If the parties involved wanted a clear moral solution there’s a very clear precedent in the form of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process. For that to happen, though, Israelis would have to be willing to acknowledge Palestinians’ fundamental right to exist, and as I noted above they’re currently opposed to that by a 2:1 ratio, and Palestinians do not have the power or tools to force the issue. The international community would have to drag Israel to the negotiation table kicking and screaming, and as long as they’ve got the US on their side that’s not going to happen. Realistic political solutions seem remote right now, sure – but if you’re just talking about a moral one, it’s shockingly simple.

If I could pick a nit or two, Jewish people internationally are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. Israeli citizens might be – and while Netanyahu and Likud are extremely controversial in Israel, they do represent a significant and very vocal portion of the Israeli voting public. Worse, general Israeli sentiment towards Palestine and Palestinians is not good – 60% of Israelis still support the war after 18 months of wholesale civilian slaughter in Gaza. 70% support the ongoing settlement and annexation of the West Bank. The positions of the major Israeli parties on Palestinian lives and rights differ from Netanyahu’s “kill 'em all” approach mostly in degree rather than in kind.

To put the rotten cherry on the shit cake, Israel has one of the highest rates of dual citizenship in the world, with ~10% of Israelis holding two passports. Unlike the other countries you named, a significant fraction of Israelis could just leave if they no longer wanted to co-sign their government’s genocide in Gaza. I am perfectly willing to hold the Israeli people responsible for the actions of their government, moreso than I am for the other countries you mentioned. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not forced on them against the popular will. They chose this, and continue to choose this, by a large majority.

All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

Frustratingly, these are required now because a significant number of American high school grads didn’t actually absorb any of that information in high school. College professors have long bemoaned the declining educational attainment of incoming students (not surprisingly, starting around when W signed NCLB into law) and these remedial introductory classes are an attempt to bridge the gap between what freshmen are actually bringing in to college and where they need to be to actually grasp more advanced concepts.

Twins are safer in theory but with caveats, mostly to do with pilots putting too much trust in that sense of security. A twin with one engine out has serious differential thrust that needs to be managed, and significantly reduced climb rate that can easily catch the pilot off guard. Pilots can get into an unrecoverable situation thinking that they’re still airworthy, whereas in a single when the engine starts sputtering you immediately are looking for a place to put the plane down.

Says the ‘man’ who just tried to buy an election in Wisconsin.

It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

The Zionist factions that were foundational to the establishment of the Israeli state saw the Holocaust as proof of two things: first, that the Jewish people would never truly be safe in the world without a country of their own, and second, that the horrors visited on Jews by the Nazis, and European antisemites before them, and the Cossacks before them, demonstrated that no extreme was unjustified in the establishment and protection of that state. Those attitudes have been at the bedrock of modern day Israel from its founding. To those who adhere to them, “Never again” is short for “Never again to us,” and damn anybody who doesn’t fit their narrow (conservative, religiously observant, largely white Ashkenazi) vision of Jewishness.

To these folks, ethnic cleansing of Palestine was always the goal, and they’ve been waiting decades for an international order that would look the other way while they purged, displaced, and slaughtered their way to complete Israeli control of the land they saw as theirs to take. Now they’ve got it, and they’re not wasting any time.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V’s story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn’t, to the point that I’m truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).

That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I’ve touched feel hit-and-miss – I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality – but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him – they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided “I’m gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters” and made it work so damn well.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

everyone else gets the Superdome treatment.

Which is perfect, because that’s what all the Gulf states are gonna use their devolved FEMA funds to build!

I’d argue the internet was moving things left, while the bar for entry was at least nominal. When the bar for sharing your ideas was at least as high as “learn to code HTML and find a place to put your site up” the Time Cube cranks were few and far between, and most people participating on the web could be assumed to have some modicum of intelligence. However, the defining factor of the Internet as it stands, dominated by social media platforms, is that it’s frictionless by design. And yes, the platforms are pushing right-wing content, but to a certain extent that’s accidental, or at least was when engagement algorithms first became a part of the experience. Left wing content, reality-based as it tends to be, is generally full of nuance, equivocation, and explanation that takes time and (critically) doesn’t reach down into the basal structures of the brain and squeeze the amygdala quite like a right-wing fearmonger shouting “TRANS PEOPLE ARE SNEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER’S SCHOOL RESTROOM TO ASSAULT HER BE AFRAID!”

Could social media be designed to put the brakes on reactionary content and boost thoughtful, well-researched opinions? Yeah, probably. But that requires expensive and time-consuming human intervention in the form of fact-checking, and doesn’t boost engagement like content that just pushes all the fight-or-flight buttons way down in the lizard brain. Making the Internet easy and frictionless only turbocharged Terry Pratchett’s idea that “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” because technology makes the lie spread faster than ever, but the process of getting to the truth never got easier at quite the same rate.

Yes, and I was one of that generation who believed broad adoption of the Internet would cut out the gatekeepers and lead to a better-informed electorate that would give more radical ideas a shot. And I guess it did, but the problem is that it’s primarily allowed the worst of bad actors direct, unfiltered access to a vast swathe of the most credulous, easily-manipulated idiots in the world. Arguably it’s massively tilted the field towards authoritarianism because before the Internet, left-wing activists were better-educated, and more capable of organizing and communicating. Now, though, it takes no special knowledge or effort for a right-wing conspiracy theorist or authoritarian demagogue to jump on X or Facebook or whatever other platform you like and immediately blast their message out to vast numbers of their followers – who are largely passive consumers of this stuff, waiting to given their party line and marching orders. Before the Internet, they had mostly-mainstream ideas because that was what the filter of the mainstream media gave them. Now they’re getting sucked into the far right because social media is biased for shareable outrage-bait propaganda and against validated facts and nuanced discussion.

What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it’s shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the “marketplace of ideas” play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the “supply side” of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.