ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
11mo ago
Well, I'll at least say your the first consistent prescriptivist I've come across!
Omg, I would love a way to distinguish between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns.
If you ever find yourself in the unlikely position of having to pick up a Nordic language, you'll have that to look forward to.
I think these sorts of theories are much more plausible than those involving deliberate sabotage.
Israel created massive refugee camps of the native population of its lands and then tried to dump the problem onto the neighbouring Arab states. I can’t gather a lot of sympathy for them for failing at this and having to deal with the consequences of its actions.
I'd say it was the invading Arab armies in 1948 encouraging Arabs to leave their homes to make fighting the Israelis easier that are more responsible for the "massive refugee camps". But even if, for the sake of argument, we put all the blame on Israel, it's significantly less brutal than what the colonialists in Australia or the USA did. Maybe you wouldn't have much sympathy for them either if Native Americans started massacring thousands of American civilians. But I'm skeptical you'd be as energised about that as you are about Israel.
Also it lost Sinai in a war (incidentally: a war that displayed how extremely vulnerable the country is if its enemies can act with even a tiny bit coordination. Israel’s short sighted and frantic actions are pushing its enemies into such coordination right now)
AFAIK Sinai was given back in the 1979 Camp David accord, 6 years after the Yom Kippur war ended with the international community begging Israel not to march into Cairo and occupy it militarily. I guess you could look at that and reduce it to "Israel lost Sinai in the war" but that's a pretty motivated description of events. In any case, I wouldn't look at that as an example of how much danger the Arabs pose to Israel.
If the world started operating on pre-20th century assumptions of ethnic conflict again, Israel would have a free hand to exile or kill the Arab population of course. But then it could also not expect much sympathy or support from the West when the hundred fold more populous enemy surrounding it did the same to Israel. So be careful what you wish for.
Is your suggestion that Arabs are holding back from trying to destroy Israel due to respect for 20th century norms of handling ethnic conflict?
ZanarkandAbesFan
11mo ago
I'm skeptical the US ever provided nuclear deterrence for Israel. Even without the current hard pivot away from Israel that the Democrats are performing I can't imagine there's any world where the US would have nuked Iran in return if they try to nuke Israel.
Because it means the remaining Arabs will have to either be somehow deported, or live under a permanent apartheid/occupation regime.
The words occupied and apartheid don't mean what you seem to think they mean. Gaza wasn't occupied or under any form of apartheid under the standard definition of those terms between 2005 and 2023. And who was planning to deport them before recent hostilities?
No Iran doesn't want a 20% Jewish population I am sure. But then Iranians didn't settle in a land exclusively inhabited by Jews in the 20th century and then spent the last century in a struggle to take over the said land. So the comparison is really pointless and distracting.
Israel tried to give Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. It unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt. That's not the behavior of a country consistently struggling to take over land. Again, these words don't mean what you seem to think they do.
In fact there are approximately zero comparable cases to Israel's ethnic problems in the last century which is the exact thing that makes it such a hot-button issue.
The only thing that makes Israel's case unique is how benevolently they treat the other ethnic groups they share the region with. I can't think of a single other nation in history that, were they in the same position as Israel is now, wouldn't have crushed the Palestinians decades ago. I can only assume you're aware of how the Romans or Ottomans handled hostile activity in the Holy Land. Do you honestly think the case of Israel is the first time in history one ethnic group has achieved dominance in a particular region at the expense of another? How do you think Australia and America became full of white people?
Modern IDF has not proven itself capable of fighting anything other than severely resource constrained urban insurgents. It failed badly the last time it tried to act against Hezbollah, which has much more in common with a proper army than an insurgent group. There is little indication that IDF’s ground forces have actually increased in quality since the last war.
This is cope. Hezbollah losses were twice as high as Israel ones during 2006 according to wikipedia, and that's with Hezbollah hiding behind civilian shields, having an extensive tunnel network to hide and move around in, and fighting on home territory. They also don't have an airforce.
Israeli military depends almost entirely on western supplies and cutting edge technology.
Israel has one of the most advanced defense sectors on the planet. Part of why the west sells Israel weapons is because they want to buy Israeli military hardware for themselves. The types of arms that Israel buys are often highly precision-based and used to minimize battlefield casualties. Cutting them off from that wouldn't handicap Israel war efforts, it would just make them a lot more indiscriminate.
The main problem with the Israeli political chaos is that Israel is making many suboptimal decisions, prioritising Netanyahu’s political survival and the populace’s thirst for vengeance over Hamas.
This is concern trolling. There's no country on earth where it would be viable for a government to do nothing in response to an Oct 7th style-attack, or to the thousands of rockets Hezbollah keeps firing at them. Complaining that Israel's response is "suboptimal" is just a way to launder the actual wish for Israel to simply not respond at all and accept being constantly under siege.
ZanarkandAbesFan
11mo ago
That would be totally suicidal, nobody in the country supports such a thing and it’s simply a fake solution made up by westerners (just like the “2-state solution”) to avoid thinking too hard about the unpleasant implications of the Israeli state.
Why is it an "unpleasant implication of the Israeli state" that Israel wants to keep its Arab population from not growing much beyond 20%? Is it an unpleasant implication of the Iranian state that they probably don't want a 20% Jewish population?
I'm sure this argument applies in some cases but proves too much when applied to English IMO. If we accept that English's minimal conjugations for person and number (limited in almost all cases to the '-s' suffix for third-person singular) encode useful redundancy in any real sense, we'd have to accept that modern English is monumentally inferior to languages with fuller inflectional profiles like Old English or Proto-Germanic for reliable communication. And we should subsequently advocate for far more extensive language reforms, like a complete re-introduction of the case system, than e.g. telling people off for using double negatives or whatever.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1yr ago
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is still good, but you can already tell the series has lost the spark that went with Patrice Désilets.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1yr ago
I assume "elites" here refers to journalists, democratic party workers etc.
English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles.
I'm not sure what I said that you're responding to with this paragraph.
If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually.
I'm not arguing that English should drop inflections. My point was that if you're arguing that English should be as effective a tool for communication as possible, then there are hundreds of ways the language could be changed for that purpose (including removing obvious redundancies like some inflections) beyond simply insisting people use the word "literally" correctly. I don't think such measures are necessary, because languages are pretty adept at maintaining their ability to communicate all shades of human meaning effectively.
Trump unironically probably would be better for everyone in the ME, including Palestinians (though not for the reasons that Democrats think). The worst outcome for Palestinians is that Hamas keeps using them as meat-shields in new conflicts they feel emboldened in starting because they're confident a Democrat administration will keep restraining Israel. That factor is lessened with Trump in power.
Is an idea radical if it's 2000 years old?
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