It’s kinda hard to call that a threat. It’s more accurate to say it’s an accusation that the guy is a terrorist.

I think arguments about who has a claim aren’t the real question here. Recency vs historic rights to a region aren’t enough and really never have been. The whole argument comes down to who has the power to hold the region and any arguments to the contrary are naive. Israel has the power, Palestinian’s didn’t want to play ball, so Israel took the ball home. A large part of Israel being able to hold the region has come down to geopolitics and capitalism. A lot of companies have headquarters and branches in Israel which makes a lot of money. Hamas, like the Taliban, are not expected to be good for big business. On top of that, Israel is friendly and cooperative with western allies and is one of the few such in the region. The west is not going to trade a friendly but harshly conservative Israel for an unfriendly and even more conservative Hamas.

You can talk all day about who deserves what, who has rights to what, and what the moral thing to do is. At the end of the day the world is going to follow the Golden Rule, “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

It’s kinda hard to call that a threat. It’s more accurate to say it’s an accusation that the guy is a terrorist.

I once went to a public swimming pool in Austria, half the pool was for nudists and the other half was for clothed persons. The restroom for clothed people was very long, but the restroom for nudists was busy but short. I ended up going to the nudist restroom and a 50+ year old naked guy walked up and started talking to me while using a pissoir. Basically he was asking why I was dressed at the nudist portion of the pool, I told him the line was shorter, he laughed, and went about his pissing.

I don’t know about encouraged, but it’s definitely not uncommon in some places. Small talk doesn’t have to be a lot of communication either, it can be as little as basic platitudes. It’s things like sitting at the bar in a pub and the guy beside you points out an amazing play on the television or it could be the person on the bus pointing out something crazy they see out the window.

Personally I think that small talk is also regional. Some places small talk might be discouraged at a store while other places it might be encouraged. The same might be for the subway, a restaurant, the bathroom, etc, depending on the country or culture it may be totally ok or exceptionally discouraged.

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Hey but both sides suck and it’s not worth voting this year.

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Sounds like you had a new guy checking you out who didn’t know about the discounts or didn’t care. The experienced pharmacist stepped in and applied the correct discount codes.

It’s just like with your taxes, you’re more than welcome to overpay on your taxes if you don’t know the discounts available to you.

In a just world the system would just apply all the applicable discounts without your input, but I guess that’s the free market in action. One pharmacy will lose your business for not applying the available discounts while another will gain your business for doing so. It’s truly fucked up.

Hey, I appreciate your response! I totally understand that people want to have their feelings confirmed in such a space, but that’s also why I am critical in it. In this sort of environment the discussion is almost as much emotion and feeling as it is the words actually used. A sort of slang can develop where we can understand what each other means without the words we use being truly accurate. The problem with that is that this environment is also an echo chamber, we put meaning onto things that we want it to mean because it also confirms our beliefs.

This leads to situations where it’s impossible to differentiate between radical statements and reasonable statements. A good example is the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When both extremists and normies use the saying it becomes hard to differentiate them. Another example is the Gadsden flag, on it’s own there is nothing wrong with the flag with a deep historical heritage, but when the far right started using it as a symbol any rational centrist or leftist immediately stopped using it for fear of association. Back in school I had a friend who had the flag hanging on their wall, but around 2012 they specifically stated that they had taken it down because it had been co-opted by the far right.

I don’t really like the use of the word colonizer in this context, it just doesn’t fit right with me. The definition technically fits, but colonization to me is more like an invasive species moving in and slowly overwhelming the native population. This is more akin to what we were seeing with settlers moving into the West Bank.

What’s going on in Gaza is more akin to straight up scorched earth takeover and land theft. Hell, calling it an invasion and genocide feels more accurate.

I never said I was ok with what Israel is doing, my argument was on the meaning of words. Leftists in general are really terrible about saying what they mean, because they don’t seem to know the meaning of the words they use.

The cycle seems to go like this:

• make a statement
• realize the statement doesn’t mean what they wanted to say
• double down and try to change the meaning of the words they used

I know I said we need to be clear in our language, but since we were talking about a “regime” from the beginning I didn’t think I had to continuously spell it out throughout the discussion. Yes, we’re talking about whatever regime is being referenced, but again the last guy said it wasn’t Israel.

Regime Noun

a particular government or a system or method of government:

Your comparison between China and Israel is really terrible. If we’re being super duper clear on what a regime is, it’s the system of government. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, all citizens over the age of 18 can vote. Since the regime is democratically elected it’s kinda hard to differentiate the Israeli people from their Regime. China on the other hand is a unitary one-party state, if you’re not in the party and at the right level of the party then you don’t have any voice. It’s a lot easier to separate the people of China from their government.

Well that can’t be what he thinks, I listed that as an option in my original response

Except this guy specifically said he hopes the current Israel is dismantled. At best they could be hoping that Israel changes into a better government, but I don’t think that’s their meaning.

But he clearly said

No where does that say dismantling Israel.

So what entity which has colonized Palestine for 76 years, but isn’t the current Israel does he mean?

EDIT: Words have meaning, if the words you use don’t mean what you mean, then admit that you used the wrong words and be more clear or else people must assume you mean what you say. Coming in after the OP and attributing meaning that they didn’t give doesn’t suddenly change what they said. A reminder, the original post was;

Hopefully this is a step toward dismantling the brutal apartheid regime that has colonised Palestine for 76 years."

that has colonised Palestine for 76 years.

So who are they talking about then?

No one said that, dipshit.

Dismantle verb

To get rid of a system or organization, usually over a period of time:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/dismantle

Basically everyone wants either two-states based on 1967 borders or Israel to give Palestinians equal rights and create a single, secular democracy

Except this guy specifically said he hopes the current Israel is dismantled. At best they could be hoping that Israel changes into a better government, but I don’t think that’s their meaning.

I think that makes a weird sort of sense. I mean, if you’re gonna pay 1 person 3x what you pay the others you kinda expect them to shoulder more of the burden. Same goes for Doctors in general and Air Traffic Controllers, the barrier to entry is exceptionally high, the pay is high to match, but the expectations are even higher

I can’t speak to the union bit, but I would say most aren’t in a Union in the US since most of the US doesn’t have Unions. If you’re in an area that has them then maybe they get a better deal.

I can’t speak to your numbers, but using the same salary comparison searches I used for the Pharmacy Tech position it looks like 3D Animator pay is somewhere between $50-105k national average with LA being $98-150k and NYC being $45-110k. Maybe game industry specific is the cause for your lower numbers?

I think that’s the thing, it’s not that amazingly well paid. Considering it only requires a high school diploma and a certificate it pays well, but overall you’re probably only making around $38-55k per year. I did find some exceptions such as the upper end of NYC techs making $65k, but even LA had a high end of $55k. Maybe the salary data I saw was wrong, but that’s not particularly well paying.

The high paying job is the Pharmacist who is probably pulling in $120-160k, but the tech is doing all the real work.

This guy probably looks at it like they aren’t conventionally attractive (which isn’t true) and they aren’t making stupid high salaries.

It’s certainly a respectable job, but it’s not an overly well paid job which is probably that guys quibble. As with many jobs it depends on the specifics, but it seems like the job pays around $38-55k depending on where you live. It looks like some areas can get a bit higher (NYC had some data indicating $65k/year).

For a job that only requires a high school diploma and a certification that’s not bad, it’s just not particularly good either. If you have two people making roughly that amount it’s probably good enough to live comfortably, but not live very well.

It’s the Andrew Tate mentality where the only acceptable partner is either an “Alpha” making $10 million a year and is conventionally attractive or doesn’t work at all and is even more conventionally attractive.

Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.