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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. English bacon is back bacon and we eat streaky bacon. Often theirs isn’t smoked, only cured. I agree the American version is superior.
  2. A reminder that the only option that is acceptable to Hamas is “Israel unconditionally surrenders” and that’s what lots of people in the West think Isrsel should do.
  3. https://www.yahoo.com/news/israel-says-four-hostages-rescued-123033809.html You’ll remember Noa being hauled off like some victim of Bronze Age tribal warfare from a concert. They were being stashed with civilians because of course they were. Always good to remember the way language is used for political aims, Nuseirat remained a “camp” only because UNRWA called it one, it was not tent people and outdoor kitchens. One might also call it a town mostly built after 1948.
  4. They are behind a lot of bullshit across Europe. Most of it is low-level and petty type arson and vandalism and shit. Most governments are wisely keeping the non-meaningful stuff low-key, there’s no reason to pump up the capacities of the Russians and scare everyone when they’re just doing hoodrat stuff with their friends.
  5. This long story in the Globe and Mail about HUR’s elite unit needs to win all the awards and be read by all. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-the-fearless-ukraine-soldiers-front-lines/
  6. It’s a near iron law that as we get smarter and better equipped, unexplained and mysterious phenomena become ever more mundane and explainable. The UAP phenomena is almost certainly a flaw on our sensing and perception side. In this debate I am reminded of the canals on Mars, for which there was vastly more consensus and agreement that they existed than we have for alien craft, and vigorous debate among mainstream experts over what they were for decades. We got better telescopes and the reality was just that eyes and equipment were playing tricks on us. This is usually the direction things go.
  7. Wright Patterson is home to this day of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which was created out of the Air Force’s foreign technology study program. In the 1940s through 50s they studied German and then Soviet aircraft. That’s what was behind the doors of the “UFO” building. Even Goldwater had theories about it. No spacecraft needed, just recovered and defected Ilyushin and Yaks.
  8. Humanity chose to send dick pics and an address. “Aliens, u up?”
  9. More fun with big numbers: About 4 billion species of cellular life have existed on Earth. One has become space-faring and invented a radio telescope. There are other forms of life on this planet that are very close to being intelligent. Dolphins have had millions of years to evolve into a technological species but haven’t. There’s a buried assumption that evolution inevitably trends towards intelligence and complexity but it doesn’t. Make a few tweaks to the geological history of earth and maybe it never happens here. We never got a technological dinosaur after all.
  10. I also don’t understand the flaw that’s being associated with the Fermi Paradox. I think that anyone who wants to make the argument from probability that there is intelligent life out there that is capable of reaching us (much less HAS reached us) should reflect on the following: 1. Life evolved on earth 3.7 billion years ago. 2. No species capable of using language or technology evolved until about 315,000 years ago. 3. That species didn’t do much with that capability until around 30,000 years ago. 4. That species has been discoverable for about 100 years via radio waves and has been spacefaring for about 70 years. Earth is the only place we KNOW evolved intelligent life. But the chances of actually finding it here on any given solar year you choose randomly are FAR,FAR, FAR worse than winning the PowerBall. The odds of aliens finding us are far worse than you think.
  11. I was in Finland this week. These coastal defense guns once were Russian and now they are Finnish. Time to go get some more.
  12. Marginal and mostly as a PR stunt, Russia remains dependent on its own base of manpower. They do prefer to grab people from impoverished areas first.
  13. I’ve been out of this thread as a mental break as I kind of live and breathe Ukraine non-stop. I do not believe that Putin would elevate to the use of nuclear weapons absent a compelling threat to Russia internationally recognized borders. Crimea may be a somewhat gray zone. There is almost no battlefield sense and it would likely tilt the west in favor of intervening directly. The reason he threatens with them so much is because they are of little value militarily, their utility is in the threatening.
  14. This is a dangerous political precedent. What kind of message are we sending to other billionaires who might want to commit crimes and then become president? It will have a chilling effect that they may be held responsible.
  15. Pot, meet kettle. I’ve said that “European” as an identity or common heritage is mostly meaningless. I’ve said that trying to understand the establishment of Israel as substantively similar to the establishment of New Spain, the English settlement of Australia, the American expansion West, or Yermak’s subduing of Siberia is also not super precise or helpful with as many differences as similarities. You have been tilting at a complete strawman for a few pages.
  16. You can begin talking about a shared conception of what it means to be “a European” as part of the post-War integration project that’s still ongoing and far from consolidated. Prior to that the term is helpful only as a very broad geographic indicator, every bit as precise and useful as calling someone “African” or “Asian” (so not really helpful).
  17. Literally the first post I quoted establishes “white Europeans” as the relevant category for this discussion.
  18. Thinking about how an obsession with categorizing people as “white” and “not white” and talking about things like “common European heritage” or “Judeo-Christian civilization” was once the realm of the worst race scientists, religious cranks, and reactionaries but now these concepts have been adopted whole cloth by huge chunks of the left so that Ashenkazi Jews and Israel can be placed within them. This shit is doing a number on some brains.
  19. Continents are real but the idea of some sort of “continental heritage” is the simple part. An immigrant from Africa is “African” but there’s no such thing as “African heritage”— there are over 50 countries and many more languages and cultures, all of that is more relevant to their heritage and history. Bangladeshis and Koreans do not share some “Asian heritage” in any meaningful way. European Jews of course existed and absolutely created communities, they were there for well over 2000 years! They are still there! Determining their defining characteristic as “white European people” is the absurd part of this discourse. Some Jews can be said to have become EXTREMELY integrated and alike to their non-Jewish neighbors— in France, in Vienna, in London. Others on shtetls shared much less. It’s not a helpful category, and Jews across Europe found out in a visceral way how little any shared identity and culture mattered.
  20. The idea that Jews in what was the Holy Roman Empire developed some unique customs, languages, and tradition during the millennia they lived there is fairly uncontroversial self-evident. Jews did the same in the Arab world, Spain, Ethiopia, and the Caucuses. Or Bukhara for that matter. What is absurd is trying to parse the existence of this community out as some sort “European Jews” with a marginal connection to the 3000 year old continuity of Jewish existence, as if there are some other Jews with a better claim to that heritage. Despite the obvious cultural interchange that happens everywhere, the defining aspect of being Jewish in the diaspora is that of being different, some of that self-maintained and much of it imposed. They didn’t just emerge from the ground in the Holy Roman Empire—they just moved there from where they were before. Boiling this down to “white Europeans vs. brown locals” is no less simplistic and wrong than “Jacob vs. Ishmael is still going on.”
  21. The handwringing over British Mandate Palestine is also hilarious. All these countries are fairly new and made up. They invented royal families. No one is clamoring over the permanent right of the Sublime Porte to rule Jordan. For that matter, no one seriously entertains that Turkey should give back Ararat to Armenians. In the upheaval of the early to mid-20th century your borders changed and you didn’t get all you want? The collapse of the Ottomans and World War II changed the map? Welcome to the club. Lol at the idea this is because of “Europeans” being the problem and not “Jews.” If the problem is Europeans, someone tell me what happened to “not European” Jews in North Africa…..or Jews in the rest of the Arab world who lived across the region in 1948 but now don’t. A two state solution remains the only real one but that will never happen as long as Israel is illegitimate is the common narratives
  22. “White European” is meaningless. I mean, most people will agree that Swedes are white Europeans. But what about Albanians? Azeris? Tatars in Kazan? If you line up a Catholic Croat, an Orthodox Serb, and a Muslim Bosniak who gets that status? What about the Sami shamanists? The idea of “white European” or “European heritage was invented by American racist dorks who needed to reconcile Nazi race science with their need to expand to let in the Poles and Slavs and others to be attractive in the New World. Progressives then adopted the category as the people it’s OK to be against and then added in the Ashenkazi Jews because the frame of colonizer/colonized is the only way to view the world.
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