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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • So let me get this straight: they cut down the forest, plant palm trees, harvest it for i guess a few years, and then… plant the forest back? How does that make sense just on any level?

    I mean at least i happen to know it doesn’t make sense on an ecological level as a new groth forest is massively different from an old growth forest, so the new forest is no replacement for the old one.

    Also i’m not sure if you understand what an argument from ignorance is? It’s not an ignorant argument, it’s a specific type of logical fallacy. The observation that no extractive industry has proven sustainable is a predictor that they’re unlikely to prove sustainable in the future.







  • Yeah, but the further back you go the less useful it becomes. If you look before Israel you find the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire; two of these don’t exist anymore and the last doesn’t really exist anymore.

    The choice of which time range to include isn’t that arbitrary, there are pretty significant markers that make the previous state of things a lot less relevant. When studying french politics, it’s not useful to go back further than the 1789 revolution because that event changed so much that the previous reality doesn’t matter anymore; similarly, the foundation of Israel changed the power dynamics in the area significantly enough that you can start there. Remembering the previous events is useful for context but won’t change the conclusion.



  • This is comical because Israel is the attacker, and has been for its entire existence. Their goal is to conquer and ethnically cleanse more territory in order to create an enthnostate.

    Hamas only exists as a reaction to israeli colonialism. That’s litterally the only reason for their existence.

    So, to be precise:

    • Israel is finishing a war they did not start

    Maybe not in the narrow sense, but the colonial efforts of Israel are responsible for the broader conflict lasting since the 50’s, which the current conflict is a chapter of.

    • There is literally no way around it

    It’s not necessary for Israel to conquer Gaza. It would be enough to just not expand their territory and respect human rights and international law, which they never did at any point in 70 years, leading to the current situation where there are no good options anymore.

    • The terror attack was the proof that restraint didn’t do anything

    The terror attack is a consequence of lack of restraint. (i wouldn’t normally word it like that, i’m just using the same words for rhetoric effect)


  • Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

    One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

    The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

    But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.


  • This is just a different manifestation of a core problem the fediverse has: it can get annoying to try to interact with content outside of your own instance.

    And then we wonder why people flocked to Threads instead of Mastodon.

    I really think the federated aspect should be almost invisible infrastructure, like how we never think about OpenSSL behind the scenes when we make a secure payment. There’s even a browser plugin to simplify Mastodon federation, so it can’t be that hard. Frankly, something even more seamless than that should be the default.

    But it wasn’t designed this way for whatever reason, i’m sure there’s good reasons but it’s hard to empathize when i follow a link and suddenly i find myself in a new place where i’m not logged in, even though this “place” is still on Lemmy.