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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I was defending someone who had their comment removed from Palestine@lemmy.ml for saying the governments of both Palestine and Israel had failed their people. Someone replied with

    Leave it to a .world liberal piece of shit to rules lawyer in defense of a fascist collaborator

    and later

    Not in a community for the oppressed people, you fuckwit. Just from your comment I can tell you’re a white liberal male who has never had to deal with any sort of discrimination or oppression. Get the fuck out of here with that centrist “both sides” bullshit. You disgust me.

    I wasn’t even being provocative or anything, so the personal attacks seemed out of nowhere. The only “rules lawyering” I did was saying criticizing a country’s leadership isn’t racism. And the so-called “fascist collaborator” spent more time criticizing the Israeli government than Palestine’s.







  • It’s not racist. People accuse others of that term too flippantly. It is ignorant though.

    Language changes a great deal over time, and slurs are no exception. What is a completely inoffensive label at some point can be a slur later on. What is a mild insult in one area can be much more severe somewhere else. Sometimes what was a slur can be reclaimed and become acceptable, even positive. But that can also depend on who is saying it and other contextual details. I don’t know anything about “k!wifarms” but I wouldn’t assume malicious intent without more information.

    That example looks much like the No True Scotsman fallacy, since a word is redefined later to exclude what would be exceptions to their claim based on an added qualification. Person A also made Person B get the evidence to refute their claim rather than fulfilling the burden of proof themselves. I know it’s not a formal debate or anything, but even so, bad faith arguments are just rude. Just own the mistake and say “you’re right, I was only thinking of first world countries/liberal democracies/developed nations/whatever”.



  • Well that’s kind of the point. It’s low hanging fruit because everyone agrees with it. No one thinks you are obligated to argue with others, which is the straw man’s position. It’s not that you don’t have a right to block critics, the question is “When is it a good idea?”.

    It sounds like a lot of people think the author does it too liberally, which can lead to an echo chamber. Most people would say creating a lawsuit against your critics is also an overreaction, but people have also been saying she gets harassed a lot. That makes it more reasonable if true.






  • The channel is Jubilee. The format is that 1 fairly prominent political activist debates 20 people with an opposing position for a few claims the 1 has given beforehand. The 20 swap out who gets to debate at any particular time by voting them out.

    I’ll admit it is ragebaity sometimes, but I also find it educational and entertaining. There’s typically about two among the 20 that have gone off the deep end, but everyone else is respectful and appreciative of the opportunity to engage the other side. Also, it does have good fact-checking so the crazies are at least recognized properly.

    This is the video the image came from.


  • The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:

    In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

    1. Killing members of the group;
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

    1. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

    You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.




  • Chess is an old game, and stalemate wasn’t always considered a draw. At other times, creating a stalemate may have been considered a win or loss or partial win, or it may have been illegal altogether. But the modern draw makes sense if you keep in mind a few things. First, the victory condition is putting the opponent’s king in checkmate (or accepting their concession). Second, exposing your king to an attack during your move is not just a blunder, it is actually an illegal move, to the point that you can’t even do it as a pass through while castling. So stalemate is a unique outcome where neither player achieves their victory condition, yet the game cannot continue, since the player who must move next has no legal moves available.

    In a practical sense, stalemate offers a means of giving a player in an inferior position a means of escaping a loss by punishing the dominant player for not being able to capitalize on their lead. It helps prevent someone from being able to brute force a win by making safe moves that do little to actually progress the game, like advancing all their pawns until the game is trivial. It’s much less interesting to have the end game strategy be more about not losing one’s lead rather than extending it.

    So a win requires being more than slightly ahead of an opponent. It’s worth pointing out that most high level chess games end in a draw where neither player has a sufficient lead to force a checkmate. There are other rules in modern chess that also force a draw to make sure the game is more about getting a win than just avoiding a loss. Otherwise there would be plenty of ways someone could stall forever to try to get their opponent to concede, and that’s not very interesting.


  • This doesn’t even need to be for a crime if you consider eminent domain. And all industries still face regulation in a capitalist nation like the US, meaning industry is only given as much leeway as the state allows.

    Private “ownership” is an exaggeration for convenience; the office building you own may still be searched without permission or notice if you are suspected of a crime, it may be seized if you are late with paying taxes or simply do not maintain it, you may not own mineral rights or the right to restrict aviation above it, and you need the approval of the local government to make certain construction projects on it.

    The definitions I hear for socialism could often apply to the US or any other capitalist nation.