Perspectivist

I take your point to be that hostility toward Israelis right now is about opposition to Israeli government actions in Gaza, not about their ethnicity or religion. If that’s what you mean, I get the distinction you’re making.

I’m not saying every action taken against something Israeli is motivated by antisemitism. But it’s also undeniable that some people in the anti-Israel/pro-Palestine crowd are antisemites, and they hide those views behind the broader narrative. Acts of indiscriminate hostility toward anything connected to Israel - even if not motivated by antisemitism - look and function exactly the same as if they were. People should consider the optics, even if their intentions are clear to themselves. That’s the specific distinction I’m talking about, and it’s the one I haven’t seen you address yet.

Sanctions against Russia are a coordinated, state-level pressure tactic aimed at hurting the Russian economy to twist their arm. Everyone acknowledges there’s collateral damage to civilians - the difference is that the economic impact is real, and it has a plausible path to change. If someone were vandalizing the business of a Russian-born German citizen with no involvement in the war, I’d criticize that just the same.

Randomly targeting an Israeli company or civilian abroad that has no connection to the war isn’t the same thing. It’s not part of an organized effort to apply economic pressure, it doesn’t meaningfully weaken the Israeli state, and it has no realistic chance of changing policy. It’s just hostility toward something for being Israeli.

Buddhists probably had figured out a lot of things about the workings of the human mind way before science did.

You haven’t addressed my point. I’m not debating whether Israel’s actions are above criticism - I’m saying that targeting unrelated Israeli entities, like an airline office in Paris, isn’t legitimate anti-war activism. It’s indiscriminate, identity-based hostility.

You can frame it as “just graffiti” if you want, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s aimed at something with no connection to Gaza. That’s exactly the distinction I was making, and nothing in your reply engages with it.

And that's called a moral contamination fallacy - the belief that if X is connected to Y, then X must share full moral responsibility for everything Y does.

This kind of vandalism does nothing to hurt the war effort. All it does is damage property, terrorize innocent civilians and alienate the people who would've otherwise been on your side.

This reminds me of the time we often heard people saying "I'm not racist, I'm race realist"

An honest critic of Israel directs their criticism at the people and organizations actually worth criticizing. Antisemites, on the other hand, direct it at anything that’s Israeli or Jewish. In your previous comment, you showed no sympathy for an Israeli airline’s office in Paris being vandalized - as if that has anything to do with the war in Gaza. That’s not anti-war activism; it’s blind hatred aimed at people based on their group identity - i.e., racism.

Emojis are for chatting/texting. I don't even want to see them here.

Samsung default one. It's funny when I'm at the hardware store buing supplies for work in the morning and a phone rings there's like 5 builders who all check their phones.

I hear you - you're reacting to how people throw around the word “intelligence” in ways that make these systems sound more capable or sentient than they are. If something just stitches words together without understanding, calling it intelligent seems misleading, especially when people treat its output as facts.

But here’s where I think we’re talking past each other: when I say it’s intelligent, I don’t mean it understands anything. I mean it performs a task that normally requires human cognition: generating coherent, human-like language. That’s what qualifies it as intelligent. Not generally so, like a human, but a narrow/weak intelligence. The fact that it often says true things is almost accidental. It's a side effect of having been trained on a lot of correct information, not the result of human-like understanding.

So yes, it just responds with statistical accuracy but that is intelligent in the technical sense. It’s not understanding. It’s not reasoning. It’s just really good at speaking.

Things were different during the pandemic because there was a real risk of vastly overwhelming the healthcare system. Airborne diseases never went away, but the difference is that if you catch one now, you can get treated - which wasn’t always the case back then. That's why we urged people to wear masks and get vaccinated; that we all wouldn't get sick at the same time.

I think a huge issue online is just how incredibly mean people can be to each other - and the fact that they don’t even see themselves as mean. They’ve built a story around how their behavior is justified, so they keep doing it, completely oblivious to the fact that they’re part of the problem.