Oh yeah absolutely. Humankind has not been… kind, to their species.

holy shit

I can’t wait for the elephant-to-human translators

imagine if we could actually talk to elephants? if we could, like, teach them concepts?

Lightsong the Based

This isn’t religiously motivated violence the same way that the Spanish Inquisition was. But religion is pretty deeply baked into the conflict, in some very important ways.

You know? I think that sums it up nicely.

That’s fair. Religion can be a very important part of both identities.

However, I would like to stress that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not directly motivated by religious differences. As in, it’s not a case of “their religion is different! GET EM!”. The direct problem isn’t that the other side has a different religion, it’s that the other side essentially has competing land claims, and a competing nationalist vision.

Since religion is an important part of Hamas’ identity (and possibly of some factions in Israel, I’d guess), that affects how each side frames the conflict, and what some of their means and ends are. But the key issues of the conflict have to do with things like land borders and economic conditions.

No, it has almost nothing to do with religion. The only part of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis that actually tangibly relates to a religious dispute, is the contesting claims over Jerusalem (because it’s holy to both Judaism and Islam).

Literally the entire rest of the conflict is based on competing nationalist claims.

Yes, even though Hamas is yelling “Allahu-akbar”. Believe it or not, they’re not fighting because of their religion, they’re fighting because of their political goals (namely in Hamas’ case AFAIK the destruction of Israel). They do also happen to be religious, but the primary conflict is a political one.

That’s pretty wild.

What’s even the point of using a nuke at that point? Are they somehow cheaper to produce than conventional bombs of a similar scale? Even if you just want some fallout, you can use a dirty bomb or something, no?

If we’re going with what the commenter above laid out, then even if Hamas fighters evacuate, their tunnels presumably get collapsed.

Also, I think that might actually be why they gave such a tight deadline. If there isn’t enough time for everyone to get out, will Hamas manage to escape, that sort of thing.

God I hate all of this.

The southern part of Gaza

I don’t think they make nukes small enough to only get the northern half of a city, without also getting the southern half, and everything else around the city for a decent radius.

Honestly, fair enough.

As far as I know, the USSR collapsed because Gorbachev’s reforms weakened existing institutions and power structures, without providing replacements.

I’m torn between “oh yeah? that’s crazy” and “oh god we’re all going to nuke each other”

The “as geography permits” part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.

According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.

this is very accurate. however:

collectively pregnant

0_o

Is the torture that goes on in the USA’s Guantanamo Bay facility “an inherent part of capitalism”?

It would be nice if it was just Putin. And it’s true that lots of Russians are opposed to the war. It’s even probably true that lots of them are as apolitical as they can be, just doing whatever they have to do to survive day by day.

But there are lots of Russians who support him. Even outside of Russia. There is, in fact, a large portion of the population that approves of him, despite the invasion into Ukraine. A lot of it is retired people, of course, but also shit-tons of people who listen mainly to Russian news sources, and therefore believe Putin’s propaganda.

Even if Putin were assassinated the next day, his replacement wouldn’t be much better. Hopefully they’d pull out of Ukraine, but they would likely be just as chauvinist and nationalist as Putin. Russia’s political spectrum is, unfortunately, very close to “50 shades of nationalism”, to the point where even Navalny had to curry favor with them to build up sufficient support. And nationalists (and fascists) tend to do stupid shit like invading neighboring countries.

I would agree that “fuck Russians” is going a step too far. But if Russia’s international reputation is shit right now, it’s no one’s fault but Putin’s, and it is unfortunately well-deserved. And, whether we like it or not, when you say “I’m from [country]”, that country’s reputation will affect how people see you. So if individual Russians around the world are facing stigma, that’s really unfortunate, but it’s the inevitable outcome of shit like this. It’s nothing new — after WWII, Germans had to deal with the exact same shit.

They’re going to invade Ukraine even harder now

It is pretty neat. They’ve made a lot of really interesting design decisions that make for a pretty unique language.

One of its main selling points is how it guarantees memory safety without using a garbage collector. That, plus the fact that it does a shit-ton of compile-time optimizations, actually makes it pretty fast. Like, 80%-90% as fast as C (which is much faster than all the other high-level languages like Java, Go, etc, partly because they do in fact use garbage collectors).

If you want to check it out, I recommend this playlist as a solid intro.