Cory1848

While the Israeli state was born in great trauma, and while the Jewish people have been persecuted more than most others over the millennia, and while this may put the Israeli state in a “unique historical position” to advocate for human rights, at the same time I feel that Israelis/Jewish people are no more and no less responsible than any other group of people, or the citizens of any other state, for the maintenance of global civility. In most respects, Israel is just another country, one among a few hundred. Giving Israel a “unique historical position” encourages some people to hold Israel to a higher standard, and thus obsessively criticize Israel for behaving badly when in fact far worse crimes are being committed (at any given moment) in other parts of the world. That said, Israel is domestically in a bad place right now, and as you point out Abbas just gave extremists there more ammunition.

Absolutely not. As badly as the Israeli state has treated the Palestinians, they have not rounded up six million of them and murdered them in cold blood. False equivalence.

I have no idea what you mean by “genius girl,” and the whole notion of intelligence testing, IQ scores, and offshoots like Mensa is becoming failed science, like phrenology or humorism. How can one “measure” “intelligence”? The notion is absurd. Why not just find a woman who’s immediately appealing to you, ask her out for dinner, engage her in topics you like to talk about, and see if there’s mutual interest? I think that’s how it usually works ... Good luck ...

Like a friend of mine in another forum said, that mug shot is perhaps the best work Trump has ever done. Even better than his Mussolini impressions.

It is indeed a weird thing to announce, but perhaps Prachuap is simply indicating his awareness of history. Benigno Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac as he was returning to the Philippines in 1983 after three years of exile, leading to the People Power revolution, the end of the Marcos dictatorship, and the election of Aquino’s widow Corazon as president three years later. The circumstances of course are totally different, but this kind of drama has happened before.

Aw ... We're a nice little state, really -- plus, no sales tax, and really low property taxes!

I don't think you understood a word of what I wrote. I wasn't being an "apologist" for anyone.

In Delaware, state residents pay a reduced rate to get into state parks. The idea is that residents pay Delaware state tax, which goes toward park upkeep, whereas out-of-staters don’t. That seems reasonable to me, although the difference between the rates isn’t nearly the tenfold gap that occurs here, which seems excessive. Also, a (government-owned) state park is one thing and a (corporate-owned) theme park is another. Disney would be exclusively focused on the bottom line, so perhaps they’re providing incentives for local residents, who are within easy driving distance all year long, to visit the park more frequently.

I think that pretty much gets at the crux of it. People with money will do what it takes to keep that money, and people without are too concerned about putting food on the table to be able to think about much else. And the current mode of neoliberal capitalism just exacerbates this, by increasing the wealth gap, which is happening worldwide. As for whether fear is more a motivating factor or a paralyzing one, I’m sure there are arguments on both sides!

Yes, it was a neighbor’s brother, and thanks for asking. It was heat stroke, and apparently he was perfectly healthy, so it was quite a shock -- six hundred people at the funeral! It’s been really hot here (Chiang Mai), but I don’t have to work outside like a lot of my neighbors do, so can’t really say how it feels doing manual labor or how it differs from a couple of years ago.

About the future being “doomed,” one factor is that global warming seems to be happening more rapidly, at least as measured over the past two years or so, than expected. I’m not a scientist but think there’s solid evidence to back that up. And while you might argue that the news is filled with hysterical accounts of tourists fleeing Rhodes, and 120-degree temperatures in Phoenix, and half of Pakistan being under water, and that such stories help sell newspapers, that doesn’t mean that the events aren’t actually happening, with greater volume, frequency, and intensity than before, and killing lots of people. So I’m willing to buy into a little “gloom and doom” talk if it frightens people into voting for public servants who will regulate the fossil fuel industries, help fund alternative energy sources (which can also be profitable), press for global cooperation, etc. I’m sorry if that sounds naïve, but I see these as common sense initiatives, and a little optimism helps me sleep at night!

I have no idea who the “richest people” are but would trust whatever Forbes says, whose lists some people have cited here. I do know that fossil fuels remains an immensely profitable industry. And the fossil fuel industry getting richer by bribing right-wing politicians (via campaign contributions) to do nothing to regulate their industry, is simply how it works. In like manner, other industries bribe other politicians to do their bidding. This is not privileged information.

I don’t disagree … Social media has a way of shortening one’s attention span, and over the long term that will be devolutionary. AI is likely to just speed up this process. However, it’s encouraging to see some people here relying on actual science and citing actual climate scientists; it’s possible, with an educated effort, to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak …

John Clauser, the scientist you’re referring to, is a researcher in quantum mechanics, not climate science. Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in 2016, but I wouldn’t necessarily trust what he might have to say about climate change either. And while Clauser’s invitation to speak was indeed withdrawn as you state, I would steer clear of the Gateway Pundit, which is your source, as it’s primarily known for spreading disinformation.

Well, yeah, assuming that consumers of news are empty vessels incapable of rational thought, or of distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not. Given the number of people worldwide who say they get most or all of their news from social media (or from bloggers living with their mothers and selling herbal remedies on the side), there’s certainly reason for concern. Your list of examples includes everything from very real existential threats to festering problems to nonissues. I’d like to be optimistic and believe that there are still enough people who can tell the difference.

Don’t be daft; politics in the United States (and elsewhere) runs on corporate money. Somebody mentioned Scott Pruitt earlier; when he was attorney general of Oklahoma, fossil fuel industries fed him $215,000, and he sued the EPA at least fourteen times. When Trump won the presidency, he made Pruitt head of the EPA. Such information is available everywhere.

At least partly because of how they reduce the human attention span. Even forums like this one are at fault in that way. Serious topics are raised that warrant serious discussion in public forums, but it’s hard to make a valid point in two sentences or less, which seems the norm in social media, constrained either by the software or by convention (nobody’s going to read past the first couple of sentences). Pretty soon, the best you can do is start hurling insults at the party you’re “respectfully disagreeing” with. <sigh> It’s addictive though!

I got two in the past week, women of Asian origin claiming to live in Canada, and right, both said that something I’d posted on my own timeline was funny. One said that I was “among the recommended friends,” whatever that means. I had a brief chat (via FB Messenger) with one of them; it was pretty innocuous and didn’t lead anywhere. I have no idea if they are women who are bored or phishing, or if they’re trolls, or not who they look like, or what, but I go by the general rule that anything I post on Facebook is immediately in the public domain, so I don’t post much. Not too concerned about it …

It seems that lots of people, illogically, equate concern for the environment with “liberalism,” “woke-ism,” and other bogeymen they have been propagandized into hating and/or fearing. I.e., being open-eyed about climate science and what it actually tells us means that you’re “woke,” which means you favor a “liberal” agenda, which means you’re not a patriot, which means you hate your country, and so on. Of course, as you say, all you have to do is follow the money. As far back as the 1970s, the oil companies knew all about the long-term effects of burning fossil fuels (they undoubtedly had the budget to hire the brainiest scientists) and decided to just bury the results of the research, as profits were more important.

It doesn’t take much internet sleuthing to learn exactly how much money Pruitt rakes in from the fossil fuel industry. Fortunately, for every person of influence like Pruitt who has been purchased by that industry, there are tens of thousands of climate scientists who are neither corrupt nor compromised and who actually know what they’re talking about.

I think their numbers are diminishing. My neighbor’s brother died last week of heat stroke -- 59 years old, a rice farmer. Working in his field on a particularly hot day, he felt woozy and sat down, then just collapsed and died. I’ll find out more from my neighbor once she’s gotten over the shock -- whether he had preexisting conditions, what the death certificate said, etc. -- but it gets pretty real when neighbors who make their living working outside start to drop dead …

When he was photographed a few years ago with Texas governor Greg Abbott, all smiles, backstage at a concert in Austin, that did it for me. I didn’t burn my Clapton records, but I’ll never listen to them again.

You are quite correct: in linguistics, the Semitic languages are one branch comprising Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, and many others. No argument on that. In plain English, though, the word “anti-Semitism” means hostility to or hatred of Jews as a group. No amount of semantic trickery on your part can dilute the actual meaning of the word. As for the origins of Ashkenazi Jews, there was a theory floating around that they descended from the Khazars, a proto-Turkic people whose leaders adopted Judaism and whose Asian khanate was absorbed by the expanding Russian state. As one poster here commented, though, that theory has been debunked by genetic testing.

Well, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck ...

In the movie at least, the girls who got caught were kept totally in the dark; they didn't have a clue about the overall plan.