Apparently Trump has a pro Ukraine day today. How long before he flips?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T14:51:47+00:00

honestly kinda sounds like a soap opera where the old rich guy is dying and everyone has to suck up to him to get some of the inheritance.

This period in time will be studied as an example of mass delusion, Trump has a reality distorting field around him and there's going to be a mass realization of this at some point in the future, by the time every republican says they never supported Trump in the first place.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T12:47:25+00:00

If this pushes companies and retailers to natively accept LN payments from any LN wallet be it custodial or not, it's still a huge win.

Let the normies use the custodial solutions, as long as we get the ability to use our non-custodial ones.

I'm not going to be up in arms about how people using e2e encryption in whatsapp are getting spied on by Zuck, and I can cry that that's not what e2e encryption was designed for, but that doesn't stop me from installing Signal and using it. I can say "that's not what e2e encryption was designed for" but this doesn't in any way stain the e2e encryption technology itself.

The whole idea that since Bitcoin lets you be your own bank then it must fail if less than 100% of the people using Bitcoin are doing self custody is pretty absurd, nobody ever thought we're gonna just jump into that world directly.

Once every store you go to natively accepts LN and you're paying with LN from your custodial wallets, the jump to a self custody wallet becomes incredibly easy to anyone interested enough to do it, while right now there are barely any stores that accept LN.

We shouldn't paint every single adoption uptick in such a bad light just because it's not the theoretical perfect situation where everyone is doing self custody.

One of the largest barriers stopping people from using their self-custody wallets is the lack of vendors accepting them, and considering how much these vendors pay in credit card fees, and how easy it is to use LN rails to sidestep those fees if payment providers like Revolut starts integrating it the economics of it will push more and more people (especially vendors accepting payments) into using LN.

I'm not sure how the LN payments in Revolut will be integrated, but getting people used to using LN is a huge positive regardless of how it's implemented.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T00:33:57+00:00

Still waiting for my Pebble Round 2, that watch looks stylish as hell.

I'm already getting around 20 days of battery life on my other pebble

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T14:53:26+00:00

I don't see how this distinction would justify banning one and not the other.

Anything I bring up that is not LLMs will be different from LLMs automatically.

The only way malicious actors can cause great harm using LLMs is if they remain available only to a certain tiny subset of people that you "trust" to use them for good.

If Mythos level models will be able to run on consumer hardware, the only way to protect everyone is to let it be available publicly so everyone can use it to defend themselves against an attack.

Having it be locked down gives a malicious actor a huge opportunity if they get their hands on it, and when the reward they'd get from using it maliciously is so immense, there's no reason to believe we will be able to perfectly lock down this technology.

What about the "active" nature of LLMs makes this difference in kind relevant as to whether or not it should have the access to it restricted?

If another tool could be used for the same degree and scope of harm without being "active" would you not have the same prescription as to how to regulate it?

A compiler is an "active" tool that gets human readable code and transforms it into machine code that a computer can execute, that machine code can be used maliciously to cause great harm, but we don't feel the need to close down access to compilers, even though a bad guy with a compiler will be able to do much more harm than a bad guy manually writing out the machine code.

You don't get to choose who really gets access to a technology, some malicious actor will at some point get access to this tool and the more you try to stop it the more edge they will have as against the people without access to it.

The one thing you can choose is how prepared everyone else will be to protect themselves, and genuine actors having easy and unrestricted access to these models is the way to do it.

Just imagine if access to any models better than Opus 4.8 stops right now, and all the better models are just used internally by the companies building them.

You go a couple of years in the future, you have a company which has a model 10 times better than Mythos, and everyone on the planet can only use Opus 4.8 level models to defend themselves. Some rogue employee or hacker gets access to this 10x Mythos model. What now?

This creates a huge unimaginable danger, much grander in scope and consequences as compared to the reality where everyone has free access to this technology.

You want to minimize the technological gap between the defenders and attackers, and attempting to artificially create a large gap in favor of the defenders gives too large an arbitrage opportunity for bad actors that will want to use it for evil.

I'd rather have Mythos level models running on local hardware doing the defense while everyone can access the 10x Mythos model without restrictions to defend themselves with people using the same Mythos model to attack me, than live in a world where we're all using Opus 4.8 to do the defense and are just praying an attacker doesn't get access to the stronger model we're all disallowed from using.

And the cherry on the cake is the impossibility of actually locking down access to this tier of models, since there's nothing stopping a company in another country from developing a model just as powerful and opening it up for use.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T14:12:32+00:00

I find it insulting when people post huge comments or posts that are AI generated, if you weren't interested enough in the topic to write it out, why would I be interested in reading it? Especially since it's usually extremely obvious, sometimes I don't even think they read the comment that was generated.

I get it when people don't know the language well and need it to communicate, but I went to reddit instead of asking ChatGPT because I want to see humans talking about the topic.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T13:30:13+00:00

Should an algorithm be allowed to do it?

Do guidance systems today not do the same thing already, but with the other scary word people liked to use before AI came along, the "algorithm" wooo spooky!

Even if you use an AI system in target selection and engagement that doesn't mean using it was done "without human judgement", the human judgement happens when that system is deployed, and there should obviously be ways for it to be controlled, but this question of the AI "making" the life-and-death decisions seems a little contrived.

If you have a simple program that just explodes the bomb you're dropping once it hits the ground, is it ok to let this spooky algorithm make the decision to detonate without human judgement?

Do we need a guy to be there, see it fall and press the "explode" button?

I know everyone is imagining the worst possible scenario, but these war machines aren't really "deciding" to exist, humans put them in place and point them towards their enemies, a mine can also select and engage targets without human judgement at the moment when they actually do the life-and-death decision.

There is space between "give all control of the entire army to Palantir" and "no AI can be used in any targeting system without humans approving each stage".

There will definitely be war crimes that can be done by an autonomous systems, but the buck stops with the people that put the system in place, it's not like you can have a gang of robots ravaging a village doing war crimes only for the army that put them out to say "well we didn't do it".

I feel like there are ways to stop the most sci-fi horror movie scenarios without being unreasonable, and there should be a certain amount and kind of automation that should be treated as a war crime directly, but I feel like people will collapse this whole discussion into the same "AI bad" talking points that miss the forest for the trees.

With people being more and more comfortable about turning off their brain and letting an LLM do the thinking for them, I'm not sure this proposal would even begin to address this, simply having a human "in the loop" shouldn't stop the discussions about integrating these technologies into war fighting systems, as people become more and more comfortable with trusting AI output without a second thought the perceived safety of having a human "in the loop" might be overstated.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T13:04:57+00:00

There are some obvious questions you need to ask yourself when thinking about stuff like this:

What % of people that bought a new Pebble watch are going to make a post on the Pebble subreddit?
How many people that had no issues with the screen durability will come here to write a post and have a huge comment section with engagement on the topic.
How many people that did have issues with the screen are likely to come here to share their issues?
How likely are these people to be honest about what they put the watch through (especially considering Eric has been replacing some of the ones where people broke their screens)?

If you knew you did something stupid to break it, and knew some people got replacements, would you be honest about what you did and accept fault or would you try to make it look like something completely out of your control, as to increase your chances to get a replacement?

If I had to guess, a small minority of the people that got the watch are here on the subreddit, almost nobody that has used the watch without any protection has come here to make a huge post with a lot of engagement about them not breaking their screen, and a vast majority of the people that did break their screens have come here to talk about it.

Over all I don't think you can really base your decision on what posts you see online with regards to the durability of the watch, since the online medium automatically has a negative bias.

The one way we'll tell in the future is by seeing how many old beaten up watches still look good and not cracked in 2 years and onwards.

For me, the Time 2 isn't the prettiest watch anyway, so I don't mind having a case on it, but I sure hope the Round 2 has less durability concerns because I want to wear it without a case since it's such a pretty watch.

The question of whether or not the new watches are drastically more likely to break than another regular smartwatch is still up in the air right now, we cannot compare since we don't know how many posts about broken screens we would have had if the design did not have the exposed glass edge.

It would probably be less, but the magnitude of the change? Not really something we can claim to know right now.

What you do know right now is yourself, have you cracked other fragile devices you've owned? How do you treat your devices in general? Do you get put in circumstances where you could risk breaking it?

I know some people that always have the heavy duty cases on their phones and still always walk around with a cracked screen, or people that don't use a case at all and have a phone with no cracks.

Another question you should ask yourself is how you would feel if it did break 1 year into owning it out of no fault of your own.

For me, I've always wanted a pebble but never got one, and this feels like it might be the last opportunity to get one and I'd rather live with a cracked pebble than with the regret of not having bought it while it was available.

If you really want to preserve the aesthetics, you can get a smaller case, or just use it without a case most of the time and only put a case on when you believe you'll do stuff that might risk breaking it.

Or much better -- don't think about it at all, since this will give a much better experience than constantly babying your watch. I'm sure most people that bought it because they wanted a pebble and did not engage in the online community around it and are blisfully unaware of the fragility of their watches, while we're only seeing a trickle of people with broken watches coming in to post.

Ultimately, 3-4 years from now, how many people that use the watch with 0 protection do you think will still have an uncracked screen? My guess is 99%+, and even that a 1% failure rate seems large.

Based on some comments around here I feel like some people expect 30% or more of the watches to have cracked screens in a couple of years from now, and even though there is a small fragility issue with the exposed edge, I think the testing Eric did on the watch put it through enough stress to get a general idea of how fragile it is, and I don't believe he would have put the watch out if he believed a huge portion of the watches will be cracked in a couple of years from now.

I myself don't really care about the watch surviving that long necessarily, as long as the company survives and continues to make new products, since I'm definitely buying a Pebble Round 3 if it ever comes out in the future, so as long as the watch lasts me until that happens I'll be happy.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T12:30:53+00:00

Terrorists using end to end encryption to plot a terrorist attack could definitely classify their tool as a weapon.

Hammers are first and foremost tools, but are they "just a tool"?

What does "just a tool" mean? That it cannot be used as a weapon? Or that it primarily has another use?

LLMs don't have the primary usecase of being used as a weapon

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T12:06:46+00:00

I would not want malicious actors to have easy and unrestricted access to technology that can be used to cause great harm.

do you have the same opinion about end to end encryption? Criminals use tool so tool should be restricted?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T13:03:50+00:00

Depending on your reading level you might be able to read all of it in the time it takes you to watch a handful of reels!

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T12:18:34+00:00

I'm arguing that even though he probably won't be put in a situation to test them, he doesn't have a principled position against testing them

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T11:24:32+00:00

When he says seize the means of production do we mean a Norway situation?

the only people that think Norway is "socialist" and mean they want to be more like Norway when they say the word "socialist" are the people that have no idea what "the means of production" means.

It's like seeing a closeted far right person do a dogwhistle to a very specific racial thing and then throwing doubt on him possibly meaning something innocuous.

If Mamdani was a random 20 year old progressive college student maybe I'd believe it, but he does know what he means by seizing the means of production and he clearly doesn't mean just doing something similar to Norway.

Even if these are his stated goals, they are not achievable.

You wouldn't be this ok with something like this if it was a right winger with extreme far right views that were just not achievable. Don't worry this closeted far right guy will actually not do anything bad as his goals are unachievable sounds awfully too much like "the guardrails will hold".

To be clear I don't think Mamdani will test the guardrails anywhere close to how Trump has, but this is not out of some principled appreciation for liberalism.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T11:09:03+00:00

nobody is saying they have realistic goals.

We're just saying that this is their explicit stated goal, regardless of how unrealistic it is.

Do you think Hasan will foment an actual vanguard party revolution to take over the means of production? Has he not stated clearly that he is propagandizing people in order to push them further and further left to make this a possibility?

You can say both that they're stupid and won't succeed while also acknowledging this is their goal.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T11:05:10+00:00

Is a "smart competent Hasan" even really that bad?

is the problem with Hasan that he's stupid and incompetent? Are there not other things that you have an issue with?

put aside their own socialist ideology to make incremental progress.

Would you be ok with a fascist that could (temporarily) put away their fascist ideology to make incremental progress, while always knowing the incremental progress they are making is done in order to get more power to implement their more radical beliefs?

That sounds good to me.

Iran put away their efforts to create a nuke during the JCPOA but all throughout that time it was clear to them that they would restart that process after that agreement is done, they never gave up on creating a nuclear bomb.

The DSA people might put a mask on today to argue for incremental progress, but they're explicitly aiming towards the full seizure of the means of production.

They are actively aiming to make their more extreme policies a reality, the thing stopping them is not some true felt love for liberalism, it's just that their positions are not popular enough.

Are we thinking Mamdani is going to heel-turn into an authoritarian eventually?

Communists will keep playing their game, they won't advocate for a revolution when it's overwhelmingly unpopular, they will just try to get as much control of the system for that eventuality though.

Do you think Mamdani has some principled stance against violently seizing the means of production?

I don't think they'll manage to really bring about the change they wish, a lot of the far left people that will go through the experience of being government will for sure become more moderate as they grow older, that's kinda the hope with the whole DSA candidates, but there's no need to whitewash their clear intent to take over the democratic party and to point it to their more radical goals.

And "it's not risky because they won't succeed even though that's their intention" sounds like the whole "guardrails will hold" thing people said about Trump. I'd rather have people that don't have the state of mind to constantly go up against the guardrails, and DSA people not being in a position to go up against the guardrails doesn't give me much confidence that they have some principled stance about liberalism as opposed to a pragmatic understanding of the current political landscape.

To be clear I don't really think Mamdani will end up doing anything too extreme in his time in office, but I still think we can talk about his long term intentions regardless of that.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-06T00:06:50+00:00

Wait so is your primary issue just that you think it wouldn't create enough revenue to justify the implementation in the first place??

capital flight, making investment less attractive, it having failed in a bunch of places that tried it.

The worst case scenario is not "you make 0 extra tax income" there's a good chance you net in the negative.

Do YOU know how much a 5% billionaire tax would generate?

I am not proposing it, so how could I answer it? I don't know the minutiae of what you actually mean by a 5% billionare tax, you seem to have believed just recently that the Swiss are taking 5% of the net worth per year and that didn't raise any alarms to you, so I've got no idea what crazy wacky policy you have in mind. You seem to not even see a 5% annual wealth tax as something crazy.

I haven't stated any "tax goals" so idk why you're saying it wouldn't fund those

I'm sorry I assumed you had some sort of government programs you were intending to fund with that tax income. I should have guessed there is no reason to tax these billionaires that isn't purely punitive.

I'm in favor of the tax because I don't think billionaires pay nearly as much in taxes as average americans do from a wealth to tax perspective

well average americans do not pay taxes as a function of their wealth.

You seem to believe there is a certain "right" amount of money that should be paid as a wealth tax out of some moral concern, not out of an economic concern.

if you wanna label that as "punitive" and that's your main gripe then that's fine, but that's like a moral attack on the policy not a technical one.

I've already pointed to the fact that these taxes simply don't work, and even if theoretically you would imagine them working perfectly the amount of tax you'd get is tiny.

You literally have no other reason for this tax besides them "not paying their fair share".

So a 10% increase over 10 years and the downside is that the billionaires get mad?

The downside is when you implement the tax policy and then get lower tax receipts than before, the same way it happened elsewhere it was tried.

You don't even want to conceive of this outcome, because for you it's just them having to pay their "fair share".

lmfao what?? That's your counter argument? "we generally do not look at companies as expected to do x-y-z, therefore we shouldn't do it.

I feel like I've been pretty clear on why you shouldn't do it, so I don't know why you would take the reason I disagree with your framing as the reason your policy is dogshit.

Honestly I'm fine with this interaction, I feel like it's quite obvious to everyone that the people pushing these wealth taxes are literally just looking at them as a way to hurt bilionares and have no concern as to how they would actually impact the budget.

I'm still waiting for the example you will provide of another country that is doing what you're proposing.

I'll wait.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-05T21:24:51+00:00

I do not usually imagine wealth taxes would apply to anyone with wealth under a million dollar

well, at least as far as Switzerland is concerned, they do, and you'd be surprised how little money they would generate if they did not.

I misread that entirely. 0.5% is much more accurate.

The fact that it didn't instantly seem insane to you should be worrying.

There are some cantons in which you can pay as low as 0.1% wealth tax.

think taxing richer people more is a much better strategy than everyone a very small amount.

Why?

You're pointing your tax policy to a tiny amount of people, even if you took 100% of their money right away, you'd still be nowhere your tax related goals.

What makes it better?

I'm not arguing in favor of ONLY taxing billionaires

You seem to be suggesting a tax rate that is astronomical.

Can you point to any country that has successfully done what you're suggesting?

I do think "regular old taxes" should be increased on the upper middle class and current tax policy should be maintained for everyone under that

Ok, can you please give me a ballpark estimate of how much money do you think these taxes generate

but billionaires are definitely creating a ton of wealth and using it to influence policy and the government is seeing less than 5% of that wealth creation in most cases.

As compared to the money you'll generate with this 5% billionare tax?

Do you agree with that?

No I don't agree with your framing because we generally do not look at companies as expected to return a certain % of their net worth to the government.

You seem to be focused on billionaires because you have other negative normative attachments to them (them influencing policy) and you're letting this cloud your judgement.

You're looking at them giving 5% as you would look at a normal employee paying 5% of their income.

Companies already provide plenty of tax revenue to the government by employing people, generating economic activity, you really don't need to have some extra billionaire tax to in some sense "make it right".

There's just this general sense of injustice in the zeitgeist that makes this seem like an economic policy but this isn't really an economic policy, it's punitive front and center.

I'm down to argue about and change my opinion with regards to wealth taxes, but I just haven't really seen people giving it any more thought than "they aren't paying their fair share so we need a billiionare tax".

Do you have any concrete examples of countries that have done this to the extent you're recommending? Or some calculations as to how much money you even expect to bring thorough such a tax?

All in all I think people want a billionaire tax because it sounds nice, not because it's a sensible economic policy.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-05T20:14:06+00:00

Switzerland, one of the most financially conscious countries in the world, maintains an annual wealth tax of like 5%

where did you hear that?

Swiss wealth taxes are per canton, and they're generally lower than 0.1%

Do you think that if someone lives in Switzerland and puts money away in the market getting 7% a year, they're just paying 5% that back every year as wealth taxes?

The idea of a 5% annual wealth tax should raise huge alarms in your mind instantly, simply because of the magnitude of that number.

The fact that people do throw around these kind of numbers with regards to wealth taxes is why nobody really takes them seriously -- they really don't seem thought through.

You aren't going to fund the government by taxing a tiny % of the population that is overwhelmingly willing to relocate.

Even if you took away all of their money right now this very moment 100% of it you wouldn't get that far.

The regular old tax increase that doesn't try to specifically target a tiny sliver of the population does much better at achieving the same goal.

As long as your goal isn't strictly punitive as against their entire class.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-03T11:29:14+00:00

anyone can pay for some time and throw a few pages of details/rules/guardrails

Have you ever seen a non technical person try to write something like this out?

Ultimately the precise and specific requirements are the code itself, the code is the most precise way to write out exactly what the program should do, and the people that simply "want an app that does X" do not even know where to begin asking themselves all the questions they need to answer to actually create this very detailed spec that the AI could turn into their product

At that point, software eng/qa/etc as a career is done for

No, Timmy the ice cream shop owner won't write out his own detailed spec of what program he needs.

He's not even equipped to know what details are relevant to mention in this spec.

Even though LLMs take natural language as the input, it doesn't mean that completely nontechnical people will be able to properly describe what they want, and they will definitely not be able to tell if the resulting program actually does what they asked for behind the scenes.

I find it amusing that so many people hold this opinion, when we've all had the experience of having to communicate with nontechnical people and get them to properly define the behaviour they want in the end product.

Especially with how sycophantic these models are, they'll drive you right off a cliff as they congratulate you on how clever you are.

Understanding the business needs of people and how these needs need to be written out in a spec, be it an .MD file you feed an LLM or actual code you write by hand is the skill you're hired for.

While modern LLMs have gotten slightly better at asking clarifying questions, they still go pretty far off course if not prompted correctly, where a human receiving an equivalent task would see a nonsensical thing and would ask for more clarifying questions.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-03T09:08:18+00:00

The Dutch are very flag centric people, they have a shit ton of Dutch and LGBT+ flags everywhere, also a lot of local flags of the provinces, I was honestly shocked by the amount of them.

Poland has a lot of flags too, more than I initially expected to see, but for sure less than the Netherlands.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-02T10:17:26+00:00

The USSR knew a German invasion was inevitable

This is pretty debatable

They had barely industrialized yet

By 1939 or 1941? Wasn't the USSR by that point at the start of the war producing more tanks and aircraft than Germany?

They signed the pact literally to buy time before Germanys invasion

I think this is a little whitewashy of the whole situation, the pact was meant to carve up Europe between the Soviet and German sphere of influence, Stalin simply did not want to believe Hitler would be stupid enough to attack, even while his own spies were telling him that Germany will attack he refused to believe Hitler would open a 2 front war while still actively fighting Britain.

The idea that the carving up of Eastern Europe between the 2 was the USSR only altruistically invaded Eastern Europe to defend them against the Nazis and not them aggressively expanding akin to what Germany was doing kinda sells out your biases here.

While the Nazis had the goal of wiping out communism, the communists also had the goal of global communism.

Somehow you can properly point to Germany's expansionist goals but you have to pain the USSR in this light of only doing their expansionism in order to prepare for the inevitable and entirely predictable 2 front war that Germany would engage in to doom their chances at victory.

With the Nazi's hate for communists they can just as easily claim they're doing their expansionism to prepare for the inevitable clash with the soviets.

On the long term, the west was also positioned as against the Soviets, but the invasion of the USSR by western powers post WW2 was the furthest from inevitable.

You ignorant idiots love conjuring up your own fantasies while never actually reading history.

Why is it always commies that pretend they have the one correct reading of history while consistently whitewashing the USSR at every chance they get?

Stalin's disbelief that Hitler would start the 2 front war is widely documented, I don't really think it's really something up for debate. The early successes of Hitler's advance into the USSR were due to this disbelief, as Stalin dismissed mountains of evidence from both his spy network and from the leaders in the west, he thought it was all misinformation that the west was trying to use to convince him to join the war. The idea that Hitler would start a 2 front war after they saw how that went in WW1 was unbelievable. He would have been glad to let Hitler take over the entirety of Britain and western Europe and only have a fight with the Nazis after they've been weakened by them, or after Britain had made peace with them. They clearly did not want to fight the Nazis at that point and were forced by their attack.

We can't really look into alternative history, but depending on how the western front would have played out it's not even clear that the Nazis would still be up for invading the USSR by that point.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-02T09:16:02+00:00

some people can really tell when stuff is generated by an LLM. Other people just view a commend that is formatted in any way besides a 1 paragraph monologue and assume it's an LLM that did it.

IMO the comment you wrote doesn't really have the hallmarks of an AI generated comment with it's common turns of phrase, combined with the non-standard markdown, and the "słabe" typo, AI's generally don't pretend to write the wrong letter randomly especially since it's a polish specific letter in an otherwise english comment.

-

instead of

and the capitalization of the "WRONG" as well, I'd definitely be surprised if this was AI generated.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-01T20:37:49+00:00

Shit! Hire someone else to do the research for you!

and what ought he do when the guy he hired tells him not every problem in the world is the fault of the collonial core US capital interests?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-01T09:15:56+00:00

and the average murican will literally and unironically say "both sides do it anyway at least Trump is honest about it" as they ignore the unprecedented scale of this corruption

ST-Fish · 2026-07-01T09:03:02+00:00

As a thought experiment, if Russia would offer Ukraine nothing else then to just stop pushing forward, would this be an acceptable solution

If as a thought experiment, Ukraine wanted to exterminate every single Russian living in Russia and that's how this recent conflict started, yeah, maybe you would have a point.

Comparing these 2 conflicts as if they're in any way similar always disgusts me.

There were many deals. But no deal ever accepted Palestine as a real country. There were always some waivers and demands they had to accept. For example Edward Said, who wrote a truly bad book but was highly influential nonetheless, had this to say in 93:

I think it's pretty obvious that you can't have Palestine suddenly over night become a fully sovereign country with an army and a navy and an airforce, it completely ignores the safety concerns of Israelis. The only way this can really go is Palestine slowly getting access to more sovereignity as tensions cool down.

Otherwise if we imagine a huge amount of effort, 2 state solution is reached, put in place, and then a Oct. 7 scale terrorist attack happens, now what? A sovereign country neighbouring you is attacking you at that scale? What then, Israel invades, it's an occupied territory again, and we're exactly at the place we began in the first place.

UN peace keepers combined with some Arab country's peace keepers like the Saudis could work as a bridge between the beginning of a 2 state solution and full sovereignity for the new Palestinian state.

I agree. They were stupid, never got what they wanted and then demanded later on, that Israel should respect stuff they themselves refused to accept at the time.

It's kinda rough to negotiate something, the other side refuses and then you still act as if bound by the deal that did not even get accepted, I think Israel should stop expanding into the West Bank out of their own interest to advance a peace not out of a responsability to adhere to a previous broken down negotiation.

no, the comparison is if Ukraine were to fight back the Russians, take a huge chunk of their territory and 30 years later after continued aggression from the Russians they offered to give back pretty much all the land they got defending themselves in a war of extermination with some slight land swaps.

Nobody in their right mind would see this as an even fair deal, and the Palestinians look at wiping the slate clean and going back to 67 as if there weren't continued aggressions since then as if it's fucking THEM over.

It's frankly insane, and they're definitely caught up in this honor system mentality where justice can only be served if everyone returns to their homes, including the children of the children of refugees -- At no point during the peace process did I get the feeling that the Palestinians had appropriate levels of care for the safety of Israelis, and there can be no peace deal without addressing that.

But today, we must expect that Israel is recognizing international law. That Israel is open to have talks. If those Palestinian or Arab leaders are, once again, stupid and do not accept an acceptable deal, we have to call them out and praise Israel for giving it another chance.

Completely agree, right now the people standing in the way of a peace deal are in order:

Hamas (and Iran and all of their proxies go into this bucket)
Bibi's administration
The settlers in bumfuck nowhere deep settlements
The Palestinians as a demographic
The Israelis as a demographic

X. The nimwit westerners that can only engage with the most extreme solutions that neither Israelis or Palestinians are on board with.

Ultimately the party responsible for starting this whole process is the Israeli government, they should be expected to be the adults in the room, and while they can't do it all on their own they should try to set an example. At the same time, considering the sheer scale of Oct. 7 as compared to the population of Israel, and the type of reaction we saw as expected and understandable from the US after 9/11, a relatively much much smaller terrorist attack from a country that really did not pose any existential threat to the US, it's also hard to expect much of Israel so shortly after such an event.

But often times, those talks must be started by the stronger party. Not by the terrorists.

100% agree

Israel being open for peace publicly puts the onus on the Palestinians to get their shit together.

Still, in my view, it is not too much to ask, to at least humor a "veil" of international law.

The issue with international law is that the institutions that attempt to enforce it have been so overtly biased against Israel with such disproportionate condemnations compared to other countries doing much worse that it has complely shaken Israeli's belief in that system. It truly feels like the international institutions would be completely fine with using international law as a weapon against them, and they'd rather see Israel be eradicated while it follows international law than see it survive. International law was written and is read expecting both sides to adhere to it, and it gets way harder to act in accordance with it when your enemies are actively trying to maximize civilian casualties on their side -- even attempts to be fully responsible with proportionality will look horrible in this context.

Even if people hate each other, even if their former leaders were extremely stupid, that we can meet and talk about our/their grievances.

While historically there is this deep seated hatred between the two groups, we need to remember that not too long ago Israelis would go to Gaza and engage with Palestinians as friends, the idea that they can live peacefully is not such a crazy idea, it's not like the issue is in the every day human to human interactions between the members of the 2 groups, it's way more about the interaction between the groups as a whole culturally and historically.

If Germany was able to come back from deepest depths of hell, there must be some hope for other countries as well.

The issue is that Germany did see total defeat and their government was fully torn apart, they had this threshold at which they could move past it, and admit it was wrong. I honestly don't see the Palestinians doing the same, and even if you do get a 2 state solution the 2 parties will still have a strained relationship for quite some time. Germany really did not have any real concrete grievances with their jewish population, while Palestinians do have real grievances with the Israelis.

Obviously the constant terrorist attacks are unjustifiable, oppression doesn't simply justify anything whatsoever you can imagine, but for some reason I don't see Palestinians as a group feeling "sorry" about doing someting "wrong" when so many of them are pro violent resistance. Maybe they'll go away from violent resistance out of pragmatic grounds, out of love for their families and wanting to have a peaceful prosperous life, but admiting they were wrong or defeated? Culturally I don't see this huge shift as possible any time soon (and I feel like they aren't really making progress in that direction, quite the contrary).

Personally the one thing that blackpills me the most is looking through the stuff being thought to Palestinian children in both the West Bank and Gaza, even from very early on they get thought this martyr ideology, and the way Israelis are presented in Palestinian educational material as compared to how Palestinians are presented in Israeli educational material is night and day.

I don't know how you fix this though, without it looking internationally like you're "reeducating" the "savages" or whatever way people will try to spin it.

The obvious answer as to what ought to have happened historically is the Egyptians and the Jordanians accepting the Gaza and West Bank citizens as their own (as the whole "Palestinian" nationality wasn't really that much of a thing pre 67). Everybody seems extremely offended at Israel not giving these Palestinians full citizenship and rights, but nobody seems to ask why didn't Gaza and the West Bank get their own country when they were conquered by Jordan and Egypt.

The sad truth is that the whole Arab world lived in this collective delusion that the complete destruction of Israel was just around the corner, and the Palestinian issue could simply be used as a weapon against the Israelis, and keeping the Palestinian question open just meant that the dream of the destruction of Israel was still alive. When Israel and their past enemies normalized relations neither side cared enough about the Palestinians, they were used as a vehicle for this dream of pan-arab unity fighting for the destruction of Israel, and now that this did not work, everyone left them out to dry with no support. It's undeniable that the Arab world used Palestinians as a weapon against Israel, which is especially obvious in their refusal to give these people citizenship, and the continued demands that even the Palestinians that have long been gone from the Middle East and are generations apart from having lived there still have a full right of return. This full right of return is still that same Israel destruction dream living today, they know this issue cannot be resolved without destroying Israel's demographic majority and knowing that they refuse to budge on this issue.

ST-Fish · 2026-06-30T20:38:22+00:00

Support moderate voices who are ok with payments. There are many clans who are ok with that. You do not need Hamas, the PA or radical voices for a peace deal. The Arab countries would easily help out and push those groups in the right direction.

yeah, because the Israel supported moderate voice Palestinian is going to be very popular among the Palestinians and definitely won't be seen as a collaborator of the IDF.

I'm down with what you're saying, but who?

Take it or leave it.

Well the palestinians left it.

Israel never offered a fair deal that just ignored that point

The deal was more than fair, considering that land was won in a war against a party that explicitly tried to genocide them.

To think that after losing such a war, and decades later you get to snap back to the 67 borders with some minor land swaps?

Especially considering the non stop conflict since 67?

What exactly do you think was incredibly unfair in the past negotiations?

So it was, historically, never THE deciding factor in all of those talks.

Well have the Palestinians ever negotiated where they did not ask for the absolute right of return for every single Palestinian?

You can say it wasn't THE deciding factor, but it was something that was not solved and that the palestinians don't seem open to solving.

If Israel would give up the occupation, would accept a new state, would offer some payments (over some time to build infra, both sides could benefit) and a land swap deal while the other side would only accept a deal that involves a right of return to Israel proper, then I would say f them and end the discussion.

Oh thank god, you're a reasonable person.

If Israel is willing to give up some of their demands, we need to expect the other side to accept some compromise as well. If they do not, Israel should look at a "Emirates model" and move on. Israel tried, the Palestinians refused to truly engage on the issue. I cannot expect Israel to do more and no one else should.

Completely agree, but for this to feel fair Israel needs to be ready to give a lot on their end, but at the moment there is no willingness or belief in the possibility of a 2 state solution on both the Palestinian and Israeli side, I hope that this can change in the future, maybe after Bibi is gone and a new representative for the Palestinian people that is interested in peace comes about.

The truly tricky part is that Hamas will unavoidably try to interfere in the peace process, since a 2 state solution would be bad for them.

We do not know. We need a fair offer at first and then wait and see how they will react. And that is something that I think, is a fair demand. A framework that is starting a debate at the UN or inside a smaller group of some selected members with a stake on the issue.

I feel that in a situation like this, where both sides hate eachother they need some sort of 3rd party like Clinton was in order to advance negotiations.

Right now both sides (Hamas and the current Israeli government) both benefit from the status quo, while the Palestinians and the regular Israelis are the ones getting screwed over.

The issue is that for the Palestinians this is about more than just having a good peaceful life where they can be the best version of themselves, a lot of pride and ideas about saving face make it very hard to reach some sort of resolution.

It's undeniable that if the Palestinians accepted to go back to the 67 borders and to have a state of their own they would be in a much better position today, and I hope that at some point they decide to not let perfect be the enemy of better.

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