adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

“idealism” is a funny way of saying “opposition to war”. you are making excuses for a country raining death on a civilian population. you are drawing a line in the sand, saying that we cannot have a better world than this, and actively defending an organization that is killing children. war is the problem i want to solve, and your “solution” doesn’t solve that problem.

the world is not “wretched”, it does not “work” in some predefined way you expect it to. you have just decided not to advocate for a worthy cause, because it falls outside the bounds of what you have arbitrarily decided it is possible for the world to be, even as larger and larger groups of people fight to obtain that which you call a “fantasy”. there is no use in accepting the world as it is, in presuming that things cannot change for the better. we can’t know if its impossible without trying, again and again, as many times as it takes. progress was never made by accepting the status quo. it was never made by limiting the scope of our ambition.

stop speaking as though deflecting blame from the IDF, deflecting responsibility onto a terrorist organization, and making excuses for why a famine should continue are the “realistic” outer bounds of what we can do. the world you say you want doesn’t come about by aligning yourself with forces that are currently driving war, injustice, and suffering in Gaza. it doesn’t come about by abdicating the IDF of the responsibility of the war crimes you admit its soldiers are committing. you are seeing the alternative, you are seeing a principled opposition to war unfolding around you, and deciding that it is unobtainable, deciding that it foolish, and aligning yourself with the war-makers.

I will not do the same. I recognize the history of anti-war movements, the ways in which they have failed to achieve their goals. I do not have delusions that war is easy to kill. I just don’t have the arrogance to assume I know what the outcome will be. Even if we fail to create a world without suffering, at least I can know that we tried. Free Palestine.

you’re constantly trying to frame opposition to Israel as a failure to understand. i’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. we understand the conflict. we understand the players. we understand that Hamas is a far-right organization, and would do harm if they were to come to greater power. we just don’t think that justifies the kinds of violence being leveled at the Palestinian people. i’m not pro-Palestine because i don’t understand the stakes, because i’m blindly following the underdog. i’m doing it because i object to the death of innocent people, because i oppose war, apartheid, displacement, and destruction in all its forms.

again, deflecting blame. it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter what “every single nation on Earth” would have done (although I think there’s plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn’t even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i’ve heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel’s actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don’t want to die of starvation. i don’t want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

whose rockets have been raining down on whose homes? the appeal of a potential future threat to Israeli lives outweighing the current, present threat towards magnitudes more Palestinian lives is played out. people here aren’t ride or die for Hamas, they just acknowledge that leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing them from getting food is both not likely to lead to less rockets on Israeli homes, and is in itself an act of genocide. when did appeals to not killing innocent Palestinians become support for Hamas to you? when did persistent, unending violence against the Palestinian people become “self-defence”?

this is not “think of the children”. its “tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government”. we aren’t appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i’m sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don’t get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they’re using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a “master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it”, if you’re genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.

Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.

maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren’t voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren’t safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.

that isn’t what the linked article says lol.

you know, i’ve felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that’s ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i’m not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

some healthy self-deprecation is definitely nice, but the eldritch implications of somebody representing their intelligence as convertible to a temperature value transgressing thermodynamic law intrigue me more.

somebody talking about their IQ would be a major red flag for me lol

this is just not a well founded assumption. humanitarian aid was going into Gaza, and was being distributed to the people there before Israel cut off the supply. you’re trying to engineer a false dichotomy, where the only solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused in part by the denial of necessary resources is more denial of necessary resources. like, just think for like a moment. Hamas has a surplus of resources to supply their own forces. they aren’t reliant on humanitarian aid. not allowing food and other resources to get into Gaza only negatively affects the civilian population, and does very little to harm the supposed actual target of this indiscriminate violence. like, even if nearly all of it was just taken by Hamas, the quantity that remained would almost certainly still help innocent people survive this conflict, and that’s a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

but whatever, i bet you’ll just move the goalpost again. we cannot act based on what Hamas “should” be doing if they were acting responsibly. Hamas isn’t taking responsibility for the death and destruction being waged against the Palestinian people, they aren’t providing the resources they have, they aren’t distributing them to those who need them. and seeing that situation, we should act to prevent the suffering of these people who are not being served by the government that is supposed to represent them, instead of actively preventing aid from reaching into the region.

i don’t think anyone should have a war at all. there, are you happy? i’m frankly uninterested in litigating what hypothetical circumstances under which it might be okay to kill a civilian.

“killing civilians is always reprehensible” as a moral statement has nothing to do with the mechanics of conflict. i’m telling you what i believe. giving room for acceptable civilian casualties in a moral framework provides a ready made justification for bad actors, that so long as they present a situation as looking enough like the acceptable kind of civilian casualty then its fine that an innocent person was killed.

i am taking issue with the rhetoric of acceptable casualties. no. there are only casualties, and they are all horrific. rhetoric that is not an explicit condemnation of war can be used as a justification for it.

the scenario you’re imagining doesn’t exist. this isn’t a rock paper scissors thing, where Israel either shoots through hostages to kill insurgents or dies themselves. if Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, they aren’t attacking Israel, they’re hiding. if they’re attacking Israel, they aren’t in a crowd of Palestinian civilians. the IDF does not need to have a shootout with civilians in the crossfire to protect its people. the IDF does not need to bomb civilian residences to wage war against an insurgency.

you are so willing to conflate the two, assume that Israel must kill or be killed themselves. that is a fucking falsehood. there is so fucking much a military force can do to defend against attack that doesn’t involve shelling apartment buildings, shooting into crowds, and otherwise being monsters.

all civilian casualties are inadmissible. its not wrong, its a moral imperative, and one that the state of Israel is blatantly disregarding. the framing that “okay, these civilian causalities are okay” is fucking monstrous, and gives a ready made excuse for Israel to escalate violence in Gaza.