• 1 Post
  • 137 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • Look, I left something unsaid, certainly. I can’t say that this particular incident would have happened or not if Israel were not currently engaged in genocidal acts on a daily basis. What I can say is that Israel clearly uses antisemitism as a shield and a pretense for those genocidal acts, and in less dire times, for the decades of lower level but equally unjust and horrific oppression that has characterized the occupation of Palestine from the beginning.

    The ONLY time I experienced targeted antisemitism (graffiti & threats at my synagogue) as an American Jew growing up in a liberal area, was in the lead up to the second intifada as the Camp David Accords fell apart. So yes, antisemites are responsible for their own antisemitism, and antisemitism like any kind of prejudice is fundamentally unjustifiable - of course. And no, by that token, of course nothing Israel could do would justify antisemitism. What a moralistic statement like that misses, however, is the reality that antisemitism ebbs and flows with the state of the conflict in the holy land, and that Israel uses it as a self-reinforcing narrative to justify their ongoing crimes against humanity, paradoxically reinforcing the very thing they claim to be fighting against, and making the world less safe for the people they claim to fight for.

    And to make it all very clear. I am blaming antisemites for antisemitism. Conflating Jewish identity with the state of Israel is antisemitic. Zionists are antisemitic.





  • SwampYankee@mander.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlTrue 😄
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    I just started my switch to Linux and the only things that don’t work out of the box on my brand new Lenovo laptop are things that have no bearing on the actual use of the device. And frankly, spending hours fiddling to make things work is much more satisfying than spending hours trying to figure out how to stop Microsoft spying on me.




  • The real mistake may have been attempting to pivot to Iran in an attempt to reinstate the JCPOA. As admirable a goal as that is, I also think it’s clear Trump squandered any trust Iran had in the US when he cancelled it. Iran has taken the Biden admin’s overtures as an opportunity to test its regional influence, instead of being a good faith negotiating partner - and why would the Biden admin have expected anything else when the US hadn’t been a good faith partner? Trump was awful on foreign policy, and set middle-east peace back decades, but Biden has completely failed to understand and adapt to the new status quo.





  • Historically it doesn’t matter what the creator of anything prefers unless it’s an “unveiling” and they name it on the spot.

    I can’t for the life of me find it now, but the gif was introduced with an image that contained in its metadata a statement that “it’s pronounced jif”. You can still find it somewhere and open it in notepad and read it for yourself.


  • What’s frustrating is that anyone can find a piece of evidence for their argument, and there are propagandists everywhere offering up grand narratives full of such evidence. So when someone is extremely concerned about children getting sex changes, and you say something to the effect of “that’s not really happening” they’ll just come back at you with a few examples and you’re like “yeah but a few examples isn’t a statistical trend and you’re blowing this way out of proportion” and then they call you a groomer. Like, I’m not okay with it, but also it’s not something that we need to be specifically worried about and build an entire political movement around. Like children get attacked by sharks occasionally (probably more often than they get sex changes), but there’s no mass political movement to shame parents who encourage their kids to swim in known shark habitats.


  • Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.

    It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.