BestOfLemmy

Behold the matching forearms of Lemmy:

https://lemmy.world/post/19983744

I visited for the first time around this year. It was incredible. The people were so nice. The Palestinian children I met in Israel were incredibly rude and surprisingly well-dressed considering we were all playing on a playground. My aunt and cousins were translating what they were saying to me and encouraging me to say rude things back that they’d translate. Reflecting on that: weird fucking experience and incredibly sad overall.

The people within Palestine were so polite, accommodating, and eager to share their culture. Many of them appeared to have meager means, but seemed so happy.

I saw an old Jewish man fall from a chair and hit his head on the stone ground near the western wall. Blood sprayed out and began quickly pooling. His family rushed to his side, but most of my fellow Jews ran away. Some to seek aid, most to flee from the inauspicious event at this holy site. But the most people who rushed to directly help this man we’re Arabs, presumably Palestinian, using their nicest holy garments to help a bleeding stranger and offering him water.

Years later, it hit me: the rude rich Palestinians I met at the playground weren’t acting that way due to cultural or religious differences, it’s because they were rich assholes repeating rich asshole shit. And their presence at the playground was only because their family could afford to live in Israel. But my aunt and cousin? They absolutely were making everything about race and religion. It had been trained into them and they were trying to train me. This was all pre-Netanyahu.

When my cousin got older, he started taking classes to learn Aramaic and Arabic so that he “could understand the enemy better” for intelligence purposes and tell them in their own language that he was going to kill them. He became a volunteer police assistant so that he could get gun training. Then he was allowed to police areas with high Palestinian populations.

It was during this that he learned how incredible Palestinians were and that most of their aggression was due to misinformation and fear. He never killed a single Palestinian and eventually became a more vocal advocate for their human rights. He knew that, given the chance, they’d kill him in a heartbeat but he also recognized that the impulse was driven into them by oppressive regimes. He even got the rest of his family to recognize the fraught existence of being treated like an unwelcome guest in your own home. A fugitive for merely existing…

When I visited Israel years later, I was being driven out to the military base to visit another cousin. Israel had expanded its borders; next to the highway where we were traveling, I saw fenced off vacant homes with tanks driving through them. “Oh cool!” I said, “are they doing training over there?” My cousin’s parents sadly explained to me that I was looking into Palestine. The people had been temporarily evacuated from their homes and the Israeli government was ensuring that “they won’t have homes to return to.”

After October 7, the first cousin I talked about hasn’t been the same… His unit was one of the first reactivated and mobilized; he was at the site within half an hour of the attack. What he saw of the dead and mangled still haunts him. The things he’s seen and done that go completely against his moral compass… The guy who used to laugh and tell me stories about getting stabbed by a Palestinian at a checkpoint and only arrested her because he’d do the same in her position; the guy who has caught and thrown grenades avoiding casualties; the guy who was arrested for refusing to needlessly fire into a crowd of protesting Palestinians. His clean conscience appears to be gone and sometimes he just disappears into whatever dark images he can’t seem to shake.

The place you see in that photo probably is gone. The people are gone. They were gradually eroded away. Any hope I had to see them again disappeared after October 7. The Israel I remember is gone, too… It’s been fanned into an inferno of hated that will likely last generations. The spirit of the Palestinians can’t be erased, though. I hope someday to see that spirit reflected in their society. I hope to see the warmth I remember of Israel shared once again by its people.

I hope that the next time I see my cousin that he remembers all the good he’s done and that he’s accepted what he’s done. I imagine he’d sooner go AWOL. I wish Israel and Palestine could forgive and reconcile, but I’ve lost about all hope to see humans treating each other humanely in that region within my lifetime…

(The title you see below mine is the wording chosen by the OP of the full post - I hope I do not cause offense, but I cannot control it showing up here as it is linked.)

This explanation has pictures, and I learned me a thing or two from it!

Here's a (grainy, blurry) screenshot, if you don't feel like clicking away to read the comment in its original glory:

Hilarity Ensues

Edit: Swapped link to a screenshot
Link to post: https://lemmy.world/comment/11837413

Great knowledge by the OP and a commenter!

Thanks!

... I think learning about Nicholas II really contextualized fascism for me. The tsar was a traditionalist authoritarian rather than a fascist, but he really shows, I think, how ordinary people can hold totalitarian beliefs and still be ‘good people’ (note that I would never call the tsar a good person, but bear with me). Oftentimes people say “X is fascism” but quickly backpedal if real-world comparisons are drawn between family or friends. “They’re a good person!” they object, “Just misguided! Not like the other rubes!”

But Nicholas II shows the face of genuinely conservative authoritarianism. The face of the mediocre man, who puts no deeper thought into his beliefs than to parrot what he was raised with and stubbornly resist all challenge to that. He was not exceptionally cruel in terms of personality. I think probably a significant minority of ‘nice’ people, in Nicholas II’s circumstances, would have turned out just as big a piece of shit as he was. ...

see here for the full comment by @PugJesus: https://lemmy.world/comment/11418466

The French may not have the first democracy, may not have the best democracy, but they have had to fight harder than most for their democracy.

• paraphrasing from an audio tour by Rick Steves, I think.

Edit: oops, i flipped words in the title

I believe we can do it https://lemmy.world/post/16111988

A really good explanation that I felt deserved to be highlighted.

Originally a light-hearted post poking fun at and doing a survey to gather input, but it has turned into a thought-provoking deeper dive into what it really means to be someone that people would call a "tankie". Note that to some (die-hard conservatives), we all are "tankies" on the Fediverse, but is there a meaning beyond the pejorative of merely "holding a belief that I do not personally agree with"? Come and join the fun, or read about the community consensus even long into the future?

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

He's doing a great job.

Link to thread

Screenshot says:

Name scratched out

6 upvotes

Posted 1 hour ago

Another take on that is that he wasn't going to war for his school at all. That's ignoring the previous comments about it not being about the school at all (which is partly true), but recognizing the validity of that perspective. My point is that even if the war had been about the school itself, that wasn't what Harry was fighting for. He was fighting for his home.. Books or movies, Hogwarts was the one place that Harry felt was home. Not the Durselys', not even the Weasleys.

Hogwarts was Harry's first real home. So, even if he hadn't been the "chosen one", even if voldemort was attacking the school directly as a goal without any of the rest of the part about him and Harry, I think he still would have fought as hard as he could to defend it. You could make Harry a supporting character with his parents just having died of natural causes, and him being taken in by the Dursleys to eventually go to school at Hogwarts with nothing else involved, and that kid would still have fought for the one place he felt at home.

Hogwarts was like that for other students, but Harry had that abusive household and extremely limited freedom to make other social connections. That's an ideal setup for someone to attach to something as wonderful as Hogwarts was in comparison. I really think that Harry would have fought just as hard or harder for no other reason than that.

Source

Context, a thread on rising fast food costs and comparing local joints in terms of value: https://lemmy.world/comment/10015048