Prescriptivism is mostly just an unprincipled mishmash of shibboleths someone pulled out of their rear end hundreds of years ago, classism, and knee-jerk reactions against language change.
For example - why do people distinguish less vs fewer to refer to countable vs uncountable nouns? Because someone wrote in 1770 that they thought that distinction was elegant, despite not actually reflecting the way English at the time was spoken.
Why is ain't "not a word"? Because it originated in the speech of poor people, and was used less commonly by rich people. People roll their eyes at new business-speak because it comes from rich, powerful people, but look down their nose at language innovations from poor hillbillies and other disfavored groups.
And you can find writings from old prescriptivists complaining about literally every change in the language, such as hating the new ambigious use of singular 'you' when 'thou' was perfectly good and unambiguous or hating phrases like 'very pleased'.
A pogrom[a] is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews.[1] The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).
Arabs wouldn't have called something like the 1929 Palestine riots a "pogrom" or a "riot", because they didn't speak English, French, Yiddish, or Russian. Things have different names in different languages. They call it the Thawrat al-Burāq.
In English, we might use either the more specific Russian loanword pogrom, or the more general French loanwords riot or massacre. Labeling something a riot doesn't mean it has to have been done by the French, and labeling something a pogrom doesn't mean it has to have been done by the Russians, even if that's the origin of the loanword...
People lie about their age all the time. There's been many elderly people with badly documented births who fudged the numbers and added a decade or five to their age.
Unless there's good documentation, be skeptical of extreme longevity claims.
What exactly does it mean to be an apartheid state?
Apartheid was explicitly racialized discrimination. White citizens and black citizens had vastly different rights under the law. Black South African citizens, for example, couldn't vote for parliamentary representatives by 1959.
Israel is different, in that most legal discrimination is on the basis of citizenship. Arab-Israeli citizens face a lot of private racism, but their legal rights are completely different vs Arabs in Palestine without Israeli citizenship.
The difference between Arab Israelis and people in Gaza isn't racial, it's whether they lived in Gaza or in what was partitioned into Israel, and if they fled during the 1948 war or not.
Israel's regime is deeply problematic in many ways. Whether it's aparthied or not seems mostly in how you generalize your definition of apartheid. If apartheid must be explicitly racialized discrimination against citizens, Israel is obviously not an apartheid state. If discriminating against non-citizens counts, Israel is an apartheid state.
Imperial basically developed by picking a useful measure at each given scale.
For example, a mile was originally 1000 paces, and wasn't standardized at all. The first Roman legion to march down a road would stick mile markers down based on the length of their stride.
A furlong was one agricultural furrow long - the distance you'd plow with your Ox.
A foot was originally someone's literal foot.
It's inconsistent for the same reason a meter doesn't go neatly into a light year. That doesn't make it good, but it's a very human system of units.
One problem with units is defining them precisely.
For example, a meter is ostensibly "one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle". That's not exactly precisely defined because the earth isn't a perfect sphere.
So currently, a meter is defined to be the distance light travels in a vacuum in 9192631770 / 299,792,458 hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133.
Rather than doing the same sort of thing with updating the standard definition of a foot or pound, the US just piggybacked off the work precisely defining metric units and defined imperial in terms of metric.
So now a foot is officially the precise distance light travels in some number of hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133, and the US government didn't need to do a thing.
Fundamentally, you can't. The same as how a gas car can't avoid a $5k transmission or engine replacement. Cars being totaled due to their most expensive part failing isn't really a new thing or unexpected. Beaters are sold for scrap literally every day because it's not worth repairing them.
All cars have a limited lifetime. For ICE cars, that's on average around 12 years, and things often start going wrong around ~150k miles. You can get particularly well-maintained cars to last much longer, but most people don't. Classic cars are mostly a hobbyist thing for a reason.
The question isn't "will the battery eventually die", its "will the battery last 15-20 years while still having 60-80% of its initial capacity?"
And based on real-world data, the answer appears to be "yes, unless you have a lemon or really abuse your battery." Lemons are also nothing new.
First of all, we already have good electric distribution infrastructure, but don't have an industrially-sized hydrogen distribution infrastructure. It's way easier to install a new charging site than a new hydrogen refueling site. Building hydrogen out will be expensive, unless you're talking about vehicles with a centralized depot, like busses or ferries.
Second, fuel cells aren't really that efficient right now, and neither is electrolysis. Due to losses at each step, 100 miles worth of green hydrogen is way, way more expensive than 100 miles worth of electricity.
With more research, that could change. But for now, there's a reason you don't see many FCEVs.
Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.
Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn't really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.
The headline said she's not apologizing for her earlier remarks, not that she refuses to consider that it might have been a case of friendly fire.
In fact, the article itself shows she's not doubling down. She's just not apologetic about taking initial reports at face value.
"Our office cited an AP report yesterday that the IDF had hit a Baptist hospital in Gaza. Since then, the IDF denied responsibility and the US intelligence assessment is that this was not done by Israel," she wrote. "It is a reminder that information is often unreliable and disputed in the fog of war (especially on Twitter where misinformation is rampant). We all have a responsibility to ensure information we are sharing is from credible sources and to acknowledge as new reports come in."
"Our office cited an AP report yesterday that the IDF had hit a Baptist hospital in Gaza. Since then, the IDF denied responsibility and the US intelligence assessment is that this was not done by Israel," she wrote. "It is a reminder that information is often unreliable and disputed in the fog of war (especially on Twitter where misinformation is rampant). We all have a responsibility to ensure information we are sharing is from credible sources and to acknowledge as new reports come in."
Omar called for a "fully independent investigation to determine conclusively who is responsible for this war crime."
It sounds like she acknowledges Israel probably isn't behind it, but also isn't apologizing for her initial remarks like some Republicans were calling for. The story should probably mention that higher up and more explicitly, rather than burying the lede.
The knesset (Israel's only lesgislative body) uses party-list proportional voting, using closed party lists and the d'hont method for apportioning seats.
Basically, each party publishes a list of candidates. As long as that party gets at least 3.25% of the vote, they'll get a seat.
On the plus side, everyone has a voice. On the minus side, it's not hard for the crazies to get a seat at the table and an outsized voice due to having to make a governing coalition.
The direct problem isn't that the other side has a different religion, it's that the other side essentially has competing land claims, and a competing nationalist vision.
Right.
But those nationalist visions aren't entirely secular in origin. For both Hamas and religious zionists, they're rooted in their religion.
This isn't religiously motivated violence the same way that the Spanish Inquisition was. But religion is pretty deeply baked into the conflict, in some very important ways.
Misfires happen, but "rocket falls short of target on empty field" isn't a news story; you'll never hear about it. You'll only hear about them when they result in tragedy.
Rockets occasionally misfire and don't make it to their destination. Israel is claiming that's what happened - that a Hamas rocket fell well short of its intended target.
Hamas, as mentioned, is an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood. The Muslim brotherhood still exists in Egypt, despite Egypt not oppressing Muslims. Hamas might not have split off into a separate organization, but they'd basically still exist without Israel.
More to the point, though, why Israel? Why did Jews want to establish a state in Israel? Are you really going to argue that had nothing to do with religion? The second intifada was literally caused by Ariel Sharon visiting the Al-Aqsa mosque. Clearly, that had nothing to do with religion either.
I'm not saying that the conflict is purely religious. It's a complex blend of religion and politics.
Arguing that religion has nothing to do with it is ridiculous.
Prescriptivism is mostly just an unprincipled mishmash of shibboleths someone pulled out of their rear end hundreds of years ago, classism, and knee-jerk reactions against language change.
For example - why do people distinguish less vs fewer to refer to countable vs uncountable nouns? Because someone wrote in 1770 that they thought that distinction was elegant, despite not actually reflecting the way English at the time was spoken.
Why is ain't "not a word"? Because it originated in the speech of poor people, and was used less commonly by rich people. People roll their eyes at new business-speak because it comes from rich, powerful people, but look down their nose at language innovations from poor hillbillies and other disfavored groups.
And you can find writings from old prescriptivists complaining about literally every change in the language, such as hating the new ambigious use of singular 'you' when 'thou' was perfectly good and unambiguous or hating phrases like 'very pleased'.