I understand your resentment but the restaurant manager is a different user

fuck it, go full mathematician. Serve an empty bowl on the grounds that it’s a vacuous fruit salad, every ingredient in it is a fruit

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

Add a “refuse” button that pops up a short text box detailing the consequences. The End, credits roll. Problem solved, now they can all go explain to everyone on the forums why this is the best ending

Now of course one could make some damning argument about the state of the tech industry in practice, resulting in one of those bell curve memes with “using SQLalchemy is a sin” on both far sides and “noooo it’s just a name it’s fine there’s no fraud involved” in the middle

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Hey lurkers, the moment you see the phrase ‘everyone knows that’ stop reading and go look the thing up. Seriously, a single google search. Open a new tab and go google it. Click on a variety of sources. Be fair and also read the Al-Jazeera article, which last I heard still blames Israel. Don’t let some rando on a social media site tell you what ‘everyone knows’.

Now. Couples on the verge of divorce do this thing. ‘Who the fuck cares about the details or about who’s right in this particular instance. Let’s zoom out into the grand, very well argued, story of why I am in the right, and you are in the wrong and also an asshole. Fine, you didn’t snoop in my cell phone like I accused you when we started this argument, but you might as well have, and you’ve done worse before anyway’. This is very cathartic and gratifying, but it is not productive.

Why care about satire? Satire is a powerful force for exposing truth. All good satire has a grain of truth in it, and delivers that grain to the reader wrapped in a reductio ad absurdum: you believe X, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. In this case: You believe Israel’s denials, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. I suspect you know this. I suspect if a satire argument attempted to deliver a payload you disagreed with you would also suddenly concede that things like this are more than just a prank, bro.

I also sigh deeply at the attempt to make this about a psychoanalysis of me as a person. This is the year of our lord 2023. Everyone is angry. I am sure you are also angry about plenty of things. This is not meant as a general defense of Israel, of the Israeli government, of Israeli opinions about the conflict. Rest assured that I know plenty about the exact moral failings of the Israeli public and the current ruling coalition, and could write about my grievances with them at length and in great detail. But this “we’ve decided who the bad guys are, inconvenient facts not allowed” mode of thinking – no. I won’t stand for that. Fuck that noise.

When the story was that this was a lethal attack by the IDF with hundreds of casualties, there was nothing funny about this. Now that most credible sources in the first world agree that the IDF was probably not at fault for this particular atrocity (yeah yeah death to the first world and hail Xi & Putin etc, if you’re one of those people just kindly stop reading), now it’s suddenly time to turn this into a joke and short-circuit people’s critical thinking. “ha ha, ‘we didn’t do it’, sounds like a made up claim that the person who did it would say”. What a genius master stroke of insight.

You know what, I now have newfound respect for the people who at least put in the work to argue that the rocket geolocations were fabricated, the Hamas operative convo discussing the malfunctioning rocket was by paid actors, etc etc. At least they are making an argument, which a reader can evaluate and decide whether they believe. This headline is exactly as productive as if they’d written “Hamas reports deadly Israeli airstrike with 3000 victims at the house of You, The Reader”. What a disgrace.

The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.

Propaganda is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it

Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun’s heat is moderately spread around (like you don’t get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions have reasonable continuity properties, so that with ‘one step to the right’ you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.

That is a perfectly coherent take for 1994 and even for 2015, but these last years Israel has been aligning itself more and more with the anti-US axis in its spirit and rhetoric. The US says “we approve of this, we disapprove of that” and the Israeli elected government responds “who are you to criticize us after what you did in Iraq and Afghanistan?”, like if Putin were there in the flesh he could not have been more on-brand. Geopolitically right now Israel wants to be Hungary, and the only thing preventing that is the historical accident of spending all those years as a US proxy state, and all the strings that came attached to that. And some people waving flags and whining “we liked it as a US proxy state” but clearly no one cares about them.

I am not saying you can’t make an argument for that succinct manifesto above, just that it used to be self-explanatory how one part is exactly aligned with the other, and nowadays it’s much less self-explanatory than it used to be, and that’s a point of interest.

These concerns sound exaggerated. There is no way that simply being infected with microplastics can force a change in behavior like that. In fact, it is my personal opinion that we should manufacture as many microplastics as possible, and disseminate them to the environment where they can reach more biological systems and provide their many medical benefits to as many people as possible. helphelphelphelphelp This title is simply fear mongering.

The intellectual obsession with logical fallacies was a mistake, and you are a living proof why. People are not perfectly objective robots with infinite capacity for information processing, attention and critical thought. Caring about bad actors, and taking everything they post in the context of them being bad actors, is not an intellectual deficiency. It is a precondition for sanity.

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All these comments but still I had to run a google search to be informed that there is no such thing, and “outer space” is simply a synonym for “space”.

We also had backseat modding and obnoxious rhetorical questions back on reddit, if you really insist we have this discussion