Elerond
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Posts posted by Elerond
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1 hour ago, melkathi said:
Bruce, we hope the ruling will be based on the evidence. Because any person who honestly looks at the facts knows that Israel is guilty.
But the individual judges aren't impartial. They are human beings and part of the societies they grew up in. People will always expect a US American to not vote based on facts but on US policy. As a German citizen I am not going to trust the German judge until he proves me wrong. He is more than welcome to do so. But if you were to follow the nosedive in freedom of press in Germany the past few years, the extreme bias in reporting, not just on this issue, I am terrified of the direction Germany is heading. We have seen where that leads before.
And of course everyone will expect the judge from Lebanon to vote against Israel.
ICJ's rulings don't have much of impact, like for example
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6 hours ago, uuuhhii said:
wait does finland count as nordic
Finland is part of Nordic countries.
Nordic countries are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Often Nordic coubtries are mixed with Scandinavian countries, which are Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although some could argue that Denmark isn't really part of Scandinavian Peninsula
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3 hours ago, Keyrock said:
But Russia doesn't share a border with Sweden. They can't just teleport tanks and troops to Sweden, how do you propose Russian troops reach Sweden without crossing a NATO nation's land, waters, or airspace?
Technically Sweden and Russia share maritime border in international waters, meaning that Russian troops can go from Kaliningrad to Sweden without crossing any Nato nation's land, waters or airspace. Also there is international waters from Saint Petersburg to Sweden and also from Atlantic ocean to western side of southern Sweden.
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1 minute ago, ShadySands said:
I don't know why, especially since I don't know what the rules are anymore, but Special Kherson Cat having a blue check mark is hilarious to me.
You get blue check mark by paying 8 USD
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Which country's F-16 they shot down, as Ukraine is still waiting to receive their first
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20 hours ago, Malcador said:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144447
US might as well file their veto now
It would be first time after 1959 when soviets blocked resolution against Vietnam because of their aggression towards Laos. Usually countries that opposite issues that have been brought up using article 99 just refuse to participate in the vote. Although last time when article 99 was invoked was in 1989 for Lebanon crisis.
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11 hours ago, Gorth said:
Finland can breathe a sigh of relief… looks like Putin got tired of the game and probably realised he couldn’t pull off a new invasion of the country…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67647379
edit: also helps alleviating his manpower problem in Ukraine a bit
That may have been one of the Russia's goals in beginning.
First market Finland as easy port to EU and offer short term visas to Russia in masses to anyone that ask without any actual processing.
Second take immigrants moneys and bring them to Russia.
Third guide immigrants to cause political issues in Finland and cause Finland current right wing anti immigration government to do predictable closing of the border that Russia also can use in their propaganda to Russians to tell how Finland is russophobic
Fourth force immigrants to join Russian foreign legion by threating to charge them of breaking their visas. And blame Finland for leaving those poor immigrants to starve.
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In Finland there is no minimum required amount of votes for party to get seat in parliament, but we have 13 electoral districts, switch have certain amount seat based on population of the district and seat per district are divided between parties using D'Hondt method, which causes that party needs ~3% of all the votes in district in order to get 1 seat in parliament, which means that small parties almost never get even 1 seat.
In last election we had 16 parties, from which 8 have been in parliament now for 30 years or more. These main parties again took 199 of 200 seat and 8 other parties got 1 and it went to billionaire business man that left one of the main parties and formed own party. And even from that starting point winning that 1 seat very difficult. Usually in elections parties outside of main 8 don't get any seats. This is because parties in the parliament have supreme advantage of getting all press time before the election and almost all the press time during election, so building voter base is expensive and difficult process that can take decades, which usually lead parties breaking because of infighting before they have even one member in parliament.
Also main parties are supported by fact that government's funding for parties is divided between parties based on how many members they have in parliament and that election advertisement is only allowed from couple months before election to election day. Which has caused that almost all the viable candidates will register themselves one of the main parties list instead of trying to fight almost unbeatable fight to get one seat for minor party, as even with that one seat you need to do cooperate with main eight in order to get anything to done.
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12 hours ago, Zoraptor said:
So owned by jews that they'd have had to deport quarter of a million arabs from it at a ratio of 180:1 and representing ~1/3 of the population of arabs in Palestine. Jews didn't even have a majority population in that 20%.
One of the big issues was that the Ottomans sold land fraudulently to absentee 'landowners' to raise money- sometimes they even did it multiple times as well. The people living there tended to be a bit surprised when jewish landlords turned up to turf them out.
Your figures are for Haifa city, not Haifa district- even today Haifa district's population is ~5x that of the city itself and the rural areas proportion of arabs considerably higher. Though I definitely should have said Arab rather than Muslim, always tend to forget there were a lot of Christians around who got expelled alongside the muslims.
They didn't deport Arabs from the area that was proposed as Jewish state by British in 1936, as proposal was rejected and Arabs and Jews continued to move in the area.
Haifa city has now population of 282,832 and its metropolitan area has 983,500. so bit less than 4x more.
In 1922 before British established Haifa city as their main port of the area, population of the city was 24,600 and before WW1 started population was about 20,000. In 1936 population of Haifa city had grown to about 100,000 thanks to industry that British build in the city and during Israel independence war in 1947 population was grown to 145,140 (70,910 Arabs (41,000 Muslims and 29,910 Christians) and 74,230 Jews). Current metropolitan area had less population by estimates, but there is no official number, but most of the residential buildings for that area have been build post 1948.
Time magazine wrote on their 3 May 1948 publication that reason why Arab population of Haifa city fled/left by their own accord when British withdraw their forces was "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city. ... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.". Of course it is The Times and they have very British perspective of things, but regardless in end of 1948 only 5000-6000 Arbs were left in the city so bit less than 10% of Arab population in beginning of 1947.
So it wasn't really expelling of Arab population, but of course they did have good reason to fear for their lives, as Jewish terrorist Irgun constantly targeted Arabs with their bombings and other attacks and Jewish Haganah militia committed multiple massacres in their retaliation attacks against Arabs with blessings of Jewish leadership.
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That 20% was already owned by jews that had bought it with backing of rich Zionist jews around the world.
Haifa has not had 90% Muslim population after Ottoman Empire collapsed.
The 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British authorities, recorded Haifa as having a population of 9,377 Muslims, 8,863 Christians, 6,230 Jews, and 164 others. By the time of the 1931 census of Palestine, this had increased to 20,324 Muslims, 13,824 Christians, 15,923 Jews, and 332 others. In 1938, 52,000 Jews and 51,000 Muslims and Christians lived in Haifa
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1 hour ago, Malcador said:
Bit unfair really, DPRK spends their money in a way EU citizens wouldn't enjoy. Also stretching the "we" there, hah. Keep seeing anecdotal moaning about lack of artillery and mortar ammo in Avdiivka though
It should not surprise no one that 1 million has yet to delivered, considering that in March when pledge was made, EU's and Norway's total production capacity of all types of artillery shells was 650 000 per year and they pledged to deliver 155mm shells, which even though are majority of that 650 000 is not the full capacity. EU also gave funds to build new ammunition factories, but those aren't build instantly (meaning that first of them start to produce ammunition next year). And of course because of EU politics all the ammunition needs to be bought from the EU manufactures. And some of the capacity has went to restock EU members own storages as they have send ammunition to Ukraine.
DPRK in my knowledge has only send old stock to Russia, so those numbers aren't comparable, as it EU's number does not take account ammunition that member states have send from their own stocks.
I am not sure how it comes as surprise to any foreign minister in EU, especially in Baltic states that EU members have decreased their ability to build conventional weapons and ammunition as there has been belief to that peace will last and possible future conflicts will be handled be the new intelligent weapons. I wonder what kind of optimism has taken over EU's defense ministers considering that Finland has largest artillery in western Europe, but not that many that use promised 155mm shells, so who in that meeting though that there would be such manufacturing capacity in Europe that they should announce that they will deliver million shells to Ukraine.
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13 hours ago, Gorth said:
The only army who ever won a war of attrition against Russia was Russia... when the Red Army defeated the White Army (iirc that is)
Afghanistan(Mujahideen) won against Soviet Union. After nine years of waring Soviet Union collapsed and war evolved as Afghan civil war, which lead to taliban taking over the country.
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2 hours ago, Gromnir said:
people (many/most) don't understand that ww2 hardly resulted in instant tolerance o' jews from the western world. is a common misunderstanding that europeans and americans welcomed displaced jews after ww2 and that just ain't the case. it took america a couple years to abolish anti-jewish immigration laws which had been in place since the late 1800s and remained throughout ww2, and the US were far more accommodating than most o' europe.... and then the cold war ramped up (almost immediate after ww2) and sudden there were added restrictions on russian jews and those from soviet satellites.
how many jews were murdered by local populations when they were first liberated? unknown, but one reason jews were rounded up and detained in old concentration camps for years, were to protect 'em from enlightened westerners looking to do 'em harm.
oh, and 'course the unscop report determined that the brits had illegal restricted jewish immigration to british mandate land, detaining those displaced european jews in the infamous cyprus camps. 'course the brits were dealing with a problem created by the rest o' europe 'cause nobody in europe wanted to accommodate displaced jews.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?476538-1/the-million
western history textbooks is a bit fuzzy on a few o' the details regarding western tolerance o' jews after ww2.
HA! Good Fun!
And tolerance of Jews is not only fuzzy thing in western history textbooks. They forgot to tell that many people that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps, like for example gays were just moved to german prisons to serve their sentences that they received during Nazi regime and they were not acknowledge or compensated as victims of mass murder until 1985 when they got mentioned in speech by German president. Romani people didn't get much better treatment by their 'liberators'. And quite rarely you hear mentioned things like that State of Croatia annihilated about 25000 romani people which were virtually every romani that lived in Croatia. And after the war The courts in the Federal Republic of Germany determined that romani weren't persecuted because of their race but because their crimes, even though it is estimated Nazis killed 250k-500k romani (although no one knows for sure because no one was interested to know how many romani there were Europe before the war and how many were left after the war). Also romani who were forcibly sterilized or illegally deported from the Germany were left without compensation. West Germany acknowledge that Romani were racially persecuted in 1965. And in 1982 Helmut Schmidt acknowledged that romani were also victims of genocide.
I have still not seen history textbook that directly tells that Europeans, even allied countries continued to persecute victims of Nazis long after the liberated them from the Nazis.
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8 hours ago, Lexx said:
Funny, we learned about the whole WW2 thing a lot in school, but I never really grasped the background of it all until I've read Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery. At first the book highly confused me, so I started reading up on it more until it finally really clicked for me, that jews weren't just hated by Germany back then. It goes so damn far back in time. In hindsight it is obvious, but it really wasn't in my mind like that. Literally everyone hated jews and they were commonly used as scapegoats. Chances are high that if germany wouldn't have started with the death camps, someone else for sure would have.
Sometimes I wonder how people have missed the almost two thousand years worth of propaganda that jews killed God's son and our savior Jesus and they should be punished for that crime.
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10 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:
The last bit is incorrect. The situation is the same as for Russia/ Ukraine. Neither party there is a member of the ICC either, but one party has requested an investigation and the ICC has accepted jurisdiction. Palestine requested an investigation, the ICC accepted.
(Relevant history/ ruling/ etc from the ICC is here for anyone interested)
ICC does investigations and gives judgements but there usually is no enforcement because USA and Russia threaten with severe actions if anything is done to their citizens, which also limits quite lot ICC's power to make actions against any one from countries that aren't members.
Even member states, ignore ICC's arrest warrants when target is anyone with political power.
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5 hours ago, Malcador said:
Most of it I've seen lately is justifying the IDF "taking the gloves off". Not sure why everyone seems to assume the IDF are going to turn into some psycho killers with their response. But 'tis a poisoned well I am drinking from anyway, is a subreddit
Fair enough, didn't think you had meant legal. As you say the ICC's not going to try to touch them. Mossad would probably off a couple of ICC people if they did
Members of IDF are conscripts, from most don't actually have any experience of war that have been now forced to clean corpses of civilians worst massacre in Israel's history and it seem that next there is plan to send them among people that are hostile towards them, whom those members have seen in social media celebrating deaths of those civilians whose corpses they have just picked and send to be buried to look terrorist that they have hard time to identify among the hostile civilian population. And they have political leadership that tells them to avenge the attack. So IDF "taking the gloves off" is more question how well IDF leadership can keep discipline of troops up.
Israel is not member of ICC, only way they will be hold as responsible by ICC is that some other country invades and conquers Israel. ICC is pretty powerless, from which big thanks goes to USA and Russia.
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1 hour ago, BruceVC said:
I dont get it, please explain ?
Finland's northern neighbor is our Nato partner Norway
In south we have our Nato partner Estonia
In west there is unallied Sweden
In east, there is great yellow and we don't talk about it
Also every nation except Sweden (and yellow, which we don't talk about) around Baltic sea are members of Nato
So it has to be Sweden
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1 hour ago, Malcador said:
Well yes that was my point, consistency is the thing. Already see people becoming near genocidal in response to this, which is amusing (as its impotent). Doubt the IDF is going to turn Gaza into Homs or something regardless.
There needs to happen miracle, in order to avoid absolute tragedy. But I am not sure that such miracle is showing up.
Israel's current government is hardcore zionists and they got in power by promising security, but now deadliest attack in Israel's modern history has happened and it targeted primary civilians. So they most likely use more harsher methods than needed in order to save their faces.
Gaza has been controlled by Hamas now for 16 years, and they are extremist whose main goal is destruction of Israel and killing all the jews. So there is high likelihood that they will pour more fuel in the flames.
And forces that could put some restrictions in conflict have their own issues that hinder quite lot how much effort they will put in
UN has failed for long time get any meaningful resolutions because there never seems to be any unity in world anymore
Ukraine war has eaten lot of resources and will to prevent conflicts.
In many European countries far right parties that most likely will not put any effort to prevent mass killing of Muslims, have won most recent elections.
USA is divided and its governance is paralyzed and they usually by default support anything that Israel does.
Iran is flexing its muscles when no one is looking because of other conflicts.
Russia and China have their own agendas that benefit from conflict that draws world eyes aways from them.
Turkey wants to be leader of muslim world, but also has its own internal issues and they usually don't want vex USA in Israel questions.
Saudi Arabia does not have much love towards Palestine as they are too chummy with Iran
So we can only hope that extremist leaderships of Israel and Palestine will see reason even though they have seek destruction of each other for long time.
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23 hours ago, Zoraptor said:
Russia is not a security partner and ally of Artsakh. Armenia itself doesn't recognise Artsakh* as independent either.
Yes, because Russia demanded them stop to do so
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14 hours ago, Zoraptor said:
I'm sure all the dead Armenians will die glad in the knowledge the EU's thoughts and prayers were with them.
They have probably at least same level warm feeling as they have towards they ally and security partner Russia, that declared that area belongs Azerbaijan and that conflict is Azerbaijan's internal struggle and that they will not get involved with the conflict.
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13 hours ago, Zoraptor said:
yep, more bijis than a playlist at a 70s disco. The tank explosion is fairly classic too I guess.
That video is bit bad evidence of anything as it does not actually show that tank was destroyed in the end as it cuts just before smoke clears and picture is so blurry that you can't identify the tank model from the video.
But Turkey's Leopard 2A4 have outdated anti tank protection, because Germany refused to upgrade them because Turkey used them against Kurdish forces and in they original deal Turkey promised not to use them against Kurdish people. Which was one of major reason why ISIS were able to destroy and capture 8-10 of them.
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1 hour ago, Malcador said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/us/politics/ukraine-troops-counteroffensive-training.html
"Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach.
That seems odd considering that American way is supreme air superiority and Biden refused to give air crafts to Ukraine
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Niger has been so stabile for past 63 years, only 7 republics from which are 5 military regimes have ensured that it has been able to build good foundation for country and ensure bright future especially considering that there are less than 20k soldiers in country of 22 million, but it is still military is able keep control over the state and there are not thousands and thousands people belonging in radical groups like al-qaida and isis in the state.
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10 hours ago, xzar_monty said:
Another good example of this is racism and the idea that only white people are racist. You only need to look at Japan to totally disprove this nonsense, but of course it exists pretty much everywhere else, too. Despite all evidence, I have come across some people who honestly claim that it is impossible for a white person to be racially discriminated against.
People are just being broken telephones and citing things they have only half understood when they heard them.
Claim that it is impossible for a white person to be racially discriminated against, is distortion on phrase that White people don't face systemic racism in countries where there are white majority population. But even that is too simplistic way to look issue because minority ethnicities among white population will face systematic discrimination from majority population.
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Ukraine Conflict - Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war
in Way Off-Topic
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Yes, but because of Sweden 700 year rule over Finland and first converting Finns to Christianity through three crusades and then converting them to Lutheranism and ordering creation of written language for Finnish in order to steal Catholic church money for their Gustav Wasa's funds, Sweden and Finland have formed much closer cultural ties than Finland and Estonia.
Also Finland's ties to Denmark, Norway and Iceland are closer because first Denmark ruled all Nordic countries during Kalmar union and then Sweden took over and ruled most of the Nordics. What little of Finno-Ugric past there was left was saved by Swedish speaking Finns Elias Lönnrot, Johan Runeberg and Johan Snellman when they were forefront of united meaning of Finnishness in 1800s.
Also in Geographical sense part of Finland belongs in Scandinavian Peninsula, so technically we Finland is part of Scandinavia, although generally we don't count us as part of Scandinavia even if Finland's highest points Halti and Saana fells are part of Scandinavian mountains.