As an American who knows how evil our government is, I would be like "good for panama but also China is probably not doing this out of justice and freedom"
Recently, Hamas carried out their largest and most brutal attack on Israel, killing many innocent people and generating international shock
Israel is now responding by invading Gaza: a dense, poor city with about 2 million people in it to try to wipe out Hamas.
There is now worldwide outrage at Israel's response, which is disproportionately deadly due to their advanced military and billions of foreign aid. People are protesting Israel as an apartheid state and claiming that they are now pursuing genocidal goals.
The United States does not have a democracy. The United States Government is an enemy of democracy.
A serious analysis of our government and history exposes layers and layers of undemocratic rot in no particular order, and by no means exhaustively: The electoral college, police intimidation and violence against protestors, gerrymandering, regulatory capture, the historic and current slavery, segregation, and disenfranchisement of Black Americans, mass surveillance, imprisonment of Asian Americans, torture of prisoners, the genocide of Native American Indians, systematic destruction of voter registries, and the ability of our lawmakers to invest in the industries they regulate, and regulate the industries they invest in. This injury to our democracy is topped with insult as every one of these glaring injustices is either still festering in our government, or had to be taken down through immense sacrifice and pain, or for the aforementioned minority groups, represents an irreparable scar on our history.
The result is a Princeton study that, even according to its critics, describes our government as having only a 50/50 chance of serving the will of the American public.
And that's just at home.
Abroad, the United States is a zealous and brutal enemy of democracy anywhere its true goals are threatened. Over the past century, the US has overthrown dictators and democracies alike in service of private wealth and power. They have murdered countless innocent people and left countless more to live and die in the aftermath. In at least one instance, just a few people in our government with a blank checkbook and no oversight or accountability were responsible for the destruction of democratic governments abroad.
The United States does not value democracy or freedom. It values the feeling of democracy and freedom while actually crushing people and taking everything they have unless they stand to benefit us more if we let them keep it.
I'm aware plenty of people condemn Israel for good reason, but what I don't hear is the snide "you'll never get anyone on your side like that". It's a sentiment that black people have been hearing since the 60's, and is more commonly leveled against "underdogs" that are fighting an establishment.
I think this story should be engaged with some nuance: I for example think Hamas is evil. But that does not mean I support Israel. Israel denies Palestinians their basic human rights, kills innocent people, and displaces people from their homes. It places palestinians as second class citizens.
They would be doing this whether or not there was a villain to oppose them, and they do it both when Hamas attacks and when they don't. They have an absurd amount of wealth and power. They have a military that absolutely crushes people when they do their thing, both in "peace" time and at war. The evil that Israel is capable of is simply not accessible to the likes of Hamas.
It is interesting that similar sentiments aren't leveled against Israeli police & military when they slaughter innocent people.
It would be weird and suspicious if I did that right?
"Well, Israel would probably have more people on their side if they didn't kill thousands of innocent people" (which they have done)
It's like you can use this line against whoever you don't like to justify not liking them.
My sincere question is, what do you actually want the outcome to be? It is my opinion that if Hamas stopped going to war completely, Israel would continue to oppress Palestinians by denying them rights, displacing them from their homes, and keeping them as second class citizens on the basis of race.
Yeah, that seems like a fairly lean education on the topic. If you're going to receive an education on something it probably shouldn't be just the bare minimum?
"Palestine" is not the one that did this. Hamas is a terrorist group, and their actions do not justify the fact that the Israeli government operates an apartheid state where people are given rights, status, and property on the basis of race, and also participates in the slaughter of innocent people.
This isn't a "whoever's worse should lose" situation. Israel commits human rights violations and Hamas is a terrorist group.
In order to learn about sex you're going to have to learn about either straight sex, gay sex, or both. Turns out both types of sex happen to exist. If you're going to learn about straight sex you should probably learn about gay sex too in case you're gay. If you're trans the topic of puberty and your changing body gets 10 times more complicated. You should probably learn about that in case you're trans. It would be helpful for queer kids and the things they experience to not be left out of sex ed, also so that kids who don't know there's some form of queer yet don't grow up thinking that they're broken.
Since both straight and gay sex exists, and because trans people exist too, learning about sex from those perspectives is important.
This kind of education is what could have stopped an entire country from thinking that AIDS is caused by being gay.
Excluding queer sexuality and gender from sex education is what we've been doing since forever, and surprise it's left queer kids unprepared for the things they will encounter, and the other kids with the kinds of assumptions that you express here.
Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn't pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say "workplace democracy"
I'm aware of all of this, but most of the software I use is Windows only. Recommending GIMP/whatever seems like enough to a proud Linux user, but it really just doesn't cut it. I'm savvy enough to get rid of all the stuff I hate about windows or switch to Linux, but I'm comfortable enough to stay with wondoes
You won't hear from the ones that don't.