Generally speaking, the statement “Tankies made the X face the wall” is true for all X. Anarchists, monarchists, fascists, capitalists, Mensheviks, Jews, Doctors, poets, authors, musicians, peasants, soldiers, factory workers, Marxists, Bolsheviks, wives and children of all of the above, and eventually even Stalinists.

I feel like libertarians would love the concept of FOSS and decentralization, and I don’t think anyone would argue they skew left.

Yup, there has always been a large libertarian contingent in the OSS community.

Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they’re Marxists. They’re also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.

I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Well, right, you’re dealing with statistics. It’s not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

I mean, it was more like over the course of a millennium, starting with the Roman destruction of the 2nd temple. I’m sure it picked up with the Muslim conquest, but that wasn’t the start of the diaspora.

What’s funny?

Seems to break along subreddit lines.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

Not supplying them with water and electricity would be a crime against humanity.

So they’re simultaneously committing genocide, and carefully avoiding violations of international law?

Again, I’m definitely not saying Israel has done nothing wrong. I’m specifically pushing back on the casual and irresponsible claims of genocide.

including Gaza, as much as Israel would like you to believe otherwise

In what way were Israelis occupying Gaza before the attack in October? Not with troops, right? They controlled the border pretty tightly, but it’s not Gaza’s only border. So…by what mechanism were they occupying it?

The settlers in the West Bank are a problem, and their relationship with the government & people of Israel is complicated and messy. To be clear: they’re wrong, they’re fundamentalist religious assholes, and to the extent the government supports them, the government is wrong to do so. I can totally get on board with that criticism!

I don’t buy the claim that relocating people is a genocide. Many genocides do involve relocation, and relocation on it’s own may well be be considered a crime against humanity (especially if there are signs that it’s permanent), but it’s a different crime than mass extermination.

Well, but basically what you’re saying is that the genocide in Gaza exists in the hearts and minds of certain Israeli leaders. The Israelis have had the Palestinians at their mercy for decades, and they’ve been…supplying them with free water and power. Doesn’t seem very genocidal to me.

I agree that there are some scary government figures. I wouldn’t doubt that some of them have genocidal desires. But they’re counterbalanced by the fact that, in the end, Israel is a liberal country. And if the standard for ‘genocide’ is that some government officials harbor or express the desire for genocide, then the list of countries in the Middle East that are not genocidal would be a pretty short list.

What’s happening in the West Bank is wrong. You could, at a stretch, call it ethnic cleansing, but usually that term is reserved for government policy in land it controls. Extremists creeping across the border to settle and claim land, with the goal of driving the Palestinians out–to the annoyance of most of the government in power–doesn’t really fit the mold. I mean, the attack on Israel was executed by the governmental body that can best be claimed to represent the Gazans, with the eventual intent of driving all Jews out of the region, per their officially stated policy. Is that therefore ethnic cleansing?

Thanks for the earnest reply. I’m not convinced, but it’s refreshing not to just get downvotes and insults.

Trying to remove a people from their land Armenian genocide-style is also genocide

The thing that made the Armenian genocide a genocide is that the Turks killed somewhere between 0.6 and 1.2 million of a population of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. The forced relocations were just an implementation detail. If forced relocation on it’s own was genocide, then the Soviets would be responsible for like a dozen genocides.

There has always been a strain of Israeli politics that has been striving for “greater Israel”. It’s never been dominant, but I think there’s a real concern that a genocide (in the traditional sense) might occur there, and I think you could claim conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing. Israeli politics is ugly, and the fundamentalists are scary. Still…calling the current conflict a genocide is misleading and hyperbolic as hell IMHO. But that’s what it’s called all the time, without question, and people get furious if you ask what, specifically, they’re talking about.

It reeks of propaganda. I can’t take people seriously when they casually throw the term around. Talk about the terrible things that Israel actually is doing instead.

Removed by mod

I shave my head. Where’s my option?!?

I’m getting there. One by one, I’m leaving the news communities, because they’re so deranged.

It’s frustrating, though, cuz Reddit (for better & worse) was a pretty good source of news, and a good place to discuss it. Yes there was a lot of noise, but most of the time the top few comments were worth reading. Sometimes it was legit deep analysis, sometimes insider knowledge about the politics/business/culture in question. Then below that, there was the bog-standard predictable takes and the shit-slinging.

On Lemmy, you only seem to get the latter. I guess it’s just not big enough, or skews young and inexperienced.

Counterpoint: if you think the world is so terrible right now (relative to…?) that anyone pointing out anything positive must be shut down, you’re probably just a toxic asshole.

There’s like 3 regular-looking Swedes who make just about all popular music, isn’t there?

I think this might be giving the attackers too much credit for strategy. Don’t discount the simple religious aspect: don’t make the mistake of refusing to believe that devout religious people don’t actually believe their own religion.

Take ISIS. A whole lot of their actions made almost no sense, from a strategic point of view: picking fights with everybody, massacring civilians instead of letting them flee, destroying ancient artifacts (instead of either preserving or selling them) if you omit the simple explanation of religion. They wanted to trigger the final, apocalyptic battle that would usher in the end of the world. They said exactly that in their social media videos, but we secular atheists (or non-devout believers) just kinda skipped over that detail.

Things aren’t as clearly religious in the case of the Palestinians, but probably plays some role. Same with the Israeli Right, and the American Right with their unconditional support for Israel. We shouldn’t ignore the impact of religious belief.