Matrim Fox Cauthon

Just say the quiet part of your words out loud and accuse Kalbear of antisemitism for the audacity of criticizing Israel! Make no mistake. Hamas committed an act of terrorism. They are terrorists. Hamas should be punished for its horrific act of terrorism and kidnapping. Some people made the comparison that if 2977 people died in 9/11 that proportionately for a nation of Israel's size and population that the dead on 10/7 would be a much greater magnitude. What then does that mean for the death toll that Israel has inflicted upon the civilian populace of a nation less than 1/8th the size of Israel? Does that mean nothing? Are the lives of Palestinian civilians worth less to you? How many dead Palestianian civilians at the hands of Israel is the removal of Hamas worth to you? What is the acceptable number of hostages that a police officer can shoot andkill in order to take out the terrorist who is using them as shields? While we may rightly condemn the terrorist using people as shields, wouldn't we also condemn the police officer who seems pretty indifferent to killing hostages in pursuit of the terrorist? The United States was rightly criticized, IMHO, for the many civilian deaths we inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq in its pursuit of vengeance and our "War on Terror." In retrospect, our invasive wars on terror created many more problems than they solved. And many people from these lands hate us more now than before. Why is Israel free from similar criticism?

Before he was Trump’s Chief of Staff, he was my representative. I would love nothing more to see him in jail.

Though to be fair, even if the leaders of the Cherokee nation bombed the state building, would the US government be justified in doing to the Cherokee nation what Israel is doing to the Gaza strip? I expect that the United States would be rightly condemned for creating a humanitarian crisis in the Cherokee Nation by cutting off their utilities and bombing their escape routes.

I was being glib.

I believe that he answered that before: they should all be rising up against Hamas. Just like the people of Afghanistan should all be rising up against the Taliban. Or the people of any totalitarian or terrorist state should be rising up against them. Easy.

I'll be honest, I'm more curious about what you think about that question, because I mostly see you blaming Palestinians for nearly everything they are suffering.

And Jordon is throwing his hat back in.

You may think that your suggestion sounds great in your head, but I fear that in actual practice that it makes it easier for Israel to round them up, put them on a reservation, and forcibly take even more land (i.e., the rest) when the world isn't looking. Edit: To be clear, your solution is pretty close to what the U.S. Government did with the Trail of Tears. The massive relocation of 60K American Indians to the Indian Territory, which they tentatively were told would be an indpendent sovereign state (whoops!), is considered by many to be a clear act of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Preferrably one that doesn't speed up the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as I fear that your "solution" would likely entail.

Much like with Jewish identity, Arab identity is not so cut-and-dried as you make it out to be. Egyptians, for example, are considered part of the broader Arab world, but most Egyptians are descended from indigenous pre-Arab Egyptians. Likewise, many Arabs in Iraq are descended from the pre-Arab indigenous peoples who inhabited Mesopotamia. The indigenous peoples were not massively displaced by Arabian Arabs. Arabization involved a long process of imperial, linguistic, religious, and cultural assimilation. The same is true for many native pre-Arab peoples who were living in the Levant, who were primarily (but far from exclusively) Aramaic-speaking Christians at the time.

Or she is falling on the sword for Trump.

Yeah, but all you have to do is rise up and send Hamas a strongly worded letter and they will go away.

You realize that a lot of this rhetoric about "agency" was used to demonize people of color, especially African Americans, for their poor conditions and inequalities, right? Through your own agency you can go from a pauper to a billionaire. Of course, reality is often stacked against the poor and people rarely leave their socio-economic bracket. So the idea of "agency" is not as cut and dried or naively simplistic as a basic function of whether or not we have agency. Just because someone has agency doesn't mean that it's easy especially when Israel stacks the deck against Palestinians and the opportunities that they are afforded in their lives.

I'll believe anything after what we experienced with McCarthy's speaker election.

I'm also curious about somthing. Did you skip the before you decided to be needlessly hostile, Maithanet? If Twitter used to be good but it's not good any longer, it's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy to continue using it. The solution is to move on and find more reliable sources of information.

Turns out that this is much easier to do when you quit Twitter.

That was kind of our* thinking. I have told friends and family asking about my decision that Vienna is a small progressive island surrounded by a sea of conservatism. It's a bit like Austin, Texas. Sure, Austin is a progressive city, but at the end of the day, you are still living in Texas with Greg Abbot as your governor and Ted Cruz as your senator. There are at least more alternatives in Germany, whereas it feels like in Austria there is just Vienna. * My German partner, who got a job working at a hospital in Hamburg.

I'm moving to Hamburg in less than a month, so it seems that I may be dodging a bullet.

And where can Palestinians feel safe?

It's Russian conscription time. It looks like Putin is gambling on the long-term game that wears Ukraine and its allies down.

Moving to Hamburg, so not exactly moving to the country-side of Schleswig-Holstein. I do try watching things dubbed or even some German-language programs on Netflix.

Despite living in Austria for the past 8 years, my German has basically been stuck for the past few years at around B2. It doesn't help that I work and teach in English and speak to my German partner primarily in English. But I would like to get over this last hurdle and officially reach C1. After that? I'll be honest. Plattdeutsch would be interesting, since I will soon be living in northern Germany, but I think that Arabic or Italian would be far more useful.

There's a Rocky and Bullwinkle joke in there somewhere. I just know it!

Showing that they are friends to their trading-partners in Africa.

But this is what makes advertisers nervous about Twitter/X. Companies don't want their product appearing next to child pornography or someone who posts it.