Not really. Suppose he invaded China. Do you think he’d get away with that?

There was nothing he could have done. It’s a mistake thinking the US changed so dramatically almost overnight in the past few months. In reality, the cracks in the dam have been growing slowly over the decades. There just comes a point where you can’t paper them over anymore.

All the suggestions here about moves Biden could have made to the Supreme Court or with other laws are forgetting about January 6th. There’s a huge number of people who voted for and actually want what is happening right now. Blocking them or delaying them is only delaying the inevitable. Politics is war by other means.

Russia’s economy is roughly comparable in size to the Netherlands. Putin has destroyed so much of it. He’s caused enormous brain drain by driving young men with any means and intelligence out of the country. He’s devastated his own industrial base and now he’s on the brink of losing to Ukraine, a country far smaller than Russia.

He’s very, very, very far from owning the planet.

No one is untouchable. No one is invincible. No one has unlimited resources.

One day Putin will seem untouchable. The next day he gets pulled out of a ditch like Gaddafi.

Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.

The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.

Not according to the state of Israel

Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.

Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.

But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).

If you’re just going to lie then you’re not even worth talking to.

A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.

That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.

Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.

You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters

Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.

That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.

I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.

Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist

That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.

It seems you’re conflating the words nation and state. A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian. A state is an officially recognized group with sovereignty over an area of land. Many nations exist which do not have their own states.

All nations have the right to exist by the human right to freedom of association. Sovereign states have no right to exist: their existence is asserted and defended by force and by mutual recognition with other sovereign states.

Also the real life story of anthropologists visiting an uncontacted tribe via helicopter!

Community gardens still divide the space into individual plots. If I grow a bunch of jalapeño peppers on my plot then it’s not cool if you just come along and harvest them all.

Save up your money and then move to a low CoL country that’s friendly to foreigners.

Thanks for this.

Greed is a dangerous word on Lemmy. It’s usually associated with billionaires, not people from Latin America trying to make a better life for themselves.

The problem is you’ve created a false binary between refugee and economic migrant. In reality there’s a huge spectrum of economic and political conditions which drive people to leave their home country and seek opportunities elsewhere, none of which has anything to do with greed. In so doing you’ve painted vast swathes of people as greedy, the same thing the Trump admin has been doing to justify using ICE to break up families.

Real refugees are a very narrow class of migrants. They’re narrowly defined by the UN because their acceptance is controversial in international politics. Almost all migrants are economic but almost none of those I would classify as greedy (people travelling from wealthy liberal countries to the US to pay lower taxes and make more money). Many economic migrants are people travelling from poor countries with corrupt/oppressive governments to seek a better life in the US, Canada, or Western Europe. These folks end up working as cleaning staff for businesses, delivery/Uber drivers, or working on farms picking produce. Hard jobs that no one would accept out of greedy motivations alone.

The remaining are international students (or recent graduates), usually from Asia, who are classified as economic migrants but I would consider political/social migrants. I know A LOT of these folks. I wouldn’t call any of them greedy. They’re here for a better opportunity, yes, but also to get away from their parents and the social/political problems back home.

That’s flat out wrong. You may be an immigrant but you have a warped picture of the landscape. Countless economic migrants are borderline refugees. They’re fleeing corrupt, crime-ridden, and low opportunity countries in the hopes of a better life. They aren’t qualified refugees because they aren’t fleeing imminent threats of violence but they’re definitely not doing so out of greed. They’re taking enormous personal risks with the dream of a better life. Many end up being economically exploited in their destination countries, hated, abused, and even arrested by ICE (in the case of many South and Central Americans moving to the US).

You’re also wrong about refugees being left wing. The most conservative people I’ve ever met belong to refugee communities from Somalia. They have extremely tight knit families and they support every new family who arrives from Somalia. They are extremely warm and loving people but they are devoutly conservative Muslims in their beliefs and practices.

Perhaps this map will help:

To get from Iran to Israel, the Iranian soldiers would have to cross Iraq (and Jordan) or Syria, both very unfriendly countries full of mountainous terrain. Not a viable ground invasion whatsoever!

Nothing Russia has done including (or since) the invasion in 2022 was smart. It was all stupid.

Russia’s wasted a million soldiers on grabbing a rather small amount of Ukrainian land. They’ve destroyed their own economy, their trade relationships with most of the world, and their demographic future. Take a million men off the streets of most countries and it’s going to crash your population within a generation or two.