Without even reading it.

A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.

emo-stroking

Is that what my girlfriend & I were doing in her bedroom in the early 00s listening to Brand New and Death Cab?

For gaming, you’ve got Steam, which is pretty close to the ideal legit content delivery service. You don’t even necessarily have to pirate in order to demo games if you’re comfortable paying up front and making a decision within 2 hours.

Nothing similar exists or has existed for TV/Movies. Netflix was pretty good for a while, but you’ve never had the option to download the content to your own hard drive. Now you’re not even allowed to log in to your account on as many devices as you want.

Give me a service that’s a free storefront where I can pay a one-time fee for content that I’m actually interested in and download it to my hard drive as many times in as many places as I care to. Bonus points if I can stream to other devices that I’m logged in to and lend my purchases to my friends & family like I can with Steam. I don’t care if there’s DRM in the form of me having to log in to actually use the content if I can use it the way I want.

I’m not going to tell you all the things you mentioned are impossible. I’ve read your other comments too. I’ve seen homeless women crying in the street, people with obvious mental or physical problems begging. Homelessness - visible homelessness - is terribly common. As far as crime goes, I don’t know, maybe people target tourists? My rental car visibly full of luggage was broken into in San Jose once, and they stole a bunch of electronics. Learned my lesson on that one. Apart from that I’ve wandered around some rough areas on occasion and in 36 years I’ve never been victimized in person.

Anyway, one last point: according to official stats, the rate of homelessness in Australia is nearly 3x that in the US, although I imagine that Australia probably counts homelessness differently, so it’s hard to compare, but 3x seems like a big difference for simple differences in methodology to account for. That said, I’m sure Australia has better services, so it may not be as visible to the average person, and less of a struggle for those experiencing homelessness. Hard for me to believe things are all that much better in the land of Murdoch, though.

To be fair, Gary, Indiana isn’t most people’s first choice to visit…

https://youtu.be/SLaltfyTEno?si=cZO2NIjd0eqCKJez

Bullcrap… I guess you didn’t know that Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism, did you?

It doesn’t. The religious-academic roots of Zionism in both religions go way back. Jews were resettling from Europe to Ottoman Palestine in proto-Zionist migration as early as the 1500s.

No - it isn’t. Comparing Israel to Apartheid-South Africa is actually softballing it.

Well, then you should try reading the second part of that sentence before you have a heart attack from being so triggered.

I can literally google Ben-Gurion and produce a laundry list of his quotes that demolishes your argument

Yes, Ben Gurion is one of those hard-liners who is responsible for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations in the 1920s. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his views represented the whole of Zionism prior to or during WWI. The situation was salvageable until Britain gave up.

What exactly do you mean by “you and yours” there buddy? Your view is simply ahistorical. Zionism differs from other forms of European nationalism in that it was not primarily motivated by supremacist rationalizations, but by the desire for safety. Intent is important. Today, I agree; Israeli treatment of Palestinians is clearly apartheid, and many Israeli actions are clearly genocidal under the UN definition. The further back into history you go, the less clear the situation gets, though, and is more accurately seen as a conflict between two nationalist movements in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse wherein hard-line elements on both sides stoked conflict. There was a great amount of mutual respect and acceptance of Zionism among Arab leaders prior to the 1920s. I’d suggest you look up the Faisal-Weizmann agreement. The current conflict is a product of British mismanagement of Mandatory Palestine, and the initial failure of diplomacy in the face of racist, nationalist sentiments of BOTH Arabs and Zionist Jews.

This is an absurd exaggeration of the reality of the situation. This did not become a genocidal/apartheid situation until after 1948. There was an opportunity for peace in the UN partition plan, which would have required no one to “blink out of existence”.

the supposed chosen children of God literally got given their land after WW2, gave them sympathy, gave them diamonds and global support to promote love, peace and prosperity, then watched them literally turn and slaughter their brothers and sisters next door

Ignoring the borderline antisemitism there, in reality the people of the region were essentially abandoned by the West to fight it out. The Arab League didn’t like the results of the UN vote, and so riots broke out and the violence escalated into a war in which the Zionists were victorious against 7 Arab nations. To be clear, I’m not saying it was moral or ethical for the Zionists to settle land that was already inhabited by Arabs in the first place (it wasn’t), but that ship had long since sailed by 1948. My point is there was a very serious war over the land and no one was “given” anything. After the war, the Western powers agreed to enforce the 1949 armistice borders, and began supporting Israel materially because they were seen as a counterpoint to Soviet-Arab relations.

It follows that the point of support for Israel has never been “love, peace and prosperity”, but a geopolitical calculation, and one that has been wildly successful in maintaining Western hegemony in a region of the world that has never been particularly receptive to Western liberalism. Because of its geopolitical positioning, Israel is under constant threat, as evidenced by the Six Day War, two Intifadas, the bus & cafe bombings of the 90s & 00s, and the frequent rocket attacks of more recent times. Yes, they are under attack because they are unwelcome in the region due to their history of violence against native Arabs, but that doesn’t make the fear of Israelis irrational or paranoid - just hypocritical. It doesn’t justify the violence, but it does perpetuate it.

And so the clearest route to peace was through the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab/Islamic neighbors, leading to a gradual detente and eventually a regional consensus. This latest flare-up of the conflict is a major setback in that effort, though, and speculatively, that aspect of it may be intentional on the part of Iran, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.

A world of religious extremists, megalomaniacs and dictators, living in peace. Beautiful 🥲

There is, but it’s not very active at all.

[email protected]

Are you me? I’ve been going wild the last 4 years. Mind sharing a top 5 or something? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Great topic. A lot of my discovery was through /r/listentothis, but I’m 100% off reddit now, so these recommendations are helpful.

I’ve basically never used Twitch. Are you saying there’s something akin to independent radio on there? How are these streams structured?

For real. This is so blatantly a play by Iran to drive a wedge between Israel and the Islamic nations it has recently been normalizing relations with - UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco… They were in talks with Saudi Arabia, and that would have been a bridge too far.

The US is a global, industrial empire. To maintain that position, we need to make sure threats to our influence are kept to a minimum, and we need to provide security to the global trade system that we and our allies benefit from. Israel is aligned with the West culturally and ideologically, and so it’s a natural partner, and given its location in an oil-rich region, right next to the Suez Canal, and a stone’s throw from or bordering several of our major global adversaries’ proxies, it’s a natural and necessary ally.

Anything else, like the Evangelicals’ bizarre obsession, is purely coincidence or post-facto.

The Romans created the diaspora in the first place. How relevant that is to the modern conflict is debatable. Zionists certainly use the ancient Jewish kingdoms as evidence of their legitimacy.

The Jews exist in a superposition of races until you burn down the synagogue and collapse the waveform.