• 4 Posts
  • 326 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • How many are still alive? That excuse has long expired.

    It’s not individual guilt, it’s institutional guilt. In many other cases that’s a good thing. We want German kids to grow up learning about the holocaust and thinking “we can’t allow that to ever happen again”. I don’t think what’s happening in Gaza could happen in Germany because of what Germans are taught growing up.

    OTOH, in Israel they seem to only be taught that jews are victims and can never be perpetrators.

    You can thank the CIA for that.

    Yeah, they were involved. They were saving the world from the dangers of communism. Looking back, all the west really had to do was sit back and wait for the communist system to collapse. But, I wonder what the middle east would look like without the CIA’s interference. It sure seems unlikely it would be a land of healthy, stable democracies. Look at all the places where the CIA didn’t interfere. Countries ruled by strongmen is the rule rather than the exception.

    But, however we got here, that has been Israel’s traditional role. It was a democratic country with somewhat similar values to the west, nestled among Islamic Arab countries with very different values.



  • The US had a period of “greatness” shortly after WWII.

    Why was the US “great” in the 1950s and 1960s?

    1. The labour protections from the New Deal hadn’t yet been repealed, so more wealth was shared with ordinary people (as long as they were white).
    2. The US was the only major country to escape WWII without massive damage to its infrastructure. So, while other countries were focusing on rebuilding cities flattened by war, the US economy just shifted from producing war goods to producing consumer goods.
    3. A lot of the world’s best and brightest fled to the US as a safe place to escape the war. These immigrants were essential to the US economy after the war.

    So yeah, people’s grandpas were able to buy a house and support a family working a menial job for a brief period after WWII. But, that’s not because of some fundamental characteristic about the US that makes it better. It’s mostly because the US was fortunate enough to be on the opposite side of the planet from one of the most destructive wars in history.



  • Do you mean governments or people?

    People don’t have much power here. Other than boycotts, what can people do?

    For governments, Israel is fairly powerful. They have powerful lobbyists, and aren’t shy to leverage claims of antisemitism against anybody who speaks up against Israel. In many cases, there’s also the guilt over how jews were treated in WWII. This is one reason Germany is so incredibly pro-Israel. Then there’s the fact that Israel is still more-or-less a democracy, which makes it unique in the middle east. It’s the one country in the region pushing back against various Islamic fundamentalist goverments, movements and terrorist groups. Many countries don’t want to lose that “friend”.

    And then there’s spyware. Most of the best spyware in the world is produced in Israel. Some cynical people would say that countries don’t want to lose access to the world’s best producer of spyware. Some even more cynical people would say that that spyware has already been used on politicians and Israel is using it for blackmail. Who knows what the right level of cynicism is.



  • The best part about this is that Unilever basically just bought the brand name. Ben & Jerry’s is a perfectly good ice cream, but it’s not like there’s some amazing manufacturing knowledge that Ben & Jerry’s has that no other ice cream manufacturer could match. What they are is a popular brand with well known political leanings and, with fun popular flavours.

    If Unilever ever forces them out over too much activism, it would be easy for them to start up a new Ice Cream company and bring all their old customers over. So, Unilever basically has to just accept this activism or lose their customers.