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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2024

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  • I feel like this quote from the BBC article is the bigger story:

    According to Israeli media, neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the defence minister Yoav Gallant were aware of plans for a pause before they were announced. Mr Netanyahu’s office reportedly said the prime minister had told his military secretary that the plan was “unacceptable” after hearing about it on Sunday. He has also reportedly been told that there has been no change to the IDF’s policy and that the fighting in Rafah “continues as planned”. Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said the decision to pause fighting had been made by a “fool” who was “evil”.





  • I found this article about a NPR poll which has a breakdown of support for Israel by age group and party affiliation.

    I’m not sure exactly where Biden’s position on the Gaza invasion falls on this poll, but it seems closest to “Support Israels right to defend itself while encouraging a cease fire”. Biden definitely isn’t withholding all support, and he definitely isn’t fully supporting the military actions against Hamas.

    About 33% of Democrats and 27% independents think the US should suspend aid to Israel until there is a cease fire.

    Similarly 38% of gen z/millennials think there should be a cease fire until there is a suspension of aid. This is the smallest voting cohort at about 36% of the population according to Wikipedia, and also the least likely to vote historically. Perhaps voter turn out would be higher among this group if we had a different candidate, but no one is going to cater their political platform to a group that had never reliably voted, especially if doing so costs them votes among reliable voters.

    Among Gen X and older less that 19% support a stopping aid until a cease fire happens. This is the largest and most likely to vote voting cohort.

    Also noted in the article, Biden has a 15 point lead over Trump among baby boomers who have very little support for a ceasefire.




  • You wanted a source that when the Secretary of the State said “we” she meant the state department?

    From the article:

    The quote is from a 2006 interview between Clinton and Eli Chmosky of the Jewish Press during her campaign for reelection to the US senate, and was part of a previously un-aired portion.

    She wasn’t the secretary of state when she said it, and probably had no idea that she would ever be secretary of state. I’m not sure why you would think the “we” is the state department.

    Additionally there’s no context around this quote so it’s a pretty significant leap to infer that “Hillary casually said we should have rigged a foreign election”. Her next sentence could have very well have been “But we didn’t, and we never will because that isn’t how we operate”. Or it could have been “We actually did try, but we failed because we ran out of funding”. Or “That’s what I’m hearing from the leaders of Fatah anyway”.

    Hillary is a pretty big POS and it’s pretty easy to find shit she did that is horrible but this quote doesn’t match up with what you’re trying to show.


  • Edit2: Income inequality was drastically reduced after the communist parties came to power:

    Are you talking about the 10-15 years after the revolutions? That chart shows that today China has income inequality similar to that of pre-1900 China, and higher income inequality than France, Sweden, and the UK. Even more interesting, the US only has 3% more income share going to the 1% than China does.

    Also “share of income going to the top 1%” doesn’t really tell the whole story. I think individual purchasing power would be a much more informative statistic.



  • A little context:

    According the Arab American Institute less than 1% of American citizens are Arab American.

    Arab Americans do make up significant voting blocks in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Even though they are an extremely small minority, they may have to power to cost Joe Biden these key swing states and hand the election to Donald Trump.

    Most older Americans support Biden’s response to Israel according to this poll. On the other hand younger Americans largely disapprove of his response. There’s a lot more nuance than given in my brief summary, this is just to illustrate the diversity of opinion among voters.

    Joe Biden needs to balance rejecting young Americans who are unreliable voters and Arab Americans who are a very small minority with rejecting older Americans who are a large reliable voting block. Again there’s a lot more nuance here that I’m not going to go into, I’m merely pointing out that no matter what choice Joe Biden makes it’s going to alienate some voters and could potentially hand the election to Trump.




  • Since a lot of people seem to be jumping to extreme conclusions about this based on specious assumptions, here’s how the process works according to the article:

    Magrathea — named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — buys waste brines, often from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, it passes an electrical current through the salts to separate them from the molten magnesium, which is then cast into ingots or machine components.