VinoVeritas
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User ID: 2910
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.
I know you genuinely believe these two things, but I don't think I'll ever get used to how tunnel visioned people can make themselves.
If the Israelis had never invaded Mandatory Palestine in the first place, there'd be no Israel, and there'd be no fighting. That is to say, you started this, no?
and
The Israeli prime minister is making speeches in the Knesset about how you're waging a holy war of eradication against the Biblical Amalekites. Does that not classify as 'ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription'?
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
I go long stretches these days forgetting the olympics are still a thing, they really dropped the ball on that one this past decade
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
...Where are the Palestinians supposed to go?
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous.
If Israel abandoned the settlements in the west bank and ceded a strip between there and gaza to make a contiguous polity, it would not stop 100% of the Palestinians who are pissed off that Israel exists at all, but it would surely take the wind out of their sails enough to make Jihad unfashionable
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
The Palestinians were in Mandatory Palestine peacefully living their lives and doing their thing when hundreds of thousands of Jews invaded their country, formed a fifth column, and declared independence at gunpoint.
I frankly don't care any more about the Palestinian people than I do the Indonesians or the Angolese (which is to say, not at all). But it's a constant source of amusement to me that there are seemingly about half a dozen people on the face of the planet earth who are able to vocalize the sentiment "What's happening to the Palestinians is what happened to the Indians, that's how the world works"
It was their land. We wanted it. So we took it. And put them all in reservations. So it goes
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Take two identical islands: on one, the legislators, cops, and DAs are extremely progressive and go all-in on decarceration and decriminalizing shoplifting etc.; on the other, it's the opposite, with stop and frisks and three strike mandatory sentencing etc.
The opposite of "intentionally allowing criminal activity" isn't "stop and frisks and three strike mandatory sentencing"
Opposite Island would probably look more like "publicly torturing the criminal after a same-day trial and hanging their mutilated body in the town square to rot, with a sign saying what they did"
(For real crimes like rape and murder of course, the little stuff they'd probably just take the criminal to the town square and whip them a few times, or put them in the stocks for the afternoon, etc)
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
This was one of the original ideas behind the United States, that each state would be a separate little petri dish and people could 'vote with their feet' for the policies they liked best. Maryland was for Catholics, Pennsylvania for Quakers, Massachusetts for Lawyers and Sodomites, etc
If you didn't like the policies your state was implementing, you'd go to one you liked better. Or failing that, just start a new one (like the LDS did in Utah).
We are hilariously far removed from that idea, definitely because of the civil war, but I think also maybe in large part because of the fin-de-siecle rise of 'pop culture' where everyone in the United States began (to some degree) consuming the same media
Anyway, it was good idea. Thanks for the good post
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
I disagree viscerally, but this was very pleasant to read, thank you for making the effort to write and share it
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Good point in retrospect, the average dissident thread on X is now better than most here
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
The last time I made a post it was a nice thoughtful thing about how Trump should change his mind and leave abortion 'to the states' rather than try to come up with a cut-off date
Speaking plainly, the response was abysmal, and, it turned out Trump did what I thought he should anyway. The time spent writing the post had negative value.
But just for good faith efforts sake on point #1 here is our sectary of state playing guitar in Ukraine while the war rages:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/us/politics/blinken-ukraine-guitar.html
I would think this was incredibly humiliating to our people to have our representative act like this, but for the fact we don't really have 'a people' anymore and this is much less humiliating than Biden shaking hands with a ghost or Mitch McConnell having what quite sincerely appeared to be yet another stroke when asked about running for re-election
#2 genocide in Middle East, here is a video of Israeli's destroying aid meant for the millions of people they've made homeless, and are now pushing out of their squalid refugee camps. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3wfQtRgcZ_I
It is unthinkable to me that any adult with full cognitive faculties could think these people were the good guys chosen by God. But, it is not a surprise to me at this point that millions of seemingly adult people are actually functionally children who only do as they're told. The irony that the bible could not be more explicit that Christ-denying Jews were not grafted into the Tree of the Covenant is just the cherry on top
#3 There are 10's of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every day in every western country and nobody seems to care beyond how we're going to raise more taxes to pay for them. Our already destroyed cities are having their dicks ground into the dirt. The tallest highrise in St Louis just sold for like $3 million bucks. Denver is literally broke from it https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/denver-only-has-enough-money-to-fund-migrants-for-two-more-months/ar-BB1hRFYT?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=54d5d35986d04a1ca96ee78f18d7de36&ei=17 (that story was from 3 months ago)
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
No, 'unironically,' the people who gave you a choice between an untested Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, or Johnson and Johnson gene treatment and your job do not have your best interests in mind.
NB Those have all been taken off the market because they're undeniably dangerous.
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something. Why is every topic here now a snoozefest.
Here are a few suggestions. Pick up the ball and go
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Conventional war in Eastern Europe
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Genocide in Middle East
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Unprecedented invasion of America
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Unsustainable price increases in Western world
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Canadian retroactive 'Hate Speech' laws
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Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal
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Lomez getting doxxed and turning out to be handsome, but also Jewish
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Milei singing in a superhero costume
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Eurovision being even more Satanic and odd than usual
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Lizzo at the Met gala looking like a chicken nugget and being physically carried around by white attendants
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GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason
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JK Rowling might get arrested for calling a man a man
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Literally just pick a topic that's not obtuse guys. We're all collectively losing the reason to visit.
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics (sic) like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine.
Are you thinking of the average American black, who is morbidly obese?
VinoVeritas
6mo ago
Is there a country on earth in which you would be arrested for saying this, vs, top of my head example 'maybe about a million people, 2 at most' about the holocaust?
There's nothing to do about this discrepancy but 'don't pass go, go straight to jail'
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
I can entertain that our reading past each other is from me saying 'Pro-lifers think Trump should have left it to the states [as the next move in the long-term game]' and you saying 'return it to the states [as a long-term permanent solution] is unpopular with pro-lifers' and that both are true.
If Trump weren't Trump he might've thought to punt it down the road so the judiciary could work on it for another generation or two, rather than think he was clever enough to make 'the best deal' that everyone's gonna love. But long-term, the idea that New York, California, etc would continue having late-term abortion on demand because it had been 'left to the states' is deeply unpopular among pro-lifers, for sure
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
The reality that someone who has self-selected into this group of open-minded free-thinkers could have lived through the corona-times and tell anyone to 'take off the tinfoil' about anything is a huge blackpill. No broader point, just intensely pessimistic about the future of the 'national conversation.'
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
Not as though I've been appointed spokesman of all the pro-lifers, but maybe re-read my OP where I explicitly stated the general preference would have been for Trump to stick with 'leave it to the states' instead.
Kind of difficult to have a productive conversation when Person A says 'this is my preference and here's why' and Person B says 'no actually, that's deeply unacceptable to you'
VinoVeritas
7mo ago
I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:
This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:
When asked about the rape, incest and life of mother exceptions, Trump said, “If you look at France, if you look at different places in Europe with, if you look at a lot of the civilized world, they have a period of time. But you can’t go out seven months and eight months and nine months. If the Republicans spoke about it correctly, it never hurt me from the standpoint of elections. It hurt a lot of Republicans. I think you have to have, you have to have the three exceptions.”
He added, “I tell people, number one, you have to to with your heart. You have to go with your heart. But beyond that you also have to get elected, OK? And if you don’t have the three exceptions, I think it’s very, very hard to get elected. We had a gentleman from Pennsylvania who was doing pretty well. He refused to to go with the exceptions, and he lost in a landslide for governor. Nice man lost in a landslide. You have to go with the exceptions. The number of weeks, I’ll be coming out with a recommendation fairly soon. I think it’ll be accepted.”
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.
But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
Thumbs up emoji
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
The origin of the word 'trivia' seems obvious once you know it, there was a place in Rome where three big main roads met (tri via's) and the women would meet up to do their washing, get the news, and gossip. The foundation of the whole Western world
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
My ancestors did not bother to invite writing beyond some furtive rock-scratches before the Romans invaded them and wrote them into history, my conclusion from that is that the Romans were doing something right my ancestors were not
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
This was real but it wasn't some magic thing that just happened to happen, a thousand harsh winters in Northern Europe created the conditions for it. The floor was so high because you could always fall back on family, or if you'd truly burned your ass with them, the church
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
There's still this little tickle in my hindbrain that's like 'why doesn't somebody do something about this?'
But I increasingly think this is just what people do. Absent real abiding problems, they will abstract new enemies, even (perhaps especially) in the face of real problems/enemies. We're just wired out of the womb a little 'wrong.'
Of course the problem isn't the immigrants, diversity is our strength after all, the problem is those making a fuss! If they'd just get out of the way and stop being a bother we could make some real progress
VinoVeritas
8mo ago
We'll have to agree to disagree on that one - alcohol, tobacco, latin, greek, and bible study are to me what makes a man
Personally, I don't mind the occasional post that's actually topical wedged between the endless word walls about San Francisco city council zoning proposals that occupy 80% of our timeline (which is not that busy these days anyway, just sayin)
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