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FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
19m ago
Your whole post hinges on a kind of pan Arab support that just doesn't seem to exist.
No? I'm assuming that the hand of the USA in the region is heavy and currently imposing peace on the leadership of those governments. How long does Egypt continue to support Israel when the USA stops paying them? I'm not asserting PAN ARAB UNITY (though the arabs do seem to come together, split apart, come together etc over longer periods of history) - just that there's currently a major world power spending lots of money to pacify the countries around Israel, and that those countries will be less pacified when that stops.
I think it would be hard to estimate what percentage of the Arab world ultimately would support VS oppose attacks on hezbollah.
I was talking about the immediate family members of Israeli victims. It doesn't matter which of the many groups dedicated to destroying Israel that they join, just that they join them.
Is Israel somehow not being sent food and weapon shipments from the US while also being drained financially to do so?
In this hypothetical the US/Israel relationship has been destroyed. That was given as an example as to how the relationship could be destroyed or why the US would want to withdraw from it. But I do find it entirely possible that a vengeful US could decide to prosecute Israel for AIPAC corruption and demand reparations for all the money sent there by politicians under the influence of an Israeli organisation like AIPAC. After all, they're operating as agents of a foreign government without being registered as such, so the idea of them actually getting prosecuted in the future isn't that far fetched.
OK yes, so the plan is that the Israelis are getting genocide one way or the other, got it.
Ok yes, so you're just a muslim hater who wants all the brown people to die. Please don't put words into my mouth or claim that I'm actually saying something I'm not - I believe telling someone what they believe is actually against the rules on this site. But for my actual objection to this claim anyway - the destruction of Nazi germany did not mean that the Germans were genocided. Presumably what would happen after the collapse of Israel is either a land-grab from the countries around them or the creation of a Palestinian state which the stateless Israeli survivors could become citizens of (after some intense denazification programs).
It's not like other genocidal nations struggle to find trading partners, turkey is in nato, Russia even finds trading partners in Europe as it invades one of their neighbors. Half the middle Eastern nations have committed at least an ethnic cleansing.
Who? Who are you talking about? What nation is going to be trading with Israel after they get cut off from the US? It isn't Russia, it isn't China. The only potential candidate I can think of is India, and they're going to have a lot of fun actually trading with Israel. I have been asking repeatedly for you to provide a specific example of who would actually be willing to do so and all you have are vague allusions to how other nations with completely different circumstances managed it. Again, if you're going to provide an example like this you need to actually explain the points of similarity and difference between those states. Russia being sanctioned by the US over Ukraine is such a completely different situation that you can't just make blanket allusions and go "she'll be right mate".
Thoroughlygruntled
21m ago
Point taken. $12,500 per year for undergrads and an unlimited amount for plus loans and grad school is still pretty crazy though. I myself have nearly $250,000 in federal student loans, plus the $20k-ish in plus loans my parents got to help with my undergrad. Never took out a private loan.
Spookykou
34m ago
buried
I didn't think the motte hide comments with lots of downvotes the way reddit does. Does this mean something else?
JarJarJedi
34m ago
Do you mean this guy? https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal/status/1969862447155540269
I haven't heard much about him before, but I am very skeptical he ever had any habits like that.
anti_dan
37m ago
Obvious in what way? The FBI's recent track record is not even mildly indicative that they are nonpartisan in their targets.
Small question: Is imgur considered good enough for embedding links to images in posts, or are there better alternatives? The forum's image upload appears unsuitable for the task.
Not a question: Comments+View count for all of TheMotte.org's 158 Culture War threads to date.*
*Reliability not guaranteed.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
38m ago
It's true, but I didn't want to plagiarize such a great bit of description. Perhaps I should, they do say imitation is the highest form of flattery.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
39m ago
I'm not proud of this trait
You should be. Modern art fucking sucks.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
40m ago
He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.
anti_dan
41m ago
I haven't seen the meat of this story yet. What is the bribe allegedly for? Allowing a terrorist to get a VISA? Given the FBI's recent track record I am highly skeptical that they did good enough police work to have actually made America safer via a sting operation against a Trump Cabinet Official.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
41m ago
Yet! Growth mindset!
Last night, I listened to Carl Benjamin and Sam Hyde(!) independently wax poetic about the importance of Christianity and urge their listeners to go to church. Benjamin was explicit that he doesn't believe in God or Jesus at all, but considers Christianity culturally necessary. I have no idea what's going on with Hyde; I don't really follow him on the regular, but was really, really not expecting twenty minutes of commentary about God and his Church from my gold-standard sample of post-ironic schizo internet brainrot victim.
I've suspected for some time that Christianity would be making a resurgence; being a serious Christian it's sort of a required bet, but also it's seemed to me that the cultural wind has been in our favor more or less since the Woke offensive in 2014; Woke took over the way it did because the comfortable, decadent agnostic soft-nihilism that had pushed us out had pretty clearly transitioned into the "finding out" phase. Still, from my perspective, right-wing "Christianity And..." is no better than the left-wing variant.
cjet79
42m ago
Choose your own adventure books exist, but I think that whole genre just fits way better with a game. Multiple ending options based on how you played just makes sense within a game.
Any stories that play off the actions of the player are going to be more powerful in game form. Bioshock is a good example here, but far from the only one in the genre. Dishonored is another one where choosing to be non-violent, or staying completely hidden will change minor details in the following levels.
anti_dan
51m ago
This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
Its not really a disagreement about the meaning of the word "woman" because if it was, the trans movement would have a consistent and coherent answer to the WIAW question.
daguerrean
51m ago
It’s good optics, an especially sharp contrast to the gravedancing we saw last week. But it isn’t especially surprising for serious Christians. Pope John Paul II famously forgave the man that shot him, which was especially meaningful as he directly requested (and was granted) a pardon for the assassin. That said, I am too pessimistic to think this will do anything. I think the media landscape is too fragmented. The vast majority of leftists will simply never hear her remarks. And even if they do, echochambers will ensure they are provided with readymade dismissals to avoid ever feeling an unpleasant “are we the baddies?” thought.
I think of Bin Laden’s aphorism that people will prefer the strong horse. Ultimately the left is killing their enemies and celebrating it, that seems like strength to me. Forgiving them feels like a flavor of Trudeau style “if you kill your enemies they win” cuckoldry, which is vaguely repulsive to most. I’m not sure which will prove the more powerful influence
veqq
52m ago
only to backpeddle in the most pants-on-head, clown-world fashion once they came into office
It fascinated me to see some here start backpedaling before I heard the admin do so.
Bartender_Venator
59m ago
That plus full body tats, piercings of any sort other than the ear
Yeah for me it's when Mottizens claim that heavy tattoos and facial piercings objectively make a woman unattractive. For me the libidinal effect is something similar to seeing/smelling a perfect crust on a steak. Maybe, as @Earendil would say, I have evolved to digest organisms that would be poisonous to others, and my phenomenology has evolved likewise.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
On that note, I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and it's very helpful to try and get into the mind of an Englishman from that period - the ways of thinking they brought into and then out of the War.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
She has said that she doesn't want input into the sentencing, that she'd rather let the state decide. That's a perfectly valid Christian path, I believe - forgiveness of the soul does not imply foregoing justice in this world. That's how Christian societies remained functional and (reasonably) lawful for millennia.
Does this mean she will ask for clemency at the sentencing hearing? I don't want to say it's easy to say you forgive your husband's murderer at his own funeral, but there aren't actually any negative consequenses for saying that. I suspect that this is virtue signaling.
It's also bad game theory. "The Left" didn't kill Charlie Kirk, but Tyler Robinson DID kill Charlie Kirk. It's okay to retaliate against him specifically.
Tiber727
1hr ago
While I do think Carr's comments make this situation legally murky to put it mildly, if you make the kind of money Kimmel makes speaking with a lawyer is the smart thing to do. You should absolutely pay a few thousand to see if it's worth pursuing millions.
Stellula
1hr ago
Well yes Catholics would say that we have access to more, we have the Bible, but also we have the Church which was founded by Christ himself.
The claim that Protestants worship the Bible is based on the idea that they seem to hold the words in the book at a higher relevance than what they actually say, or what Jesus actually did or said.
(Snark snark)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
This isn't a question but rather a statement. But I would like to hear what you think.
So I didn’t care for Charlie Kirk, and I’m not Christian (though I think they're pretty cool in general). But the fact that Erika Kirk, his widow, stood up and forgave the man accused of murdering her husband is staggering.
In an era where public life is fueled by score-settling and astounding cruelty this feels like a rare moment of moral progress. It’s counter-cultural in a good way: mercy instead of vengeance.
Here's an article from The Guardian about it
It's especially notable when you compare this act to yesterday’s generation of right-wing Christian political leaders, who would’ve absolutely doubled down on punishment and wrath. Can you imagine, fucking, Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Falwell or Robertson forgiving someone that murdered their spouse? Yeah right.
And just to remind us of the previous era that needs to finish going the way of the dinosaurs, Trump himself openly said on stage right next to her that he hates his enemies and doesn’t care what Erika just said about what Jesus says about forgiveness.
To see Erika Kirk take the opposite stance, forgiveness, love, mercy, is unexpectedly hopeful. I am appreciating the small bit of moral progress on the Christian right here.
I visited the Bahá'í House of Worship near Chicago when they weren't having services, and it was beautiful and welcoming. Like the Unitarians, they aren't worried about practitioners of other faiths going to hell for being wrong, and they have nice aesthetics.
It is not just CS, this sort of issue exists across all of STEM. Engineering grads from the State U where I live (a top 20 undergrad program by basically every metric) are graduating with 1 or 2 industry offers IF they are top 20% in the class AND did a relevant industry internship/co-op. To reliably have multiple offers you need to be top 5%+ experience or be a minority candidate. Bottom half graduates (and this is an engineering school that still washes out about 1/3 of freshman, and is very competitive to enter) are receiving practically zero offers. In the business environment we have been in for at least 10 years now, the whole idea of a non-fraudulent H1B visa is silly. There are dozens of qualified people Americans for any job opening in white collar work, there are gluts of degree holders in every field from Math to Chemical Engineering to LGBT studies. There are also, by this point, millions of "retired" Americans who have 2-3 decades of industry experience and have been forced into retirement, long before age 65, because they got too expensive, but even if willing to take a 30% paycut cannot find work.
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