donuts @ donuts @kbin.social

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4

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673

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yo someone check in on this dude's wife and kids, right?

He's not wrong.

Meh, to me BlueSky is really just the dude who made Twitter deciding he wanted to try making Mastodon too.

Don't get me wrong, it's certainly better than "X" at this point, but I prefer Mastodon and the Fediverse in every way. (Features, community, population, etc). If BlueSky was compatible with ActivityPub then it'd be easy to recommend, but it seems unlikely for now at least.

He still needs to spend most of the rest of his life being "rehabilitated" in jail or in a psychiatric facility.

You don't simply get to inflict a potentially lethal and disabling traumatic brain injury against someone and then get out of jail free because you're "sorry" [that you got in trouble]. This man, and people like him, need to spend time away from society so that they can truly have time to process what they've done. Anything else would be an injustice to the victims.

Some brain injuries can lead to fates which are far worse than imprisonment or death; paralysis, inability to communicate, mental retardation, excrutiating and random neuropathic pain, and other things that have major implications for quality of life. And any person who would intentionally inflict such an injury on another person needs to go away for a long, long time.

I was taught growing up that we are ALL just 1 brain injury away from a drastically worse life, and it's true.

Here's a great follow-up experiment: leave "X" and never turn back.

Netanyahu and Hamas have spent decades propping eachother up in a symbiotic relationship driving people on both sides towards militant extremism. Netanyahu's security theater politics only ever benefited from Hamas terror attacks within Israel, and in return he and his administration preferred Hamas over more peaceful and legitimate Palestinian movements. Both of them always wanted a fight, and now that's exactly what they've got.

In other words, they were made for eachother and neither has any business leading their respective lands.

Bundy has wormed his way out of legal trouble before...

This dude gets more unhinged and desperate every passing day, but a huge chunk of Americans just can't see it. It's crazy.

Is Hamas not the slightest bit culpable for using a hospital to stage militant operations? I think they are.
Is it not a brazen war crime to use the sick and injured as a human shield? In fact, it is.

Hamas militants should be nowhere near any hospital, school, place of worship, or other place where civilians and noncombatants may be gathering. To use places like this as a base of operations is both cowardly and completely against international norms and laws. The IDF would have zero justification for any military operation at Al Shifa Hospital had Hamas not made the horrible decision to use it, and the suffering people within it, as a shield. For context:

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Optional Protocols of 1977 (the main treaties of International Humanitarian Law – IHL) set a range of minimum standards for the conduct of hostilities. They are based upon the fundamental principle of distinction between civilians and other protected persons, on the one hand, and those who take part in hostilities (combatants for short).

The term “civilian” refers to individuals or objects (e.g., premises) that do not have a direct role in hostilities (See Rule 5 and Rule 9 of the Study on customary international law by the International Committee of the Red Cross – ICRC). An attack against a civilian person or object is therefore generally a violation of IHL and may constitute a war crime. A person or object can however lose its civilian status if it starts making an effective contribution to military action. It would then become a legitimate military objective (and hence a target) (See Rule 10 of the Study on customary international law by the ICRC). This determination must however be unequivocal: when in doubt as to whether a school or hospital has become a military objective, there is a presumption that it retains its civilian status.

Even attacks against legitimate military targets must, however, follow two additional principles: 1) the principle of proportionality – whereby an attack that would cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited (See Rule 14 of the Study on customary international law by the ICRC) – and 2) the principle of precaution in attack – which states that constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects. All feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects (See Rule 15 of the Study on customary international law by the ICRC).

https://watchlist.org/publications/what-does-international-law-say-about-attacks-on-schools-and-hospitals/

Hamas are certainly not ignorant of this, and so they must know that by using the Al Shifa Hospital as a strategic location they are deliberately putting a target on it, so why would they do it?

Maybe it was internally motivated or maybe it was external pressure form the people around him... but still he chose to be a bigot instead of simply accepting or embracing that people can want to be different than they are. At any point he could have accepted who he was and what he wanted from life, but he rejected that, even though it was the authentic truth.

It's sad that this guy, and so many other people like him, would sooner give up on life itself than simply rejecting their past bigotry. It says a lot.

Of course a guy who can't separate fapping from family also can't separate politics from religion.

Sure, it helps on one side of the equation, but on the Hamas side their sugar daddies are seemingly only pressuring them to go further do more.

Hold up. Let's be 100% real about the situation in Gaza for a minute: it takes both parties to arrange a ceasefire.

Those parties of course being the Israeli government (still regrettably under the impotent-feeling, "security"-focused war monger Netanyahu, by the way) and Hamas (a group that was founded on antisemitic genocide, who recently waged the largest mass killing of innocent Jews since the Holocaust, who still holds somewhere upwards of 400 innocent hostages somewhere in Gaza, and who have themselves rejected the idea of a peaceful solution to the current situation).

That's right--both the Netanyahu administration and Hamas represent one-time democratically elected but largely corrupt regimes who ran on their extreme and staunchly militant approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They both did things to prop each other up and to push the region towards militant extremism. They both wanted a fight, and it's not really a surprise that a fight is exactly what we've ended up with.

As America is a key ally to Israel, obviously the Biden administration has a lot of potential (though not infinite, as we've seen time and again) to pressure the Netanyahu admin. But they certainly don't have enough sway to get Israel to give up their counter-assault on Hamas, and especially to take back the hundreds of civilian hostages who are being held in Gaza. Furthermore, the countries that have sway over Hamas (like Iran, Russia to name two big ones) have made no attempt to get Hamas to back down, and in fact all signs show that they have been helping Hamas and cheering them on.

Kushner-esque naivety and ignorance aside, there is no push-button solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict today and there never has been. They are clearly further from peace than they have been for decades, and neither side is willing or ready to back down. A ceasefire is not on the cards, and it won't be until Israel and Hamas come to some kind of agreement.

The people who understand this simple and sad truth are just being realistic. People want to complain about Biden, but at the same time why is nobody acknowledging that his position on this is currently no different than that of Bernie Sanders? Are people going to sit here with a straight face and call Bernie a "genocidal maniac" too?

Almost mobody likes what they're seeing in Gaza (other than Putin and Iran), but anybody who says that there's a American-oriented, simple, unilateral, turn-key solution to stopping the violence is just plainly talking out of their ass.

Somehow our democracy survived

Frankly this remains to be seen...

The number of people attacking and attempted to alter America's fundamental democratic systems in their favor is still frighteningly and disgustingly high. We are nowhere near in the clear, especially with so many knuckle-dragging morons willing to overlook the facts and undermine the truth in order to push their political agenda.

• Until the MAGA Republicans unanimously and unambiguously acknowledge Trump's loss in 2020, American democracy remains in real, existential danger.
• Until low information voters on the center and the left unanimously and unambiguously acknowledge the real threats that fascist authoritarian movements in our country pose, American democracy remains in real, existential danger.

I really wish I could say that the only problem was the Trump people (who as of right now having Trump polling better than Biden, by the way), but the sad truth is that there are people like Melkath here who are seemingly more than happy to see an emboldened, unhinged, untethered and outwardly vindictive version of Trump rise to power once again, surrounded by even more like-minded yes-men than ever before.

Trump and the people around him made it abundantly clear to everyone that he had no intention of conceding in 2016 or 2020, even before election day. His actions and words on and after election day in 2020 made it even more obvious that he had no intention of facilitating a peaceful transition of power to any other government. Why on Earth would anyone even dare to seriously suggest that he would be willing to do so in 2028 under any circumstances?

We would truly be the world's dumbest country to allow someone like him to take hold of power once again, especially knowing that he would be doing so with less constraints and even less intent to ever relinquish power to anyone else (Republican or Democrat, by the way). And yet here we are once again, at the start of an election year listening to dipshits and assholes on the internet (perhaps disingenuously) undermine the seriousness of the threats that we face.

The time to tolerate and humor these brazenly foolish ideas is long past, imo.

In 2024 you're either on team Biden or team Trump, and anyone who is on Trump's team is an enemy of democracy no matter what form of twisted bullshit rhetoric they decide to use to justify it.

I'm sorry to say it, but you're a bad joke.

This massive push to make Trump the big bad wolf as scary as possible to scare people into voting for Biden when they fundamentally disagree with his actions is really getting ridiculous.

Cheeto and his buffoon squad are not competent enough to be nearly as dangerous as the media is trying to scare us into believing.

To describe a first-hand account from a witness' sworn testimony in a legal proceeding as a "massive push" or something the "media is trying to scare us into believing" shows that you have a very weak grasp on media literacy. The last thing you should be attempting to do is create narratives on behalf of Trump--he already has an army of useful idiots downplaying his fascist actions, so he doesn't really need you.

Their "coup" was just walking into the capitol, literally smearing shit on the walls, and then getting locked up in prison for doing it.

An unsuccessful coup is still a attempted coup, just like an unsuccessful murder is still an attempted murder.

Not to mention that you're downplaying what happened on election day, on and around January 6th, and multiple points in between and since. Here's a small sample of actions by Trump and his allies:

• Trump and his allies call for the vote counting to stop on election day, ultimately leading to the harassment of volunteer election workers.
• Trump and his allies gain unauthorized and unsupervised access to voting machines in contested states.
• Trump and his allies organize multiple slates of fake electors in an attempt to change the outcome of elections in states that he had lost.
• Trump and his allies continuously spread lies and disinformation about the 2020 election, despite knowing internally and losing nearly 100 court cases on their demonstrably bogus claims.
• Trump and his allies discuss invoking martial law and the insurrection act to forcibly and illegally steal voting machines from contested states.
• Trump pressured Pence into overturning his election loss during the certification process, despite being told that it was illegal to do so by his own staff.
• Trump not only called for mass demonstrations on January 6th that he described as being "wild", but he also personally ordered his armed, dangerous and violent crowd to assault the US Capitol in order to force Senate Republicans into going along with his plan to overturn the 2020 election.

I could do more, but frankly I don't have all day to fight against stupid disingenuous bullshitters. I'm sure that you know all of this stuff already, because it's not like it isn't common knowledge. So I guess the real question is, "why lie about it?".

Maybe it's because you want Trump and his increasingly fascist supports to further take control of the United States government. But either way, it's not Biden who is damaging the country, it's the fascists who support Trump, and the ignorant/complicit people like you who un/knowingly empower them.

One thing is for sure, the next Trump administration is showing many signs of being more fascist, more authoritarian, more autocratic, and more dangerous than the last. And I personally don't believe that he and the people who support him have any intention of ever allowing for a peaceful transition of power to any other democratically elected leader, based not on some kind of "lugenpresse narrative", but purely on their own actions and words.

Just walking into the Capitol... and injuring 138 police officers, hospitalizing 15 of them... in an attempt to stop the certification of a democratic election and inject multiple slates of fake electors into the process until the waters are muddied to the point where the outcome is decided by the Republican controlled House of Representatives.

Sure they're "worried" but we've heard it all before, haven't we?

I really can't stand the number of Republicans at every level of government and discourse who are willing to mildly furrow their brows at Trump's shitty, fascistic authoritarian behavior, only to openly vote for him on election day. They really don't give a fuck what happens to the country and are just as likely as Trump to sell their soul to the highest bidder in order to grab as much power as possible.

Which is hopefully a pretty good sign for the idea of the fediverse and open protocols in general.

Relax, you're only 25. You have plenty of time to fall madly in love, get married, fall madly out of love, get divorced, and repeat. Multiple times if you want to! People of all ages and in all walks of life are dating and getting together, so no, you're never too old.

Also as far as weight goes, in my opinion you should lose it because you want to lose it, not simply because you think it'll make you more attractive to others. You're more likely to keep it off that way, and when it comes to building meaningful relationships I think being fit is much less important than being yourself and being comfortable in your own skin.

Lol, and you completely ignore me saying “Not all laws are just. Not everything just is a law.”

I don't disagree or take issue with that part.

If you want to focus on the law, go right on ahead. I don’t even know why you’d bother replying to someone who clearly states they are not focusing on the law telling them what the law says.

You responded to me. I responded to you. That's how conversations work among people who aren't terminally online.

I was talking about the law because the law is objective. Whether you personally feel something is justified is subjective and irrelevant. One person's mind can justify anything. Another person might say that no use of military force is ever justified. While a third person might choose to justify the actions of one side over another based on their ideological alignment or political affiliation.

You’re biased towards Israel so you argue against anything that criticizes it.

Do you not see that it's just as easy for me to baselessly say you're biased towards Hamas so you argue against anything that Israel does?

I won't make that argument because it's weak and, frankly, more than a little bit petty and embarrassing. You have to be pretty shameless to go there.

I'm on the side of the innocent, which you would understand if you read the substance of what I'm saying. Anybody who is on the side of the innocent can easily determine that Hamas are shit eating cowardly bitches for fighting from hospitals, and in doing so they are only further hurting the innocent.

Anyway, you're boring me with this shit. I'm not an IDF general bombing hospitals, nor am I a Hamas terrorist taking cover behind injured children, so take your pent up frustrations on them instead.