I have very course facial hair and switching to women’s razors pretty much solved my post-shave irritation problem. In order of quality for my face it goes: men’s disposable razor << safty razor < women’s disposable razor.

Because tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily rising since October 7th because of Hzebollah’s objection to how Israel is acting in Gaza. To be clear, prior to October 7th, tensions were already high enough that they would regularly lob bombs at each other. Today’s “escalated” tensions include northern Israel being evacuated due to threats from Hezbolla’s rocket attacks.

At this point, it is clear that the options available to Israel are to either withdraw from Gaza and hope Hezbolla stands down, or end up in a full war with Hezbolla. Historians will say that the war with Hezbolla started months ago, and this was just one attack among many.

But they didn’t because materials that explode like that simply aren’t used as batteries.

Further, software is not magic. In consumer electronics basic power management is done entirely by hardware. A hack cannot short out the battery, because the circuit to do that simply doesn’t exist. Maybe the hack could cause enough of a sustained power draw to overheat the battery and trigger a failure eventually, but that would still look quite different from what we saw.

I can’t guarantee that none of those drivers were actually part of Hamas

We need to get passed the idea that the mere presence of a Hamas member justifies all military action. Assuming it is true, what were those Hamas members doing?

Throwing away the vaccines to use the marked car for transporting weapons and fighters? Valid military target (and a war crime)

Assisting in distributing polio vaccines? Not a valid target.

No good Sir, I’m on the level.

The President’s role is largely ceremonial. The President consults party leaders to determine who they would support, then nominates that person. The nominee must then form a coalition that can get support from a majority of the Knesset.

How do you think intelligence agencies work? There is a reason why background investigations for security clearences focus so much on “is there anything you can be blackmailed with”

It was not compulsory for Ben Gvir, who was excused from compulsory service because the IDF at the tine thought he was too extreme. He has since been convicted of terrorism, and currently serves as Israel’s minister of defense.

The problem with Israel is that its leader was a bit too vile. About half of the elected knesset refused to form a coalition government with Netenyahu, resulting in years of failing to form a governing coalition.

Eventually, the path out of the stalemate ended up being forming a coalition with far right members of the knesset that had previously been political pariahs; including appointing a convicted terrorist to the role of minister of national security.

Prior to October 7, this was an extremely tenous political position. The coalition was hanging on by a thread. The attempted judicial coup reform was stopped by massive public backlash. And the politian whose divisiveness was central to the political crises that enabled the far right to join the coalition was in the middle of defending himself in a criminal trial. However, when a crisis like October 7 happens, you are stuck with the leaders you have. And Israeli leadership at the time was possibly the worst in the history of the country for handling it (unless you agree with their manifest destiny version of Zionism, in which case I think they are doing quite well).

When you are looking at someone down the scope of a gun, you do not see a kidnapper, or a mudered. You see a person. That is not a moral judgment. It is a deep instinctual inpulse we have, enhanced by a lifetime of socialization, against killing people. Half of the point of military training is getting people to overcome tharmt base instinct.

As the commanders say, these soldiers have not had adequate training.

We are talking about US politics here, so I’m assuming the focus is what the US has been doing.

Stop funding and supplying arms to Israel.

Like the $20 billion we approved earlier this month (in direct violation of the foreign assistance act)

recognize Palestine as a state

We simply do not do this. Then again we don’t recognize Taiwan either.

Back ICJ arrest ruling for Netenyahu

The US has been opposed to this warrent, and there is talk of sanctioning the ICJ over it.

Should anyone ever arrest any Israeli official pursuant to an ICJ ruling, there is standing US law (American Service-Members’ Protection Act, otherwise known as the invade the Hague act) authorizing the President to use full military force to secure their release [0]

Urge the UN to sanction Israel

The US is routinely the sole veto on every major UN vote on Israel.

[0] This isn’t Israel specific. It us authorized for bassically any ally that is not an ICJ member.

Neutral and Israel alligned countries have been calling for a humanatarian pause on purely humanitarian grounds. Even if you don’t care about the hostages, that Hamas was willing to offer them means that they had an interest in such a pause as well; making Israel the only obstacle to it happening. That is to say, the severity of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is squarly on Israel’s shoulders. The most charitable reading of the situation is that they have determined that the tactical advantage of blocking a humanitarian pause outways the civilian lives they put at risk by doing so.

Admit that the project of establishing a democratic Jewish state has failed, and try to salvage a democratic state out of the rubble.

The UK is not supporting Hamas, so their is no point in protesting their support for Hamas. If you want to fly to Iran and protest their support of Hamas, that would make sense.

The BBC also doesn’t call them terrorists:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67083432

So, will the people currently living in the to be annexed territory be allowed to become Israeli citizens and retain full rights to their homes? Will the people who left northern Gaza at the instruction of Israel (instructions which Israel used to justify their bombing campaign), be allowed to return to their homes as Israeli citizens?

Will the conditions in a smaller and more densely populated Gaza; where Israeli annexation is now fresh in everyone’s living memory be less conducive to terrorism. Will this help Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighboors, which had been seeing significant normalization prior to Hamas’s attack?

I’ve been hereing a lot of people warn of this offensive as being a second Nakba. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba Comparing this reporting with what happened in the Nakba, that seems like a scaringly likely prediction.

Looking at how the first Nakba turns out, it is hard to see how anyone can think repeating it will end well for Israel.

Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.

In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.

If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.

Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.

Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.

Israel and Palestine are both countries. Private ownership does not factor into the equation. If you get into the weeds, part of the dispute is a claim of private property rights that predate Israel. But even that duspute could be viewed through the lense of collective rights.

There is only one country whose national religion is Judaism, but it is practiced in plenty of other places.

More to the point, the fact that there are other Islamic countries is of little comfort to the Palestinians. They do not live in those countries and those countries do not want them.

Some of those countries do provide varying levels of support for Hamas because they (accurately) see it as an indirect way to attack Israel.

By the same token, any blame you want to place on Israel for this conflict reflects on Isreal as whole, and not every individual living within it.

But if you direct people to forcibly take a kid to a camp that uses face punching as a “therapeutic” treatment, while endorsing said camp with your national platform…

Technically that might not be “direct” violence, but it is pretty direct indirect violence.