crashfrog @ crashfrog @lemm.ee

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157

Joined

2 yr. ago

They don't, though. Check. They can't. No independent body can operate freely in Gaza, it's under Hamas control. They know that Hamas can rescind whatever meager access they have, and so they figure that humanitarian purpose is better satisfied by preserving access by not angering Hamas.

But they don't have access to strike sites, they don't have access to morgues. Islam requires the dead be buried by nightfall, so there's simply no opportunity for independent observers to actually verify body counts. They're just demographically "verified" - "oh, we know about that many people lived in the apartment block, so X is a plausible figure for deaths." But that's not confirmation.

Twitter isn't losing users, it's gaining them. They may be losing advertisers but "branding" doesn't really have anything to do with that. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are, brands are otherwise meaningless to them.

Russia's openly, avowedly doing that, but of course crediting Russia with their own statements is "Russophobia" (we're not afraid of Russia, we just know it's a shithole.)

We see this happening in US as well where democrats still believe in the whole Russiagate conspiracy theory despite it having been thoroughly debunked at this point

It literally was never debunked? The Trump campaign straight-up sent internal polling data to agents of the Russian intelligence service, who then released Hillary's emails at the exact time necessary to derail media coverage of a major Trump scandal.

They were working together. Everybody knows they were. The Trump campaign openly admitted to it. The only thing that was "debunked" was "Russiagate was debunked."

Brand recognition is monetizable when you can apply it to other products. People like Apple computers; plop the logo on a phone and they'll be predisposed to buy an Apple phone.

But Twitter doesn't sell anything else. There aren't going to be any Twitter-branded products that try to monetize the brand. So what's the value of the brand lost by changing the name to "X"?

The only good guys around are the medics & doctors trying to keep people from dying

Naw, these people are bad too, it turns out. These people are willing to lie to everyone to preserve their access to Gaza and the flow of UN aid.

They're "found reliable", but not actually checked. Like, nobody actually checks Hamas' numbers; they just "confirm" them.

They don't routinely lie about it. They pre-drop little fliers that say "we're about to bomb here; if you don't want to die you better leave" and then they come back in a couple of days or weeks and bomb. What on Earth would they lie about? "Wow, a bomb went off right where we dropped leaflets saying it would, but it definitely wasn't us."

The only bombing they actually did lie about is this one, where Hamas beefed a rocket launch and struck one of their own hospitals and Israel said "yeah, we were active in the zone" before anyone knew it wasn't an Israeli weapon.

You're not going to like it, but the way you get over and past something like this is forgiveness. You have to forgive the pretentious twat who had the temerity to speak to you that way; you forgive him because that's how you eliminate his power over you. You forgive him because that's how you pull out the hooks. You forgive him because the alternative is, what? Carry this around in you forever? Find him and beat the shit out of him?

Just forgive him. Ultimately, he didn't have your gifts - the gift of grace, the gift of the expansive generosity of spirit that leads a person not to construe literally every social encounter as "which one of us is coming out on top? It better be me." The gift of not reflexively being a shithead to people, maybe. Whatever. You almost pity him. Almost.

Forgiveness is how you get past it. People don't like to hear it, but it is.

What was ever the value of Twitter as a brand? They're not in the T-shirt business.

Sure, you can definitely argue that the war in Iraq was unnecessary.

Once a week is fine. You're clean when you get out of the shower, and the towel air-dries as you're not using it. Even where I live - 65% humidity year-round - we only wash the towels once a week.

I don't think you can really argue that the war in Afghanistan was "unnecessary." We were attacked by terrorists from that country, remember?

We were never going to let OBL do 9/11 and then just walk away.

The terrible managers were the ones Romney put in! That's the whole way private equity works - they bought the company when the share price was depressed, then loaded the company with debt, paid themselves the proceeds of the loan, then liquidated the company in bankruptcy so they didn't have to pay it back. The whole private equity scheme is to operate a fraud against lenders.

I mean, I was going through college when GW Bush was elected, and here's what I remember:

1. Everyone lying about GW Bush being the "first Spanish-speaking President" (he spoke no Spanish at all), the first of many lies meant to cover up his manifest incompetence and intellectual incapability
2. Republicans shutting the government down for weeks at a time
3. A maniac, entirely fictitious scandal invented solely to hamper Al Gore's election prospects (the White House phones scandal)

What was different about that day's Republican Party than today's? We knew less about it, was all.

Consider this: the strong association of turkey with Thanksgiving means that you're not expected to eat it any any other time.

I think if you want to understand racism, you can't understand it as the failure to have certain pieces of knowledge. Racists generally aren't unaware that people experience suffering when they're held down or held back from their appropriate station in life.

What racists generally believe, if you're trying to be maximally charitable to the views of racists (ugh), is that human suffering also comes from pushing people into societal roles that are above their station. The individual so pushed suffers, and society suffers for having "the wrong people" in important roles. For instance, that's the view that held that slavery for Black Americans was good for them.

I think a racist in that strain would play the Detroit game and not be convinced, since the game likely doesn't address that position at all.