they’re filthy communists i tell ya

Small/Medium-sized Business

You’re just flat out lying at this point lol. 21-23% of the entire Israeli Jewish population is first-generation immigrants; 30-35% is second-generation, direct offspring of immigrants; 30-35% is third-generation; 10-15% is fourth-generation; under 5% is fifth-generation or beyond (which would include Jews who lived there since before Aliyah). These are numbers are from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. There’s also statistics that rather say 40-45% are third-generation with much less being fourth-generation or beyond, but with around the same amount or slightly less being first and second generation – I find the former estimates far more reasonable though. It’s estimated around 90-97% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants since 1900.

A majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants of several Aliyah (immigration to “Zion” from outside of the lands of Palestine/Israel, practically starting from 1882 but mostly ramping up around the start of the British/Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the region in the early and mid 1900s). Even the most conservative estimates say that around 50-70% of Israel’s Jewish population growth since 1900 came from immigration, with most of the rest of the population growth coming from recent immigrants having children. And those are really conservative estimates, the actual amount is likely much higher than that.

A significant portion of Israeli Jews came from immigration in the 90s, especially from the Soviet Union after its collapse – 1.4-1.6 million Jews (compared to Israel’s total current Jewish population of around 7.4 million) immigrated to Israel following the collapse of the USSR. Over a fifth of the entire Israeli Jewish population in just the span of one generation. Yet second- and third-generation Israeli Jews make up like 3-3.5x as much still.

It’s crazy for you to try to state that modern Israelis aren’t primarily (nearly exclusively) descended from relatively recent immigrants who displaced (and outright genocided) the native population. You straight up just made that up without consulting any history/statistics, not even Israel’s own statistics lol. Palestine faced a colonization and replacement by Jewish immigrants – according to the Jewish Virtual Library, 8% of people in the region were Jewish in 1882; then 11-13% after the end of WW1, after the adoption of a Zionist policy for Palestine and occupation by the UK (see the Balfour Declaration); then 32% in 1947 after several Aliyah; then in 1948 – the year the Israel was formally established and immigrants were shipped in from all over the globe, and the year European immigrants to Israel started all-out total war and genocide against Palestinians – that number jumped to 82%. It is not Jews’ “indigenous land”, 93%+ of people in the region were Arab Muslims at the time of the first Aliyah, hundreds of thousands compared to the 9,000 Jews and even less Christians. Jews hadn’t been the majority in the region since the 4th century, Arabs & Muslims have been the majority since before the Magna Carta, the Crusades, European Feudalism, they were most of the population when France just started to exist.

Considering the actual facts of the situation, your justification basically becomes “colonization and apartheid in the modern day is okay because some other people they identified with lived there 1,500-3,000 years ago”, in which case I have some bad news for like, 95% of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, who all exist on lands which were someone elses in that same time period. Ethnonationalism with feeling you have a “right” to certain land you have no actual connection to based on some ancient “predecessor” civilization that had those lands stolen from them before Hindu-Arabic numerals existed is a strong hint that you’re in the wrong (see: Nazism). Modern Jews are about as indigenous to Israel as the modern Japanese are to Korea, or modern Turkish are to Mongolia.

Zionism is modern-day ethnonationalism and colonialism by predominantly non-Levantine peoples (more than half of those being primarily European in ancestry). Its purpose is creating and justifying an ethnostate where Jews are superior and have rights that other groups don’t have – and such things are cemented in the Israeli constitution and law. To exist, Israel requires relegating non-Jews to second-class personhood and requires (or required at some recent point in time) commiting acts of genocide towards certain non-Jews; abolishing that would be abolishing the concept of Israel and Zionism as a whole. There is no real moral defense of the state of Israel.

Maybe access to connected devices (e.g. your computer components or the phone you have plugged in to your computer)

Even worse, because the Kingdom of Israel stopped existing 3000 years ago. Modern Israelis have zero connection to ancient Israel

Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.

For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…

For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.

For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…

I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.

I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.

For Finnish I mostly used pirated books and YouTube learning resources. The first books I used were from Leila White, “From Start to Finnish” and “A Grammar Book of Finnish” which are both great. I would definitely suggest that anyone who wants to learn Finnish goes through those books – the second one’s a reference rather than something you’re supposed to go through from beginning to end though.

I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.

slovake.eu was a helpful resource for Slovak when I was doing the necessary stuff for citizenship – I could’ve probably gotten by with only English (despite doing it myself and without an immigration lawyer) but I felt it only made sense to at least try to learn the language. It… definitely happened… I basically learned much of the core vocabulary and some grammar quirks, and played fill in the blank with Russian/Polish words except how I thought they’d be in Slovak for words for ones I didn’t know. Would not recommend doing that, but if you DO do it then just know that Slovak is the absolute best slavic language to do it in, they will probably understand you if you outright are speaking a different slavic language.

Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.

After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.

I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.

I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.

On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.

Language is pretty much about constantly pushing back against the force inside of you that says “you can’t do this, you’re not improving, it’s tiring” and managing your breaks/scheduling well. It’s easy to turn a “break” into just not touching the language again. You have to be motivated a LOT to learn a language (including being motivated by pressure/necessity, go get locked up in a country with speakers of your TL or something) or else you’ll just quit as soon as you hit your first wave of roadblocks.

on y office maybe? that could be interpreted as “we work there” with very poor grammar

Chimpanzees are likely going to be extinct 2-3 decades from now. Bonobos will be extinct in 4-6 decades. Orangutans will go extinct within 10 to 20 years. Most animals closely related to humans (including most apes & monkeys) are projected to become extinct within a few decades. I do not want to be alive when gorillas go extinct

This is mostly due to the meat trade (apes and monkeys are often killed for meat which is eaten by locals or traded), being affected by the wars in the Congo/Africa, being kidnapped & sold as exotic pets, and habitat loss from human resource harvesting/logging & development. Humans are effectively displacing, enslaving, slaughtering, and cannibalizing their distant cousins

It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR

It’s the most expensive if you don’t already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it’s going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn’t have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear’s cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.

Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.

Congress passing the Taft-Hartley act and then overriding Truman’s veto of it to enact laws to cripple unions (which made important union activities illegal, like solidarity strikes, jurisdictional strikes, and mass picketing) and basically completely fucked up unions, before Reagan went ahead and fucked them up even more than previously thought possible again

McCarthyism

Citizens United v. FEC

pretty sure i remember just pressing ctrl-c/ctrl-v on the android studio emulator

Have we ever seen a third party candidate this close to the election getting almost 20 percent in multiple states like RFK is?

Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 got 27.4%, George Wallace (the segregationist) in 1968 got 13.5%

Vintage clarinets can be very beautiful, but modern more standardized clarinets are also often beautiful (I’m quite partial to a lot of the Backun designs, but I have an old Selmer I really like too)

I can’t think of any instruments that aren’t made as “beautiful” as before. The only differences are that modern ones are just made… better, like way better. A $200-400 guitar now surpasses the quality of a guitar costing thousands of dollars from a few decades ago, and there’s way more diversity in the designs.

That being said, I don’t see what the point of musical instruments that aren’t “utilitarian” would be. It’s not a sculpture, it exists to make sound, there’s no reason for an instrument that sacrifices sound or design quality to have fancy aesthetics, unless it’s for a movie/play or something and the sound doesn’t actually matter.

Do people in cities have planes circling them 24/7 or something? I see like a few planes every month maybe and I live not far from a city with an international airport.

Speaking about culture, women who are confident in their engagement/initiative and take charge, or simply don’t let themselves get talked over, are generally seen as “bitchy” or something similar (when a man doing the same thing is seen as normal or a good trait). Women being not allowed to “speak out of place” has morphed into it being seen as bad when they’re dominant or demand anything, even respect; they’re expected to fit a certain archetype of being submissive or extraordinarily “pleasing” to the others (especially men) they work with. Women are talked over all the time in meetings, but it’d be a problem if they expressed issue with that or if they talked over others.

Even superiors who are women will often refuse to give other equally-performing (or even better-performing) women employees raises because of the non-explicit but powerful social pressure of male peers, or how it would reflect on them to their male peers. Society encourages “competition”.

My elaboration of your comment would be that “two people who are otherwise the same that have different external traits may be seen as having unequally agreeability, and therefore, have unequal mobility in a given hierarchy”, which conveniently applies to more than just gender and sex but anything else that affects appearance (body shape & color, voice, even clothing/cultural presentation to an extent), although I’d say in the workplace sex is more important than other “innate” characteristics (ethnicity/name discrimination might be up there though); but that doesn’t roll off the tongue…

Average work experience for a woman

People with ADHD, Dyspraxia (a motor disability), and some type of insomnia disorder have significantly higher rates of car accidents – around 4x more likely for ADHD and 3x more likely for insomnia disorders (driving while sleepy is around as dangerous as driving while drunk). At minimum 25% of all car crashes involve people with ADHD or insomnia disorders (which is why your car insurance rates might skyrocket in some states if you get diagnosed)… I have all of those. Yet, somehow, they still allowed me to get my driver’s license, and I got it with single-digit hours of driving experience at the time… very American to give licenses that allow you to drive 13-ton vehicles to people who shouldn’t even qualify to drive on public roads.

I still have no reason to waste tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years on a car though.

Why limit it to two? I say allow any amount of people in a civil union, or allow one person to have a civil union with multiple people separately. It’s mostly for visits in the hospital, parental rights, stuff like that.

Of course, that makes residence/citizenship based on relationships complicated, but that’s mostly an issue caused by closed national borders being a fucked up concept in the first place.

I don’t think there’s an all-encompassing term for people who have “destructive”/harmful beliefs considered conservative. Most I can think of is “bigoted capitalists”, but even “bigoted” could be interpreted way differently. Plus, that excludes bigoted non-capitalists so it has a more narrow usage…

What I go with, though, is “fascists” and “collaborators”. Plain and simple, straight to the point, but most importantly no chance of confusion – that’s how I see our conservatives, their supporters, and their enablers. Ultra-socially-regressives (usually religious) who want a system that enforces/maintains a social hierarchy they deem “natural” (or having a religious justification for the hierarchy). Maybe “wannabe fascists” or “social fascists” would be more accurate, since generally people think of a dictatorship when they think of “fascism”.

“Oppressors” may also work, and it also can pair with “collaborators”. It’s more general, but I think here the flexibility may come be an advantage, and it isn’t tied to a specific set of political beliefs, it vaguely just means “those who use unjust force/threats of force to control others”. Of course, contemporary conservatives follow this definition.