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2 yr. ago

  • China having more global influence than USA would help

    ... would it? I'm not sure I see how.

  • I feel like he totally misunderstood the concept of a Palestinian "right of return." They're not asking for a right to return to a future Palestinian state, that isn't a controversial thing, they would obviously be in control of their own immigration policy. They want a right for millions of Palestinians to "return" to Israel.

    Israelis view this not only as an unacceptable danger, but as a move that would end Israeli democracy; an instant majority of Muslim voters, many of whom were raised to believe that Israeli civilians should not be allowed to live, would turn Israel into, you know, the rest of the Middle East. Ban alcohol, ban homosexuality, ban apostasy, ban building synagogues or churches, do everything else every other Muslim-majority country does.

    This was one of the major sticking points at Camp David. And this guy just totally missed it.

  • I mean, the Olmert proposal was an opportunity. The 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was an opportunity. It doesn't seem that "freedom" was good enough for Palestinians back then.

    Netanyahu has been winning because Israeli attempts at peace never seem to work.

  • Targeting civilians is bad.

    Terrorists, including those who target civilians, are combatants, and are valid targets. They remain valid targets when they use schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and residential areas as bases for combat operations. This is pretty clear in international law.

    Israel still must not target civilians, and must take reasonable measures to minimize civilian casualties of war. We've seen Israel, in at least some contexts, take quite extreme measures to warn civilians, help evacuate civilians, and carefully target munitions to minimize civilian death despite Hamas and PIJ using those civilians as human shields.

    The raw numbers are still gruesome... unless you compare them to other instances of urban warfare, in which case the numbers are actually lower than many would expect. The civilian death ratio, as far as we've been able to estimate (since Hamas does not estimate), appears to be lower than usual.

    Civilian deaths are tragic. It would obviously be much better if Hamas had not started this war, or if they would agree to the ceasefire Israel offered, or if they weren't so committed to war in general. But they are. They frequently condemn even the concept of peace, and insist that they will repeat the October 7th attack as often as they can. There is no avenue to peace while they remain in power.

    So the war will continue. And we will continue to hope that Israel does its best to minimize harm to civilians.

  • That’s essentially the reality of the situation, though. The land was populated by Palestinians before Europe and the rest of the Middle East NIMBY’d their remaining Jewish populations to Israel.

    This is all kinds of wrong.

    Zionism was a Jewish movement. Antisemitism was not NIMBYism, that's a pretty horrible thing to say, it was persecution, pogroms, attacks, the holocaust, a constant stream of hate and oppression. Zionism was certainly not a movement of the Europeans and Middle Easterners who persecuted us. It was our movement. Zionism was not just an escape, but also a long held dream of the Jewish people that coalesced as it became plausible in late Ottoman policy. It was finally possible for Jews to buy land in, and immigrate to, Israel, so many of us did.

    We are not foreign to Israel. It is our indigenous homeland. As the rest of the world rejected us, we no longer felt safe as strangers in strange lands. We considered the possibility of having our own nation on borrowed land from the Russians, or from the Germans, or in Alaska. We didn't care for those ideas because of how stupid they were. We wanted a homeland in our homeland. If you don't understand Jewish indigeneity in Judea, maybe you're not ready to talk about complex topics.

    As for the Palestinian ties to the land—Palestinian nationalism barely existed before Jewish people started returning to Israel. Arabs in the various Ottoman Sanjaks or whatever division there was at the time were mostly traveling merchants or pilgrims; there was, of course, a small permanent population, which included Jews (always, despite various efforts to remove them or ban them), Christians, and Muslims, but that population expanded dramatically starting in the mid-late 1800s on all fronts. The Arabs then either continued to call themselves Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians ("Jordan" and "Palestine" were part of the same colony, I hope you know), or they subscribed to some conception of pan-Arabism. The word "Palestinian," to the extent was used at all before the 1960s, was used largely to refer to whoever happened to be in Palestine (like "New Yorker," not referring to a race of some kind), or specifically, in Europe, to refer to Jews. Palestinian nationalism largely gained traction in the 1960s as a political movement, and even then, many leaders were committed to pan-Arabism but treated Palestinian identity as a useful political fiction; Zuhair Moshen in particular, as a leader of the PLO, pushed these ideas, and in much of the politics between the West Bank and Jordan through that period. Of course, since the 1940s, Palestinian identity has taken on new meanings, but many of these meanings are young, and the vast majority of these peoples' ties to the land start between the 1800s and 1948—a beat before similarly-shaped spikes in the Jewish return.

    Palestinian nationalism is now used in other Arab countries to keep Palestinian Arabs oppressed; Jordan revoked their Jordanian citizenship, Lebanon refuses to grant them basic rights, UNRWA refuses to resettle them across multiple generations.

  • I'm with you, but more because I eat rice-based dishes and it's good to have a spoon + fork combo for those.

    1. Inertia

    People don't leave until they have a compelling reason to leave. They will stay put until something pushes them to move. Bad corporate practices are not that strong an effect—boycotting every bad company in 2024 is not a thing people are trying to do, the world doesn't work like that.

    1. Positive Network Effects

    The size and value of Reddit's network still dwarves the fediverse, and that's the primary value of any social network—the people you can interact with.

  • Meh. The mobile reddit apps and new reddit are truly trash. A lot of lemmy apps could still use work, especially kbin, and a lot of communities could use a cleaner UI, but ultimately, I think people are using Reddit due to inertia and positive network effects.

  • Nobody actually using bitcoin bitches and whines because there are only six of them and they're all neck-deep in the cult mentality promoted by the hundred thousand other guys who pump the culture to maximize their returns.

  • OP already has a bank. OP has a problem to solve and instead of trying to help OP, you decided to act like a dick and just whine about how easy you think crypto is and how everybody else should think it's just as easy as you think it is.

    By the way—you don't have to store your credit card number anywhere. If you lose your card, or it gets stolen, or somebody else manages to guess it, or any other form of loss or fraud happens to your credit card, the company will keep you safe. The concern with crypto wallets is that most of them are actual scams, if you install one from the wrong place you will lose every penny as soon as you add it to the wallet. If you store your key in the wrong place, you'll lose your money, and if you don't store it in enough places, you'll lose it and lose your money, but storing it in three secure places is basically its own fucking job.

    And that's not even to mention stuff like death—death is a hard problem for most crypto wallets, because it requires you to trust other human beings with your payment info, and the only wallets that can handle that are social recovery wallets, which aren't even EOAs.

    You have to be a fucking idiot to think crypto is anywhere near as convenient or straightforward or safe as traditional banking and credit cards.

  • next time... a sprinkle of salt and a hint of balsamic make tomatoes sing. I'd say throw in olive oil, but maybe the mozz is enough fat to do the job.

  • You do realize that you've skipped about 70 steps, right? OP needs to figure out what currency the recipient wants, pick a wallet app (most of the ones people recommend are god-awful), install it, create a wallet, figure out how to store keys for the wallet safely (which is really not possible), figure out how to add funds to the wallet in the right currency, pay attention to the transaction to make sure the right amount of funds are being transacted... and each of those steps has a dozen substeps, and requires research in an industry that is constantly lying to people.

    ... plus, OP did not say that there was a QR code involved at all, that's a very odd assumption on your part.

  • You're being generous. I'm part of a lot of communities that are clearly not being moderated.

  • Didn't they state that their next game would not be a totk sequel?

  • Well, Hannibal, but that might not be what you're looking for.

    I also think the Sunny episode "the gang gets analyzed" happens to be incredibly funny, but that definitely isn't what you're looking for.

  • But not having books on your shelves is not a green flag, it just might not be a red flag.

  • He might be federally barred from office. On March 4, 2024, his insurrection trial will start and if he is found guilty it would be very difficult for any legal system to state he can still hold federal office.

    Federal courts might call this a non-justiciable political question. Individual states might bar him from the ballot, but good luck getting a lot of red states to do that.

  • Liberals: I learned my lesson making predictions in November 2020.

    You mean 2016.