What they won’t acknowledge is that holding those hostages is basically the last bargaining chip keeping Israel from just bombing all of Gaza into rubble. What’s left of it after all the bombing until now, that is.
It’s true that far right Israeli settlers need to stop killing families to take their land. But Hamas has little presence in the West Bank and the issues are not fundamentally linked. Progress needs to be made to stop the settlement of the West Bank (pressure on bibi and sanctions on settlers) and on the need to stop attacks from Hamas on Israeli civilians + the release of hostages. But progress on one of these fronts does not need to be linked to the other.
This isn’t about those stupid fucking terrorists, it’s about stopping the other bunch of fucking terrorists who killed 20,000+ innocents from massacring more people, or destroying their homes and infrastructure leading to a slow lingering death from starvation and exposure just so that they can kill people and pretend it isn’t their fault.
How many of the thousands of children Israel has killed in Palestine were members of Hamas? How is it Hamas’ fault that those children were killed by Israel?
You could argue , that it wasn’t a terrorist attack on Israel that started this. Since Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza, you could argue they declared war, they invaded. A response to a country invading is very different from a response to a terrorist attack
So did Palestinians. Doesn’t make it okay to to go into someone else’s home, destroy everything, and tell them they can end the destruction of their home any time they want.
Yet countless people on reddit, lemmy, and the wider internet seem to think that Biden is the last humanitarian on earth who cares about the Palestinians and that Trump would be worse
I mean, Trump would probably be worse. Biden is real bad, he’s mostly supported Israel through the genocide. On the other hand, Trump has literally said “you’ve got to finish the problem” (palestinians being the problem), not to mention a slew of pro-israel and anti-palestinian decisions when he was president (read about them here if you wish).
So yes, I agree with the first part of your comment, the last - not so much.
Some of the videos of the interrogations suggest that the men were tortured by Russian security services. One of the clips, circulated by Russian bloggers, appears to show members of the security forces cutting off the ear of a man who is later interrogated over the attack and then stuffing it into his mouth. Another appears to show security forces beating a suspect with their rifle butts and kicking him as he lies in the snow.
Oh buddy this is just the tip of the ice berg. The pain they have coming to them will be beyond next level.
One of them was beaten until his eye fell out, then they cut off his genitals, and had doctors patch him up and install a catheter so more can come his way. It’s not gonna be pretty and these guys will also get no mercy.
It’s not that simple. Yes, power lines do start a lot of fires, but climate change induced drought is the main cause of the scale and frequency of wildfires in California. If the conditions are right it’s only a matter of time until something sets it off.
the quality of journalism has certainly decreased - but we have bots that summarize whatever news is out there already - and most people arent going to do more than read the headlines anyway.
The primary use of ad blockers isn’t to ensure the websites don’t make money but to protect the end user from unwanted effects of intrusive advertising. If we’re expected to be concerned with their loss of revenue they should be as concerned about ads masquerading as OS prompts, scams feigning legitimacy, false medical or financial claims, malware and miners being injected etc. If they won’t accept responsibility or accountability for the material they are serving and effectively endorsing then it’s only prudent for the users to protect themselves.
And if they want to attract subscribers instead of relying on advertising income then they should also avoid racing to the bottom by (solely) relying on LLM generated “articles” and misleading clickbait tactics. If they have to rely on tricking their prospective customers then they aren’t peddling something actually worthwhile and aren’t owed a reward for doing so.
If they won’t accept responsibility or accountability for the material they are serving and effectively endorsing then it’s only prudent for the users to protect themselves.
Who is the “they” in this. Google destroyed local news papers. All these smaller players can afford to do is open their sites up to google exchanges. It’s a viscous cycle where the leaner your journalist team gets, the more you need click bait pages to drive ad views on those exchanges. I don’t know what the solution to this looks like to raise journalistic standards and ensure they are funded, but I think that whatever it looks like will require readers to pay subscriptions and/or tolerate ads in their news.
There’s definitely a loss of accountability in the ad-based economy.
Your newspaper in 1990 knew it had to specifically tag anything that looked too much like first party content as an advertorial. If they didn’t vet their ads for some level of actual fraud, there was both reputstional and likely legal risk. Not to mention that print ads are static and won’t start demanding notification permissions or playing audio.
“We plugged the Google ad tags into our template” denies them this control, so trust vanished and people responded with ad blockers.
I agree. Google and double click were a trojan horse for a lot of print media orgs trying to do digital. What looked like the gift of added revenue cheaply made these news orgs completely dependent on Google. The news publishers became a cheap commodity for delivering ad space all flowing through Google.
the more you need click bait pages to drive ad views on those exchanges
“They” (the local newspapers) don’t have to make that Faustian bargain but choose to because it’s easier or more lucrative to. They could take meaningful steps to address and communicate to their readers that they care about the accuracy and informative aspects of their reporting as well as the safety and respect of their electronic systems used to access it.
Wikipedia doesn’t have flashing boner pill pop-ups and their pages aren’t filled with intentionally misleading information – I strongly suspect their donations would fall off a cliff if that started to change. It’s not a great comparison since the scale and business structures are different from local newspapers but other entities like PBS also show that people will donate for good/honest content.
Ad blockers just wrongly get painted with this brush as being horribly destructive to the poor companies that have no choice but to be evil when they were a logical consequence to the boundaries of acceptability being constantly pushed. We had <marquee> and <blink> text, static banners -> animated banners, auto-playing sound/video, iFrames -> pop-ups -> recursive pop-ups -> mouse click & window resize disable scripts -> overlays -> unskippable full-page video -> multiple unskippable videos -> LLM/AI generated bogus content. And tons of other variations I’m not remembering at the moment. Ad blockers also (mostly) don’t work properly when the ads are being served from the same source as the content; the newspapers could host the ads themselves and vouch for their safety and propriety.
Then use ads that don’t make reading the article a miserable, tedious experience and stop vacuuming up tracking data. Maybe readers would trust the website then, though many of those bridges have been burned to cinders already.
The value of ad space includes things like viewability, interactivity, attribution. You can’t make ads harder to see and easier to skip without lowering the value of the ads and what the site takes in. It’s hard line to balance between maximizing value for your ad space and user experience.
No. There is no rational defense of ads taking up more and more of the space around us. Companies do not concede to reasonable limits with their ads, so why should we? They take whatever part of our lives that they can, and they only ever take more of it wherever allowed. We are not irrational for taking whatever steps we can to limit and remove those intrusions from our lives.
The defense is free content. There’s operating costs for running papers. And they usually aren’t there to make a profit. So the combined income of subs and ad revenue need to cover the operational cost. If the content is free, then there’s going to be lots of ads. But even in print news, there were a lot of ads. Some full page ads. Fun front page stories that continued on Section C page 5 which forced you to flip through more ads to find it. User experience needs to be cleaned in digital to not drive users away because of the ads, but they will necessarily have to be there if folks aren’t paying for subscriptions.
“Free” content isn’t a defense in any way. It’s not free - we’re paying with our divided attention and, in more and more cases, our personal information. And they demand more and more of it while we get less. That is not acceptable. And ads being embedded in our lives for decades and centuries doesn’t justify anything, either.
They have pushed far beyond anything resembling acceptable. If it crashes and burns because people are tired of it, that’s their fault, not ours.
Yeah how dare people care more about their unmolested reading experience and not being loaded up with spyware more than if the paper is making money off the spyware?
I thought it was ridiculous when I actually had an online subscription for my local (Gannett owned) paper for a short time and the page was still absolutely riddled with ads. It’s like what’s the fucking point if I could still read these stories for free?
Now they just lock shit behind a “this article is for subscribers only” and I just look elsewhere. Since this has occurred, a couple truly local papers have sprouted up from the ashes.
I have a fairly recent android phone, but the app says it’s not compatible. I don’t see any page that lists models which are compatible. Did anyone else find one?
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