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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • It depends on where you’re from, glass jars/drinking glasses in Germany don’t shatter from thermal shock, but they do in the US.

    I reflexively yelled at my boss once because he poured recently boiling water out of a glass and turned the cold faucet on to rinse it out while scrubbing, and I thought he was about to cut the shit out of his hand. He got contemplative for a moment and then said that he had forgotten that that used to happen in Afghanistan (where he was from), but it doesn’t happen in Germany.




  • That’s what I thought. I figured things like the original garmins had a quantity unlimited but very narrowly usable data plan, like old kindles. I did know that gps was invented before the internet was widespread, but I figured that today it was like fax machines, where the vast majority don’t actually have a landline connection anymore and use the internet instead.

    Based on this comment section, I gathered that it was something else, but still didn’t expect it to be fucking radio.











  • I don’t think it’s very simple at all.

    According to the CBS, about 40% of Jews in Israel were born to a father also born in Israel. Given the relative youth of the Israeli population and the fact that it’s been nearly 80 years since Mandatory Palestine existed, the number is probably quite a bit higher (especially because that number only relates to the fathers, not the mothers), but even if only 60% of Israeli Jews are descendants of settlers, that’s nearly 5 million people. Out of a total population of about 15 million people living in Israel and Palestine combined.

    A poll published in may showed that more than 80% and more than half of all Israelis support forced expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel, respectively. That’s five and eight million people. (The poll itself was only published in Hebrew, but I think this is the link).

    How can a unified, peaceful country actually be created without “giving into their sentimentality” when somewhere between a third and over half of them feel that way? What is additional punishment? A country cannot afford to imprison that large a proportion of its population, and fines would exacerbate the resentment. I could see some form of community service in the form of war cleanup and having to physically, literally deal with the results of a genocide working to reset people’s perspective on it, but it’s not as though they’re not aware of what’s happening. I don’t know that simply being confronted with the viscerality of the genocide they knowingly support would do much, especially with such a high proportion of the population who do support it.

    I’m not saying that the answer is to just give in to the demands of genocide supporters. I’m saying that it’s hard to imagine a workable solution and simply evicting and heavily taxing a whole bunch of people is going to lead to resentment.





  • I can’t see descendants of settlers who are en masse being kicked out of their homes and heavily taxed coming together to peacefully build a society with the people whom they ceded their homes to and whom they’re paying those reparations. Can you? How would you go about it without making them so resentful that they either refuse to help rebuild or start attacking the institutions of the new single state?

    I see the philosophical balance your solution would bring and it’s what I would want to do if I suddenly found myself a settler/settler’s descendant, but I don’t think enforcing it will lead to lasting peace. Perhaps with an education system that truly integrates children and teaches all of their history, without whitewashing any of it. But I think there’s a very strong cultural attachment in Israel to homeschooling, and don’t know if enforcing public schooling would create further resentment.








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