I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it’s rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel’s actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important if we want to understand what’s happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the “ethno-” part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).

It’s somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that’s more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren’t doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.

The Swiss literally collaborated with the literal Nazis.

Ooh, I like this

Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.

I’m surprised by how much I know. It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given that I have both autism and ADHD and that makes me enthusiastic about learning basically everything, but I’m chuffed with how well rounded my knowledge is.

I studied biochemistry at university, but over the last 5 years or so, I’ve been doing a lot more reading in topics like the history and philosophy of science, philosophy more generally, political theory, disability theory, queer theory, economics, design, programming etc… My knowledge in each of these areas is relatively shallow, but I seem to be pretty good at forming lateral links between things I know, which means I can be quite fun to have in depth discussions with. It helps that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I stopped being so attached to my identity as a smart person and learned how to say “no, I haven’t heard of $thing, tell me more” or “I think I’ve heard of that, but I’m not sure — remind me?”

A year or so ago, a friend who studied English called me “well read” and it gave me a bit of an existential crisis. “But I don’t actually fully read most of the books I talk about. Many of them I just skim them until I find a chapter or two that’s most useful to me!”. Turns out that that kind of reading strategy is typical of people who are well read.

My late best friend was a historian, and one of the things I loved about our friendship is arguing with him about random shit. His background meant he often approached an issue in a completely different way to me, and we’d often ask questions or make points that would require the other to go away and think about it for a while before forming a response. I think he’d be really proud of me (and also aggravatingly smug due to him being a significant driving force behind me getting more into history).

Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.

"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.

In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.

This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”

Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic

To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.

Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.

The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla

I am filled with rage whenever I hear stuff talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists. At least articles like this call it like it is. My view is that a ceasefire can only be broken once, and then there would need to be a new ceasefire arranged. Israel broke the ceasefire not long after it was put in place, so it’s utterly absurd we’re still talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists.

Not all memory foams are equal. I’ve found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you’re talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind

That’s so funny. I feel ridiculous enough owning one (the reason I own it was because I went to a weird university where fancy white-tie events were common and most students probably went to at least one of those in their time there. )

If I punched you, that would be assault.

If I hit you with a hammer, that would be assault with a weapon.

If I stood beside you with a hammer and did not harm you at all, then I have not committed any crime.

No-one is going to be charged with crimes they didn’t commit because of this. Classifying them as a weapon is only relevant for cases in which they were actively used to commit sexual assault, much the same way that a hammer only counts as a weapon if I assault you with it.

Though I understand why you came away with the impression you did — I am often exasperated at weird drug laws that are overly prohibitive and often unscientific in how they criminalise relatively low risk drugs, which meant that I also initially had the same reading of this news as you did. Fortunately, it seems that this is not an example of one of those silly drug laws, but an actually sensible measure.

Man, this is fucked up.

Good luck with your company. That sounds like a lot of pressure. I’m glad that you have a few more years of buffer room, and I hope that you’re able to look after yourself in the meantime; I know how easy it is to burn out when you’re trying to run your own business.

Wise person. I got good at sharpening, and I ended up monetising it as a hobby, which I inevitably regretted

I got good at sharpening because I had a bunch of weirdly shaped knives, like this saddler’s round knife

Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.

Oh wow, that is pretty fucked up. That sounds similar to what I’ve heard described as “weaponized therapy speak” — where terms from mental health therapy creep into daily vernacular and, divorced from their original context, are misused in a way that causes harm.

The archetypical example of this might be if a person doesn’t remember a past event that their partner is referencing in an argument, they may be accused of “gaslighting”. It’s not always an intentional misuse, but sometimes it is deliberate and maliciously used to manipulate someone. A big example of that is someone making unreasonable and controlling demands of a person, and then getting annoyed if that person doesn’t comply, because they’re “not respecting boundaries”.

I don’t know whether what you describe would count as misusing therapy speak, but I do know that I feel icky about “consent” being used in this way — in addition to being a hurtful way to put you down, this feels like it obfuscates the actual meaning of consent.

Regardless, I’m sorry that happened to you; that really sucks. It must’ve been hard to feel like you weren’t allowed to express your beliefs — politics are pretty pervasive, so even if you’re avoiding actively political discussions, political subtext can seep into regular conversations pretty easily. Having different political beliefs to you was no excuse to shut you down in such a hurtful manner. I hope you have better friends now.

A friend once said that she finds the invasiveness of this legitimately a little triggering, because it so vividly reminds her of the time she spent with an extremely abusive partner, who would similarly restrict her ability to meaningfully say no to something.

Ever since she made this point to me, I realised that I had been thinking of online consent dialogs as being distinct from the general concept of consent that we use in other life contexts (such as sexual consent, medical consent etc.). Since then, I have started to fold the online stuff into the more general notion of consent, which adds a whole bunch of connotations that makes me feel far more icky whenever I see a dialog that doesn’t let you say no.