You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don’t want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.

There is a reason the tall masted rigged ships disappeared for regular travel; most people don’t want to take a month to cross the ocean in close quarters. Cruise ships are the closest analog to a long haul jet, and are no better to twice as CO2 producing than the airline travel, and the fuel they burn is the lowest grade fuel oil with the worst additional pollution. If you are moving across the ocean, or even just traveling, most people won’t be able to pilot their own sailing yacht and take 15-30 days to do it.

What is your plan for intercontinental travel? Increased ship travel, taking a week and burning massive amounts of crude fuel oil? Just cut off the Americas and Australia from Europe, Africa and Asia for non-commercial purposes? The supersonics have mostly been used for trans-atlantic and trans-pacific travel.

Seems like Trump isn’t the only person with a selectively blind cult judging by the down votes and angry replies. Any opinion that we should be able to do better than Biden around Lemmy gets flamed way too hard to be reasonable.

Everyone should vote for whomever represents them best despite whatever letter follows their name, and everyone should know all of their local and state options to be able to do so. Please do the same for your primaries if you at least want a slim possibility of having a decent option. Ranked choice voting would help a lot, but engagement at least helps a little. Hell, third parties got elected this year even.

People blindly straight party ticket voting after skipping the primaries simply because they just hate the other team is how all the shitty entrenched old guard like Pelosi, Manchin, and McConnel (extra especially McConnel, who even republicans hate) stay in power on both sides. And forgetting about the primaries is how we end up with such weak ass candidates as Trump and Biden. It’s so good damn infuriating.

I intend no disrespect or hurtfulness, nor would I mean to suggest the Jewish people would be a monolith. I do not believe that even most pro-Israel supporters want or advocate for an pure ethnostate outside of the extreme religious rightwing. I may also be wrong, but I believe that most regular Israelis would happily welcome peaceful and equal relations with Palestine. My understanding of Zionism is also that it is similarly quite diverse in meaning an intention for each individual. If you do feel like letting me know anything specifically that I said that is being received as hurtful, I am happy to review and learn more.

I did take some time to review some publications by the Jewish Voice for Peace as suggested, and do fine a rather hard line extreme left slant. It appears that JVP is advocating for the dissolution of the Israeli state and repatriation of the land to Palestinians, but it is not clear how this is recommended in relation with the existing population. I also feel that the JVP’s apparent stance that anyone advocating for a right for Israel’s existence is advocating for a Jewish ethno-supremasist state is reductive in an “if you’re not with us your against us” or an “anyone to the right of us may as well be alt right” format. It is definitely worth engaging with their material even if I may not agree with everything though. It has given me further insight on a facet I never would have thought about from the original “death to Israel” comment that started my inquiry. If you have any other recommendations for more insight I am open to it. I may support the existence of both Israel and Palestine in the long run, but I am always happy to expand my scope of understanding.

1. taking this logic at face value, no one can colonize specific areas of Africa where humans are from. So it is obviously wrong. Do you mean what you said or are you trying to say something else?

2. If Celtics colonized London and started doing apartheid that would also be unjustifiable.

To clarify 1) That would be abstracting it further than I’d intended with my point, though there is merit in the view that humans is humans. I was arguing from a more narrow ethnicity band such as Jewish or Palestinian or Celtic. The British aren’t generally called colonizers on the English Isles, but when they left Europe they became colonizers on those new lands.

2. I once again would like to reiterate, an apartheid is unjust whether Israel has a right to be a country or not. If England was somehow defeated in a war, dissolved, and the UN recognized Wales as an independent country with split control of London with the Britons, no one would call the Welsh colonizers, even if they made an apartheid government. The same goes for Serbia and Kosovo, or Turkey and the Kurdistan. Lots of ethnic violence and cleansing attempts, but Israel seems to be labeled colonizers because it’s an extra layer of bad while also implying they just showed up from somewhere else to steal land they were never involved with.

This relies on the reader buying into the assumption that territorial claims last forever.

The only reason I ask about territorial claims and their duration is because the argument for the creation of Palestine as a country comes from this historical territory claim just as much as Israel. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated and broken up, the two groups with the greatest historical claim in the region (Palestinians and Jews) both wanted independent states.

Also buying into a notion of a homeland needing to be a settler colonial state.

That is a bit of soft logic, ethnic groups by and large prefer to be self governed. By your same logic, the Kurds should be happy to stay under Turkish rule, since otherwise they would need to “colonize” territory from Turkey. The Irish shouldn’t have recolonized part of their island after the British solidified their territory. Oppressed peoples tend to want to have a sovereign country. That does not then in turn excuse the oppressed from becoming oppressors themselves, but that doesn’t just completely invalidate a right to exist

You could have a secular Palestine where immigrant Jewish people could live in peace as equals alongside Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians, who had a long period of relative peace before the founding of the settler colonial project.

That buys into the notion that Palestine has greater claim to exist than Israel. It also glosses over that the Jewish people had been persecuted and killed for centuries that culminated in the Holocaust, which should be an obvious zeitgeist for not wanting to be immigrants again just in a new place. This is again not permission for Israel to commit their own atrocities. Palestine was also never going to be secular even under Mandatory Palestine, but that is a helluva quagmire to try and wade through and I am not a scholar of the Levant region.

You could argue that there isn’t, there is only a moral mandate to end the current systems of violence and take proactive measures to produce equity in material conditions.

That is more or less my general stance: humans have fought for most of the planet for millennia, genociding the losers for most of that history, and have only tried to be “better” when at war for less than 100 years. The only constant is change, and humans is humans. Someday hopefully we get over the whole war thing altogether, which will probably require widespread fusion energy to fuel a post scarcity society globally, and probably will still need a global existential threat to unite everyone. It would be great if both sides would agree to return to the '67 borders and stop attacking each other, but the leadership of both sides doesn’t want that. The only way the cycle of violence stops is for one side to essentially surrender at this point, but the unelected Hamas leadership only has incentive to keep attacking and hurt Israel’s international support and Israel is unlikely to be the first country on earth to voluntarily dissolve and invite their war opponent to take them over.

As a reminder, my whole section of this thread was for those who want Israel destroyed and a one state Palestine, as I don’t understand not seeing both ethnic group’s claims on the region as more or less equal on the whole. I don’t see any reason a two state solution can’t work except for certain people’s refusal to see the other side as equal, and those certain people managing to be the ones in charge.

On that we are agreed. Should your statement be taken as the Jews being settler colonizers though? I would argue that an ethnicity cannot truly be a colonizer on the land they originated from. For that to be true, we have to acknowledge an absolute right of conquest for territory after a certain amount of time has elapsed. I believe a peaceful and fully autonomous two state solution is the most logically fair outcome, but am not holding my breath for that.

If the argument is that they are colonizers now, would the same be true in the extremely unlikely hypothetical that the United States was forced to return a state to the native tribes that were originally there? Would we call the returning native tribes settler colonizers if the current inhabitants had to leave the new tribal lands? The land has belonged to the current inhabitants for over 200 years after all, and if not, how long is the cutoff?

This mostly boils down to the question: if you can’t have a permanent loss of claim to a historical homeland through conquest, then why would there be an exception to this rule for the Jewish ethnicity? And if you can lose claim to a historical homeland if conquered well enough, why would there be any substance to return native lands anywhere else?

The premise that the Jewish people might deserve a country is nonsense? If it is, I am asking why do they not deserve one while other ethnicities do? Obviously an individuals views on whether Israel is running an apartheid state fall under the biases I mentioned, because some people do not recognize it as such, and I was not addressing the anti-apartheid movement. That definitely deserves its own discussion, but is layers above my question. South Africa is also different in that the apartheid government was formed from outside colonial settlers who had zero historic roots in the area. Israel/Palestine is closer to the bloody formations of India and Pakistan or the many other African wars caused by departing colonial powers arbitrarily redrawing maps on their way out, than South Africa’s white apartheid government in underpinning if not human cost.

I am asking what the people calling for Israel to cease existing and be replaced in it’s entirety by Palestine believe the Jewish people should do? If the region should be Palestine because of Palestinian genealogical roots, why do the Jews not get any claim in the region for the same reason? Is it because they were conquered and removed from the region in the past and the Palestinians weren’t? Mainly, if a two state solution isn’t desirable, it seems to be either because the Jewish people have insufficient or lacking genealogical claim in the region, or because they don’t deserve the same “rights” as the Palestinians for a myriad of other reasons.

So here’s my honest question, why are the Jewish people relatively singled out as excluded from being allowed to desire a state/homeland? Is there an argument that the Jewish people did not originate from that area of the world, and if so, where is the actual Jewish homeland? Did the Jewish people spring forth fully developed from Zeus’s forehead? The argument seems to be that all indigenous peoples should have at least parts of their lands and autonomy restored to them all over the world; except for the Jews, because fuck them they don’t deserve a country for non-antisemetic reasons and they should have integrated into a new Arabic country of Palestine instead of splitting the land.

Ignoring the history of Jewish treatment in other countries around the globe for centuries, I don’t understand how, for a land that is the historical birthplace of several peoples, it is considered good for one of those peoples to fight for it and bad for another of those peoples to do the same. It all seems to come down to where anyone’s specific biases fall, while everyone claims to not have any biases.

So what you are saying is that everything apparently boils down to two sides wanting nothing more than genocide, as Hamas’ goal since their founding has been the elimination of Israel and the Jews from the middle east. Under that reduction, we just need to choose whether we support a flawed but still functional democracy or another conservative theocracy under Iran in the region. Third option being to pull all support for both sides and just let them destroy each other with a statistically significant possibility of nuclear exchange in the end.

I also would like to know of any other country on earth that would allow a neighboring country to continually launch rockets at it for decades and take no retaliatory action whatsoever, like Israel is somehow an outlier. Is there honestly a realistic expectation that this time would be different if Palestine was given the full Two State system under the original borders? 5th or 6th times the charm on that one? Maybe this time there wouldn’t be another full scale war from all surrounding neighbors, but does anyone actually expect Iran to stop funding or conducting terror attacks on Israel through Palestine, Syria, or Lebanon?

It’s easier to dehumanize and homogenize the opposition than view them as people with real convictions. It happens on both sides, and it’s getting worse and worse as the polarization increases. Driven by the media and the 24 hour news cycle, capitalized on by the DNC and RNC, and keeping everyone fighting amongst ourselves instead of looking too closely at the accelerating wealth gap and banding together by class to restore healthy and competitive capitalism.

It was super shocking to find the Republicans actually knocking the third leg out of their wedge issues stool. All they really have is gun rights now, as the regular culture war stuff isn’t nearly as powerful as abortion was. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next 2 election cycles, but so help me if the Democrats manage to get back control of all 3 and STILL don’t codify abortion rights, gay marriage rights, interracial marriage, etc so they can capitalize on these suddenly stronger wedge issues. Again. So God damned pissed off at the Obama admin still because of that. Also the lack of federal legalization/decriminalization. And this is from a pro 2A former classical libertarian who wants the government shrunk by replacing all of the bloated agencies and welfare programs with a simple and solid universal healthcare system and true UBI, funded with a aimple tax code with no loopholes that incorporates something of a Georgist land tax.