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It’s not. I already wrote a very long post about why you’re wrong in this case, why those people are in those positions, and why there’s less reason to be afraid of those statements (though good reason to be outraged) than this article suggests.

Gallant also outlined Israel’s plans for Gaza after the war. He said Hamas would no longer control Gaza and Israel would reserve its operational freedom of action. But he said there would be no Israeli civilian presence and Palestinian bodies would be in charge of the enclave.

“Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the State of Israel,” Gallant’s office said in a statement on Thursday.

Al Jazeera’s Sara Khairat, reporting from Tel Aviv, said Gallant made it clear that Israeli officials want a “Palestinian entity” to be in charge of running civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip, but with “very specific conditions”.

Notable that it’s another public - this time on the record - contradiction of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.

It’s a bit weird because they switch from quoting Gallant to quoting Kairait, but I wonder if there’s anything to his adoption of Gantz’s “entity” language here. If so, it could be a sign of a bigger split between Gallant and Netanyahu. Might be nothing, but it would be consistent with their recent anger with him about his public statements about post-war Gaza.

Yes! I completely agree with you. I’m not totally sure if you’re saying that ‘people should’ apply that same standard or that I’m not applying it. I’m only talking about the people in this article, not suggesting that complexity or nuance only exist in Israeli politics. I think you need to take on a ton of nuance to even understand Hezbollah’s behaviour at the Israeli border, let alone understand them as an organization.

I’m sure the conversation you want to be having is happening somewhere. You should find someone who’s defending what’s happening in the West Bank and say this to them.

To be fair, they also said Russia was about to invade Ukraine and no one believed them.

They’re doing what in the West Bank?

They’re not expelling people from the West Bank for the same reason as OP said: there’s nowhere for anyone to go. The settlers, including the two absolute pieces of shit in the article, are responsible for horrific crimes in the West Bank but it’s not the same thing as Gaza and it’s not the same thing they’re talking about.

Neither of those things give him the power to do what he said or the influence to have it done. Both of those things matter.

As odd as it may seem: yes, they aren’t influential in directing the war. They have those positions because Netanyahu promised them for supporting his coalition, not because they were “earned” or because they’re ideologically aligned. It’s a marriage of convenience and outside of Netanyahu’s deal to desperately cling to power, these two are far-right kooks from fringe parties. It doesn’t give them real legitimacy. Netayahu’s coalition deal was an enormous controversy even outside of Israel. A big reason they formed the emergency government was to keep extremely unserious clowns like these away from decision-making by bringing in grown-ups. They are both strongly disliked and would be crushed back into obscurity in an election.

This article presents their statements as something new and they aren’t. Both of these fucking morons routinely suggest horrific shit like expelling Arabs from Israel. Ben-Gvir was convicted in Israel of racist incitement against Arabs decades ago. A former head of Shin Bet once referred to Smotrich as a “Jewish terrorist.” They are both settler extremists and known quantites; it would be stranger if they weren’t spouting racist, extremist bullshit. They are not representative of the broader government. Netanyahu didn’t have to agree to a cabinet made up of his political enemies; even that far-right ghoul knows these people are clowns. Given all that, I don’t think there’s a compelling reason to believe that they’d be the ones to announce Israeli policy.

Are you waiting for other people in their govt to say something about flattening Gaza?

I’m waiting for someone who actually matters. These dipshits do not. I mean, really, none of the people currently in power are going to be around after this conflict anyway, so I’m more concerned with what Gantz is saying than with Netanyahu’s petulant tantrums.

Honestly, no one takes either of those racist idiots seriously. They’re not serious people and this isn’t a serious plan. They’re both despised in Israel and, thankfully, neither really have any influence.

EDIT: Seriously, how cool is @little_cow

~~

RT is a Russian propaganda network. There are numerous good sources for this story. Just a couple:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/01/same-sex-couples-able-to-marry-in-estonia-from-new-years-day

https://news.err.ee/1609209284/same-sex-marriage-now-legal-in-estonia

You should repost it.

First, Mastodon isn’t a platform, it’s a service. Unlike Mastodon, Android was always a bunch of proprietary stuff built onto an open source base. The Android license (Apache) is also a lot more permissive than Mastodon’s (GPL). Probably the most important thing here is that all derivative works must be licensed under the GPL, whereas Google can use AOSP code to build out proprietary features whenever they want.

Their ability to use the app to direct users to mastodon.social depends entirely on Mastodon’s good reputation. Destroying the reputation destroys the ability along with it. Mastodon is way bigger than just m.s, but a buyer wouldn’t control the instance in a meaningful enough sense. Users aren’t serfs and there would be a mass exodus if, say, Peter Thiel bought Mastodon. Some would stay, but the people who contribute probably 90% of the activity would be out the door. Very likely, users would be given time to migrate before the larger community defederated the instance en masse. Any effort to prevent users from leaving would just accelerate that process. They just have no real ability to compel people to behave the way they want.

But while that’s a very lucky thing to have, the issue is that we depend on the owner of Mastodon to not sell the company to a billionaire.

We don’t depend on that. Buying Mastodon would get them the branding but not Mastodon itself. It’s all GPL/AGPL and would be forked immediately if sold. The buyer would have no control over it.

Oracle may have owned OpenOffice but it didn’t matter. Everyone uses LibreOffice now. Same shit.

You gotta hand it to the guy for getting his entry in for “least menacing threat of 2023” just under the wire.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors

OP: These are the kinds of people that want to toss out MBFC – liars who are happy to fall back on fiction when reality doesn’t serve their agenda.

So… all of Columbia University and… all recipients of the Pulitzer Prize are now “filthy Zionists”?

I’m not sure that Gettleman’s reporting on famine and war in East Africa was part of a vast Zionist conspiracy…

I get the idea and understand the appeal but it would be a big victory for state propagandists. Modern propaganda, perfected by Russia, operates by flooding the information space with a mix of fact and bullshit. They want to present numerous opposed but credible sounding versions of events to exhaust efforts to discover truth. Sorting fact from fiction in that pile of shit is impossible by design. They want you to conclude that it’s impossible to know the truth. The accuracy of a particular article has almost nothing to say about the source being a place to discover truth. MBFC is good not because it’s an authority but because it helps answer these questions:

1. Is it illegal for this source to tell the truth?
2. Is this source controlled by someone with a vested interest in lying?
3. Does this source have a documented history of dishonesty?
4. Do they correct the record when they make mistakes?

Asking those questions is far more important than fact-checking articles.

If that standard were adopted, I think the community would quickly shift from a news source to a propaganda source. I suspect the community would fail, or least be abandoned by those who genuinely want to understand what’s happening in the world.

Given the example listed is an article by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist representing what appears to be exhaustive reporting for a gold standard news organization, I worry that relaxing the requirement will lead to this community turning into a propaganda factory. Their proposal below that anything that “seems credible” be allowed is certainly a recipe for that. MBFC might not catch every case, but it’s good in most cases. It’s good practice to check there for press freedom, news org ownership, and documented history of deceit, which are all objective pieces of evidence rather than the more subjective assessment of bias. They’re also probably way better at this than mods are, no offense. Trying to replicate their database would be an enormous undertaking and the result would probably be poorer quality anyway.

Maintaining a list of evidence-based exceptions is probably more manageable. I suspect that people mostly want this to have more propaganda included as news though.

There’s far less because of server blocks. There are tons of gross servers that are just walled off from everyone else. Mastodon.social blocks a couple hundred servers.

Every now and then someone will write an article like, ‘I love free speech so I thought I could run a Mastodon server without blocking anyone… boy was I ever wrong.’ There’s some truly vile shit out there.

I’m not super familiar with them but mastodon.social is currently limiting them for spam.