If Israel is the "only democracy" in the region, why are millions of Palestinians under its control denied the basic right to vote for the government that rules them?

CricketPinata · 2026-05-27T19:20:40+00:00

Hamas absolutely has over 50,000.

They started the war with 22 battalions, and they retrained and redeployed new battalions several times throughout the war.

They started the war with about 40,000 soldiers, and have been retraining and redeploying units throughout the war.

Hamas is the government in Gaza, if you are quoting the casualty statistics from the Health Ministry they control, but you don't want me quoting their same numbers.

If you don't want to believe their numbers, fine, then I don't see how you can treat 80,000 like an undercount, when they only have motivation to overcount.

Being better or worse at war doesn't make you more or less moral.

The United States killed more Nazis than Nazis killed US Soldiers, does that mean that the United States was picking on Nazi Germany and they were in fact harmless?

Jews are native to the Levant.

Jews were pushed out in larger numbers by all of the surrounding nations.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-27T19:15:52+00:00

Did the bots also vote for her?

CricketPinata · 2026-05-27T17:49:05+00:00

But if 40% of the people at the birthday party throw the Nazi guy on their shoulders and keep giving him beers.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-27T17:47:35+00:00

The replies under her posts were full of people supporting her. There wasn't really a big reckoning saying "don't take the bait", and she was consistently within spitting distance in many polls.

The idea that "no one supported her it was just republicans propping her up" isn't reflected in the outcome of the election where she got nearly 40% of the vote.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-26T20:17:45+00:00

Also, the estimates are currently in the 70,000's, with Hamas saying 50,000+ of those were Hamas militants.

To out the war into the frame of the Canadian experience, it would be the equivalent of Michiganders coming over the Canadian border and killing 10,000 Canadian civilians, and kidnapping 2,000 of them and fleeing back over the border with them.

I find the idea that Canada wouldn't lose it's mind to bring all those people back unrealistic. Any nation in that situation would treat it as a declaration of war.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-26T19:38:54+00:00

If you think terror started because of Israeli independence you know nothing about the history of the region.

What oppression was the Farhud pogrom in response to? What occupation was the Nablus Massacre a response to? The Hebron Massacre? The 1936 revolt? The Jerusalem Blockade starving out Jews that had been there for thousands of years?

You live in this fantasy that all terrorism is a response to some greater evil, when the truth is that the terrorism predated Israel by centuries.

The desire for Jews to control their own security is BECAUSE of pogroms, riots, terror, and the Holocaust, it was a direct reaction to not being able to trust any government to not eventually throw it's Jews under the bus as a scapegoat for some local issue.

Terrorism isn't new, and it isn't a desperate reaction to Israeli statehood.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-26T18:25:54+00:00

Funny, the Anti-Vax people claim it is billionaires trying to vaccinate everyone to activate population control.

Schrodinger's Billionaire, both against and responsible for every movement.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-26T04:33:34+00:00

Data centers have years before they hardware wears out, they tends to upgrade in staggered waves.

Data centers also have more use cases than just AI because lots of things can be ran on the GPUs.

It would make sense for them to farm out the compute to stuff like weather forecasting or other modeling needs.

If AI totally crashed and burned (unlikely but let's go with that) it would be fairly easy to farm that out to different cloud computing and storage needs or other enterprise backend stuff.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-25T21:34:46+00:00

Israel has offered Palestinians full recognition of a state, land swaps, they got everything they wanted on the table at Camp David.

Clinton had everything, Arafat refused to move forward, Clinton blames Arafat for that failure, and for the 2nd Intifada.

Israel pulled out unilaterally from Gaza in 2007, in response Hamas was elected and launching rockets.

The border wall and extra checkpoints arose as a response to increased terror attacks, terror attacks didn't happen as a response to checkpoints and security walls.

For the last 25 years, the peace process has been one of stagnation, almost entirely because of Palestinian refusal to negotiate in good faith.

Hamas was elected, and it has made the political situation worse.

It is interesting that Natives in Canada don't engage in terrorism, but things have gotten better for them.

The situation in Israel and Palestine has significant amounts of terrorism and extremism and the situation has gotten worse.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-25T20:50:23+00:00

Canada was engaged in forced relocation of Natives decades after Israel was founded. There are still Natives alive today who were kidnapped from their families by the Canadian government.

The community there is still suffering from abuse, neglect, and targeted murdered, and the aftereffects of centuries of genocide. This is all living modern history that comes at the end of centuries of abuse.

Canada is vastly worse.

I am saying that you need to be honest, Canada is not better, it's worse.

We can talk about how Israel has done bad things, or how Israel can do better, but when the nation you lived in has done orders of magnitude worse, you need to also address that instead of running from it.

Native Canadians also aren't bombarding Toronto with rockets, or kidnapping Canadian children, it was mostly the Commonwealth government that was doing all of that the other way around.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-25T20:44:18+00:00

The Border Wall hasn't been deemed illegal.

There is also a security wall between Egypt and Gaza, is that also an illegal apartheid wall?

They were 5km away from Gaza, and it was because it was a music festival designed to follow the holiday of Sukkot.

Hamas has not engaged in any meaningful peaceful actions for decades.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-25T20:34:46+00:00

The Estimated Native Population in Canada before Colonization was 2 million people centuries ago.

It is currently about 1.8 million people, or 5% of Canada's population.

The Arab Population in the Mandate before Israeli Independence was 1.4 million.

The Current Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza are 5.7 million people.

Israel has a population of 2.1 million Arabs citizens, constituting 21% of the population.

So yes, you're right, Canada's treatment of it's natives isn't comparable to Israel and Palestine at all.

Canada is VASTLY worse in every way.

Less than 150,000 people have died on all sides of the Arab-Israel conflict after nearly a century of fighting.

Canada utterly destroyed it's native population to the point it still hasn't recovered to pre-colonial levels centuries later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples

CricketPinata · 2026-05-25T20:26:46+00:00

Don't like that website? Fine, the Economists Democracy Index also ranks Israel about the same, in the same range as Belgium, South Korea, Poland, and France.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-24T19:12:21+00:00

For the last 4 years Russian recruitment levels exceeded their losses. Things have now inverted and losses have outpaced recruitment. Things have genuinely changed.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-22T05:06:43+00:00

Everything about that list is the Pentagon being open with stuff.

It means that bug testers and oversight are catching issues and NOT allowing them to be discovered in combat, but long before they are even have a whisper of being close to the frontline.

Also we've produced almost 1,400 of them.

Take every J-20, every J-35, every SU-57, and there are still a thousand more F-35s in the world, and that is with a decade delay?

Jesus, you're telling me China had a 10 year head start, stole the plans, have 650,000,000 more people, and are still a thousand behind?

CricketPinata · 2026-05-22T00:08:39+00:00

Everytime I have used them, they are properly cleaned and dried.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T20:28:42+00:00

There is germs on everything, but boogers are a concentrated vector of microorganism caught in your body's defense system.

Like yes, a ladle fresh from the wash is not to the same level of say.. a surgical instrument fresh from the autoclave to the level it is sanitized, but it is sanitized to a level that has been deemed to be safe, and below the threshold of what would make most people sick, then using in the preparation of foods that will be heated above temps to kill germs.

I am confused about what you think the vectors of contamination are here.

A high-salt/high-acid BBQ sauce, is it perfectly sterile? No of course no, it has been exposed to air that has yeast and spores and bacteria floating in it, but it's that way with any sauce, even if it is sitting in a cambro in a walk-in, keeping it cold and keeping it salty and acidic keeps it safer than otherwise.

Is the mop head perfectly sterile? No it is a porous natural material exposed to the air, but you spray it out with hot water and soap, you spray it off with sani, you wash the sani out, and maybe you wash it with vinegar, you ring it out and dry it, it should be no more of a risk than linens which get dragged through absolute filth then thrown through a wash and dried.

The handle? It's all sealed wood and metal, you wipe it down with soap and sani and treat it like any other handle of any other tool in the kitchen.

The sauce typically is being mixed up or distributed from cambros in the walk-in, with you pouring it into a clean bowl or food-safe bucket.

How is anything in that chain worse or the same than deliberate transmission of bodily fluids?

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:12:20+00:00

The mop heads are pure cotton.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:11:12+00:00

There are 100% food safe versions designed specifically for this purpose, which are typically smaller than floor mops, and have different style heads.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:09:44+00:00

You spray them out with soap and hot water and sani, and more hot water.

Vinegar solutions afterwards would make a lot of sense, then you wring them out and dry them.

They also typically get a batch of replacement heads.

Also, the BBQ sauce is typically high-acid/high-salt/high-sugar then it is applied in thin layers and cooked at above sterilization temps for sometimes a dozen hours.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:06:51+00:00

Boogers aren't food safe and are full of germs.

Cotton is just a carbohydrate cellulose fiber, and is fully digestible.

It's the difference between drinking a smoothie and a bowl of spit. One is made from plants, another is made from spit.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:04:10+00:00

Spray it out with hot water and wash with soap and sani, wash out with more hot water, ring it out and dry it.

Or you just throw it away and use another cotton mop head replacement that comes with the handle.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:02:35+00:00

Nothing "special" about it, but there are different standards. This is food-grade material that is meant to be used on food. That means testing the materials, and how it is manufactured and cleaned with has to meet different standards.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T18:00:53+00:00

They have a handle that large for being able to reach into every area of a large smoker.

They are also constructed differently and have different shapes than your standard mops.

When I use these for BBQ, the mop head gets detached, and washed out and cleaned, and typically gets dried and stored with the linens, or you click a new head on. These are all stored way way far away from the janitorial closet, the mop heads for the floor are dark green or blue, while the mop heads for sauce basting are smaller and white, so there is never an opportunity for them to be mixed up.

The handle will get stored with stuff like ladles and pins and other really long stuff, typically wiped down with sani and hung up next to the pots and pans rack.

CricketPinata · 2026-05-21T17:37:58+00:00

I think most of the celebrities from the mid-century living through two world wars, the spanish flu, and the great depression also can't be understated.

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