V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

You severely underestimate the support for Israel outside of your bubble.

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

Deimos is a dumb piece of shit. Evidence is that Tildes is somehow still invite only after like five fucking years.

Why do you think this is a bad thing? The best discussion board that I’ve been a member of by a wide margin (not mentioning names, it’s all in Czech anyways) has been invite only for 20 years now. It’s a tried and true way to limit eternal september as long as the community is active enough to not die out, which hasn’t happened yet on Tildes.

Well the rules are pretty clear in that you can call other people’s ideas stupid, but not other people stupid. Personally I prefer spaces with hands-off moderation and focus on free speech, but those generally don’t work in a general discussion platform without any implicit gatekeeping to keep idiots away, so I’m giving this style a chance and so far the results have been far better than most places on Reddit on Lemmy.

Did you mean “social democracy”? I don’t think there’s actual socialism anywhere there - that’s still capitalism, only with a strong welfare system, which has downsides, but it’s obviously viable at least in some societies.

I’m mostly staying in an invite-only board in my local language that’s been functional for like 20 years now and is smarter than Reddit has ever been, but I’m also spending some time on Tildes, which is honestly not bad. Like lemmy, it has a pretty strong leftist bias (which is a problem for me because not being from US or western Europe I don’t really fall into their left-right division), but it’s much smarter and less toxic, so disagreement without too much bullshit is possible.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I’ve been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don’t think it had much in common with what we call “terminally online” today. I associate “terminally online” with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that’s omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the “terminally online” problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of “online feminism”, that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

I don’t think you understand what I mean, so I’ll try to rephrase.

Knowing that bad shit is happening and accepting that it’s bad shit is one thing. Wallowing in it and pointlessly arguing about it (not normally discussing it in a measured way) is a separate thing that is not necessary and helps neither the ones participating nor the community in general. It’s possible to do it differently and many are capable of it.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I’m not from the US, so I don’t really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I’m closer to the left), but it’s nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it’s normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

The problem is that the people OP complains about generally don’t want to see anything else and pointlessly argue with you if you do it. Personally I’m slowly ending my Lemmy experiment and posting somewhere where the majority cares and is capable of normal discussion.

This is the problem though. It’s fine to mention them and be informed, but there is no need to wallow in how horrible the world is and shut down anybody who disagrees, which is what OP is complaining about (and what IME really is happening in news-like and political threads). Those are two separate things, the second one is a choice and there are places where it doesn’t happen.

Again though, my point is that Hamas as an entity wouldn’t exist if Palestinians were considered regular citizens and not forced off from their own property.

This may be true and it would be good to consider this when deciding what to do after Hamas is gone, but it doesn’t change anything about current situation. The fact is that thinking a military checkpoint would filter out terrorists is incredibly naive, and whether Israel cares about the lives of civilians or not likely wouldn’t change this particular issue at all.

The people IDF is targeting are Hamas leaders or “officers”, who need to communicate a lot and sometimes even show in public, so they can be tracked with enough time. Boots on the ground soldiers are a completely different problem and Israel doesn’t even have the resources to track all of them because there are so many. How is that not obvious??

You are extremely naive if you think that a military checkpoint would solve this problem. Egypt was not able to stop Hamas terrorists and their supplies going back and forth through the Rafah border crossing to commit acts of terror in the Sinai peninsula for example. And that was during “business as usual”, not in a situation where potentially hundreds of thousands of people would likely have to go through.

Radical kindness will specifically tell Hamas “yes, brutal terrorist attacks work, keep doing them”. That is unfortunately not an option. It’s also just a fantasy because it would understandably never be supported by Israeli population for this reason.

I’m interested in seeing alternative solutions that could actually work and be realistically implemented, but outside of understandable positions like “ease off with the fucking bombing and do more work on the ground” that don’t change the goal of what is being done I have not seen any.

You have a point, but it’s not really the same thing and there’s a very good recent counter-example too. ISIS was effectively dealt with despite being spread out over a much larger area. Taliban won, but it had a whole huge country to work in and was nowhere near as violent as Hamas, so it had more support. Gaza is tiny in comparison, blocked on all sides and neighbors of Israel don’t want anything to do with them either, even if they don’t like Israel. There is also at least some alternative in Fatah, which didn’t lose the 2005 elections by that much.

Imo it’s clearly possible to get rid of Hamas, though I’m not making any claims about the probability that it will happen.

Mostly, I don’t really see an alternative. Some radical action needed to be taken because anything else would be interpreted as a clear proof that large terrorist attacks against civilians work, and Hamas should continue committing them. You cannot appease someone whose reason for existence is violence. And keeping Hamas sort of in check, only killing or capturing the worst terrorists, which is what was being done in the last two decades, clearly did not work either.

I agree that it would be better for the Palestinians, clearly Israeli Arabs have better lives than people in Gaza and West Bank despite also facing some discrimination, but Gazans would never agree to this (that is clear from public opinion polls done by PA institutions - for example over 70% of people in Gaza support violence against Israeli civilians), so the end result would be exactly the same is this one. You would still have an army of violent murderers hiding in tunnels with almost two decades of preparation for exactly this.