jameshilliard

> No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.

Russia mostly just doesn't publish those figures at all last I checked. OSINT researchers however following the Russia/Ukraine war will typically use data from Russian, Ukrainian and independent sources where available however so it also wouldn't be advisable to completely ignore the Russian data either. Even extremely biased/limited data can sometimes be used to identify trends, at least for cases where the bias factor tends to be consistent.

Israel also isn't a dictatorship and has what most would consider to be a relatively free press that is not afraid to criticize the government(i.e. Haaretz) so it would be rather difficult for Israel to deliberately publish outright fabricated data on a large scale without getting caught doing so.

I'm also not saying you should blindly trust any specific sources, however much of the COGAT data can also be corroborated via independent sources such as satellite imagery.

Keep in mind it's also not the case that the UN data meaningfully contradicts the COGAT data either, it's entirely possible for both to be reasonably accurate. In general I would say both COGAT and UN data are both likely reasonably accurate once factoring in the published limitations on that data.

The reason the numbers are different is simply because they are measuring different things. In the case of COGAT they generally measure total aid going through border crossings while the UN measures aid reaching only a subset of distributions points within Gaza.

So if you want to estimate per capita food aid going into Gaza you would want to use the COGAT figures since that data is collected at all border crossings and can be used to get a rough per capita figure on aid entering Gaza. On the other hand if you want to measure something like aid reaching UN system aid distribution points within Gaza then you would want to use the UN data.

Attempting to use UN data to calculate per capita food aid going into Gaza would clearly be wrong as the UN's own published data collection methodology clearly shows they are not measuring total aid entering Gaza.

The UN often seems to publish reports analyzing their own data while clearly failing factor in their own published data limitations into their calculations which results in inaccurate conclusions in their analysis. Usually these sort of analysis mistakes are very obvious as the UN generally publishes the math behind their calculations.

You shouldn't blindly discard data simply because you think the source might be biased in one direction, rather you should try to understand the limitations of the data and corroborate it against secondary sources where possibly while also trying to factor in bias where feasible.

Essentially it's not the raw data where there is disagreement, it's the various interpretations of what the data actually means.

> How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?

A war is not the same thing as a genocide. The Jews did not start a war with the Nazi's. Hamas started a war with Israel with openly genocidal goals, Hamas simply did not have the military capability to accomplish their genocidal goals.

> COGAT is an Israeli military unit.

That doesn't mean the data is unreliable.

> Trusting their statements is like trusting the statements of the Nazis during the previous genocide.

Comparing Israeli's to Nazi's is a common antisemitic trope.

> An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.

From my understanding no organization other than COGAT even has the ability to track the total aid deliveries, there is no evidence of mass starvation or that COGAT data is unreliable from what I've seen.

The Captain that was attacked by the copilot unlocked the door.[0]

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/wounded-flyduba...

> Apparently, Omanis are not allowed to travel to Israel, so an Omani would not be a pilot going to TLV.

AFAIU Omanis would need a visa to travel to Israel but they are allowed.

> 35000 tons of aid, 60% percent of it food. So.. 10kg of food per person, per month.

That's for UN 2720 Mechanism aid AFAIU, for totals I think you need to look at COGAT data which shows much higher numbers for total food aid.

> Israel is currently allowing in thousands of truckloads carrying 35,000 metric tons of aid per month, according to the UN: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ocha-newsitem-7aug26/

You have to be very careful when looking at this sort of data, from my understanding UN data only tracks UN 2720 Mechanism aid deliveries. I think you need to look at COGAT data to see total aid deliveries as there are non-UN aid deliveries as well that won't show up in the UN data.

> Indian-Emirati captain

I think he may have just been Indian, I did see some early reports listing him as an Emerati but the more recent reports appear only seem to list him as Indian.

> South African and Kiwi backup pilots

Was this confirmed? I didn't see a reliable source reporting on the nationality of the backup pilots. A few sources had secondhand reports that both backup pilots were European but those don't seem to be confirmed.

> I read it was ukranian/russian pilots

The apparent terrorist was the co-pilot who was Omani, the captain that the terrorist attacked was Indian.

Are you claiming my statement is factually inaccurate?

> No one claimed “unconditional” hostage return. Of course there are conditions

You responded with that article in response to this question of mine "Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.".

As expected the article fully confirmed my understanding in regards to what Hamas offered. This was not a real offer to return the hostages but rather a demand for Israel to effectively surrender and leave Hamas in place to carry out future attacks.

> Hamas is fighting 80+ years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, that’s the whole point.

Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005.

> Israel decided committing genocide was more important than retrieving their settlers. That’s on them.

There were no settlers in Gaza on October 7th when Hamas launched their attack.

> This is Israel’s policy of killing their own settlers. Human shields would be how the IDF is located in nearly every building in Israel.

This is wrong for multiple reasons, first of all Hamas doesn't care if Israeli civilians get killed so such a tactic would be entirely ineffective, second of all Israel puts their military defenses in front of their civilians, not the other way around. Israeli soldiers simply aren't hiding behind Israeli civilians.

> White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so!

There are many beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy, obviously not all of those may by applicable to you.

> I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.

Antisemitism often exists in both left wing and right wing extremists groups, the international Jewish conspiracy beliefs likewise do as well.

> Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel.

It seems the opposite is true overall.[0]

> There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.

There are deep divisions within factions in Israel, to claim otherwise is to ignore reality.

[0] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...

> An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.

Israel left Gaza back in 2005 after forcibly expelling all Jews and only later on only blockaded Gaza due to weapons being smuggled in, so they tried that and it clearly didn't work. It seems unilateral disengagement is simply not a strategy that can be succesful here.

> the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.

This is just factually inaccurate, Mizrahi Jews in Israel today outnumber the Ashkenazi.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews

> Are you willing to give up your land so that someone else can have it as their 'homeland'?

Many Jews lost their land.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

You seem to have fallen for a well known antisemitic conspiracy theory.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspirac...

> Here you go: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-07-...

The article confirms what I suspected which is that Hamas did not unconditionally offer to give back the civilian hostages. The attached conditions would almost certainly have prevented Israel from dealing with the Hamas threat.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

I don't see how this is at all related to your claim that Israel uses human shields at all.

> It’s documented by Haaretz.

Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.

> Sacrifice and kill your own people just so you can kill even more Palestinians.

Israel does not use their own civilians as human shields, they use their military to protect their civilians. You're probably thinking of Hamas here since they use their civilians to protect their military.

> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.

This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.

> One of the things I don't like about Arm Laptops is—for example—how even if a SoC is supported upstream, if the manufacturer does not upload a device tree for their device, then you're cooked.

Why? Downstream vendor kernels generally use device trees and they can typically be easily extracted and decompiled for cases where the vendor is not GPL compliant and hasn't provided sources.

I've ported arm board device trees to mainline based Linux myself, porting the device tree has not really been the hard part in general...if mainline already has the necessary drivers.

The bigger issue tends to be that vendor kernels have a bunch of drivers that don't have upstream equivalents. I've been porting a lot of Allwinner ARM SoC drivers recently for the purpose of mainlining board support and it has been quite involved as Allwinner downstream kernels very heavily diverge from their mainline equivalent versions and are often based on 10 year old kernels. Even with Allwinner vendor sources(which are typically available in some form from BSP releases floating around on the internet) the drivers typically need to be fully rewritten due to Allwinner doing things in ways that mainline wouldn't accept. Luckily LLM's are quite good at this sort of porting work since they can ingest lots of garbage vendor driver code and create mainline variants(although there's usually substantial review/refactoring needed to get these merged upstream).

Often one also needs to port the drivers to uboot as well, in many cases one can mix a vendor uboot with mainline kernel but that doesn't always work properly(i.e. for Allwinner you generally can't boot a mainline kernel from vendor uboot and need to port uboot as well).

One other issue I've run into is that mainline Linux doesn't have great support for dynamic hardware probing which is often needed when vendors have different minor hardware variants that are all expected to use the same software builds. For example Allwinner on some SoC's will use a different co-packaged EPHY depending on the SoC revision which requires dynamic hardware detection via efuse probing. In other cases one may need to say detect a touchscreen device and driver by probing i2c addresses, mainline Linux has some support for this sort of thing but it's not particularly mature so sometimes one needs to do the hardware detection in uboot and patch or conditionally load device trees and/or device tree overlays which can be a bit involved.

> What's dubious about the WMD claims, Trump keeps waffling back and forth on whether or not we've destroyed their nuclear capabilities.

Well that's different from whether or not they have a nuclear weapons program, and I think one would probably describe their nuclear weapons program as being damaged but not fully destroyed. I don't think the existence of the nuclear weapons program is reasonably in question however.

> And this is Israel's interest only. Just because we've also gotten tangled up with UAE, Jordan, etc as a result of catering to their interests doesn't make it our own.

Saudi Arabia also wanted the US to attack Iran.[0] Most middle eastern countries seem to consider Iran to be a serious threat.

> Netanyahu called Trump and forced his hand on this, administration admitted it.

It's not super clear what happened here, my interpretation was more that Netanyahu may have somewhat forced Trump's hand on the specific timing of the initial strikes but not really on the decision to attack itself. Hard to say though.

> It's either that or, at best, Trump wanting to manipulate oil markets.

I think what happened is Trump got a bit over confident from the relatively successful Maduro abduction.

> It's just us. Our NATO allies don't want this war, even though they're more exposed to Mid East oil.

I'm pretty sure our NATO allies don't want Iran getting nukes either, it seems the disagreement is mostly in regards to how to prevent that.

> What really shows that we're suckers, our adversaries like Russia and China don't care to get involved either, and they're even closer.

Russia is already clearly involved...on Iran's side. China like usual tends to just play all sides.

> They must be happy we're focusing so hard on the Mid East at the expense of say Ukraine.

Yeah, the US should be doing a lot more to help Ukraine, although at least one of Russia's key allies(Iran) has been degraded a good bit.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/27/saudi-arabia-u...

> They want it weakened, that's it.

They certainly want it gone, weakened is the fallback.

> Nobody is putting a replacement in, not even the exiled shah's family.

What Israel and the US ultimately want is not the same thing as what they will currently put resources behind achieving.

> while also making dubious WMD claims

What is dubious about the WMD claims? Even the IAEA has said Iran has not been complying with safeguards.[0] It's quite obvious based on their enrichment percentages that they have a nuclear weapons program.

> More importantly, if Israel wants something, it's not our job.

Both Israel and the US want the regime gone or at least weakened. Sure, US/Israeli interests aren't always fully aligned but they are often similar. The Iranian regime is probably only an existential threat to Israel in the near term but that doesn't mean the regime is not still a threat to US regional interests. The world shouldn't allow terrorist organizations like the IRGC to obtain nukes.

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291

> The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse.

The IRGC/regime is what prevents them from living normal lives. The Iranian diaspora is protesting in favor or removing the regime since they know who the real enemy is.[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4w728kl4ko

> Israel has 0 interest in freeing Iran from its regime, and that's not the point of this war.

Israel for very obvious reasons[0] has plenty of interest in freeing Iran from its regime as well as an interest in weakening the regime.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani...

> The way a vendor embedding NTP is _meant_ to do so is documented here: https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html

Note that in the past I've had companies writing embedded linux based firmware using ntppool for time sync request their own vendor zones, however a lot of those requests were ignored so it's unclear if that's still expected. In the end they ended up just using the default ntppool domains since they never got their own vendor zones.

> the Afghanistan war gave control back to the Taliban

At least the Taliban tends to be relatively isolationist.

> what about the other terrorists like him out there?

A lot of them are funded by Iran.

> again shooting rocket at agreed and declared aid vehicle with volunteers is a war crim NOT COLLATERAL DAMAGE.

You seem to be conflating targeting mistakes resulting in collateral damage with deliberately targeting aid volunteers, the two are not remotely the same thing.

> A colleteral could be if you missed the palestinian kid and killed an IDF assassin.

You clearly seem to have no clue what collateral damage means.

> the definition of war includes two states fighting each other militarily

No, that's not the definition of "war", for example civil war does not fit that definition despite being a type of war. There are also plenty of wars involving non-state actors.

> I didnt see any state

This is not a prerequisite for something to be a war.

> military on the Gaza side

What do you think Hamas is?

> what I've seen is total demolition and killing of civilians on purpose.

Hamas did build military infrastructure under most of Gaza and are quite open about their strategy of using civilians as human shields.

> “Hamas did it too” is not an exoneration and I’m amazed so many Israelis keep mentioning “Hamas” as if it does anything more than bring IDF down to their level.

The IDF does not intentionally operating amongst civilians to increase collateral damage like Hamas does. I never made such a claim.

> It makes both sides sound bad, but because the IDF has the support of the civilized world the standard should be a little higher. Israel is not like that though - they are very tit for tat and immature in their messaging which only makes them look worse.

How is tit for tat immature? Is it immature when Ukraine does it to Russia? It's pretty hard to deter an enemy if one just ignores their attacks.

> Also if the war is Israel vs Hamas in Gaza it makes people wonder why they are killing Palestinians outside Gaza like in the West Bank and in the illegal Jewish settlements.

Hamas is not only in Gaza.

> It has to be 2 states

That does seem to be the most realistic option, sure. It's a long way off however.

> both of which are equal members in a larger league of states perhaps in the Levant.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.

> Need a peace-loving leader post-Netanyahu in the region to unify people and get them forward-thinking with technology and a secular revolution.

Israel has had leaders in the past that have pushed for a two state solution, Palestinian leadership on the other hand has historically always refused to negotiate in good faith.

Israel has certainly been willing to make peace historically when there are partners for peace like there was with Sadat with Egypt.

> Something for the people for the region to all identify with that isn’t rooted in violence and oppression.

Unfortunately when Israel has tried to make peace with Palestinians things have generally not been successful. When Israel offered peace Palestinians responded with terrorism like the second intifada.