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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • This is a pretty thoughtful response, I appreciate you taking the time write it. I agree in spirit with what AOC wants to accomplish. Some of those judges (Clarence Thomas) shouldn’t be anywhere near the Supreme Court. My fear is that this plan only works if the impeachments proceeding are successful, they manage to successfully replace the current justices with new ones, AND enact meaningful change in a short period of time to make that a situation like this doesn’t happen again. If they fail at any of these things, then the Republicans, who don’t respect precedent, process, or the rule of law, would just weaponize the impeachments to remove the justices and replace them with their own whenever they get a majority in government.


  • In my opinion, MAGA officially crossed the line from being a fringe political movement and into a genuine cult after 2020. It was pretty bad starting all the way back during his first campaign in 2015 and it got gradually worse over the years. However, during 2020 MAGA turned into an actual national security threat, not once, but twice. First, during the anti-vaxx shit were they literally denying the existence of the virus, or even worse, they were actively mocking the people who died, and then again after they lost the election and attempted the coup.

    Any sane conservative who didn’t nope out pretty early on in his term distanced themselves after Jan 6th. The only people who still supported Trump after what he did were the ones that worshipped him. Since Jan 6, 2021 Trump’s MAGA consist of people who will follow him no matter what, will listen to whatever he says no matter how false or dangerous, and will unironically want him as a dictator. I think the cult thing became most apparent when supporters were wearing diapers in a show of support for him… that’s so batshit crazy that it leaves me speechless.






  • Usually rates that involve small raw numbers get swayed pretty significantly by relatively small changes. For example, Malta had a 3 murders last year, if that number doubled to 6, the homicide rate would increase by 100%. That’s a very significant increase, but does it imply that Malta has turned into a dangerous country? Not really, no. The increase would make it’s rate go from 0.561 per 100k to 1.122 per 100k, that’s around the same as New Zealand which is another very safe country. It should still be noted and discussed because there’s value in that, but my point is that these trends and swings in statistics can be pretty misleading if not put into proper context.





  • Let me ask you this, as someone with a life, why did you even entertain the idea of wasting time on something this pointless in the first place? Do you find it fun? What’s the thought process? Personally, after I finish working I want to spend my free time hanging out with my friends, family, go on a vacation, etc. If I really do have extra spare time on a consistent basis, I would much rather practice guitar, play ball, or doing things like you’re doing now with your car. I see no benefit whatsoever from becoming a committed unpaid admin in general, let alone for an irrelevant site.


  • Serious question, why would anybody do this? These are the requirements of an actual job but without any of the pay. If someone is putting in this much effort, they might as well just apply for a real job and get paid for it.

    I understand that you guys want to screen people first, but lmao are you guys going overboard. The people who view this as hobby aren’t going to put themselves through such unnecessary and worthless hassle, and the people who want a job won’t apply because there’s no money involved. The only people who would qualify and want to do something like this are people who literally have no life. These are people who have no family, jobs, or a social life.



  • I added the link, those quotes show why most historians consider the comparison of the Nakba and Jewish exodus from the Muslim world to be a false equivalence

    No, you can’t make up claims like this. Your quotes do NOT show that most historians have this opinion. It only shows that those very specific individuals hold this opinion, that is all. In fact the very Wikipedia article that you linked provides examples of historians who disagree with this narrative. If you want to prove that most historians hold this opinion then you’re going to need evidence that actually supports that claim like a survey or a poll.

    While there were certainly pogroms, the vast majority of Jewish immigrants were able to sell their possessions and willingly move.

    Interesting you say that because the very article you linked disproves your claims:

    Various estimates of the value of property abandoned by the Jewish exodus have been published, with wide variety in the quoted figures from a few billion dollars to hundreds of billions.[326]

    The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) estimated in 2006, that Jewish property abandoned in Arab countries would be valued at more than $100 billion, later revising their estimate in 2007 to $300 billion. They also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel).[7][327][328][329]

    Clearly the situation is much more complex given how the situation differed from country to country, from culture to culture, and from community to community. The sheer scale of this exodus prevents it from being entirely uniform. However, despite that, it still does disprove the notion that the Jewish exodus went all fine and dandy like you’re making it out to be. Even the most conservative estimates range in the billions. That is an insane amount. Even if we become ultra skeptical about this particular estimate and cut the figures by a factor of 10 due to exaggeration from bias, that would still put the amount somewhere between $10 and $30 billion. The amount lost per person on average is somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. Even if we cut this estimate by a factor of 100, that would still be a high amount. So while some Jews might’ve been lucky enough to sell their property and voluntarily move, that wasn’t the case for many.

    This is in contrast to the Nakba, where all 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed by a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign.

    Yes, this was bad. I never argued against the Nakba. I’m not having a juvenile competition about which is worse. I’m just proving the point that the violence and ethnic cleansing isn’t one sided. It went both ways.

    Whether you recognize it or not, when you bring up the exodus as a reaction to the Nakba with the conclusion that both sides are bad, the point of that argument is a justification for the Nakba.

    No, that’s not a coherent line of thought. The point is to showcase that the one sided narrative that you’re pushing for is false. You can’t oversimplify this conflict to good vs bad. You’re trying to spin these historical events in way that disregards so much context that it renders your renditions of them to be historically inaccurate and misleading. You’re doing it now by trying to pretend that the Jewish exodus from the muslim world wasn’t bad at all. That’s simply not true.

    When the UN proposed the partition plan in 1947, the Jews rejoiced while the Arabs protested and rioted. This turned in to the 1947-1948 civil war which lead both sides to lose about 1000 lives each. This escalated when the Arab Liberation Army infiltrated Palestinian population areas and started organizing attacks on Jews. This eventually culminated in the Arab Liberation Army blockading the 100,000 or so Jews in Jerusalem. The Jewish army tried to send supplies in but the Arab militants killed all who tried to get through. This event caused the US to withdraw it’s support from the partition plan, which embolden the Arab Liberation Army into thinking that it could end the partition plan all together. In the meantime, there were talks between the Arab countries on militarily intervening on behalf of Palestine. The Jews who were fighting were struggling, but their leadership ordered them to hold ground as much as possible until they could come up with a new strategy that defended the Jews in anticipation of the impending Arab invasion.

    That strategy eventually came, and it was called plan Dalet. The plan was to basically secure the Jewish settlements, unify them into a single cohesive unit, remove the Palestinians in between, and declare the independence of a new Jewish state. This was the beginning of what the Palestinians called the Nakba. This plan lasted about a month or two, and on May 14th, 1948, a day before the British Mandate ended, the Jews declared independence. The US and USSR both recognized the new state, but the Arab countries refused and decided to form a coalition army and invade. The Arab world was already hostile to Jews due to the antisemitic hatred that descends from islam, the situation in the British Mandate, and their close relations to Nazi Germany (which were spurred by their mutual hatred of Jews). The Jews in the muslim world faced constant discrimination, violence, and harassment, but after the Arab countries invaded? The rhetoric and propaganda were dialed up to max. This was the beginning of the Jewish exodus from the muslim world.

    Back to the invading Arab countries, while their numbers were great, they were pretty incompetent. Armies had poor communication among themselves, there was poor coordination among the different countries, and the leadership made poor decisions. This led the Arab forces to lose ground to the Israeli army. As Israel was making gains, it was basically continuing plan Delat on the new territory that it acquired. Which caused more displacement of Arabs. Meanwhile, the Arab countries increased their propaganda and nationalist rhetoric even more at home to compensate for their losses, which caused even more discrimination, harassment, and violence against Jews which forced more of them to flee. These events kept going until 1949, when Israel pretty much won and signed armistices with the invading countries. The end result? Over 6,000 dead Jews, over 10,000 dead Arabs, over 700,000 displaced Arabs, and around 1 million Jews were displaced. It should be noted that the violence, displacement, and aggression didn’t stop from either the Jews or the Arabs, and things kept going, at a slightly slower pace, until things boiled over again in 1967.

    That’s so much history happening in such a short span of time that affected so many people. There was no moral side and there was no unjust cause. It’s a lot complicated than that. But that’s my point. You can’t brush off all this context. You can’t oversimplify this conflict to comic book superhero storylines. You can’t disregard historical information because you subscribed to an inaccurate narrative. Pointing out the complexity of the situation is not a justification of anything, it’s merely pointing out the complicated reality.

    If you’re Iraqi, how do you not see that all the different Arab countries have their own interests? While there was some semblance of pan-Islamism and pan-arabism during the British Mandate, it ultimately was a failed project. Jordan, Egypt, and other countries were not operating on the ‘behalf of Palestine,’ and their actions are not the fault of Palestinians.

    Back then, the idea of different Arab nations hasn’t really set in yet. There were different Arab states, but the Arab world viewed itself as one big nation and thought that eventual unification was inevitable. That’s why they went to such great lengths to try and help establish Palestine. Each state acted in it’s own interests, yes, but they were all pursuing the same goals. Not to mention that the Palestinian leadership called on them for help, so they didn’t go in uninvited. Of course, you can’t blame this on civilians, but these states did act on behalf of the Palestinian state that they wanted to take place. All of these ideas are less true today because so much time and history has passed that the different states were able to form their own national identities. Even though Arabs still view themselves as one people (this is slowly but surely decreasing in popularity), idea of unification is now seen as farfetched and even as undesirable.





  • Reddit’s strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they’ve been up to:

    • Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
    • Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it’s unusable
    • Do the same with the app
    • Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
    • Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
    • Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
    • Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
    • Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
    • Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
    • Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live

    Truly the works of geniuses.