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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • The ancestors of the Jewish diaspora are too, just like the ancestors of Palestinians, but the Jewish diaspora been out of the state for at least over a 1000 years if not close to 2000, and that’s why Palestinians would experience their return and the creation of modern Israel as maybe what a Native American might have experience European colonization and the creation of the US and other modern North and South American countries.

    As I stated elsewhere, I don’t think Israel-Palestine should have been divided into two states, and that I think that since Israel is the home of Judaism, Jewish immigration should have been allowed, but the focus should have been as much on co-existing and equality as protecting the rights and lives of Jewish folk and making sure sure the constitution of this new one state never allowed anti-semitism. The division of the area into two states with an arbitrary border led to ethnic cleansing just like the creation of India and Pakistan led ethnic cleansing and the mess we have today. The creation of one non-colonial state with equal rights might not have.


  • Eh, I don’t think many societies besides America are as open as America to migration and immigrants (and we have strong anti immigrant streaks sometimes, but I think we’re more tolerant than most). Like Japan is an old society that’s just not used migration/immigration. Hell, the shogunate shut out people coming in or leaving for 200 or so years before 1850. And even old Western societies that have a colonial past and immigrants resulting from that are not as open to immigrants as the US (I mean that’s what Brexit’s about, right? And you saw how destabilizing Syrian and Libyan refugees have been to the EU, and how incompletely integrated Algerian immigrants are in France).

    Both Jews and Palestinians were first. At least some of their ancestors were chilling in the land as far back as the bronze age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/

    But Jews were expelled a long time ago from their home, and only started coming back with the Zionist movement. But with respect to the creation of modern Israel, obviously the Palestinians were there before the Zionist movement and the creation of modern Israel, and I think they might feel the same way about the creation of Israel as maybe Native Americans might feel about European colonization and the creation of the US.


  • There’s definitely been admixing with other populations (including Ashkenazi Jews with Europeans), but Palestinians are Canaanite/Levantine (just like the Lebanese and Jews and Jordanians) and form a Levantine cluster. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#Comparison_to_non-Jewish_populations Meanwhile, Judaism is certainly from Israel (if the history didn’t already point to it, the archaeology of Israel does). But a large number of Jews/Israelites were expelled by the Romans in the first century CE, creating a Jewish diaspora that shows genetic evidence of admixing with local populations over 2000 years. And certainly before the modern state of Israel was created and Zionist Jewish folk started immigrating back into Israel-Palestine after 1800-1900 years, the Palestinians were there.

    Jewish people were persecuted in Christian nations because Christians started blaming Jews for Christ’s death. You can see evolution of this idea from being nearly non-existent in the earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, to the newest canonical Gospel the Gospel of John. And sentiment is argued to have risen from Christian anger at the failure of other Jews to accept Jesus as the messiah and convert. All these negative stereotypes started to develop. And with the Romans destroying Jerusalem (or at least the temple in Jerusalem) and scattering Jews, you had a group of people with a strong cultural group identity that was strongly monotheistic in a strange land, that was easily to cast as the other. It’s all bullshit.

    Anyways, Israel-Palestine is the home of Judaism, the descendants of Israelites, and Palestinians (who probably partially the descendants of Israelites or at least neighboring Canaanites, from whom Israelites became distinct by the development of their monidolatry and later monotheism).

    Also see this 2020 paper that compares the genetics of modern people living in this region (including Jews, Palestinians, Lebanese) with Bronze Age DNA from the region: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/ (got this from an earlier section in the above Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#2017–present

    So yeah, at least some of the ancestors of modern Palestinians were in Israel-Palestine in the Bronze Age (ie before the Babylonian Captivity).



  • I’m talking about the meaning of those statements to different different people. Take a look at this video interviewing Elisha Wiesel from the Elie Wiesel Foundation and Michal Cotier-Wunsh, Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQn5X4ra8KY

    She says that Anti-zionism is Anti-semitism. To many people, Anti-Zionism is a value statement on the history of the creation of the modern Israeli state by the British, the UN, and America in the 1940s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionism I think people who hold the view that creating a the modern state of Israel as a Western colonial action (one could have simply opened up immigration to Jewish folk and ensuring that one state guaranteeing the protection and safety of Jews and declaring it the ancestral home of Israelites and the Jewish religion and Palestinians (who are also Canaanites like the Lebanese) was created, as opposed to having some asshole somewhere else draw a border (like they did in India between India and Pakistan), and unleashing the subsequent ethnic cleansing that ensued (like it did in India and Pakistan)), but don’t hold Hamas’s views that Israel and Israelis should be driven off the land (or the equivalent that Pakistan or India should be destroyed and the subcontinent reunited) can be called anti-zionist but not anti-semitic.

    My point is that if we change the statement from Israel has the right to exist to Israel exists (like the US exists) and has the right to continue exist separates the folks who think the creation of Israel in its form was a historical mistake (mostly because of all the suffering that’s resulted from it) from the folks who think it and its people should be driven off the map. That statement that Israel has the right to continue to exist is something I think both Israelis and many Palestinians can agree on and can clarify what the goal of peace should be.

    The other thing in that video is declaring Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, blaming Israel for the bombing of the Gazan hospital based on early news report, as blood libel is weaponizing the label of anti-semitism against a person who I don’t believe is Anti-semetic (she’s not declaring the Jews are trying to replace us or creating space lasers or that they created covid, or engaging in millenia-old anti-semitic tropes) and is instead trying to protect her people from violence (like the folks in the video are trying to protect their people from Hamas violence), and trying to silence her and trying to silence criticism of Israel and the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land. And I think we while the evidence seems to be mounting that Hamas lied about scale of death and damage and who fired the rocket, it’s not completely crystal clear, and I think Tliab should be given more time to judge before being accused of blood libel and being an anti-semite who should be driven out of congress, eliminating one more voice that tries to bring balance to American policy to include Palestinian interests. Edit: Someone pointed out in a Majority Report clip that Israel and Biden initially claimed that Hamas beheaded babies and children. And they (I think it was a pro-Palestinian Israeli) called it blood libel too. I think it’s the fog of war, and we need to stop calling both people blood libelists, and focus instead on the reality of the situation and see what the best options are for saving lives, getting the hostages back, achieving peace, and getting justice.

    We can talk about offers after. But that’s not what the post was about. It’s about creating clarifying statements that clearly define peace and what peace will be while avoiding obfuscating value statements. Not only does it make discussion easier, but it also separates people who hate the history of what Zionism has created from the true anti-semites who want to wipe Israel and Israelis off the map.




  • Nah, man. If they cited all those things, or more importantly the complete stifling of Gazans’ ability to prosper or flourish today, that would be one thing. What did they cite instead? The desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque. That is more important to them than the apartheid. Fuck Hamas. They’re accomplishing nothing more than the death of Palestinians and more suffering. And they just empowered the most right wing, unpopular government that Israel’s ever had, one that Israelis were divided against. Hamas and the Iranian regime need to be eradicated. They are hurting any chance at Palestinian freedom and equality and right to prosperity. And they’re just causing more and more every day normal Israeli/Jewish and Palestinian suffering. This Iranian regime supports the tyranny of the Syrian government over the Sunnis (and its use of chemical weapons against them), Russia’s terrorist attacks on civilians in Ukraine and the invasion of that country in general, the complete undermining of the Lebanese government by Hezbollah, and the complete overthrow of the Yemeni government by a similarly tyrannical group in Yemen. And it uses of rape and sexual violence and murder against men and women protesting the death of a woman caused by the morality police and the oppression of women by the regime.

    I think the only way to accomplish either a true one state democratic nation that honors Israel-Palestine as the home of Judaism or a two state solution, is boycott and divestment (because there is no way to peacefully protest and engage in civil obedience to achieve freedom and equality (they murdered a journalist and nothing came of it) and there’s no way to win militarily). It worked with the apartheid government in South Africa, and hopefully it will work with Israel.


  • As a person born nearly a decade after you, I pride my generation (Gen Y/millennial) as also experiencing life before computers and the internet in your home, but still developing (sort of naturally) with all that (but still remembering what it felt like to be really and truly bored). Gen Zers born after a similar gap as between me and those born later, don’t remember life before the internet or 9/11.


  • Nah, speaking as a Gen Y/millennial, we’re the failed generation. You guys and the folks after you are the hope. Many of us graduated into the Great Recession and then went through the pandemic. You guys are graduating into a much better economy, but some unprecedented hurdles (in recent times) like climate change. You guys are the hope and future. The difference between Gen Y and Gen Z is like the difference between the folks who came of age in the Great Depression vs. the generation that came of age in and around WWII (the Greatest Generation). I just hope we leave a hopeful world for my gen alpha nephew for when he comes of age.




  • So, it gets kind of complicated, but basically I bought the Wacom One to use as a drawing tablet with Windows, Linux, and MacOS for PC/laptop drawing programs like Krita and Corel Painter (Humble Bundle purchase). Also had an iPad Pro that was slightly busted to take notes on PDFs of Powerpoints using GoodReader. Now I can’t remember if I failed to bring it with me or if it wasn’t working, but I only had my MacBook Pro and and the Wacom tablet to take notes with for a couple of months. Apple’s default PDF viewer Preview and even an app I had paid for a long time ago, Clearview, had no drawing annotation capabilities. But Microsoft Edge has a drawing annotation tool for PDFs that even Firefox doesn’t have. I think it comes from Microsoft Edge being the default PDF viewer in Windows.




  • Here’s a good reason. Since Facebook likes to spy on you, I put Instagram on my work profile on Android, effectively sandboxing it. I’d had the account for several years at this point. Just the other day, it told me that my account had been flagged for violating the rules and trying to access data I wasn’t supposed to have access to. It asked me to upload an image of myself with a code written on a piece of paper to prove I wasn’t a bot, and they still deleted my profile and said I was acting as a bot and that I could not appeal the decision or talk to a human about it.

    I agree it’s a bit of a pain to get people to join these nerd apps, but man, it beats dealing with non-interactive bot/algorithm, punishing you for fighting back against having your information stolen.