Within Israel, the vast majority of people don't particularly care about any kind of manifest destiny style reclamation of the West Bank or Gaza, and if that were the only issue, I genuinely don't think there would be a significant problem.

What essentially everyone does care about, however, is repeatedly having rockets lobbed at them. When people feel under threat, reason starts to fall away, people begin dehumanizing the "other", and you get the massive mess we have today. The fact of the matter is that Israel will never accept any situation where its people are under threat. No matter what you think about what acts are or aren't justified or your opinion on how various parts of the history played out, none of that changes this basic reality.

Palestine is not going to be able to militarily eradicate Israel. There is precisely zero chance that Israelis allow themselves to be subjected to a second diaspora and they'll fight to the death to prevent this, and that's to say nothing of external players like the United States. Again, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a true thing.

On the flip side, Israel is perfectly capable of essentially eradicating the Palestinians, though this would subject it to massive international condemnation that would also have huge economic impacts. You're already beginning to see whispers of this as the world increasingly sees Israel's response in Gaza as being excessively harsh. The most they could do is a slow and steady degradation of Palestinian society while encouraging them to "voluntarily" leave, which is arguably what the strategy has essentially been under Likud with settlements and the like.

So, what's required for a peaceful co-existence? Firstly, you need a mutual acknowledgement from both leaders (and also, a legitimate Palestinian leadership in the first place) that the other side exists and has a right to do so, ie, Palestinians giving up on the idea of eradicating Israel and Israelis giving up on the idea of fully annexing and ethnically cleaning Palestinian lands. This is not a trivial thing. The Israeli far-right, though they're not dominant, are growing and believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, with the Arabs being seen as little more than animals in the way. The extreme Palestinian side is that all Israelis are essentially foreign invaders and should be forcibly removed or killed. Both of these positions must be completely taken off the table.

Secondly, Israel will not engage unless it is confident that its security will not be threatened, which will in practice mean that Palestinian authorities must be de-militarized beyond what's necessary for basic local law enforcement. Again, this might seem unfair, and hell, it probably is. But the fact of the matter remains that Israel is the side holding the guns here, so you either play by their rules and try to find some positive outcome, or you flip the table and enjoy the complete loss, but with some moral satisfaction. Similarly, there would probably need to be some kind of border controls for imports that Israeli authorities can inspect for covert weapons shipments, since it's a known thing that Iran does regularly try to bring weapons into Gaza. Ideally, this would be some kind of bi-national force with Palestinian cooperation.

If you reach these points, then you still have other very big questions to deal with, like precise borders, land swaps, the question of Jerusalem, how to connect Gaza and the West Bank, any right of return for displaced Palestinians both recently and during the Nakba, and plenty of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting about. But ultimately, if you have a Palestinian and Israeli leadership that are actually interested in peace and accept the existence of the other, and both agree to cooperate on matters of security and prioritizing that peace above and past grievances, no matter how legitimate, that gives you a real foundation you can build from.

I wouldn't get my hopes up though.

That would require getting elected, which would require them being broadly popular.

Hell, he literally stole money from another Republican Congressman and his wife.

You almost have to respect it.

It's also a very deliberate strategy to give a little bit of space for people who've identified as Republicans in the past but refuse to follow Trump. He's saying that you don't have to identify as a Democrat, or even necessarily drop the Republican party as a whole, but rather you simply have to recognize the obvious fact that Trump represents a major departure from the Republican party of the past and refuse to go along with it.

Of course, the part that isn't being said is that the old Republican party is well and truly dead and buried, but speaking diplomatically like that is very good politics and can help him net some more moderate votes in tighter margin states.

Sure, criticize away, and you absolutely should. It's just important to not get so carried away that you wind up contributing to an outcome that you openly know to be objectively worse at the ballot box.

Let this be a reminder to anyone who hasn't liked Biden's handling of the Gaza situation that this is the alternative.

Seriously. Trump is advocating turning Gaza into a parking lot.

And it's not like Democrats have exactly been shy of their general support of Israel, if you've paid any attention at all. They just also happen to acknowledge that Palestinians are people, unlike most Republicans.

https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd

For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.

Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.

But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.

Strictly speaking, it's the governing body of Gaza, which hasn't held elections in well over a decade. The West Bank is governed by the party Fatah, which is much less militant.

There is, however, the awkward truth that the West Bank has also not held elections in a long time, precisely because Hamas would probably win them.

For anyone who's not aware, some of the "other shit" is an extensive series of screenshots of texts where he's soliciting sexual interactions with teenage girls. Such excerpts include:

• “Why are you such jailbait? What’s wrong with you in that regard? You should just grow older you dumb bitch.”
• "Is it cool being a jailbait?"
• “Does the FBI follow you around arresting all the men you sleep with?”

https://humanevents.com/2023/01/25/read-the-texts-ousted-rick-and-morty-co-creator-justin-roiland-allegedly-to-sent-young-fans

Just so we're clear that this isn't a "petty jealous ex" kind of situation.

I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.

No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".

That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.

People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.