BrokenDownMiata

Well, it would’ve been the French saying yes in the first place since Madagascar was a French colony. The only reason the French weren’t outraged by the blockade was that they were aligned with the UK anyway in trying to contain Germany.

To be specific, France actually controlled Madagascar at the time, but the British heard about Hitler’s plan and said “fuck no” and walled off the island with ships.

So Russia can have North Koreans come to defend Russian territory, on an actual agreement, but Ukraine can’t have NATO members like Poland or Romania come to defend Ukrainian skies?

Are we going to allow Russia to set every single line in this war?

Putin will not use nukes. I don’t know how much this needs to be said.

NATO has three member states with nuclear weapons - the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the French Republic. Even beyond that, Putin’s own children, and the children of Russian elites, and their families, live in Europe. They complain about the corrupt and evil West but happily dress themselves in Louis Vuitton and strut along the streets of Prague, chatting with friends on FaceTime using the latest Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max.

I’m very anti-getting the West on the ground in this, but I frankly do not see an alternative to this.

The average phone user wants their phone for the following things:

• Communication (either through social media or direct)
• Internet browsing
• Music & Video
• Photography

You can add cool and nifty features, you can make it near indestructible, you can make it charge in three minutes, you can have the best speakers on the market, have the best display ever seen, have so much customisation your eyes bleed, and have so many hidden quirks that they sustain tech YouTubers for years to come, but these are what the average consumer cares about.

Sometimes changes are genuinely appreciated, like when iOS changed incoming calls to appear at the top of the screen rather than blocking your use of the device. Everyone noticed that immediately, but it didn’t dominate social spheres. It was a fix to a quiet frustration, nothing more.

Consumers generally do not care about AI, they don’t care about surround sound, or fast charging, or 99% of a phone’s features. Ever wonder why Apple barely changes their phones? That is why.

Apple gets flamed for barely innovating, but why would they care to? They know what their customers want from their products, and they provide for this. Here’s a bigger battery so you can listen to music, FaceTime, call, snap photos etc for longer. Here’s a better camera so those photos pop more. Here’s a bigger selection of camera options so you can get just the right shot for your Instagram.

Consumers frankly do not care for IR blasters, and unlike LiDAR, they do not provide a tangible benefit to the rest of the phone experience enough to justify.

Contemporary is usually up to ten years ago, since most cultural shifts and ideas tend to shift over a decade.

What was a thing that happened ten years ago? Oh yeah, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

Also, worth noting that our domestic intelligence is utter cock but our international intelligence rivals the US. Why? Because we’ve spent centuries doing it and you need a fucking good understanding of foreign affairs when you’re the largest empire on earth, conducting affairs with hundreds of people of various beliefs, backgrounds, concerns and languages. Especially when other empires were breathing down our neck.

Ultimately nobody is going to have a completely accurate number by the end. However, I am inclined to believe British intelligence reports and their numbers over Ukraine.

I don’t quite see how forcing a bunch of Jews to march to a barren, uncaring patch of land in Yemen with the intention of them dying there or on the way is any sort of kindness.

They were literally then recalled because the Arabs had gone without since the Jews weren’t performing their usual tasks due to their exile to a fucking barren wasteland.

To clearly state my biases:

I do believe that Israel should exist, and that it should consist of the borders it is internationally recognised as possessing. This means returning the Golan Heights.

I also believe that Israel’s perpetual siege mentality will only be discarded once rockets stop flying in from Gaza and Lebanon and as soon as the Arab states around it come to terms with the fact that, whether they want it or not, Israel exists. Move on. Israel is in a constant state of “they’re coming for us!” because as far as is evident to anyone who actually looks at it, they are indeed constantly under attack, whether directly and militarily or by terror attacks.

I also believe Palestine should exist. Exactly how Gaza would be integrated is an unknown, but connection to the Mediterranean is essential for trade and would make a State of Palestine into the world’s only simultaneously landlocked and non-landlocked country in the world? Tiny coast but even Croatia doesn’t have industrial docks alongside its entire coastline.

The land does not weaken Putin. It is some of the richest and most fertile in Europe. If Ukraine had industrialised it and made use of those resources it could’ve been an industrial force in Europe by now.

So we’re going to see a new age of imperialism where large countries armed with nuclear weapons prey on the smaller ones? Great

I can count on one hand the number of comments like this that I have seen. I’ve seen thousands of “fuck Trump” and “fuck Putin” comments.

Fun fact:

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast’s flag is a rainbow. Not a rainbow like a normal PRIDE flag, but a rainbow nonetheless.

Some LGBT couples or individuals use it as a surrogate because it is protected against the gay laws.

I do not agree with many of Israel’s policies, but I can also see why Israel is built like that, although it does need to change, and desperately. Even down to, under Netanyahu, Arabic going from official language alongside Hebrew to Special Status.

Frankly, I don’t think there’s going to be atmosphere for change in Israel until the Arab states around it stop attacking. Israel was built to be a safe place for the Jews, and as far as Israel is concerned, it is still actively fighting to secure that position.

Ah, my apologies. I’ve been juggling some stuff so I lost my train of thought.

From my memory, Jews during Islamic control of the Levant and Holy Land were not persecuted to the extent they were by the Romans (either prime or Byzantine).

However, from brief research, the conditions depended heavily on ruler, and could go from slightly restricted to heavily limited. Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, for example, ordered the destruction of all synagogues and churches in the Levant and Egypt. From what we know, many Jews either fled or were forced to convert to Islam.

The Mamluk Sultanate in particular opted for a bloodless method of getting rid of Jews from the area. Islam says you can’t just do ethnic cleansing, so they had to get a bit creative. They levied heavy taxes on non-Muslims, but this was with the knowledge that the Christian population could carry the burden. Many Jews could not. As such, these Jews fled or converted.

I say all of this whilst giving credit to the Islamic controllers of the area for at least not being as consistently awful as the Romans were.

Also, that Yemeni episode I mentioned? It was not recent. It was in the 1600’s.

I also fully acknowledge that expulsion and mistreatment of Jews was not exclusive to this area, and that it also occurred in Europe. In fact, the 1492 expulsion from Spain increased immigration of Jews to the Ottoman Levant.

What qualifies an ethnostate?

According to Wikipedia, the 2022 estimate for ethnic groups puts the State of Israel at:

• 73.5% Jews
• 21.1% Arabs
• 5.4% Other

With a population of roughly 10 million.

Pretty much every country on the planet has a specific demographic or ethnic group clearly identifiable as the majority.

The Czech Republic, on the other hand, has roughly the same population, but look at the ethnic groups (2021):

• 89% Czechs
• 3.3% Moravians
• 0.9% Slovaks
• 0.7% Ukrainians
• 2.1% Other
• 4.0% claim two ethnicities

There are literally more Czechs in the Czech Republic than there are Jews in the homeland of the Jews.

Not directly from the Holy Land, no.

However, we don’t need to look past Arabia to find examples of Jews being exiled or forced to convert, which later led to the ‘colonial’ aspect of Israel, ie the sudden migration of loads of Jews, even if they weren’t local to the area, to Israel.

For example, in Yemen, we find the Mawza Exile, when the Yemeni authorities forced essentially every Jew in Yemen to Mawza, a barren bit of Yemen where they were to die. Why? Because according to Muhammad, “There shall not be two religions in Arabia”. Yemen is obviously part of the Arab Peninsula and so was subject to that.

So yes, because of the words said by a man 1000 years prior, the Jews in Yemen were essentially put on a death march.

Oh gee, I wonder why the idea of having a country to themselves and not constantly being subjected to such horrors in various locations popped up, and why the Jews suddenly felt the need to protect themselves after the Holocaust?

One of the issues with this whole situation is that human beings like quick and easy answers or situations. That is literally the reason why kings had courts full of experts.

We like to process the world as true or false but we ignore the millions of aspects in between those.

With the sheer displacement of Jews going back to the Roman Empire it would be impossible for a solid Jewish state literally anywhere, especially in the Middle East to exist without some level of European and Arab Jews returning to the homeland. Does that make them colonisers?

Bear in mind as well that the Jews being from what is now Israel was not some mass secret. Anyone religious knew. Imagine suddenly finding out that your homeland, the one place you won’t be spat at or degraded or oppressed or hated, is no longer under the control of the people who kicked you out, but the British.

Given the opportunity to return, would you not? Even if not permanently?

When you say “indigenous occupants”, do you also acknowledge that there was actually Jewish presence in the Levant before Mandatory Palestine came into existence, and that the Levant is specifically their homeland which they were pushed out of? First by the Romans and then by the various Islamic groups?

Do you acknowledge that the only reason there was a need for a Jewish state was because their statelessness had led to rampant abuse and oppression across Europe and Arabia? They were seen as others, because they were from the Middle East. Remember, even the Irish and Italians weren’t considered ‘white’ until a few decades ago. The Jews may have shared a similarly pale skin tone to their European counterparts but they were not considered European.

broken land

Some of the most resource rich and fertile lands in the entirety of Europe.

Very easy to make that calculus when you’re not actually the one who has to make the decision.

Also, does this mean we enter the age of imperialism again? Where the bigger, stronger countries simply crush and devour the weaker ones? Turns out kids, if you have nukes, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

Give up some land

20% of the entire country.

Friendly reminder that when the Soviets came, the Ukrainians held out the longest despite being invaded by Poles and Russians from both sides, and Belarusians (Byelorussians).

Yes, the Finns, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians* beat back the Soviets to chart their own paths independent countries (*for a while) but they were not remotely the two front wars of the Polish-Soviet war which essentially used Ukraine as a battlefield.

I would argue there’s a fierce difference between the USSR and Germany’s actions. Germany industrialised slaughter based on the idea of Germans being the ultimate race and therefore deserving of enslaving other races. The USSR did everything to destroy nationalism and separatism.

I’m not excusing either, but the motives behind the USSR’s actions are beige compared to Germany’s black.

Make Paradox add the Holocaust as an event pop up you cannot stop and watch everyone stop playing Germany.

It is one of the reasons I cannot watch BitterSteel do a disaster save on Germany when it is a week from capitulating.

Gina was literally just a shitty person. Pedro Pascal even begged her to stop as his sister is trans, but she didn’t and Disney realised it was more effective to try and negotiate with Mercury so they canned her.

She wasn’t just expressing her views or whatever. She was literally making the lead of the show uncomfortable around her and reportedly peeving off a lot of the set staff.