The “ I’ve got something to say, but it doesn’t warrant its own thread “ thread.

[Finnegan]

10 hours ago, Jon the Hat said:

As we know, there is politics, and then there is Israel Palestine.  Nuance gets a bit lost in the hatred and there is so much nonsense on both sides these days the facts are hard to discern even to those with the brain power to do it.

 

I hate this. I hate that we (I've done it myself loads in the past, I mean we, everyone really) use the fact that resolving the Israel / Palestine conflict and the wider turbulence of the Middle East is hard to try and make the entire thing seem nebulous, complex, impossible to perceive and thus impossible to judge. 

 

Whats happening in Israel/Palestine has escalated under Netanyahu to way beyond anything that's come before. Israel's government just can't be defended by any honest, neutral outsider.

 

It is a genocide, it is the mass slaughter of non combatants, it is the mass murder of children, it's illegal eviction from their homes and the illegal settling of their land. That's not "oh there's so much disinformation around we just don't know, none of us are really smart enough to work it out!" All of that is fact, the disinformation is the idea that it's complex. It's not, it's pretty simple, Netanyahu is a war criminal murdering civilians. Everyone should be sad about that whatever their religious or political beliefs. 

 

Everyone should also be sad and angry about a militant terrorist organisation crossing the border in to Israel and murdering a bunch of festival goers, taking hostages and committing massive atrocities. Absolutely. 

 

But one of these is a legitimate, democratically elected modern government with global allies, including the biggest military super power on the planet as well as the backing of an enormous amount of private wealth (including Kraft.) The other is an organisation reviled in the entire West, officially designated a terrorist organisation across the EU, the Anglosphere, Japan and other NATO allies and to which membership in this country and America is a crime. 

 

One of these is a full member of the UN, Interpol, CERN, the WHO, the IMF, the WTO and countless other global groups that give it legitimacy and influence and the other isn't even recognised by the United Nations as the rightful representative of its country, which is itself only an "observer" member. 

 

I think it's pretty fair to say our standards and expectations for them should be significantly different and "wow, that terrorist organisation is horrific" isn't a good enough reason to shrug away the abysmal human rights record of Netanyahu's government as "ah yeah but there's blood on both sides, it's complex isn't it."

 

Even now, lobbies with enormous political power and financial weight uses a mixture of wealth and accusations of anti-semitism to shut down criticism of the Israeli government (and let's be clear here, that is equating the Israeli Government to all Jewish people which is far more anti-semitic than any criticism about Netanyahu.) The treatment of Mackelmore is the latest of many, many cases of this. 

 

When has anyone, ever, be cancelled or had their freedom of speech curtailed on this scale due accusations of Islamophobia for suggesting that Hamas are bad or criticising them? 

 

[BenTheFox]

[Corky]

Dentists do a remarkable job. Had some reasonably large rebuild work undertaken and the skill involved is incredible.

[Free Falling Foxes]

If algorithms are so intuitive, all seeing and powerful, why haven't they detected that I never click on an ad that appears on websites I'm visiting and press 'skip' ASAP on the ones that appear on YouTube.

Surely if they knew all that, I wouldn't be bombarded with any more ads, ever?

[Stadt]

14 hours ago, Free Falling Foxes said:

If algorithms are so intuitive, all seeing and powerful, why haven't they detected that I never click on an ad that appears on websites I'm visiting and press 'skip' ASAP on the ones that appear on YouTube.

Surely if they knew all that, I wouldn't be bombarded with any more ads, ever?

Ad platforms are usually quite dishonest with the actual advertisers. It’s easier and more profitable for Google to just let them run and hope the business doesn’t notice.

 

 

[Sampson]

Semi-related to the King Charles stuff, but I do always wonder when these old scandals come up, how the feck people are supposed to remember single off-the-cuff things they said or phonecalls they had 30 years ago and how it's still supposed to represent them as a person?

 

Surely most of us would say we're completely different people than we were 5 or 10 years ago and we've all said stupid off the cuff stuff to our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family loads of times throught our lives and have forgotten them within a week, but its like the media are demanding us to judge people on off the cuff remarks from 2 generations ago?

 

I dunno, still just feel like we're creating a society where people aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore, even retroactively.

Edited 1 hour ago by Sampson

[Foxdiamond]

1 hour ago, Sampson said:

Semi-related to the King Charles stuff, but I do always wonder when these old scandals come up, how the feck people are supposed to remember single off-the-cuff things they said or phonecalls they had 30 years ago and how it's still supposed to represent them as a person?

 

Surely most of us would say we're completely different people than we were 5 or 10 years ago and we've all said stupid off the cuff stuff to our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family loads of times throught our lives and have forgotten them within a week, but its like the media are demanding us to judge people on off the cuff remarks from 2 generations ago?

 

I dunno, still just feel like we're creating a society where people aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore, even retroactively.

Can't see any other reason Charles Spencer wanted to drag it all up again other to make a few quid.