Call yourself an “expat” and apparently you never have to integrate.

So… this is for Gazans who “do not want to live under Hamas”, but they wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

It seems to me like Israel is creating a concentration camp and will declare that anyone outside of it is Hamas and they can kill them all with impunity.

I’d like to push back on this notion.

Fundamentally it feels like saying, “a good deed is only good if done for the right reason”.

That might be important for religion or some other way to measure individual morality, but as a society it really doesn’t matter. In fact, having some sort of reward for helping others is useful, since it encourages people to be kind.

I would be pleased as punch if the wealthy and powerful were admired for how much they made the world a better place, instead of because of the size of the swimming pool filled with gold coins in their basement.

A nonce is jargon in cryptography. It means a random unique value used to make it impractical for an attacker to guess in a protocol.

This is why Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. It’s an open question whether the law matters.

Every President says they are not constrained, Congress says that they are. The Supreme Court says, “this is a political question, not a legal question, so the executive and legislative have to sort it out”.

In the Netherlands we literally cannot spend the money we have allocated for our military since there aren’t enough Dutch weapons to buy. 😬

“swarm” here is a verb, not a noun. As in, “to swarm”.

“The sappers exploded their charges under the city walls, and the invader’s troops swarmed in through the gap.”

We have a good one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That’s right. He’s still making his excellent history podcast, Hardcore History, at his traditional relaxed pace. 😆

A podcaster who used to make a podcast called Common Sense stopped because he felt he had said everything he believed and there wasn’t any point in making new shows.

He did one recently which basically said “well it happened just like I expected, but I didn’t expect it would be so sudden”.

(At least, that’s what I took from it…)

Yes sorry I was unclear. The South African president said that South Africa has a violence problem, not just for white farmers.

Indeed the president of South Africa said exactly that in the meeting.

Thanks for this link. It’s kind of amazing and I like it because it says what should be obvious to us all: public homes are a good idea.

I think that another - and I think more important - answer is that the capital class finally regained control. They chaffed for decades under the limits imposed after they destroyed the worldwide economy in the early 20th century, and spent the second half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st systematically removing constraints.

It’s almost like Israel needs Lebensraum…

We’ve had 4 of 5 cats die before reaching 6. 😢

Southern Lebanon? Surely you mean northern Israel. Just a buffer zone.

Part of the problem is that our models of knowledge were flawed. The basis was the information deficit model; the assumption was that people were missing data, and that if they learned more they would shift their understanding.

It turns out that this isn’t a good fit for human psychology, but approaches based on it still persist today.

Another problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of world views. People on the left tend to think that equality is a good thing and should be a goal. People on the right do not believe in equality. Not in the sense that they opposed it, they literally don’t believe it is possible. So any attempt to improve the lot of the worst-off is interpreted as an attempt to disrupt the hierarchy, ultimately ending up worse off for themselves. “You’re just jealous and want to be in charge.”

I think that there are communication strategies that can work, but maybe not. Humans have suffered under hierarchy for millennia, and maybe we are too flawed as a species.

It may seem unfair that the left would have to put so much effort into communicating with the right, who doesn’t give a fuck. That’s true, but the forces of hierarchy have had many more centuries to refine their propaganda. And what the left asks is for change and growth, while the right merely asks for a return to the way humans lived for most of civilization: a powerful few getting all the benefits and most of humanity struggling to survive.