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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • There’s children, there’s folks who refuse service. So I would venture to say that there are some people in Israel who are innocent. Of course, anyone who served in the military is not on that list.

    Conscientious objectors are a thing. There are consequences to objecting, of course. Maybe it makes you a pariah in the settler colonial apartheid ethnostate of Israel, but just fucking move, you’re not supposed to be there anyway. Maybe you cannot move out of Israel, and you’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life or whatever. But you know what? Murdering a child to save your own career still makes you the bad guy. Helping others murder children to save your own career still makes you the bad guy.

    But even beyond that, it’s not like these folks are going to gaza with a gun pointed to their head. Most of the population supports the government’s genocide of Palestinians, as polls show. There are very few innocents in Israel.








  • wpb@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldwe need more users
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    7 days ago

    if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall

    I don’t consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.

    Here’s another way a high monthly active user count doesn’t necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going “have my updoot, kind sir” and “this!”. Higher user count, lower quality.

    Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don’t tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don’t need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.

    I’m not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I’m just saying its goodness is very far from established.





  • I would like to start out by saying I would’ve preferred Harris over Trump, and that the two parties are NOT the same. For example, the FTC as it was during Biden would never have happened under a republican administration.

    What makes you think that bombing Venezuela wouldn’t have happened under Harris? I can only think of three explanations: because she is a woman, because she is a democrat, or because Kamala Harris specifically is against foreign intervention.

    I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I would’ve preferred Harris over Trump, and that the two parties are NOT the same.

    The first explanation sounds weirdly sexist to me, so I won’t spend too much time on it. We don’t have a female US president to compare with, but look at the voting record in congress and the senate on the use of force in the invasion of Iraq back in 2002. When you control for party affiliation, women were actually more likely than men to vote in favor of the invasion.

    I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I would’ve preferred Harris over Trump, and that the two parties are NOT the same.

    Maybe because she’s a democrat then? Let’s look at some recent democratic presidents, and see how they fared on foreign interventions.

    Obama: 40 billion in military aid to Israel, expanded drone campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. Surge of 30k troops to Afghanistan. Continued use of black sites and torture camps like Gitmo. Explicit legal protection for the torturers.

    Biden: 18B in military aid to Israel as it was committing a genocide. Air strikes on Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan.

    I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I would’ve preferred Harris over Trump, and that the two parties are NOT the same.

    Maybe Harris is an especially anti foreign intervention person then. From her DNC speech I quote: “I will ensure America has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” What do you reckon she wanted that fighting force for? A tea party?

    I would’ve preferred Harris over Trump. It would’ve mattered a great deal for women’s rights, lgbt rights, and to some small extent even a bit for worker’s rights. But to pretend the electorate has any meaningful choice when it comes to US imperialism, is, I think, not realistic.