What I don't trust is the neutrality regarding company sensitive information and competitors. (I still trust the US government more than I would trust most any other than that, but still not much.)

I have found that I am easily trolled when I have the beginning of allergy troubles. It is better to not comment than to find out the hard way I need anti histamines.

Sorry for wasting people's time and energy.

You have a point, I am easily trolled when people lack arguments and start discussing person.

Regarding earlier comments... I got mainly upvotes, until an hour ago.

I have argued, a year or two ago, that this subject have to much emotional attachments and doesn't work on HN. It is twice as true today, it seems people now often have secondary accounts used for trolling when they lack answers about soemthing they find important.

I wrote it INSIDE "()", AS AN EDIT. since that was the only thing you could comment on, sad...

EDIT: I used a ":-)" three comments ago as a mark of irony. Well, justin66 have no serious answer, so I end it here.

Edit 2: Justin66 seems to downvote my comments in this old discussion now, with multiple accounts... 15+ downvotes on old and new comments in 20 minutes. That is what happens when people lack both a serious argument and maturity. (Easy to find for HN mods..)

Edit 3: detaro -- The karma is irrelevant. And I should be equally ashamed as justin66 for needling whai I hope is a teenager when he have dearly held wrong opinions. Enough.

Side A is officially antisemitic in their founding document (Hamas) and TV programs (even for children!); they literally took inspirations from the 3rd Reich. They condone murders of civilians (even children) and pay pensions to the family of killed murderers. They have expelled all members of side B. They persecute members of side B everywhere on the planet where both groups live in the same society.

Side B have racism from individuals, which is officially condemned by a democratically elected government. They throw murderers of civilians in jail. 20% (?) of the population in side B are really part of side A, with no expulsions (except once in a bad civil war, when both sides did it, almost 70 years ago).

And so on, there are lots of examples.

You can dismiss this as "just a matter of degree". But then note that there is also "just a matter of degree" in Celsius between Antarctica and Hawaii.

When do "double standards for different sides" go over the limit to the definition of stronger terms?

(Edit: If you're going to argue that persecution and hatred of Jews are excusable because of X, note that more Jews were expelled from the Muslim world than Palestinians that fled from the Nakba. And multiple times more land was stolen from them than the total area of Israel.)

These days I play an undead thief in Dark Souls 3. (But maybe it is realistic, I have no idea how professional thieves live.)

Israel has been literally criticized a hundred times more than e.g. Sudan with a million rapes and a million murders (more?).

See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Co...

(Also, Falk have been writing for Counterpunch and so on, you don't do that if you're not quite politically extreme.)

The other side is when the Jews were thrown out of the Muslim countries and their property stolen. Not in a civil war, but just from racism -- because they had the same religion as in some other country.

Note here that more Jews fled from the Muslim world than Palestinians in the Nakba. And in the fleeing Jews' stolen property there were more land than multiple times the size of Israel.

Contrast this with that not every Palestinian fled from Israel. They are still a large part of the population today -- the Israeli Palestinians were NOT thrown out as a reaction to when the Muslims threw out their Jews.

And you are really, really upset about Israel -- but dismiss the worse things happening in e.g. your home country Tunisia...

I have to stop here -- any further comment on your opinions, moral and intellectual integrity can't be polite. Let me just say that as a Westerner, I think you should judge yourself harder than you judge others.

The sympathy for due process of terrorists will wear thin in most democracies. Afaik, most countries with continuous terror problems throw out the law book.

This is a quite logical result, since the point of terror is to get a fear and horror reaction from the civilian population to influence them. Scared voters make politicians hysterical, so everything is done to stop the situation. (Democracies seems to be even worse here, since voters are more important than non democracies.)

Afaik, this goes for USA, Germany, Israel, Britain, Spain, etc. (I saw claims from some English guy that they did it different regarding IRA, then some other GB guy contradicted and listed some English laws. Let's call that example uncertain.)

Arafat got at least two offers for a Palestinian state (at Camp David and once later), with about 91% of the West Bank iirc.

The later offer was when Barak needed Arafat's support of a peace agreement before an election (so the Palestinian side had a good negotiating position).

Arafat didn't accept either -- which was one thing. But there was no counter offer like "Give us XX and YY and customs advantages ZZ and ...". Instead Arafat started a terror campaign.

But there is no blame for all that refusal to even give a counter proposal; it is all a big Israeli conspiracy.

(Seriously, I feel a bit sick when I chat with hateful people.)

You had no problem with that description in your previous comment.

But good references to non partisan sources would be interesting?

(AGAIN: If the ones controlling an area -- including doing elections, defense, police and taxes -- put all their economy into rocket artillery against another country's civilians, the reaction will not be mild... And Gaza is not part of a city, it was a free area.)

If e.g. Finland or Estonia started to shoot rocket artilleri towards St Petersburg, the reaction would certainly be much worse than Israel's at Gaza...

(And because of Karelia etc for Finland and generations of slavery for Estonians, they have as good reasons as the Gazans.)

The situation is:

Side A attack side B's civilians. You only complain about side B's quite moderate defense against A's attacks. (Again, installed to stop the attacks.) Then you motivate that further attacks from A are understandable, because of B's defense.

It is such a sad case of hypocritical and hateful circular logic I get vertigo. :-(

So the isolation and security came up because of violence, the terror against civilian Israelis is not an original reaction to the wall.

But I suspect you know this.

Especially since their assets were confiscated...

The Palestinian terrorists are declared martyrs, mural paintings are done, their relatives get a pension from PLO -- while caught Israeli murderers are sent to jail..?

It do seem like equivalent sides, as you claim... :-)

Also, Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia were civil wars.

Anyway, how many free elections had Croatia and Bosnia had at that time, to be defined as democratic? :-)

How many peaceful transitions of power had there been at the time (the real gold test)? :-)

If just one reasonably free election is needed, then Hamas in Gaza is a democratic government... :-)

The consensus is that the Assad junta is responsible for much more death/torture than even ISIS. They have the ability to use barrel bombs and artillery on civilians.

And I do think you know both points above.

Edit: No references in the answer to this, as expected. (I can only blame myself for arguing with what looks like an extra account created to troll people someone don't agree with.)

(At least about modern, mainly international, politics -- what the Brits did before WWII seems quite irrelevant to anything by now.

Edit: WWII started almost 80 years ago for 's sake, there is some time limit when even people in the Middle East have to stop blaming GB...)

How many free elections did they have? :-) How many free transfers of power did they have? :-)

(The next point here is that the democratic peace theory didn't say anything about civil wars?)

EDIT: I am NOT going to comment on Dragonwriter's answer to this and for a THIRD TIME ask for references about how Yugoslavia and Serbia are stable democracies that have been doing transfer of power after free elections AT THAT TIME PERIOD. :-( I am disappointed over a 30+K karma account for this bullshit.

In Sweden, since that is the subject, we really used to be naive and trust what we were told.

Some of the typical characteristics you saw, all the way back to before written history, is that we are group oriented and do what we were told. This made for a high trust society, which is probably what made the place work.

But no more, the society elites are really destroying this trust now.

That the democratic world supports Saudi A is an extreme example of realpolitik, of course. We need stability in that part of the world.