Feeling pretty bogged down.

But have you considered the heat death of the universe?

Your quote from the Jordanian commander dates to after the Nakba. There was significant intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine because of the mismanagement of Jewish migration by Britain, and escalating tensions from the “legal” land purchases you mentioned that had been occurring since the late 1800s. Yes, Jews attempted to purchase and settle uninhabited land, but the fact is big chunks of the land purchased were misappropriated under the Ottoman Land Code, and European Jews frequently expelled (by force if the implication wasn’t clear) the Arab Muslims they found living on it, who may have had no idea it was sold out from under them.

The real mistake may have been attempting to pivot to Iran in an attempt to reinstate the JCPOA. As admirable a goal as that is, I also think it’s clear Trump squandered any trust Iran had in the US when he cancelled it. Iran has taken the Biden admin’s overtures as an opportunity to test its regional influence, instead of being a good faith negotiating partner - and why would the Biden admin have expected anything else when the US hadn’t been a good faith partner? Trump was awful on foreign policy, and set middle-east peace back decades, but Biden has completely failed to understand and adapt to the new status quo.

emo-stroking

Is that what my girlfriend & I were doing in her bedroom in the early 00s listening to Brand New and Death Cab?

For gaming, you’ve got Steam, which is pretty close to the ideal legit content delivery service. You don’t even necessarily have to pirate in order to demo games if you’re comfortable paying up front and making a decision within 2 hours.

Nothing similar exists or has existed for TV/Movies. Netflix was pretty good for a while, but you’ve never had the option to download the content to your own hard drive. Now you’re not even allowed to log in to your account on as many devices as you want.

Give me a service that’s a free storefront where I can pay a one-time fee for content that I’m actually interested in and download it to my hard drive as many times in as many places as I care to. Bonus points if I can stream to other devices that I’m logged in to and lend my purchases to my friends & family like I can with Steam. I don’t care if there’s DRM in the form of me having to log in to actually use the content if I can use it the way I want.

Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.

It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.

Hah, I kinda glossed over that one. Not sure what the downvote is about, it’s a joke. JS and PHP are the two I’m most familiar with and they’re scripting languages, not “proper” programming languages. That doesn’t make them any less serious. Anyway, React, being a library for a scripting language, is two steps removed.

Scripting languages are for popular kids and jocks.

What would be beautiful is if “entity” meant “subdivision of a single state” but I won’t hold my breath.

The PA was intended to manage the Israeli withdrawal and establishment of an independent Palestinian state, as agreed upon in the Oslo Accords, and yes that was meant to be a collaborative process with the Israelis. There were people on both sides who were serious about the peace process, but unfortunately the people in charge often weren’t, and so the situation deteriorated until Hamas and Likud, the two worst possible parties to oversee the peace process, consolidated power.

Just make sure no one named Ted Faro gets anywhere near the project.

The problem is democrats love exploiting brown people for their cheap sweat shop labor.

You could build an IMAX theater with all that projection.

I suppose that’s because parliamentary parties are much stricter with their membership. A small difference of opinion could lead to the expulsion of a member. US parties can’t really do that, so instead we have caucuses within the parties that vote along party lines most of the time, but differently on some important issues. In a parliamentary system, the caucus members would be expelled and would have to form their own party to have their views represented.

Yeah, beyond that I was mostly responding to the assertion that “Americans are stupid and easily manipulated.”

No, they are responding to an imperfect system that punishes them for having strong morals. Far from stupid, it’s actually quite rational. The best thing you can do if you care about not having to choose between genocide and even more genocide is get involved in pushing ranked choice voting through ballot measures, lobbying your state legislature, or hell, start with just municipal elections if you think you can get that done.

I say this as someone who’s going to vote third party - Trump and Biden are the only two choices. One of them is going to win, period. I’m voting third party because I know beyond reasonable doubt which one is going to win my state, so I have the privilege of throwing away my vote. I can’t fault someone for voting on a “lesser evil” basis in a swing state.

It’s more that the third-party spoiler effect is inherent to the first past the post system, so voting your conscience (for a third party) is effectively the same as not voting, and if enough people vote their conscience, it’s effectively like voting for exactly the opposite of what you want.

https://youtu.be/55btGpGsuDo?si=1ZNqf4ySZcfoHOFK

Wang Gang scrambles China’s eggs

Israel, the UK and France invaded Egypt in 1956 after Egypt expropriated the Suez Canal from its French & British owners. Then they fought a war in 1967 to keep it open. The conveyance of European trade through the Suez Canal is a major part of Israel’s geopolitical importance.