I think it's not so difficult to understand the appeal, of course for those deeply religious who long back to Zion, but also to those who just long for a home country. I know old secular Jews who, before all this bullshit, was considering moving to Tel Aviv for their retirement because it felt more like home to them then the US, despite being American all their lives and despite being politically progressive and very much not on the Bibi side of things.
It's a complicated situation now - on one hand I think it's crucial that Jews should not feel the need to be apologetic or to constantly have to emphasize that they don't represent a government they have nothing to do with. If that becomes the standard we're already lost. On the other hand, people might need to hear it in order to understand Netanyahu is not some supreme leader of the unified Jews of the world, as too many people seem eager to believe.
I have to admit I've had this approach taking to Israelites for a while - I never felt comfortable in a conversation before having some sort of an indication of their political leaning. Israelites seem to often have a way of talking about things without talking about things, which usually makes it clear pretty quickly where they stand. I guess they also often feel a need to place themselves.
As for Jewish people living outside of Israel, I think the fact that they've all had a standing invitation to move to Israel and opted not to make use of it speaks for itself. Sure there are Bibi supporters, but that goes for Christians as well.
Still I see where you're coming from of course. And I find it freaking terrifying to be honest.
This is what I don't get here. Why the hell do people interpret this as if it's spreading Israeli propaganda?
We know Hamas killed substantial number of innocent people and are keeping hostages.
We know these hostages are kept somewhere in Gaza.
We know Israel is bombing the shit out of Gaza, actively destroying civilian infrastructure.
What we learn from this is that Israel has indeed killed hostages in their indiscriminate bombing, that Hamas seem to be keeping hostages alive when they are not killed by Israeli bombs, and that being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza is still an awful situation to be in.
If this makes Hamas look bad it's because they are bad.
If you think it makes Israel look good you're sick in the head - this is triggered by them intentionally bombing Gaza until there's nothing left.
If you're upset that it makes a Jewish person look human then fuck right off you worthless piece of shit.
It's not exactly a deserted wasteland - it's not that easy to find somewhere to dump 170m tons of mining waste without affecting some ecosystem or another.
The fjords are pretty and symbolically nice, but the fact is that as long as there's a demand for minerals, they have to be dug from somewhere, and ecosystems are going to be affected by it. Moving the problem somewhere else doesn't solve anything.
It reminds me of that time we needed rocks for road construction in Norway, and we had decided all the mountains in the region were too precious to be destroyed for that kind of purpose. So we ended up buying vast quantities stones from China rather than using locally sourced products. Which is great - that way they can fuck up their nature instead.
If we don't want mining we just have to stop consuming. Moving problems out of sight doesn't solve anything.
Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.
Unfortunately I don't know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I'm liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.
Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!
Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It's also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it's a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It's also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it's only Spanish though, and as I'm not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven't gotten any real use out of it.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don't always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don't want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I'm using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it's very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don't like the direction the company has taken and I don't want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
Nah, as a paying customer of Kagi and someone who cares about how I find information online, this is not about drama, it's about making informed decisions. In my case, the informed decision to cancel my subscription.
Anti-Semitism is used for people who dislike Jews, anti-Zionism is opposition to a political ideology. One of these is deplorable, the other is vital to any non-totalitarian society, whether you agree with it or not.
By blurring the line between the two you are at best either legitimizing anti-Semitism or pushing towards a totalitarian mindset where political ideologies cannot be challenged. In reality you're doing both. And even worse, I think you know what you're doing.
Anti-fascism and anti-semitims are also not mutually exclusive. Anti-communism and anti-consumerism are not mutually exclusive. Anti-war and anti-liberalism are not mutually exclusive. Anti-abortion and anti-gay rights are not mutually exclusive.
Hell, few things are mutually exclusive. You had a handful of god-damn Jewish Nazis and one fucking honorary aryan during the war. So not even Semitism and anti-Semitism are mutually fucking exclusive.
Things not being mutually exclusive is a pretty fucking moot argument.
Don't forget the dragon!