whatsapp for family, because that’s where family is.

nobody uses facebook to connect with family, they use facebook to connect with people from high school they haven’t seen in 15 years and don’t care enough about to actually keep in touch.

wait, is “buddy” gendered?

I like to mix it up. but language is context dependent. “buddy” is a go-to of mine, and feels entirely gender neutral.

“my people” is good for plural.

“friend” is good as long as you have the right rhythm with it. Like, you know, in the second person, like “hello, friend.”

“bro” obviously doesn’t work, but I have casually referred to trans friends as “broham” and they didn’t seem to mind. I don’t do it often, but sometimes mixing in a good bro pun is more fun that way… go a little over the top, call somebody brobrahk brobrahma, nobody’s going to be thinking that you’re implying gender, it’s an equally ridiculous term to call anybody by. Similarly, although context dependent, there are implicitly feminine words you can use, although some of them can be degrading in the wrong context. “Gurl,” “bitch,” and “slut” can work, as long as it’s ridiculous enough in context not to be taken seriously. I’m a guy, I’ve had friends call me these. “Gurl” might not be the best for a nonbinary friend or a trans man friend, so be careful with it.

I don’t know, I only have a few nonbinary friends, I guess, and I mostly refer to most of them by their names.

in addition to you being an asshole, you’re also wrong in practice about how HR teams work. If they hear about shit like this, they really do try to do something about it. Sometimes they can’t really accomplish anything, and they’re just bureaucratic about it, but no, they do not think of the person making the report as a problem, they think about the person actually causing the actual problem. Hostile work environments are unproductive, are bad for employee retention, and have a heightened risk of law suit. Only shitty businesspeople think the problem doesn’t exist as long as it’s not on paper.

OP’s better off if their employees steer clear of them—that much is obvious, isn’t it?

op mentioned the DSA…

I think the main success of the current narrative on Palestine is disguising Israeli expansion as Israeli self-defense. Here’s a map of the UN partition plan for Palestine and you can check today’s borders to see how much land Palestine has ceded to Israel, unwillingly of course. Israel was created as a result of the Palestine Civil War and have been expanding ever since. That was the plan the whole time, as it says in the above linked page:

Arabs rejected that partition plan and waged war after war against Israel. Land changed hands both ways in the late 1940s—the great sin of Israel is that it won more land than it lost, that’s what the Arabs can’t forgive them for. The Arabs started the war thinking they could beat the Jews and expel them altogether.

Some of the land taken in 1967 is up for debate, but regions like the Golan Heights have a large strategic value and have historically been used to attack Israel. Israel happily returned Sinai to Egypt for peace. I’m generally opposed to settlement expansion, but that’s almost never framed as self-defense. And the current war in Gaza is really not expansionist.

I don’t see how Palestine is any different from Ukraine in terms of needing to cede land to the invader in exchange for peace. What do you think? I’m sure there’s a lot I’m not aware of.

I’m assuming you’re talking about the Olmert proposal or similar, since land isn’t really a big part of the Gaza debate, Israel wants the hostages back and Hamas gone.

Peace is the concession being made by Palestine, not for Palestine. many Palestinians are strongly opposed to peace with Israel. Hamas is categorically opposed. Palestinians want an end to the occupation, control of East Jerusalem, as much land as they can get, and a totally unrealistic “right of return” that would realistically end Israel.

The deal in question included East Jerusalem, removal of Israeli settlers from the west bank, an end to the occupation, acceptance of a number of Palestinian immigrants into Israel, and was just a starting point.

The land swaps—not a one-sided cession, swaps—are designed around areas that are already mostly Israeli settlers. Practically, moving multiple townfulls’ worth of settlers is really unrealistic. Israel removed 80,000 settlers from Gaza unilaterally during 2005, and is willing to remove more but removing hundreds of thousands, especially from towns that are already mostly Israeli, is an extreme challenge and land swaps are a practical way to get around it.

About the negotiations and truce offered to Israel:

Lol, I assumed you were talking about a peace deal. Hamas was really open about this one: permanent concessions (there was more to it than just the land), in exchange for a temporary truce that was just a strategic aim on their part to shore up resources so they could more effectively massacre all of Israel when the truce had ended. And there’s no way they’d be able to keep the truce going for as long as they said, they couldn’t even handle the days-long truce in the current war.

but there was justification, I believe it was NATO encroachment or something about Nazis in Ukraine.

Lol, Ukraine never joined NATO, even after the Donbas invasion, Ukraine was literally run by a Jew, and the Russians have turned the Azov battalion into heroes. And none of that would have been grounds for war, if it made any sense to begin with.

the justification for Israel invading Palestine in the first place was “we are God’s chosen people and we want this land”

… what the fuck are you talking about? Are you attempting to describe the Israeli War of Independence? Or something else? I’m so confused.

How much land do you think Ukraine should cede for peace?

For a war Russia started? With no justification? None. Not even land swaps.

How much control should Russia have in Ukraine’s government in exchange for ending the occupation?

As much as it takes for Russian civillians to be safe, which is to say, again, none. Ukraine does not have a history of massacring Russian civilians, they haven’t repeatedly stated that they’d repeat attacks on Russian civilians ad infinitum after any hypothetical ceasefire.

Also, are you aware of Palestine’s proposal to respect the 1967 borders, which Israel rejected?

Which proposal?

Actually the opposite, it’s a line of reasoning that supposes that no-one is really indigenous to anywhere in particular, thereby avoiding the good ol’ extreme claims to sovereignity.

… what? So you don’t know what indigeneity is, so you just said, “fuck it, we’re going to do away with the concept altogether so nobody has a right to live anywhere at all!”

I’m always baffled as to where you people think the Jews should be living.

I don’t care what their opinion is, Israel in fact ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005.

People are now upset about a blockade that started in 2007. Aside from ignoring the reasons for the blockade, and totally ignoring the two years between the end of the occupation and the start of the blockade, people like to pretend the blockade is an occupation because it’s not very nice and they don’t know how to talk about an unoccupied Gaza (or because they’re just too stupid to know what’s going on there).

The Journey to the West is an option, although the moral of the story is usually all about how great Buddhism is (or how silly the monkey man is)

The Olmert proposal where Israel wanted to keep 10% of the West Bank (not that we know much about the proposal or why it failed, but from that point it’s a no-go)?

No, the actual Olmert proposal. It involved land swaps for about 6.3% of the West Bank (to help minimize the number of Israelis who need to be forced out of their homes), giving East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as the capitol…

Abbas didn’t feel like negotiating from that starting point. Because he either didn’t want peace, or didn’t think he could swing it politically (with a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority). A not-one-inch even-with-land-swaps even-with-this even-with-that policy is not conducive to peace.

And what opportunity in 2005 they fucking blockaded the place as soon as they left.

No, the blockade started in 2007. You’re missing the two years where Gaza was totally free and Hamas used that freedom to ramp up rocket fire, kill their opponents in Fatah, and gain a majority in the PA.

Gaza has not been occupied since 2005.

Palestinian arabs have been launching pogroms against Jews without rest since 1920, but Israel didn’t occupy the West Bank or Gaza until 1967. Maybe if Israelis felt they could possibly be safe without occupying the West Bank, they would try it. Like they tried with Gaza. Gee, look how that played out.

Gee, I wonder how Germany and Japan managed to get freedom from occupation… Oh right, they went with peace!

… what?

“Jews of other countries” are also indigenous to Israel / Judea / Canaan / Palestine / whatever you want to call it. I’m a Persian-American Jew. Before Iran, my community came from Israel. Is it possible that there are some Russian Jews in my family tree? Or Egyptian Jews? Or Bucharian Jews? Or Iraqi Jews? Yes. Are they all still indigenous to Israel? Yes.

Conversion to Judaism is extremely rare, but it does happen. Is it possible that some portion of my family tree converted to Judaism and is not indigenous to Israel? Sure. Does one drop of Iranian blood in m DNA make me somehow not indigenous to the place the rest of my ancestors are from? Hell the fuck no. Especially given that my ancestors in Iran were never welcome for long. It’s also worth noting that, since the Arab Conquest reached Iran, conversion from Islam has been, for most of that time, illegal (it’s currently punishable by death!), so the idea of converts to Judaism is extremely rare.

This is a strange, disturbing line of reasoning. You wouldn’t ask Native Americans with ancestors from two different tribes how they can be called indigenous, would you?

What’s going on here?

China having more global influence than USA would help

… would it? I’m not sure I see how.

I feel like he totally misunderstood the concept of a Palestinian “right of return.” They’re not asking for a right to return to a future Palestinian state, that isn’t a controversial thing, they would obviously be in control of their own immigration policy. They want a right for millions of Palestinians to “return” to Israel.

Israelis view this not only as an unacceptable danger, but as a move that would end Israeli democracy; an instant majority of Muslim voters, many of whom were raised to believe that Israeli civilians should not be allowed to live, would turn Israel into, you know, the rest of the Middle East. Ban alcohol, ban homosexuality, ban apostasy, ban building synagogues or churches, do everything else every other Muslim-majority country does.

This was one of the major sticking points at Camp David. And this guy just totally missed it.

I mean, the Olmert proposal was an opportunity. The 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was an opportunity. It doesn’t seem that “freedom” was good enough for Palestinians back then.

Netanyahu has been winning because Israeli attempts at peace never seem to work.

Targeting civilians is bad.

Terrorists, including those who target civilians, are combatants, and are valid targets. They remain valid targets when they use schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and residential areas as bases for combat operations. This is pretty clear in international law.

Israel still must not target civilians, and must take reasonable measures to minimize civilian casualties of war. We’ve seen Israel, in at least some contexts, take quite extreme measures to warn civilians, help evacuate civilians, and carefully target munitions to minimize civilian death despite Hamas and PIJ using those civilians as human shields.

The raw numbers are still gruesome… unless you compare them to other instances of urban warfare, in which case the numbers are actually lower than many would expect. The civilian death ratio, as far as we’ve been able to estimate (since Hamas does not estimate), appears to be lower than usual.

Civilian deaths are tragic. It would obviously be much better if Hamas had not started this war, or if they would agree to the ceasefire Israel offered, or if they weren’t so committed to war in general. But they are. They frequently condemn even the concept of peace, and insist that they will repeat the October 7th attack as often as they can. There is no avenue to peace while they remain in power.

So the war will continue. And we will continue to hope that Israel does its best to minimize harm to civilians.

That’s essentially the reality of the situation, though. The land was populated by Palestinians before Europe and the rest of the Middle East NIMBY’d their remaining Jewish populations to Israel.

This is all kinds of wrong.

Zionism was a Jewish movement. Antisemitism was not NIMBYism, that’s a pretty horrible thing to say, it was persecution, pogroms, attacks, the holocaust, a constant stream of hate and oppression. Zionism was certainly not a movement of the Europeans and Middle Easterners who persecuted us. It was our movement. Zionism was not just an escape, but also a long held dream of the Jewish people that coalesced as it became plausible in late Ottoman policy. It was finally possible for Jews to buy land in, and immigrate to, Israel, so many of us did.

We are not foreign to Israel. It is our indigenous homeland. As the rest of the world rejected us, we no longer felt safe as strangers in strange lands. We considered the possibility of having our own nation on borrowed land from the Russians, or from the Germans, or in Alaska. We didn’t care for those ideas because of how stupid they were. We wanted a homeland in our homeland. If you don’t understand Jewish indigeneity in Judea, maybe you’re not ready to talk about complex topics.

As for the Palestinian ties to the land—Palestinian nationalism barely existed before Jewish people started returning to Israel. Arabs in the various Ottoman Sanjaks or whatever division there was at the time were mostly traveling merchants or pilgrims; there was, of course, a small permanent population, which included Jews (always, despite various efforts to remove them or ban them), Christians, and Muslims, but that population expanded dramatically starting in the mid-late 1800s on all fronts. The Arabs then either continued to call themselves Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians (“Jordan” and “Palestine” were part of the same colony, I hope you know), or they subscribed to some conception of pan-Arabism. The word “Palestinian,” to the extent was used at all before the ~1960s, was used largely to refer to whoever happened to be in Palestine (like “New Yorker,” not referring to a race of some kind), or specifically, in Europe, to refer to Jews. Palestinian nationalism largely gained traction in the 1960s as a political movement, and even then, many leaders were committed to pan-Arabism but treated Palestinian identity as a useful political fiction; Zuhair Moshen in particular, as a leader of the PLO, pushed these ideas, and in much of the politics between the West Bank and Jordan through that period. Of course, since the 1940s, Palestinian identity has taken on new meanings, but many of these meanings are young, and the vast majority of these peoples’ ties to the land start between the 1800s and 1948—a beat before similarly-shaped spikes in the Jewish return.

Palestinian nationalism is now used in other Arab countries to keep Palestinian Arabs oppressed; Jordan revoked their Jordanian citizenship, Lebanon refuses to grant them basic rights, UNRWA refuses to resettle them across multiple generations.

I’m with you, but more because I eat rice-based dishes and it’s good to have a spoon + fork combo for those.

1. Inertia

People don’t leave until they have a compelling reason to leave. They will stay put until something pushes them to move. Bad corporate practices are not that strong an effect—boycotting every bad company in 2024 is not a thing people are trying to do, the world doesn’t work like that.

1. Positive Network Effects

The size and value of Reddit’s network still dwarves the fediverse, and that’s the primary value of any social network—the people you can interact with.

Meh. The mobile reddit apps and new reddit are truly trash. A lot of lemmy apps could still use work, especially kbin, and a lot of communities could use a cleaner UI, but ultimately, I think people are using Reddit due to inertia and positive network effects.