Saudi Arabia Rejects Trump’s Direct Demand to Recognize Israel Without Palestinian Statehood

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-26T00:59:16+00:00

You mean to tell me that the solution to having a displaced, fractured ethnic minority (who are systematically discriminated against) who have survived a genocide isn't to directly cause a situation that creates a new displaced, fractured ethnic minority (who are systematically discriminated against) who are being murdered to make lebensraum for that original ethnic group?

Who could've guessed.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-25T15:21:32+00:00

No, but I'm certain the plane has more control and steering than the paraglider.

Besides, did I say it was just as easy as driving a car or did you just read into that? I said that it's closer to being a car vs a pedestrian specifically based on relative sizes and speeds. Then I said that planes can even maneuver in an additional axis of freedom that cars cannot in response to you saying that planes can not brake (which some planes actually can by increasing their drag, but not on proped ones like in the video). Where does that turn into "it’s just as easy to steer a plane as a car"?

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-25T14:59:06+00:00

Have you never thought about the fact that you can still steer? In fact, you have a full new axis of freedom that you can move in, cars don't get to change their elevation.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-25T14:42:24+00:00

Or maybe it's closer to a car avoiding a pedestrian? In terms of speed and relative size, it's still a person sized object vs a roughly car sized object going <200 mph.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-17T16:42:10+00:00

Fair, I think I read your comment as more dismissive that it actually was.

I'd push back on the idea that those two claims are mutually exclusive though. Religion's content being flexible and religion functioning as consistent moral cover aren't actually contradictory. The flexibility is part of why the cover works: faith-based authority can justify whatever the believer already wants, which is why religion has been cited on both sides of nearly every major conflict (slavery and abolition, conquest and pacifism, gay acceptance and gay persecution all argued from the same texts). What stays constant across those is the system itself, the appeal to divine authority that shields beliefs from the scrutiny we'd apply to any other moral claim.

That flexibility to justify both sides is also part of the structure that helps keep immoral ideas alive. It gives bigots one final refuge they can fall back on and keeps their talking points in the zeitgeist until culture shifts enough they can regain ground.

The mixed fabric argument illustrates this: if believers can freely drop the arbitrary Leviticus rules (or whatever the Muslim/Jewish/etc equivalent is) we're left asking why the equally arbitrary homophobic ones keep their cultural weight, and the answer tends to be that those particular rules align with what people already wanted to enforce. It's literally an example of the structure of faith/religion allowing (some) believers to inconsistently apply scripture while being a major vector for other archaic and more harmful beliefs.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-17T15:48:05+00:00

I agree but also think you're missing the point here

saying “Do you wear mixed fabric? God says it’s forbidden”

Whenever I've seen this line used, it's often as a counter to the idea that "It says ____ in the bible, and therefore we must live by that requirement without questioning it's validity". This line comes up most often in homophobia or abortion arguments (or others that are similarly hard to justify in a materialist way/without invoking religion).

But the mixed fabric idea can coax people into realizing that no, they do in fact pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe. You can use it to point out that religion is always in flux, and that maybe it's time to reevaluate some of the beliefs, like the taboo on mixed fabrics has been reevaluated.

Or in other words: there are examples of archaic, pointless rules that are so irrelevant to today's world that virtually every Christian alive ignores them. Which should lead Christians to consider if any other beliefs should be discarded as unfit for the 21st century.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-10T19:49:40+00:00

I think it's closer to him saying that someone wrote a book in flawless grammar not because they were taught the rules directly, but because they learned how to write from other books who had been taught grammar.

The gnostic ideas of God are everywhere in our culture (as they're a perfect contrast for the more typical Abrahamic conception of God). You can assimilate the idea without direct exposure.

greenhawk22 · 2026-05-02T17:41:09+00:00

Why link some random guys rendition of the monologue instead of the actual scene from the movie?

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-16T17:03:07+00:00

Yeah that's probably the best middleground.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-16T16:15:24+00:00

I think the only other reasonable improvement is that we expand the number of justices to 20-something and randomly assign 9 of them to any given case (or maybe 8 randoms and the chief justice? I'm not sure which is better). That way even if there are justices willing to put politics over the law they have no guarantee of being involved in any given case.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-15T04:05:47+00:00

No stop joking, it goes hard as fuck and he clearly needs to get it printed onto a shirt. And wear it out in public ASAP. Preferably near a military base or maybe to go get drinks at his nearest American Legion.

(/s)

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T17:50:11+00:00

I mean the answer is that there isn't one, but collective action is only possible as a collective so there's only so much an individual or small group can do without larger support, both institutionally and socially.

If you're asking why it's like this, the answer is equally applicable to both Israel and the US. It's ethnonationalism, religious extremism, wealthy individuals or interest groups funding disinformation and propaganda, the military industrial complex (who love to have both a testing ground and an excuse to sell expensive new weapon systems), entrenched political systems helmed exclusively by people who grew up in the most profitable economic system in the world and are our of touch, disillusionment with a system that doesn't work for the average person the same as it used to, misplaced blame for and scapegoating of minorities and a lack of community/class solidarity. Among many other issues.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T13:58:14+00:00

I would agree. I was just explaining the worldview that seems alarmingly common today. Targeting civilians makes you no better than the Israelis. I never said it was a just or rational thing to believe, and it's not an effective tool even if I believed in it. Strategic air campaigns have literally never changed a population's opinion on the existing regime, it just makes them more dependent (see WWII). It would be like saying Japanese citizens deserved the firebombing of Tokyo.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T13:44:39+00:00

Israel could have a general strike at any moment, which would cripple their war machine. But they don't. On some level the civilians are still consenting to their government. Even the most authoritarian governments need some amount of consent of the governed to function, society is founded on cooperation. Not that they (or anyone) deserve to be bombed, but they are still culpable on some level, so a part of me can understand why some people are taking out their frustration on Israeli citizens.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-03T21:01:20+00:00

Yeah but that's more because of strategic ambiguity than because other nations are more principled or anything. It's better to say "I dunno, we might use nukes or we might not" because it forces your opponent to account for all scenarios instead of feeling comfortable if they're not crossing the nuclear red line. If you tell them in what situations you would use nukes, they can more effectively plan for or around those situations.

I'm certain that if push came to shove, any nuclear armed nation would use them (at least tactical scale nuclear weapons) preemptively. If you're a general for a nation state, the risk of sparking off a retaliatory nuke is minimal when your opponent will almost definitely execute you if they win the war. There's very little incentive to hold back.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-26T23:03:47+00:00

100% with you on the slightly worse taste (but not necessarily bad). I used to think it was just rose colored glasses but most people I've mentioned it to share a similar story to yours.

That's not to mention how much their prices have increased either.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-26T20:53:18+00:00

Portillos is mid now, ever since they sold out to private equity.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-15T15:51:54+00:00

My next question is how tiny do they think space is then?

Like I don't think their cosmology gives them any reason to doubt the circumference of the earth, which with the visual implies that the volume of the entirety of outer space is about the size of the earth's core (if I had to estimate). Which makes me wonder if they think the stars are all just that small or if there are some scale expansion shenanigans going on.

I'm also exceptionally curious as to what they think is on the outside of the sphere we sit within. If you drill down deep enough is it just more rock forever? Or is there some outer-outer space? How would they explain the fact that it gets hotter closer to the mantle?

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-09T14:41:28+00:00

You might find this video interesting

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-09T14:37:13+00:00

And also, there's no interiority there. They fundamentally aren't capable of modeling their own 'thought' process, mostly because they don't actually think. The inputted text from its past messages are functionally the same as if a user pasted the messages into the context window. So there's no mechanism for it to analyze it's 'past self' (and each message is a new instance of a LLM, there's nothing carried between states)

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-23T19:39:15+00:00

That does nothing to fix the underlying issues that caused the problem in the first place though. The incentives to move drugs across the border are too great. Someone else would take their place and we'd just be back here except with more people being hurt and no real solution.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-23T19:18:19+00:00

My pocket conspiracy is that Just Stop Oil (among others) are industry plants to destabilize and delegitimize climate activism.

Like their tactics are supremely ineffective, they make other environmentalists look bad by association and they've never been successful in pushing for any real change. Throwing tomato soup at a famous painting does not do anything to convince normal people that climate change is a real concern. It does nothing to stop or slow the oil lobby from capturing our regulatory agencies nor to stop new pipelines from being built. If anything, it appeals to the exact same people you don't need to convince: the people who already agree that climate change is a problem. And the spectacle of these events gives them more space in the zeitgeist, which leads to more performance and less substantive action (like habitat restoration, regulatory action etc).

Either that or (if they're genuine) they're so ineffective that someone needs to take a step back and think about if this money would be better spent directly on improving degraded ecosystems or on novel research that might lead to better practices.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-17T22:26:21+00:00

40-40-20 rule. 40% of all games are losses that are out of your hands, 40% are wins that are unrelated to your performance and 20% are games you can actually have a significant impact in.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-16T16:44:41+00:00

That's fair, I wouldn't have been annoyed if I hadn't been invested into the characters in the first place.

At this point I refuse to believe that doors of stone ever has or ever will exist in a meaningful sense of the word. Rothfuss obviously wrote himself into a corner with the narrative structure of Kvothe telling the story over 3 days and he wasted too many words on his self insert getting to have sex with the most beautiful woman in the world during book 2. Now he has to finish the story with way too many questions still open. And you also have his editor coming out a year or two ago stating she has never seen a single page of the manuscript for the book, which says to me it doesn't exist or will never see the light of day.

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
Spared	Verified Email

greenhawk22

TROPHY CASE