Alon

Alon, 3 hours ago

@DiegoBeghin @pony @jon It's not about absolute empty but relative empty. The LGV Sud-Est passes through a lot of nothing between a megacity and a metro area of 2.5 million. In that it's like Madrid-Zaragoza-Barcelona or Berlin-Hamburg or Berlin-Hanover - it's not about the absolute population density in between but about the relative density to the sizes of the cities at the ends.

Alon, 2 hours ago

@DiegoBeghin @pony @jon They do, but that's relative to the population density of other places in France, is the point.

Alon, 11 hours ago

@Truckasauruslex @ww3real For China and India, after this many military dead on both sides, nothing short of destruction of the other's ability to fight counts. In the Middle East... yeah, Israel and Turkey don't have the same aims, which is sometimes made explicit in the story.

Alon, 11 hours ago

@Truckasauruslex @ww3real The fight is in the periphery but it is not quite for the periphery; the tension is that if the Yangon perimeter is reduced, China does have the troops to crest over the mountains and attack Northeast India, which is why both sides care about a city that has way fewer troops than Bangkok did.

Alon, 18 hours ago

@foxandcity Where is this from? :D

Alon, 18 hours ago

@wollman Bound morphemes get borrowed: -er is a Latin suffix that got borrowed into proto-Germanic, -able got borrowed into English (but not German), pre- and post- got borrowed into English and are sometimes also used as prepositions...

Alon, 1 day ago

@pony @ww3real 4-10, it's the equivalent of American B, B+, and A-, not sure about the Czech equivalent.

Alon, 2 days ago

@gavi I think it's just called a polycule; if it doesn't have catgirls, does it even count as a polycule?

Alon, 2 days ago

@thisisskaly Oh shit, what did they do? :(

Alon, 2 days ago

@DiegoBeghin @Colinvparker Fun fact: in Judaism, it's not permitted to travel on Saturdays, but there's an exception for long-distance journeys (e.g. by ship) provided one gets on and off the ship on weekdays. Rabbis considered making a similar ruling for trains but decided not to permit it, on the grounds that unlike boats, trains don't offer any serenity for respecting the holiness of the Sabbath.

(In conclusion, lol at Orthodox Judaism.)

Alon, 2 days ago

@DiegoBeghin @25kV @jon @seatsixtyone Yeah, this. The intercity trains here are more or less a state monopoly, and they're also making a profit more than the usual rate of return on capital, and the combination of these two things breaks the brains of a lot of mostly American anti-government types.

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Yeah, 36,000 is not Dresden (it's slightly more but on four times the population, and also Dresden was a single night's bombing, and also everyone overrates how many people died at Dresden due to Nazi propaganda).

And the point is that if you say "I support two states" to a Palestine protest organizer, you'll be yelled at as a liberal Zionist. Occasionally they even have been protest chants clarifying "we don't want no two states."

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Vonnegut was repeating a figure from Nazi propaganda as if it was fact. And no, the Gaza Strip death rate is not close to one-day Dresden levels (it's 1.6% of prewar population vs. 4%).

And support for two states has also gone up in Gaza; Hamas is not representative either, but protesters routinely wear Hamas emblems (this is especially bad in Canada, but the splinter group in Germany that Greta protested with did the same).

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle He specifically mentioned the 100,000+ death figure pushed by Goebbels, I believe. The actual was 25,000, so 4% (not 2%); Gaza is 36,000/2.2 million, so 1.6% (the missing are not all dead; the Gaza MoH methodology aims at a middle count, not a confirmed minimum).

Support for Hamas is low in the general public, and yet anti-Israel protesters happily sign petitions saying 7.10 was an act of resistance against Israeli colonialism.

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb The IRA certainly knows terrorism - it was (weakly) supportive of the Irgun, which copied its tactics. Ireland can always be counted on to support the worst terrorists.

That said, the IRA never had any irredentist claim on Britain, whereas Hamas has irredentist claims on Israel (the Palestinian Authority does not, but if you say "I like Abbas" you're probably a liberal Zionist and not a Palestinian flag waver and certainly not a red triangle flag waver).

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle The alternative should look like how Western engagement with Turkey is to end its democratic backsliding, which means hugging the domestic opposition. The EIB lends to opposition-controlled cities at lower rates than are available to the Turkish state, which gives their mayors the ability to challenge AKP without fear of domestic economic isolation. Notably, there's no mass protest movement in the West calling for support for the PKK.

Alon, 2 days ago

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle With negotiations? Remember, Olmert made an offer that Abbas would have accepted if Olmert hadn't been a lame duck by then. The "how should Israel be forced?" line is entirely people in Western countries wanting to establish a dominance hierarchy on the Jews; nobody talks about how the Netherlands or Sweden or Finland or (for years) Austria should be forced not to have an extreme right government.