Search
289 results for “mosu”
-
Scored today: box from my Iraq battle buddy, Fred Minnick, consisting of cigars and a bottle of Green River Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Fred, these days a successful bourbon writer, called me yesterday to let me know the “goodies” were inbound. When we were in Iraq during 2004, he had a blog in which he named me Sammy whenever he referred to me. He revealed to the world my true identity in his book, “Camera Boy,” about his experiences in Iraq.
#Mosul
#CameraBoy -
Preacher américain: "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea..."
PIerre: "Kossé qui dit le preacher?"
Marie: "Apparemment qu'y aurait un mosus qui aurait étendu sa main au-dessus de la mer..."
Pierre: "Un mosus? Y parle en joual, dieu?"
Marie: "Ça ben l'air..."
(Mosus = Mausus.
Ça peut aider:
-
When census comes around, I never know what to say for Religion. I want to say whatever they got on Infant Island: their god only acts when called upon with song, and will willfully die trying to help, buying time so her children, or their children, can finish the job because, in the words of TOHO, "Mothra IS Life", and that's how Life works.
-
Scored today: box from my Iraq battle buddy, Fred Minnick, consisting of cigars and a bottle of Green River Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Fred, these days a successful bourbon writer, called me yesterday to let me know the “goodies” were inbound. When we were in Iraq during 2004, he had a blog in which he named me Sammy whenever he referred to me. He revealed to the world my true identity in his book, “Camera Boy,” about his experiences in Iraq.
#Mosul
#CameraBoy -
Scored today: box from my Iraq battle buddy, Fred Minnick, consisting of cigars and a bottle of Green River Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Fred, these days a successful bourbon writer, called me yesterday to let me know the “goodies” were inbound. When we were in Iraq during 2004, he had a blog in which he named me Sammy whenever he referred to me. He revealed to the world my true identity in his book, “Camera Boy,” about his experiences in Iraq.
#Mosul
#CameraBoy -
Scored today: box from my Iraq battle buddy, Fred Minnick, consisting of cigars and a bottle of Green River Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Fred, these days a successful bourbon writer, called me yesterday to let me know the “goodies” were inbound. When we were in Iraq during 2004, he had a blog in which he named me Sammy whenever he referred to me. He revealed to the world my true identity in his book, “Camera Boy,” about his experiences in Iraq.
#Mosul
#CameraBoy -
3 Days Itinerary in Mosul, Iraq - Travel Guide https://trola.net/city-itinerary/3-days-itinerary-in-mosul-iraq-travel-guide-trip?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Mosul #Iraq #MosulIraq #itinerary #travel
-
3 Days Itinerary in Mosul, Iraq - Travel Guide https://trola.net/city-itinerary/3-days-itinerary-in-mosul-iraq-travel-guide-trip?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Mosul #Iraq #MosulIraq #itinerary #travel
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
Crossing a river by automobile, Mosul, Iraq, 1935
https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2038471/crossing-a-river-by-automobile-mosul-iraq-1935
-
For #FreewareMonday of week 07/2025 we picked
#TheDarkQueenOfMortholme by MosuPlay this #freeware adventure on @itchio
https://qwertyprophecy.itch.io/mortholme
and consider the #pwyw option to support the developer
#gamedev #indiegamedev #freeware -
#FLAC (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9639) and #MKV (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9559) are now #IETF proposed standards!!
Kudos to the CELLAR working group and to authors (for MKV: @robux4 , @mosu and Dave Rice)!!
-
Jeremy Corbel (Credible Journalist)
"What the U.S. Military Knows About UFOs" - posted 7 hours ago (1h30m)
- Hundreds of people
- Every day
- Earth/Sea/Air/Space in seconds
- Paper trial
- Professional observers
- (US) Government says they are real
- We don't know who's they are
- Strategic advantage
- Military footage
- UFO Crash retrievals
- #HalPutoff
- 40 sworn witnesses with #DavidGrush
- Commander Fravor (The TicTac pilot)
- "Shape emerging UAP narrative"
- Jellyfish UAP vs CIA
- Fastidious, Network of sources
- Whistleblowers
- Phoenix lights
- #UAS vs #UAP
- Perception managementhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi-s84uJZHw
Especially recommended for the "#Sceptics" (Disambiguation, not #Debunkers)
#UFO #NHI(Image, CIA capture Mosul UFO video)
-
🇮🇱🇮🇷 Airstrikes Hit Iranian Proxy Forces Near Mosul
Airstrikes hit Iran-Iraq border as US and Israeli plan to mobilise Kurds gathers pace . Israel and the US are trying to degrade the capabilities of pro-Iranian militias in Iraq with airstrikes and special forces operations on the ground, according .
-
https://archive.org/details/bokobandela
Bokobandela : lisolo by Bienvenu Sene Mongaba
Topics
#lisoló, #búku, #mokandá"Kimina azali kalaka ya leta. Mpiaka likolo ya mpiaka. Mokolo mosusu, ngenge : ministre alaki ye na moninga ye. Bakokende Addis-Abeba na koyangana monene ezali kuna. Bakofutama na ndenge ekoki. Na lifuta wana, Kimina na mwasi na ye bakani kozwa mabele epai ya Bateke mpo na kosala bilanga. Nzoka nde..."
-
CW: Unarmada for Gaza: Long bars, extreme content
home #DAARVO feds yet to #merc and #narc us
smash our #heartland up; calmly #FARC us
but mark this; #markets are #MarkingTargets
garnering chips before #Autumn darkens
looking for our links to chill our parlance
listing #collectives , #trans and #anarchists
and if these corpses swept under carpets
trust they coming next for our kids
be it #Farage or whoever’s in charge,
our tyrant’s tools will have us in our compartments
chemical froth corrupting our lungs
minds addled by the slop, #SaveOurSons
#f35 tonne bomb mach one
song old as rhyme – #TheBeastIsGaston
#quadcopters will soon barrage us
one hot post will be cause to charge us
wires and walls and #checkpoints will part us
a crime from you and they’ll kill your fathers
#warning : content’s awful mar true
sins are mortal and laws are martial
a living child interred in rubble
the rocks won’t crack an inch; she can’t pull
in Gaza as in #Mosul and #Kabul
dogs ran with morsels of human charnel
now even the mongrels’ deathly gargle
life taken hostage by unremarked ghouls
like #GenghisKhan and #JeffreyDahmer
the #ThaneOfGlamis and rabid #piranhas
slashed up a world of kids with #katanas
hung them from larches like #pinatas
pincushioned by acid archers
then called in the #AirBarrages
posting vids as they blew the charges
truly the most moral armies
then as we scream “ #MassMurder ” started singing #FrankSinatra
#WishingOnAStar wearing literal guts for garters
try with all my #dada can’t impart the sheer #disaster
we’ll all always have been most against this in the hereafter3/7
#Bars
#Poetry
#Lyrics
#Songs
#writing
#rhymescheme
#geopol
#MiddleEast
#IsraeliWarCrimes
#FreedomFlotilla
#Sumud
#ConvoyOfSteadfastness
#FreePalestine
#Madleen
#AntiFascist
#Genocide
#UKpol
#Labour
#RuleOfLaw
#Atrocity
#Imperalism
#Collapse
#Ethics
#Society -
Sounds of heavy clashes reported in Mosul, where alleged US helicopters are reportedly opening fire with machine guns on Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) positions.
Iranian news outlets claim the helicopters took off from Harir Airbase in Erbil province.
Popular Front
-
"On the 10th of June 2014 #IS captured #Mosul in Northern #Iraq and went on to swiftly capture other #Sunni #Iraqi areas. it then linked them up to areas it had already taken control of in #Syria , across the border. On the 29th of June the group declared itself a a #caliphate , rebranding as the #IslamicState and it named its then leader Abu Bakr al #Baghdadi as caliph. In August that year IS marched to #Yazidi areas near Mosul and killed and enslaved thousands of its residents. "
-
Gonna play around with Chimera Linux on a Raspberry Pi 5, 8GB toninght.
Because the Argon One V5 (NVME) case is a pain in the rare* I'll just put the image on a USB SSD.
things to test:
- convert installation to btrfs with seperate SWAP partition
- activate Zswap
- run KDE
- see if bluetooth Keyboard & Mosue work
- see if printer and scanner work*the case blocks access to the SD Card slot
#ChimeraLinux #raspberrypi #Argon #2025
-
𝗕𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗦 𝗴𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝗸𝗲𝗲 𝗜𝗿𝗮𝗸, 𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗻 𝗷𝗮𝗮𝗿 𝗻𝗮 𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗸𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗮𝗮𝘁
Bijna tien jaar nadat terreurgroep IS in de iconische Al Nouri-moskee in het Iraakse Mosul het kalifaat uitriep, maakte de organisatie voor cultureel erfgoed van de VN, UNESCO, vandaag bekend dat daar deze week nog bommen van de beweging zijn gevonden. De explosieven...
-
Oghuz Turkish atabeg Imad ad-Din Zengi, who died OTD in 1146, ruled Aleppo, #Hama, Mosul, and Edessa https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/syria/hamah.html?s=mb #travel #Syria #history
-
#Iraq
From Mosul Eye on Twitter: Discover the Oral History of Mosul project, working to preserve diverse stories and experiences of Iraq's cities - Mosul, Basra, Dayala, and Anbar. Meet the investigators collecting and sharing these important histories. #OralHistory #Iraq #Mosul #Basra #Dayala #Anbar @iraqhttps://twitter.com/mosuleye/status/1627763224077651974?s=12&t=H0cbutiBivF6k5q9OPjqCA
