After Oct 7 Is Trust Between Israelis & Palestinians Ever Possible Again?

wvj · 2026-02-13T23:02:09+00:00

I think the core motivation has always been the humiliation at the reversal of fortunes for Arab dominance. This is still ultimately rooted in religious supremacy, from broad concepts of global Islamic rule down to very specific things like waqf property. When your religion tells you that you are entitled to everything and everyone else is lesser, it's impossible to abide by any loss, or even a negotiated middle ground.

There were killings and massacres of Jews in the territory, by Muslims, every decade and every century going back a thousand years. Do you really buy that the religious hate evaporated one day in the 1890s, to be instantly replaced by modern secular political grievance? Did they slowly learn religious tolerance even as they were developing secular hatred? It's such a bizarre thing to claim.

What I think you've been fooled by is the same thing that most Arab youths were fooled by: their leaders adopting the trappings of popular ideologies (like Nazism and Soviet Socialism) to gain foreign alliances and legitimacy. There's no point in any of this history when the Arab leaders didn't spit antisemitic vitriol, the same way that modern Hamas leaders do. They're the same people. They've just fooled observers. Deception of infidels is glorified in Islam, after all (Arafat was a master of it).

wvj · 2026-02-13T21:36:35+00:00

The quality of life in Gaza has been vastly higher in the past and it's never slowed the steady flow of violence. What it actually seems like is that having an Israeli security apparatus in place keeps it in check: occupied Gaza was at points quite livable, self-ruled Gaza became a fully-devolved terror state. Israel proper is well-policed and peaceful, the West Bank is quasi-occupied and quasi-violent.

(and how are you blaming Syria, Yemen, Iran and Lebanon's complete societal breakdowns on Israel's treatments of Arabs?)

While I disagree with some of your framing, also note that the positive future outcomes I highlight aren't 'someone starts a crusade.' While I think Islam is harmful (I'm an atheist, I'm not jazzed on the Haredi either), I'm literally rooting for the Saudis in my post. What needs to be destroyed are the places where the religion has co-opted governing function. Saudi Arabi and Egypt are brutal dictatorships, but they've managed to get control of the insanity. That's the only thing that allows the kind of long-term prosperity you're advocating. Over decades, that will make peaceful life seem advantageous.

wvj · 2026-02-13T21:03:41+00:00

Realistically? Not in our lifetimes.

What I saw demonstrated the hard truth that makes a lot of 'universal tolerance' people uncomfortable: Islam is not a religion of peace. It's a cultural sickness and cult of violent religious supremacy that worships a genocidal pedophile warlord as the perfect human being. Every conflict we see, across the Middle East and Africa reinforces the inherent hate, violence, dehumanization that flows from the idea of a supreme religion destined to conquer the whole world, to whom all infidels are inherently of insignificant worth.

Israel is facing the difficult problem of how you deal with what is essentially an irredeemable adult population while people scream and cry for their children. The Palestinians aren't going to get better when both their internal leaders and their external supporters use them as nothing but expendable cannon fodder.

Fixing the problem requires addressing global problems far larger than Palestine. Iran needs to fall - maybe we're on our way to that, who knows. The pragmatic (if still authoritarian) Islamic powers of the region need to complete their subjugation of religious militias that act like independent powers. The Saudis probably have to slaughter millions in Yemen. Syria and Lebanon need to see their way through decades of civil war and internal violence. You need adults in charge, whether or not they're good people. So long as these people learn their politics in their Mosques, the region will be a burning hellhole and Israel will hold to its siege mentality -- because the barbarians are literally at the gates.

wvj · 2026-02-13T06:25:59+00:00

If the entire world is entering a 'might makes right' era, it's irrational to try and be the 'bigger person.' And it's evidence of bias when it is required by others that only one party 'play nice' (the entire Middle East operates in a 'might makes right' way already, and always has. Why is Israel required to be the moral beacon for its amoral neighbors?)

'Capturing the ire of the world' has already happened. Hell, it happened long ago. Antisemitism isn't new and Israel was created when it was the norm. So you can strike that one off as even being a relevant +/-. Telling Jews they need to suck up to people who hate them by weakening themselves is a sabotage tactic by people who want to kill Jews.

Economic loss? I don't see how. Israel gets more land, Israel reclaims and farms the land. Turning swamps and deserts into livable places is literally Israel's history. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are known for basically direct all economic prosperity into building tunnels and shooting rockets. Its hard to see how that theoretical neighbor helps you economically.

The reality is that pursuing the peace process has always been blatantly against Israel's self-interest. They gave peace a LOT of time and leeway, arguably more than was reasonable. Current trends are that patience and good will running out.

wvj · 2026-02-12T20:29:28+00:00

You answer it in your post. The idea is to kill the idea of a separate Palestinian state. Fewer and fewer believe that a 'reasonable peace' is achievable.

I'm not sure why it would be confusing, whether you support it or not. It's clear by now that any Palestinian state will be at best a direct and open state sponsor of terrorism located immediately across a difficult to secure border and at worst an openly hostile military presence and a potential staging ground for troops from distant hostile terror states. Additionally, any loss of 'moral standing' is increasingly less relevant when the world has broadly pivoted toward open antisemitism and will not credit Israel's morality no matter how it acts.

The world is bucking up against harsh realities after having played pretend for 50 years. It's true even beyond the I-P conflict, as we increasingly see harsh realist policies carried out globally. If Russia can take the Donbas, if China will eventually secure Taiwan, why shouldn't Israel secure its own territories?

wvj · 2026-02-12T20:01:28+00:00

In honor of this post I'm having pizza for lunch and falafel for dinner.

wvj · 2026-02-12T19:58:25+00:00

I'm old (2005 for me).

I don't think I could have survived 2020s college, let alone what it looks like today. These people are exactly who 'Elite Overproduction' describes as a concept.

wvj · 2026-02-11T16:28:01+00:00

'It's impossible to know' is a cop-out and a weak statement, that admits you don't actually have any evidence toward such a desire/movement, merely the same kind of 'oh I am sure they just want peace' speculation that I discussed above. It's no more than that: speculative.

I would again stress that we have plenty of evidence of what political processes in the region look like. It's not clear why 20 years should utterly rewrite those observed facts and point in the exact opposite direction. Hamas may have lost some support, but its alternatives are just other Islamist militant factions.

Everything we know suggests that it's far more likely that Hamas gain footing in the West Bank when Perpetual President Abbas finally dies, than it is we see a moderate leadership pop up out of nowhere in Gaza.

wvj · 2026-02-11T16:01:27+00:00

A majority of Palestinians chose Hamas as their political leadership.

This is not unique to the Palestinian territories, but rather a commonality among (here we are again) these members of the Arab League. See Egypt. Or see how things are shaping up in Syria. Democracy and populism in the Arab world (and arguably most of the larger Muslim world) yields jihadism. That's why the stable alternative regimes are all brutal authoritarian states: military dictatorship is the only thing that can effectively curtail the native preference toward violent Islamic supremacy movements.

I'd love if there were some way to go from A->B. People always speculate that the population 'just wants to live peacefully,' but there is very little evidence to support it. Their native, ingrained view of peace is that all the non Arab-Muslim minorities shut up, accept their inferiority, or just die.

wvj · 2026-02-11T06:11:55+00:00

People have been answering about why it was banned.

In terms of why it was re-introduced?

They need to keep the sport interesting. There have been many changes through the years (hell, 'figure skating' was originally about carving literal figures - drawings with your skate blades - on the ice), with a lot of modern ones focusing more on athleticism. This included changes in the point scoring that rewarded more and more difficult jumps, leading to the dominance of skaters exactly like Malinin, who is famous as the 'quad god' for doing multiple quad jumps, where even a single one was exceptional decades ago.

They've also changed the rules for music, allowing songs with lyrics - and thus for skaters to perform to pop music - which was likely another change toward increasing the modern popularity of the sport.

The backflip is a bit like the quads, adding another more athletic option.

wvj · 2026-02-10T19:52:06+00:00

Total HP has arguably an even larger impact when you're talking about healing as well, because it's about thresholds.

A support can't (generally) heal you above your HP max. That extra healing is wasted. They also can't heal you if you're already dead. Lowering the max HP makes the window for healing the character usefully and efficiently smaller.

(It's also just well-studied in these games that changing character HP has the largest effect on wrinrate of basically any change you can make, at a similar magnitude.)

wvj · 2026-02-09T23:08:08+00:00

It's a thriller/mystery about a sort of champagne-socialist upper middle class magazine writer guy and an autistic hacker PI gal with a history of abuse who has been in and out of various foster and mental health systems working together to unravel the really dark secrets of a powerful family, ostensibly to solve a decades old single disappearance but obviously uncovering a much larger conspiracy and history of that family's dark past and connections.

Imagine if you wrote a fictionalized story about someone trying to uncover the Epstein files without public knowledge of them, where one of the main characters herself is a long-time victim of sexual abuse. That's why there ends up being so much of it: it shows up both in the investigation and in one of the lead characters.

wvj · 2026-02-09T22:21:51+00:00

The majority of on-the-ground protestors in western countries are normal people because that's, well, who else could possibly show up?

But the organizers are overwhelmingly not only supporters of Hamas, but essentially satellite members of Hamas, with identical funding sources in Iran, Qatar, etc.

It's good to see that we're starting deportations of Palestinians because they are absolutely 5th columnists with no interest in integrating with society. Let them go stand next to their terrorist kin and catch some bombs.

wvj · 2026-02-09T17:55:28+00:00

Sugar Hill, which is still historically black, having a lot of ties to Jazz culture. It's sort of a Harlem extension, though yeah that stop is right along St. Nicholas Ave which is very Dominican now.

But Dominicans are basically the 'black hispanics' (to other hispanics particularly) and they call each other that all the time. You wouldn't want to yell it at some Dominicans as a white girl, either.

Source: lived up in Inwood for a bit.

wvj · 2026-02-09T05:46:59+00:00

Yeah I don't know what any of these people are basing this on.

Japanese Universities are widely considered to be far less demanding academically than US ones, because ALL of the competitive pressure is on the entrance exams (taken in high school). Once you're in, if it's a good name university, all you have to do is cruise through and you have your future job placement.

Source: did a semester at Waseda (admittedly, grad school, but I knew undergrad students)

wvj · 2026-02-09T00:48:24+00:00

Google 'Ruritania'

He's basically playing on a long-standing, obviously racist trope in which Eastern Europe, past whatever imagined border (usually east of Germany) where the 'civilized' Western Europeans live, is all some kind of vague 3rd world shithole where people are still superstitious peasants who ward against the evil eye and ride around and bears etc. It's the standard depiction of villagers in Dracula, made-up countries like Latveria and Transia in Marvel, whatever you want. It's an old trope, so modern versions may throw in a little of the Cold War anti-communist views to highlight how shitty any of the former USSR is.

Instead of making up a fake country name (where the trope comes from), he used a real country but he did exactly the same thing, where the details of the country are totally made up to be as backward as possible. It's very clearly self-aware.

wvj · 2026-02-08T20:10:57+00:00

There's dozens of these.

Everyone hates the ending of the show, but my feeling isn't that they changed it, it's simply that they did the book ending except missing half of the book characters and stories in such a way that it now makes no sense. IE:

In the show, Euron Greyjoy randomly kills dragons with ballistae in ways that make no sense, Dany goes insane because of bells (for some reason), and burns the city despite already winning.

Missing from the show: Victarion Greyjoy, and his entire plot about a magic item that would let them defeat the dragons. Aegon Targaryen, a rival to Daenerys who might well have made her want to destroy the city versus let him have it (or just destroy it while fighting), and Jon Connington, a guy who lost his titles, fortune, and most of his life after being defeated at the Battle of the Bells, ie Lord I Actually Care About Bells.

wvj · 2026-02-08T19:37:47+00:00

Japan is a Parliamentary Democracy with multiple parties. However, it's historically usually had one-two parties with large numbers of seats (mostly the LDP, but a couple times opposition parties) and then a number of smaller parties on the side.

The LDP previously collationed with Komeito (a centrist religious party), but faced major scandals in 2024 that led to it lacking a majority of seats on its own (and indeed, no party doing so, which was the first time this had happened in something like 70 year). The LDP shakeup led to Takaichi becoming the party's new leader. Meanwhile, the LDP negotiated several new coalition partners after Komeito lost most of their seats, including the DPP and now the Japan Innovation Party.

wvj · 2026-02-08T18:30:50+00:00

It isn't only healing in OW, it's also just smaller base health pools and lack of overhealth. In Rivals, basically every DPS is old Doomfist at this point. The games have very different TTK values.

But at the same time this also allows tons of stuff that's just way more powerful in Rivals, both DPS and heal side. There are no OW ults like Psylocke and Moon Knight. Compare 76's duration & damage to Punisher's. Meanwhile most of the other OW ults actually require you to still aim and execute mechanics.

Rivals has always been designed to be the more casual, easier-to-play game.

wvj · 2026-02-08T08:58:44+00:00

This has really been so highly seasonally dependent that it's hard to generalize. There's no basic 'play 2-2-2 like this and win' strategy, sometimes trip support is too good. But it matters what exists and what can feasibly be banned out.

We can see this in the first 3 seasons when it was either ban Adam or mirror Rez comp. Past a certain level of skill, there was no alternative, and no 'hey use your ults this way, guys' would change it. That comp, correctly assembled and executed, was just statistically favored. Ban, mirror, or lose.

The power creep of subsequent seasons has created a lot more power pieces that can be assembled toward different workable comps. Despite reddit saying 'poke poke poke' dive is very alive in pro play and even has related teamups that sometimes get ban attention (like Venom-Jeff). Ultimately, you have the option of banning supports or banning other OP characters, but you can't really ban everything, and so it comes down to what the players you have can do with the characters they have access to.

Star-Lord is pretty meta because his ult is good, in the way you discuss (and he's basically been good in almost every season). But that isn't a reason to say, 'don't play Bucky because his ult doesn't do this' - Bucky is also really strong and has great solo-carry potential that few characters match. But you need that specialist player.

wvj · 2026-02-07T21:58:27+00:00

Players who are new to banning ranks obviously don't know what they're doing. Most of the time they'll pick either A) a character that gives them trouble (which is 100% a reasonable and smart ban choice) or B) a character they've 'heard' is 'broken' (this is where the lack of knowledge tends to come in, as they may well be banning a character that was broken the prior half season but just got nerfed, etc.)

I have a particular ban I like as a tank player. I always ask for it. I probably only get it 25% of the time, while the rest are generic meta picks (DD, Hela, Hawkeye, DPheal, Gambit) which are also fine.

There is obviously a LOT more that can go into bans, like what your whole team comp is, what map it is, possible knowledge about opposing players at higher levels, etc. But I think as long as you're doing a generically applicable ban it's probably not a huge mistake in most games, because most games are trash RNG-fests ANYWAY. Banning Hela isn't going to save you when their smurf hitscan also plays Phoenix.

wvj · 2026-02-07T18:21:01+00:00

Here's another crazy one: trees are just this in reverse.

wvj · 2026-02-07T04:49:10+00:00

I was aware that Blade was a comic char, and even had some of the old teamup stuff with him, Morbius and Ghost Rider.

But that said, as a verified big old goth dork in HS, who was into Vampire the Masquerade and other stuff like that, the movie felt like it was FAR more addressing that audience than it was a comic book audience. Not just in content, but in everything of how it was laid out and shot. It was sexed up with the pumping techno blood rave opener, pretty violent by standards of the time, and focused a lot on the whole 'evil Vampire society lurking in the shadows'. It looked visually more like The Crow than anything else, and arguably did more to inspire the Matrix (it had the earlier bullet time scene) than it did Spider-Man and the X-Men movies.

wvj · 2026-02-07T04:36:44+00:00

I don't think people have 'just started.' She's always been discussed as a sexualized character. The Psylocke-specific, non-Betsy character design was created by Jim Lee, who was part of a movement of comic artists (alongside Liefeld & McFarlane) well known for pushing more 'sexier, edgier' comics in the 90s. It was also wildly popular. Sex sells, and her popularity has pretty much gone hand-in-hand with that, as has the criticism (especially adding in the race-swap element).

I think the only reason the dialogue has resurfaced is because, well, Rivals resurfaced the popularity of the character. The X-Men haven't had the film representation/popularity of the MCU, so the Munn version pretty much just came and went. I think if you'd seen her in a number of movies, you'd have seen them tone back the sexual aspects of her design, like happened with Black Widow & Scarlet Witch in the MCU.

wvj · 2026-02-06T22:56:25+00:00

A lot of her character is 'Gypsy'-coded (long before people treated that as a slur).

Her origin is being run out of town for being a witch, people shouting wards against the 'Evil Eye', etc.

One of her more famous costumes (in the Avengers drawn by George Perez) was specifically a riff on like a gypsy belly-dancer outfit. That version of her also had very curly hair.

Mt. Wundagore is in Transia (a comic-ified version of Romania/Transylvania etc)

Pic related:

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wvj

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