We know they’re stealing Palestinian land. They were stealing Palestinian land when the British Empire installed Israel there. And yes, at that time George VI was glad to suggest it is right and proper to push out the lesser peoples so that the Jewish folk could settle there. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing since.

However, since then, the international community has become more aware of the humanity of peoples who are not as wealthy or white as westerners, so much like the Church in the middle ages advocating only for Jus Bellum (so that expansionist kings had to find a way to justify their rightful ownership of the places they conquered) modern nations have to find a way to legitimize the regions they annex, or the peoples they war against.

So yeah, Israel was glad to have the excuse when Hamas or Hezbollah were there to provide it. And Iran props them up (provides them materiel support) so that they have the opportunity to take shots at Israel, knowing it will drive them to cruelty while the world watches, de-legitimizing the Zionist movement in the eyes of the international community (and the public).

While Israeli patriots can politely talk about the propriety of (say) price-tag killings or the treatment of Palestinians in Hebron, the State has to be more delicate. All the more so when IDF troopers are expressing glee in the opportunity to massacre Palestinian civilians down to the last child and grandmother.

But there are no humanitarian interests at the international level. All the states are still propped up by oligarchs wanting to clear land and seize resources for their own use, and at this point, as far as I can tell, we’re all going to be killed by famine and water shortage due to ecology collapse before that changes.

A lot of things.

For one thing, Trump / Project 2025 wants to kill NATO. Trump has already sown enough distrust that Germany is looking to secure military independence from the US.

Another thing is Trump and his companion ideologues are manipulable, as per his relations with Putin, Kim Jong Un and the Sauds. Even if they can’t turn him against Israel, they can certainly goad him into making brash decisions.

Then there’s the matter that the MAGA Republican Party favors loyalty over principle, which scares away its own intelligentsia, and creates a brain drain. We already see the Project 2025 plan to replace government department staff (who have education and experience) with Trump and MAGA ideology loyalists (who do not), which is going to speed the regime’s plummet into corruption and decadence.

The latter 20th century was defined by the US being the baddest dog on the field, tempered only by the USSR being right there to harrow the US and keep it busy. Now the cold war is ended, the US has just turned into a military bully for the interests of its own oligarchs. (It doesn’t help that the white Christian nationalist movement has been pushing the US towards fascist one-party autocracy since the FDR’s New Deal, as explained in Behind the Bastards two parter How the Rich Ate Christianity ).

Genuinely free, fair states are a threat to autocrats, far more than other autocrats, so seeing the US fall to one-party autocracy is absolutely on Iran’s holiday wishlist.

They may get it too, depending on if Trump wins the election, or his coup d’etat is successful, or civil war breaks out in the States.

Yeah, Iran made me do a genocide the way a wife made her abusive spouse do a domestic violence. More that Iran knew the Israeli administration (Netanyahu and friends) were totally eager to accelerate the genocide (it has already been happening), and provided them an easy excuse, because drunk daddy can’t help himself.

This is why the US has been screaming at Bibi, Don’t! It’ll be just like Fallujah! It’s a trap! And Bibi couldn’t listen with that kind of temptation.

(And yes, this is one of those hazards whenever Trump is in the White House, because Trump can’t help himself either.)

Israel, and the current western response to Israel is laying plain for the entire international community that we are at our base, imperialists who won’t suffer non-whites or non-Christians. The US has yet to demonstrate otherwise, and in on the verge of possibly installing a one-party autocracy. Iran got all that it hoped for and more.

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

The reasonable conclusion comes from the vast range of possibilities of what is true, which is exponentially larger than the range of possibilities specifically expressed in the world’s popular religions, even if we were to assume that every human being has their own understanding of what is true. The range of possibilities not conceived of by one of eight-billion human beings is vastly greater, so the chances of one person getting it right is akin to winning the lottery.

If we assume that any two people agree on religious truth, that number of religions becomes less, and the odds it is not one of those becomes even greater.

Note that there are about (not quite) 40,000 denominations of Christianity (and then all the non-denominational churches, some of which are megachurches that stay ND so they are not recognized as an NRM, which law enforcement presumes is a potentially-dangerous cult-or-sect) so we get very specific as to what religious truth is, and we fight wars or litigate over these specifics.

Considering the scope of the universe compared to the scope of life on earth (let alone human life), it’s highly more likely the Milky Way galaxy (including the solar system and everything in it) is incidental to any divine purpose of the cosmos. The difference between the chances that we’re special or important, and the chances mold under a specific Sequoia tree in central California is special or important is infinitesimal.

So even when we only consider theistic possibilities within the universe as we see and understand it, any popular religion that has a non-zero possibility of being true still doesn’t have much more than that.

That was the point of the action. Iran understands the hatred by the Israeli state for the Palestinian people (condoned, sometimes commended by western imperialist interests, particularly the British empire and the United States) only required provocation before Israel would commit atrocities that could be called a holocaust. So the Iranian intelligence state funded Hamas to cause trouble.

And they played Netanyahu the way Martin Luther King Jr. played US police departments.

The difference is, information from Palestine leaks out better now than it did throughout the 20th century, so the global public, especially in industrialized states, gets to look at it. We get to know what is happening and it is more frightening than we imagined.

The horror of the German holocaust, according to our own nations and their state departments, is not what was done, but to whom.

At this point, skip asking for a raise and go straight to forming a union. It saves time. It implies they should have been taking care of the workforce in the first place. And your colleagues likely need raises too.

Then over demand, because they’ll try to offer less. If they try any technical or procedual shenanigans, show they’ve been caught and double your demands.

Remind them that unions and strikes are the peaceful alternative to violent retribution, and by trying to block unionization they are admitting they’d rather a class war.

If law enforcement gets involved, tell the state that siding with the owners will only escalate thr conflict, and extend the precarity out to the rest of the economy. Stock values will totally tank, and legislators and gubernators will be held personally responsible by their shareholding plutocratic masters.

Ever since the civil rights movement and the overturn of the Jim Crow laws (and the establishment of the right to interracial marriage), laws to prevent gun ownership based on race (even by implication, such as based on neighborhood) have been successfully challenged, but that doesn’t stop the police rushing to escalation once it’s established a someone has a gun, and blacks are represented disproportionately in officer-involved homicide.

But I can’t say I have the data specifically regarding armed black suspects verses armed white suspects. Still if you’re black in Missouri or Mississippi (or Oakland, California – the US teems with a lot of racial-tension hot zones) then yes, the police are more likely to escalate a situation or shoot at you than if you are white, but that’s true regardless if you have a gun.

Also blacks are convicted of crimes, violent or otherwise, statistically more often than whites with less evidence, and are given harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes, and this includes possession of illegal firearms. I suspect it’s harder for nonwhites to get concealed-carry permits in states they are needed.

(My impression is no-one really likes open-carry in urban or suburban regions. Even here in California, there are rural towns where one could carry a rifle on their back, at least during hunting season, especially since the local economies depend on hunting tourism. So you’re not going to be bothered by the county sheriff along the California / Nevada border the way you would say, in the Bay Area.)

The killing of Philando Castile in 2016 serves as an example of what blacks fear. He was pulled over for a broken tail-light, announced he was armed to Officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony PD. Yanez freaked out and shot Castile seven times, two of which penetrated his heart. (Of note is that in the last thirteen years, Castile had been pulled over 39 times in that area for broken tail-light type offenses.) Yanez was tried and acquitted. He was removed from that precinct but as far as we know Yanez is serving as law enforcement elsewhere.

…guns dont fire accidentally

Oh yes they do, and its a contingency in any theater of war. New guns are required to be safer but old guns that are less safe still exist and are in use. I was raised shooting guns well older than I was…or am.

And they can misfire which often means clearing a cartridge that might still go off. Fun times.

Depending on the state. In some states, you haven’t committed a crime until the weapon is discharged, and then not a seious one until it hits something important. But that can change based on the race and circumstances of the gunman. Most counties really don’t like black men carrying guns.

I’m worried you’re going to accidentally kill someone or shoot your femoral artery. No one is perfect.

This [is what] I was taught handling firearms in the eighties. So imagine my surprise and distress seeing the police lines during the Ferguson unrest standing or walking with their guns pointed at the crowd. One unintended discharge by law enforcement could have been disaster.

We’ve gone batshit bizarro regarding guns in the US.

I only got good at Jetty Boot specifically to unlock the jet boots. And it’s the one mini-game I kinda resent.

Setrik’s soiled loincloth!

The candidate for rich people who resent poor people.

What is scary to me is the degree to which information as understood by biblical scholars is withheld to the laity, such as how the writers of the books of the bible were often at odds, with conflicting interests. The OT and NT are not univocal, not inerrant, not divinely inspired. And there’s a lot that we interpret today to mean something different than what it meant when it was written (a process that isn’t always a bad thing).

When I’ve interacted with Hellenists, they still understand that their mythology is exactly that, fanfiction of stone-age and iron-age folk trying to explain natural phenomena or telling stories of their people.

But Christian ministries not only don’t want to acknowledge the chthonic origins of their own scripture, but then want to reinterpret it preserving the power of the church, which is particularly odd since the Protestant traditions sola fide (by faith alone) and sola scriptura (by scripture alone) seat salvation and comprehension squarely in the hands of the solo parishioner. Then again, people who are comfortable with their own spirituality are less desperate to keep up on their tithes.

We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).

YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.

Our society tries to be contractrarian, which is to say it asserts the rule of law (law applies to everyone equally and is legislated from everyone equally) but even in the short history of democracy-informed states, signs of disparity are evident, from motorists exceeding speed limits to white collar crime getting sentenced lighter punishment than petty crime even though it causes more cost, destruction and loss of life by multiple orders of magnitude.

All states in the world fail to carry out their side of the social contract. Few even try. And all states exhibit social stratification in which the ownership class is protected but not constrained, and the working class is constrained but not protected.

So while states might pretend to ask for consent to govern, they command obedience, by force. At the botton rungs, weare imprisoned or killed if we dont obey perfectly, and sometimes if we do.

So yes, on the chalkboard, but in reality, no.

There are some Deep Rock Galactic gun builds (color and framework) that look like this.

This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.

This is why we can’t relent, ever.

The save the world plot is new.

I appreciated the capitalist / industrialist commentary that this is what Ficsit does: Drop a few pioneers onto a planet and turn it into a giant self-consuming manufacturing plant, like a bacterium infecting a cell, that feeds some remote market with hyper-processed goods.

Oh well. I expect it still to be amazing.