It is complex and yet it isn’t. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.

If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.

At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.

Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.

The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.

Why are your citizens somehow more valuable than any other citizens? I am not even saying do nothing. I am saying killing people indiscriminately is not OK.

Second, if these are unprovoked attacks I have no idea what in your world constitutes provoked. I don’t think attacks being provoked makes them right but they didn’t come out of nothing. Israel is not an innocent party here. Neither is Palestine.

There is another question on a micro level. How many people who are not about to kill you can you kill in self-defence to save how many people?

While in theory, every human life is as important and valued as another we do often in practice allow some movement morally.

The third question is immediacy. Are you allowed to kill someone in self-defence if you know they will kill you tomorrow? Is it just current action, and how far current stretches.

But while those are simplified questions on the philosophy of ethics in these situations they don’t entirely apply to Israel and Palestine. That is because they ignore the power imbalance.

While Israel is part of the cause of Islamic terrorism in Europe, I think we should not pat too much on our backs. Yes, our countries’ positions taking sides on Israel is problematic as hell and so is us being tied to the US in the minds of many people outside Europe. But so is our own Islamophobia. I get where it comes from, but othering and sidelining people will lead to further radicalization. Which for people whose Islamophobia is rooted in current oppression in many Islamic societies, is entirely opposite of what they want.

If Israel wants to keep occupying an area, yes they do have the responsibility to keep supplying vital supplies to Gaza. Even if some of them would be terrorists. And while some of them could be called terrorists, you do not have permission to deliberately cause harm to everyone in largish area.

You being attacked does not allow you to commit war crimes, genocide or ethnic cleansing. This is not a grey area.

Which was influenced largely by the antisemitism of the West and the rise of Zionism for Jewish people which is partly radicalization as a response to thousands of years of oppression. But Brits were still in power with colonialism in full force.

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I had it but really had to scroll to the bottom. It was also not Reddit but articles saying it was the first result. Which is kind of ironic.

And criminalization of civil society is in general thriving in many European countries including France.

I didn’t say it is worse than it ever was. Just saying it is not the best it ever was either.

My perspective comes from the fact that I am an aid worker and human rights activist. This has nothing to do with online discourse. My perspective is also not only found in online echo chambers. It is common among my colleagues. I am not referring to Twitter dying. I don’t care about that. And yes, activism is at least in my field of activism pretty damn ineffective. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

While the number of wars is less than 20 years ago there is an uneven but increasing trend for the past decade. Last year casualties were also more than at least 89 apart from a huge spike in 94. Amount of refugees has also been increasing in the past decade a little bit faster than the world population has.

Despite these facts, globally things are not at least yet out of hand. At the same time, there are many countries, especially in the West where current politicians are dismantling social security nets and human rights legislation. We are also increasingly seeing the effect of climate change on conflicts and displacement. Famine is thankfully rarer than ever before but we are so badly behind on any environmental action that it is pretty much guaranteed to happen more and more. I might be less pessimistic if the climate crisis weren’t staring us right at our faces. In general, historically things have gotten better and better with some lows. If we had time, we could probably sort ourselves out. There are also a lot of very smart people that could help with the existential threat but after the past decade, I don’t trust that they will be allowed to fix it.

You can also only be almost completely anonymous if you know what you are doing. The majority of people don’t know how. While data gathered from default users might officially be anonymized, the amount of data collected will often make you pretty easily identified. Zero-click spyware that has already been used against political opponents while not relevant to most average Joes do exist.

The world can’t be pulled up by your bootstraps. Most defeating is that you can do anything in your power and things still get worse. Yes, I might have more than a touch of secondary trauma but activism these days feels like hitting your head on the wall repeatedly. You can’t stop people from dying. You risk ending up in jail in too many countries that you once thought were civilized. And you are once again marching again Nazis when they sit in parliament in too many countries.

When pre-pubescent children transition, they don’t start by physically transitioning. It is purely a social transition until the onset or probable onset of puberty and it isn’t done by kid one day deciding that they are trans. There are usually multiple medical professionals including a lot of counselling. Even when puberty blockers come into picture it is still reversible. Hormone replacement might later come into picture and that can have permanent changes. But it is not started willy nilly either. Detransition is rare with incidence rates between 1-6% of transitioned kids depending research.

What your opinion is missing is that mental health issues are far more likely in trans youth whose gender identity is not supported socially and possibly medically while incidence of mental health issues in trans youth whose gender identity is supported have incidence rates comparable to general public. This is why transition as it currently (lot less common, slower, in beginning entirely reversible, surgery rare) is offered to kids. The benefits outweigh the risks.

I might have to print it and put it on a lanyard. Or it sometimes feels like that.

The good thing for him is that he was so young when he was diagnosed that he probably doesn’t know anything else. Saying this from personal experience as I was diagnosed at 14 months in mid 80s. Of course, something like this would be amazing as I can’t tolerate even small amounts of accidental gluten but as I don’t know anything else I can’t even imagine anything else.

I also have really complicated relationship with hope. Mainly, I try not to hope as my body seems to be insanely problematic. I am disabled with multiple autoimmune diseases and genetic syndrome. While objectively I find the advancement in treatment interesting and amazing, I personally try not to hope. It is absolutely exhausting to get your hopes up only for the other shoe to drop.

I am 86 baby and you are one of the only very few people born in 80s or earlier that had really early adoption to computers in addition to me. I could use MS-DOS before I could write anything else as I also had had computer available since pretty much birth also because of my dads job.

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That was part of the issue. The father of the idea that handwashing can lower people getting puerperal fever and even other infections Ignaz Semmelweis was practicing in the 1840s in Vienna and during that time doctors were already top of working society. Because there was no idea of the germ theory of disease until later he was basically saying that first the doctors were responsible for deaths that could rise to 18% child birthing women in hospitals and secondly that they were unclean people. As gentlemen latter was offensive as that class of people both didn’t have to get their hands dirty in the way “lower” classes had to and if they got dirty definitely didn’t keep them dirty. Ignaz’s theory why didn’t help as he thought their hands were dirty with cadaver or animal carcass matter and not with invisible microbes.

That is also where white-collar and blue-collar worker terms come from. White collar workers didn’t have to get so too dirty working that they couldn’t wear a white shirt and collar (which was a separate piece of garment until the early 20th century).

Even though doctors washing hands lowered the puerperal fever deaths to about 1% in the maternity ward of Ignaz’s hospital handwashing didn’t really become a thing in hospitals at that point. It needed many other people to get it through in 1850s and 1860s.

No one said the people running it are competent.