Those more extreme than Netanyahu are at least still a minority, albeit empowered by their position in the coalition. The majority of the protests against Netanyahu come from the same kind of centrists as the Americans you saw protesting Trump in 2017, who objected to the fascist boomerang coming around to hit them but wouldn’t have raised nearly as much of a fuss about deportations and overseas assassination campaigns if Hillary Clinton had been the one behind them.

I think it’s all too easy to imagine a mass of undifferentiated monsters rather than confronting the connection between unfortunately familiar patterns of political engagement and the slaughter they cause, just because that connection is more obvious closer to the blade of the imperialist knife. Plenty of militaristic genocide deniers are just as much liberal progressives as their counterparts in western countries until the switch flips back to their military brainwashing and they start talking about security guarantees and buffer zones.

Maybe I’m naive for believing that people can change, but I don’t think that everyone who’s been sold on the lie that forever war is the only way for them to be safe is as committed to violence as the backyard terrorists with lawn chairs.

I guess I’m trapped in the void, trying to set up crafting for enough sigils to break into splashing dimensional cores, as usual. Orb of Creation had already been consuming enough of my life…

It depends, would you consider Sam Altman part of the LGBTQ+ community?

Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.

It’s not even secret, there have been highly publicized tests of ground- and air-launched interceptor missiles, and a fair few tests observed by amateur astronomers where military satellites rendezvoused and closed to observation/weapons range with dummy targets. It’s very hard to hide anything that happens in orbit.

It doesn’t have to be a full on quest marker HUD overlay, just being able to glance at a mirror of your phone’s map display in your peripheral vision without taking it out of your pocket would be great.

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It’s hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

There’s actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don’t count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn’t, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

The USPS just got done ordering a custom-designed vehicle built from the ground up for efficient, safe, and comfortable package delivery. It doesn’t look like this.

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They’re really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state’s Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it’s weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It’s like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There’s a predictably authoritarian “just listen to your boss and your rabbi” bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it’s a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it’s just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

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There’s a lot of government and religious NGO money funneled around Israel for religious schools and student stipends, so any unscrupulous rabbis looking to start an abusive cult have plenty of opportunities handed to them. It’s really not unlike the various Christian cults that sprouted up on compounds in the American West, taking advantage of cheap resources and isolation tactics to build organizations that beat the shit out of children or do whatever else they want.

Edit: I think the settlements in particular create a similar physical dynamic, where living on stolen land ringed with fences and security checkpoints allows leaders to create an insular community that keeps victims in and accountability out. Even twenty minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, no one gets into a settlement without arranged permission, and a housewife with no car may as well be stranded out on the prairie.

It would make a very apt metaphor for the machines as a social construct, fragments of billions of people’s subconscious thoughts combining to maintain the system that holds them captive.

edit: Actually this isn’t worth dignifying with a response in the first place.

Who cares about whether it’ll benefit the business, the business owners want a place to park their car out front of their workplace, and it doesn’t matter who pays, how much, or if it’s in blood.

Always fascinating how upset people get about someone being slightly weird on the website for weird people.

Are you aware that Bedouin exist? That an area not being solid fields and cities on a map doesn’t mean people can just be resettled there without consequences? How Palestinians feel about Egypt, by and large?