Clementine
6d ago
Doing my best to!
Clementine
6d ago
Thank you
Clementine
6d ago
- Regardless of whether some people saying Death to America only mean it idiomatically, we know not all of them only mean it idiomatically since they have proven, through action, their non-idiomatic desire for Americans to die.
- Even if the original Persian has a more idiomatic meaning, the entire discussion was about Western English speakers saying the phrase in English. They (probably) don't mean it literally, of course, they're just using it to signal how they're the good kind of kafir you definitely shouldn't stab or bomb or shoot while you're idiomatically deathing to X.
- Of course the same people saying this is fine would have a total meltdown over something similar or lesser reversed. I think it's even funnier if you have more context about the metafilter purity death spiral as they've progressively purged their ranks of anyone guilty of wrongthink.
I remember on October 8th the feeling of going online and seeing people celebrating the rape and murder of Israelis. It was a complete shock, I was totally unprepared for the sheer glee in the online progressive spaces, the instantaneous "pray for Palestine" posts combined with "this is what decolonization looks like" posted approvingly under dead bodies.
Two years later I am able to be a good deal more amused than traumatized by the repulsive shenanigans of the bot army. Partly it's because I am now more aware that much of it is a bot army, a carefully coordinated effort not organic sentiment. Partly it's because compared to when our hostages were still in Gaza I can breathe more freely now.
Partly it's because it's funny. /r/worldnews had multiple users posting their analyses about how Iran has these massive stockpiles of 50,000 missiles and 5,000 launchers that they're keeping hidden in reserve, they're just gonna wait until the defense stockpiles disappear and then theyre totally gonna unleash the hell they haven't managed to until now. (It's easy to imagine them gnashing their teeth as they write this.)
Meanwhile metafilter, which is a site that after its leftist death spiral is so tiny and inactive I'm not sure it's worth deploying a bot army to, had an (Australian) user immediately saying Death to America and discourse ensuing between the people who thought that was totally fine and the people who thought that wasn't "helpful" which yielded the following gem
for what it’s worth, “death to X” is an idiomatic phrase in the Arab/Persian world that just means “down with X” or even just casually “frickin’ X,” not a literal call for everyone in a given country to be executed, in much the same way that English-language “sucks” is no longer regarded as having homophobic implications as an idiomatic usage
I know this kind of stuff would have infuriated me two years ago. It would have made me so angry and depressed. And now I can't help it, I laughed out loud reading that comment. Wow, it truly is possible to be this level of distilled stupid.
That doesn't mean I wish well on these people — I don't, I think they're disgusting. I've had a post brewing in me for two years about how I find it so much easier to sympathize with some terrorist in Gaza who is attached to home and his family and hates me, then with some keyboard warrior in the west with a moral compass directed straight up his ass. The terrorist may also be wishing death upon me (and attempting to enact it) but there's something more morally clean about him.
We've had a much quieter week than expected (thanks to all those thousands of launchers the iranians are stockpiling for the right moment). There's at least 1-3 sirens a day but often not more than that, where I live (other areas of the country have much more because they're more in the flight path of debris). The very beginning of the war had the most, up and down and up and down and up and down like I described, by it's tapered off pretty dramatically.
The houthis don't appear to have joined in with their Iranian friends at all this time around. Hezbollah did join in, which has pissed off the non Hezbollah Lebanese enough we might, maybe, perhaps, if I'm being crazily optimistic, actually see some significant meaningful backlash against them there.
I've been working from home. We are hosting my siblings-in-law who don't have access to a bomb shelter near them and have a newborn, which comes with the expected tensions but has been ok overall.
My poor team lead is Muslim so he gets to have the rocket induced sleep deprivation and also fasting for Ramadan. At the beginning of the week he told me between those two things his brain was barely functioning, but as the rocket fire has decreased we've had more peaceful nights and he's been doing better, as have we all.
It's still uncomfortable and hard, my kids still struggle with waking up to sirens, I know people who lost their homes, I've read about the people who died although I don't know any personally. But I go online and read about all the dead my government has been allegedly covering up and it comforts me, I like not living in the alternate reality these people are living in.
Unlike many many people online who seem to know a tremendous amount about all sorts of things (so many bombs have hit us and been covered up so effectively that no one who actually lives here knows about them — but these people magically do) I know almost nothing. Just the daily experience here, and hoping things turn out okay.
Hope everyone here is ok as well.
Clementine
13d ago
Peace would be wonderful. Sometimes a bit hard to believe in, but stranger and more wonderful things have happened over the course of human history...
So far it's ok. Only light injuries today in Israel, thankfully.
School is cancelled and we will probably be expected to wfh but the corona years + years of war have made this stuff (sadly) a kind of routine we're used to.
Clementine
13d ago
No, I just live in an apartment building.
Lots of people also have a reinforced room in their house, and then some people just have community shelters in their neighborhood they have to run to every time. Which is pretty miserable, so a lot of times people just camp out in the shelter for a while.
Clementine
13d ago
Since I sort of semi promised a post about the previous war and then didn't really follow up on it I had hoped to at least provide one for the inevitable next one, but since Trump likes wars on weekends because of the stock markets and I do not use my phone/computer on Saturday you don't get anything too live, sorry. And frankly might know more than me since I'm only now catching up on the news.
The first war was a pretty big shock, we were woken up by an earthquake siren (Israel has been overdue a major earthquake for a few centuries now) which was followed by a text message clarifying that there was no earthquake, but we had attacked Iran.
This time around was, uh, well they evacuated the embassy Friday so it wasn't really a big surprise. On the other hand it's already been a month of will they won't they. We had a siren early morning, went down to the bomb shelters, came back up, went back down, came back up, went back down, came back up. "Iran trying to raise our average life expectancy by forcing us to do some cardio" was the joke (perhaps funnier for the people not doing eight flights of stairs each time...). At some point in the afternoon the early warning systems came up (I don't know why they weren't initially up) so we were able to have advance warning that a siren might be coming shortly instead of having to run immediately each time.
One of the things I realized trying to write a post about the previous war and am running into again with this one is that aside from the personal angle there's not so much of interest I can share because we just don't know anything. Like this would be a more valuable post if I had interesting geopolitical takeaways rather than just "wow I don't know what's going to happen guess we'll find out haha".
I still remember the Iranian protests in 2009 and how they came to nothing, and the many many protests between then and now, so it would be pretty incredible if finally 16 years later something actually changed.
(The timing is, uh, interesting from a Jewish perspective since we're celebrating a prior defeat of a person from Persia who tried to wipe out the Jews this Tuesday/Wednesday. In the moment it does mean the celebrations planned for tomorrow in the schools are all cancelled since everything is closed)
Fwiw I don't think comments like yours are signs of bots. To me an obvious sign of bots would be multiple separate accounts repeating a claim that Iran has thousands of launchers waiting to be used. Or one account that's constantly posting comments on this topic and no other topic round the clock and spreading misinfo. It's mostly on reddit or Instagram that I've seen that kind of thing. But I do also believe there's coordinated attempts at pushing narratives on social media that aren't just fog of war misinfo.
I do hope there were very solid strategic reasons for America to join and that they pan out but it's not like the Trump administration is clearly communicating them, hence "hope", that the 4d chess board or whatever becomes obvious in a few weeks. It's really early in the war, but it definitely from my perspective with so little information feels like a big big gamble so I'm really hoping that for the people who have access to way more secret intelligence than I do it's much more of a sure thing.
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