Yeah, a common them I come back to is cycles of mistreatment: people who were push from their homes pushed people from their homes.

Chill, man. I’m not here to fight.

I’m also not going trying to white-wash anything. War and tribalism are indeed ancient, and historical echos can certainly be found. But my point is this: the regional conflict between Jews and Muslims is most certainly not a persistent, perpetual, irrational animosity that has stubbornly raged on for millennia. It is true that it is informed by a long cultural relationship. But the violence is modern. It’s caused by political forces, and it can be ended by changing those political forces.

Prior to the Zionist movement and the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century, Jews and Muslims (and many other groups) cohabitated Israel-Palestine (or Trans-Jordan or whatever you want to call it). They did in fact share the land peacefully in the nineteenth century.

https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/

True. It definitely has a long history. My point though – as you said – is that it’s really a persistent myth that these people are just oil and water. Their conflict is far more material than that.

It certainly isn’t intractable.

I must politely reject this assessment. There have been decades and centuries of peaceful coexistence. It isn’t as though this is a persistent condition.

Prior to 1948, there were a lot of Christians and Jews living in Palestine without major conflict.

The modern ethno-religious tensions are the product of modern political events, not some mystic curse.

I think the most important takeaway here is that for those of us in the imperial core, the urgency has never been greater to understand the architecture of power and find the weaknesses in its ediface.

The opportunity (and associated responsibility) to pursue shared liberation is greatest for each of us on in America and Europe.

Divest everything. City governments, schools, business, whatever. My city – Oakland – has had great success at this. And each institution that joins the efforts is another crack that will eventually bring end the occupation. We can do it this decade!

We have to have hope enough for ourselves and those with far fewer options.

Holy shit, really?

That is Sony levels of stupid.

View from the Top.

I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.

It would explain a lot

Whew.

The thing about these incidents that I find most interesting is that they basically reveal a widely held suspicion among many people that these government contractors are over-crexentialed bullshit artists.

This just shows what we’ve all suspected: they’ve been cutting corners, claiming underserved authority, and making up shit for years. But now some folks are checking and reporting on it.

Respectfully, religion really isn’t the cause, it’s just correlated with ethnicity, like language.

He apparently had a whole seminar on how he assess who he thinks most resembles the antichrist , and I have no idea if this is some sort of thought exercise or is he’s being literal.

The real added later of absurd irony is that if THE Jesus Christ returned to share his message of radically pious non violent service to the downtrodden, Thiel would call him the antichrist and demand for him to be tortured to death again.

The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

The murdered we’re Al-Muntasir Billah Abdullah, 26; and Youssef Asasa, 37.

Their poor families… Also, fuck the AP for making that paragraph 11. Jeez.

This is clever.

I think to complete the concept, it needs to have an absurd feature that is supposed to justify connectivity, and a way to stop it from functioning when commanded.

How can a pan break? I guess the handle can fall off? So it has a solenoid that locks on the handle. The pan is sold as a subscription where they replace the pan part to keep it’s Teflon coating fresh. And if you mess with it or use it more than 20x the handle falls off.

'Guys, it’s no big deal. I was just doing a science experiment to test whether escaping from a life sentence for my crimes was feasible.

So far, my hypothesis appears to be false.’

Yeah, agree. Tables can be used standing or while sitting in the floor. Chairs are nice, but without tables a lot of stuff would happen at floor level anyway.

Definitely easier to get by without chairs.

This is an excellent shower thought.

I get that that’s the intended meaning, but op makes a good point.

Also, there was a lot more hope than change.

Ultimately, Obama did a perfect job executing neoliberalism. And by demonstrating the outcomes of neoliberalism when perfectly executed, I think he also executed neoliberalism in the other meaning.

I think this is the main story. I don’t think it’s new info, but it confirms the issue persists: this LLM is so heavily trained to fawn over Musk that it doesn’t exercise any application of context or attempt to find truth.

Which is sad.