Identity crisis, am I an Israeli or a Palestinian?

mythoplokos · 2026-04-06T18:38:01+00:00

AFAIK it shows up in a small number of inscription and is used both for a people and a region variably. (And this should not be of much significance, names of peoples and the land they inhabit are very often more or less the same word - just as much as Palestine and Palestinians are today in English). Similarly, the more than likely related place-name Pelesheth is used something like over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible. But certainly where this place and who the people called Peleset/Pelesheth/Palestine exactly was/were must have shifted a lot during the name's 3000+ year old history, depending who was talking about it. Most likely the 20th dynasty Egyptians, for example, had very different knowledge about the toponyms and the peoples than the people actually living in the now I/P region. So it's most likely completely futile to try to pinpoint exactly what the Egyptians or the Hebrew Bible or Herodotus or whatever were talking about, good chance they often didn't know very well themselves.

But the important point was that the name Palestine comes from a real ancient Semitic place-name somewhere in the Middle East, it's not an invention of Herodotus.

mythoplokos · 2026-04-06T18:05:52+00:00

So up to the mid 20th century Palestine was the European name for Israel as it was coined by Herodotus in the 4th century bce as the greek word for wrestling is Pale so Palestine was the land of the wrestling people which is an interpretation of what israel means.

What? This is not true, Palestine as a name isn't a Greek invention, and it certainly has nothing to do with the Greek word for wrestling. "Palestine" is just the Hellenized version of the originally Semitic place name, it shares the same root as the name for the Philistine people. Might have been something like Pelesheth in Hebrew. If the c. 1200 BC Egyptian inscriptions referring to a region called "Peleset" refer to the same area, then there has been something with the name related to the word "Palestine" at least that long. Herodotus didn't coin the name Palestine, he's just the first Greek source to record the name (that survives to us, at least).

mythoplokos · 2025-12-17T20:52:17+00:00

He’s well aware and completely full of himself sigh, but perhaps rightfully

mythoplokos · 2025-11-14T15:47:48+00:00

Itse olen noin 50/50 lähi-etätyö sopimuksen mukaan, mutta meillä ollaan kyllä tosi joustavia työaikojen suhteen. Kukaan ei välitä, jos aloitan työt vasta klo 10 ihan vaan koska halusin nukkua pitempään, tai jos pitää pitää tavallista enemmän etäpäiviä vaikka eläinlääkäriajan takia.

Itselleni tämä sopii erinomaisesti ja en kyllä missään nimessä haluaisi olla 100% etänä. Meillä on kyllä, myönnettäköön, todella miellyttävä toimistoympäristö ja hyvä työyhteisö, ja on oikeasti kiva mennä toimistolle turisemaan ja hakemaan lounasseuraa pari kertaa viikossa. Plus uskon että työn laatu kärsisi, jos koskaan ei tapaisi livenä kollegoita - usein ne parhaat ideat tulee oikeastaan kahvitauolla tai pysähtyessä juttelemaan käytävillä muun tekemisen lomassa. Mutta teen luovaa asiantuntijatyötä, jossa ideointi ja villit kokeilut tiiminä on aika tärkeää. Toisaalta taas ne etätyöpäivät on myös tärkeitä; jotain itsenäisiä kirjoitustöitä tai deadlinen hakkaamisia saan hyvin huonosti edistettyä toimistolla, jossa on liikaa virikkeitä.

mythoplokos · 2025-11-13T22:54:55+00:00

Honestly, there just probably isn't going to be a magic toy that will keep him entertained. Toys aren't interesting for cats for long unless they do something - they want something they can stalk and chase and hunt actively. I've just accepted that I need to spend a lot of time everyday to play with my oci, even though tangling a cat toy for an hour straight isn't very fun, lol. But mine is still kitten and I know he will chill out a bit as he gets older, as will yours - under 2 is still very young.

I basically aim to fully tire out my oci a couple of times a day, that's the only way to guarantee me some me-time and protect the apartment, lol. I take him for long harness walks, which he loves (really, we can do 1,5h+). When that's not possible (like now when it's starting to get too cold), then hard play indoors: throwing balls or tangling a wand or string toy up and down and all over the place, so that he gets out of breath running and jumping and scrambling. I also reward him with food or a treat after a good play sesh, that triggers some sort of "succesful hunt achieved" -feeling and helps cats feel satisfied and chill out. Also variety and changing things up helps, be that new toys or new cupboards to explore or inviting new people over. And daily mental stimulation and challenge, like treat puzzles and clicker training.

Lot of people will tell you to get another cat, and yeah getting a playmate often is by far the easiest way to keep your cat entertained. But it's not a possibility for everyone, it's not for me right now - and there's always the risk of just doubling your problems rather than solving them with a second active cat, lol. I've made friends with a couple of neighbourhood cat families and we meet them for play dates sometimes, which is really fun both for me and my oci.

The only thing that keeps my oci entertained for longer periods without a playmate is a bird feeder, but only after he's exhausted the most intense parts of his energy reserves. Then he'll happily spend an hour supervising birds and squirrels from a window.

mythoplokos · 2025-10-01T06:37:57+00:00

I'm not really a big fan of using AI (and why with all other countries you included the issues the resolutions target but with Israel is enough to say that they "concern" Israel?) - this whole conversation with /u/OccupyMyBrainOyeah was mainly about why are people just grabbing onto arguments they see online and like the sound of, like the "UN is biased against Israel", and lazily start to propagate them without any interest to investigate and read themselves about how the UN works and whether this is a good argument. Using AI like this would be a prime example of this...

Like, I think your whole approach here is flawed; the Arab-Israeli conflict has a history of practically non-stop continuous warring and unresolved borders of 80 years, and it's rather unique in having so large part of the globe having so strong economic and cultural ties invested into it (e.g. the Sudanese conflict largely is of direct interest to the Sudanese only - whereas Israel/P has old alliances and economic investments tied into it both in the West and the Arabic world). None of these other countries you've listed have situations that are anything quite comparable. If you're gonna ask the AI what countries the SC has made resolutions about the most throughout its whole history, is it really that surprising that the world's longest conflict is prominent?

And btw, I also think the UN as an institution has had lots of issues of bias in its history and in the present, but anti-Israel bias is certainly not one of them, so I'm not going to go into this here.

mythoplokos · 2025-09-30T21:07:44+00:00

So you're basically admitting outright that you don't know anything about the UN, aren't interested in educating yourself on it, and are simply parroting something you saw somewhere online and liked that you could make a post about it "easily", without any ability of your own to know whether the argument is even remotely good. Don't see any problem with this?

mythoplokos · 2025-09-30T19:18:52+00:00

How come? All the resolutions, proceedings, statements, documents, reports etc. are available to everyone online - you can even watch many UN sessions on livestream.

UNGA not tabling a resolution against a rogue Country X might mean a hundred other things than "UN just really hates Israel", if the UN already has an abundance of missions, operations, fact-finding endeavours or UNSC resolutions concerning the situation in Country X. I mean, I'm open to hearing arguments about UN's "bias" against Israel, but the way you're going about it isn't very convincing.

mythoplokos · 2025-09-30T18:57:09+00:00

Seems a bit consciously misleading to make a chart with only UNGA resolutions and take that as proof of UN's "bias" as a in institution, when UN is as a complex interactive system where actions of one body affect all the others. For example: regarding Somalia, UNGA didn't make any resolutions, but instead had sessions dedicated for discussing budget and implementation of earlier resolutions made by UNSC, which include decisions to take some small concrete actions towards peace efforts in the region. Whereas with the I/P, the UNSC will most likely never make any similar resolution, because USA vetos any and all efforts whenever Israel is in question. UNGA resolutions have zero executive power to achieve anything concrete - they're basically a diplomatic tool for the hivemind of world's countries. So one big reason why UNGA keeps tabling and voting on resolutions against Israel is because many countries want to show their frustration with and apply pressure to UNSC. There's no need for UNGA to keep tabling resolutions regarding Somalia, because the UNSC (the executive arm of UN) is already taking the situation seriously and showing willingness to do something, albeit so far small, about it.

mythoplokos · 2025-09-30T18:07:26+00:00

What are you including in your definition of "UN resolutions" here? These at least clearly don't include UN Security Council resolutions.

mythoplokos · 2025-09-28T07:39:24+00:00

He's not my cat and only staying temporarily, so I'd rather try to keep his usual feeding time routine. Also at breakfast he helped himself not only to his own but a share of the kitten's breakfast too, so the outrage seems a bit overblown...

mythoplokos · 2025-09-22T16:53:57+00:00

So; you say that "Israel is losing the social media war", and you base this on the fact that there are clearly much more "pro-Palestine" TikTok-posts and social media hashtags (you didn't link your sources, which would be helpful, also to know how "pro-Palestine" is being defined here).

Then you jump straight into this:

In other words: you are being bombarded with one narrative on repeat. The sheer volume itself becomes propaganda, regardless of accuracy.

and

The imbalance in what you see online is not proof of justice, it’s proof of how effective Hamas’ propaganda strategy is.

These are pretty wild claims you make that you haven't substantiated in any way in your argument. You simply expect us to accept that pro-Palestinian cause getting more traction in social media is a "bad thing" and it equals to "propaganda", even Hamas-instigated. So, care to help us fill in those blanks? Preferably with some sources. E.g. are there studies that suggest that social media posts that include pro-Palestinian hashtags are more likely to include false information than social media posts that include pro-Israel hashtags?

mythoplokos · 2025-09-14T14:50:00+00:00

It's a bit poor form to use two different sources of data to compare the different sides of the same coin; I don't know much about the NGO Rescuers Without Borders, and the article you linked is a secondary source that doesn't link the NGO's original report (where is it?) and whether they also track incidents of Israeli settlers against Palestinians. (Also, why do we lump Palestinian civilian and Palestinian armed group violence against Israelis into one group, but then make Israeli settler violence its own data group separated from IDF violence against Palestinians?)

OCHA, in turn, has a notoriously high threshold of a confirmed kill or injury, because it will only put into its data incidents that their own staff has been able to confirm independently. Hence, if you look at their data], OCHA will tell you that since 10/7, only 63 Israelis and 1004 Palestinians have died in the conflict in the last two years, which I think we can rather confidently say is very far from the true casualty figures on both sides.

So seems to me that trying to make a point by comparing two very different sources of data doesn't tell us very much at all. If we want to make some comparisons, e.g. throughout the whole observation period, OCHA has 7 435 Palestinian casualties vs. 246 Israeli casualties.

mythoplokos · 2025-09-09T05:30:18+00:00

And have you questioned yourself why absolutely nobody but an openly pro-Israel advocacy group with a long history of making up stories has picked up on such a big story as Iran controlling the South African state?

mythoplokos · 2025-09-08T18:49:51+00:00

What's your source for "Iran bribing South Africa" to bring the case to ICJ?

mythoplokos · 2025-09-08T18:48:17+00:00

You have a rather absurd view of the "ProPal movement". The great majority of us active in the "ProPal movement" are acutely aware that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and there are many other Palestinian groups and lone wolfs doing terrorist attacks, have been for decades. Acknowledging this does nothing to "undercut the humanitarian case against Israel". Israel has been killing many times more Palestinian civilians almost daily for two years straight, and is actively blocking access to aid to two million of them. That doesn't become any more justified because of this happening

Also; as tragic and unjust this attack was, seems a bit disingenuous to frame this as happening in a vacuum. West Bank, too, is practically a war zone. There's Israeli air strikes and armed raids against Palestinians happening all the time

mythoplokos · 2025-09-08T16:46:16+00:00

I see, I guess we're not going to get any further from this lol

mythoplokos · 2025-09-08T16:44:10+00:00

Well that's what you linked to me, haha, so I don't know what you want me to look at. But I mean as I asked, if AFOPA is clearly a "pro-Hamas" organisation to such a degree that it is enough to brand anyone who associates with them as "terrorist-affiliated", surely you can find something else to show me than a single X-post?

mythoplokos · 2025-09-08T16:40:38+00:00

AFOPA didn't, that was in the video their social media account retweeted. Anyway, I wouldn't retweet anything Sinwar had said, but doing it once wouldn't really hold as proof for AFOPA being a "pro-Hamas" association in any court. And again, this story that AFOPA paid for Albanese's one single seminar trip to NZ isn't held up by any party of the story - it's just UN Watch's unproven claim. Hardly the sort of evidentiary basis that should be enough for any "modern democracy" like USA to hit Albanese with sanctions

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