The question is not whether you like or don’t like Biden. The question is not about the morals of lesser evilism. The question is about is the left going to be able to organise in the future, or is it going to get crushed by force. Is that an end result you can get behind that might justify the means of *checks notes* spending five minutes to do the possible within the limits of the current material conditions, i.e. turn up to the fucking ballot booth.

Biden’s blown any chance he had. You’ve got a better chance of getting Maryanne Williamson into office.

Who? I mean sorry I’m European but if I haven’t heard of her no she doesn’t have a chance. Ballots aren’t decided by policy, first and foremost they’re a popularity contest and the first step in that is be known. Second step, make sure people believe you can win, appear to have enough support to actually be worth a shot. Then policy comes into play. Biden has the first two nailed down because institutional inertia, policy don’t matter if your other candidate doesn’t reach that bar.

For extra impact, have Seal Team 6 second the president’s lawyers/entourage whatever it’s called and deliver the question. In full gear.

Depends on implementation but just paying it out to everyone is the easiest option. You can even make a progressive tax system that’s nothing but UBI + flat tax, ridiculously easy to administer. If the UBI was, say, 1k and the tax rate 50% (just to have easy numbers) if you earn 100 bucks a month you end up with 1050, if you earn 2000 you end up with 2k, and if you earn 1m you end up with 501000: Under 2k income the effective tax rate is negative, at 2k it’s exactly zero, at just over 2k it’s very low, over that it approaches 50% in the limit. Much cheaper and easier to just give it to everyone than means-test a gazillion low-income people just to spite Gates.

Do we really want to save this shit system that empowers the worst of us?

Do you want the masses to have the material means to do anything other than bow to systemic pressure?

Kinda ironic, isn’t it? The whole union push started because VW’s joint works council said “We get that it’s impossible to have worker’s representation in China, but the US? Why don’t our US plants have shop floor councils?”. VW then first moved towards simply instituting worker’s representation: Have them elect people, give them board seats, but US law apparently outlaws that as it considers it a yellow union. So VW started to reach out to unions, “don’t you want to organise?”, unions then did and… besides general anti-union sentiment, workers said “what’s there to complain about VW bosses are fair, sensible, and listen to us”. That’s because elsewhere in the world there’s workers sitting on boards firing bad bosses you numpty.

Capitalism depends on the threat of homelessness to function.

No it doesn’t

Market economies don’t. Capitalism OTOH by definition has an exploitative class and that class needs a whip to enforce their status. The two have been equivocated a lot by capitalist propaganda, same as they’re equivocating free and unregulated markets (which couldn’t be further apart in reality).

And it doesn’t need to be homelessness as such, it can be many things. The actual question is one of power, whether workers have a realistic option to say “nope, not that shitty a job for that shitty a wage” and tell the bosses to shove it. Can’t exploit someone who can say “fine by me, I’ll get a table saw and start to do some carpentry”.

It’s not even some nebulous “they”, JMS himself has been pitching it since 2021 and latest news is, well, that CW didn’t cancel the project amidst ownership and direction change and the writer’s strike.

Stargate premiered 1997, it was already well-established in 2000. The Nox are introduced in s01e08, Asgard in s01e10. Season 5 is the first one which could have 9/11 influence, It’s mopping up the Jaffa rebellion and Osiris and Anubis are introduced but there’s plenty of non-Gua’uld episodes. Oh, and Wormhole X-Treme!.

A leftist is someone who, in the French national assembly, sits to the left, as seen from the lectern: Supporters of the Ancien Régime (monarchists) sat to the right, revolutionaries (of every colour) to the left.

As such the core tenets of leftism are Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, in short, enlightenment values later coalescing into humanist values, as well as the metric system. Which is why the US cannot into leftism.

Read an article in the economist ten years ago or so that said that with the automation potential back then, we could have 70% unemployment and still produce western middle-class living standards for absolutely everyone. Probably not cars (go public transport, instead) but definitely roof and four walls, healthy food, education and entertainment, healthcare, and a washing machine. Reason it’s not happening is that while investing in that kind of thing has a giant ROI, it’s also long-term, for quarterly or even ten-year profits it’s more advantageous to hire humans.

Honestly, actually that’s good news: It’s going to happen one way or the other anyway, and we don’t want that kind of control over automated means of productions in the hands of people too greedy to invest in it.

Because Babylon 5 ended in 1998 and the reboot isn’t even in production yet. Also MGM doesn’t have the faintest idea what it’s supposed to do with Stargate.

Maybe it’s not the most elegant example but the barbie movie of last summer is an interesting example of a piece of media that addresses the fact that certain types of male socialization is harmful to everyone if you can approach it with an open mind.

Imagine the same points being made in a different movie, without all that Barbie Girl Power. In a movie not marketed towards gals. Just doesn’t happen. Pretty much all the male hero arcs in (non-kid) media are geared towards the female gaze and phantasies, not issues actual men face. And why not of course we live in capitalism and that’s what sells the most tickets. No, “guy saves the day” doesn’t really get men off, by and large “the roof for once doesn’t need fixing and I can kick back” is way more attractive.

while simultaneously putting a lot of pressure on being “a real man” that gets the girl,

Meanwhile, gals are asking “where are all the real men gone”. Everyone is willing to tell you versions of “this is how it works” without actually understanding the issue, from “just open up” (which gets you ignored at best, cast out at worst), to “just punch everything”, which of course also doesn’t work.

There is a distinct lack of solutions, or even a desire to build a new tradition of behaviour that does not require ideological buy-in, or only works for abusive couples (like Dworkin and her victim). Things that align with instinct. E.g. you can’t simply demand non-violence and then only look at physical violence: What’s a guy to do if a gal becomes psychologically abusive? That’s the point where “Real men don’t hit woman, we tickle” then suddenly makes a ton of sense. You don’t get to attack me at my weak spot and not get a proportional response.

My two cents? Difference feminism has been dismissed prematurely. Of course, get rid of all the ancient toxic normative shit the groups that brought it up brought with them, but fail to include difference on a fundamental level and well-meant but absolutely counterproductive advise such as “just open up” will never vanish due to a structural incapability to see the other side as you insist that it’s the same as you: Way worse than essentialising a banana as a banana is essentialising it as an apple. That’s also how you get shit like the new Mulan: Because apparently the only way a gal can ever achieve anything is to be born magical so that she can fight like a guy. I mean it kinda works as a transmasc egg fantasy but they should’ve just kept the old story, or, better yet, not make a re-make at all, as the old story did show how a gal can, indeed, save the day, with brains and guts instead of brawn or magic (and of course the new one’s a Mary Sue but I wanted to complain about theme, not just shoddy writing). Am I beginning to rant? Probably better stop.

You’re the one who’s naive if you hadn’t thought that through.

What about handing the cement over to Palestinians you can trust (and you know very well they do exist), or international aid organisations, and watching the whole thing with drones?

You seem to be keen on using your creativity and imagination to show how things can’t work. That’s not bad, that’s providing security. Where it becomes a problem is when it replaces thinking of ways how it can work.

Indulge me, suspend your disbelief for a couple of minutes and apply yourself to coming up with something that can be done. Hamas is using pipe sections to build rockets? Fine, tank trucks and canisters exist. Logistically inefficient? Yes. Unviable? Hell no. Then you can say “because of Hamas you now have to carry your water”, not “because Hamas you now have no water”. In one of those two you come across as guarded, but friendly, in the other as heartless.

If Israel does less, it will be perceived by militants

Who the fuck cares about the perception of militants. Worry about the perception of the rest. Worry about Palestinians seeing Israel as the bigger problem than Hamas, worse, as a fucking ally of Hamas.

I do know that continuing to blame the entirety of blame and responsibility of Israel doesn’t move us closer to any sort of resolution.

And blaming everything on Hamas and demanding the impossible – that fascists magically deradicalise – is moving us closer to resolution? That’s the absolutely least likely scenario, yet you declare it to be the only possibility when you say “the ball is in Hamas court”.

Maybe, in this all, we’re looking too far ahead. Would you oppose a Smolanim government that would not giving up on passive security, but stop all the antagonising? The settlements, the turning of PLO territory into Swiss cheese, the “fund Hamas because Fatah is too reasonable” approach? Because if anything should come out of this then it’s wide understanding that the right’s approach to security failed even more than the left’s. Yes maybe Rabin was too naive, people were too hopeful back then (I certainly was), that doesn’t mean that moving to annex the west bank will bring security.

If only it were that simple. Hey, let’s present Hamas with official Israeli workers to kidnap and kill.

Who the fuck said anything about neglecting security and being naive?

Hamas and all of the other extremist militant groups have the crucial ball though. They’re the ones who are in the only position to end this.

No. That’s an excuse to avoid being creative and if you’d reflect about it you’d see it. It’s social conditioning saying “we’re the victims, always”.

What’s your plan for the future? Continue the Otzma Yehudit way of “antagonising until they give up”? That’s what got you into this position in the first place. It’s the reason the IDF wasn’t near Gaza and Hamas saw an opening because the IDF was busy in the west bank backing settlers harassing Palestinians. Realise that there’s portions of the Israeli society who want this to continue, whether they admit it or not, because it is convenient for them, because a scared populace can be way more easily convinced to vote for them. Don’t be complicit in that.

But you all would rather blame Israel than the militants

Israel is militarily, technologically, and economically far superior. That means you have options that Palestinians who want to de-escalate don’t have, thus the ball is in your court. Or, well, practically all of the balls that can be played towards de-escalation are in your court. That’s not a special yardstick we carved just for you, it’s not about “who started it” or “who did worst” but “who is in a better position to end this”.

Also y’all speak English and are on the internet. I could rant to you about Fatah corruption but what good would that do.

How do we remove dictators like Hamas from power?

Hamas has more than one wing, all dependent on each other, and one of them you can right-out supplant. Heck it even meshes with security concerns: Instead of saying “Gaza can’t have concrete because Hamas” say “We’re going to donate concrete but because of Hamas we’re going to do the pouring, tell us where you want those houses”

More generally speaking: You will need to be able to take a punch while showing that you can be an asset to your region of the world meaning internally, you’ll have to make sure that forces who right-out enjoy having an external enemy to fuel their eternal war have absolutely no influence. Doesn’t even need much, all the civil society needs to do is to be receptive enough to understand that Kahanites and Nazis are the same shit with a different coat of paint so that the Israeli Antifa will come back out of exile – Berlin, I know, of all places. It’s an excuse for a city they could’ve at least chosen Hamburg but I digress.

It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, trust isn’t built in a fortnight. There’s no quick solutions, there’s only approaches which breed resentment and those who don’t, and one kind is perpetuating hatred, the other isn’t. I know this kind of stuff can sound like platitudes but it really isn’t. Being disciplined in that regard is the only way.

More concretely, right now, don’t fucking blow the Saudi Arabia deal. If you need to stop the offensive to do that, do it.

Every restriction is an attempt to reduce violence and terrorism.

Every restriction also breeds resentment and thus increases violence and terrorism.

There’s one question I want to ask here, and it’s not an easy one, and Israel will take a long time to come to a national consensus on it: Was it just money that Israel funnelled to Hamas to weaken the PLO, or also fighters?

Once you understand how you created that monster you’ll also understand how to starve it. Minds can be changed, the mechanics of conflict and conflict resolution can’t.

“Withdrawal” can be really misleading, here, because it was very much not disengagement aka leaving Gaza alone: The moved the prison guards from inside the strip to the wall surrounding it and then closed the gate and enacted a blockade, for 16 years straight now. About 50% of Gazans are 18 or under, growing up under those conditions, 80% are reliant on humanitarian aid.

You can certainly make arguments that an arms blockade is warranted. But concrete? Starving the city of water? Yeah that’s very much not leaving people alone.

Presumably because they don’t apply to taxis. Singapore definitely has a licensing system, don’t ask me for details.

Kinda… yes and no? Visualisations aren’t necessarily spatial, as in representing a map of a space. Random example I get a different erm quality for the qualia for “fish tank” and “interaction of fishes in a tank”, only the latter has that space-like quality the other is a mere image representation of an idea. It cannot have, as a singular object there’s nothing to set it in relation to.

But back to practice: Close your eyes, and consider where you are. You’re probably still “seeing” the room around you in your mind’s eye, and could navigate to, say, the door reasonably accurately (and the inaccuracy is due to lack of practice, blind folks excel at that kind of stuff). Navigation through terrain you’re not directly seeing (whether that be because of closed eyes or a forest obscuring it) is the original function of the circuitry and other uses of it have a similar quality to it.

What is almost certain is that that circuitry is the reason why we have a very hard time visualising anything higher-dimensional than 3d space: It’s just not in its feature set because little warm-blooded critters living alongside dinosaurs had no use for it.

The High Priests of the Egregore! The High Priests of the Egregore!