I hate to have to say it, but you've labelled the a party that still commits atrocities as "right" simply because they've committed fewer atrocities. I believe this point requires no further discussion. Both can be wrong for committing atrocities. Again, the main argument you've got here is "Israel bad, Palestine good" and "The things Palestine does are fine because they had the moral justification to begin with."

You are too ideological. I'm a political realist; you're a political idealist. You looked at what "is right" and then decided that anything done in pursuit of that right must be good. You've allowed the ends to justify the means.

In political realism, you must sometimes force off the justice boner and realise that the best result realistically possible is not the one that is the fairest or rights the most historical wrongs. This is what I was trying to get at with my original comment. History is not fair and never will be, and blindly trying to change that is unconstructive. You have to play the cards you're dealt. It was a historical wrong for Israeli settlers to colonise Palestinian land. At the same time, I am saying that in the near-future, it will be impossible to right this wrong. The Israelis will never be punished for what they did. Palestinians will never control land from the west bank of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean again. Believe me, they want that, and they're maybe even justified in wanting that, but it doesn't matter what is right. We need to think of what is the best way to resolve the situation right now. It is pointless to argue about who is right and who is wrong because that means nothing. That is the harsh reality of international geopolitics. That's how it is now, how it's been since the dawn of human civilisation, and as long as the idea of the sovereign state exists, that's how it's always going to be.

I will give one final parting analogy: Imagine you are tied up and being beaten on the ground by an assailant who is many times stronger than you. The beating has gone on for several minutes now until your assailant offers you a deal: "If you allow me to hit you ten more times and give me all the money in your wallet, I will let you go. Otherwise, I will shoot you dead and take your wallet anyway." Is this a fair deal? Of course not. Are you "right" to refuse and your assailant "wrong" for even daring to offer such a thing (and putting you in the situation of having to consider it)? Without question. But at the same time, you'd be a fool not to say "yes" to that. You'd also have to be extremely stupid to say "fuck you" in response to that. Even if there's only a slim chance that they'll actually uphold their end of the bargain. Honour, after all, doesn't actually have any value. Your life does.

That is all I have to say on the matter. I will read your reply if you devote the time to write one but I've said all that needs to be said.

You are correct. I would be easily radicalised, as would most people if I were placed into such a situation. I'm not immune from the same forces that radicalised everyone else there too.

I do not equate colonisers to the colonised, however, one must recognise that both have done things that they shouldn't have done. At this point, "but he started it" is no longer an excuse for racial and religious hatred. It's been 70 years already. People have been born into the conflict, grown up in the conflict, and died from the conflict.

The State of Israel has committed acts of genocide against the Palestinian people. I do not deny it. But at the same time, I cannot wholeheartedly support the other party in this conflict when their methods of resistance include terror attacks, hostage-taking, and indiscriminate bombings—the same things they decry Israel for doing. The Palestinians have rejected several offers of peace. The UN partition plan—rejected. Two state solution proposals—rejected. Peaceful coexistence—rejected. Instead, they counter with a Palestinian state stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinian leaders want to wipe the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants off the face of the earth, and Israeli leaders want to wipe the State of Palestine and its Arab inhabitants off the face of the earth.

You can say that the Palestinians were right/to begin with—that they had no obligation to cede any territory at all to the Israelis. And you'd be right. But it's important to recognise that being right to begin does not give anyone a mandate to do whatever they want. You can be right and move yourself into the wrong by how you act, and this is exactly what happened. Yes, I sympathise with Palestinians whose lands were taken from them by Israelis. At the same time, I condemn those who take matters into their own hands by bombing Israeli music festivals.

Instead, what is happening is that the situation may quickly be moving to a forcibly-imposed one-state solution with that state being the State of Israel. And that would be a tragedy.

This is what I mean by "history is nuanced". There is no black and white here and to portray any situation as such would be naïve.

1. Parliament
2. Generally, no.
3. Votebank politics, blind nationalist ideology, backward superstitions, "patrons", favouritism, nepotism, &c. Indian politics is flawed in many ways but that is a discussion for another time.

This is a tragedy of history. That is all I will say on the matter.

I hope you realise that countries recognise the People's Republic of China because it's politically expedient. It's lip service since the PRC government is easily offended. So for many countries, it's easier to just play along, shut up, and let's get to negotiating some lucrative trade deals instead. Public support among Western nations and their allies for Taiwan's continued autonomous existence remains high despite their governments recognising it as a province of China. You don't seem to understand how useful doublespeak is in international geopolitics. To pretend countries say what they mean and mean what they say is incredibly naïve.

Your behaviour is exactly why I filtered out Hexbear in my feed. There don't seem to be any actual socialists on Hexbear, just people knee-jerkingly defending any country that claims to be socialist without any regard to whether they practice what they preach. Social democracies like the Nordic countries are way closer to socialism than modern China is, but all you have to do is point your finger and say "liberal" and Hexbear users start foaming at the mouth. I say this as a citizen of the People's Republic of China and a socialist.

This conversation has reached its productive end.

Maybe, but remember that the Governor can't just issue whatever new laws he wants. There is a normal legislative process, which means these bills have probably been in the works for weeks or months.

The procedure to create shortcuts, as an example, is rather convoluted. I originally looked this up because I was 90% sure that you could just use New-Item and it'd just work.

The problem is that even if you install things with a package manager like Chocolatey and do not hunt for installer wizards on the Internet (the default Windows way to install software), applications don't commonly add themselves to the PATH and it's just a pain to get it working.

I would encourage you to look up "user-friendly Linux distros" on your favourite search engine and check the first few results.

PopOS is System76's distro. It's quite popular among beginners and frequently recommended to those just starting with Linux. I don't personally use it.

Again, I want to remind you that a $1,000 phone winning against a $150 phone is not a victory at all. The iPhone should have absolutely kerb-stomped mine. The fact that it is even competitive is the point I am trying to make.

You can visualise a sort of bell curve of battery life. My phone is probably somewhere around the 30-40th percentile (and note that a 90th percentile phone is not 2× better, it's probably only 50% better). A bit worse than average but not terrible. It's a cheap phone, after all.

But the issue is that (new) Apple phones I presume are placing consistently around the 60th percentile, which is good and better than average. The issue is that you're paying 80th-percentile prices for 60th-percentile performance. That is the point I'm trying to make. It's relative performance to price, not absolute performance. These numbers are made up but illustrate the point I'm trying to make.

If the iPhone were priced at $400-500, it'd be an excellent value and I would recommend it to a lot more people. That's what I feel a comparable Android would cost. Maybe it could go up to $550 since Apple products do have better build quality and the Apple ecosystem, but at $700 for the latest base model iPhone 14, I think it's just not delivering the value for money compared to Android phones. Of course, that's my opinion. I make decisions based on hardware. Others may make decisions based on the fact that they like the iOS experience and the ecosystem it provides, or even because they just like using Apple products. And yes, the fact that Apple products are of consistently above-average quality does count for something.

I'm not attacking you if you own an iPhone and like it, and I don't judge you for it. I will criticise Apple though, because I feel that Apple is short-changing their customers on the technical side by providing mediocre hardware for not-mediocre prices.

Apple users really just didn't notice the limitations. Whether you consider that "working" is up to you.

Apple users are used to their phones taking ninety minutes to charge and not lasting the whole day. They consider that "normal" and are unlikely to consider that for Android devices, even cheap ones, sub-1 hour fast charging and all-day battery life are standard, not exceptions.

Apple's (previously) bundled charger is a measly 5 W whereas my cheap $150 OnePlus comes with a 33 W charger, delivering over six times as much power. Granted, Apple devices tend to be more power-efficient than others, but not six times less.

You're probably right, but we also want prisoners to actually still get jobs and earn money, so it can't cost more than hiring a regular working because then why would anyone bother.

I would support the State adding a few dollars to minimum wage and taking that as a commission or something to offset costs.