Me doing my part to portray car dependency as deeply unpatriotic. Which it kinda unironically is.
What's ironic is my city, Montreal, is arguably the biggest cycling city in North America. Even in winter the bike lanes are filled with cyclists. Why? Turns out that all you need is good-quality bike infrastructure that you actually maintain in the winter and people will happily bike year-round.
It's especially dumb because RISC-V is -- dare I say it -- inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you'll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.
People complain about the UN doing nothing, but it's also important to remember it was literally designed to not be able to do anything if one of the security council nations -- USA, UK, France, Russia, or China -- vetoes it. And USA always vetoes anything against the Israeli government.
Considering the UN's hands are tied, I'm very glad they're at least using their figurative microphone and international influence to call attention to how fucked up the treatment of Palestinians is.
I don't know for others, but growing up American, Israel and its friends in Washington had done a terrific job of conflating any criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. What finally got me to re-evaluate my stance on the Israeli government a few years back was when well-known, respectable organizations like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International started using the word "apartheid" to describe the situation of Palestinians.
Hearing sources like the UN Office for Human Rights, the UN Secretary General, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International calling out the Israeli government's actions in strong, unequivocal terms like "war crime" and "apartheid" is a start. I wish they could do more, and I sure as heck am angry with US foreign policy in this, but I'm just glad the UN has the balls to actually call this a war crime.
This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh
In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.
Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.
Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don't talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can't even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won't be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn't actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.
I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.
And what's doubly ironic is they're INCREDIBLY selective about what they want free market for. Abolish restrictive zoning, parking minimums, and other arbitrary deed restrictions to allow literally anything but suburban sprawl and help alleviate the housing crisis? Nope, the GOP is all about government-mandated sprawl for all! Eliminating child labor laws? Hell yeah, GOP is all about that free market with zero government mandates at all, baby!
It's so blatantly obvious their whole schtick is just pure, unabashed selfishness. Keep burdensome land use regulations because it inflates their property values (which is profitable to existing landlords and speculators), but reject child labor laws so you can hire cheaper labor.
It'd be one thing if they actually tried to be consistent in support of the free market, but they don't even try to. As in many things, the GOP has no principles besides profit.
When people tell you there's a war on cars, it's projection. There's a war on anybody and everybody not in a car.
This is the propaganda I can get behind.
And with trolleybuses powered on a renewable grid, it's zero gallons!
Me, who's not in web dev:
One of my roommates in undergrad was from China, and whenever he went back to China to visit his family, we literally couldn't contact him because all the messaging apps/services we use are blocked in China.
Another family friend of mine lived and taught in Macau as a professor for a while, and he explained how he had to get a VPN just to access the regular internet.
Any government that locks down access like that is not one worthy of admiration. It's insane that people defend the CCP.
It's funny how people always use play it like "oh, it's just differing opinions" when what they're actually defending is indefensible malarkey like nazis and tankies. They know if they made a meme saying we should "try to understand" nazis and tankies, they'd be downvoted to oblivion. And so they hide behind a shield of "differing opinions".
These cretins have a right to post nazi and tankie shit on their own instances -- them's the beauty of the fediverse. But I also have a right to not want hate speech, genocide denial, and Hitler/Stalin/Mao simps polluting my feed. It's not mere "differing opinions" when one person's opinion is "Holodomor didn't happen, and if it did, the Ukrainians deserved it" or "Holocaust didn't happen, and if it did, the Jews deserved it" or whatever apologia they wanna peddle.
Excellent point, brother. Always choose AMERICAN MUSCLE over COMMIE OIL.