If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

The US and Jordan have been allies for decades, and the US has military bases in allies around the world.

This particular base is located near Syria, so it might be because of the Syrian civil war.

Also, fun fact - the king of Jordan appeared as an extra on American TV. Specifically, on Star Trek Voyager.

Monorails are often considered a gadgetbahn.

Gadgetbahn is less about being new, and more about being gimmicky with few real advantages.

The calculation shouldn’t be “chance of things getting worse”, but “expected value of how much worse it’ll get”.

These seem like they can circle for rather longer than a rocket could.

There’s a bit of a difference, tactically, between a rocket with 2 min of fuel vs a prop plane with 5 hours of fuel.

Netanyahu’s popularity tanked after October 7th.

70% of Israelis want him to resign. But only 25% want him to resign now - most want him to wait until the current war settles down. Which unfortunately gives him and Ben Gvir some perverse incentives, because there’s no way they remain in power after the dust settles.

I mean, to make that argument about the holocaust you’d need to lie about the numbers.

There were 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939, but only 11 million in 1945. In Europe, the population went from 9 million Jews just before the holocaust to only 3 million Jews continent-wide after it - even counting those in allied and neutral countries.

Poland, before the holocaust, had over three million Jews; 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis. Those people didn’t just evaporate.

Meanwhile - did I lie about the numbers? Keep in mind, 2 million is the current number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage.

What exactly is the map going to tell you?

There’s almost two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. In 1952, Israel gave citizenship to the ~160k Palestinians living in Israeli territory who hadn’t fled during the 1948 war; they lived under martial law until 1966.

No one is displacing Palestinians in Israel; Israeli settlers are displacing Palestinians in Palestine.

The 1931 census, carried out by the British, found a total population of a bit over a million people. Looking at other estimates doesn’t have it increasing that much between 1931 and 1947.

Israel’s population is currently about 9.7 million, which doesn’t count the ~5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So about 15x the population as in 1931.

In Israel, there’s currently around 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs. About 80% of Arab- Israelis are Sunni Muslim, 9% are Christian and 9% are Druze.

So, uh, it looks like the Muslim population of the land that is current Israel has more than doubled since 1947?

The problem is mathematical.

To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

There’s literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he’d need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell’s.

The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn’t be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don’t exist just doesn’t work.

Israel has been involved in several wars against multiple other nations - for example, in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it was invaded by Egypt, Syria, and a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cuba, Jordan, etc.

Israel is located at a fairly strategic location. Britain and France used Israel during the Suez crisis to stage an attack against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is one of the most important global trade routes.

US support of Israel is a combination of funding American arms dealers and wanting Israel as a strategicly located partner. That’s why we fought proxy wars with the soviet union over it like the Yom Kippur war. The aid is intended not to fight Hamas, but to keep Israel strong against e.g. Iran and other neighbors. They’ve had peace with Egypt for decades, but that might be more because of Israel being strong enough to not be worth attacking.

I doubt Biden personally supports the Gaza war, but a lot of this stuff is more about realpolitik and strategic concerns than anything else.

First Past The Post, which is more typically called ‘plurality’ in the US. Each person votes for only one candidate; the candidate with the most votes wins.

According to the EPA,

The primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector in the United States are:

Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes.

And

The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%). In terms of the overall trend, from 1990 to 2021, total transportation emissions have increased due, in large part, to increased demand for travel. The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by light-duty motor vehicles (passenger cars and light-duty trucks) increased by 45% from 1990 to 2021, as a result of a confluence of factors including population growth, economic growth, urban sprawl, and periods of low fuel prices. Between 1990 and 2004, average fuel economy among new vehicles sold annually declined, as sales of light-duty trucks increased.

In the US, cars and the car-centric sprawl it encourages is absolutely the largest single contributor to carbon emissions.

There’s a reason that the per capita emissions of the Netherlands are literally half of what they are in the states. It’s the cars.

Sure. In terms of directly produced emissions, most billionaires emit somewhere between 100-1000 times as much as the average American.

Which, yeah, isn’t all that equitable. But there just aren’t that many billionaires, and there’s hundreds of millions of average Americans.

It’s not like wealth, where the richest 735 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 166 million Americans.

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, …

“Billionaires generate obscene amounts of carbon pollution with their yachts and private jets – but this is dwarfed by the pollution caused by their investments,” said Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland.

“Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels. …

The carbon footprints of the investments were calculated by examining the equity stakes that the billionaires held in companies. Estimates of the carbon impact of their holdings was calculated using the company’s declarations on scope 1 emissions – direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company – and scope 2, indirect emissions.

Most of that isn’t their direct expenses, but from the businesses they own. Their actual travel and direct expenses are a small fraction of the emissions stated in that:

A superyacht kept on permanent standby generates about 7,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the analysis.

“The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else,”

The average carbon footprint in the US is 16 tons. 7000/16 = 437.5. The emissions of these billionaires is mostly not private jets and super yachts, and the emissions from super yachts and private jets are a very small percentage of the US’s total transportation emissions.