5 ms·

Hamas' social media following has skyrocketed

26 points by lxm 3y ago

hifycycyv 3y ago
[dead]
HHC-Hunter 3y ago
You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause.
- nikau 3y ago
  or they are monitoring for the name of the city where they live
- CommanderData 3y ago
  or when the Army denies government and media stated incidents making people believe they were false flag operations to justify further destruction of a ethnic people.
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    This is vague enough that I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to.
- Cymrukicks 3y ago
  Hamas and Palestine are two different entities. Considering a march for Palestine as support for Hamas is a big stretch. You wouldn't consider a protest in support of Israel as backing Likud would you?
  - qznc 3y ago
    That does not feel like a fair comparison to me. More like Putin and Russia.
    - jakeinspace 3y ago
      More like Afghanistan and the Taliban. Wanting the US out or Afghanistan didn’t mean you were a Taliban supporter, even if that was always going to be who stepped in to fill the vacuum.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    If majority of Palestinians support Hamas[1], it isn't that big of a stretch to say Palestinian should pay the price for Hamas' crime. If majority of Israel supports Likud then yeah it is not wrong to blame Israel's people for his action. Same goes with Russia. I don't have any sympathy for them if Putin is popular and make decisions like Ukraine invasion. [1]: https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8e1323fc1cad819c34da08fd87 https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8...
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      The problem with this rhetoric is that bad people have a strong incentives to let others think they have strong support. Unless you are living in the area and can talk to citizens directly, it's going to be damn hard to make any informed decision about that fact. E.G: In the link you cite, the numbers come from "the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research". Researching how reliable this source is is a huge and hard work I'm assuming most HN users have neither the resources nor the skill to do. Medias outlet and politicians from all sides have demonstrated little benevolence or competence so trusting them to do that is also a stretch. Even in France, I'm distrusting statistics from INSEE (!) now because it's so hard to verify neutrality. Condemning people to death based on those information is unwise. Even if the data is true, where does that lead you? American have elected Bush which lied about WMD and went to war with Irak against the vote of the UN, killing thousands of civilians. Do Americans deserve to die? In which case which people from which country would be absolved from that judgement?
      - crabbone 3y ago
        Dude. I lived in Ashkelon for two years. In this time I worked with people from Gaza too. There's no nuance there. Whoever talks about it has no clue. Antisemitism for these people is not a curse word. It's a society that similarly thinks about women as lesser, less deserving beings for example, without any reservations. To them Jewish lives aren't important. And the fact that Jews are allowed to tell them what to do generates explosive righteous indignation. Imagine yourself being ruled by chimpanzees. It wouldn't matter to you how benevolent they are, whether you have food or roof above your head. You'd feel like it's absurd, and whoever drove you into the situation where an ape tells you what to do must be brought to justice. This is how the average Gazan feels.
  - Synaesthesia 3y ago
    Hamas also has different wings, it's a political party, it's got a militant wing and it's got a charity wing as well.
    - junon 3y ago
      Exactly this. Nobody seems to talk about the other half of Hamas. I deplore what the military side did, it's not okay in any case. But it's not so cut and dry. There's so much nuance and complexity with this topic that online discussion is so tiring to read. People take two points out of twenty and make sweeping judgements and generalizations without having the full picture.
      - crabbone 3y ago
        There is no "other" side of Hamas that doesn't want to kill all the Jews. This is a delusion of someone unfamiliar with situation. They may differ in methods. The side that does fundraising in Western countries knows that being openly anti-Semitic will negatively affect their fundraising activities... so, they aren't that stupid. They want the money / resources and they will pretend for as long as necessary to get those sweet donations. They will promptly give those donations to the other side though.
        junon 3y ago
        I didn't say that, but I also don't agree with "they want to kill all the Jews". Very little of this conflict has to do with religion, anyway.
        crabbone 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      And yet neither could exist without the others, and all three are effectively governed by dudes like Ismail Haniyya relaxing safely in Qatar. Furthermore: there haven't been elections since 2006 - there are people at fighting age in the entirety of Palestinian Territories who have never seen a voting booth in their life.
  - crabbone 3y ago
    This keeps repeated over and over... Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation. And so do you. Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others. So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions: Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example. Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious. Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel. The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives. The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash). So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance. There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs". Some of them identify as Palestinians, but their interests usually align with one of the two previous groups, except most of these want Israel to stay as it is. Israel, for obvious reasons really, really, doesn't want the first group anywhere near its borders. And, geographically, Gaza has the most refugee camps where people from this group live. This also explains why Gaza is a lot more violent and anti-Semitic in its rhetoric then the West Bank. So, the people who know zilch about the situation on the ground may claim that Hamas only represents 53% or w/e other percentage of Palestinians... they are missing that the other 47% or however many there is are represented by similar but less popular "political" parties, most of which have "liberation of Palestine" in their name. In other words, when it comes to Hamas' goals in terms of vanquishing all the Jews, pretty much everyone in Gaza agrees with them. Their political differences lie along the lines of how much of Sharia law they want to implement or whether communism is good or bad. There isn't a single political entity in Gaza or West Bank for that matter whose political program would be to say "you know what, we are sorry for trying to kill you like three times in fifty years, maybe we should leave that in the past and start fresh as respectful neighbors". That is not in the cards, and as long as this situation is convenient for Iran will never be.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  There hasn't been an election in Gaza in like 18 years, not counting municipal elections. Besides I don't exactly get the feeling here that Hamas would be all to happy to have a peaceful election and step aside if they lost. Allegedly (and who knows, it may be Israeli propaganda), the rockets they launch are made by pulling up the water pipes. And to clarify: I don't side with Israel. I just don't think Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians. I know Nethanyahu is not on the side of the Israeli people and ben-gevir basically shares hitlers pov about Jews marrying non-Jews, which should pretty much prove how much he is not on the side of the good guys.
  - crabbone 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - tomjen3 3y ago
      >You don't even know who Palestinians are They are human beings and deserve to be judged by their individual actions.
      - crabbone 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - enterprise_cog 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - crabbone 3y ago
        [flagged]
- tivert 3y ago
  > You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause. How so? Western nations are full of wackos and nutjobs. Someone protesting does not necessarily mean anything needs to change.
walthamstow 3y ago
'Skyrocketed' is an interesting choice of phrase!
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  Blown up? Exploded? They could’ve picked a worse phrase.
  - internetter 3y ago
    Now I’m trying to think of a better phrase and coming up empty handed… Dramatically increased?
    - lordgrenville 3y ago
      Soared? Surged?
sam_goody 3y ago
[flagged]
- regularjack 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - sam_goody 3y ago
    [flagged]
cyco130 3y ago
Hmm, I've read Mein Kampf but I'm not a nazi.
marban 3y ago
I know, hard to grasp but follow ≠ endorse
dash2 3y ago
This is interesting: > Durov argued that Telegram was different from other platforms because it doesn’t use algorithms to promote content Is that fair? Is an algorithm the equivalent of an editorial line? And what counts as an algorithm? It seems like there's a continuum from something simple like "most recent posts at the top" to "+5 bonus to Elon's tweets".
- lxm 3y ago
  There's no news feed. The left pane is a list of "channels" sorted by most recent updates. The right pane are the updates from the specific channel, sorted by most recent.
llm_nerd 3y ago
"Following" is such a misnomer and it's a word that should be banished from the realm. I had joined the two Hamas telegram channels to see what the org was saying. I'm as much a detractor of the org as anyone, and am quite pleased to see their annihilation (though it is incredibly unfortunate that civilian Palestinians pay the greatest price). Their channel has been an exercise in cope while their narrative shifted quickly from arrogant, untouchable boasting about the things they did, to now being effectively a pathetic desperate pleading.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Watching this play out on Twitter has been interesting. For days after the attack, there was almost unanimous support for Israel. Then the Harvard letter came out saying that the blame was entirely on Israel, infuriating most of Twitter. But then over the next few days, a steady stream of posts have been bubbling up which all carry the theme of making the reader question whether Israel is justified in its reaction. Telegram has been a source of war content, both for the Ukraine conflict and this one. I’m not sure why it’s so much more prolific than Twitter, but it definitely is. It might just be a difference of public vs private. Watching the Telegram rooms, you get the impression that someone is reporting to you directly, and that there’s no chance the videos will suddenly disappear. You had to opt in to the room to see it at all. Whereas a bunch of videos were made inaccessible on Twitter when the accounts that posted them got suspended — videos that bubbled up onto the “for you” feed algorithmically, rather than being shared in a private curated channel. It’s fascinating watching from a distance. Everyone likes to feel the social media forces can be controlled or shaped. To an extent they can be, but most of it is just chaos on both sides. Telegram shows that people will tune in to private channels, though their reach might be limited compared to default-public mediums like Twitter. Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation a few days ago: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk... One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.
dgb23 3y ago
I've seen some of the videos published by Hamas. Some of them are literally filmed with "gopro" or similar cameras during their attacks. Generally I don't recommend watching these. These kinds of videos are incredibly disturbing. --- Trigger warning: violence. One thing that struck me is how horror-like all of it seemed and how invisible the opponent in such an engagement is. The invaders would often not see where the defenders were and would get shot seemingly out of nowhere. Vice versa they would shoot into small nudges and windows here or there and its often unclear whether they hit anyone or not. My cousins who fought in Bosnia would often tell me similar stories. Their enemies were invisible most of the time, while sometimes someone would get hit on their side. For reference: I once watched Full Metal Jacket with one of my cousins and there was a scene where suddenly, out of nowhere, the protagonists would get attacked in an urban area but they couldn't even see their enemies, just flashes of rifle fire here and there. He said: "This is exactly like war." --- I don't know what to make of it. It all just feels like pointless horror.
- bm3719 3y ago
  There's certainly other forces at play, but having participated in one, I tend to view the main reason that war is traumatic to the individual is its depersonalized (and in modern times, mechanistic) nature. A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably. So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.
qwerty456127 3y ago
Everyone probably subscribes even if they hate them so they can keep an eye.

26 points by lxm 3y ago

[dead]

You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause.

nikau 3y ago
or they are monitoring for the name of the city where they live
CommanderData 3y ago
or when the Army denies government and media stated incidents making people believe they were false flag operations to justify further destruction of a ethnic people.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  This is vague enough that I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to.
Cymrukicks 3y ago
Hamas and Palestine are two different entities. Considering a march for Palestine as support for Hamas is a big stretch. You wouldn't consider a protest in support of Israel as backing Likud would you?
- qznc 3y ago
  That does not feel like a fair comparison to me. More like Putin and Russia.
  - jakeinspace 3y ago
    More like Afghanistan and the Taliban. Wanting the US out or Afghanistan didn’t mean you were a Taliban supporter, even if that was always going to be who stepped in to fill the vacuum.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  If majority of Palestinians support Hamas[1], it isn't that big of a stretch to say Palestinian should pay the price for Hamas' crime. If majority of Israel supports Likud then yeah it is not wrong to blame Israel's people for his action. Same goes with Russia. I don't have any sympathy for them if Putin is popular and make decisions like Ukraine invasion. [1]: https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8e1323fc1cad819c34da08fd87 https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8...
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    The problem with this rhetoric is that bad people have a strong incentives to let others think they have strong support. Unless you are living in the area and can talk to citizens directly, it's going to be damn hard to make any informed decision about that fact. E.G: In the link you cite, the numbers come from "the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research". Researching how reliable this source is is a huge and hard work I'm assuming most HN users have neither the resources nor the skill to do. Medias outlet and politicians from all sides have demonstrated little benevolence or competence so trusting them to do that is also a stretch. Even in France, I'm distrusting statistics from INSEE (!) now because it's so hard to verify neutrality. Condemning people to death based on those information is unwise. Even if the data is true, where does that lead you? American have elected Bush which lied about WMD and went to war with Irak against the vote of the UN, killing thousands of civilians. Do Americans deserve to die? In which case which people from which country would be absolved from that judgement?
    - crabbone 3y ago
      Dude. I lived in Ashkelon for two years. In this time I worked with people from Gaza too. There's no nuance there. Whoever talks about it has no clue. Antisemitism for these people is not a curse word. It's a society that similarly thinks about women as lesser, less deserving beings for example, without any reservations. To them Jewish lives aren't important. And the fact that Jews are allowed to tell them what to do generates explosive righteous indignation. Imagine yourself being ruled by chimpanzees. It wouldn't matter to you how benevolent they are, whether you have food or roof above your head. You'd feel like it's absurd, and whoever drove you into the situation where an ape tells you what to do must be brought to justice. This is how the average Gazan feels.
- Synaesthesia 3y ago
  Hamas also has different wings, it's a political party, it's got a militant wing and it's got a charity wing as well.
  - junon 3y ago
    Exactly this. Nobody seems to talk about the other half of Hamas. I deplore what the military side did, it's not okay in any case. But it's not so cut and dry. There's so much nuance and complexity with this topic that online discussion is so tiring to read. People take two points out of twenty and make sweeping judgements and generalizations without having the full picture.
    - crabbone 3y ago
      There is no "other" side of Hamas that doesn't want to kill all the Jews. This is a delusion of someone unfamiliar with situation. They may differ in methods. The side that does fundraising in Western countries knows that being openly anti-Semitic will negatively affect their fundraising activities... so, they aren't that stupid. They want the money / resources and they will pretend for as long as necessary to get those sweet donations. They will promptly give those donations to the other side though.
      - junon 3y ago
        I didn't say that, but I also don't agree with "they want to kill all the Jews". Very little of this conflict has to do with religion, anyway.
        crabbone 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    And yet neither could exist without the others, and all three are effectively governed by dudes like Ismail Haniyya relaxing safely in Qatar. Furthermore: there haven't been elections since 2006 - there are people at fighting age in the entirety of Palestinian Territories who have never seen a voting booth in their life.
- crabbone 3y ago
  This keeps repeated over and over... Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation. And so do you. Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others. So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions: Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example. Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious. Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel. The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives. The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash). So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance. There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs". Some of them identify as Palestinians, but their interests usually align with one of the two previous groups, except most of these want Israel to stay as it is. Israel, for obvious reasons really, really, doesn't want the first group anywhere near its borders. And, geographically, Gaza has the most refugee camps where people from this group live. This also explains why Gaza is a lot more violent and anti-Semitic in its rhetoric then the West Bank. So, the people who know zilch about the situation on the ground may claim that Hamas only represents 53% or w/e other percentage of Palestinians... they are missing that the other 47% or however many there is are represented by similar but less popular "political" parties, most of which have "liberation of Palestine" in their name. In other words, when it comes to Hamas' goals in terms of vanquishing all the Jews, pretty much everyone in Gaza agrees with them. Their political differences lie along the lines of how much of Sharia law they want to implement or whether communism is good or bad. There isn't a single political entity in Gaza or West Bank for that matter whose political program would be to say "you know what, we are sorry for trying to kill you like three times in fifty years, maybe we should leave that in the past and start fresh as respectful neighbors". That is not in the cards, and as long as this situation is convenient for Iran will never be.
tomjen3 3y ago
There hasn't been an election in Gaza in like 18 years, not counting municipal elections. Besides I don't exactly get the feeling here that Hamas would be all to happy to have a peaceful election and step aside if they lost. Allegedly (and who knows, it may be Israeli propaganda), the rockets they launch are made by pulling up the water pipes. And to clarify: I don't side with Israel. I just don't think Hamas is on the side of the Palestinians. I know Nethanyahu is not on the side of the Israeli people and ben-gevir basically shares hitlers pov about Jews marrying non-Jews, which should pretty much prove how much he is not on the side of the good guys.
- crabbone 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    >You don't even know who Palestinians are They are human beings and deserve to be judged by their individual actions.
    - crabbone 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - enterprise_cog 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - crabbone 3y ago
      [flagged]
tivert 3y ago
> You kind of have to ask if your geopolitical policy of blacklisting democratically elected political parties is working when you see protests in Western states supporting them and their cause. How so? Western nations are full of wackos and nutjobs. Someone protesting does not necessarily mean anything needs to change.

walthamstow 3y ago

'Skyrocketed' is an interesting choice of phrase!

jakeinspace 3y ago
Blown up? Exploded? They could’ve picked a worse phrase.
- internetter 3y ago
  Now I’m trying to think of a better phrase and coming up empty handed… Dramatically increased?
  - lordgrenville 3y ago
    Soared? Surged?

sam_goody 3y ago

[flagged]

regularjack 3y ago
[flagged]
- sam_goody 3y ago
  [flagged]

cyco130 3y ago

Hmm, I've read Mein Kampf but I'm not a nazi.

marban 3y ago

I know, hard to grasp but follow ≠ endorse

dash2 3y ago

This is interesting: > Durov argued that Telegram was different from other platforms because it doesn’t use algorithms to promote content Is that fair? Is an algorithm the equivalent of an editorial line? And what counts as an algorithm? It seems like there's a continuum from something simple like "most recent posts at the top" to "+5 bonus to Elon's tweets".

lxm 3y ago
There's no news feed. The left pane is a list of "channels" sorted by most recent updates. The right pane are the updates from the specific channel, sorted by most recent.

llm_nerd 3y ago

"Following" is such a misnomer and it's a word that should be banished from the realm. I had joined the two Hamas telegram channels to see what the org was saying. I'm as much a detractor of the org as anyone, and am quite pleased to see their annihilation (though it is incredibly unfortunate that civilian Palestinians pay the greatest price). Their channel has been an exercise in cope while their narrative shifted quickly from arrogant, untouchable boasting about the things they did, to now being effectively a pathetic desperate pleading.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Watching this play out on Twitter has been interesting. For days after the attack, there was almost unanimous support for Israel. Then the Harvard letter came out saying that the blame was entirely on Israel, infuriating most of Twitter. But then over the next few days, a steady stream of posts have been bubbling up which all carry the theme of making the reader question whether Israel is justified in its reaction. Telegram has been a source of war content, both for the Ukraine conflict and this one. I’m not sure why it’s so much more prolific than Twitter, but it definitely is. It might just be a difference of public vs private. Watching the Telegram rooms, you get the impression that someone is reporting to you directly, and that there’s no chance the videos will suddenly disappear. You had to opt in to the room to see it at all. Whereas a bunch of videos were made inaccessible on Twitter when the accounts that posted them got suspended — videos that bubbled up onto the “for you” feed algorithmically, rather than being shared in a private curated channel. It’s fascinating watching from a distance. Everyone likes to feel the social media forces can be controlled or shaped. To an extent they can be, but most of it is just chaos on both sides. Telegram shows that people will tune in to private channels, though their reach might be limited compared to default-public mediums like Twitter. Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation a few days ago: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk... One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.

dgb23 3y ago

I've seen some of the videos published by Hamas. Some of them are literally filmed with "gopro" or similar cameras during their attacks. Generally I don't recommend watching these. These kinds of videos are incredibly disturbing. --- Trigger warning: violence. One thing that struck me is how horror-like all of it seemed and how invisible the opponent in such an engagement is. The invaders would often not see where the defenders were and would get shot seemingly out of nowhere. Vice versa they would shoot into small nudges and windows here or there and its often unclear whether they hit anyone or not. My cousins who fought in Bosnia would often tell me similar stories. Their enemies were invisible most of the time, while sometimes someone would get hit on their side. For reference: I once watched Full Metal Jacket with one of my cousins and there was a scene where suddenly, out of nowhere, the protagonists would get attacked in an urban area but they couldn't even see their enemies, just flashes of rifle fire here and there. He said: "This is exactly like war." --- I don't know what to make of it. It all just feels like pointless horror.

bm3719 3y ago
There's certainly other forces at play, but having participated in one, I tend to view the main reason that war is traumatic to the individual is its depersonalized (and in modern times, mechanistic) nature. A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably. So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.

qwerty456127 3y ago

Everyone probably subscribes even if they hate them so they can keep an eye.