In this seemingly forever argument, it seems there is some nuance in that Palestine is not Hamas and vice versa. One of the perspectives as I understand it is that Hamas is actually a threat to the existence of Palestine; the militaristic behaviour undermines Palestinian efforts at independence (and this is an avenue for exploitation by those who don't want to see an independent Palestine).
It is a similar situation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
You can argue that the government of Israel isn't the will of the people of Israel (in the same way the US government isn't the will of the people of the US), but in my opinion there's more of a separation between 'Palestine' and 'Hamas' than there is between 'Israel' and 'the will of the people of Israel'.
There's a lot of wrongdoing, which means there are a lot of innocents being harmed, and the harming of innocents is the greatest wrongdoing. Harm by inaction is also wrong. Harm by preventing aid and assistance is also wrong.
None of this stuff is easily answered.
The joys of ideology, or maybe more correctly, the joys of living amongst those who take ideology so seriously that they attempt to enforce their fantasies upon the real world.
In my personal logic bubble: Protesting in support of Palestine is not protesting in support of Hamas. Declaring support for Israel is protesting against Hamas and their acts of terrorism against Israel. I can do both of these things without being hypocritical (like I said, in my personal logic bubble).
There's simply no excuse for what Israel has been doing and everyone with a functioning moral compass should be denouncing it. Debating about Hamas is a distraction. They have a right to defend their country, but not treating a whole population as collateral damage.
No, it's actually really simple. You start with these two questions:
1. Is Israel an apartheid state?
2. Is Israel committing a genocide?
At this point (IMHO) you need to do some serious mental gymnastics not to answer "yes" to both questions. As soon as you do, it gets real simple. The existence of Hamas doesn't justify either of these things.
The people who bring this up are engaging in respectability politics or engaging in weaponized cvility. Instead of addressing the underlying issues, the focus is on the methods and the actions of the oppressed when it is the oppressor that sets the level of violence. As Nelson Mandela put it:
> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.
People understood this quite clearly with apartheid South Africa. Can you imagine protesters having to do the performative "does apartheid South Africa have a right to exist?" pledge? No, me neither.
While I actually have sympathy for people on both sides of the struggle, I also find it hard to answer "yes" to both questions, mostly because of how muddied the definitions of everything are. It's obvious to me, that both the Israeli government and Hamas are both committing serious warcrimes, and that there no good actors here, here are some questions I don't have an answer to.
For example, is Palestine its own country? Is Hamas is its rightful government? Does that extend to the West Bank or only in Gaza? Palestinians seem to say that Palestine is its own country, Israelis say that Palestinians are not a part of Israel - so how can it be an apartheid state if BOTH sides say they aren't part of the same country at all?
Is Israel committing a genocide? Well, what does a genocide look like? Israel is still distributing food in Gaza, to this day. I don't think it would look like this, but at the same time, there are terrorists on both sides (Itamar ben-Gvir being the most prominent on the Israeli side, in my opinion).
There are more issues and questions and uncertainty around the problems in Israel, Palestine, the Levant as a whole, Iran's involvement and so on.
Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side! (A counter-genocide?) Regardless, if this issue were easy to solve, it would have been solved already.
Honestly, the situation seems to complicated to boil down to two "simple" questions and I admire that you can have such an "obvious" outlook, but the more I look at Israel and the Middle East (and read, and research), the more questions I have.
The definitions aren't muddled. Apartheid [1] and genocide [2] are both defined by the UN. Apartheid in particular is also objectively true. Do Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Jewish Israelis? No, objectively [3][4].
As for Palestine being its own country, it clearly isn't. Palestinians live on land claimed by Israel and recognized by pretty much every country in the world. But what if it was? Then Israel is illegally occupying it. Is that better? Why does this matter? Does one make the treatment of Gazans (in particular) more acceptable?
> Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side!
You can't use a theoretical future genocide to justify a current actual genocide. Also, it's ahistorical. Did this happen when apartheid South Africa ended? What about slavery? No, what actually happened was the former oppressors continued to commit violence against the previously oppressed.
"democratically elected" being an extremely load bearing sentiment if you know anything about what people's lives are actually like on the ground. did you know a large majority of the populace didn't even vote in 2006? since 2006? there hasn't been elections since. The median age is 18.
Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!
Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.
your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.
2006 is 20(!) years ago, the elections had a 70% turnout, and Hamas received only 44% of the vote.
Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.
And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.
So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.
I wonder what percentage of total graduates walked out? The video shows maybe around 50 people at all. The title makes it seem like everyone graduating walked out.
Hate him or not, Steve Jobs understood humans. He spoke and behaved as a human. He was flawed and may be considered "cringey" now, but I think he'd be liked better than the rest.
There's two opposing forces at work. Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs, and no one wants to be Steve Ballmer. So the only choice is to go to the extreme to stay as far away from the other end as possible.
Regardless of the details of this speech, I believe Sundar Pichai is uncommonly out of touch with reality and with the nation of the United States of America, even among tech CEOs.
Everyone loves the "free Palestine" slogan, but I've never actually seen the people who call it offer a concrete realistic solution that could achieve that - is it a two state solution? Is it a one state solution that will burst into a civil war? What's the plan?
What does it actually look like?
I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.
Unless the people who shout “Free Palestine” are part of the Knesset or Hamas, I don’t think their offering of a “concrete realistic solution” matters one bit.
It's a fashion statement for some people I've found. Like the Anarchy symbol on a T-Shirt. I've run in to people with such a hard line opinion on the matter who couldn't even point to where Palestine is a on a map.
Free Palestine simply means a sovereign Palestinian state separate from Israel, which Israel has rejected many times over the years, most recently in the Knesset vote in February and July 2024, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. Any time there was outside attempts to recognize Palestine as a state (e.g. through UN efforts) Israel responded with building more settlements in the West Bank.
Let's start by Israel no longer committing a genocide on the Palestinians and go from there.
Most "free Palestine" protestors probably don't care an awful lot about the final outcome of the conflict, they just want the mass killing of innocent people to stop.
There's a reason the movement only flared up when Israel started carpet bombing Gaza, and not during the mostly-quiet years before.
Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.
> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.
Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.
The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.
I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.
Seems this has more to do with Palestine and Google's involvement with Israel to provide cloud computing.
In this seemingly forever argument, it seems there is some nuance in that Palestine is not Hamas and vice versa. One of the perspectives as I understand it is that Hamas is actually a threat to the existence of Palestine; the militaristic behaviour undermines Palestinian efforts at independence (and this is an avenue for exploitation by those who don't want to see an independent Palestine).
It is a similar situation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
You can argue that the government of Israel isn't the will of the people of Israel (in the same way the US government isn't the will of the people of the US), but in my opinion there's more of a separation between 'Palestine' and 'Hamas' than there is between 'Israel' and 'the will of the people of Israel'.
There's a lot of wrongdoing, which means there are a lot of innocents being harmed, and the harming of innocents is the greatest wrongdoing. Harm by inaction is also wrong. Harm by preventing aid and assistance is also wrong.
None of this stuff is easily answered.
The joys of ideology, or maybe more correctly, the joys of living amongst those who take ideology so seriously that they attempt to enforce their fantasies upon the real world.
In my personal logic bubble: Protesting in support of Palestine is not protesting in support of Hamas. Declaring support for Israel is protesting against Hamas and their acts of terrorism against Israel. I can do both of these things without being hypocritical (like I said, in my personal logic bubble).
There's simply no excuse for what Israel has been doing and everyone with a functioning moral compass should be denouncing it. Debating about Hamas is a distraction. They have a right to defend their country, but not treating a whole population as collateral damage.
I agree with your first sentence.
The rest is the messy middle around which negotiation is required for any form of minimal co-existence.
No, it's actually really simple. You start with these two questions:
1. Is Israel an apartheid state?
2. Is Israel committing a genocide?
At this point (IMHO) you need to do some serious mental gymnastics not to answer "yes" to both questions. As soon as you do, it gets real simple. The existence of Hamas doesn't justify either of these things.
The people who bring this up are engaging in respectability politics or engaging in weaponized cvility. Instead of addressing the underlying issues, the focus is on the methods and the actions of the oppressed when it is the oppressor that sets the level of violence. As Nelson Mandela put it:
> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.
People understood this quite clearly with apartheid South Africa. Can you imagine protesters having to do the performative "does apartheid South Africa have a right to exist?" pledge? No, me neither.
While I actually have sympathy for people on both sides of the struggle, I also find it hard to answer "yes" to both questions, mostly because of how muddied the definitions of everything are. It's obvious to me, that both the Israeli government and Hamas are both committing serious warcrimes, and that there no good actors here, here are some questions I don't have an answer to.
For example, is Palestine its own country? Is Hamas is its rightful government? Does that extend to the West Bank or only in Gaza? Palestinians seem to say that Palestine is its own country, Israelis say that Palestinians are not a part of Israel - so how can it be an apartheid state if BOTH sides say they aren't part of the same country at all?
Is Israel committing a genocide? Well, what does a genocide look like? Israel is still distributing food in Gaza, to this day. I don't think it would look like this, but at the same time, there are terrorists on both sides (Itamar ben-Gvir being the most prominent on the Israeli side, in my opinion).
There are more issues and questions and uncertainty around the problems in Israel, Palestine, the Levant as a whole, Iran's involvement and so on.
Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side! (A counter-genocide?) Regardless, if this issue were easy to solve, it would have been solved already.
Honestly, the situation seems to complicated to boil down to two "simple" questions and I admire that you can have such an "obvious" outlook, but the more I look at Israel and the Middle East (and read, and research), the more questions I have.
The definitions aren't muddled. Apartheid [1] and genocide [2] are both defined by the UN. Apartheid in particular is also objectively true. Do Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Jewish Israelis? No, objectively [3][4].
As for Palestine being its own country, it clearly isn't. Palestinians live on land claimed by Israel and recognized by pretty much every country in the world. But what if it was? Then Israel is illegally occupying it. Is that better? Why does this matter? Does one make the treatment of Gazans (in particular) more acceptable?
> Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side!
You can't use a theoretical future genocide to justify a current actual genocide. Also, it's ahistorical. Did this happen when apartheid South Africa ended? What about slavery? No, what actually happened was the former oppressors continued to commit violence against the previously oppressed.
[1]: https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cspca/cspca.html
[2]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
[3]: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/all-israelis-are-equal/
[4]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
Hamas has been the democratically elected government of Palestine since 2006. That was the year after Israel pulled all their military out of Gaza.
"democratically elected" being an extremely load bearing sentiment if you know anything about what people's lives are actually like on the ground. did you know a large majority of the populace didn't even vote in 2006? since 2006? there hasn't been elections since. The median age is 18.
Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!
Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.
your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.
2006 is 20(!) years ago, the elections had a 70% turnout, and Hamas received only 44% of the vote.
Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.
And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.
So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.
That's a weird way of saying there hasn't been an election in 20 years.
Aww, does that mean we won't get to see whether he could avoid getting booed when he inevitably mentions AI?
If only there weren't so many reasons.
If only Google kept "don't be evil."
I wonder what percentage of total graduates walked out? The video shows maybe around 50 people at all. The title makes it seem like everyone graduating walked out.
Which part of the title indicates that everyone walked out? I assumed it was merely some of the cohort.
It does not.
Tech leaders from this era will not be remembered well.
There's not much good to remember them by for the past decade they have been implementing a global panopticon system etc.
At least in the 1990s and 2000s it felt they were doing some good stuff for humanity. But the 2010s and 2020s the masked pretty much slipped.
I wonder which spectrum Steve Jobs would be on if he was still alive to this day.
Hate him or not, Steve Jobs understood humans. He spoke and behaved as a human. He was flawed and may be considered "cringey" now, but I think he'd be liked better than the rest.
That is a bold prediction
It doesn't seem like a stretch. I don't know what you mean.
(You may disagree with the opinion of course, but "bold" is a counterintuitive adjective here)
No it is not.
There's two opposing forces at work. Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs, and no one wants to be Steve Ballmer. So the only choice is to go to the extreme to stay as far away from the other end as possible.
I'd take Steve Ballmer over most of the current big-tech CEOs, to be honest.
Regardless of the details of this speech, I believe Sundar Pichai is uncommonly out of touch with reality and with the nation of the United States of America, even among tech CEOs.
He should step down.
Everyone loves the "free Palestine" slogan, but I've never actually seen the people who call it offer a concrete realistic solution that could achieve that - is it a two state solution? Is it a one state solution that will burst into a civil war? What's the plan?
What does it actually look like?
I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.
Unless the people who shout “Free Palestine” are part of the Knesset or Hamas, I don’t think their offering of a “concrete realistic solution” matters one bit.
I'm very uninformed but could "free Palestine" not mean a two state solution?
It's a fashion statement for some people I've found. Like the Anarchy symbol on a T-Shirt. I've run in to people with such a hard line opinion on the matter who couldn't even point to where Palestine is a on a map.
Free Palestine simply means a sovereign Palestinian state separate from Israel, which Israel has rejected many times over the years, most recently in the Knesset vote in February and July 2024, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. Any time there was outside attempts to recognize Palestine as a state (e.g. through UN efforts) Israel responded with building more settlements in the West Bank.
It's performance for social standing. They don't actually care.
Let's start by Israel no longer committing a genocide on the Palestinians and go from there.
Most "free Palestine" protestors probably don't care an awful lot about the final outcome of the conflict, they just want the mass killing of innocent people to stop.
There's a reason the movement only flared up when Israel started carpet bombing Gaza, and not during the mostly-quiet years before.
Associated story released after: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sundar-pichai-stanford-c...
Speech itself was kind of fun: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s...
Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.
> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.
Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.
The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.
I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.
I wish I’d skipped my graduation ceremony as well. What a complete waste of time.
What was the speech on?
It was a commencement speech. Here's a transcript: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s...
No mention of AI at all.
Good kids - proud of them.