barsoap

barsoap , 9 hours ago

They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun

Well they don’t strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don’t happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn’t exactly easy.

Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn’t actually that bad if it doesn’t make the reactor otherwise more expensive.

What’s much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don’t care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, “do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often”: That’s an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They’re planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they’ve won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can’t exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.

barsoap , 5 hours ago

the germanic honor-culture has survived here and we value doing the right/honorable thing more than anything else.

If you were the Swedish kind of neutral I’d accept that, but you’re the Swiss kind of neutral. You may have stopped selling weapons to both sides of a conflict, you may have even stopped providing offshore accounts for both sides of the conflict, but the overall attitude of “eh it’s not in Switzerland it doesn’t matter” is still around. Heck, you still harbour Nestle. At least you had the sense to go after Steinmetz, though.

barsoap , 1 day ago

Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly,

Kinda… yes and no? At least with x86 there’s still things like encoding selection going on, there’s not a 1:1 mapping between assembly syntax and opcodes.

Also assemblers, at least those meant for human consumption (mostly nasm nowadays) tend to have powerful macro systems. That’s not assembly as such, of course.

But I think your “a compiler changes the structure of the code” thing is spot-on, an assembler will not reorder instructions, it won’t do dead code elimination, but I think it’s not really out of scope of an assembler to be able to do those things – compilers weren’t doing them for the longest time, either.

I think a clearer division would be that compilers deal with two sets of semantics: That of the source language, and that of the CPU. The CPU semantics don’t say things like “result after overflow is undefined”, that’s C speaking, and compilers can use those differences to do all kind of shennanigans. With assemblers there’s no such translation between different language semantics, it’s always the CPU semantics.

barsoap , 1 day ago

So then, you think Nazi Swastikas without context should be allowed without any repercussions.

That’s incoherent. “Nazi swastika” and “without context” doesn’t mesh because “Nazi” is a context for “swastika”.

That aside, I’m going to take German law as an example: No, non-nazi swastikas are very much not outlawed. You can see them on stray Hindu temples or shrines in the country, for example. “Without” context they’re generally assumed to be Nazi ones over here because historical context, also, only Nazis draw random swastikas over here. You also see ones broken in pieces getting thrown in the trash or in a crossed-out circle, those come from the Antifa side.

Both the Hindu and Antifa uses are legal, the Nazi ones aren’t. That’s because German law doesn’t outlaw the swastika as such, it outlaws “using symbols of unconstitutional or outlawed organisations in a manner suitable to further their aims”. A Nazi painting a Swastika on a Jewish gravestone is considered furthering the aims of the NSDAP, which had the swastika as their logo. A Hindu chiselling a swastika into their gravestone is a completely different matter. (Do Hindus use gravestones? Anyway doesn’t matter it’s a hypothetical example).

In another country, where the historical context is different, those “without” context swastikas won’t be interpreted the same as in Germany. So even under German law those would arguably be legal, there.

barsoap , 1 day ago

Azov has gotten completely diluted by a gigantic influx of ordinary people, its hardcore Nazi times were over before they were even rolled into Ukraine’s overall command structure which came along with some more denazification. The Wolfsangel isn’t recognised as a far-right symbol in Ukraine by the general public so they kept it. It’s also not a clear-cut Nazi symbol even in Germany, you see it on plenty of coat of arms, it also has plenty of use in forestry which is its original source: You hang it with bait onto a branch to kill wolves in a rather gruesome manner. That’s outlawed nowadays but you still see it on border forestry border stones, to mark wood, etc. The heraldic use derives from that, it symbolises presence or importance of forestry in the area the coat of arm represents. Not much forest around the Azov sea, though.

Those are not the Nazis you’re looking for. If you want to see, well not exactly nazis but the hot-bed of ultranationalists in the Ukrainian army have a look at the right sector regiment. Dylan Burns did an interview.

Next up: Someone’s going to claim that the Ukrainian army uses the “Iron Cross”. First off, the Bundeswehr still uses it, secondly, no the Ukrainians don’t use it you’re looking at the Cossack Cross, derived independently from the Templar Cross, unlike the Iron Cross not via the Teutonic Order. They’ve been using that thing for centuries.

EDIT: Oh wait I just remembered I’m completely banned from lemmygrad they won’t see this. Well, whatever.

barsoap , 2 days ago

It should be “I broke fast”, not “I breakfasted”, there’s already a verb in there but people have forgotten, TBH “To have break fast” is quite questionable grammar. It’s different in German, “Frühstück” means “early piece”, an adjective-noun compound which then can be fed through the usual verbification rules.

barsoap , 2 days ago

English does that all the time, breakfast is actually a very good example. Toothpaste. Hairstyle. Bedroom.

barsoap , 2 days ago

Not as a general principle. That doesn’t mean that constructivists say that there can’t be sets for which the operation is valid. In particular enumeration is not a precondition for a thing to be pickable.

Now they say that the levers are indistinguishable, which means that their difference actually does not lie in their identities, but their relationship to the space they’re in (or everything would collapse into itself), thus I don’t have to look at the levers I can look at the space. They say that “I can’t enumerate them all” but that means that there’s at least a countably infinite number of them.

So the solution is easy: I take the space, throw away all of it that doesn’t hold a that countably infinite subset, observe that the result is now isomorphic to the naturals, then cut it down to six, and throw a dice. There, not just arbitrary but even (a bit) random.

Really, only ultrafinitists would have trouble with this… but then they’d turn it around and challenge you to actually construct that infinite number of levers for real, not just in the abstract, and untie everyone while you’ve stopped the tram due to being caught in an endless loop.

barsoap , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

They’re overpaying for them. Which then makes companies calculate “we could sell a lot of product at small profit margins to the general vegetarian and flexi public” vs. “we could not invest in production capacity and charge affluent urban vegans and arm and a leg” and guess what they’re going for.

The reason why there’s tons of almond etc. milks costing 3-4 times as much per litre as actual milk is not because of subsidies. It’s because vegans are stupid enough to buy 20 cents of ingredients for that price.

barsoap , 3 days ago

“wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?

It’s a bad idea in general to eat predators because the higher up the food chain you go the higher the chance you’ll contract an illness. Humans are not alone at all among predators to practically only go after grazers, and not other predators. We leave the rest to carrion eaters who specialise to deal with all kinds of nasty stuff.

People thinking that this is some kind of grand ethical-philosophical argument or conundrum just shows how alienated they are from the ways of nature.

barsoap , 3 days ago

Ok. We’re on the prairie. There’s literally nothing here to eat but bison, though somehow you’ve got it into your head that you can eat grass. Fine, we’ll let you try for a bit until you come to your senses. Two weeks later your digestion is fucked, you’re lethargic, and we have to carry you.

You, MindTraveller, have just become a burden to the whole group, lowering all of our chances of survival, all over some so-called “principle”. I know of gods, I know of spirits, if your principles are anything like that then certainly they must be evil. Maybe shaming won’t help to drive them out, we can try other rites, but if nothing helps then we will have to leave you behind.

barsoap , 3 days ago

32 is ASCII space, the highest number you need is 114 for r (or 122 for z if you want to be generic), that’s a range of 82 or 90 values.

The target string has 13 characters, a long long has 8 bytes or 16 nibbles – 13 fits into 16 so nibbles (the (x >>= 4) & 15) it is. Also the initial x happens to have 13 nibbles in it so that makes sense. But a nibble only has 16 values, not 82, so you need some kind of compression and that’s the rest of the math, no idea how it was derived.

If I were to write that thing I’d throw PAQ at it it can probably spit out an arithmetic coding that works, and look even more arcane as you wouldn’t have the obvious nibble steps. Or, wait, throw NEAT at it: Train it to, given a specific initial seed, produce a second seed and a character, score by edit distance. The problem space is small enough for the approach to be feasible even though it’s actually a terrible use of the technique, but using evolution will produce something that’s utterly, utterly inscrutable.

barsoap , 3 days ago

This kind of thing needs to be started by universities and/or research institutes. Not the code part, but the organising the first journals part. It’s going to get nowhere without establishment buy-in.

barsoap , 3 days ago

Citation count is a shoddy metric for a paper’s quality. Not just because there’s citation cartels, but because the reason stuff gets cited is not contained in the metric. And then to top it all off as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric.

barsoap , 2 days ago

You can divide a thing made up of any multiple of 3 number of things into three. Say, divide twelve eggs by three that’s four eggs, rational division is justified by “I could have multiplied some numbers beforehand so now I can divide”, it’s the inverse of multiplication, after all.

But that only applies to rationals: The issue is that there’s no integer you could multiply pi with that would result in an integer… otherwise pi would be a rational number which it isn’t.

barsoap , 2 days ago

The founder of homeopathy did the first blinded studies, in a time where allopathy was doing bloodletting and their theories about how things presumably affect the body were, well, bullshit, quite often doing more harm than good. Humour theory and everything, even as a systemic view it’s crude AF compared to what Indians and Chinese came up with.

Now, as in currentyear, homeopathy is bullshit because we are way better at blinding and know that homeopathic drugs are no more effective than placebo.

Which just goes on to show that yes, science is a process.

barsoap , 3 days ago

Also someone who fringes the ring quite unlike any other.

barsoap , 3 days ago

In certain areas it has practical know-how we don’t. CATL is a good example. Not just their sodium-ion batteries, but their production processes in general. We might be able to readily reproduce their battery chemistries in a lab but that’s not the same as having an industrial production process and the experience from ironing out all the kinks that feed back into basic research. With a joint venture, you can tap into that stuff.

If we had invested as heavily in the tech as they did we probably would be ahead right now but we didn’t so we aren’t. If they had invested as much into fusion as we did – oh wait they did. They’re behind, Max Planck is currently looking into the details of building a commercially viable reactor in the early 2030s, they’re confident to have the plasma physics down now it’s about stuff like “do we use a cheap material for the diverters and replace them often or do we develop/use something fancy”, that is, about actual operational costs.

barsoap , 4 days ago

have variable width instructions,

compressed instruction set /= variable-width. x86 instructions are anything from one to a gazillion bytes, while RISC-V is four bytes or optionally (very commonly supported) two bytes. Much easier to handle.

vector instructions,

RISC-V is (as far as I’m aware) the first ISA since Cray to use vector instructions. Certainly the only one that actually made a splash. SIMD isn’t vector instructions, most crucially with vector insns the ISA doesn’t care about vector length on an opcode level. That’s like if you wrote MMX code back in the days and if you run the same code now on a modern CPU it’s using just as wide registers as SSE3.

But you’re right the old definitions are a bit wonky nowadays, I’d say the main differentiating factor nowadays is having a load/store architecture and disciplined instruction widths. Modern out-of-order CPUs with half a gazillion instructions of a single thread in flight at any time of course don’t really care about the load/store thing but both things simplify insn decoding to ludicrous degrees, saving die space and heat. For simpler cores it very much does matter, and “simpler core” here can also could mean barely superscalar, but with insane vector width, like one of 1024 GPU cores consisting mostly of APUs, no fancy branch prediction silicon, supporting enough hardware threads to hide latency and keep those APUs saturated. (Yes the RISC-V vector extension has opcodes for gather/scatter in case you’re wondering).

---

Then, last but not least: RISC-V absolutely deserves the name it has because the whole thing started out at Berkeley. RISC I and II were the originals, II is what all the other RISC architectures were inspired by, III was a Smalltalk machine, IV Lisp. Then a long time nothing, then lecturers noticed that teaching modern microarches with old or ad-hoc insn sets is not a good idea, x86 is out of the question because full of hysterical raisins, ARM is actually quite clean but ARM demands a lot, and I mean a lot of money for the right to implement their ISA in custom silicon, so they started rolling their own in 2010. Calling it RISC V was a no-brainer.

barsoap , 4 days ago

ARM prominently has an instruction to deal with Javascript. And RISC-V will have those kinds of instructions, too, they’re too useful, saving a massive amount of instructions and cycles and the CPU itself doesn’t really need any logic added, the insn decoder just has to be taught a bit pattern and which microops to emit, the APUs already can do it.

What that instruction will never do in a RISC CPU though is read from memory.

On the flipside, some RISC-V macroops are CISC, fusing memory access and arithmetic. That’s an architecture detail, though, only affecting code to the degree of "if you want to do this stuff, and want it to run faster on some cores, put those instructions in this exact sequence so the core can spot and fuse them).

barsoap , 4 days ago

You don’t need a laptop to use a framework mainboard, they run without battery and display and everything. So if you have a Framework 13 or are in the market for one this might actually be a very nice thing, especially if the price is comparable to other boards.

barsoap , 4 days ago

You can develop using it as an SBC, then put it into the laptop when you go to a conference to present your stuff. Or if you really want to code in the park it’s not like it’d be a microcontroller, it is fast enough to run an editor and compiler.

But granted it’s a hassle to switch out the mainboard. OTOH you can also use the x86 board as an SBC so when you’re at home it doesn’t really matter which board happens to be inside.

I guess from framework’s POV there’s not much of an argument, it’s less “do people want potato laptops” but “do we want to get our feet wet with RISC-V and the SBC market”. Nobody actually needs to use it in a laptop for the whole thing to make sense to them.

barsoap , 4 days ago

Hooking up a BananaPi to a keyboard+monitor is going to be quite a bit cheaper, and unlike with the framework laptop you can’t re-use case, monitor, etc. with an upgraded board.

barsoap , 4 days ago

graphics, video, neural-net acceleration.

All three are kinda at least half-covered by the vector instructions which absolutely and utterly kills any BLAS workload dead. 3d workloads use fancy indexing schemes for texture mapping that aren’t included, video I guess you’d want some special APU sauce for wavelets or whatever (don’t know the first thing about codecs), neural nets should run fine as they are provided you have a GPU-like memory architecture, the vector extension certainly has gather/scatter opcodes. Oh, you’d want reduced precision but that’s in the pipeline.

Especially with stuff like NNs though the microarch is going to matter a lot. Even if a say convolution kernel from one manufacturers uses instructions a chip from another manufacturer understands, it’s probably not going to perform at an optimal level.

VPUs AFAIU are usually architected like DSPs: A bunch of APUs stitched together with a VLIW insn encoder very much not intended to run code that is in any way general-purpose, because the only thing it’ll ever run is hand-written assembly, anyway. Can’t find the numbers right now but IIRC my rk3399 comes with a VPU that out-flops both the six arm cores and the Mali GPU, combined, but it’s also hopeless to use for anything that can’t be streamed linearly from and to memory.

Graphics is the by far most interesting one in my view. That is, it’s a lot general purpose stuff (for GPGPU values of “general purpose”) with only a couple of bits and pieces domain-specific.

barsoap , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I can talk about how France, a white, French ethnostate, is mistreating Muslims without being a racist bigot

Oh boy with the French it doesn’t start with Muslims. It starts with the French, it goes back to at least 1500 with the 1900s being particularly nasty regarding language laws, their education policies eradicated a number of regional languages. And, crucially, they still haven’t reversed course. They got rid of the most damaging policies but still haven’t ratified the ECRML. As a European nation they’re supposed to protect minority and regional language against the onslaught of the Dachsprache.

Also French at least on paper is not a white ethnostate. It’s a French ethnostate. They don’t care about the colour of your skin as long as you carry baguettes under your arm, have an accent at least less grating than the Qubecois, your religion doesn’t matter as long as you’re hardcore secular, and you also need to choose a team in the butter vs. olive oil civil war.

barsoap , 6 days ago

I mean China can’t really do anything about the autonomous mainland provinces steadfastly refusing to declare independence, even if you can find precedent of a sovereign state kicking out its provinces unilaterally it’d still be a dick move.

barsoap , 5 days ago

The one China policy is first and foremost about the principle that there is only one China. Hence the name: That the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are still locked in a civil war, that neither declared independence from the other. There is no “reuniting” because you cannot unite what is not split, they’re still one.

Which is a rather different situation from divided Germany: The East declared independence as a new state, and the West accepted it. The West still considered Eastern citizens who made their way across the border her own citizens, but there was no “you can’t have your own sovereign state” stuff going on, from either side. Upon reunification the East re-introduced its federal states, which then jointly but individually joined the West, leaving the East without territory and people which thus vanished in a puff of how international law defines the concept of a state.

The Mainland could pull an East Germany and declare independence at any time, Taipei would accept it. Some old-guard Kuomintang would gripe but they’d get over it. Taipei declaring independence makes no sense… independence from whom? Imperial China? They won that struggle before the PRC even existed. It’s the PRC which is rebel faction in the civil war, you don’t declare independence from rebels if then you grant them independence and, well, the rebels don’t want independence.

barsoap , 5 days ago

Western Germany recognized the border between Poland - the Oder-Neisse line in 1970.

There was no final settlement until 1990. Because you cannot give up claims on territory you don’t actually control, the ROC is in a similar situation with Mongolia. In Germany’s case there’s the additional complication that until 1990, occupation statutes still applied.

This implied there was only one Germany, in area and population greater than just Western Germany.

No, it didn’t. First off, the preamble isn’t actually part of the constitution, secondly, it did not in any way or form claim rule or sovereignty over the Eastern states. “We’d like to re-absorb those territories” is a different thing than “those territories remain ours”.

Also, German public broadcast used the upper left map for weather reporting up until the 70s, when they switched to the one on the top right without any borders.

Until the early 60s, both sides claimed to be the successor state to the German Empire, the GDR dropped that claim with the construction of the wall. After literally a decade of discussion the West changed to the Neue Ostpolitik in the early 70s and recognised the GDR as a separate state in its territory but did not change its own self-conception as successor state of the Empire. With that it also stopped applying the Hallstein doctrine, stopped to consider other states recognising the GDR as sovereign to be a hostile act.

Then came the two-state period, then there was a revolution in the GDR and while we call it reunification, legally it was the absorption of federal states which happen to be on the territory of the now-former GDR into the constitutional framework of the FRG. Nothing special, happened before with Saarland. If you want to draw a parallel to China I guess you can make one: To the until 1960 situation, with the PRC saying “There’s going to be trouble, ROC, if you move to any other position, it’s the status quo or proper unification no alternative”.

Also, German public broadcast

…is not controlled by the government, least of all the federal government which is responsible, or at least co-responsible, for all foreign policy (but religion and culture because there the federal states are completely sovereign). It does reflect the political attitude back then: That the status quo borders were “arbitrary” and until there’s a better set, the old ones still somehow apply even if it doesn’t match the situation on the ground. The switch in 1970 was the broadcasters throwing their hands up in the air.

And you know what I think the map until 1970 is missing the border to Denmark if I’m not mistaken.

barsoap , 6 days ago

Nah phishing is a 90s term though probably coined in reference to phreaking. That started up in the 60s and by the 80s even the US had mostly switched to out of band signalling for their telephone system so none of the stuff worked any more.

barsoap , 7 days ago

Blender changed it to just start typing one or two minor versions ago. There’s certainly stuff I have no idea how to find in the menus because F3 is way more convenient than remembering things (just be aware that you still need to be in the right mode for stuff to show up).

barsoap , 7 days ago

Shit being uncomfortable has no relation to whether it’s true or not.

barsoap , 8 days ago

Maybe not for him, he very well might lose his neolib majority in the assembly, but looks like it’ll definitely pay off for France.

barsoap , 8 days ago

Without snap elections the right would have torn him apart and endangered his foreign policy. The left is going to be a headache for him when it comes to internal policy… but OTOH also stop people from burning cars in the street with their policies. And they’re quite likely to back him when it comes to Ukraine, his grand plan to Europeify French strategic autonomy, all that stuff.

Guy is still a man of boundless ambition and still wants to go down in history, and he can still do that with a left-dominated national assembly. Pension policy isn’t exactly a corner stone to his visions for the history books, it’s negotiable. Also just for the record it would be mistaken to have the impression that Macron thinks he’s the second coming of Napoleon: Completely to the contrary, he thinks that Napoleon was the first coming of Macron.

barsoap , 8 days ago

Melenchon is definitely not in favour of Russia keeping Ukraine. If I were him I’d take the chance of left unification to silently give up all my previous positions on the Russsia/Ukraine thing. France overall is less hawkish than Macron when it comes to boots on the ground, when it comes to NATO – Remember when Macron called NATO braindead? Melenchon doesn’t like EU austerity politics and such stuff but he’s not an Eurosceptic, he just wants a different Europe. His opposition to a European army was rooted in “an army against what”, again, he should use the chance to make people forget what he said about Russia in the past, if he really wants to get out of NATO strengthening European security integration is the way to go. Though personally I think it’s a good idea to have Europe overall in NATO after all someone has to keep somewhat of a leash on the US.

In any case foreign policy and security is presidential prerogative in France, Macron doesn’t need the assembly to do anything there – and the assembly doesn’t need Macron to do other stuff. If either of the sides is smart they’ll agree to disagree on a couple of things and not oppose each other too heavily, table any remaining issues until 2027 (next presidential elections).

barsoap , 8 days ago

He condemned the invasion but yes his policies on the issue are generally shit. He’s also not terribly popular as a unifying figurehead and candidate for becoming prime minister, though.

Basically it’s the same vulgar pacifism that you also see from some European lefties elsewhere, “we need to give diplomacy a chance”. I would be absolutely in favour of that if Russia ever gave it a chance, and if those chucklefucks wouldn’t completely ignore Ukraine’s sovereignty and instead substitute some “It’s the CIA, again” narrative.

barsoap , 9 days ago

Calling Terry racist is ableist. He was very much equal opportunity, applying the hard r to pale white CIA agents (imagined or otherwise).

barsoap , 9 days ago

You can keep the array processors fed with low IPC and frequency by having absolutely massive vector lengths, the engineering for that kind of processor isn’t in the pipeline, branch prediction etc. it’s in the APUs and how to stream data into them. Much more like GPUs, in fact RISC-V has instructions for gather/scatter.

barsoap , 9 days ago

Are the civilian victims less dead? Do their families feel differently?

No, and no. But intent still matters. Afghans learned that when you stand next to the wrong type of person, you could be hit, that if you stumbled across the wrong spot, like a hidden US observation post while herding your sheep, you could be hit.

There’s at least a plausible connection to military necessity. The US approach helps them fuck all when it comes to winning hearts and minds, and you’re still breeding resistance by eliminating that shepherd who stumbled across your position instead of calling a chopper to evacuate and relocate, but the people overall don’t feel like they’re being exterminated – because they aren’t. Because in the end, the US does have restraint, sometimes even to the degree that they’re willing to lose a battle over it, that was the case in Afghanistan for Taliban etc. holed up in Mosques.

That is, there’s insufficient regard for the civilian population on the US side, they’re prioritising tactical military goals too much – but not completely. The IDF doesn’t even know what regard for civilians is. The US is court marshalling soldiers left and right when they misbehave, Israel is applying military law to 10yold Palestinians who lobbed a stone at a tank, dishing out decade-long sentences. US soldiers carry sweets to hand out to kids. Those two attitudes are not the same, and if you think they are, you’re trivialising genocide.

barsoap , 9 days ago

Two, how the fuck are rural Afghanis supposed to know who’s on the CIA kill list?

The fuck does the CIA have to do with anything. And you don’t need to be a genius to infer that hanging out with insurgent commanders is not a safe thing to do.

How stupid do you think Afghans are. Do you think that they are capable of language, of exchanging observations and experiences and drawing collective conclusions from them.

Motherfucker.

If you kill civilians with an air force, that’s “collateral damage”. If you kill them with a truck bomb, that’s “terrorism”.

Bullshit. In both cases, collateral damage is if alongside with the enemy commander or whatever, any legitimate target, you take out civilians. It’s in the world “collateral”. Look it up. If you’re targeting civilians directly that’s not collateral.

barsoap , 9 days ago

Military “intelligence” has a lot of holes in it to rely on it as an authority on who lives or dies-- and that’s before we even get into “collateral”.

And that is why Germany’s kill lists had juridical oversight, and collateral damage was not measured in civilians but “people who at least look like they’re probably fighters”. The Taliban also once sent the Bundeswehr an apology letter, saying “Some idiots of ours thought your convoy was a US one hope you’re not mad”.

You seem to be under the impression that I’m defending the US approach, I’m not. What I am doing is contrasting it to the IDF while you’re engaged in trivialising IDF actions by insinuating the US is even half as bad. Even in Vietnam it wasn’t as bad as the IDF is right now. US military intelligence blindly believing random accusations? The IDF doesn’t even need those accusations to target you. Stochastic terrorism is part of their strategy.

Can you get it into your head that this isn’t a simple, binary, “good” and “bad” thing, that there’s degrees to everything?

barsoap , 9 days ago

IDF is worse than Hamas because of the context.

Hamas very much is an occupying force, too. They’ve been brutalising Gaza for quite a while and are very very happy with the result of October 7th. It got the exact response they wanted it to have, what’s luckily missing is the reaction among Palestinians they wanted it to have, those accelerationist fucks. “Make Israel crack down harder to make the population madder”.

Can you please stop that campism it’s brainrot. Just because fascists happen to be on the underdog side doesn’t make them in any way worthy of supporting, fascists love fighting other fascists as they can reinforce their respective holds over their own population.

barsoap , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Hamas and the variety of militias comprise the Palestinian armed resistance to Israeli occupation.

No. Generally speaking, that’s the role of the PLO, a bunch of secular lefties and also Palestine’s representative to the UN, which Hamas very much is not a part of. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, rabidly Islamist, very much more interested in martyrdom than liberation, more interested in making sure that male hair dressers don’t serve female customers for whatever fucked-up reason, and also very much funded with the at least aid of Israel. Because the PLO has too much foreign goodwill.

Note that I’m saying here “Hamas” as in the organisation. Individual fighters might indeed have better motives, and individual paramedics definitely have better motives. But the middle to upper levels of the organisation, the strategists, the mullahs? Islamofascist, the lot of them. Not a single bit better than the Kahanites on the other side. They love each other, as the existence of the other means their war indeed can be eternal (see Umberto Eco). There can be no Israeli security without Palestinian freedom, and there also can’t be Palestinian freedom without Israeli safety. The rest of Palestinians generally understand that, Hamas refuses to acknowledge it.

You know what you’re doing right now? You’re applauding the Mujahideen because they can be used to fight against the Soviets, blind to the Taliban you’re creating. You’re using the same fucked-up US doctrine that you slammed a few comments earlier. As said: Stop that “enemy of my enemy” campist bullshit.

barsoap , 8 days ago

They are following their strategy, not yours. Your bloodlust doesn’t matter.

barsoap , 7 days ago

It’s you who’s equating having military capacity and using it. It’s you who’s equating resisting occupation with massacring far-left hippie Kibbutzim who were out there in Gaza, helping Palestinians left and right, and on the 7th you probably also made fun of them having a rave.

The average Palestinian is channelling Ghandi hardcore and all you care about is giving Kahanites pretext for genocide while freeing them of the inconvenient lefty voices within Israel. That is what your support for Hamas does, critical or otherwise, because that’s what they’re doing. There were plenty of other targets in reach, plenty of other civilian targets, Hamas chose the hippies. Why?

barsoap , 7 days ago

Fuck noble how about strategically opportune. Is that a thing you can do, prioritise strategy and the achievement of aims over your bloodlust.

barsoap , 7 days ago

Have you actually ever had a look at what Palestinians say. Their political discourse. Would be a much more useful use of your time than mindlessly parroting thought-terminating cliches such as “If you are against bombing hippie civilians you’re pro genocide”.

Do you seriously think you know better what to do than Palestinians themselves. Is that some white saviour shit or something.

barsoap , 7 days ago

No. Which doesn’t have to do with anything. I also didn’t ask you to move there to have an opinion, all I asked you to do was reading up a bit on Palestinian politics. Was that so unthinkable a suggestion that you need to get all defensive now and attempt to deflect.

barsoap , 7 days ago

I am aware of the limitations of my own perspective,

Then be aware of the average attitude of Palestinians towards stoking the bear, will you, instead of coming here with an attitude of “The PLO is invalid because they’re not fighting they’re complicit in their own genocide”, as you very much insinuated.

Because, you know, being aware of the limitations of your own perspective includes not running your mouth when you haven’t done your research.