• 0 Posts
  • 851 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldPromised Land
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.

    Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.


  • and that’s the only way it’s ever used.

    Kind of an extreme claim which is definitely not true.

    It’s the best example of what it’s trying to describe. It’s a hypocrite of a phrase, engaging in what it condemns.

    So phrases are by themselves guilty of word crimes? A cliche isn’t just an often repeated series of words, it’s a tired idea. “Thought terminating cliche” is itself a thought terminating cliche if it’s being used that way (such as to shut down someone who was engaging in good faith and happened to use a common expression as part of that), but that doesn’t mean this category of expression doesn’t exist. Of course it exists, the modern internet is plagued with it because it’s full of propagandists with an interest in pulling people’s levers with minimal effort and no interest in argument.



  • If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

    What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.






  • Online debates about politics tend to be bad, but that’s mostly just because of people who are more interested in propagandizing than honestly hashing out ideas. If they aren’t doing that, and you aren’t doing that, it can be worthwhile. IMO the easiest way to tell the difference and know to stop replying is if you get a response that clearly was written after loosely skimming your comment, and using those few words as a jumping off point to launch into a mostly unrelated rant, rather than directly addressing your central point. Or, a common one with conservatives, an argument framed as unsolicited personal advice, that’s never going anywhere constructive.