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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Two months without genocide is better than genocide. There’s no moral or humane reason not to exert every ounce of possible influence to stop this even if it ends up being temporary. I don’t think Biden has any idea how poorly history will judge him for his lack of action. He has the power in this relationship. And it’s infuriating that he has consistently refused to use it.

    And for an example of how unfair the world is: Trump will probably not be judged poorly, even when he inevitably makes things worse, because Trump doesn’t get the blame for the bad things he does, he gets rewarded. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but not much is these days.


  • I appreciate the question, and like many Jews I love questions like this. It is never hateful to be curious.

    Like many/most identities, being Jewish doesn’t mean just one thing to everyone. First and foremost, Judaism is a religion that is passed down through the matriarchal side of the family. So if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. You’re Jewish particularly to other Jews in this instance, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself Jewish.

    Judaism is not a race, full stop. Just like Christianity is not a race. There are white Jews, black Jews, Latino Jews, South Asian Jews, East Asian Jews etc. There aren’t a lot of us as a whole, but we do exist in most racial groups. But Judaism is often correctly linked to ethnicity, which is a set of shared traditions, culture, language, and norms.

    There is a huuuuge range of ‘orthodoxy’ under the umbrella of Judaism. Different ‘sects’ holds fundamentally similar values (for example: you won’t find very many anti-abortion Jews), but people inside these different groups will observe their traditions at differently levels/extremes or not at all. Most Jews in America don’t keep Kosher, for example, but most Orthodox Jews do.

    Judaism also has a rich tradition of questioning everything (which is why we usually love these kinds of questions). It is not considered heresy to question beliefs or authority, in fact it’s usually encouraged. You’ll find many Jews who openly identify as atheists, and yet most still fully consider themselves to be Jewish. This usually doesn’t bother anyone, Rabbis included. Atheists even hold a place of honor in some Jewish communities, because atheists get their morality from their own values or other people, not from a fear of god or some external force. This is part of why it is pretty common to find Jews (observant or not) who consider themselves atheist.

    All of that is to say you don’t necessarily need to believe in god to be considered Jewish.






  • I didn’t see what you were responding to, but I’m very close to doing this. Yesterday I unsubbed from just about all the .ml communities I was subbed to. They’re impossible to talk to and have gotten incredibly nasty. They just start indignantly name-calling immediately, there’s no real engagement anymore. I consider myself to be extremely left wing, but I also live in the real world. They are insufferable.


  • Deep breath. Bernie is a politician who sees the world for what it is. He rightly recognizes that there are only two options in this election, and he’s campaigning for the one who’s closer to his ideals. He is never shy about criticizing Harris or any politician from either party, so I think your rage would be more effective if directed at the actual bad actors. We’re days away from the election, so it’s Trump who deserves your anger, not one of the few politicians who actually cares and has consistently been on the right side of history.



  • There aren’t a lot of conservative judges like this guy left. He testified in front of the January 6 Committee, so Trump lost him a while ago, but his testimony and subsequent public interviews are master classes in what it means to put the country before partisanship. I strongly disagree with his judicial philosophy and his conservatism, and find a lot of his views to be antiquated and part of the problem, but he stood up and spoke out when others didn’t. That should still mean something for a judge, who rarely go public like this.



  • This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

    I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.


  • This kind of direct home visit has been happening for years in Muslim regions of China, for different reasons. At least these pregnancy visits (ugh feels gross to even talk about) don’t involve home stays, but any time the state shows up at your door to surveil your family, your human rights have been violated. It’s incredibly invasive and dystopian.

    “Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

    In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.

    Source