Oh there’s even worse. Post-9/11 media has only a small selection of villains, so the most iconic ones for me are like this:
“SPEAKS ARABIC” when they’re not speaking Arabic
"يتكلموا بالعربية” when they’re not speaking Arabic and the subtitles are in Arabic. Could you guess what that translates to?
The fact that they pass a referral link by default even to Lemmy is really funny.
Hey, the drones were circling over my fucking Christmas lunch this week. We were cranking up the Bublé to cover the constant buzzing, and the bad/worst part is that the kids seemed used to the sound. The only reason those things were in the air over an area with no militia activity is psychological warfare basically. This was a good 80+ km from the border. People in Santa hats were sticking their heads out of the window and looking up. I struggle to get across how normal we are while discussing what we’re dealing with, and I figure mentioning how it’s affected me filling myself with wine and carving a comically sized bird could help get that across to people who also do this every year, or to who the idea is less foreign than the idea of being constantly surveilled by a hostile expansionist entity. I’m not trying to use my sect to say I’m special and don’t deserve this, I’m just trying to see if it can help bridge a gap to discuss something difficult, to be clear.
That said, my opinion might still come off as a bit too lenient to some of you and I think I should write it out. But I am from and live in Lebanon, and I am directly affected by these crimes.
I’ve got a lot of users (I think literally every single one on German instances lmfao) tagged in my client as “Zionist”. I think most of them just pop into a few threads naturally and make a few reality-denying comments from force of habit. I see them in other places and they fit the typical description of internet dude with opinions on Rust and Linux making interesting comments about random stuff. They’re mostly well-behaved outside of beliefs that are upstream of me being chucked into a concentration camp so the US military’s contractors can make my home a parking lot at an exorbitant cost. When I catch them in a thread about solar panels or something, I’ll even find them making comments that I want to read. Normal people with good insight.
The average person in the West has been fed such a blatantly false narrative that I find myself not blaming a few of the milder opinions. It’s on par for me with progressives talking up and down the potential greatness of the American experiment. I think Zionism is one thing that people can learn about and understand and clearly see that the status quo is not normal or natural or inevitable or even self-sustaining.
This might all be downstream of me moderating the way I have tended to handle this stuff on Reddit, my old online home which I’ve spent well over a decade.
Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.
My opinion is a two sided thing because I don’t know if this means blocking users from other instances from federating, blocking them from posting or voting on our instance’s posts and comments, or blocking them from signing up.
I think blocking them from signup is very reasonable. Probably morally necessary.
I think blocking them as external users, regardless of the extent of it, might be heavy handed if it’s a one-off comment by a normal human being, often German, who has been propagandized since birth that Jews will all immediately die if Arabs aren’t treated like cattle. I think these people can learn. OTOH there are what seems like dedicated Hasbara accounts that have an RSS feed of every post with “Israel” or Palestine and have to respond to every single one with a comment that would immediately get you banned from literally any webpage with a text box if you swapped the words Jewish and Muslim. If we can block those outright nothing will be lost.
What I propose is a three/five strikes system for external users with a relatively gentle warning message with some good links like someone already proposed here. Probably a little thing in German to get the attention of those with Nazi baggage who are completely delusional and intentionally ignoring reality.
Personally if I was the one writing it I’d also include that, as a Westerner, believing that Jewish people may inherently leave the West for a colonial frontier far away from you is literally anti-Semitism if you think about it for 20 seconds. Nothing says ancestral homeland like having to rename towns and treat the local population like inconveniently located bags of blood.
I’m also in favor of extending the window since a lot of people are not going to be online much this time of year. I hope, at least. For their own sake.
Happy New Year everyone; I hope Natenyahu lets me and all of us see the untold horrors that await us in 2026.
I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.
إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)
خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét
The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!
My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.
Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.
Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.
We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.
My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?
Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.
To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.
These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.
Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.
Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.
I mean technically you can hear the difference if it’s a mobile setup that has been plugged and unplugged 9000 times. The gold contacts will fare better because of the lack of oxidation. So for analog signals, I guess you technically could hear a difference.
Thing is, at that point the wear and tear could also be hard on the cable core itself and not the connectors, so you will have functional connectors on a cable with a literal break in the signal wires. But I’ll always feel like a cable is ever so slightly less shit if they’ve decided not to spare the great expense that is 0.00004$ of gold plating.
OP is hilarious though. Gold plate my wifi next please.
I don’t think most people here realize how hard it is to enter that country pre-2020, and especially in the 80s.
Might just be that things always hit a bit different when they are close to home but for me this is much more interesting than a lot of the other info that’s being shared around.
Thank you! Today in Lebanon they were flying MKs low and we could hear one through the whole day. I’m not sure if it’s good or horrible that the kids seemed to be used to the sound. Not the Christmas lunch I grew up with.
I don’t even think they have any useful information to gain from this, just a constant drain on our nerves. It’s only a fraction of your experience, and even that is not acceptable.
انشالله ينعاد عليكم بظروف افضل
Permanently Deleted
That all looks good, but I wanted to specifically mention the most simple barebones and decent option that’s already included in software more of us use. I’d think if we’re installing more things we would be looking at something more powerful.
Permanently Deleted
For simple things, the local translation in Firefox has been more than enough. Go to about:translations. It’s pretty limited compared to Google’s frankly impressive language list but I’ve used it almost exclusively since it’s added the languages I need to translate most frequently.
The Arabic is pretty broken and was clearly pasted into a left-to-right text field.
I think you’ve hit the cultural irrelevance relatively well. I wouldn’t worry too much about it
Errands, dishes, cleaning the house, illegally unpaid overtime, Sisyphean traffic, overeating, illegally unpaid overtime, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, researching projects I don’t start, near-catatonic day sleeping, opening and closing my kitchen cabinets to look inside, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, staring at the ceiling listening to weird internet music, programming 0.04% of a new personal project, Sisyphean traffic, errands, staring at the ceiling listening to podcasts about the terrible football team I follow, researching projects I don’t start, overeating, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, cleaning the house, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, near-catatonic day sleeping, researching projects I don’t start, staring at the ceiling listening to nothing, illegally unpaid overtime, dishes, traffic, ceiling, dishes, unpaid overtime, podcasts, sleep,
The game I’m currently playing is great! I haven’t been able to play this last weekend though. Please ignore that Steam says I haven’t launched it since November 4.
I’ve hit procrastinating games that I want to play. Do you understand where that leaves other things that could be more important?
I did this on an iPhone 4 over a decade ago. I don’t think I’ve actually had an audible ringtone since.
Sorry, this was clearly edited using standard hue saturation and luminosity modifications. This kind of irresponsible laziness is exactly why we’re behind our innovation KPIs for this quarter. Please ram this through an image generator to make sure we’re aligned with our ambitions and keeping our utilization numbers up unless you want to be written up by the Innovation Department again.
I’m going to retch out every organ in my body one after the other after writing this.