Defund means to essentially get rid of a department or thing. The phrase "defend the police" means "get rid of the police". It doesn't matter if there's some cartoon to re-explain away the phrase or a bunch of other people trying to re-define the English language. English is English, and words have meaning.
The "defund the police" movement failed because us liberals don't fucking understand marketing. Like, at all. I can't count the number of times some liberal movement crops up with their slogan and Republicans turn that slogan against them because nobody spent the ten minutes time to think about how that phrase or thing could be abused. For example, that brief time when the LGBT movement wanted to rename themselves to LGBTQIA2SUVWTFBBQ? Seriously?!?
It's like naming your baby "Assman McAssface" and wondering why he gets bullied in school.
Some of the more extreme-minded liberals do a good enough job at sabotaging themselves and the movements they are a part of, without the need for malicious saboteurs. Like Atheist+ or progressive stack.
Then again, Russians orgs are out there, trying to influence politic movements and sabotage others. GamerGate was an entire sea of political actors, journalists, influencers, and Russian agents, trying to push their own narratives to the point of mass disinformation from both sides, with the general public on either side confused and angry at the other's responses.
Which was 70 years ago. We're in this spot because a bunch of people are still bitter about the Seven Day War, and the nationhood of the Gaza strip was never officially declared. After all, how the hell can Palestine lay claim or maintain a territory that is totally disconnected from the West Bank? The short answer is "you can't". You can't police it as a separate entity. You can't ask its citizens to move from one area to another without having to deal with passports crossing over the country. You can't govern it.
Israel was formed. It has its own government, and it is a recognized nation. What is not its own nation, and is a lawless neutral zone that has been actively housing terrorist groups, is Gaza.
israel doesnt get to say it has a right to defend itself/right to exist when its defense now and existence in the first place is a function of the displacement of that population.
Which was 70 fucking years ago! Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself. After a certain point, the borders are the borders, and you can't just point to territorial wars from decades past as justification for not recognizing its nationhood.
Israel was founded by the foreign seizure of already settled lands. Observe in the “1947 U.N. Palestine Plan” UN is the subject and Palestine is quite literally objectified.
Which is the story of all nations, actually. How many times has Europe been conquered by other empires and dictatorships? How many native populations have been been displaced by colonialism?
I'm not saying it's right, but it's the bloody history of how our each of our nations have been founded. No matter what soil you stand on, it was subjugated by somebody else.
Entire terrorist groups have been founded on the idea of some territorial subjugation from the 1800s gives them the right to enact violence on the nations of today. So, I don't subscribe to this idea that we should point to the actions of 70 years ago as justification for wars or terrorism or rejecting the sovereignty of a nation.
Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?
Which part? The strip of land west of Israel that was involved in the latest terrorist attacks, or the other strip of land east of Israel? Which one is Palestine? Because it can't be both. And Palestine didn't even agree to both when it had the chance in 1947.
And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country, if they want to lay claim to both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All they have to do is march their army in the West Bank, cross Israel, and arrive at the Gaza Strip. (Insert Gru four-panel here.)
It's also too bad the PLO/PLA is too in bed with terrorist groups to have a standing army that would be involved in defense, instead of bombing citizens partying at a music festival.
Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?
In our bloody history of war over the past several thousand years, I can't recall a war that didn't involve starving children, homelessness, the death of civilians (accidental or otherwise), and all of the other horrors that it entails. War sucks, and it's especially brutal on the defensive side.
Having said all of that, Israel certainly needs to calm down its hard-on for atrocities and police its own warcriming. Israel had some sympathy with the catalyst of the war (the music festival bombing), and quickly lost all of that when it decided to go gung-ho on the whole Gaza populace.
Though, it is especially unfortunate that one side chooses to hide behind terrorism, instead of clearly identifying military over citizens. Maybe if the PLO didn't embrace terrorism, their citizens wouldn't be in this dangerous spot.
From your initial comment it seems like the main misunderstanding is that nation states unilaterally declared by European powers in Africa and Western Asia from the nineteenth century until around the middle of the 20th century have been utterly disastrous to those places rather than being the only source of order in those places.
Is this the starting volley of an argument that unfair colonization from the 1800s is justification for a nation's lack of sovereignty?
tend not to consider them as legitimate and more of an encroachment.
As I pointed out in another post, using decades- or centuries-old arguments for sovereignty has been used as justification for terrorism. When bin Laden smashed a couple of planes into the Twin Towers, that's exactly the kind of argument he used as justification.
It's not about moral dissonance. It's about how hate spreads through ancient spites and grudges. The decades of failed peace attempts in the Middle East have been brought about by clinging on to these ancient grudges, and it's exactly why Palestine has had much less of a standing in being officially recognized as a nation than Israel has.
I… what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
You seem to miss my point: A single country cannot be composed of two completely separate regions, because they cannot defend both regions, especially when trying to defend against their aggressor would involve marching across said aggressor's territory. There's only a few solutions to this problem:
Turn both regions into their own countries.
Have a military impressive enough to defend both regions. Only the US and British get to do that with their extra colonies, and even then, there's enough of an argument to give those back or at least turn them into their own states with better representation.
Somehow conquer an area between the two regions, which is laughably unrealistic, considering Israel (or the US) are not going to just let them do that.
Let the problem fester for 70 years until Israel gets tired of their shit and "solves" the problem their own way. Which is how we got here.
Likud has been helping Hamas defeat their less-violent domestic opposition, and elevating the most violent and unreasonable element in Palestinian politics, for years now. Which kinda makes it weird for them to all of a sudden get upset that the Palestinians are acting violent and unreasonable. It’s like picking the worst and most dangerous dog to take home to your family, then torturing it on purpose because it’s a “bad dog,” and then blaming someone else when it mauls one of your children, and saying everyone needs to put you in charge and never question you so you can protect everyone against these dogs and keep torturing the dogs. To me, that shit means you should never be in charge of anything again and should maybe be brought up on charges both for what happened to the dog and what happened to your kid.
Perhaps Palestine shouldn't let foreign powers influence them and clean up their terrorist elements, instead of promoting them.
I'm not saying what Likud is doing is right, but right-wing fuckheads are going to do what right-wing fuckheads do the world over. See also: Nixon and the Korean War peace talks, Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan and Iran-Contra, the Bushes and all of their wars, Trump and Afghanistan (or about a million other things), the Tories and their numerous sudden resignations, Putin and every other right-wing leader in Europe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges
Seems fine to me, but you and I know that's not going to happen.
and find some people whose solution to “they did an atrocity to us” is something other than “Let’s do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it’ll show them not to do that again.”
I see this more of "let's completely annex Gaza Strip, so that it's ours and we get to clean up the area and flush out terrorists ourselves". At that point, if some terrorist group in Gaza Strip decides to bomb another target in Israel, it's entirely Israel's problem and they alone get to deal with it. Because Palestine sure as fuck isn't handling it now.
It's a shit solution, because war always is a shit solution. And again, Israel needs to calm the fuck down with their civilian causalities. But, it is a solution. With an ending. It ends. No more 70 years of debate about Middle East peace talks or whether Gaza Strip is a nation or a part of Palestine or is in this lawless, terrorist-filled region of an in-between state.
I mean, let's look at the US and their wars of aggression against terrorism. They've had a pretty fucking terrible track record, but during the time the US occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, they were better countries than what they were before or afterward. Iraq had free elections. Afghanistan was undergoing a feminist movement. But, the Iraqi military ran like cowards when ISIS invaded, and Trump sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban. I think if the US thought of them as a stepping stone towards allies in the Middle East (like Israel), and less like these short-term military projects, we might still have these countries in their more progressive states.
But, hey, I've already acknowledged that it's a shitty solution, and we're a couple of intelligent people, so instead of "finding some people" for this solution, which is what we've been doing for the past 70 years, let's just talk about what the solution should be. What's really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I've lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn't Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It's been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You've been talking about this "realistic path for peace", right? What's that path look like?
Because the world is filled with nuance and shitty solutions.
I defend that Israel is a country, and don't defend arguments based on ancient grudges from decades past. I'm not even defending what Israel is currently doing, but what solutions do you think they should be doing in response to a terrorist attack? (Which was the last straw in a series of terrorist attacks.)
I would say that we happen to be posting in an Internet forum, where we all have access to the Internet, and I could just look that up. But, it's a more nuanced question that isn't as easy to look up. According to Wikipedia, more than half are stateless and 21 percent of Israelis identify as Palestinians.
But, I'm sure you're leading this question into an answer that you already have a page up for, so let's hear it.
You are pleased to use the devastation and fragmentation and discoordination of a region which used to be connected and prosperous as some sort of gotcha against Palestine’s legitimacy- In all ignorance of the fact israel inflicted that devastation and fragmentation, ensured that the only coordination could be underground, with the necessary help of US dollars.
Which is, again, ancient history. Israel was established as a nation after the Six Day War. It doesn't matter how wrong that war was, or why it was done, or how it was done. It was done, and it was done over 70 years ago. Borders are established most of the time through bloody conflict, so this is not something that is suddenly unique to Israel.
for Palestinian independence
Which is what? Which borders do you agree are Palestine? Is it:
The West Bank? Sound fine to me. Maybe they should start pushing this with the UN and officially ratify it?
The West Bank and Gaza Strip? No. They can't properly manage two separate landmasses like that. And even when they had the chance to accept that accord, they rejected it.
The entirely of Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. Fuck no. This is what I'm talking about when it comes to ancient grudges. They fought a war and lost. It happened. Israel formed. Ancient history.
That support only continues because of the strategic and material advantage of having a hold on Suez shipping
Are you actually serious? You think the entirety of the Israeli independence was because of a shipping lane? Not the fact that Jerusalem is in the center, or that a bunch of displaced Jews wanted to form their own state, or the fact that there have been several crusades to take back Jerusalem for centuries? In fact, I will accept almost any religious-based argument you give me. But, not because of a fucking shipping lane.
And as far as continued support, let's not forget that there's still a bunch of nukes pointed at Russia from Israel. Why do you think the Cuba Missile Crisis happened?
is that remnant of the ottoman empire
I... ummm, I'm going to have to stop right there. The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. You are, again, using ancient grudges to justify terrorism.
What of their right to exist? Open war and guerilla war and terrorism- flying planes into skyscrapers: This is what they will take when they are denied the right to exist.
Yeah, I shouldn't have read any more. Now you're calling 9/11 a justified act. This conversation is over.
My point was that there are large numbers of Palestinians who have much more recent grievances than 70 years – like dead relatives of all ages, or lost homes, within their lifetime.
Which all stem from that original conflict from 1947. A wave of hatred against the Jews who took their country, which spawned more violence, not all of it balanced, which spawns more terrorism, which spawns more violence, until we get to today.
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the “stronger” party in the situation, when their “solution” is some kind of rampant injustice.
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
you would never accept that that’s justified because they’re “solving the problem.”
Because that sort of "justice" is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don't have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don’t think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide – so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn’t just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then – sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop,
I think the problem is that they've been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there's a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I'm against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I'll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn't need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it's Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn't, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don't even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they've held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn't currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it's still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because "our God is not theirs".
I’m willing to bet for my own (admittedly useless) part that the peoples of Palestine and israel would settle at this point for the two state solution if it meant a lasting peace
You mean the Oslo Accords? Remind me again who fucked that one up?
I basically did the exact opposite. I never press the upvote/downvote button, but I almost always leave a comment on the page whenever I have something interesting to say. I even reply to the replies I get. I have carried this behavior forward to Lemmy.
This is just natural. You want to comment on threads to conversate, even if you don't really agree or disagree with the article. If you like/dislike the article enough, you'll up/downvote it and comment on it.
On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose...
The way voters protest this sort of issue doesn't follow logic or reason. People will happily not vote in protest, even if it means somebody far worse will win because of their actions. Cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I think the news needs to shame these kind of voters, instead of pushing this narrative that it's Biden's fault. Biden's views are his own, and yeah, the news should try to highlight and change them. But, voter patterns of using "uncontested" or third-party candidates to sabotage the main electees is actively destroying Democrats' chances of winning elections.
Saudi officials confirmed in a statement to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced on 9 January for what the Saudi government called “terrorist offences”....
Selective enforcement probably, especially towards a known women's right advocate.
They were pretty brave to go through with these sort of protests, but at the same time, Saudi Arabia is just not the country to do this sort of thing. It is a harsh religious dictatorship that only respects the richest of its citizens. The best thing to do is to leave, and encourage others to do so. I know that's not an easy thing to do, but it's certainly better than to spend the rest of your life being beaten in a prison cell.
AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.
It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.
Note that this behaviour is configurable. It's default is a 500 char limit because that is the Mastodon default.
That's a shit default, and a shitty way to treat a standard that is meant for all sorts of communication. ActivityPub is not Twitter, and it is not just for short-form communication. In fact, a majority of the web is longer-form communication that isn't a mere 500 characters long.
Retorting with "this behaviour is configurable" is dancing around the issue. Good, sane defaults mean everything in programming.
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it's good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
Image comes from the monstrous work the Asahi Linux team did to get Netflix working on Linux on ARM Macbooks: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/
The girls – who were detained in shopping centres, classes and street markets – were accused of “spreading and encouraging others to wear a bad hijab” and wearing makeup....
As for them getting beaten for “confronting the men”, of course you are going to get beaten if you resist arrest or argue. That’s true in most countries, but particularly in Afghanistan the authorities tend to hit people if they are not compliant.
Your whole post was already getting into a questionable defense of Afghanistan's bullshit, but then you start defending police brutality and violence against women as something that is "true in most countries"? You've already lost me and probably most of the community here.
Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean "things becoming shitty". Just because "shit" is the base word doesn't mean that's what the whole word means.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.
From the guy who coined the term itself:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
Cop busted for unauthorized use of Clearview AI facial recognition resigns ( arstechnica.com )
"So the cop was tracking random people off social media using this incredibly invasive technology, on a pretty regular basis."...
The Google Pay app is dead ( arstechnica.com )
YouTube Processed a Billion Content ID Copyright Claims in Six Months * TorrentFreak ( torrentfreak.com )
Photoshop Terms of Service grants Adobe access to user projects for ‘content moderation’ and other purposes ( nichegamer.com )
The State of global Piracy - May 2024 ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )
🏴☠️ AHOY fellow pirates and welcome to the state of global piracy for May 2024! ARRR! 🏴☠️...
Israel has encroached on 32% of Gaza ( www.aljazeera.com )
Box Office: ‘Furiosa’ Just Barely Beats ‘The Garfield Movie’ in Disastrous Memorial Day Weekend — the Worst in Decades ( variety.com )
The level of engagement on Reddit these days
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/22092764...
Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it ( www.theguardian.com )
On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose...
Poland arrests nine on charges of Russian-ordered sabotage ( www.euractiv.com )
Archived link...
Cyberpunk 2077 director thanks fans as the game hits a 95% positive review rating on Steam ( www.eurogamer.net )
Atari Revives Infogrames As A Publishing Label ( atari.com )
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track ( arstechnica.com )
Young women in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 11 years in prison by "anti-terrorism court" after being arrested for “her choice of clothing and support for women’s rights” ( www.theguardian.com )
Saudi officials confirmed in a statement to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced on 9 January for what the Saudi government called “terrorist offences”....
Reddit if full of bots: thread reposted exactly the same, comment by comment, 10 months later ( i.imgur.com )
For the threads with the older one on the left: https://lemmy.world/post/14859950...
I Played the 5 WORST Reviewed Games on Steam ( www.youtube.com )
Dune | It's Hard to be a God ( www.youtube.com )
How Greed Ruined Gaming ( www.youtube.com )
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it's good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
"Piracy is a service issue.." (Image is a real story btw, link in post) ( lemmy.ml )
Image comes from the monstrous work the Asahi Linux team did to get Netflix working on Linux on ARM Macbooks: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/
Afghan girls as young as 16 arrested in shops, classes and markets in Kabul by the Taliban, who labelled them ‘infidels’ for wearing ‘bad hijab’ ( www.theguardian.com )
The girls – who were detained in shopping centres, classes and street markets – were accused of “spreading and encouraging others to wear a bad hijab” and wearing makeup....
Scrollbars are becoming a problem ( artemis.sh )
Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback...
In China, It’s Already Cheaper to Buy EVs Than Gasoline Cars ( www.washingtonpost.com )
In China, It’s Already Cheaper to Buy EVs Than Gasoline Cars::undefined
ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day ( www.firstpost.com )
Repost from HN:...