Hey but both sides suck and it’s not worth voting this year.

Hey, I appreciate your response! I totally understand that people want to have their feelings confirmed in such a space, but that’s also why I am critical in it. In this sort of environment the discussion is almost as much emotion and feeling as it is the words actually used. A sort of slang can develop where we can understand what each other means without the words we use being truly accurate. The problem with that is that this environment is also an echo chamber, we put meaning onto things that we want it to mean because it also confirms our beliefs.

This leads to situations where it’s impossible to differentiate between radical statements and reasonable statements. A good example is the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When both extremists and normies use the saying it becomes hard to differentiate them. Another example is the Gadsden flag, on it’s own there is nothing wrong with the flag with a deep historical heritage, but when the far right started using it as a symbol any rational centrist or leftist immediately stopped using it for fear of association. Back in school I had a friend who had the flag hanging on their wall, but around 2012 they specifically stated that they had taken it down because it had been co-opted by the far right.

I don’t really like the use of the word colonizer in this context, it just doesn’t fit right with me. The definition technically fits, but colonization to me is more like an invasive species moving in and slowly overwhelming the native population. This is more akin to what we were seeing with settlers moving into the West Bank.

What’s going on in Gaza is more akin to straight up scorched earth takeover and land theft. Hell, calling it an invasion and genocide feels more accurate.

I never said I was ok with what Israel is doing, my argument was on the meaning of words. Leftists in general are really terrible about saying what they mean, because they don’t seem to know the meaning of the words they use.

The cycle seems to go like this:

• make a statement
• realize the statement doesn’t mean what they wanted to say
• double down and try to change the meaning of the words they used

I know I said we need to be clear in our language, but since we were talking about a “regime” from the beginning I didn’t think I had to continuously spell it out throughout the discussion. Yes, we’re talking about whatever regime is being referenced, but again the last guy said it wasn’t Israel.

Regime Noun

a particular government or a system or method of government:

Your comparison between China and Israel is really terrible. If we’re being super duper clear on what a regime is, it’s the system of government. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, all citizens over the age of 18 can vote. Since the regime is democratically elected it’s kinda hard to differentiate the Israeli people from their Regime. China on the other hand is a unitary one-party state, if you’re not in the party and at the right level of the party then you don’t have any voice. It’s a lot easier to separate the people of China from their government.

Well that can’t be what he thinks, I listed that as an option in my original response

Except this guy specifically said he hopes the current Israel is dismantled. At best they could be hoping that Israel changes into a better government, but I don’t think that’s their meaning.

But he clearly said

No where does that say dismantling Israel.

So what entity which has colonized Palestine for 76 years, but isn’t the current Israel does he mean?

EDIT: Words have meaning, if the words you use don’t mean what you mean, then admit that you used the wrong words and be more clear or else people must assume you mean what you say. Coming in after the OP and attributing meaning that they didn’t give doesn’t suddenly change what they said. A reminder, the original post was;

Hopefully this is a step toward dismantling the brutal apartheid regime that has colonised Palestine for 76 years."

that has colonised Palestine for 76 years.

So who are they talking about then?

No one said that, dipshit.

Dismantle verb

To get rid of a system or organization, usually over a period of time:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/dismantle

Basically everyone wants either two-states based on 1967 borders or Israel to give Palestinians equal rights and create a single, secular democracy

Except this guy specifically said he hopes the current Israel is dismantled. At best they could be hoping that Israel changes into a better government, but I don’t think that’s their meaning.

Unfortunately Genocide Joe is probably not watching the same news we all are.

This is a weird comment as it implies that Joe Biden has less information about what is going on in Gaza than the average person who watches the news.

Hey, I’m not saying this technology doesn’t have a use, and maybe if it’s stupidly expensive it will be heavily subsidized. The point I’m making is that it “likely” isn’t the solution to world wide water scarcity.

Another user commented that desalination is a grift, it’s not, the market forces just aren’t there yet to push its large scale implementation world wide. However, the idea that an upcoming technology may theoretically scale up and be the same economic scale is historically unlikely.

Historically the trajectory of this sort of technology is that it will define technology for the next 20 years (Nobel Peace Prize or more), or it will be bought up and buried by a big corporation (goodwill isn’t typically good for capitalism), or it won’t scale up as predicted and will be a major nothing burger.

It’s complicated, typically US rates aren’t a flat $/gallon. Most have flat fixed costs (meter fee, availability fees, etc) and then the actual volumetric rate charge is tacked on top of that. In my city the rate is additionally tiered, so the more water you use the more those later gallons cost. Most residential users fall into Tier 1 though, up to 4 CCF (Centicubic Foot or 748 gallons) per month, which is billed at $1.89 per CCF or $0.002526 per gallon.

So it’s hard to use the rates alone as there are additionally fixed rate costs (around $10 a month) and other usage is billed differently (commercial and industrial have higher flat rates as well as higher flat volumetric rate). The result is that commercial and industrial users pay higher rates than residential.

Luckily, my city also publishes raw statistics which indicates that, all things averaged together, the water costs around $0.04 per gallon.

But furthers the point I’m making. If your water costs more than mine then the potential price of this machine is even higher and the base price is already expensive as is. If this was truly a cheap and affordable alternative for people’s in need then it likely would have made that price point a major point of the article.

Just because it’s cheaper than an alternative doesn’t make it affordable.

EDIT: Also the article says

“the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.”

Great point, sorry for the error!

While this is a cool development I would recommend tempering expectations. The cost of tap water is exceptionally cheap and the claims made here likely take these estimates to the extremes. The economics of scale likely don’t match up.

For example, tap water in my city costs ~$0.04 per gallon, at 5 liters per hour, 0.264 gallons per liter, 24 hours per day, for 5 years is $2,312. So saying they can make it for less than the cost of tap water doesn’t mean it’s affordable.

EDIT: Forgot to convert from liters to gallons

This has been my guess from the beginning, the only logical final objective solution was annexation. If you’re gonna drive everyone living there out and level the landscape it’s obvious you don’t intend for the original people to come back. I said this back in the beginning of November, come 2025 Gaza will just be a normal annexed portion of Israel.

Barak replied “It’s already been known for many years that they have a bunker that originally was built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa,” which was used as a “command post” for Hamas and as a “junction of several tunnels”

“I don’t know to say to what extent it is a ‘major.’ It’s probably not the only…command post. Several others are under hospitals or in other sensitive places.”

…

Barak, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1999 to 2001, responded, “decades ago, we were running the place, so we helped them.” The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since 2007.

“It was many decades ago…that we helped them build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of these compounds.”

Does anyone actually care what New Zealand thinks? If New Zealand cares so much they can start taking more people in. From what I understand New Zealand is one of the few countries that takes more quota refugees than asylum seekers. That means they take in less asylum seekers than the UN mandated quota of refugees. The UN quota is 1500 per year so their total intake per year is less than 3000 people.

I wouldn’t say New Zealand is xenophobic, but they are extremely restrictive on immigration, asylum seekers, and refugees. I play a lot of Path of Exile which is based out of New Zealand and they’ve stated that to get a job there you have to move to New Zealand because New Zealand law prohibits companies from hiring from outside of New Zealand unless the company can prove that the needed job can’t be filled by a New Zealander.

The standard of living in New Zealand is fairly high, but it’s mostly because they are NIMBY and I Got Mine.

Oh that’s cool, I ran across the same website while making a comment to another user here.

I’m not super sure how reliable they should be considered to be honest. Looking at Mediabiadfactcheck.com they state that they are mostly factual in reporting but points to their lack of transparency on funding and strongly loaded emotional wording that may be misleading.

Based on the rest of the review it seems that they are really good about being very specific in their statements to avoid inaccuracies. Looking through this article and a few of their other articles they mostly focus on local accounts (X person said this, they live in Gaza) or third party references (Y on Twitter said this based on an article by Z at the BBC).

Another representation of this style of reporting would be this example:

Headline: “The Election Was Stolen!”

Body: New information has come out about an investigation into the legitimacy of the 2020 election. SOUTHERN boy on Twitter shows a video of FBI officials going into the election offices to perform an investigation. SOUTHERN boy also recently posted a potential connection between the investigation and the Trump 2020 election, but it hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream media.

We also spoke to Melissa Simpson in Mississippi and she says she and all her neighbors believe the election was stolen.

Since 2020 Trump has been telling everyone that, “The Election Was Stolen!” Does SOUTHERN boys information show the proof to Trump’s claim?

End example

Technically nothing I posted is false, I’m not making any claims myself, but anyone reading this would know the subtext to my article.

A lot of people have no objection about receiving news about Palestinians from blatantly pro Israeli outlets. So yeah, there is one Pro Palestinian source, surely the balanced person would take info from both.

In the real world this is certainly true, there are way more Pro-Israel publications and listening to an opposing opinion is wise, but on Lemmy it seems that the vast majority of active persons have been unwilling to accept any Israel source, no matter how tangential.

The double standards have to stop. Either object against both, or read both and decide for yourself.

There’s nothing to say this person doesn’t, and given the amount of flak Israel related sources get it’s worth noting the bias here as well.

But to always call out just Palestinian sources, it smells of cultural oppression

I completely agree, but I am somewhat thrown by the choice of name by this publication. It just lacks a certain professionalism associated with good journalism. This isn’t to say it’s not a worthwhile source, it’s just not the best name. It’s kinda like if someone named their publication the Digital Revolution, the Uprising, or something similar, I’m just gonna cringe a bit and be skeptical from the start.

Looking online I found this site (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/electronic-intifada/) which reviews the bias of various media sources. Based on this it’s just a group of international journalists with their publication based out of Chicago. Their information seems to be mostly from grass roots reporting or third and fourth party accounts.

EDIT: I wanted to quickly follow up, I’m reading through the article now and it’s a real shit show for navigating. In general I’m not familiar enough with the people they reference that it’s really hard to get a good read on this article. It’s kinda like if I said that a guy I know named Billy works at the city and he said he spoke with the Mayor who said that crime is on the rise, but the Chief of Police released a report to the contrary. Billy could be worthwhile, but I don’t know Billy and I can’t readily find good references to the Mayor’s statement.

Even the representation of the original referenced article by YNet is kinda shit. For example, they use a reference to Syrian Girl on Twitter who is referencing Yoav Zitun on YNet, who is referencing a paraphrased statement from Lieutenant Colonel A. Zitun states that the Lieutenant ordered the Fighters to shoot everything near the fence and later attacked their own installation so that other troops could move up to it. Syrian Girl makes the connection that Zitun’s reporting indicates that the military was blindly killing everything that moves (including their own troops) and EI runs with that sentiment.

In Zitun’s own article (included at the bottom of the EI article) it is clear that unrestricted firing was only in proximity to the fence itself but other bypasses of firing restrictions were approved separately as needed or were taken by Fighters without approval.

In all honesty, if this wasn’t serving as a proxy war that might have been possible, but I think with China, Iran, and Russia squaring up to support Palestine there’s no way we’re going to cut off Israel. From a big picture perspective Israel is the only real ally the US or western powers have in the middle east and even if we dumped them for the crimes they commit it would ultimately hurt the US and western powers to abandon or sanction them.

I saw an article saying that Belgium is considering sanctions against Israel, but Belgium is also a NATO country and only has 24k active troops with an additional 6k in reserves. In 2022 Belgium had the third lowest % GDP military investment out of the NATO countries.

Whether we like it or not the big players in the game aren’t looking at the atrocities Israel commits in Gaza, they’re looking at whether they will have a foothold and ally in the middle east if we have a World War.

We as individuals can take a stance on the conflict without considering the geopolitical outcomes, but to be able to do so we should admit that we are in a place of privilege. I imagine that if news came out that Ukraine blew up a school Poland still would still support Ukraine, because they’re right next door.

At the same time, countries which don’t meaningfully contribute to their own defense should recognize their privilege when it comes to the world stage.

EDIT: Had accidentally called Ukraine Russia, fixed now.

Hell we would probably have deployed troops to Gaza and also to stand by in case of actions from Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, or Syria.