Israel is starting to crack under pressure by the US and the IDF and proposing to have Palestinian Authority members staff the Rafah crossing, but it's still on copium and wants them to pretend to be members of a local aid committee, to avoid broadcasting that there's collaboration between Israel and the PA. Mahmoud Abbas, wisely, is saying that he wants this to be official. https://www.axios.com/2024/05/13/israel-palestinian-authority-rafah-crossing
@Alon Honestly, from the outside, (2) seems like a decent outcome, but I guess over there it's considered an embarrassment or a loss of sovereignty or something?
Question: what is the modern moral equivalent of the Holocaust?
Answer by party:
Greens: nuclear power plants
FDP: raising taxes or government spending by 1%
SPD: taking any action by the government
CDU: heat pumps
Die Linke: not buying gas from Putin
AfD: idyllic landscapes of German perfection... wait, is the Holocaust supposed to be bad?
TIL the Israeli ambassador showed up at Putin's sham election victory celebration two months ago. For shame. No wonder Ukraine and Poland aren't bothering to vote with Israel at the UN.
The US was hedging between Israel and Egypt until 1967, when the Six-Day War drove Egypt from non-alignment to Soviet alignment and the US figured that it might as well support Israel in the open. Bibi and the IDF likewise tried to hedge between the US and Russia, no matter how ridiculous it looked; after Putin's support of Hamas on 7.10, it should have been immediately replaced with hardcore levels of support for peripheral US allies, like the Lithuania-Taiwan relations. Instead, we get this.
I'm streaming in 20 minutes about the Northeast Corridor south of New York. We have a timetable; with padding, the New York-Washington intercities could do the trip in 1:54, making one stop per state.
In my alt history, I'm figuring out how advanced each economy is through GDP per capita, normalized so that the US today is 100. The weighted Anglosphere average today is 93, but in the alt history, the UK is only about 83 - too much aristocratic bullshit.
I bring this up because I'm working out the alt history of West Africa, where, today, on the same scale, Nigeria is 7.7, Côte d'Ivoire (the richest) 8.6, Liberia 2.3, Niger (the poorest) 2. Global inequality is that extreme.
New poll from Israel by Lazar, the most consistent pollster since the war started, has the prewar coalition back at 47. They were polling in the 45-48 range for most of the war, went up to 50 after the Netzah Yehuda sanctions and walkback, and are now back down.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite No, I mean the pro-Bibi people; the anti-Bibi people are the opposition, and are now back at 73 seats (arguably just 68 because Hadash-Ta'al is too radical, but for all intents and purposes Hadash-Ta'al is part of the opposition bloc).
At #Amaze2024, at a talk about solarpunk and Games for Future. Speaker talks about positive change needed for decarbonization and gives the historic examples of women's suffrage in 1918 (1971 in Switzerland), indoor public place smoking bans starting 2017... and the closure of the nuclear plants last year. In a talk about the future and climate change.
@Alon@cidney my daughter has board game (schnappt Hubbi!) which has an electronic moderator/dm/whatever. I wonder if screens will become something like keyboards: a thing used by old people.
I should say, I did mention @jon and his board game about cross-border rail in Europe as a way of using games to encourage and inform environmental activism.
This elevator is making me think - all the elevators I keep seeing here on the U-Bahn have doors open in one direction on the street and the opposite direction on the platform, even when it's possible to have same-direction opening as is the norm in most buildings. Is this an intentional decision to allow wheelchair users to get in and out without reversing direction?
So, @cidney and I are thinking of famous literary and historic incels, to see if Young Werther was the original example... and then Cid pointed out that Sappho was femcel millennia earlier.