Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country. An area with an insanely high population density an almost no way in our out for armed forces of their own the what did you expect really?
I expect Israel would gladly hand the Gaza Strip back to Egypt at this point. It doesn't seem that Egypt wants it back.
The root cause of this mess is that the Palestinians want their land back (after it was bought from them first in the post-WW2 UN partition plan that broke up Palestine into a Palestinian section and a Jewish section and then later further taken by the new state of Israel in various wars)
FTFY
Yes, a very important point.
Actually, the root cause can be traced back another couple of decades, to the various crises in the British Mandate of Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. You might argue that the British handled things badly, but I'm not that sure that it could have been handled well. By the time World War II was over, there was little that could be done to repair the situation.
If you view either side as clearly in the right, you're a fucking fool.
Israel is clearly in the right.
That doesn't mean that Israel is without fault. Clearly, they're not. But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
The situation is not complicated. That doesn't mean solving it is easy; there are many simple problems that are hard to solve. But we can say for sure that false equivalencies do not help.
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one. At this very moment Israel and Gaza is exchanging rockets missiles and bombs and hundreds of people are being killed every day. If, as you say, "Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days", then do it and get it over with.
Israel are trying to minimise casualties on both sides. Hamas are trying to maximise Israeli casualties, and use Palestinian casualties to their political advantage. It's a perfect example of asymmetrical warfare; the capabilities and aims of the combatants are completely different.
Israel has the military capability to destroy Gaza, just as the US had the military capability to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan back in 2003. But doing so is not in their long-term interests.
Regarding the present situation, Hamas is clearly the aggressor, launching an unprovoked and strategically and tactically useless attack on Israel. Hamas wants Israel destroyed; Israel doesn't want to be destroyed. Not complicated.
The problem is it is not sustainable. Each intercept missile cost $60,000, a rocket launched by hamas costs $800.
Israel's GDP is the equivalent of about US$250 billion. They can easily afford tens of thousands of intercept missiles if it keeps the population safe.
Hamas can DDoS the hell of out Israel.
DDoS attacks generally rely on multiplier effects, getting someone else to do most of the work for you. Botnets, service vulnerabilities like the NTP reflection attack, that sort of thing. Hamas don't appear to have any such advantage.
All they need is decently trained soldiers and decent supply of rockets.
And if they had three fully-equipped tank divisions and a carrier group, that would help too.
If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
Two points: First, their improvisations are war crimes; second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
The charter for Stora, a Swedish mining company, was granted in 1347. It's probably the oldest limited-liability corporation in the world. Yes, it's still around today.
Then you're going to be disappointed.
The speed of light in optical fibre is about 200km per millisecond. So a round-trip ping of 10ms, ignoring all other sources of latency, limits you to a range of 1000km (call it 600 miles). And that's never going to change.
Yes.
Perhaps the simplest thing would be to point out that while America might be building walls to keep unwelcome visitors out, the Soviet Union built walls to keep its people in. A state that needs to imprison its entire population is not a state that has any right to exist.
I'm really not sure why we even need to discuss this. Assuming people are too young to personally remember this, were they also asleep during their history classes?
Communism is an economic theory that can't work in theory - it centralises economic planning leading to an insoluble information processing scaling problem, while at the same time destroying precisely the information (prices) that are needed to make sensible decisions - and has been proven not to work in practice. There have been plenty of Communist states. They all failed spectacularly, generally displaying massive corruption and brutal oppression as they did so.
They may not have looked like you imagine Communism should look, but that's because Communism cannot function at the scale of a nation-state, not in the real world, not with real people. And an economic theory that doesn't work unless people stop acting like people is not a very good theory.
Would it really be such a bad thing for the Soviet Union to come back?
Yes. The Soviet Union was a nightmare state.
The offered a balance of power. With the exception of a couple proxy wars (not that they weren't bad) we kept each other in check, but never checkmate. Compared to now, the world did its own thing.
Tell that to Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Not to mention North Korea and Vietnam. I'm sure they enjoyed doing their "own thing".
After the fall of the Soviet Union, we immediately elevated ourselves to the status of, "United States of America: Full-Time World Cop." That has not gone well. I sometimes miss the sanity of mutually assured destruction.
What? Seriously, what? How old are you? Do you actually remember the Cold War?
The fact that America is a flawed nation is no excuse for false equivalencies with brutal totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. Those countries, under those leaders, deliberately killed tens of millions of their own people. We never want to see anything like that again.
There is no meaningful difference between totalitarian regimens in practice. The only real difference are the excuses. Fascism, Communism and Nazism are one and the same, and no it s not possible to have a non totalitarian communist country. Communism needs big and all powerful governments and those governments as they grow become more and more totalitarian. There is no way to avoid it.
I agree with that for the most part (and history bears you out with regards to Communism). However, Fascism doesn't tie itself to a specific, unworkable, economic theory; it accepts capitalism so long as the state maintains control. Which is is a very prominent factor in Russia of late, possibly even more than in China.
Fascism is far more apt for Russia's state of government under Putin than Communism.
£5.5M for a year's support for hundreds of thousands of of XP systems is extremely good value, and far cheaper than any other option.
Of course, they'll still be in the same position a year from now. But in government, if you pass the buck for long enough, it becomes someone else's problem.
Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one you are least interested, and say nothing about the other.
