i don’t care about debating this with you. i will, as a concluding remark, just note incredible irony in lecturing about entitlement while simultaneously demanding gratitude for your work from people you literally just told to fuck off from this service three replies ago. in very blunt terms: i think you are getting the exact level of gratitude you deserve from us after this exchange, which is none. my experiences with you have been thoroughly unpleasant, unkind, and paint you as a toxic person and it is my view that your “years of work put into this software” are meaningless in the face of the blatant disrespect you show members of your community.

A schizophrenic person in one culture may be a cleric in another.

yeah there are some zany established differences in the manifestation of schizophrenia between cultures and how it’s treated—religious visions, interestingly, tend to be a rather Christian manifestation of schizophrenia and apparently are not so common even in other Abrahamic-dominated countries

i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn’t even publicly committed to leaving is “fuck you” because you don’t like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you’re strongly vindicating us here in supposedly “never ma[king] any code contributions” or “donat[ing] any money” (and i’m just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i’m not even sure it’s true). i’m not going to contribute to someone’s software when they’re openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.

if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.

I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.

respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs–which is our primary reason we’re even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software–is entitlement. we’re basically handing you a silver platter entitled “hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term” and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it’s an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!

for a variety of reasons:

• we don’t have a rule against what is effectively posting cringe and i am opposed to a rule of that sort on principle
• what is considered cringe is a completely subjective and arbitrary judgement that, if we made it a rule to not post cringe, would lead to a lot more bickering about sourcing. it’d also almost certainly make this place a lot less interesting, a lot more ideologically homogeneous, and a lot more prone to confirmation bias
• personally, i am just not all that interested in trying to parse “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” sources beyond the absolute minimum “is this a crank blog or self promotion”, especially when media is not heterogeneously trustworthy on every possible issue. i don’t think most of our mod team is interested in trying to parse such a thing either
• we generally trust our userbase to be discerning
• we generally trust our userbase to be self-regulating etc.

as i recall, the leadership of Israel has also ruled out an independent Palestinian state and a two-state solution, so i’m not sure why it’s news to the Times of Israel that Hamas doesn’t want one either. it’s clearly not advantageous to either party

No, it’s not the same thing. When most Christians, or governments in countries with majority Christian population, hear about priests raping kids, they are disgusted by it and are 100% ok with punishing the offender.

ignoring that this is severely debatable, “which religion is more fine with sexual abuse” is an embarrassing pissing contest to have and one that we’re not interested in having on this website.

absolutely fuck off with this bigotry

what…? i don’t even know what we’re doing here, guys

you literally just had a protracted argument with me, an admin who determines what gets removed or not, in another thread over Israel and that was not removed. you have another pro-Israel set of comments in this thread that have not been removed even though i personally think they’re even less defensible than what you were arguing with me. i don’t know how you can seriously attempt to make this point.

I honestly don’t know,

respectfully: if you yourself have to begin an answer to these questions with “I honestly don’t know,” and then go on to talk about how Israel might be prioritizing its own soldiers over civilian life because even the civilians “have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews,” perhaps you can understand how some of us would conclude that Israel might not care very much about Palestinian civilians and consider them both acceptable collateral damage or actual military targets based on the sheer number of them they’ve killed to this point

So unguided rockets vaguely aimed at cities, suicide bombers (including the use of children and mentally impaired people as suicide bombers), random stabbings, random shootings are “armed struggle” now?

well yes, definitionally, that’s how armed struggle is manifesting in Palestine currently. there’s nothing you or i can do about that.

but that’s a little besides the point, which is that i think you at most selectively take issue with morally depraved military actions. almost everything you’re charging Hamas with has an established and equally immoral analogue in Israel’s strategy toward Palestine to this point. it’s conspicuous to me, for example, that you do not seem to comparably weigh Israel damaging or destroying 70% of Gaza City with Hamas’s unguided rocket attacks–especially given that both have led to large numbers of civilian deaths? like, do you think that 70% of Gaza City harbored Hamas militants, or, alternatively that it was militarily necessary to do that sort of damage even though it was inevitable large numbers of civilians would be caught in the crossfire? that seems like the only way for this to not boil down to vibes of who’s “good” and “bad”

and mind you, i have no issue with saying that Hamas is a depraved terrorist group who should never be in power and that it’s very, very bad for the region that they are now the primary credible opposition to Israel in Palestine. if i had my way, they would be unilaterally eradicated in favor of Fatah who at least seem willing to work toward a peaceful resolution. but i don’t have a magic wand, and Hamas does not exist in a vacuum. the Israeli state is directly complicit in making them that primary credible opposition, both through its military strategy and through selectively looking the other way when money and weapons are funneled through back-channels to the group. even Israeli outlets admit to this sort of arrangement under Netanyahu.

I wonder what happened in between those two things. Have you ever looked up what the blockade was actually blocking?

i think it is a moral imperative (or at least, unambiguously morally justifiable in all cases) to wage armed struggle against a country doing apartheid like Israel, so it’s basically irrelevant for my purposes that Israel’s justification for the blockade is “these people waged armed struggle against me”–the oxygen of that armed struggle as it currently exists is the apartheid. if anything it just demonstrates that Israel’s government so devalues Palestinian life (as is also being demonstrated by their cavalier attitude toward murdering civilians) that it’d rather continue the oppression that’s led many Palestinians to jihadism in the first place than ever reconsider whether that approach will lead to stability in the region and long-term peace

When Israel does actually make concessions, like when they pulled all settlers out of Gaza, invited tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for several times the wages they would get in Palestinian territories, they get thanked with more violence in return, showing the Israeli public that extending the hand does nothing to calm this conflict down, so with each terrorist attack, they shift further to the right politically, electing politicians who promise strength and keeping Palestinians at bay instead of compromising. That’s how you get injustices like indefinite detention of Palestinians. Cause and effect.

i mean this is just cringe apologia for Israel, respectfully. “benevolently” stopping your settler colonialism in one part of the Palestinian state you don’t want to exist and almost immediately transitioning into an ongoing permanent blockade of said part of that state after you do is not actual benevolence or a “concession” in any meaningful sense of the word–that should be the baseline expected of Israel. you’re also completely ignoring, in saying this, the much more impactful apartheid under which Palestinians live and the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank that Israel aids, abets, and funds, and has for decades. in pretty much any other circumstance what Israel is doing to Palestine would be widely accepted as a casus belli for war. the implication underlying everything you’re saying here is that the root of the conflict is all Palestinian, but that’s demonstrably incorrect and actively revisionist to a point where i don’t think you’d get most Zionists to agree to it.

If they are targeting civilians, then why are they warning them?

aren’t we like, three days removed from the IDF killing obviously surrendering Israeli civilians including a civilian they basically hunted down? the argument that Israel can’t possibly be targeting Palestinian civilians because they “warn” those civilians seems to stand clearly at odds with even the simplest things such as “how they treat their own, surrendering citizens–much less the citizens of a state they don’t want to exist”

What we should do is support Israel in the eradication of Hamas while also getting as much help to the civilians caught in the crossfire as possible and put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and surrender.

…or we could actually solve the issue here by demanding Israel stop indiscriminately murdering civilians (the actual root of the problem and a thing that even Joe Biden kind of thinks they’re doing now) in a misguided attempt to eradicate a terrorist group when the “shock and awe” strategy has never worked in contemporary warfare and has only guaranteed further resentment and conflict against the state doing the shock and awe!

this is going to be locked for a variety of reasons:

1. this is essentially propaganda/an extremely biased opinion piece
2. it uncritically adopts the framing of Elise Stefanik when she is neither a good faith actor generally, nor asking questions about “calling for the genocide of the Jews” in good faith. it’s very clear she just means “pro-Palestinian demonstrators” when she talks about people “calling for genocide” and that’s stupid.
3. it’s just not a good article, generally. there are plenty of other, better articles that can be used as a vessel to talk about Israel-Palestine (including ones that have a pro-Israeli voice)

this thread is so full of terrible, not-relevant, or just plain rule-breaking discourse across the board that we’ve decided to totally remove it, and that’s very disappointing because this is the first time we’ve had to do this to a thread. let’s please not do this again.

i suspect that two things are going on here: China may either be playing both sides/otherwise have shifting allegiances depending on the situation, and the rebel groups are heterogeneous in terms of who they look to for support (since there are like 50 different ethnic rebel groups fighting the government right now). it’s a very multifaceted situation in general.

very much not looking forward to the next year of climate disasters–as i recall, we’re not even close to peak El Niño and probably won’t be for another six to eight months.