gattsuru
1yr ago
I think it's too large for Qassams without a secondary explosion; depending on model they're usually 5-20 kg TNT- or ANFO-shrapnel mixes, plus whatever fuel was left over. This card is absolutely inappropriate for comparison, but it's the sort of thing that the ATF doesn't shoot people for talking about, and I don't think it gives anywhere near the boom present there.
That said, there's other which less commonly-used payloads, and they range from 100lbs-300lbs, often of better high explosives without as much (or any) mixed-in shrapnel.
There's always the possibility of a golden BB: even a small warhead can cause tremendous damage if it hits the wrong place. Hospitals will naturally have people in fairly close quarters in an environment like this, as well as a lot of oxygen tanks and fuel moving around. It doesn't look like secondary explosives, but sometimes that's hard to identify.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
I'm not sure if the Iron Dome interceptor -- and the bright rocket flare is definitely an interceptor -- that's the focus of the first fifteen seconds of these videos is related, or just what distracted the cameramen before a separate rocket launched into the disaster.
EDIT: strike that, I'm not convinced the prolonged rocket flare and airborne detonation is proof it was an interceptor. Hassams don't act like that, even during the ascent phase, but some of the longer-range rockets might./EDIT
I don't do rocket science, but in the general aviation world the rule of thumb for freefall is 3-10 seconds per 1000 foot drop, and napkin math for a powered-but-sub-mach rocket gives a limit of almost a second per 1000 foot distance. It's possible that the Iron Dome interceptor EDIT: or an internal failure /EDIT damaged a guidance surface without breaking up the rocket's motor or general structure, and then you get close to normal (or even higher) speed but a wildly wrong direction. That's... not impossible, although I'd be weirded out by the multiple detonations, but there's a lot of OSI people giving it credence so what do I know.
IF the IDF is telling the truth, which isn't a given, it's possible that the second flash of light while the cameramen are looking upwards at the interceptor was a separate launch, which misfired into far too shallow an angle or with partial motor failures, and the near-instant impact is the rocket working up to speed and hitting the ground. But they're really too close in time for the claimed rocket trajectory. Maybe a motor failure and detonation in mid-air for the first flash shortly after launch, then the payload impacted on a ballistic trajectory?
Dunno. It's pretty far outside of my field of focus.
EDIT: and to be clear, I don’t think Hamas has or even wants SCUDs specifically; they’re just about similar in yield to the upper bound of known rockets in the Strip, which we have a known mass casualty incident.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least part of the issue's that there's a mess of allegations, here. Some of them are just creepy combined with the rest of the stuff (eg, he'd buy students expensive dinners); others are the sorta thing that justify pitchforks and torches on its own.
TOSU's college locker rooms were allegedly a nest of peeping toms and exhibitionist masturbation, and a lot of people unrelated to the lawsuits giving allegations that Jordan knew about (and reacted to!) Strauss being part of that. See page 55 here. This is pretty bad behavior unless you're in a gay bathhouse, and honestly a little distasteful even there, but it was also allegedly not just Strauss, and while it's illegal it's usually the sorta thing that just gets you banned rather than arrested. There's not a good count for how many times this happened, but eighty-four students said they observed it at least once; there's basically zero chance Jordan was unaware of it.
Then, separately, Strauss was also inviting random people photo sessions, sometimes having the photo subject pose topless or in wrestling singlets, then groping them. That's wildly inappropriate given the power disparity. The investigation found 16 students who described this behavior, most of them encountering one or two incidents before avoiding the man entirely after that, and since we're mostly talking the 1980s or early 90s, there's a lot of very good reasons that they would not have told everyone contemporaneously, or that everyone would have recognized what Strauss was doing -- even for some gay people in the 80s, this would have looked like 'just' really awkward overtures rather than grooming. A larger number were targeted for photography in their underwear as part of medical studies Strauss lead, but this is not as clearly abuse rather than just creepy given the abuse. Jordan probably would have heard of at least some of this, but probably not in detail, and it's not certain.
Then you have a lot of molestation pretending to be medical exams, ranging from groping them beyond any necessary testicular exam to unnecessary rectal exams. This seems to have been the largest category, with 122 athletic students being targeted, some with multiple incidents. This was and is legally and morally sexual assault, but not all victims realized it at the time, and the extent it was present in earlier complaints rather than rumors is not well-established. By 1994, there had been both internal and external complaints, but it's not clear if Jordan would have been involved in the resolution of those complaints, as a lot of this occurred through Strauss' access to the medical care team rather than through the school's sports program, but he might have heard of some rumors.
Then you have overt sexual assault or, to borrow from Oprah, rape-rape. This ranged from performing unnecessary digital rectal exams and then grinding an erection against the victim to digital or oral sex to try to create an erection or to completion. There are clear reports of this behavior by January 1996, and Strauss used some shaming tactics that probably would have prevented earlier victims from coming forward, and the investigation found 44 students who described behaviors along these lines. Again, much of these happened under the auspices of TOSU's medical care side rather than its sports medicine one, and most of the complaints along these lines were from the end or outside of Jordan's tenure, so it's not clear that he would have been involved but might have heard rumors.
And then you have the molestation of minors, which was the highest-profile allegation. The investigation found a couple people who probably were abused in manner related to Strauss's position in high schools, but only one gave a first-hand account, and that account was not clearly abuse. There's not much obvious reason why Jordan would have been aware of these allegations.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The cyclical pattern is common, and some people with Crohn's modify their schedule to work around it.
Unfortunately, beyond that, Crohn's seems to be one of those things where people have drastically different responses. I've heard reports of people who consistently have flareups not just to specific foods, but certain types of perfume, temperature swings, alcohol, which are not common even to relatives with Crohn's/IBD.
The typical recommendation is to set up a food diary with a rating system, but I don't know how productive that is.
The IDF is claiming that the hospital impact was from a PIJ rocket (Palestine Islamic Jihad?), with some video showing a failed rocket launch with the right time stamps (maybe not; see below) as one of many in the salvo. Doesn't make it the truth, especially since it's hard to see what hit where, but video evidence is still worth a bit.
Still finding the casualty count weird. We know what happens when a Scud hits a crowded and ill-armored building, and almost all of the arms involved here are sub-Scud payload-wise. I'd expect hospital patients to be more vulnerable than soldiers, but this much more? Maybe if something big on the ground cooked off.
It's quite possible it's unintentional rather than an IDF hit or a false flag; Hamas has been firing a lot of rockets out, and especially as they move to older ammo they're going to have their already-high misfire rate increase, and some of the bigger rockets don't die easy after an intercept.
The numbers are also... weird, either way. Neither the typical IDF nor the typical Hamas impactor have the sort of dispersal or energy payload that you'd expect to kill a hundred people in a single strike, even assuming tightly clustered beds and the sort of nearby flammables common to hospitals (eg, oxygen tanks, fuel reserves).
gattsuru
1yr ago
They're better at it than the Germans, as the morbid joke goes, but that's damning with faint praise and Hamas has put a lot of effort into making past hostages very hard to recover at all and especially recover alive. (Cfe Shalit's 400-meter claymore zone.
Again, I don't expect them to succeed, at least at the sort of scales required to avoid "Pyrrhic" from being the go-to term. I just don't see anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Qatar.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think the military checkpoints are more meaningful examples: being vulnerable to blockade and international electricity/water shipments describes a lot of places everyone considers states with sovereignty.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Total sedation is pretty rare for colonoscopies these days; even if you ask for it, a lot of places in the US will just sedate you enough that you can't remember it when you come back. There's some fun ethical and philosophical arguments about that mess, but mostly just don't try to think too hard about it.
If you are thinking to yourself “That’s a lot of fluid” you are thinking the same thing I thought. And it is. It’s two liters.
I don't know if it's approved in Japan, but there's an alternative to the two liters of Go-Lightly, called Phospho Soda. It's two tiny satchets, usually mixed into a small cup of water or clear soda.
Do not take it.
You can't get it any more in the United States because of some possible health risks, but even if you don't care about those (and they are kinda ill-supported), do not take them.
I've downed coconut water on a very badly-placed bet. Chugged a liter of unflavored barium sulfate. I've had (and resisted vomiting after) ipecac. I've had the incredibly-unpleasant situation of vomiting from airsickness, having the choice of either wearing or swallowing it, and making the wrong decision.
Fleet Phospho Soda still remains the single least pleasant thing I've had in my mouth. It's not that it tastes bad, because if you let it touch your tongue you've already lost the battle, and even then you still can't really taste it because there's not much to taste. It's just aversive, beyond all things, as if it were just a glass of the words "do not imbibe" in liquid form. As a colonoscopy prep, it had skeptics and a high failure rate simply because so many patients would vomit it up; among patients who used it, the most common warning was to never mix it into a drink you liked, or with water, because you'd never be able to drink it again without having flashbacks.
I heard good things about SUTAB (generic name is a mix of sodium sulfate, magnesium sulfate, and potassium chloride). Haven't tried it myself yet though.
Yes, to be very clear I don't expect the IDF has a good plan to rescue the hostages alive, or that such a good plan exists or is even possible. They just have a plan to release time pressure. Gush Etzion was 2014.
To be charitable, again we're talking a lot of babies or the elderly, a few chronically ill or recently-injured, and a lot of women. There's worse things than death, and years of negotiations give a lot of time for those worse things to happen and then death, followed by the disappearance of the bodies. To be less charitable, part of wartime leadership is not giving orders you know won't be followed.
There's no amount of pain that they can inflict that will get Hamas to return them, and there is no plausible ransom Hamas could demand that Israel will be willing to pay.
YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
That tells you all you need to know.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Meanwhile, one of the 'sidelined' anchors has been reporting on Gaza with Al Sharpton in the last couple days. Which says a lot of things. I guess for a silver lining, they do have an expert and professional pogrom leader on NBC?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes.
Do you see the slighest chance Netanyahu survives this, politically? Safety has been the third rail in Israeli politics for its entire existence, this attack seems like a repudiation of the entire Likud philosophy for Gaza and the West Bank, and there's really not many spaces left to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The extent he's still in power is less a rally-around-the-flag unity and more just the procedural timeline.
The flip side is that there's not many of his domestic critics that claim any alternative to intervention, here. There's not really any vision for how to stop this from happening again without a ton of boots on the ground.
Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There’s a lot of wiggle room in “things that they don’t agree with”. The last week has had a lot of public statements that range from disagreements on strategy and ethics for a difficult ground war to questions related to the cycle of violence to ‘that live-streamed mass shooting was faked and if it wasn’t it was a political conspiracy‘ to literally complaining The Final Solution didn’t go far enough. The imprecision of the rest of your post does not really make clear what you’re engaged with.
There’s perhaps a steelman where even the most extreme sides of that spectrum did not have a even or honest application against the Red Tribe (both that Damore was not tolerated, and that the Blue Tribe equivalents to Alex Jones were), and I’d probably agree with you for a significant part of it. But outside of the irony of it all, I don’t really see how much info there is in people only noticing when their ox is on the line.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Locking Gaza down is probably the right tactical decision (urban warfare sucks, urban warfare against military willing to used ununiformed and armed troops alongside an armed civilian populace that hates you sucks even more), but it's not politically viable (there's no appetite among the Israeli population nor the IDF would accept orders that don't cost enemies blood; until the hostages are returned or known dead kinetic actions are going to take too high a priority) and more importantly it doesn't really work over the long term.
Beefing up defenses around and boxing in Gaza still gets you kilodeaths among Gazans, they're just going to die to less kinetic means, and be more photogenic (and often even more innocent!) victims. Gaza just doesn't have the infrastructure to maintain consistent food, water, medicine, and power, Hamas isn't interested in developing that infrastructure, no other nearby country is interested in doing so (or can be trusted to do so without providing combat or dual-use materials), Israel can not maintain connection into the country without presenting new vulnerabilities. You're either kicking the can down the road until another high-profile civilian hostage crisis shows up, or somewhere in May of next year international pressure (correctly!) notices that you're basically starving hundreds of young children a day.
I don't think we've gotten a full tactical breakdown, and we may never get one, but this (caveat: It's the New York Times) and this point to broader issues: Hamas struck at communications, observation, and relay posts, often ones that the IDF believed were heavily obscured or distant enough that fast-reaction groups could protect them, while bringing a massive level of coordination across a wide area that the IDF believed would not be possible without the IDF having detailed early notice, at least given holiday standings. The paragliders had some impact for increasing the chaos, but much of the attack looks to have gone through the normal 'how strictly do you define a technical'-style road-based troops.
Which is pretty typical for light aircraft as a military force. Paragliders, gyrocopters, plain passive gliders, all have a long history, but there's a reason they've historically been limited use.
I expect the bigger immediate question's going to be how Hamas got that level of planning done without it getting into the newspapers (or just someone starting things off early!), and where they got the information to do that planning. The former may be an unavoidable consequence of Israel keeping its military and civilian groups out of Gaza, but it's also possible that the IDF got so complacent that they mixed LARPing with not. On the information control side, there's been fingers pointed at the Gazan work permit program, and there's basically zero chance that survives the month, but I don't think that provides a sufficient level of detail for this operation. Maybe we're all just underestimating what open-source intel can do, or the Gazan border was a nest of light drone incursions, but I've seen red teams try to exploit far more completely-covered fields before and not been able to pull that level of detail and coordination together.
If we're lucky, I think the practical result is gonna be increased buffer zones (probably extracted from Gazans), hard border restrictions, and strongly increased isolation, along with turning those buffer zones into a shooting gallery for anything bigger than a paper airplane and destroying any military leadership that tries to unify what's left inside the zone. The more pessimistic options... don't look great.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Strong feels that she was dismissed as a result of her discussions on Israel and Gaza; you can check her twitter and likes listings over the last week if you'd like. Boxtown has not officially stated why, just that it happened, and I'd be surprised if they ever explicitly state why. It's possible that they just got sick of her outspoken veganism, but I don't think that's particularly plausible.
LexManos officially separated over long-standing personality conflicts, but the actual turning point was his reaction to the Nashville School Shooting.
((I'm... pretty sure social conservatives could come up more examples.))
I don't think matters said out of grief are always permissible or moral. These are... basically boomer-level takes, in both cases, though (sometimes literally in Strong's case). To a large extent, they are just especially unacceptable to the cancellers because of the bad actions of the people these speakers were focusing on; the cancellers do not want the bad actions or applause of small numbers of bad actors associated with a broader social group. Which would be a lot more compelling were people to Well Ackshually them, rather than tell everyone in their field that discussions near this topic with the wrong positions Are Not Allowed.
I'm not sure there's a word yet for the problem that this presents, but a framework where sufficiently bad actions by themselves justify exacting standards of discourse for those trying to criticize those bad actions gives some very bad possible feedback loops.
gattsuru
2yr ago
We Got This Covered reports:
It’s been reported that Tara Strong has been removed from upcoming noir-themed adult animation Boxtown. Although she was due to play the leading role of Bill the Orphan in the series, opposite Gravity Falls creator and voice actor Alex Hirsch, Strong has now been let go from the show and will be replaced. No reason has been given as yet for the move, but the timing certainly suggests it’s in response to the current controversy.
She'd not be the first person targeted for Cancel Culture over this conflict, and in many ways it's more understandable for people to expect the best moral code apply to Twilight Sparkle than a porn star, at least assuming Strong was let go for her tweets rather than pissing in someone's cheerios. Of course, Mia Khalifa was celebrating spree shooters targeting civilians, along with advising those shooters to improve their cell phone video game. What, precisely, did Strong say?
This is only the beginning. They were smart to start with a country people love to hate.
Oh.
This isn't the first time that I've seen a cancellation effort target overstated reactions in sympathy to the victims of a massacre. I don't know that Boxtown matters, in any serious way, and it's quite likely that none of Strong's other gigs so much as complain. But I don't like that we're just a couple hits from making a pattern.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Rand's view on Native Americans was... not great: like a lot of pre-1970s Americans she largely saw them as primitive and nomadic tribal groups that hadn't really developed a concept of properties rights or technological advancement. The modern Objectivist analysis holds that some of this falls from often-bad scholarship of the time, which obscured a lot of Native American social technologies, but I'd expect she'd still find them to have failed her techno-utopian vision.
That said, Author Bloom's summary of Rand's position during the Donahue interview isn't very accurate. See here for a transcript, where behind the ellipsis we instead see :
No. I don’t resort to terrorism. I don’t go around murdering my opponents, innocent women and children. That is what I have against the Arabs. That takes the conflict out of the sphere of civilized conflict, and makes it murderous. And anyone, private citizens, who resort to force is a monster. And, that’s what makes me condemn and despise them.
I don't think she ever wrote specifically on the exact bounds of "civilized conflict", but a few of her books touched on her conflicts with 'just war' theory. Most interpretations become... idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I don't think Bloom's "no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets" is an honest read.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I think Netanyahu's going to retire or be shoved out of the public sphere regardless of what extent he 'knew' an attack was coming. The pre-October doctrine where Gaza was left to Hamas with business relations, a jobs program, and occasional missile exchanges and shooting atrocities was Netanyahu's brainchild, a major bet that no matter Hamas' public doctrine it wouldn't do anything as an organization outside of The Usual. It was a sad and bloody sort of 'deescalation', where a 'win' for Hamas was a gentleman's agreement for the Israeli's to not explode every member of Hamas' senior leadership, but they had eight years of that and it was a lot nicer for Hamas leadership than exploding, and the rule brought everyone to this.
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
Yeah, this is absolutely a humanitarian disaster, regardless of the underlying cause.EDIT: Nope, apparently not! It's still bad, but it looks like duplex-fire bad rather than Grenfale-disaster bad.
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