Now’s the time to swap the Ukrainian flag for the Palestinian flag.
Are there lots of Palestinian OGS players? Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I guess not. My understanding of the decision by anoek to use the Ukrainian variant logo was not simply (or even primarily? ) geopolitical commentary or sympathy with a suffering people, but because there are/were lots of Ukrainian OGS users affected by Russia’s invasion so showing solidarity with them.
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How many people worldwide and here on OGS are affected by Israel’s invasion and total destruction of Palestine?
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is complicated. Just showing the flag of Palestine or Israel would be inappropriate, it would need more context.
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Where did you read that war in Ukraine is over?
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The Russia-Ukraine conflict is complicated. Just showing the flag of Russia or Ukraine would be inappropriate, it would need more context.
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That’s not true and even if it was, it wouldn’t mean showing the flag of Palestine or Israel would be a good idea.
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What is not true?
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Here we go again 
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This is the only place where you can swap a flag.
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While I don’t think it would be a good idea to change the flag, I cannot let this stand uncommented. This exact sentence is often used to shut down conversation and to keep people from informing themselves on the conflict. It’s propaganda. There is a lot of history to this conflict, with many nuances, that’s true. But the nature of the conflict itself is very clear. It’s Apartheid, and there should not be any equivocation which side deserves our solidarity.
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No.
It is not very clear what you mean by “nature of the conflict”, as you said yourself there is a long history to it.
It is not very clear that Apartheid is the right word to describe the situation. I have only read parts of the 10,000 word long Wikipedia article on Israel and apartheid, but I know antisemitism all over the world is an import part of the current situation too.
It is not very clear which sides you are considering, there aren’t just two sides. Just two years ago an Arab party was part of Israel’s government.
It is complicated. And calling this statement propaganda is disrespectful. Maybe it is sometimes used for propaganda, but it is true nonetheless.
The situation needs a solution aimed at longterm peace and freedom for all the people who live in the region. Whoever works towards that has my solidarity.
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Every war and conflict is complicated. The current situation in the middle east, depending on how thorough you’d like to be can be traced 20, 50, 80, 100, 150 or even a thousand years back. Or even two or three. (e.g. “The word Palestine derives from Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines, who in the 12th century bce occupied a small pocket of land on the southern coast”)
The situation in Ukraine similarly, depending on how thorough you’d like to be, can be traced 2, 5,10, 20, 70, 100, 200, 400 or 800 years ago. Or even 1200-1400 years ago when the Byzantines tried to do some “geopolical magic” in the area and succeeded (it is all recorded history. This is an interesting read).
This region of the world is not Yukon or Yakutsk where few people historically lived and few people historically fought over.
The Middle East/Asia minor, the Balkans, the regions around the Black sea and the whole of Europe and nothern Africa. Those are places with thousands of years of recorded histories and bloody feuds and differences. If you view even one of those “changing maps” videos of those regions just for fun, you will realise how rare this time of relative peace we currently enjoy is.
Proof? Here:
(e.g. notice where Bulgaria first appears, when the video begins from that timestamp - exactly where the war is happening now, even though we all know that Bulgaria hadn’t been there for a looooooooooooooong time. They soon get displaced and on the map there it says “Magyars” which are the Hungurians that later got displaced too from that region and so forth. Do note that the Bulgarians are still a bit angry about Basil the Second and if you click on the link you will see why. Yeah, it happened more than a thousand years ago, but that’s not enough time to completely “forget and forgive” around this part of the world)
Let’s not pretend that in these regions one war is “complicated” and the other is somehow simple.
Here in OGS things are simple. Ukraine and Russia has a lot of Go players, so that case is relevant with the thematic of the server, so the owner of the site decided that there was a need to have a position on it, as @Uberdude pointed out.
The middle east doesn’t have a lot of Go players, so as far as OGS is concerned, it is just another conflict of the many that happen globally.
That’s simple. True.
Outside OGS, both wars - and most wars - are complicated. If anyone would like to pick a side, that is their prerogative, for any conflict they like, but please let us not pretend via calling for simplicity that we really have a clue of what’s going on ten countries away or that we studied centuries of history and we were really in tune with the current ongoings in those regions, so now we can safely pick a side. Most of us do not know what on earth our local town council is voting each week, so let us show some respect to other people’s histories and at least say “I do not know, I reserve judgement” instead of oversimplifying things to justify trying to fulfill the need to “pick a side”.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said “that would be most unusual”. E.g.
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Are you saying you can’t see the difference in complexity here? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was totally unjustified.
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I think for Jeth there is no topic with such a low complexity that it would require a less than 2 screens long post. 
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I was not aware of measurable algorithmic complexity concept being adopted in historical and geopolitical concepts were we can have the analogy of O(n) and O(nlogn) crisis, but I will say that when it comes to geopolitics, in most cases (1) , things are revealed to increasingly complex the more we learn about them and vice-versa. The less we know about an issue, the more clear-cut it appears.
E.g. In the recent crisis in Syria and the subsequent immigration wave, a lot of people in my country exclaiming their simplistic disbelief of why “able bodied Syrians didn’t stay in their country to fight and decided to hop on a boat and appear on our borders?” … it seemed to them as a very reasonable thing to say while drinking coffee on their break from work.
Meanwhile in Syria:
(source - I have not read it, but since it is a research paper and not a random internet image, it is the correct thing to cite it. Just from the abstract though, it is relevant to the point I am making about centuries of historic feuds affecting the current events)
Now, I will not pretend that I have the faintest idea of what went on in Syria during that time, but just from that graphic, it is no wonder that a lot of people there couldn’t just “pick a side” and fled.
But the people here, being so far removed from the situation, didn’t really bother even googling the basics, so they thought that it was just a “clear cut civil war with two sides” and made unfounded assumptions about the situation.
The less we know, the simplier geopolitical matters appear to us.
(1) I said “most” to err on the side of caution. For the record, as far as my limited historical knowledge is concerned, I cannot think of any geopolitical situation that this is/was not true.
Kind of true, but come to think of it … (proceeds to write a few pages on that, while also pointing out that before anything else we should establish a common way in which the screens are measured - phone swipes? tablets?, standard pc monitor page downs, what screen resolutions in that case, or maybe copy-pasting the text to a doc file, etc 
)
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We have two big global conflicts now. Russia versus Ukraine, and Israel versus Palestine. That’s four flags: Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine. Which one do we pick? How do we decide? Tough questions.
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No worry, you don’t have to chose.
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The algorithm listened our talk about complexity … here’s what popped up in my FB feed:
I don’t know how accurate that is, it is just a random FB recommendation, but it seems like the expected result. Some countries are almost totally white 
and that is just the side of history that we are aware of.
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I suppose that the density of historically recorded battles is correlated to both the history of population density and the history of writing systems (which I assume are correlated to each other as well).
And when the creator of that map is from a Western country, I also expect a bias towards Western historical sources for that historical battles map (I take Wikipedia to be Western biased as well).
Population density:
Writing systems:
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