Hate to break it to you but it’s Israel who pays for disinformation campaigns to dehumanize Palestinians and erased their history and connections to the land.

You’re a fool if you think that propaganda ans disinformation only exist on one side of this conflict, or any conflict for that matter.

Regardless, I’m instantly suspicious of any person online whose initial response in a comment is an obviously copy-pasted wall of cherry-picked information which paints one side as the forever victim and the other as a infinite aggressor. And then your next response is to quote that same shit to me again? That only makes you look less like a person discussing the matter in good faith. Is that wrong?

First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Palestine, is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands.

If we’re going to talk about the modern English name “Palestine”, maybe we should reflect on the fact that it comes from Hebrew:

Pəlištī (פְּלִשְׁתִּי; plural Pəlištīm, פְּלִשְׁתִּים), meaning ‘people of Pəlešeṯ’ (פְּלֶשֶׁת)

Peleset was indeed more or less the region that we think of today as “The Gaza Strip”, and was most certainly not a contiguous or well-defined region spanning “the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River”. Regardless of what your propaganda says, there is no evidence at any point in history of a single “Palestinian” nation “from the river to the sea”. That’s a fabrication, in my opinion. But maybe you have a legitimate historical source?

Further, the Philistines (the original tribal people from Peleset) had very little in common with today’s Palestinians–whose culture is derived almost entirely from an Arab Muslim tradition forced upon them during the genocidal conquest of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate ~650AD.

Today’s nations of Israel and Palestine are mere creations of the British and the League of Nations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire post-World War I. Throughout recorded history the Levant has been under the control of various empires and factions (the Ottomans, the Islamic Caliphate, The Byzantines, the Romans, the Persians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and so on). Today’s Israelis and Palestinians both have legitimate historical claims over land in the region dating back hundreds, if not thousands, of years (much like Native Americans have a legitimate historical claim of America’s lands dating back thousands of years or more), but that means very little in the context of modern geopolitics and the people who lived in the Levant in the Brozne Age has very little resemblance or cultural similarity to those who live there now, obviously.

Maybe that’s a tough pill for people here to swallow, but I don’t care about that because it’s simply the truth.

Oligarchs get cozy with oligarchs, what a shocker.

Cool propaganda copy pasta, dude. How much does it pay to post that?

Real talk: neither Israel nor Palestine existed as nations 100 years ago, and the Levant has been under control of like a dozen or more factions and empires over the last 2000 years. Arab Muslims only exist in Gaza today because of the violent conquest of the Rashidun Caliphate ~650AD and the genocide and cultural erasure of those who lived their before.

Modern day Palestinians were handed a country by the League of Nations and the keep losing territory by fighting wars against the Israelis that they aren’t capable of winning. I fully expect that Israel will further shrink their territory as a result of the latest chapter of their decades long conflict, so maybe they should writing checks that their asses can’t cash.

The fact that people are downvoting you for scrutinizing this obviously shitty and biased source shows that they aren’t interested in the truth.

Let’s all take side in a dumb fucking holy war that has nothing to do with us? Fuck that, give Israel and Palestine back to the Turks for all I care.

They aren’t really the same answer.

People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has “servers”, as if the entire point of the internet wasn’t to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe… But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?

What’s more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or “will be”™), and as such it’ll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.

Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.

Why would the #1 backers of Palestine do this?

I thought that Islam was an open and accepting cult, but now I’m confused because this just seems oppressive and toxic!

Yep. I’m glad you see it that way too.

We don’t make art or music anymore, we make “content” for YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Kids don’t grow up dreaming to make the next killer movie or fun game, they want to become a rich and influential “content creator”. If they are lucky, the “content” that they make for big tech company “platforms” will eventually lead to them gathering a dedicated group of loyal followers over whom they can hold a strong “influence”, and that influence can be traded for money via advertising corporate products.

What it comes down to is that the tech corps have money, and they will use some of that money to entice people to make “content” for their “platforms”, and that’s a big part of the framework of the modern era. If they ever gain the ability to create genuinely desirable “content” using AI, they will instantly cut out all of the human money-sinks from their business model.

You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?

BlueSky has rich people behind it.

Wasn’t Socrates also considered an asshole? Not that I’m equating these influencers to philosophers, but at the time the people considered him to be mocking their culture (religion).

Everything we know about historical Socrates we know from his students, and I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest he was an asshole. Socrates was allegedly put to death for thought crimes against the city-state and the state’s patron gods, as voted upon by a jury of his “peers”. His philosophy was not counter to the idea of gods, nor do I think it was particularly anti-authoritarian, but clearly people didn’t like what he had to say or the questions he was asking, so they up and killed 'em.

Personally I think that makes the Socrates the good guy and the people of Athens circa 400BC the assholes, but to each their own.

Either way, there’s a big difference in my view between a person who is influential for their ideas, creations or achievements versus someone who is an “influencer” because of the “content” that they create for the corporate tech platform of choice…

Dude looks like a mid HD remake of an N64 game.

The concept of “influencers” and “content” is just some dystopian shit that came out of some corpo’s mouth at a tech company boardroom meeting and stuck. The fact that our modern culture is built on this kind of bullshit is a condemnation of modern people.

Man I’m sick of “famous” people being given carte blanche to act however they want. Lock this dipshit up and throw away the key.

I’m afraid you’re the one who has fallen for it…

There were plenty of reasons to vote for the Democratic candidate in 2024–climate change, affordable housing, healthcare, global stability, a continuation of what is actually a solid economy (especially when you look at markets, GDP growth, take home pay, employment numbers, and the latest inflation numbers).

But, funny enough, that’s all irrelevant to anyone with half a brain.

The real reason to vote for Harris in 2024 was as a means of voting against Trump and the fascist clown posse known as the Republican Party. This is the part where I could spend an hour writing our all of the reasons that Trump and the Republicans have been, continue to be, and will be bad for the country and the planet, but if you haven’t figured that one out by now you’re beyond help just like all the people who made the terrible decision to allow this to happen.

I don’t blame the politicians for being politicians–that’s like blaming a dog for barking. I have reflected deeply on this past election, and the only conclusion that I can logically reach today is that it is the American people who are to blame for putting these terrible politicians there in the first place (either by voting for them OR failing to vote against them).

One day America will cease to exist, and if there is anyone left on Earth at all, their history will accurately show that it was the American people who dumbed themselves to death.

I just wish we could beat them at the fucking ballot box first. Right now it looks like the nazis are a majority in this fucked up shithole country of ours.

Yeah, I’d love to do it myself, but once I saw that you have to unglue the screen I decided that I have enough projects going on right now. lol

God is a lie.

Oh both can be true, but in this case they are not.

There has always been valid reason to give arms to Israel, and there continues to be today. If you think that alone amounts to “supporting genocide” you’re about to be pretty upset when you watch the actual genocide that unfolds in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the next 4-8 years. Trump and Netanyahu are about to go scorched earth on Palestine like never in the history of the ~80 year war.

Bernie fuckin’ Sanders could be POTUS today and he’d still send weapons to Israel, because they are our main ally in the region who also happens to under near-constant threats and attacks from multiple angles. The absolute best we can reasonably ask for is that weapons are sent on a conditional basis, but nobody wants to talk about that reality.

I mean, they aren’t wrong, are they?

Hamas is all but defeated, Hezbollah is also on their back foot, and even the model caliphate, Iran, has proven to be almost completely ineffective against Israel’s defense system. Europe will make empty gestures about war crimes via the toothless ICC, and America is now totally controlled by the Republicans who never wanted a two-state peace process in the first place.

Israel has never in their short history had a better opportunity to go for the power play and deal with the Palestinians however they please, and under Trump we can expect that they won’t get even a little bit of push back from the US, regardless of how harsh and violently they want to play it.

I expect a fucking bloodbath and a full annexation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and possibly parts of southern Lebanon.

But hey, the American people have spoken, and I guess that’s what they wanted.

Holding Western stability hostage in the name of the oligarchs, good job voting everyone…

I’m pretty sure most of the blue states, California especially, would be happy to leave the union at this point. What’s in it for us?