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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2025

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  • Those more extreme than Netanyahu are at least still a minority, albeit empowered by their position in the coalition. The majority of the protests against Netanyahu come from the same kind of centrists as the Americans you saw protesting Trump in 2017, who objected to the fascist boomerang coming around to hit them but wouldn’t have raised nearly as much of a fuss about deportations and overseas assassination campaigns if Hillary Clinton had been the one behind them.

    I think it’s all too easy to imagine a mass of undifferentiated monsters rather than confronting the connection between unfortunately familiar patterns of political engagement and the slaughter they cause, just because that connection is more obvious closer to the blade of the imperialist knife. Plenty of militaristic genocide deniers are just as much liberal progressives as their counterparts in western countries until the switch flips back to their military brainwashing and they start talking about security guarantees and buffer zones.

    Maybe I’m naive for believing that people can change, but I don’t think that everyone who’s been sold on the lie that forever war is the only way for them to be safe is as committed to violence as the backyard terrorists with lawn chairs.












  • Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

    In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.




  • From what I understand, biological systems regulated by sex hormones require one or the other to work at all. For example, you get one pattern of post-puberty bone growth with estrogen, a different pattern with testosterone, and no bone growth at all if you have neither. These systems also have some counterbalancing factor, like your bones constantly being slowly dissolved to keep calcium in your bloodstream, so if you have no gonads and no supplementary hormones, you essentially speedrun osteoporosis over the course of a few years.

    I’m not too clear on other effects, but a lot of things are downstream of “your bones slowly melt,” and lots of other parts of your body rely on sex hormones to regulate them and will have long-term issues without them.