I live in the UK and I don’t drink beer because I generally, ironically, think beer overall tastes like piss, and yet I still know Tsingtao. It has fairly substantial market recognition in a lot of countries.

I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.

Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it’d be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn’t want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn’t want to ever be approached by them again.

That’s the very long way of saying I’m not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I’m very happy I caught on early enough.

We actually had to step over still wet seaweed at the bottom of the path (the darker bit at the end of the path) to even get onto the beach at this spot, so the normal tidal variations even during a relatively calm summer weekend still got all the way to foot of the walls. I would not particularly like to see the insurance costs or list of things that are not covered for the closest properties. Most of the properties along that stretch are set above fairly sizable seawalls.

Ryde is facing the Solent, the strait between Isle of Wight and “mainland” England, so I guess it’s more sheltered than some other parts of the island, but they must still get plenty of nasty weather during the winter.

The word “nice” in every setting is almost the full extent of Nice’s tourism branding.

And yet my comment did not suggest any views in either direction and only addressed the specific point of selective schools.

Thanks. It was a ~100 pound shitty low-end Android phone, so I don’t blame you for disliking the camera quality.

Thanks for the interesting overview.

To be honest, I mostly like dragging that quote out because it confounds people’s expectations.

Marx certainly wasn’t arguing against universal provisioning of education - that had been a demand in the Communist Manifesto for example - but against state control of the curriculum, which really must be understood in large part I suspect as a direct outcome of his own personal experience with the Prussian government repression before he left, and fear it’d end up used for government propaganda, rather than any kind of objective assessment of quality.

But that was very much a product of a very specific time, and quite possibly personal resentments mixed in. I suspect had he seen the relative state of the US and German education systems today, he’d certainly have preferred the German model.

I’ve not suggested otherwise, so I don’t know why you felt compelled to point that out.

Weird fact: In 1875, Karl Marx ripped what became the SDAP (which eventually through mergers and name changes became the SDP) a new one when they argued for state-provided education, and argued that rather than people getting an education from the state, “the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

In the same section he argued that the then-US model of private or locally run education to publicly set standards was far preferable.

Of course, this was at a time when the German/Prussian government was deeply authoritarian, something Marx and his family had experienced first-hand, so I’m sure that coloured his views of state-run education.

There are over 160 selective secondary state/public schools in England. Being state run does not prevent the existence of selective schools.

Your blood and soil arguments are entirely irrelevant to the point that Israel itself does not make the extremist claims you’re making. You keep recycling this despite its total lack of relevance to the argument. And in doing so you’re aligning yourself with a tiny minority of the most far-right extremist fascist-adjacent Israeli parties.

beyond the fact they agreed to a 2 state solution in the 90s then reneged and attacked Israel

Again you’re collectively blaming a population, the majority of which were not born when the Oslo accords were signed (look it up; 65% of the Palestinian population is below 25 years old, and the Oslo accords were signed 30 years ago) for actions a far higher proportion had no influence over.

beyond the fact they elect a genocidal government that will only bring themselves ruin

I’m assuming you don’t get the irony in writing this when it can be equally applied to Israel.

Of the two sides, only one has a government actively engaged in what covers a substantial portion o stage 8 of Stantons ten stages of genocide.

When you cut toddlers throats and rape Innocents who have NO SLIGHTS AGAINST YOU, film it for fun plus have genocide as your prime governmental policy I give 0 shits about your plight regardless of what pushed you there. You deserve to get pushed around by the people you have a desire to wipe off the face of this Earth. To quote the bible, “live by the sword, die by the sword.”

This boils down to “it’s ok to murder innocents and oppress people and want to get rid of people because the other side murdered innocents and wants to get rid of you”. Unless you’re an utter hypocrite, you’d apply that to both sides. Yet this “logic” is meaningless if applied to both sides. By your own logic, Israelis deserve to get pushed around because some of them have murdered innocents and because some of them wants Israel to annex all the land (to be clear, despite your argument in favour of collective punishment: they don’t; just like Palestinians don’t deserve to be collectively punished for the actions of a few either). But if that is the case, you have no moral basis for your uproar over Hamas’ actions - by your own logic you shouldn’t give 0 shits about it.

Yet you clearly do. So clearly you’re not applying that logic to both sides.

You’re conveniently only applying it to the Palestinian population, whom you’ve elsewhere also implied collectively are untrustworthy and likely to try to take over any state who might invite them in.

Again, note how quick you are to be ok with collective suffering for Palestine for the actions of some, while you’re up in arms about the suffering of a portion of Israelis for the actions of some.

Can you see how this deeply hypocritical and one-sided demonisation of Palestinians as a people, whom you have elsewhere implied are collectively untrustworthy and a risk of trying to take over, comes across as racist?

Because I certainly do.

I have no interest in continuing to indulge you in your ongoing demonisation of a population of five million people of whom the vast majority has done no wrong other than been born in what is effectively an open air prison where you, to quote you think they “deserve to get pushed around” despite the majority of them never having voted in any violently oppressive government (and that holds for the majority of Israelis too, though sadly not for the majority of the electorate - but just as I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for the actions of some, neither to dI hold all Israelis responsible for the actions of some; have a think about that).

And so I’ll shortly be blocking you, so I don’t have to deal with any more attempts at justifying oppression of innocents because of the crimes of some.

I’m simply applying the logic the Palestinians apply.

This might be relevant if it was a Palestinian state imposing apartheid on Israel. If so, they would be equally worthy of condemnation irrespective of who had which historical claim to what land.

But they are not, so bringing it up is yet another attempt at victim-blaming.

Had Israel stopped at a point of doing the bare minimum to secure its legally recognized borders, or indeed the borders they themselves recognize, and attempted to avoid oppressing innocent civilians for decades, there’d likely still be conflicts, but then Israel would have something of a moral leg to stand on. They have not. They do not. As it is, they are occupiers, as recognized by their own government and their own courts.

I’d also feel more empathy for the apartheid conditions if Palestinians would stop electing a political group who’s stated goals are the deaths of every Jewish person.

Hamas didn’t even exist until a couple of decades into the oppression. It was formed as a result of the failure of PLO to get Israel to the table, so this is blaming the victims again for responding to decades of Israeli unwillingness to end their oppression.

Also, notice how in contrast to your repeated talk of the Palestinians as a unified group while assigning blame, not once have I tried to blame the Israeli people as a whole for Israel’s actions, despite the fact that a majority of them have elected governments in every single election for the entire existence of their state that have continued a policy of illegal occupations and apartheid?

I stand by that. Just like the Palestinian people as a whole can not be judged for the actions of Hamas, neither can the Israeli people as a whole be judged for the actions of the Israeli state.

Are you going to do the same, or are you going continue to assign collective blame to people including the millions on either side who have no power whatsoever to influence the actions of any of the belligerent parties and/or who oppose them? Including the millions in the West Bank who are largely cut off from even being able to intervene in what goes on in Gaza due to Israeli apartheid policies beyond the control of Palestinians in the West Bank.

And as I said it’s comical you keep saying I support apartheid policies by simply stating killing innocent people is fucking wrong and deplorable no matter what side does it.

When you criticise only specific and limited outcomes of the oppression rather than the oppression itself, then, yes, it’s natural to presume you’re fine with the oppression. Notice how even here you only express opposition to the killing of innocents, and not against the imposition of apartheid or the illegal occupation that created the conditions for it over multiple generations.

If Ukraine starts liquidating Russian cities and raping, torturing, kidnapping, and using innocent’s as human shields I’d say the same fucking thing to them and pull my support. If this is how Palestine wants to do things I shed no tears as they are destroyed.

If your support for opposition to oppression is contingent on the oppressed doing no wrong, then you’re really just looking for any excuse to side with the oppressors.

My support for the Ukranian people, as for the Palestinian people is unconditional. That does not mean I support every action made on their behalf. I do not. That does not mean there aren’t actions I find deplorable. It does not mean I don’t sympathise with innocent victims.

It does mean that in an asymmetric fight the oppressor is the only side that has the choice of ending the oppression, and until they do they have no moral standing to complain when some of their victims lash out in desperation - the oppressor is ultimately always the culpable party for every consequence of their oppression.

Anything else is to create an incentive for oppressors to be extra brutal in order to provoke an extreme response, knowing that if they do, they’ll have people like you ready to dismiss the plight of the entire oppressed population because some of them were pushed into a level of desperation where they’ve gone too far.

Firstly, see “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012:

Not even the Israeli government or the Israeli Supreme Court agree with you that Israel has a legitimate claim to the territories beyond their internationally recognised borders. Maybe somebody here is talking about the entirety of Israel, but I am not, nor have I ever. If Israel were to withdraw to their borders, and Palestinian attacks still continue, then there’d be at least room for discussion of blame.

Until then, as long as Israel itself legally recognizes that it is an occupying power, there is none.

Secondly, people’s experience of being oppressed does not recognize law. Irrespective of who has ownership of what, Israel is engaged in treating Gaza in particular as an Apartheid-style bantustan, and is committing crimes against humanity by doing so.

Whether or not you agree with the legal position on that, when someone places people in those conditions, then it is entirely on them when they hit back.

Blaming people for resisting gross abuse because you don’t like how they do it when you’ve put them in a situation where they have no realistic opportunity to fight clean is victim-blaming.

Are you going to argue that it’s bad for Germans to murder Jews, but it is okay for Muslims?

Nice try. I’ve not argued it is okay for anyone. I’ve argued in some threads that unless you’ve provided a better alternative (and not suggested it; actually tried to make it come to pass), then like the rest of us you’re not in a moral position to judge people for taking desperate steps to try to fight back.

That doesn’t mean not feeling for the victims, because they had no power to end this either. It doesn’t mean not thinking it’s a horrible situation. It doesn’t mean you can’t get angry. It means resisting the urge to assign the blame to a people the vast majority of whom have been born into effective bondage under an apartheid regime for taking desperate and irrational actions to try to end a gross abuse they have no realistic power to change.

Who? Israel? No, they do not have a legal claim to the occupied areas, or they wouldn’t be occupied. Both irrespective of the occupation, the crime of Apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome statute.

The Israeli Supreme Court has ever since 1967 consistently accepted the Israeli government’s own contention that the territories are occupied, and not part of Israel proper, because if they were part of Israel, then Palestinians affected by Israeli oppression would have far stronger legal claims.

So if you want to argue that the occupied territories belong to Israel, you’re arguing against the position of both Israel the state and the Israeli Supreme Court.

See “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012

Only one party is currently illegally occupying land they have legal claim to and engaging in the crime of apartheid. Only one party is engaged in fighting against an illegal occupier. That you choose to argue in favour of the apartheid regime engaged in an illegal occupation says enough.

Nice “whatabout”, but the bully here is the party that engaged in an illegal occupation, the crime of apartheid, and extensive war crimes (annexation through settlement of occupied territory) in the first place. That you try to redefine away the fact that Israel created this situation in the first place borders on apartheid-apologism. It’s exactly the same tactic used by supporters of South African apartheid to dismiss the situation in South Africa whenever the ANC carried out a violent operation, and it was apologism for oppression then, and it is apologism for oppression now.

They are a victim of bullying when they’ve been under decades of illegal occupation. Hamas is an awful organization, but it was only formed as a result of ongoing brutal oppression. When you keep punching someone in the face, sooner or later they’ll start punching back, and sometimes they’ll fight dirty. That doesn’t make them good, but the bully is still the one who kicked things off in the first place and the one who should be first and foremost held responsible for the situation they created.

Hamas individual victims get my full sympathy; they’re victims of both Hamas and Israel. Israel as a state does not - without their brutal oppression, extensive war crimes, and apartheid regime, there wouldn’t be any Hamas in the first place.

ANC bombed civilians and their attacks were celebrated by many. The IRA did, and were celebrated by many. ETA did, and were celebrated by many. It is common, and suggesting it’s unique to Palestinians is pure racism.

EDIT: Ah, looked at one of your other comments that were equally awful. Block incoming.

A victim of bullying will eventually lash out whether or not they think they have a chance because they become desperate.

I think chances are we are at a stage where most would-be smokers would just opt for vaping, given that while it sounds like he wants some restrictions on that as well, it doesn’t like that’d be subjected to the year over year age increase?