Interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer trespasses into the copyright owner’s domain, but he does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Although it is no less unlawful or wrongful for that reason, it is not a theft.
You can't vouch submissions, only comments, which means anyone with a handful of accounts has a mega delete button that can't be reversed. The only way to stop this is for so many people to flag so many things that the mods turn off the ability for flags to delete things.
From the article:
Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.
In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:
> Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…
> Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
The population of Gaza has increased during the war. Roughly 60k deaths and roughly 103k births, using the UN statistics of 150 births per day in Gaza.
The statistics of 150 births/day in Gaza are from 2023- is it clear to you that the population now is undernourished, forced to flee from place to place, their homes demolished and their relatives dead or injured? Life expectancy in Gaza plummeted from 75 years to around 40.
And how do you even know that there have been 60k deaths in Gaza? That number is likely a vast underestimate.
No matter how you slice the data, births have exceeded deaths in Gaza during the war.
Elsewhere in the thread, I supplied data showing 130 births/day in April 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. No matter how you slice it, (100 births/day, 130 births/day, 150 births/day, or 180 births/day) there have been at least 70,000 births in Gaza since the war started, though likely many, many more. This exceeds the number of known deaths by any measure. Were you familiar with these figures previously? Can you supply alternative data showing a lower birth rate? No and no.
As for the deaths, you asked if I know there have been ~60k deaths. The truth is I don't know there have been 60k deaths in gaza, and neither do you - that figure comes from Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization and belligerent to the war, and it includes natural deaths, deaths reported in google forms,terrorist deaths, palestinian deaths caused by Hamas, and has had to be downward revised (including cutting the known number of female and child deaths by half) several times in the conflict - so for most of the conflict at least, people citing these figures would have been wrong. But I'm willing to use this figure here because I consider it an upper limit.
Source: "About 130 children are being born daily in Gaza as Israeli authorities' total siege on supplies enters its second month, putting mothers and newborns at risk as medical and food supplies run out and a lack of flour closes all bakeries"
https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
Source? Also, even if this is true, it doesn't actually negate claims of genocide. That is still a colossal number of deaths, and conditions in Gaza are rapidly worsening to the point that few of those born will survive.
No, I really can't find any documents like that. Could you post a URL to the document you're referring to? Additionally, your claim of 60,000 deaths is an extreme underestimate. The dataset provided by data.techforpalestine.org lists more than 60,000 deaths, despite only including people whose corpses could be identified and directly linked to an Israeli attack. In other words, this does not include deaths from starvation, exposure, or illness. It also does not include unconfirmed deaths, and, of course, cannot include unreported deaths.
You may think data.techforpalestine.org is a biased source, but their total identified death count roughly agrees with every other source I could find.
It's hard to get good data on current birth rates in Gaza, but the recently published preprint of a demographic study of the death toll in Gaza (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...) provides some evidence that the death toll in Gaza is approximately balanced by births. Specifically, the project directed in-person interviews of Gazan citizens representing ~2k households and ~9k people in them, and recorded ~390 violent deaths and ~360 births in that cohort, both from 10/7 and until January 2025.
Thank you for providing a source! That data certainly contradicts @richardfeynman's claim, in that it suggests a shrinking population. Additionally, since total deaths will be greatly in excess of violent deaths, I would say it suggests a rapidly shrinking population. I would not call the birth and death rates "approximately balanced" in this case, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.
No, this data in fact suggests growing population, for the following three reasons:
- the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort
- however, it is well known that the violent deaths occurred overwhelmingly early in the war (so far) - according to the official Hamas statistics, something like 50% of all casualties are in the first 4 months of the war, out of 22 so far. Whether these statistics are over- or under-counted is not likely to make a dent in this huge imbalance. So as the war is ongoing - and it's already been another 8 months since the 14 covered by the survey - the death rate is still "collapsing" compared to average rate so far.
- at the same time, the birth rate has evidently not seen such a huge collapse since the first 4 months of the war; this can't be gleaned from the survey, but enough plausible reports (e.g. what @richardfeynman quoted) exist that point in that direction.
So if we consider the survey relatively representative of the entire population, the imbalance towards shrinking population after 14 months is already almost certainly repaired towards growing after another 8 months, because so few civilians are violently killed (again, compared to the first 4 months of the war) in 2025.
Once again: do you have sources for any of this? Yes, there were more violent deaths at the start of the war, but how much more? @richardfeynman did provide quotes for his birth rate claims, but as I already mentioned, those quotes appear to be estimates of birth rates for a single month. Extrapolating that data across all 22 months is nonsense.
Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed.
And finally, we don't even need to play these games counting up death tolls in different, increasingly creative ways. There are already reports from the UN and others directly confirming that Gaza's population has decreased: <https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...>
The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.
There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.
There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.
Thanks, but we still need better data on births for this argument to hold any water. Additionally, if you want to include the segment of the population that has fled, you will also need data on the birth/death rates for that segment.
I would also like to note that you found a study looking at birth/death rates, but after realizing it suggested a shrinking population, decided to combine information from that study with information from a separate dataset so that the population could be argued to be growing.
And none of this actually takes nonviolent deaths into account, however small you believe that number may be.
"On 18 January 2024, Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the UN Population Fund, spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, stating the situation was the "worst nightmare" the UNPF representative had ever witnessed, as there were 180 women giving birth daily, sometimes on the streets of Gaza, as the territory's health system collapsed"
The 60k death count is likely an overcount, not an undercount, but this one I won't google for you. However you cut the numbers, and even if you believe in nameless ghosts under the rubble, there's been no population collapse.
Thanks for providing sources! They estimate 180 giving birth every day, but over what time frame? Without a time frame, it's not really possible to estimate the total born.
As for the 60k count, every single source I have found suggests that 60k is a massive underestimate. You'll need to provide some very strong evidence to back up your claim to the contrary.
Regardless of the balance of birth and death rates, multiple sources have reported a significant decline in Gaza's population this year. So far, all evidence you have provided contradicts your own initial claim.
Excuse me, but my initial claim is that there is no genocide in gaza because there is no massive population collapse. During the holocaust, 66% of european jewry was murdered in a systematic effort -- all civilians, with no Jews attacking European cities. The figures during the rwandan and armenian genocide were similar: massive population collapses.
Whether you believe there have been 100 births a day or 140 or 150 or 180, I have demonstrated that there were tens of thousands of births during the war in gaza, using credible sources like the UNOCHA and WHO. But even if you assume ZERO births, the gazan population will have only collapsed by roughly 60k people. I may be wrong about this, but I think this is an OVERESTIMATE, not an underestimate. While you don't have to believe me, I at least can make this claim without appealing to nameless ghosts under the rubble and can provide credible sources.
- The hamas figures are not an independent registry. The numbers are produced by a Hamas-run Ministry of Health—i.e., a belligerent party—without external audit. The UN, etc. do not independently verify these numbers; they simply repeat them. Even sympathetic explainers acknowledge the ministry is governed by Hamas and its routine updates aren’t independently verified.
- The system accepts public self-reports (initially via Google Forms, later an MoH web portal). That alone invites duplicates, misclassification, and bad data. Washington Institute documents the Google Form; it also cites the current MoH “report a death/missing” portal.
- The public reporting portal explicitly allows “natural death” submissions. When the same pipeline feeds the headline tally, non-combat, non-IDF deaths can (and did) get swept in. The live MoH form literally offers “martyr,” “missing,” or “natural death.” Mainstream reporting later noted removals where entries turned out to be natural deaths.
- the gaza ministry of health uses opaque and unreliable methods to count deaths (“media reports” + family notifications) with weak validation. Beyond hospital records, the MoH has relied on poorly specified “media reports” and family submissions; AP also notes names often come via the Hamas government media office—not hospital documentation. That’s not a chain of custody you can audit. It included the known false figures from the al ahli hospital incident.
- Totals and demographics are unstable and there have big retroactive corrections. The UN/OCHA famously halved its women/children figures in May 2024, and months later the MoH removed thousands of previously listed “victims,” with officials conceding some were natural deaths or living detainees. That volatility is incompatible with “hard” totals.
- The overall figure doesn’t separate civilians from combatants or assign cause of death. By design it bundles Hamas fighters, civilians, misfire casualties, indirect war deaths, and (as above) even natural deaths—so it cannot answer the key question “how many Gazans were killed by Israel.”
Thank you for providing sources. I do find it interesting that the Washington Institute report concludes by saying that the Gaza Health Ministry's list of deaths is generally considered accurate, and that list currently includes more than 60,000 names.
But maybe you're right! Maybe the very sources you're relying on are wrong, and only 50,000 or so Gazans have died. That still doesn't mean this isn't a genocide.
The argument is that Gaza is currently undergoing a genocide, not that the genocide is already complete. If we were to have this argument about the Holocaust in 1942 or so, you could similarly say that only a small percentage of European Jews have died so far, therefore it can't be a genocide. In the case of Palestine, give Israel another decade of unchecked brutality and I'm sure they can attain your high standards for human extermination.
The sources I provided show that there are severe problems with the Gaza Health Ministry list. You may find particular sentences that show the top-line number is correct, and indeed that may be true. I provided those sources not to show that 60k is the wrong number of dead--a figure I myself used in my initial comment--but rather to show that the list itself has issues and that arguments can be made that it's an overestimate rather than an underestimate. I agree the actual figure is difficult to pin down. There's no need for snarkiness ("Maybe you're right and your sources are wrong.") in a discussion like this, where the goal is to discover truth on a complex, emotional issue.
The bottom line is that whether you believe 60k people died or 100k people died, and whether you believe 60k people were born or 100k people were born, there has been nothing close to a population collapse in Gaza. Indeed, the population appears to have risen. Therefore, if you're going to make the argument that there is an ongoing genocide, you're going to have to also admit (as it appears you now do) that Gaza's population has either risen during this alleged genocide, or decreased by a small amount.
There are additional hurdles for those claming a genocide: (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?; (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones; (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill; (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week; (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low; and I can go on forever. You may have respones to some of these questions, and we can debate these, but perhaps it's not necessary. The argument for genocide is one of those "emperor has no clothes" issues. People say it with such confidence, as though it's common knowledge (and indeed it is widely believed), but that doesn't mean it's true, or that the emperor has clothing.
Finally, by the end of 1942, the Nazis had killed 30% of european jewry, 3 million innocent civilians. There was already a clear genocide, which the world ignored. The inverse is true today: there is no clear genocide, but most of the world maintains it is.
> (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?;
"The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you, and you have seen with your own eyes what has happened. Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons while sending you only shrouds.
"There is little time left — the game is almost over."
So, to your question, the primary purpose of these leaflets is to terrorize and threaten the population. The secondary purpose is to have hasbarists like yourself pretend that they are evidence of humanitarian magnanimity.
> (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones;
"[Forensic Architecture] has documented a pattern in which civilians have been directed to move to certain areas by official evacuation orders, only for the Israeli military to attack those same areas shortly afterwards, either on the same day as the evacuation order, or the day after.
> (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill;
Even rhetorically this question makes no sense, considering that it is very well-documented that Israel has been and is actively preventing real humanitarian aid. The Israeli-sanctioned "aid" via the GHF is a "killing field" of desperate Palestinians: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-ma...
> (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week;
Because then there would be even fewer of those alongside you willing to defend the indefensible.
> (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low;
The postulate required for this pair of questions to not be self-defeating is to expand the meaning of "terrorist" to encompass, at the least, every male in Gaza. In other words, "Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza." - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel...
>The leaflets read: “For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters … Anyone near terrorists or their facilities puts their life at risk, and every house used by terrorists will be targeted.”
I think this answer partially misses the point, because at the core of Aaronson's argument is the idea that they are the victims, that some crazy murderer moved by a hatred as deep as it's nonsensical has forced them to this horrible choice.
And yet it's Israel that is illegally occupying parts of Palestine, not the other way around; it's Israel that has closed Gaza in a total blockade for twenty years and bombarded it any time it liked, claiming many more civilian lives that Oct 7 did; it's Israel that imposes apartheid on Palestinians in the West Bank. It's Israel that constantly builds new illegal settlements in other people's territory. It's Jewish colonists that invaded a land to build an ethno-religious state that excludes the natives.
It's the whole victimhood narrative that justifies the apparently immoral solution to the ethical dilemma: "fuck it, I'm done being a victim, I will not uphold high moral principles when I'm constantly being beaten by others"- except that Israel is a nuclear power that has enjoyed for the past 50 years at least the complete economic, military and diplomatic support of the US and the West, is illegally occupying other people's land, implementing apartheid and building new settlements with the obvious long-term goal of ethnically cleansing the whole land. And has obviously no trouble whatsoever reducing to rubble all of Palestine and the capitals of a few neighbouring countries- at the same time.
Whenever someone says "I'm done being a victim, I will only look after my own interest from now on" remember- that's exactly how Nazism justified itself.
Did the Nazi homocaust of Jews seek to destroy all Jewish people, no. The UN has a working definition of genocide. The whole world, outside of the US (thanks AIPAC!) and maybe the UK is convinced that Israeli atrocities on Palestinians is clearly genocide.
"Never Again!" - really, Israelis? It's only okay if it's you doing the killing?
> Did the Nazi homocaust of Jews seek to destroy all Jewish people, no.
The entire goal of the holocaust was destroying all Jewish people (and many who weren't). This was exactly why this was dubbed "The final solution to the jewish problem". You might want to educate yourself a bit more on the subject
> The whole world, outside of the US (thanks AIPAC!) and maybe the UK is convinced that Israeli atrocities on Palestinians is clearly genocide.
The whole world was convinced that the Germans were mere victims who only need one more concession, Hitler was merely trying to fix the injustice of Versailles. Further, there was wide support for the German efforts to solve their "Jewish problem", As Jews of course have caused World War 1 through bond trading and caused millions of deaths, famine in Germany as well as Communism and its subsequent millions.
That may sound funny to you now, but that was a popular opinion in elite universities. When words lose meaning and truth become second, all kind of stories seem true
Well what are your thoughts on reducing Gaza to rubble? On forced starvation and repeated forced relocation of Palestinians? On killing called "mowing the lawn" by Israelis? On expanding Israeli terrority to include the property of neighboring countries and calling it "Greater Israel" ???? Where do the Zionists (many who are athiests) plan to stop, if ever? Does Netanyahu refrain from peace agreements simply to remain in power? Why does much the Israeli population reject all of this spilling of innocents' blood?
My thoughts are that when Hamas kidnapped 200 Israeli citizens including babies and massacred a 1000 more, which included mass rapes, beheading and burnings, there was no choice left to Israel but to remove that organization completely.
Because Hamas as the governing political party in Gaza, decided to use all of their resources to build fortifications below civilian neighborhoods, this endeavour entails the destruction of entire Gazan neighborhoods. Not unlike the Battle of Berlin or the bombings of Dresden.
It's cliche to say war is terrible, but it is, that's why you don't start one, and that's why Israel always tried to do quick operations which amounted to nothing ('mowing the lawn' as you incorrectly quoted out of context). An advice Gazans have surely needed.
If you finally do start a war, you should really start a war you have a chance at winning. If even that isn't true, at the very least you don't go on such a barbaric rampage making your enemy extremely determined at removing your force completely, at great expense at your civilian population which elected you
Regarding starvation in Gaza, due to racism, media rage bating and general long cultural tradition in the west to scape goat a certain ethnicity, the perception is far different than reality. For example, a recent Gazan instagram account:
I want to remove them from my own feed. I want the button that says "hide" or "show fewer shorts" to actually work and ideally hide them forever. I have to play whack-a-mole on the different devices and browsers to try to hide shorts.
Well you aren’t wrong but the attitude isn’t helping.
It is my feed as far as it explains to you that it’s not about disabling something for others. It isn’t my feed as far as who actually controls it is concerned.
I can’t reply to your other comment so I’ll do it here.
Article 8 can be revoked for public safety, prevention of disorder or crime, protection of the rights of other people, but also for the protection of health and morals.
Given the problems with attention spans in systems like TikTok and shorts, they definitely could ban it even given article 8.
There are barely any alternatives, so yes, when I'm going to Google's or Meta's properties that's largely against my will. They literally make me, where "they" is a large and diverse group of entities.
To boycott Google I'd be forced to quit my job for example, as it literally forces me into Google's services.
Specifically YouTube has very little in the way of alternatives, but I get what you're saying — I just respectfully disagree with the coping method. Which is to say, on the gradient between "we should suck it up" and "we should Luigi Mangione the person responsible" I fall somewhere in the middle.
Everyone who put mandatory stuff on YouTube and only here. Two last examples I faced recently:
- Companies who put their product instruction manual exclusively on YouTube
- university curriculum who require you to watch contain that is on YouTube only.
Sure I'm free not to buy any manufactured products or not resume my studies, but it's like saying the Gulag was OK because people were free not to criticize Stalin.
the shorts are on the home page for doomscrolling. all the examples above will give you a playlist or will embed the videos in their pages. I don't see how shorts on the home page are a problem here? could you clarify please?
"going on YouTube" and complaining about shorts made it sound like you were going to the home page where shorts are shown as an option.
going on YouTube to watch a single video from a manual is a very different thing. I didn't move the goal post, I pointed out your motte and bailey position.
There no motte, and no bailey, I never talked about shorts in the first place (surprise, there are multiple users on this platform …) I just witnessed your bad faith argument about how people aren't forced to go on YouTube and proved it wrong.
The key problem isn't that YouTube has been degrading its user experience for a while, the problem is that we don't have anywhere else to go as YouTube is the most encroached monopoly in the tech scene (which is no small feat).
This is a very common response where users acquiesce to an internet of mediocrity rather than demanding the corporations do better
I mostly don't watch them. But they literally spam every single search. (While we're at it, Youtube also isn't very good at honoring keywords in searches either)
Easy on the website. Very click and swipe intensive on the phone in my opinion. Shorts are front and centre of the app and the search screens. I don't see any feed of suggested videos anymore.
The worst thing for me is they don't show the channel names. So much of the channels pushing Star Wars shorts are quite obvious bot names, and it's hard to filter these from legitimate SW content creators who are, on top of that, all using the same damn AI voice.
If I hear an AI voice I click the little menu button with three dots, then click don't show this channel or whatever it says.
The Venn diagram of AI voice users and good content creators is pretty close to two separate circles. I don't really care about the minority in the intersection.
Except that now Youtube also "helpfully" auto-dub legitimate videos in other languages (along with translating the titles) by default, so even the 'AI voice' isn't a good signal for gauging if it's quality content or not.
As a french-speaking person, I now find myself seeing french youtubers seemingly posting videos with english titles and robotic voice, before realizing that it's Youtube being stupid again.
What's more infuriating is that it's legitimately at heart a cool feature, just executed in the most brain-dead way possible, by making it opt-out and without the ability to specify known languages.
I don't think agi necessarily implies consciousness, at least many definitions of it. OpenAIs definition is just ai that does most of economically viable work
