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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Biden did not “strike it down”, he halted all EOs not in effect so their administration can review them (see: the first paragraph of the linked article). Instead of re-issuing an EO, something that can be withdrawn on a whim (see: your post), Biden did the actual hard work of working with Congress to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The $35 cap is now backed by law rather than by diktat. Trump took the lazy path and issued the EO in the last days of his Presidency - a Presidency he spent quite a long time using to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

    Try understanding the issue instead of spamming MAGA talking points.


  • I guess the point wasn’t clear enough: Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land due to ancestry. Reasonable people understand the issue is complicated; displacement was a friendly replacement for massacred, forcibly removed, and slavery. You can clearly see that the intent of the creation of Israel was to redress a wrong perpetuated over millennia, regardless of the reality that it caused another migration of peoples.

    Like you said, Zionism is just the belief in a divine ancestral claim (core, even, for Judaism) to the region. You can be flippant about it being based in religion and dismiss it from your position of privilege behind a keyboard, but there are radical religious people that believe the land is their birthright just as strongly as some Palestinians and are fighting over that. The religious extremists on both sides of the conflict frankly don’t care about your opinions. A two state solution offers the best course for peace in the area, but the extremists from both sides need to be isolated and dealt with. Most Israelis and Palestinians are good people such in the middle of a shitty situation.



  • Israelites

    Jewish diaspora

    The presence of Jews in that area of the Middle East goes back over 3000 years until the expulsions. People don’t dispute that modern-day Palestinians lived there prior to the 1940s - but people conveniently set arbitrary time limits of settlement to allow for one genocide and decry the other.

    Politics in the middle east is not a simple case of “Israel bad.” Both groups of people deserve a home and both are going to lose part of their national identity regardless of the outcome. A two state solution is the most prudent solution and arguing otherwise ignores reality.


  • Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there’s a reason why European Jews were in such ample supply. It’s hard to negatively judge early Jewish Zionism when many of the Jews in question were liberated from genocide and given their ancestral home back. The actions of the right wing government in Israel don’t speak towards the large number of Israelis that oppose the actions of the government or their particular view of Zionism. The term Zionism has been co-opted by various groups to the point where it no longer carries meaning but instead becomes caricature for a certain type of villain.



  • No, Romney made that rhetorical statement and Blinken looked flabbergasted that the statement was even made.

    Romney’s statement was made in the context, ironically, that certain social media “news” is made in the absence of any historical context as appeals to emotions instead of facts. The fact that the Twitter poster made an obvious cut to give “context” to Romney’s strange claim is an example of what Blinken said is wrong with certain social media news “sources”.

    TikTok ban discussions have been going on for a long time, well prior to Hamas’s October attack, and it’s a distortion of reality to claim motives otherwise.

    Romney should not be a role model for anything other than uncompassionate conservatism. If this type of “news” article is indicative of how many people get their information, then reality really is fluid for a whole lot of people and that’s scary. Though it’s hardly unsurprising with the amount of obvious propaganda sites posting “news” about the conflict that people take as gospel.





  • And what Hamas is trying to accomplish is also genocide - but this is all besides the point. The larger question is this: what would it take for you to believe even a fraction of what the Israeli military claims?

    Can it be true that the IDF is indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as well as telling the truth?

    Would you claim that Hamas is justified in their killing of civilians if the Israeli military also kills civilians?

    Even further: what happens if all foreign governments stop sending aid to Israel and Lebanon/Hamas/etc. attack Israeli citizens with the intent of purging them? Would you suddenly support the IDF in it’s struggle to protect Israeli citizens from these groups who have already made it clear that their primary purpose is the genocide of the Jews in the Levant?

    Regardless of anyone’s feelings on the IDF, it is incumbent on all of us to take the claims of Hamas and Israel with a massive grain of salt - you may not believe in the credibility of the IDF but you certainly cannot dismiss the engrained antisemitism of Hamas and others in the region and believe them at face value.


  • Which is more likely for underground tunnels that don’t hold many people and are kitted for permanent subterranean living:

    1. a safe place for a terrorist organization’s leadership and inner circle to plan attacks with the easy ability to traverse the city unknown
    2. temporary bomb shelters for the population of Gaza

    At what point will people, who bend over backwards to defend a designated terrorist organization who exclusively target civilians, admit that the conflict is more complicated than “Israel bad” - when Hamas revives indiscriminate bus bombings of Israelis (or do they pine for the 90s/2000s again)? Netanhanyu needs to go, but Hamas doesn’t even try to distinguish between military targets and civilians - all Israelis are military targets (genocide). The victims in this conflict are Palestinian and Israeli civilians and this needs to not be forgotten in their haze of Israeli bloodlust.





  • Outspoken libertarians aren’t going to be bullied in college - outspoken anything in college generally leads to people ignoring you. College students that think they’re being bullied most likely attribute normal behavior to bullying - just like incels treat normal human interactions as impediments to getting laid.


  • It’s vav across many, if not most, Jewish ethnicities (not sure why you’d single out ashkenazi Jews) as well as predominantly a ‘v’ sound in almost all cases. I googled it and found that waw is accurate if we were talking about semitic origins of the letter, not its modern usage in Hebrew.

    Adonai, Elohim, and El Shaddai. All 3 names are used in the Torah and all 3 are plural. We were taught that the God of Israel was one of many gods, but that the ancient Israelites were specifically chosen by this god. This god liked to war with the chosen people of other gods and the Torah is full of those tales. Basically, I’m not talking about kaballah but the authors of the Torah using multiple words for the name of God, some of which being plural.



  • The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) and the 10th Amendment clearly state that the federal government has more, read: supreme, power over the states. You may be misremembering that the phrase “nor prohibited by it to the States” exists in the amendment. Basically, a federal law today will immediately and automatically nullify a 200 year old state law - precedence nor time of the state law will survive a Supreme Court review even if all 9 Justices are Federalist Society lackeys.