I have been reflecting recently that I was not learning the same lessons about the Holocaust as some of my classmates. I got the impression nothing like it should ever be allowed again and we should do everything we can to stop it when we see the signs. I assumed everyone got that impression but I'm realizing that was not the case.
I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can't help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.
You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.
Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say "Well... it's complicated." And if it's complicated -- if it's not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil -- then it must not be genocide.
Yeah, I think this "cartooning of evil" is at the core of American patriotism and entitlement. There are a lot of Americans who legitimately believe that we're immune to certain phenomena "because we're American". It's the same as when people say they're not racist "because they're not trying to be". Or the rich man bankrolling the presidency isn't evil because he doesn't twirl a mustache.
In the same way, this can't be genocide, because we would never do a genocide! We're just doing what we believe needs to be done to maintain our standard of living...
My Oma was in the Netherlands in the 1930s. Her family sheltered part of a jewish family(the elderly mother who was too sick to escape to North America, and one of her sons, a lawyer, who stayed behind to care for her.) This was before the invasion and the start of the war.
At the time, late 1930s, she said that everyone knew something bad was happening to the Jewish people the Nazis rounded up, but not what.
After more than a year of occupation, they were turned in by a neighbor for extra rations because none of her family needed daily visits from a doctor. The Nazis took the two Jewish people and her Dad into a camp.
A local factory owner, some months on, tried to have everyone from the area released in return for his compliance in letting them use his factory output. Her dad was among those released, but they refused to release any Jewish prisoners. Her parents then immediately joined the resistance and helped it out until the end of the war. The factory owner allegedly ensured that the output to the Nazis was changed to be only subtly defective units, pipe walls too thin, cooled too quickly etc.
Okay, we might get to 2.5 degrees, but the economy!
This will go on until we get to around 5 degree and most parts of the world have become uninhabitable and most animals and vegetation has gone extinct and we've locked ourselves in perpetual wars due to water and food shortages. Sounds like a shitty B movie, but this is what I truely believe we will end up with.
I’m hopeful economies and governments will collapse before 3 degrees and measures will be put in place. I’m not extrapolating a utopian future. Before we get to the point where the world reacts, there will be many wars, migration and fascism. But as it gets worse, I’m hopeful groups will work together and fight for a better future.
Nah, what will happen is that said incompetent governments will be replaced by incompetent dictatorships that will just tell people over the barrel of a gun that things are better now.
If it makes you feel any better, once it gets that bad, society will eventually break down and our CO2 levels will naturally return to normal over the next several centuries while the Earth is reclaimed by nature as we go extinct.
Fun fact: a lot of mining companies have been incorporating climate change projections into their closure plans for years now, using RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 scenarios. Hey, we are using a thermal cover to make sure this gargantuan pile of mine waste rock doesn't cause metal leaching/acid rock drainage issues later on: we'd better over-engineer it to take on higher-than expected warming, given that we'll be liable for it for the next 100+ years
Common Dreams can be a little much some times. Here's Politico's take which is a bit more dry.
Some important notes though. Aid groups absolutely dispute that there's an ability to fit everyone in the designated area; feed the people that can fit; and that Israel will allow everyone who wants to evacuate to do so in good faith.
So there are very good objections to this plan. If the IDF let people pass without mass arrests or randomly deciding to shoot at the people crossing their lines then that would be good. But it has not been the norm. Which brings us to the next problem. The IDF has behaved so criminally, the people of Gaza do not trust their announcements of where to go for safety.
At this point the only correct answer is an immediate ceasefire. The removal of all IDF troops from Gaza. And an international war crimes tribunal.
Fine. Let them be replaced in due course by a legitimate form of government that is fairly elected. Sounds great to me.
You know I don't see Gaza as an illegal occupation. I did before October 7th. I find the settlements in the West Bank to be still illegal.
In my learned opinion though, after October 7, Israel has good and just cause to go to war to eliminate Hamas, the de facto government-in-hiding of Gaza, and its tunnel network. Hamas is not a legitimate government and can simply no longer remain in charge, dead or alive. I don't see anything illegal about occupation, the goal of which is to achieve that end, because n so far as Gaza ever was a state under Hamas, it is now a collapsed state with no effective government, legitimate or otherwise. It's a rump state. Irredeemable territory. And, in that case, it's the neighbor's duty to step in, establish law and order, and govern temporarily, legitimately and equitably.
Martial law is a legitimate form of interim government during a transition from hot war to reconstruction, before a provisional government of local stakeholders can decide how to form and choose a new government. No government run by the whims of a few religious people will ever be legitimate.
Hamas was fairly elected. Israel and the US were the ones that interfered because they didn't like Hamas trying to go legitimate.
And no, just no. This is not Just War Theory. In Just War Theory you don't carpet bomb residential areas. You don't make the Hospitals main targets and you certainly don't repeatedly attack and kill plainly marked journalists standing in the open. You cannot commit war crimes and then claim it falls under Just War Theory. That's the complete opposite of that theory.
And it's a collapsed state because Israel ensured that, by preventing the legitimate winners of the election from taking power peacefully, by blockading them when the people who voted for them rightfully put them in power anyways, and by repeatedly attacking them over the last couple decades, claiming any government official was a terrorist including civil servants running the basic infrastructure of the region. You cannot punch your neighbor in the face, and then move into his home on the theory that he's in the hospital now and call it a moral argument.
What a joke. Hamas was elected, after telling people not to participate in the elections. They die take power and immediately used it to cancel all future elections.
They collapsed as their own state. Hamas corrupted everything it touched. They turned every institutiom into instrumentalities of international terrorism. They robbed the country of its whatever resources and wealth it had and used the money to launch suicide bombings and rocket attacks and to dig the tunnels which they use to smuggle fighters and rocket launching systems. Hamas big wigs are hiding under ground or living in Qatar with lavish wealth while their families are in Gaza starving.
All they had to do was reject violent extremism at any turn, and they couldn't do it. These are deranged fucking worthless people and nobody is going to miss Hamas. Anyone that does should join them.
Pan Islamist terrorists don't get to "go legit" and have their own state. Never going to happen.
And it's a collapsed state because Israel ensured that, by preventing the legitimate winners of the election from taking power peacefully, by blockading them when the people who voted for them rightfully put them in power anyways, and by repeatedly attacking them over the last couple decades, claiming any government official was a terrorist including civil servants running the basic infrastructure of the region. You cannot punch your neighbor in the face, and then move into his home on the theory that he's in the hospital now and call it a moral argument.
I agree. Nobody should be getting forced to go anywhere. In a "normal" war humanitarian routes would be established along with Internally Displaced People camps run to the UN standards. Those routes would be inviolate except for checkpoints to search people, and every stray round impacting near them would result in a full investigation. Aid would be flooding these camps and the entire zone behind the front lines. People would be encouraged but not required to leave within a distinct timeline.
The IDF has not done that. They've basically done the opposite of that. They want to force people to leave the area with the aid, into a camp that mathematically cannot meet UN standards. They've already said they're going to detain all men attempting to leave the area. And they routinely fire into their own humanitarian corridors. This entire operation is a war crime from the top down to the sergeants.
Only correct answer is an multi-national subjugation force to kill the IDF forces in Gaza, then push into Israel and take the current government into custody to be put on Nuremberg-style trials while setting up an interim government in Israel.
If there is some sort of cease fire, the UN needs to bring in a Cyprus style peace keeping force to physically stand between Israel and Palestine for a generation (or probably more).
Anything less will just lead to the same repeated outbursts of violence that we've seen for the past 70 years.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Netanyahu's war crimes, but that's something that's never going to happen. Far more likely is evidence continues to go to the ICC and arrest warrants rain from the skies. Then there's a bunch of conservative Israelis who are stuck in Israel or Russia/China aligned countries. And they have to live with the knowledge that they are the new low hanging political piñata for every American president who needs a polling bump.
Oh no there are definitely novel parts to this. That's what makes it so interesting. And it's still way more likely than a multi national coalition going there without the UN.
Bit of a misdirect in the headline. This was not primarily a scientific projection. This was a political reckoning by scientists who had recently suffered the bureaucratic pain of serving on the IPCC, and voluntarily responded to a survey.
As one climate scientist put it:
"As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make," Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. "We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades."
Change never comes from politicians first, but these are people who are zoomed in on whether politicians are changing their minds.
They're not going to change their minds slowly over time. It's gonna be nothing at all until the electorate is too loud to ignore, and then suddenly 100% of officials will claim they've "always condemned fossil fuels", "from day one", and "in the strongest terms possible".
We've seen time and again that policy changes tend to bubble just below the surface for long time and then suddenly emerge with multiple changes happening in quick succession.
I was of voting age when just saying the word "civil union" in the context of gay rights was political suicide, and I'm not that old. Things can change quickly. Keep your hope alive and keep agitating. We can do this.
The intentionally-created famine and water shortage may be the worst war crime of all. There aren’t enough bombs to kill everyone, but starvation and thirst will.
Human beings should not be treated this way. At least allow humanitarian aide in for innocent civilians. Children.
The cruelty is absolutely the point here. They want to ethnicly cleanse them, whichever way is quickest before the international community actually does anything about it.
Starvation of civilian populations is a time honored military strategy. Bonus if you starve them out, then use catapults to launch infected/rotten livestock over the walls.
"Chivalry was abandoned, too, if the fight dragged on, such as when Henry V had dead animals thrown into the wells of Rouen in France during his siege of 1418-19 CE. Catapults might launch manure and corpses in the hope of spreading disease amongst the enemy."
Which Monty Python reversed for comedy in Holy Grail:
And it has been clear since the 10. October after Israel stated to block all food, water, electricity, medial aid and other goods for basic human survival, stating to fight "Human animals" and stating that "there is no uninvolved Civilians"
There was a powercut this week in a large part of Mexico (I know because of family from there). They're getting rarer now as Mexico has really tried to get its grid uptogether. The downside of countries like this having more stable grids is more people and business installing aircon systems, which just means more energy used, more emissions.
The funny thing is there are ways to passively cool areas. You can literally install shading over windows and walls that face the main sun. Last year in the UK we had a few days where it was over 35C. Nobody here has aircon. So that heat is a shock to us. But I managed to cover the outside of open windows with reflective bubble wrap insulation cut into sheets.
I also installed a small solar system on our shed to run a fridge freezer out there. The funny thing is the half inch stand-offs actively created significant shading and the inside of the shed really cooled down to where we could sit in there and chill out or do tasks without melting. When I realised this I started looking online for research on solar power and shading and found agrovoltaics. Solar panels over farm crops such as fruit in hotter regions mean less watering needed... its more spread out than usual solar farms as it has to let the sun in a bit more to the food but its something that needs to be done more.
I also read of people ignoring their energy policy for their home electric and installing grid-tie solar. They use sheds, stands in their garden, conservatory roofing etc, and usually just a few hundred watts of solar. Typically homes have a fuse rating of 30-50 amps. One 300w solar panel grid tied is not going to be anywhere near that, but will mean up to 300w of clean energy. Energy companies should just allow these systems, even provide them if its a problem or worry to them. You can buy this stuff off amazon for a few hundred quid.
Also, and it's kinda insane to me that not more people do this: just grow any plant on the sides of your house. If you are worried about your walls build a cheap metal fence a few centimetres before that wall. It's the cheapest insulation you can get.
Wild wine, ivy, anything that will climb and live more than a year would work.
we need some people, either hacking or inside job, setting the temperature in all conference rooms used by any politicians worldwide 2.5 degrees C higher than normal.
The shitty thing is they'd start wearing lighter clothes, and use it as a campaign point that it's not that bad, actually. Power appears to be a hell of a drug.
It's all just scare tactics, they'll say.
Also, that feeling of power.
Ah, the entire collection of S. Harris' Global Warming cartoons, though lumped together with other environmental topics, is worth linking.
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