BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

In Gaza?

I'm fairly confident that the Palestinian Authority has no real control of anything in Gaza. Fatah and Hamas literally had a minor civil war over the issue in 2006 and 2007.

That your messages are encrypted at all
That your encryption keys are kept on-device, and not plainly available to a centralized party
That the encryption the application is using is securely implemented

This is true, but something that should be noted is that, to my knowledge, no law enforcement agency has ever received the supposedly encrypted content of WhatsApp messages. Facebook Messenger messages are not E2E encrypted by default, and there have been several stories about Facebook being served a warrant for message content and providing it. This has, as I understand, not occurred for WhatsApp messages. It is possible, of course, that they do have some kind of access and only provide it to very high-level intelligence agencies, but there's no direct evidence of that.

I would personally say that it's more likely than not that WhatsApp message content is legitimately private, but I'd also agree that you should use something like Signal if you're genuinely concerned about this.

Is it really that hard to imagine that he genuinely believes that aiding Israel and Ukraine are good ideas?

McConnell isn't a Matt Gaetz. He's an absolute asshat, but he does have real policy objectives and viewpoints, and a select few of them align with general American opinion. It also helps that he and Biden have known each other for a very long time and have always been on reasonably friendly terms.

Frankly, disgusting or not, it's essentially accurate. Israel is not going to tolerate Hamas and a militarized Gaza continuing to exist, regardless of how many people on the internet post criticisms of it.

This article is discussing an income tax, not a wealth tax, which you correctly state would not be legal at a federal level without an amendment.

It's hard to really interpret what the article is actually talking about though due to a lack of specifics. Billionaires do pay quite a lot of taxes (the top 1% of Americans pay 43% of all income tax revenue, for instance), and also pay a lot in consumption taxes, but due to the way their income is structured, a lot falls under capital gains and other taxes rather than standard tax on salary. Gains in assets contribute to net worth, but (correctly) are not taxed until those gains are actually realized. There are some loopholes in how those assets can be used as collateral for loans, but since those do still have to be paid back with interest, they do quite literally not represent net income. There's a difference between aiming to close tax loopholes and simply trying to get more revenue from billionaires. Neither is necessarily a bad aim, but they're not exactly the same thing. There's also an important distinction to be made between taxing billionaires because they're a useful source of revenue for important government programs and taxing them because you just think they're icky and shouldn't exist.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/bidens-15-minimum-wage-federal-contractors-blocked-by-us-judge-2023-09-27/

Biden did issue an executive order mandating a $15 wage for federal contractors. It was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/us/politics/federal-minimum-wage.html

He attempted to put it in a reconciliation package, but it was blocked by the Senate parliamentarian, so it would have required 60 votes to pass. The Senate had 50 Republicans at that time. I probably don't need to remind you about the literal circus that is the House right now.

So, given the impossibility of legislative action after an earnest attempt, he tried to unilaterally raise the wage for federal contractors that he may have had unilateral authority over, but a Trump-appointed judge stopped that.

You might notice a common thread of Republicans stopping both of these things, so it's genuinely fascinating that you then somehow condemn Biden as being the one at fault here, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

I love the whoosh of goalposts flying by.

https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/notre-but-cest-de-terroriser-les-juifs-linquietant-projet-dattentat-dune-cellule-dados-radicalises-22-10-2023-5SSUSJI6JZBCZBAUUOSOH7YYOY.php

I believe it's this article. There's a paywall, but the header is this:

« Notre but, c’est de terroriser les juifs » : l’inquiétant projet d’attentat d’une cellule d’ados radicalisés
EXCLUSIF. Fanatiques de Daech et d’explosifs, trois collégiens ont été mis en examen à Paris pour avoir projeté une attaque contre une ambassade israélienne. Révélations sur une nébuleuse djihadiste d’adolescents français, belge et russe ultra-connectés.

My humble translation:

"Our goal is to terrorize the Jews" : The disturbing attack plan of a cell of radicalized teens. Fanatics of ISIS and of explosives, three students were indicted in Paris for having planned an attack against an Israeli embassy. Revelations about a Jihadist nebula of ultra-connected French, Belgian, and Russian teenagers.

You're assuming that Palestinians have a desire to get rid of Hamas, which is not at all guaranteed. Polling, as unreliable as it is, shows that they have a non-trivial amount of support even in the West Bank.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the morality of the situation, Israel is simply not going to risk its security on the hopes of a "maybe" that Palestinians won't support violent attacks on Israel, especially when polling tends to find about half of them do support it on some level.

The funny thing is how people on both sides could read your comment and agree with it, but for opposite reasons.

Seriously. Trump is advocating turning Gaza into a parking lot.

And it's not like Democrats have exactly been shy of their general support of Israel, if you've paid any attention at all. They just also happen to acknowledge that Palestinians are people, unlike most Republicans.

I think the point is that we saw just two weeks ago the methods that Hamas would use to un-exist Israel, so it's not that hard to read between the lines of what people mean when they say that Israel should not exist.

We're the Jewish homeland. Everyone else can eat shit" needs to exist.

This isn't really an accurate description of Israel though. Israel isn't the multi-ethnic paradise it should be, but Israeli Arabs have full legal rights and are pretty well-integrated. An Israeli Arab medic was actually murdered at the music festival when he approached Hamas members in an attempt to negotiate with them.

I would agree that Israel should not make full legal rights dependent on being a Jew, but it doesn't do that, even though there are some actions it's taken, particularly under Netanyahu, to tie Israeli identity more strictly to Judaism. That stuff pisses off quite a lot of secular Israelis as well.

And philosophical quibbling about the role of nation states aside, the fact of the matter is that Israel does exist and it's people are not going to go anywhere. Given that Hamas' explicit aim is to murder them all, Israel is going to do anything and everything to resist them. Palestinian statehood cannot and will never proceed if it's dependent on the violent eradication of Israel. Fortunately, it does not need to depend on that, though Israel must do more to facilitate an actual peaceful conclusion, such as dismantling settlements. But regardless, violence is simply not a productive option for the Palestinian cause, and it never will be. It must be abandoned.

Mate, do you know where Gaza is?

Israel is occupying the West Bank, absolutely. The IDF is literally everywhere, conducts military operations all the time, and huge chunks of the land are under direct Israeli administration.

None of those things is the case for the Gaza Strip. That border was established in 1949 following negotiations between Israel and Egypt, and afterwards it was functionally a part of Egypt. It was then captured and truly occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Days War. This lasted until 2005, when the IDF fully withdrew from the Gaza Stop (the boundary of which, I'll say again, was established in 1949) and forcibly evicted all Jewish settlers. A military blockade was instituted after Hamas won elections in 2006 and started lobbing rockets at Israel, since Hamas' explicit goal is the violent elimination of all Jews from the entire region.

You can say that the blockade is unjust, collective punishment, destroys any hope for prosperity, and anything else. I'd even agree with you on a lot of that. But you cannot say that it is an occupation, because that is a word that describes a specific situation that simply is not happening in Gaza.

A blockade is not an occupation, unless you're suggesting that the British were actually occupying all of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1916.

Note that I'm not saying that a blockade is not harsh or oppressive, only that it is not in fact the same thing as an occupation.

The British clusterfuck here dates back to the first world war. No one remotely involved is alive now.

So how, exact, do you see the process of making Israel not exist proceeding? Genuinely, I'm curious. Do you really see absolutely no way for a state of Israel to exist in some fashion without the genocide of Palestinians? If not, then what exactly are you proposing?

I've add that this would not be remotely out of line with history. Weapons have been stored at Al-Aqsa even in the past.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-07-20/ty-article/watch-how-assailants-carried-out-temple-mount-attack/0000017f-f595-d460-afff-fff70d7a0000

I will never understand straight men.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

Here's a transcription. I'd really recommend people actually read it before commenting.