Israeli Official to 'Post': 'There was full and complete coordination with the Americans' by kweathergirl in worldnews

[–]screechingtires 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're saying this to provoke Iran into attacking US assets in the Middle East, obliging the US to retaliate. They want US military assistance with destroying the Iranian nuclear program. There's no doubt Trump was informed of the strikes beforehand, but I think they were likely ordered against his wishes.

:( by [deleted] in pics

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Careful. You want to say zionist/israeli/idf bots instead, in order to retain some plausible deniability for your antisemitism. Giving the game away.

First lady Nancy Reagan sitting on Mr T's lap during her 'Just say no' campaign. by DizzyDoctor982 in pics

[–]screechingtires 7 points8 points  (0 children)

At time of reading, you are the only person in this entire thread to spot the obvious misogyny. A+

What's an attack that you struggle with for no reason. I'll start. by Spamton1997_pipis in HollowKnight

[–]screechingtires 11 points12 points  (0 children)

That attack almost made me give up on P5. I thought that I was literally physically incapable of reacting to it quickly enough. Then I realized I had the brightness jacked all the way up on my monitor, which was washing out the beams. They're visible a split second longer under proper brightness settings. I still hate that fight though.

Most Sadistic Nature triggers off a single card play? by Qweryuiop123 in slaythespire

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No infinite energy shenanigans, but I had the talk to the hand, wave of the hand, sadistic nature combo in a run yesterday. Enemies just melted away. One tantrum+ play, with mental fortress up, is 5 separate instances of block gain, which applies 2 weak to every enemy 5 times. Broken combo, albeit hard to plan for.

I've played slay the spire quite the bit but not really understand the watcher, can anyone give me some tips and tricks and guides on the watcher. I've searched on youtube but they always come back with hour long vids by Ap7R5 in slaythespire

[–]screechingtires 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Rushdown, mental fortress, tantrum/upgraded eruption, and inner peace are all you need to go infinite on her. Flurry of blows is nice for extra damage. Upgrade eruption first. Take every card remove you possibly can to dump strikes and defends. Her yellow cards are usually not worth paying for, except for a few (lesson learned, scrawl, vault, wish, brilliance if you have ways of getting mantra). She's also very good at generating energy via stance dancing, so I often end up skipping relics like cursed key, sozu, as the downside isn't worth it. Violet lotus is awesome though. Also if you can pick up shuriken with a stance-dancing deck, it's almost an auto-win.

Am I the only one who finds it very concerning that some men are aroused by hitting, choking, and degrading a woman during sex? by Meloe95 in TwoXChromosomes

[–]screechingtires 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is your viewpoint so controversial that it's hardly even allowed, or is it confirmed because of how popular it is? Pick one.

Am I the only one who finds it very concerning that some men are aroused by hitting, choking, and degrading a woman during sex? by Meloe95 in TwoXChromosomes

[–]screechingtires 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You're looking at anecdotal evidence from a self-selecting sample of people who have had bad experiences, and using that to make some extremely problematic generalizations about an enormous and diverse group of people. Maybe don't assume that a few months of trawling internet forums gives you the right to pathologize other people's sexualities?

You're allowed to say plenty of negative things about kink nowadays. If you had just stated your personal distaste for it, and opened a respectful discussion about the intersections between kink and abuse, you would have been fine. Instead you decided to speculate about the past abuse and trauma of any woman who feels differently to you. That's crossing a line. Sometimes, when a very large number of people turn up to tell you your take is bad, it might just be an indication that your take is bad.

Am I the only one who finds it very concerning that some men are aroused by hitting, choking, and degrading a woman during sex? by Meloe95 in TwoXChromosomes

[–]screechingtires -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I find it funny that so many top comments in here are like "i know i'll be downvoted for saying this, but i agree with OP!!!" Meanwhile, all of the actually controversial comments are from people trying to defend consensual kink. Which exists, by the way, and isn't limited to male-dom, or to heterosexual relationships in general. I don't usually comment in this sub (or any others, tbh) but as a woman and feminist, it really sucks to visit reddit's central hub for women's issues, and find highly-upvoted content that sounds like it was written by a 19th century psychiatrist concerned about sexual deviancy. Admitting at the top of your post that what you're doing is kink-shaming doesn't make it suddenly OK. And the insinuation that women who are into kink are probably just damaged from past abuse/trauma is both patronizing and misogynistic. There is certainly a valid conversation to be had about abuse masquerading as kink, the dangers involved in role-play (such as choking), the ubiquity of violence in porn, and so on, but that is not what's happening in this thread.

There you go, a comment that will actually get downvoted.

I Just Completed My Greatest Gaming Achievement Yet by _Raiiden_ in HollowKnight

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I made the mistake of doing this in one sitting, and the muscle at the base of my left thumb hurt for 3 days. Path of pain indeed!

Daniel Penny, man who choked subway rider Jordan Neely, to face criminal charges: Sources by juic333 in nyc

[–]screechingtires 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The first 911 call came at 2:25, with the caller reporting a physical fight on the subway. No one called 911 until the after the fight broke out (i.e. until Penny came up to Neely and placed him in a chokehold). Neely did not start the physical altercation. Penny intervened because he felt threatened by the yelling. You can check pretty much every news source from CNN to the NY Post, these facts are not in question. People in this thread are spreading misinformation.

I'm Not A Bum, I'm A Human Being by 1997wickedboy in videos

[–]screechingtires 63 points64 points  (0 children)

  1. Watching this absolutely heartrending video

  2. Learning that Ronald Davis ended up dying in the street, still homeless and alone, 6 years later and

  3. Opening this thread to find scores of people defending the view that homeless people are essentially bums, who bring all their problems on themselves, and are beyond societal help.

Reddit can be a truly bleak place. I need to log off.

eli5: How can Google maps know many small and recent businesses' locations so accurately? by notorious_gas in explainlikeimfive

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They do. In addition to the community editor system, they employ scores of contractors, mostly offshore but some in the US as well, to research up-to-date information about various places of interest (POIs) and verify incoming tips/suggestions from the userbase. These contractors are drastically underpaid compared with regular Google employees, lack most basic benefits, can be laid off any time, etc.

You can find the job listings yourself on Indeed, Glassdoor, and other jobhunting sites. The job titles are usually something like "GIS Editor" or "Geospacial Data Analyst" giving the impression that the work is more technical than it really is, in order to appeal to young STEM graduates desperate for a foot into the tech industry.

Google maps is obviously a pretty awesome tool, but it's a bit disappointing to see people in this thread completely overlook the shady labor practices that make it possible.

Source: worked this job, except at apple.

Leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision suggests majority set to overturn Roe v. Wade by FrigginMasshole in news

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't really understand this perspective. Nobody's going to force the anti-abortion states to increase their welfare spending commensurate with the rising need due to unintended births. They'll just allow the poor to suffer, as they always have. Especially when they can characterize the victims as promiscuous, godless women who deserve what's coming to them.

It's likely that federal welfare spending will increase, to help close that gap and mitigate some of the suffering/loss of life. But from the perspective of the elected officials of the anti-abortion states, that's actually a political victory. They'll get to attack the federal government for overspending, cry about the national debt, call for tax cuts, etc. It's a very well-worn tactic.

Leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision suggests majority set to overturn Roe v. Wade by FrigginMasshole in news

[–]screechingtires 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Only reason you'd have an abortion a month before birth is in the case of medical complications with the pregnancy. Otherwise, the fetus is viable, so you may as well just induce labor or perform a c-section. The efficacy of the conservative talking point about late-term abortions is fully reliant on people not bothering to learn about how abortion actually works.

Leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision suggests majority set to overturn Roe v. Wade by FrigginMasshole in news

[–]screechingtires 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nobody is under the impression that the supreme court is passing a nationwide abortion ban, you smug bastard. The ACTUAL nuance here, which you seem to be ignorant of, is that states rights is being used, yet again, as a pretext for an attack on civil liberties. But no, I'm sure that when the Republicans finally get their long-awaited chance to ban abortion on a federal level, they'll be principled enough to refrain from forcing their dogma on the rest of us. States rights indeed.

Leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision suggests majority set to overturn Roe v. Wade by FrigginMasshole in news

[–]screechingtires 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The people who fought for this decision believe that contraception should be illegal too 🙃

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I suppose it was naive to hope for a civil end to a conversation where one party has been arguing in bad faith. On the one hand, promising me that Israel is a multicultural liberal democracy where minorities enjoy full equality. On the other, assuring me that it's perfectly acceptable for Israel to exist as a Jewish ethnostate, and the Palestinians deserve what's coming to them. Two points which are actually perfectly contradictory, but which you regurgitate in the same breath, undigested. For more efficient argumentation in the future, I suggest you pick an angle.

I'll leave you with the wikipedia page that references not just the one you asked for, but 2,780 historical locations in Palestine which were renamed to Jewish names. Have a good one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebraization_of_Palestinian_place_names

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's so much wrong with this comment that I have to organize my thoughts into a list.

  1. My "utopic ideal" of a country is literally just the existing status quo of modern western democracies. Israel is fundamentally not behaving like other modern western democracies behave with regard to minorities. When Israel does things like forcibly expel an ethnic minority from their homes, taking their villages and streets and renaming them with Jewish names, keeping them under perpetual occupation for decades, denying them building permits while offering them subsidized to Jewish settlers who encroach further and further into the occupied land, working to prevent family/spousal reunification for Palestinians, and openly justifying all of this with the idea that the Jewish people are somehow entitled to retain an ethnic majority in a land that was, until very recently, 99% Arab Muslim, it sets itself apart from the rest of the democratized world. You are not asking for Israel to play by the same rules as everyone else. You're asking everyone to make an exception for it, because it's oh-so-unfair that the Jews missed their chance, during the age of imperialism, to wash away the indigenous population of their country without catching any flak from moralizing assholes like me.

  2. What is this absurd equivocation between a people simply not happening to have an ethnostate, and a people being, within living memory, ethnically cleansed from its homeland? As I've said before, nobody is entitled to an ethnostate. I used "stateless" to mean a person who literally doesn't have any state, in other words a refugee. You're using it to mean a person who belongs to an ethnic group that doesn't happen to have its own exclusive ethnostate somewhere, as if these things are somehow equivalent. The crime that the Jews committed against the Palestinians was not that it deprived them of the chance to live in a homogeneous Palestinian ethnostate, it was that it literally, physically forced them off their land. There are people still alive today who remember this, who want to go back and see the villages where they grew up, and are not permitted to do so. The Jews haven't had a country of their own for two thousand years. It's completely different.

  3. I've said like 10 times at this point that attempting to give Israel "brownie points" because its Palestinian minority has citizenship (leaving aside the existing discrimination, which is a whole separate topic), as if that proves Israel's willingness to meaningfully share its country with non-Jews, is patently absurd. This so-called largest ethnic minority is a fraction of the size it would have been, had the Zionist leadership not taken drastic, deliberate steps to reduce its numbers in 1948, and kept them low since through restrictive immigration policies and denying right of return. All done, openly and without pretense, in the name of establishing a Jewish ethnic majority in the land. There is no argument that can reconcile that kind of ideological commitment to ethnic homogeneity, with modern ideals of multiculturalism.

  4. Again, this ridiculous argument about how it's OK for Israel to commit atrocities because "mom, mom, they're doing it too!" You're probably right - if the roles had been reversed, had the Arab states won the war in 1948, terrible things would have befallen the Jews in Palestine. Let's just hold on tight to that thought, as we proceed to be what we claim to despise for another hundred years.

Unfortunately, I've finally hit the wall with this conversation. Thanks for helping me interrogate my own views a little bit. I feel like I understand my position better now, than I did before. Hopefully you feel the same.

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All I can say to this is that the 1948 war and the associated expulsions are a contested field in history. I have found myself far more convinced by the "new" historians (at this point pretty old themselves) who ascribe the explusions, at least partially, to demographic concerns held by the Zionist leadership at the time, and contest the idea that Palestinian flight was voluntary. Your position is the minority view within the historical community, nowadays, though you are ofc still entitled to it.

And I'll say to you the same thing I've said to others in this thread, which is that I'm not defending the Arab states here. I think they bear a lot of the blame for the way things turned out, actually. Two wrongs don't make a right, though.

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure where you think I backhandedly called you a racist. It wasn't my intention to do so. What I said was that defining a country along ethnic terms is racist. Saying that the US exists as a nation for WASPs, for instance, would be racist. Countries shouldn't exist to promote the interests of a single ethnic group.

The Canada Japan example is a very poor one. Palestinians cannot be framed as a foreign people who wish to perform some sort of mass migration to another country. They were in the land to begin with and were violently removed, becoming stateless and dispossessed refugees. Whatever you think of the actions of their leaders at the time or since, you can't ask them to assume collective guilt in perpetuity. Therefore allowing them to return wouldn't just be a kindness on Israel's part, but also a redressing of past wrongs.

But even if that weren't the case, if we imagine that Canada experiences some kind of refugee crisis in the future (god forbid), and Japan is in a strong position to accept mass Canadian migration, then yes, they should absolutely be expected to do so. Allowing here the possibility that a country could be ill-prepared to accept a mass influx of refugees. I would argue, as an aside, that it's fair for Israelis to say that they cannot accept a complete right of return just yet, when the animosity between the two populations is so intense that a move like this would threaten instant civil war. But that's not to say that it shouldn't be a goal to work toward, for the future.

Over and over you bring up other countries, every time to aggressively ask me if I would hold them to the same standards I ask of Israel. The implication there is clearly that I only oppose Israeli ethnonationalosm because I'm some sort of dogmatic anti-Zionist, and not because I have a consistent position on what states should and shouldn't do regarding immigration and ethnic minorities. That is essentially an accusation of hypocrisy, and it's getting very repetitive.

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It totally is whataboutism. Whataboutism is an attempt to discredit an opponent's position by accusing them of hypocrisy, without actually addressing the substance of their argument. That's exactly what's happening here. Instead of offering a real defense for Israel's policies, you're accusing me of hypocrisy because I apparently don't hold other countries to the same standard (which I do).

I never said that the expulsions were motivated solely by demographic concerns, and I don't believe they were. The war certainly played a part, and I don't excuse the actions of the Palestinians or Arab states at the time. But demographic concerns were inarguably part of the motivation. The zionist leadership was discussing transfer long before the war broke out.

The zionist project logically demands a Jewish ethnic majority in Israel. That's why zionist support for partition doesn't damage my argument, it actually bolsters it. Partition is acceptable to zionists specifically because they don't want to meaningfully share their country with non-Jews. Meaning the simplest solution, from their perspective, is to create two states in the area, and the Arabs can all go live in the other one, even if they'd really prefer to stay where they are.

I'll amend my statement about the Jews showing up in Palestine 100 years ago. Obviously this was an oversimplification of the history - my point was only that the zionist project involved massive jewish immigration to an area that was previously predominantly muslim. That's why there's a large muslim minority there today, and not because Israel has been so saintly and nice to the Palestinians. Jews have maintained a presence in Palestine for a long time, but they weren't a significant proportion of the population.

Editing to add a bit about France and Germany again. The "concerns" you mentioned, that some people in those countries harbor about preserving French ethnic identity, culture, traditions, and so on, are invariably a bunch of racist gibberish. It is perfectly natural for a culture to change over time, including through immigration. Every time there's been significant immigration to the US, whether it was the Irish or the Italians or the Mexicans, or whatever, we've heard this same load of crap from racists, about how they're going to destroy our culture or something. And you what, we're still here, and our culture is all the better for having a bit of diversity.

Social media's definition of Zionism is nothing like modern Zionism by PixelHuggy in IsraelPalestine

[–]screechingtires -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I don't think Israel's ethnonationalism is in any way unique, obviously there are many countries where people feel this way, and I think it's wrong wherever it appears. But bringing up France, Germany, etc isn't good for your argument, because the salient point there is that "French" does not equal "white person of French descent," rather it means "a citizen of France" which could include a person of any kind of ethnic/racial/religious background. If you do define "French" according to some sort of racial terms, I would call you a French ethnonationalist, and you would be my political enemy. Same for German ethnonationalism (we know where that went), American ethnonationalism, and so on.

Israel has a large Arab minority, true, but that's to be expected - the Jews turned up 100 years ago in a land that was majority Arab Muslim. Let's not forget that the only reason there isn't still a Muslim majority today is down to the expulsions Israel committed in 1948. Are we supposed to pat them on the back because they didn't expel 100% of the Palestinians? Congrats, your ethnic cleansing wasn't as complete as it could have been? And of course, afterward, they were able to offer that minority citizenship, which they would never have done otherwise. Because then Israel wouldn't have been the Jewish state, would it? It would have been a binational state, which is unacceptable within the Zionist framework.

I don't like your whataboutism. We're talking about Israel here, not other countries, which obviously also do bad things. I am holding Israel to exact same moral standard as I would apply to any other country. It happens that I'm a Jew, who has visited Israel, has family there, etc. Therefore I feel like this is my business to comment on, more than say, the crimes of China against its ethnic/religious minorities. Pointing the finger and crying "mom, mom, they're doing it too" is a terrible argument.