BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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They're saying that Arab nations have a legitimate reason to be concerned about allowing in Palestinian refugees, given that every time a nation has done it, it's sparked civil war, and that this point has not received a satisfying response.

I'm gonna guess English isn't their native language, but luckily, I majored in linguistics.

Within Israel, the vast majority of people don't particularly care about any kind of manifest destiny style reclamation of the West Bank or Gaza, and if that were the only issue, I genuinely don't think there would be a significant problem.

What essentially everyone does care about, however, is repeatedly having rockets lobbed at them. When people feel under threat, reason starts to fall away, people begin dehumanizing the "other", and you get the massive mess we have today. The fact of the matter is that Israel will never accept any situation where its people are under threat. No matter what you think about what acts are or aren't justified or your opinion on how various parts of the history played out, none of that changes this basic reality.

Palestine is not going to be able to militarily eradicate Israel. There is precisely zero chance that Israelis allow themselves to be subjected to a second diaspora and they'll fight to the death to prevent this, and that's to say nothing of external players like the United States. Again, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a true thing.

On the flip side, Israel is perfectly capable of essentially eradicating the Palestinians, though this would subject it to massive international condemnation that would also have huge economic impacts. You're already beginning to see whispers of this as the world increasingly sees Israel's response in Gaza as being excessively harsh. The most they could do is a slow and steady degradation of Palestinian society while encouraging them to "voluntarily" leave, which is arguably what the strategy has essentially been under Likud with settlements and the like.

So, what's required for a peaceful co-existence? Firstly, you need a mutual acknowledgement from both leaders (and also, a legitimate Palestinian leadership in the first place) that the other side exists and has a right to do so, ie, Palestinians giving up on the idea of eradicating Israel and Israelis giving up on the idea of fully annexing and ethnically cleaning Palestinian lands. This is not a trivial thing. The Israeli far-right, though they're not dominant, are growing and believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, with the Arabs being seen as little more than animals in the way. The extreme Palestinian side is that all Israelis are essentially foreign invaders and should be forcibly removed or killed. Both of these positions must be completely taken off the table.

Secondly, Israel will not engage unless it is confident that its security will not be threatened, which will in practice mean that Palestinian authorities must be de-militarized beyond what's necessary for basic local law enforcement. Again, this might seem unfair, and hell, it probably is. But the fact of the matter remains that Israel is the side holding the guns here, so you either play by their rules and try to find some positive outcome, or you flip the table and enjoy the complete loss, but with some moral satisfaction. Similarly, there would probably need to be some kind of border controls for imports that Israeli authorities can inspect for covert weapons shipments, since it's a known thing that Iran does regularly try to bring weapons into Gaza. Ideally, this would be some kind of bi-national force with Palestinian cooperation.

If you reach these points, then you still have other very big questions to deal with, like precise borders, land swaps, the question of Jerusalem, how to connect Gaza and the West Bank, any right of return for displaced Palestinians both recently and during the Nakba, and plenty of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting about. But ultimately, if you have a Palestinian and Israeli leadership that are actually interested in peace and accept the existence of the other, and both agree to cooperate on matters of security and prioritizing that peace above and past grievances, no matter how legitimate, that gives you a real foundation you can build from.

I wouldn't get my hopes up though.

Just because it hasn't been said yet, this already exists in bodybuilding. The professional league, the IFBB, which hosts the Mr. Olympia competition, does not prohibit drugs and they are de facto required. Essentially every IFBB bodybuilder uses steroids, and it's a very open secret.

Something that does need to be considered here is that not all sports necessarily benefit from steroids, at least not nearly as much as bodybuilding. More muscle isn't necessarily always a good thing if it makes you heavier or less mobile, so there's already some limited regulatory effect from that as well.

No, that's not what I mean by 'falsifiable'.

That there exists some external force or entity that is completely outside the realm of anything observable is not a falsifiable claim, because there is absolutely nothing we could ever observe that would absolutely contradict it. It is, quite simply, not a statement about the observable universe, so it's definitionally outside the domain of science. Science will never disprove the existence of Heaven, because Heaven is by definition not observable.

That's a very different kind of claim from "If you'd sneakily observed Jesus' crucifixion and followed him as he was buried, you'd eventually see him come back to life, move a stone away from his tomb, and wander up into Heaven after having a few chats with friends".

To be clear, I'm not saying that those religious claims have been absolutely proven false, only that they hypothetically could be proven false. Of course, there are other religious claims that have been proven false, like young earth creationism, but those have a funny habit of being either abandoned or significantly re-interpreted after conflicting facts come about. It's also probably just a coincidence that the more fantastical claims all tend to be from long enough ago that gaps in the historical record provide a significant amount of fuzziness. Why God got tired of performing miracles after the invention of the camera is just one of those mysteries.

It needs to be emphasized that I am not making the absolute positive claim that Muhammad never flew to Jerusalem. What I'm saying is that someone with sufficient information could possibly make a clear determination of the truth. Muhammad himself, for instance, presumably knew the truth of the matter. It's falsifiable in that it could be falsified given sufficient observed information, unlike the existence of Heaven, which categorically cannot be.

(It's also worth mentioning that the Qur'an itself actually contains only the slightest and briefest mention of the Night Journey; the story is greatly expanded upon in the hadiths, which he himself did not directly write but are rather traditionally attributed to him).

My point is that, in this context, "bombing a refugee camp" is not meaningfully different than bombing any other urban environment.

Which is to say, very deadly and terrible and generally a bad idea unless there are literally no other options, which I would say isn't really the case here.

The vast majority of religions do make explicit falsifiable claims about the natural universe that go far beyond the existence of a god.

A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.

"Refugee camps" is something of a misleading term when it comes to Gaza. While there are several settlements that did begin decades ago as camps of tents, which is the image the term conjures, at this point they are essentially cities like any other. Due to some unique legal circumstances, a huge chunk of the population of Gaza are legally considered refugees by the UN, but this is a unique status that's even inheritable by the descendents of the people who originally fled during the establishment of Israel.

This isn't to defend bombing civilians, to be clear. It's just that, frankly, it's difficult to throw a dart at Gaza without hitting what is legally considered a refugee camp.

I'm not going to feel particularly bad about people with the slogan "Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews" being killed in combat in a retaliatory military strike.

Do you have a source for any Yemeni civilians dying yet?

No civilians died in the first strikes, and I'm not aware of any sources claiming any civilian deaths in these strikes either, which is probably to be expected given that they were against a military air base.

I don't think Mike Johnson or Mitch McConnell care that much about Biden's bully pulpit. Nor did Manchin, for that matter.

I just wish that people could actually see the alternate universe where Bernie was president, and the proceeded to get very little accomplished because it turns out that no amount of shouting will actually make Republicans vote for your policies.

I think the entire point was actually that no single party can unilaterally make that decision. People who want to interact with Meta can, and those who don't can simply not.

If you don't wanna deal with them, be on a server that doesn't federate with them.

They - and literally anyone else - can already do that. Mastodon data is totally public.

"They're just disrupting the oil trade to help reverse climate change!"

• At least one very confused person, somewhere

For what it's worth, I don't really disagree.

Due to the SCOTUS ruling, any debt cancellations have to be pretty limited in scope to survive legal oversight. I honestly really respect Biden continuing to chip away at the issue where he still can instead of just giving up after the SCOTUS loss. It doesn't magically solve all problems for all people, but for the people affected, this is a massive help.

Basically, and that in the modern era where attacks can happen very quickly and with zero warning from non-state actors (as opposed to having to march an army across fields for days), the President needs to be able to react very quickly.

Given the current state of Congress, with a shutdown looming, no real plan, and apparently now some rumblings of a plan to oust the Speaker yet again, I can kinda understand the logic.

More cynically, it isolates Congress members from any political accountability.

The numerous times that he has proceeded to not do something after the SCOTUS tells him that it's unconstitutional.

The millions of people with significantly lowered insulin costs because of the IRA might disagree.

Or the 3.6 million people who have had $132 billion of student loan debt forgiven.

https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-announces-nearly-5-billion-additional-student-debt-relief

Cheers.