Yep, and this is the obvious dishonesty of the people who single out Israel. It’s one country with a Jewish culture, where non-Jewish people also prosper in large numbers. But there are MANY officially Islamic nations where there is a state religion, where laws and religion are mixed together, and where violence/oppression of minorities is normalized and welcomed. Not a single pro-Gaza or anti-Israel activist will acknowledge this. It’s dishonest. Israel is much more egalitarian and frankly, civilized.
> Not a single pro-Gaza or anti-Israel activist will acknowledge this
Go easy on the Kool-Aid.
It's the opposite; those things are not talked about because they are universally acknowledged by anyone except the groups themselves as bad.
The problem with Israel is that you have a huge number of people who are not even Israeli gleefully supporting a genocide, either overtly or by doing everything in their power to silence anyone calling it out. This is a stark contrast: the only people actively supporting the oppression of minorities in Syria or Saudi Arabia are those carrying it out. There are no large groups of powerful people solely comprised of Americans in the US or Germans in Germany who do their best to silence criticism of Saudi Arabia. I'm sure you'll be able to find a few PR firms that Saudi paid, or a few people with business interests there who did such things, but it's completely incomparable to the Zionist lobby and the active carrying out of its interests.
What’s dishonest is your racist defense of a murderous and genocidal country that cynically uses Judaism
as a shield for war crimes. You should really think deeply about how you’re conflating the Zionist state with the Jewish people… not sure a lot of them are in board with your project. There is no world in which a Jewish-supremacist state is righteous.
As for equal rights, it is to laugh. Israel is an apartheid state. Ask any expert in the subject.
Let’s talk about the racist death-penalty-for-Palestinians law that just passed to Ben Gvir drinking champagne and to celebratory prayers in the Knesset. Or what about the fact that gay people cannot legally marry? Or that protesting the genocide gets you brutally arrested. Not to mention the ghetto that Israel has turned Gaza into. (shame on the Zionists!) What about no right of return to the people who lived on the land that Israel stole and continues to steal? (let me guess: all in self defense!) It goes on and on.
Why did this repose by someone else get flagged dead? It's factual and provides additional context. Deng why do allow these posts but then allow such one sided 'discussion'?
"The penalty imposed by the Palestinian authority for selling their property to a Jew is the death sentence. Conversely, the Palestinians or Jews or Christians inside Israel don’t face any such restrictions."
Your comment is an example of that dishonesty, since you’re ignoring all the Islamic supremacist states while stating your opinion that Israel is supremacist. Something like 20% of Israel’s population are Muslims, and they’re prospering there, so you can’t call it supremacist. On the other hand, officially Islamic nations are explicitly supremacist. They have state religions and laws against blasphemy and rampant systemic discrimination.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli group B’Tselem have published reports characterizing Israel’s legal framework (especially considering the occupied territories) as apartheid or involving systemic discrimination. I’m not sure what more can be said.
The Amnesty International observer in Gaza reported students who were working together on projects with Israeli students and hoped that were be treated with extreme prejudice. Totally an unbiased organization on the subject.
How do you think Islam spread? Peacefully? Look at history. And look at Islamic texts that preach the subjugation and killing of anyone who isn’t Islamic. It’s much more of a supremacist culture than any other.
islam wasn't the only religion to have an empire. and islam spread through voluntary conversion, for hundreds of years the subjects of the islamic empires remained majority the pre conquest religion. also no muslim empire ever conquered indonesia and malaysia, yet they are two muslim majority countries today.
> hundreds of years the subjects of the islamic empires remained majority the pre conquest religion
Even if this was true, which I dispute, Islam imposes all sorts of methods to oppress other religions. Like special taxes for those who aren’t Muslims.
> no muslim empire ever conquered indonesia and malaysia, yet they are two muslim majority countries today
And now these countries have inhumane systems like sharia courts.
You can dispute but you're still wrong. The majority of people under Islamic rule historically were non-Muslims but were afforded far greater rights than other societies, such as freedom or worship, protection, the right to their own laws, and the right to Islam's laws as well if they wanted.
And yes, they were taxed. Muslims paid zakat, non-Muslims paid jizyah. We can't make non-Muslims pay a religious tax, so they paid a different one. You make that sound like it's a bad thing.
Also, what you said about Malaysia and Indonesia is bizarrely bad and incorrect. It's not worth replying to you, you just spew lies like a Zionist. Oh wait...
Jizyah wasn’t at the same rate as zakat and its rate wasn’t uniform. It was often used to humiliate, reminding non Muslims of their subordinate status under Islamic law
Are you seriously trying to revise taxation of other religions into an “alternative” when it clearly was meant to discriminate and oppress them? The Quran literally says the jizya is about fighting those who don’t believe in “god”, to subdue them.
You are spreading revisionist misinformation, but it’s also so obvious and easy to disprove with a quick search. Why even try to spin it this way?
“Fight against those who do not believe in Allāh or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allāh and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth [i.e., Islām] from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.“
Notice the four characteristics mentioned here (all of them must be satisfied):
- do not believe in Allāh or in the Last Day
- do not consider unlawful what Allāh and His Messenger have made unlawful
- do not adopt the religion of truth (doesn't necessarily mean Islam, since true Christianity and Judaism believe in one God)
- from those who were given the Scripture. That includes Muslims themselves by the way, since they were given a scripture. Elsewhere in the Quran when it refers to Christians and Jews it says "People of the scripture". In other areas it mentions "Those who were given the scripture", which includes Muslims.
What it essentially says: if you do not follow the law of the land, whether you are a Christian, Jew, or a Muslim, there are consequences. Every nation has laws, and if you break those laws you will be prosecuted. In this case it says those will have to pay a "fine".
I don't know Arabic, but I read the English differently. I see "fight against those who X, and those who B, and those who C" as different groups, all of whom one is supposed to fight against.
I find it quite hard to read this passage like you do and see this as evidence of equality of treatment between Muslims and non-Muslims. Even the translator interprets 'religion of truth' to mean Islam.
Plus I think in general you're ignoring the pretty hostile tone of this passage. The jizyah is explicitly intended to be a humiliation ("humbling"). I was skeptical, but I think this passages is strong evidence that the jizyah was intended to "discriminate and oppress" non-Muslims.
As apologetics what he's saying is complete nonsense. The jizyah has been interpreted by every islamic society as a tax on non muslims, not a fine for those who break the law. You could argue that the passage doesn't actually say that the purpose of jizyah is to humiliate people (humbling is different) or that islamic societies in practice didn't (typically) use it as a means of ridicule, but saying that actually it was just a fine is utter make believe.
The mainstream academic consensus is that Jews generally fared better under Islamic rule than in medieval Christian Europe. Scholars also agree that jizya was paid in lieu of zakat (which Muslims paid) and military service.
Of course, this raises the question: if Jews fared better under Muslim rule than under Christianity, why would they leave their alleged homeland and go to Europe, only to want to go back a thousand years later?
Does it raise that question? Or is it rather a hopelessly ambiguous and undecidable question that's really more of a racialist rhetorical argument? The state of Israel was not formed based on a calculation of whether the Ottomans were better sovereigns to serve under than the French, German, or Russians.
I hope I'm communicating well where I'm coming from, which is not that you're wrong (or right) but rather how unproductive this particular species of reasoning is in modern geopolitical discussions.
Wow. So he was on their board, learning all about how their business works and what they’re working on, and then launches a competitor? Is that really legal?
In this case they're saying "created by", as opposed to "a copy was received". The latter would be weighted much more heavily towards automation.
In other words, I think a human-written message to 10,000 customers would be counted here as +1 to "written by people", whereas a "Your account X is overdue" generated for one customer would be +1 to the not-by-people.
Airbus is not an American company, and any legal framework on which to base a sanction is shaky at best - there is no law forbidding selling images of military assets of a foreign country to a client during peacetime.
IMO, I think losing a war to Iran and revealing the US military is more of a rotted out paper tiger than people realized should put the kibosh on saber rattling with China. Thats just me, though.
It makes a lot of sense that Asians, including Indians, went for the GOP in larger numbers in 2024. I don’t think they were going for Trump specifically as much as looking for an alternative to progressive extremism. Look at the issues and positions pushed by the far left in America in the years leading up to Trump 2: soft on crime policies, years (decades?) of racial discrimination in college admissions, years of DEI-driven quota policies at tech companies (for hiring and promotions), increasing amounts of spending without results in cities/states, reducing quality in public schools, and so on. Is it any surprise that ethnic groups known for a focus on education, safety, and high incomes, soured on the Democrats’ platform?
That doesn’t make them gullible like the “leopard” comment suggests. They’re just caught between two sides that both have vocal minorities who hate them in different ways. And remember, in the entire campaign and early months of the administration, there was little visible racism / bigotry in the mainstream places.
I think the right-wingers that can’t stand them, the racists / far-right extremists, are small in number but very vocal and perhaps influential (just like the far-left). This is especially visible on Twitter, where it does feel like the algorithms amplify many of them. I find it strange that so many of them are visible in replies to Elon or others. But in recent months, especially with immigration becoming a central topic in politics, it really ramped up. And it’s unfortunate that intelligent and capable people like Vivek Ramaswamy have been the victim of that bigotry - I’d love to see what people like him can do in politics.
Regardless, I think the extremism and rampant corruption of the Trump administration alone will push these groups back to the Democrats, at least a little bit. The visible rise of racism against immigrants and Asians will make this swing back even bigger.
We never had any progressive extremists in the US. Our last president was center, maybe slightly right of center. Our current president is a far-right fascist.
Jimmy Carter might have been our last left of center president. Clinton, Obama, and definitely Biden were pure center to right of center.
We get more progressives in local government, like Seattle’s newly elected mayor, but Democrats become more center the more votes they need to get elected.
They preferred racist extremism and anti-scientific, pro-oligarchical policies to the extremely conventional governing we were experiencing? That's like deciding to kill all the pollinator insects because a yellowjacket bit you once. Southeast Asians are only tolerated in numbers to begin with because MAGA elements have been suppressed for so long.
As I mentioned before, I live in a blue state as most Indian-Americans do. I can tell you every racist encounter me or my family has ever had (thankfully not a lot) has been with people who if they voted at all voted Democrat. The Internet is not real. Groypers don’t actually exist in my world. Crime, potholes, fraud, woke extremism and low standards do. Mostly these are not national issues but the national party sets the tone.
In 2028, I can see Indian-Americans voting for Vance or Rubio. If it is someone more extreme than that I don’t know. Last time I asked who the Democrat nominee should be. No one answered. If it is someone who is merely “not Trump” or has an appropriately colored vagina I like Republican chances.
If you read “Mostly these are not national issues but the national party sets the tone.” and understood that I think the president fixes potholes then maybe you should do the country a favor etc.
The pattern day trading rule was always odd. A lot of these regulations are gatekeeping that makes it harder for every day people to have the same access that the richest people do. But FINRA is itself odd - why are these regulations entrusted to the industry itself?
We need all new antitrust laws. The size of these companies is itself a problem. They have so much power that there is no possibility for fair competition. Maybe we can start by taxing companies that are worth more than 1 trillion at an extremely high rate.
I wonder who would prosecute them. What about an AG who, when confronted about doing a bad job, deflects by pointing out that Nasdaq is "smashing records?"
I'd be in favor of giving Lina Khan a lifetime appointment to heading the FTC along with 10x their current budget to tackle exactly this problem.
A major part of the problem isn't even that we don't have laws on the books, it's that funding to the enforcement agencies has been gutted to the point where they can mostly just go after extreme egregious violations or very easy to win cases. The IRS is in exactly the same boat.
That would be great, but I think even her job needs new laws. Otherwise, one of the problems is even hardcore enforcement takes years and huge amounts of taxpayer expense. We need to make it simple, cheap, and quick to improve competition.
Luckily, Lina Khan has just announced The Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which is going to be training the next generation of antitrust lawyers for the US. If we are lucky, she will also be working on much bigger things than that at the same time. If we are doubly lucky, she will be training hundreds of new lawyers as good as she is.
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