed. Israel is capable of wanting many different things and intelligently balancing their actions to accomplish many different things. For example, if Israel wants to remove all Palestinians from Gaza while also retaining some international allies, they would balance their actions to achieve both, and that would probably look quite similar to what we are seeing.
It's like in chess. I want to capture my opponents pawn, that is a thing I want. That doesn't mean I will sacrifice my queen for the pawn. And if an observer says "he must not want to take that pawn, because he could have taken the pawn with his queen but didn't", that observer would be looking at things in a very one-dimensional way and would be wrong.
OK. What would it look like if Israel just wanted to remove Hamas from power in Gaza without wanting to remove Palestinians from Gaza?
Just to remove doubt - I'm genuinely asking. One thing I don't feel I've ever gotten a real answer on is what should Israel have done after the October 7th attack instead of what it did. Not in general about the situation, but specifically on October 7th.
They need a carrot and and stick, not just a stick.
For one thing, they need to let in the thousands of trucks of aid that are held up by their onerous inspection processes. They need the people of Gaza to see Hamas as the source of their troubles and Israel as a source of aid.
It's hard thing to do. I remember listening to Jocko Willink (a US Navy Seal) describe this difficulty in Iraq. They had to work closely with poorly trained Iraqi soldiers to help them become better trained, and they had to go out of their way to obey the rules of engagement. He had to explain to soldiers that their mission was to stabilize Iraq, not just to kill insurgents and survive the next patrol. Some of his soldiers died because of this. Those soldiers wouldn't have died if the US just dropped 2000 pound bombs on everything, but that wouldn't have accomplished the mission of stabilizing Iraq. (I know there's plenty to criticize about the Iraq war, but focus on my point please.)
I don't get the sense that the IDF is doing this. They are all stick, no carrot. Their actions will not reduce the amount of terrorism coming out of Gaza.
Remember when the Israeli hostages tried to get help and surrender? They wave a white flag, they seek help, the IDF just shoots them, and later we all recognize it was a tragedy. Well, that scene has played out hundreds of other times, but hidden, Palestinians getting killed intentionally for no good reason. If my accusations here are true we would expect to see other instances as well, such as blowing up marked international aid vehicles that are actively coordinating with the IDF--the IDF just blows them up anyway, blows up one vehicle, survivors crawl away, minutes later they blow up a second vehicles, minutes later they blow up a third vehicle. Other times, we see things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhVV2_mub84
Maybe I have a blind spot in my news sources, but has the IDF done anything to show the Palestinians that they are friends, or could be friends? I know the IDF tried to give out flour once and ended up shooting several hundred Palestinians and killing about a hundred (the "flour massacre"). Maybe I've missed it, but have they ever tried that again with more success? Have they done anything to help the civilians of Gaza?
These are not actions that will reduce terrorism. These are not actions that will help the people of Gaza learn to live in peace.
I think there are plenty of actions and statements from Israeli political leaders to differentiate between a focused goal of eliminating Hamas and collective punishment and revenge, and it appears punishing all people in Gaza is one of the things they want.
> They need a carrot and and stick, not just a stick. [...] They need the people of Gaza to see Hamas as the source of their troubles and Israel as a source of aid.
Oh, I absolutely think Israel should've done this, both for strategic reasons and moral reasons. I think Israel should've been showing Gazans (and the world) some amazing innovations in getting aid into a warzone, proving to everyone that it cars more about Gaza's civilians than Hamas does. I think this would've been, not just the moral thing to do, but then smart thing to do.
I just don't think that not doing so means it's committing genocide. It's just undertaking a war like most countries do. War is always awful.
> It's hard thing to do. I remember listening to Jocko Willink [...] He had to explain to soldiers that their mission was to stabilize Iraq, not just to kill insurgents and survive the next patrol. Some of his soldiers died because of this. Those soldiers wouldn't have died if the US just dropped 2000 pound bombs on everything, but that wouldn't have accomplished the mission of stabilizing Iraq.
Yes, I heard this podcast (and I admire Jocko). Israel did something very similar - the first few weeks of fighting were mostly bombings, but the ~5 months after that have been a ground invasion that has gotten IDF soldiers killed (as opposed to more aerial bombardment).
That said, Israel is facing a tougher situation - Hamas is far more entrenched and very innovative in terms of their insurgent operations. You can watch videos by Preston Stewart to get a sense of the kinds of attacks Hamas is doing (a recent one is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFeWC1svUQI). Hamas is moving around dressed as civilians and can plausibly claim to be civilians, right up until the moment they open fire. That's a very hard situation to deal with, leading to many tragic situations.
> Remember when the Israeli hostages tried to get help and surrender, they wave a white flag, they seek help, the IDF just shoots them, and later we all recognize it was a tragedy. Well, that scene has played out hundreds of other times, but hidden, Palestinians getting killed on purpose for no good reason.
Yes, there have been countless tragedies in this war. It's partially the fault of the IDF lowering the bar for shooting, it's partially the fault of Hamas operating in the way that they do (there are cases of them deliberately pretending to be civilians then ambushing soldiers).
That video is utterly without context. I don't remember the exact case (I think Preston Stewart talked about it), but those could literally be armed militants walking to/away from battle. I don't know if Al Jazeera followed this up with any other information.
> These are not action that will reduce terrorism. These are not actions that will help the people of Gaza learn to live in peace.
I don't think Israel is trying to help Gaza learn to live in peace. It's trying to win a war against the Gazan government and military so it doesn't attack again.
I cannot understand your key points that this is a) not genicide, b) it is simply what the US was doing all these years c) Israel kills acts with self constraint not imposed by others
Israel is actively doing most of the points above against an effectively unarmed and blockaded group of people. US was fighting against actual armies whichever their quality. Israel claims “hamas” and kills indiscriminately, there is no footage of “hamas” army with any heavy military equipment, israel actively causes famine, destroys all hospitals, creates mass graves that have victims with hands tied behind their backs. Israel official claim their desire to kill everyone.
They simply cannot do it immediately because they are doing it with western financial and military support which would evaporate because you can only do propaganda so much.
> Israel is actively doing most of the points above against an effectively unarmed and blockaded group of people. US was fighting against actual armies whichever their quality.
You are just factually wrong on many of your points.
It's true that Hamas isn't a traditional military with heavy equipment, but they are a 30k strong insurgent group that has had years to plan their defense. They've built tunnel complexes that are said to be larger than the NY Subway and hide in them, coming up to ambush soldiers.
If your view of what is happening is that the IDF is going around shooting at civilians, then you're just incorrect about what is actually happening on the ground for the last many months.
If you look at videos that Hamas themselves post, you can see them constantly attacking soldiers, collapsing buildings on soldiers, placing munitions on tanks to blow them up, etc.
> [Israel] destroys all hospitals,
Absolutely not true. Israel hasn't destroyed hospitals, definitely not all of them, despite this being commonly claimed.
There was one hospital that saw a week of fighting between Hamas and the IDF. After that week, much of it was destroyed. This btw goes against your point that Hamas is effectively unarmed. But while most other hospitals have seen attacks around them and many have been ordered evacuated, they aren't destroyed. (Some are damaged, to be fair - but hospitals are pretty big, and there's a world of difference between "some hospitals have been damaged" and "Israel has destroyed all hospitals".)
> israel actively causes famine
I think Israel has acted horribly around humanitarian aid, yes. This has largely changed recently, thankfully.
> creates mass graves that have victims with hands tied behind their backs.
This was recently reported and hasn't been investigated. Many things later turn out to not be what was claimed by the Gazan authorities (Hamas) who are playing a disinformation campaign. Israel says this mass grave was made by Palestinians. Neither you nor I know the truth of this. I highly doubt it was Israel, if those people are civilians. If it was Israel, that would most definitely be a war crime as far as I can tell.
> Israel official claim their desire to kill everyone.
Not true, and I've talked about this in another comment in this thread.
> They simply cannot do it immediately because they are doing it with western financial and military support which would evaporate because you can only do propaganda so much.
OK. But that's an unfalsifiable statement. You can always say that Israel is "just about" to do more. Do you think Israel has more support now or 6 months ago right after the October 7th attacks? I think it has far less support, which was entirely predictable. So why wait so long? What kind of evidence would convince you that Israel doesn't want to engage in genocide, if not doing it when it had more support isn't strong enough evidence?
There isn't a single item on that definition that hasn't been reported and evidenced on numerous times by the limited press coverage. To bring the conversation back to the article.
The argument that it could kill more is ridiculous. Israel is clearly killing as many as it believes the international community will let it, without becoming a pariah state. Deliberately, and indiscriminate killing or maiming of 5% of a population is not trivial.
I find it difficult to classify what is happening as a war. The disparity in power, control and access to military and other means is to disparate. Like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc it's transparent one side is doing it because they can, and without regard for anything but their own satisfaction and revenge.
Not just that, the international community [0] is helping them, by giving them weapons, money and other kids of help to do so. Even coutries like germany, who had their own genocidal "incidents" in the past, continue to export weapons to israel.
Agreed and on moral grounds the war of Israel is far more defensible than these examples because they are directly subjected to the aggressor. That doesn't allow killings with impunity of course, but that is far from what Israel is doing.
There were quite a few statements by key people in the current Israeli government that demonstrate clear intent for genocide.
As to why they don't massacre every living Palestinian in Gaza if they really want to do so - Israel still depends significantly on external support, most notably from US, but also from European countries. Thus even if intending to commit genocide, they have to do so in a plausibly deniable way.
> There were quite a few statements by key people in the current Israeli government that demonstrate clear intent for genocide.
There were a few statements, mostly made very early in the war, most of them ambiguous. These are horrible, but fairly similar to most war-time propaganda in most countries.
They're also dwarfed by the many, many statements almost all of them made that quite explicitly clarified that that isn't what they want, and that the only goal is to remove Hamas while trying to minimize harm to civilians.
Btw, this is less true of ethnic cleansing - there is a minority, but influential, part of the government that is, at the very least, hinting strongly at ethnic cleansing. I find it despicable and am convinced the majority of Israelis would never go along with this, but those statements by those (despicable) "leaders" are recent.
> As to why they don't massacre every living Palestinian in Gaza if they really want to do so - Israel still depends significantly on external support, most notably from US, but also from European countries. Thus even if intending to commit genocide, they have to do so in a plausibly deniable way.
This is an unfalsifiable statement. People have been claiming for most of my life that Israel is either committing genocide, or wants to, and is only held back by foreign powers. A genocide hasn't occurred so far, and I believe very strongly that Israel will never do so. But you can always say "oh well, they just can't because other people are keeping them in check". OK - so what kind of evidence would convince you that that's not true?
There are clearly genocidal statements from Israeli leadership.
Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister, for example: "We need to encourage immigration from there. If there were 100,000-200,000 Arabs in the Strip and not two million, the whole conversation about the day after [the war] would be completely different".
Remember, these are people whose entire nation is Palestine. He's certainly not suggesting that Palestinians be accepted as refuges in Israel, and he has also been actively taking land in the West Bank, so is not proposing they go there either. In the Knesset in September 2021 he told an Arab Knesset member: "You’re here by mistake, it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948".
The most charitable interpretation of this so far is that he only wants a "forcible transfer of population" (Article 7 of the Rome Statue of the ICC - a crime against humanity) instead of a genocide. However, those statements can be coupled with actions:
* While people in Gaza were suffering famine, he issued an order blocking flour into Gaza.
* Half of Gaza's population is squeezed into a tiny corner, Rafah, by Israeli actions. Smotrich has called for: "No half jobs. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction". So he is calling just there for killing half of the Gaza population, which he has made clear, he doesn't want to continue to exist in Gaza.
I think all of this together is quite solid evidence that Smotrich is inciting genocide with intent to destroy at least part of the Palestinian nation. Others are even more extreme. For example, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza to wipe out everyone there.
In this context it is worthy to cite Article III of the genocide convention (which directly follows the above definition in Article II):
> The following acts shall be punishable:
>
> (a) Genocide;
> (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
> (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
> (d) Attempt to commit genocide;
> (e) Complicity in genocide.
Bezalel Smotrich is deffinetly guilty of (c) here, “Direct and public incitement to commit genocide”, but being a member of the Israeli government which is plausibly guilty of (a), a government who’s several members are also guilty of (c), including the Prime Minister himself. it is very likely—though we don’t know this yet—that he, other Israeli officials, and generals in the Israeli military, are also guilty of (b) “Conspiracy to commit genocide”.
Even in the most charitable interpretations of Smotrich’s words, he, and other members of the Israeli governments, are plausibly guilty of (e) “Complicity in genocide” as Israel has a duty to protect Palestinians from Genocide, but still allowing genocidal actions to unfold in Gaza, while not punishing offenders, nor even stepping down their rhetoric.
The tech nerd in me insists I complain that this isn't a database. It's just a document.
I've read this site multiple times. While some statements there are horrible (and I never said there weren't), many are really taken out of context and/or exaggerated. And most are very early in the war, as I said.
Also, to get to such large numbers, they are putting in statements from random infantry soldiers, random journalists, etc. If you want the list that's actually somewhat relevant, I think only the decision makers one is (22 statements there), maybe parts of the army personnel. Is it really relevant to include "public expressions" made by a football player, or the Australian Jewish association? Does that make sense to call it an "Israeli Incitement to Genocide"?
What matters is that these statements were both echoed and followed by actions. When random infantry soldiers recite genocidal rhetoric, and don’t get punished for that, at best you are complicit in genocide (which is also a crime according to Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention). When genocidal rhetoric is echoed on the international stage by random journalists, or football players representing your nation, you need to disavow those words (and in case of the football player, dismiss the player from the sport).
Genocide is serious crime, and when it is plausible that a genocide is being committed, any incitements to further it are criminal, and need to be punished, if these acts are not punished, or worse, dismissed as not relevant, you are at best complicit. But the fact that genocidal conduct continues on the ground, and officials are not backing down their rhetoric, and are not punishing genocidal actions, it is reasonable to assume that genocide is also the intent of the people in charge.
In fact, the US is guilty of genocide as well - it just has a far more effective media control apparatus, which shields its citizens from the outrage they'd experience if they really knew and understood just how responsible they are for such atrocities as, the funding of ISIS, the destruction of Mosul, the destruction of Raqqa, the destruction of Libya, the military support of the genocide of Yemen, and .. on and on.
So yeah "the bigger bully also kills people" might be an effective thought-blocking argument, but that is only the case because that bully has been effectively thought-blocking any inspection of its war crimes by the people, who ultimately pay for them.
Yes, the US should face justice for its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and so on. No, it won't face justice because, instead of frog-marching its war criminals to face justice in The Hague, it has plans to invade The Hague, instead.
Those who support Israels massacre of innocent Palestinians need to be very, very careful about the association with bigger bullies. Just because your allies got away with genocide, doesn't mean you will. (See also: Australia)
The ICJ are NOT investigating Israel for the crime of genocide. This is a common misunderstanding. See clarifications by the former president of the International Court of Justice, Joan Donoghue.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. You cited a ruling from March 28th 2024, which imposed extra provisional measures in light of evidence that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, and ordered Israel to stop doing that. Or in words of the Court (Article III, Paragraph 45):
> In conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation, Israel shall:
> (a) take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary; and
> (b) ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group under the Genocide Convention, including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.
The original ruling is from January 26th 2024 was also orders of provisional measures, but crucially ruled that the court had jurisdiction over the case (Article II, Paragraphs 31-32) and that accusations of genocide were plausible (Article IV, Paragraph 54):
> In the Court’s view, the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude
that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are
plausible.
The court has not concluded on this case, which means that it is fact still investigating the allegations. I honestly can’t see where my supposed misunderstanding lies.
Here is the precise misunderstanding; the statement you quote
>In the Court’s view, the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible.. (my emphasis)
Has been widely reported as saying that the allegations of genocide are plausible.
The court ruled that it has jurisdiction over the case, and that some of the allegations are plausible. How are they not investigating Israel for the crime of Genocide?
Is the misunderstanding in the meaning of the term investigate? It very common for justice systems or law enforcement to investigate whether a certain crime falls under a given category, for example Hate Crime.
Now this example is of a local law enforcement, which has pretty liberal laws on what it investigates. The World Court however needs strong conviction to even accept a case. The court did rule that the accusations are plausible and that they have jurisdiction over it. In other words, they are investigating whether Israel’s conduct falls under the crime of genocide.
Speaking as an American: yes. Bush and Obama are war criminals and I'd say that they belong in Gitmo but I'm more principled than that and we need to shut Gitmo down.
You may confuse the deaths of the sunni-shia civil war with deaths under US fire. Saddam Hussein like Gaddafi would have died sooner or later. To me there is nothing that suggests that these civil wars wouldn't have happen sooner or later, like in Yugoslavia.
Source? None of the organisations tracking Iraqi civilian deaths that have broken down figures by cause show that number caused by US forces directly.
If you're including indirect causes too, such as a rise in sectarian violence, deprivation, and increased criminality then, yes, but that's a different statement.
The context of the convention needs to be understood in the general context and especially in the context of a war (though of course they don't "exist" only in that context). And wars are awful.
(not saying what Israel is doing is correct or even adequate - but generalizing terms helps nobody)
That's a built-in failing of the genocide definition: it requires intent, otherwise no doubt the US would have been on the hook as early as the Korean war.
Sadly for the Israelis, they have a cabinet of the kind of people who just cannot help themselves from communicating intent.
Are you familiar with the fine words of Madeleine Albright and her cohorts in PNAC, who very clearly demonstrated the intent to massacre hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, mostly children, and then proceeded to do so?
Just because the US got away with genocide doesn't mean any other nation should. The American people should be jailing their own war criminals, and then go after those of Russia and Israel and the UK and Ukraine and so on. However, war crimes are good for (American) business. See also: the military support of the genocide of Yemen by a known fascist totalitarian-authoritarian dictatorship.
Madeleine Albright should have been frog-marched into The Hague for justifying the US-sanctioned deaths of over 500,000 children. [1], [2]
The extremely deceptive, duplicitous individuals in PNAC are the ones who lied and scammed the American public into funding the destruction of Iraq, and countless other sovereign states in the Middle East, in order to be able to refactor those states according to American interests.
This is why the USA illegally occupies 1/3rd of Syria's sovereign territory (its oil fields) in order to deny the Syrian people the resources they need to rebuild their country.
It is why Libya was destroyed, why Iraq was destroyed, why Afghanistan was left in utter ruin. Its why Yemen suffered a genocide widely ignored by the West.
This is why the USA funds and supports ISIS as a "fifth column" (See also: Operation Gladio[3]) in the region, in order to fight wars without the approval of Congress. Note that Gladio is still in effect as official US military doctrine - under different names now, but the modern manifestations go all the way back to the original Gladio doctrine.
It would be very important for you to understand who PNAC are and what their very clearly stated intentions are - these are the fascist oligarchs whose dogma allows the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get away with mass murder. Real, actual mass murder, not hyperbole, of cultures deemed culturally inferior by Americas oligarchic ruling class.
Note that, even if Americans are not aware of these things, the rest of the world is, and is - I believe - a motivating force behind the rise of BRICS and the general anti-American sentiment that exists outside the Anglosphere bubble.
Exactly how you think the US can support ISIS (oil sales via Turkey? Used plumbing trucks to JAS/JAN which aren’t ISIS?) when Lloyd Austin blew hundreds of millions to arm like 10-100 people is beyond me.
I swerved hard on a girl obsessed with Madeleine Albright. I'm glad I got out and around that because I never really liked the look of that older woman.
Ironically, the DoD has internally concluded those UAPs to be AI controlled craft and investors are already lining up, demanding access to siloed intellectual property concerning recovered technology.
While people here are busy mocking the seeming absurdity of the premises, that very absurdity has been determined to be a kind of intelligence test and deliberately administered social stimulus.
It is particularly fallacious when the topic is 'scrutinizing actions of authorities'.
I find it highly worrisome, people apparently prefer to be told what to think by "authorities" than to learn how to rationally check and judge arguments for their validity. It's tribalism vs enlightenment.
Authority is not inherently bad, and in some cases what an authority recommends is going to be significantly better than whatever conclusion an individual comes to via their 'enlightenment'.
Maybe you're smart and great at critical thinking and have a high level of self-confidence that you could investigate an issue and reach the right, or at least a good enough conclusion, but I don't think that's true for most people.
> It's certainly not true for the "authorities" in question here. Meaning, they indeed aren't "authoritative", as you would have it.
Weird use of scarequotes. And yeah, no one is claiming the person who wrote the opinion is an authority. You made a generalization though, and that's what I was responding to.
> I guess, because you have so little confidence in what your peers would do if they found out?
Found out what? I don't even have confidence that most of my "peers" would think it's important to check in the first place.
A far less extreme take could be that a random agitator writing an opinion piece has a lot less of a reputation to lose than a publisher or professional journalist.
No it's not. The police have authority. Your doctor has credibility. Your doctor doesn't order you around. The doctor's reputation is an aggregation of the public's mood.
The point here is people succumbing to confirmation bias and circular reasoning. That article is no simple 'clickbait'-nonsense.
Objectively, importance is judged via cumulative consequences over time. The event of contact with non-human higher intelligence can hardly be over-stated in that regard.
Being made fools of by your government to such a degree, you would risk missing a potentially world-changing event, is also quite something.
I actually appreciate The Hill's opinion section and contributor editorials, as they regularly pierce my bubble and expose me to some, frankly, batshit opinions and bad ideas. But I think in moderation that's a good thing.
But I give more weight to The Hill's actual authors and editors. The name means something to me. Same as The Times, The Post, or (formerly) GiantBomb.
Where do you propose your "limitless" supply of toys to fit within the finite confines of earth?
Even if you could "spread out to the stars", earth stays a closed system. It can take only a finite amount of pollution, which we actually already overstepped.
Earth is indeed finite, but if presently accessible resources give humanity tens of thousands of years of runway, that is for all intents and purposes limitless - because in that time the science and tech that get developed will resemble magic. Consider how peak oil turned out to not be a problem after all. Now humanity is on the verge of a renaissance in nuclear reactors, a revolution in fusion reactors, and the success of renewables deployment at scale.
That's entirely the point, the economy is quickly dematerializing. As the smartphone example shows, we can provide the same service (and in fact, a far superior one) using a tiny fraction of physical resources. Electronic mail and newspapers, online marketplaces, real time video-communication are in every way better, cheaper and environmentally friendlier than their traditional counterparts.
So we can generate far more economic output (defined as transactions people are willing to make, for example software licenses, apps etc) using the same physical input.
No, it's not.
The "virtualizable" part of the economy is limited. While it gets digitized, the remaining part continues to grow exponentially, rendering the former irrelevant.
The primary problem here is the generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based and all those material products have a very limited lifespan, ending as pollution.
What you need is complete recycling, which necessitates to incorporate that goal in the design phase already.
> generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based
The current system is unscalable, sure, but are these fundamental limits that preclude growth?
The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.
So we are many, many doublings away from hitting the physical limits on growth, and we can barely comprehend how our society would look like in such a scenario.
> The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.
You are greatly underestimating how fast exponential growth gets out of hand.
At 1% annual growth in human energy use starting from where we are now, in around 9300 years our annual energy use would equal all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I mean all the energy including the energy we'd get from converting all the mass into energy (E=mc^2).
12000 years from now, so a mere 2700 years after we are consuming an entire Milky Way per year, our annual consumption would equal all the energy in the entire observable universe.
There are similar limits if we look at population growth. At 1% annual population growth we would need the mass of the observable universe to make all the living humans in about 12300 years.
For population growth another limit 1% hits in 12000 years is space. Assuming no FTL, since every human is close to Earth now in 12000 years every human has to be within 12000 light years of Earth. The volume of a sphere of radius 12000 light years divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth gives a volume available per human that is about equal to the volume of one person.
One I've not calculated is what the limit is when you combine 1% energy growth and the speed of light limit on how fast we can expand human space. Long before the earlier limit of 12000 years to needing all the energy in the universe we'd reach a point where the energy density in human occupied space is enough to turn human space into a black hole.
If anyone wants to calculate that limit I'd love to see the results.
I believe I'm treating the physics of growth, not the economics of growth.
If you need to use 1% more energy each year starting from what we use now per year, our universe does not contain enough energy to do that for more than 12000 consecutive years.
It is that analysis in specific that I object too. Its not obvious energy will increase the way you describe; as ive written elsewhere, the factors involved in current population/birth declines are not related to environmental carrying capacity, they are more closely related to the global monetary system and central planning, and it could have a relationship to high levels of economic development.
Existing political issues aside, an entire industry can die off and we can still call that growth, as we do when its replaced by something that creates more value at a lower cost, like the beginning of the automotive industry ending the reign of horses. We dont know if quantum computers will ever be realized for practical purposes, if they are then maybe we can unlock all the processing power anyone could ever need with much lower power consumption, or maybe we dont but computation simply becomes a less pressing matter after we reach some unknown level of technology (ie. If you are trying to capture a black hole to use as an energy source, you really might only need the computational power of a ti-86.
There is also, in my observation, a type of material ladder that bends ever towards the crystalization (forgive the terminology) of chemicals. Where raw wood rots in weeks to months, treated lumber can last a decade, vinyl can last 2-3, steel for 100+, who knows what comes next? These materials are likely to require lots of energy to create, but require less over their lifespan. There is a similar ladder in energy, starting with humans burning poop and currently sitting somewhere between nuclear and natural gas, where each step up on the ladder requires greater capital investment but produces less pollution and has lower lifetime costs, where nuclear is like the diamond of energy, huge investment to create something that will last this side of forever.
The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.
To be more specific the person you replied to has confused total amount present (of U, etc), with total amount recoverable (at any cost), and not even addressed total amount that is economically feasible (a cost that can be afforded).
WRT: "total amount"
Elements in suspension in ocean water become increasingly dilute as more of them are removed .. so "in theory" 'all you need to do' is move the entire ocean from one bucket to another and remove what you need as you do so ... (otherwise you are constamtly circling back for diminishing returns).
WRT: "recoverable"
Then there is the no small matter of exactly how uranium (or other elements) are extracted, by what means and at what efficiency - today it's unclear what the answer for that is at scale.
WRT: "economically feasible"
Once you have a method, how much can be recovered at a sensible cost .. for less energy than the energy expended for the recovery task, how much gold can you mine for lesss than the value of the gold recovered, etc.
It's not feasible to mine all the roadways on the planet to recover all the valuable minerals burnt away in catalytic converter.
You might want to read up on this topic. The total amount of Uranium in the oceans is estimated at 4.5 billion tonnes, constantly replenishing at a rate much higher than we could currently imagine consuming.
Feasibility studies were done since the 70s assessing the opportunity to exploit this resource, and found a that Titanium oxide hydrate adsorption bed could be able to extract the resource at a cost of a few thousand $ per pound, one order of magnitude over traditional mining. Since we are talking about exponential economic growth, the notion of economic viability has only a tenuous connection to present day reality, as such growth would drastically cheapen machine labor, even to the point of deploying a software command to build the factory.
It stands to reason that such factories could still recover uranium even if the concentration in the oceans dropped, say, by 20%, so the "recoverable" quantity - in this scenario of exponential growth - is indeed, in the billions of tons. Each cubic meter of ocean water contains 3 mg of Uranium or something like 100 kWh of energy, far more than the energy required to circulate ocean water to the surface to get at it. Of course, there could be ecological reasons why you would not want to do that, as well as an enormous source of energy to solve them.
So I gather from your invective spiked tantrum that you concede there are no fundamental hard limits that prevent the recovery, in principle, of at least 1 billion tons of U from the oceans, at a future price point we can't currently estimate?
Like I said before, we need to make a distinction between what's possible in principle and what's actually possible. There's nothing, in principle, that prevents you from winning the lottery, so would you therefore go on massive debt after buying a ticket?
Another example is how modern farming yields far more produce than in the past, with less inputs. For example, vertical farming can yield 240x more produce despite using 99% less land and 99% water versus a regular farm. That technology is in its infancy and will innovate rapidly.
Or we might do away with farming entirely. Photosynthesis is less than 1% efficient while a solar cell can exceed 40%; so direct chemical synthesis of starch could become the primary source of calories in our food chain, further processed into proteins, fats etc. by appropriate bioreactors down the chain.
Does that figure include the cost of manufacturing and installing the photovoltaic cells? Plants may waste sunlight, but they're very cheap to produce.
Also, plants produce sugars from sunlight almost directly. Intuitively, producing electricity from sunlight and then using that electricity to produce sugars could not possibly be more efficient. It could very well be that storing energy in carbon-hydrogen bonds is intrinsically inefficient.
> producing electricity from sunlight and then using that electricity to produce sugars could not possibly be more efficient.
Per photon, no. Per area of sunlit land, yes, orders of magnitude more.
Also, the photosynthesis efficiency generally refers to the entire chemical energy stored in things like the leaves, stem etc., often useless in the food chain. Solar to food efficiency is abysmal.
Then, there is the question of fertilizer and pesticide use, runoffs and accumulation in groundwater and soil, destruction of soils by intensive agriculture, water use, substantial energy required to transport the large masses involved, the subtraction of that land from the natural habitat etc. Modern agriculture is a necessary evil.
Having worked for two vertical farming startups… people have been saying the same thing for 20 years.
Turns out when somebody actually tries this in practice its not so feasible. Considering both of the startups failed in quite rapid fashion i would say it might not be so surefire like you seem it to be.
The most recent examples I've seen from the last few years are very promising. Big investors are moving in, too. Even if the attempts failed in the past, they'll keep getting better. Just like with anything else - renewables, fusion, etc.
The point of these papers isn't to make precise predictions of "the day civilizational collapse occurs" nor does it merely "illustrate some complex relationships".
It is to show every closed system, even only remotely resembling our own, is bound to end in overshoot&collapse unless you change central tenets of the driving economic paradigm.
Namely abandon exponential growth for a steady (or oscillatory) state approach.
Individuals aren't helpless bystanders either. As adults in a democracy, it isn't only your right but your responsibility to bring about the necessary change.
Since we aren't able to export our pollution out into space, or mine food on mars, yes, we live in a closed system. We live on a round spaceship known as Spaceship Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth)
For all practical purposes, earth's gravity well serves as a boundary for material resources at scale.
More importantly, the input of polluting material into earth's obviously very limited ecological system is limited. You simply cannot pollute as much as you want, so getting more stuff from the asteroid belt or whatever doesn't help.
How many thousands of dollars does it cost to launch a kilogram of mass into orbit again? Out of orbit?
Do we even have a closed system that can support a small group of people indefinitely to launch? Unfortunately, we do not yet have such a system outside of the earth itself.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure in what sense the others are using the term. The mechanism of collapse in the paper, exhaustion of fossil fuels, relies on not enough energy in the system, so I assumed energy was part of the calculation.
That is assuming exponential growth inevitably leads to overshoot & collapse, which is a flawed zero-sum perspective. Growth (adding value) doesn't necessarily have to come at the cost of resources.
You didn’t address that I already participate in democracy. I’m just realistic in my actual capacity to execute change, which is inherently largely local, so I focus on local change.
The whole point of voting in my country is to serve as a check on the legislature against using the government to do things to its citizens. The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.
A dictatorship is a much better system for changing society, if that’s your goal for government.
I mean, to a degree I agree with the GP. You can't fundamentally change a system from within the system itself. No democracy has ever turned via a series of elections into, say, a monarchy. The only way that happens is either by violent collapse (e.g. a coup or a revolution) or by gradual erosion of bureaucracy (where increasing corruption enables a few powerful individuals to seize control regardless of what the law says). The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.
> The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.
The point of bureaucracy is to limit change, to not allow dramatic change.
The point of democracy is to make decisions. And the larger the groups of people and the less frequently voting happens, the larger the granularity of those decisions.
Decisions should be able to change bureaucracy, add to it or subtract or realign or whatever.
When bureaucracy is used to gate-keep decisions that can be made in a democracy, it's not really democracy any more. And I think a lot of people, regardless of their political beliefs, believe that has happened: nominal democracy where votes don't really matter because they can't affect the bureaucracy.
I would say the point of bureaucracy is to make the functioning of a system consistent with some set of rules. The preservation of those rules in some specific form does not have to be part of the rules, and so does not need to be a goal of a given bureaucracy. However, a self-preserving bureaucracy can arise, either by design or accident. I would say every government that has ever existed fits that description. Can you think of a single one that has not been fundamentally conservative? "Conservative" meaning seeking to maintain the status quo that allows it to exist in its present form at any given time.
You are misrepresenting the science here.
This wasn't "just a PhD thesis" in particular.
Also, your take of this to be "sensationalism" is very odd. The danger of imminent tipping points turning "climate change" into "climate catastrophe" is absolutely real.
> The researchers today report their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study united the RAINFOR and PPBio research networks, with dozens of short-term grants enabling more than 100 scientists to measure forests for decades across 123 experimental plots.The plots span Amazon and Atlantic forests as well as drier forests in tropical South America.
> These direct, tree-by-tree records showed that most forests had acted as a carbon sink for most of the last 30 years, with tree growth exceeding mortality. When the 2015–2016 El Niño hit, the sink shut down. This was because tree death increased with the heat and drought.
The situation with Canadian forests is much worse. The Amazon accounts for 20% of the global carbon sink but the meters-thick layer of peat below Canadian forests is a third of all carbon stored (along with the peatland in Russia, which is also burning).
There’s enough carbon stored in that peat to double or triple the CO2 ppm which would be absolutely catastrophic to the planet.
Those trees are made of carbon that was already in the atmosphere, and they will release it back into it whenever they die in the next couple centuries anyway. Trees are basically irrelevant as carbon capture, unless they're cultivated to maturity and then buried underground.
Nonsense, a region that is forested has a proportion of carbon locked up in biomass indefinitely. If that region is deforested and no longer has any carbon locked up in biomass that is unambiguously a net source of carbon.
It's not locked up, it's continuously flowing in and out of that ecosystem. It's only locked up when it gets buried and can't return back to the atmosphere (except through technology). There's any number of reasons why a forest could get disrupted and die out besides intentional deforestation.
I hate to break it to you but we need all the time we can get. Also a rotting tree doesn't completely turn into gas, some of the carbon (I think 30%?) goes into the soil.
> trees are basically irrelevant as a carbon sink.
Some quick googling shows me that all flora on earth hold about 1000 gigatons of carbon, whereas we are releasing about 40 gigatons per year. Doesn’t seem irrelevant.
I'm fairly sure the total biomass of flora on Earth is fairly consistent across human time scales. It's not going to double in 25 years and then continue increasing at that same rate.
Do you have evidence for that? I in turn would assume that there's considerably less flora since the industrial revolution. If you ever kept a garden you know how fast weeds colonise bare soil.
If you’re in a sinking boat it is the amount of water inside the boat that you worry about, rather than the amount of water in which the boat is floating.
If you're in a sinking boat you should worry about how fast water is coming in, not about how much water is inside. Would you rather be carrying 10 tons of water without leaking, or 1 ton of water and taking in half a ton per minute?
That's not how it works, the time the carbon got stored has an effet on the climate, the same way that 1 euro tomorrow isn't the same as one euro today.
However, intact tropical South American forests overall were no more sensitive to the extreme 2015–2016 El Niño than to previous less intense events, remaining a key defence against climate change as long as they are protected.
Did you read the post you’re replying to, which quotes the article being that it is measuring specific plots of land on specific trees? There’s no estimates or simulations here. The only excel models I bet are just formulae executions.
By that logic if I measure the weather outside every day, and say the average weather for the past month outside my house is x, I’ve created a model and therefore not real, lol
I think it's far more far to say the opposite: science is an ever evolving model of the world, but science is always just a model.
F = ma is a model.
And you may try to limit your argument to only "statistical models = not science" but then you would be dismissing essentially all social sciences but also ecology, geology, climate science, not to mention every single aspect of statistical mechanics.
Science is essentially hypothesis testing where hypothesis represent models of how the world works. Didn't you even take high school physics where you spend considerable time running experiments and writing up why they don't exactly match the formula's prediction in the book?
Would you mind explaining what model-free science looks like? Is it just cataloging observations?
>>> Would you mind explaining what model-free science looks like? Is it just cataloging observations?
Anything that can be tested and replicated with all things exactly equal, except that which is the hypothesis being tested.
Most if not all of social science, ecology, geology, climate science may not be possible to do this way, since it often involves humans and/or earth, and its physically impossible to duplicate earth, or a human (with identical thoughts,feelings, or experience)
No, science is probabilistic by nature. Science seeks to generate models to explain reality. The process is to test said models against reality (probabilistically).
This is a common misconception.
The US system of state secrets for example is enormous, and while leaks do occur, they are negligible compared to what is kept hidden.
There are multiple tricks employable, one is to keep any single collaborator in the dark aboout most of the conspiracy. That way, any single leak is manageable.
Your conviction of believing conspiracies to be unrealistic is common and helps conspirators a lot. It disincentivises whistleblowers in particular.
> The US system of state secrets for example is enormous, and while leaks do occur, they are negligible compared to what is kept hidden.
Not from those whose job it is to find them. The Manhattan Project leaked to the Soviets multiple times over. Any time the government does something illegal, a whistleblower has leaked it to reporters.
The really weird thing though is, how people defend their preconceptions with "conspiracy theories", invoking stigma and thereby inhibiting further inquiry.
Which is unfortunate, as the actual reasons are at times much more interesting (and inconvenient) than people's infantilism allows.
There have been real conspiracies (MKULTRA might be remembered, Snowden's leaks were mere consiracy theory pre-leak). And those claiming them to be real were shunned as lunatics.
The (certainly?) currently existing, real conspiracies hide (are hidden?) behind the stigma as well. Is it wise to let them?
Background radiation is categorically different than ingesting/inhaling radioactive substances with the latter many orders of magnitude more dangerous.
The claim, nuclear testing related increases in radiation exposure not being relevant for public health is probably false. There are only very few studies with dubious reliability. The lifetime increase due to that nuclear testing is estimated to be 4.4 Millisieverts. It would have risen continuously with more surface tests, which got abolished accordingly.
The idea, beaches were a sanctum against radiation is wrong again. Sand is ground down mountains in case you wondered. Some are highly radioactive. But of course, UV light is harmful radiation as well.
We eat bananas all of the time. Bananas are delicious and nutritious, and they are known for containing lots of potassium. Well, some of that potassium is radioactive! It’s not very much radioactivity though. It is an amount which is easily measured, but which is not harmful enough to make eating bananas dangerous. This is true even though the potassium will be used to strengthen your bones and teeth. It will also be distributed to your muscles, red blood cells, skin, etc, etc.
