Opinio Juris

> Israel is directly causing a mass starvation event in Gaza. Innocent children and women are dying every single day, and if nothing is done soon, scores more will in the near future.

Asuming all that is true, the person you are responding to never said they supported the policies that lead to that or that state of affairs.

It is possible to imagine that someone could both believe that Israel's continued military operation is neccessary and that changes could be made to relieve the humanitarian situation. I dont know if the person you are responding to actually believes that, but based on their comments there is no reason to think they dont.

Edit:

I would also add that the war crime of collective punishment has a specific intent requirement. The perpetrator has to specificly intend to punish the group for an act. Even if the person you were responding to supported all the things you mentioned, unless they supported it as a punishment for oct 7, instead of out of a belief (for example) that it would allow Israel to defeat hamas, then it would not be collective punishment. It would be other war crimes but not collective punishment. See https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/24/a-short-history-of-the-war-crime-of-collective-punishment/ for a summary of what collective punishment is.

P.s. not so fun fact, the ICC lacks juridsiction over collective punishment, and given they are the main legal body investigating this conflict, we probably arent going to see any investigations into…

You are fighting an uphill battle, and honestly taking a weird—and insignificant—hill to die on.

I’m hardly the only one which has this reading of the court order[1]. Here is a human rights lawyer speaking with the Times[2] which describes the ruling as:

> Having the World Court say to the state of Israel that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide will be heard by the rest of the international community, even if Netanyahu doesn’t want to hear it,

Like I said earlier we are actually arguing about the meaning of “plausible”. I’m using this word in a non-legal way while applying it to the legal definition of genocide. The ICJ on the other hand uses it in a legal way, for them plausibility has a legally defined meaning, and using it must meet some specific standard[3].

The conduct in question here is the general behavior of Israel in Gaza, which some of our ancestors say:

> Its not a genocide by any definition

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40268163

or:

> I would not agree this constitutes genocide.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273408

they are talking about Israel’s general conduct.

South Africa brought in its case many examples of general conduct and accused them of violating the Genocide Convention. Israel—in its defense—did not deny this conduct, but rather stated they weren’t Genocidal, and didn’t violate the Convention, and therefore the Court had no jurisdiction over the case. The court ruled that these allegations “appear to be…

> Dev blogs are not equivalent to medical or law journals in many ways that I don’t need to list. Academic computer science white papers are a bit closer.

Okay, there are law blogs and medicine blogs too, which are directly comparable to dev blogs. And by that I mean blogs targeted at legal and medical professionals, not blogs on those topics targeted at consumers. For example, BMJ's Frontline Gastroenterology blog [0], whose target audience is practicing and trainee gastroenterologists, and its authors write for their target audience – it is public and anyone can read it, but I don't think the authors spend too much time worrying "what if an unqualified person reads this and misinterprets it?"

Or similarly, consider Opinio Juris, the most popular international law blog on the Internet. When a blog post contains the sentence "As most readers will know, lex specialis was created by the International Court of Justice in the Nuclear Weapons Case, to try to explain the relationship between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL)", [1] you know you are not reading something aimed at a general audience.

[0] https://blogs.bmj.com/fg/

[1] http://opiniojuris.org/2020/01/13/the-soleimani-case-and-the-last-nail-in-the-lex-specialis-coffin/

Another fun fact, most of the success of critical theory, post modernissm, "neo-marxism", left-wing intellectuals, etc is because of the three letters.

They successfully kept western leftists overpaid and spewing fashionable nonsense in the academy instead of acting in the world. The fact that left-wing intellectuals are so trash is engineered on purpose.

Jacques Lacan and his fake ass math equations in particular can only be explained this way as a literal psyop on academia.

Chomsky was in bed deep with Epstein and the left has turned themselves into a pretzel trying to explain it . Foucault, Sartre, De Beauvoir were defenders of pedophilia. Foucault might actually have been a pedophile! Arendt (a jew) was fornicating with a Nazi (Heidegger) and ties herself into a pretzel defending it (after also defending American segregation for some reason???), Deleuze killed himself. Althusser went crazy and killed his wife. Wilheilm Reich went just as loony related to the "orgone" machine (despite mass psychology of fascism being a decent-ish book).

Please just leave this decadent and degenerate misapplication of "philosophy" in the dust-bin where it belongs. Baudrillard is part of…

I'll provide evidence, and you'll say "fake news". I know how this goes.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/ https://opiniojuris.org/2024/04/05/the-icjs-findings-on-plausible-genocide-in-gaza-and-its-implications-for-the-international-criminal-court/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2022.2122448 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2413175 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11103200/ https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/holocaust-scholars-say-israel-is-committing-genocide.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

Interesting that there's no mention of the documentary "Crude" at all. For those unfamiliar, it was a (very pro-Donziger ) documentary that seemed to suggest Donziger was crossing some ethical boundaries. Chevron sued to obtain outtakes and unused footage, and the result was extremely damning for Donziger . He's on tape, talking to a documentary crew, admitting to much of what he was later accused of: http://opiniojuris.org/2010/08/04/chevron%E2%80%99s-explosive-filing-on-collusion-between-plaintiffs-and-ecuadorian-court-appointed-expert/