Everybody talks, but no body cares, no body takes serious actions. Kids, women, elderly, whole families are being killed for almost two years and no body gives a shit.

Millions of people trapped in a land and moved from north to south from south to north like animals, have you seen videos of starving people running in masses to get food from aids thrown from the air? I can’t beilieve such things are happening in 2025! Sometimes I think, what would I do if I was put under such circumstances? How much hate would I accumulate? What if something happens to my kids? What if I see my kids starving in front of me and I can do nothing about it?

Also big companies, they only care about money, ethics and morale do not exist, they only care about money money and more money.

Countries fighting for women rights in Iran and Saudi (which I agree with) but at the same time, those same countries don’t say anything about the killing of innocent people, pure hypocrites.

I guess the difference is that I'm aware of it and I try to fight it. The ability to empathise with those whom you disagree with or share little in common with is a skill that can be learnt, and one we should try to teach to our children. And I mean this in its most extreme sense. If you can't empathise with someone you find truly bad/evil, that's a problem because we can always view others as bad/evil if it allows us to justify our lack of empathy towards them. Typically its those who we believe instinctively deserve the least empathy which we must proactively try our hardest to understand and care about. You see this all the time in war – they're the bad guys and deserve the bad things we do.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how practical what I'm saying is at its limit. Something you quickly realise when you practise being empathetic to everyone is that people will take advantage of that. But still, as a trend the world would be much a better place if more people could see past differences and care for the suffering of people equally.

Even still, have previous recent or concurrent conflicts like Myanmar or Sudan not caused you to lose faith either? I often find people who say this have some personal vested interest in this particular conflict and find it somewhat hypocritical that other such conflicts have not moved them the same way, for it's still humans fighting each other after all.

> Also big companies, they only care about money, ethics and morale do not exist, they only care about money money and more money.

I mean, yes, that is the purpose of corporations, they do not have morals by themselves. They are like machines to absorb money, you wouldn't expect a lawnmower to have ethics when it runs you over.

Still gaza war feels different, maybe because it’s almost streamed live on social media platforms by the directly impacted people?

I don’t agree with the statement that corporations are machines to absorb money, behind corporations there are people and people must have morale.

This is covered by the principle of the diffusion of responsibility. One person may have morals but spread over many, the entire structure does not. Those corporations that do have morals are outcompeted by those that don't, in terms of amount of money made, so over time corporations that are not moral do better.

The mistreatment of the Palestinians is long running, deliberate, calculated. The recent blood bath in Gaza is another entry in a long running tragedy.

Between River and Sea by Dervla Murphy is a wonderful, humane examination of the country. It's over a decade old but still very informative without being academic or dry. I would recommend it highly.

My main concern is how quickly what I would have considered Western value structures, democracy, press freedom, international law, reasonableness have evaporated and I now see the West, and the US in particular very differently.

Allowing one group, in fact enabling them in so many ways, of people who we have close affiliations with to kill, starve, displace and torture an entire population, no matter the reason, just makes me see the world in a very different way.

This centuries illegal wars had opened my eyes somewhat but even those I'm going back to and re-evaluating and seeing them and the current situation as frankly great evils.

I'm old enough to not really have to worry for myself, but selfishly it does make me very concerned for my children.

And yes I am more than concerned for the Palestinians, if that is the "cause" you are referring to.

If anyone from Gaza Sky Geeks is reading this, please consider sharing those updates on your blog as well as on your email newsletter, so that they can be shared more widely.

[0] https://gazaskygeeks.com/

I'm Jewish, and opinions in my extended family about Israel have always been in tension; but this war has brought it to an untenable level. I've stopped going what had previously been the normal Shabbat and holiday dinners, in favor of smaller ones with family that is less pro Israel (and very staunchly anti Netenyahu). Even there we more or less avoid the topic. Our less Passover sedar involved a very thinly veiled discussion about the war, which did not go particularly well.

Professionally, there has been much less of an effect. I work for a US defense contractor. For the most part, we avoid talking about it. From the little conversation, I have had, there seems to be a general morale drop; but that might be a selection effect with who I am willing to talk to about it.

The only time Israel became an open topic of discussion was after the pager bombs. Even then, it was pretty much a professional "and this is why we have so much red tape around supply chain management".

It has taken a small but noticeable toll on my personal life. Amongst my family we find ourselves talking about the state of the occupation and how hopeless it makes us feel about humanity probably once a week. I can see my liberal Jewish friends having a lot of trouble being criticized and rejected from both sides of discourse in USA. I recently saw two jewish people shouting obscenities at each other while waiting to get off a plane and talking about Israel. Antisemitism on the street seems to be increasing -- I met someone a few days ago who started saying baseless hateful things minutes into our first conversation.

Probably like other people here I've spent a lot more of my free time in the last year learning about the history culture and politics of Israel, Palestine and Iran.

On a personal level, I boycott all Israeli products and companies, including companies that do business with Israel (to the best of my ability, I still need an alternative to NVIDIA).

The VC community, weighted by AUM is profoundly Zionist.

I worked at one of the most prominent funds and 4 of my coworkers (American) literally relocated to Israel for ideological reasons

You can't bite the hand that feeds even if it's morally right.

Foreign Students are come and go anyway. Unlike in USA they can't stick around in Israel.

Israeli tech companies raised record amounts in Q2

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-tech-companies-ra...

https://tradingeconomics.com/israel/stock-market

But I also thought we were kind of beyond outright corruption and jingoism too. That these societies that you think are sophisticated and educated are actually not different at all from the sensibilities of societies that crucified people, enslaved people, wholesale eradicated people, economically suffocated people ...

There's nothing about our advanced society that has markers of advanced character, certainly not advanced moral character.

To be fully clear, if you show me a cohort of high school graduates from this year, with wonder in their eyes and a lot of talk about "the future will be good and just", I will absolutely give no credence to it. They are branch of this long torrid code base, and the romance of us as a species is mostly over in my heart (IDGAF how many rockets we launch into space, and how cool AI is). This is not a new type of epiphany, as I'm sure many people were broken throughout history exactly like this. If you believed the young people of 20-40 years ago that their innocence would persist and they would truly build a better world, you got catfished. None of us were ever going to be really different than the shitheads from yesteryear, and the dark truth is this will probably be the case long after our current iteration has mostly passed on.

In short, human innovation and energy is something I no longer believe is sufficient enough for building a sound world anymore. I falsely believed scientific and infrastructural advancement would be enough to keep lifting society. It's clear we morally platued quite some time ago, while technology has trended way way up.

It fascinates me that it's become so popular to defend people from reprisals for their own elected government's actions.

I also found it really interesting that over a thousand Israelis were killed, yet the people I work with immediately started saying that any kind of response was totally unfair to the Palestinians. Not a single word of compassion for the Israelis who were killed. But I guess that's not a trending thought.

https://www.thefp.com/p/friedman-when-we-started-to-lie

I don't understand why so many in the west get upset by the Gaza war but are so indifferent/don't care about Ukraine or actively hand waive away concerns and/or loudly say 'I don't care about Ukraine'.

Whereas they've already contributed billions to supporting Ukraine

You'd see 10x the outrage if for some reason the US was providing Russia the munitions they use on Ukrainian civilians

In the case of Israel, western governments (particularly US) are directly transferring arms and military support used against the civilians

This is paid for by taxpayers who receive no economic benefits whatsoever, with minimal negative economic impact from decoupling

It's also different when then ratio of civilian to military deaths is multiple orders of magnitude higher, and ~5x higher in absolute terms despite Gaza having ~5-10% the population of Ukraine

about ratio:

- i'll suggest you to take a look at wiki page of siege mariupol. iirc it's up to 75,000 civilian casualties in 3 months

- ukraine actively evacuates civilians.

- hamas said that that well being of civilians is problem of israel and unrwa and actively using civilians as human shields. here is 10 years old analysis that says that it does so in order to shape western opinion https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....

- ukrainians from day one of war were allowed to seek refuge in europe

- egypt build second wall on border with gaza over past year in order to prevent any refugees crossing and europe talking about any possibility of evacuation of civilians as of ethnic cleansing.

With regards to ukraine, billions contributed are mostly due to personal interest of europe: it cheaper to make ukrainians fight russia than deal with it by itself in case it will decide to reunite with baltics for example

I don't consider myself part of the HN crowd, rather just someone with a waning tech background and persistent interest in many things. I'm unaffiliated with any identity regarding the conflict. A mere American, dizzy and uneasy.

Personally, the effects for me, coupled with Ukraine, instill a sense of illness. I deliberately avoid the numbers as I would the flu. My delusions of a wonderful world are presently reserved for intoxicants and occasional suspensions of disbelief which come sparsely. The tension surrounding the topic, however, is palpable.

I wish you the extensive discussion the subject deserves.