In principle platforms should verify government entities, given sufficent documentation

Why?

That is indeed possible. But it happens not to be both.

Ironically, the people who talk about Linux and veganism at inappropriate times the most are folks making this exact joke.

There’s children, there’s folks who refuse service. So I would venture to say that there are some people in Israel who are innocent. Of course, anyone who served in the military is not on that list.

Conscientious objectors are a thing. There are consequences to objecting, of course. Maybe it makes you a pariah in the settler colonial apartheid ethnostate of Israel, but just fucking move, you’re not supposed to be there anyway. Maybe you cannot move out of Israel, and you’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life or whatever. But you know what? Murdering a child to save your own career still makes you the bad guy. Helping others murder children to save your own career still makes you the bad guy.

But even beyond that, it’s not like these folks are going to gaza with a gun pointed to their head. Most of the population supports the government’s genocide of Palestinians, as polls show. There are very few innocents in Israel.

*genocide

If anyone’s having thoughts like this; it’s completely normal. Rest assured, I have thoughts like this multiple times a day, and I don’t even have a newborn.

It’s a drink actually

I mean, I really cannot think of anything worse as a symbol than a skull

To see people behaving greedily under capitalism and conclude greed is human nature is the same as to see people drowning in the ocean and conclude drowning is human nature.

The netherlands is sending *troop. One guy.

Now do one on twinkies!

I guarantee you they will “closely monitor the situation”.

Yeah, and destabilizing regions with brown people in them is a very effective way of doing that, hence my confusion.

This reads like Poland saying, “if Germany invades, the axis powers should defend us”.

I never understood why they ended USAID. It has been such a fantastic tool for destabilizing non-allies, so democrats and republicans alike should love it. And aside from that, it also did some actual good stuff like medical aid, so even progressives like it. It seems like such a win win, yet here we are. Is it just incompetence?

It’s so painful for me to see there’s a group of people who are ostensibly allies to the Palestinian cause, but who balk at the idea of them actually defending themselves against the apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The kind that will only support armed resistance after all is said and done, when it no longer matters. The kind that supports slave revolts in 19th century US, the warsaw uprising during WWII, the Black Panther party and Malcolm X in the 60s, the ANC during apartheid South Africa. But when a group uses violent means today to fight against horrific violence and oppression, that’s a bridge too far and we all have to stop and think about the optics.

They’ve tried non-violent means. We’ve all seen where that ends. Look up the march of return. Non-violent demonstration. Resulted in Israeli snipers targetting children, the disabled, and the elderly. The world looked on and did fucking nothing. And that’s been the story over and over, for nearly a century. There’s kids being murdered on a daily basis, but you want these Palestinians to sit on their thumbs and host a tea party. Go fuck yourself, they do not have time for this.

if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall

I don’t consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.

Here’s another way a high monthly active user count doesn’t necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going “have my updoot, kind sir” and “this!”. Higher user count, lower quality.

Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don’t tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don’t need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.

I’m not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I’m just saying its goodness is very far from established.

Have you done hazardous work? It fucks with your brain.

A true traitor of the people. Par for the course of Nobel peace prize winners. Kissinger won one, for example.