[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

I know no one likes maintenance, but it's necessary. We reformed social security in 1981. We can do it again now, and we can do it again before 2054. I'd propose eliminating the taxable income cap and means testing benefits before we think about raising the rates or the retirement age again.

That’s to say nothing about how Social Security is objectively a very poor retirement plan and the average person would do much better by simply putting the money into any random total market fund instead, but that’s another topic.

Social Security keeps over 20 million people out of poverty. Frankly, I don't give a shit about what's better for people who've had the means and the opportunity to save for retirement independently (of which I am one). We're talking about people who don't have enough to begin with. If you eliminated social security, assuming employers didn't just pocket the 6.2% and passed it on to their workers, the working poor would use that money for sustenance, not savings.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Government spending is not the root cause. If that was the case, we would have seen inflation much sooner, since we've been in the era of quantitative easing ever since 2008. The fed was starting to raise interest rates even before covid because the post-2008 recovery was turning into an expansion; we are still in that expansion phase, and covid fucked up our supply chains which kick started the inflation that would have accompanied the expansion regardless, but would have been easier to control in normal times.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Christian Zionism

And where exactly do you think the Christian Zionists got their ideas?

Could it be Maimonides?

The days of the Messiah, however, is the time when rulership will return to Israel and that they will go back to the land of Israel and that this king will be very great, and the seat of his rulership will be in Zion (Jerusalem). His fame will grow and his mention will be among all of the nations, [even] more than King Shlomo. And all of the peoples will make peace with him and all of the lands will serve him, due to his great righteousness and due to the wonders that will come about though him. And anyone that comes against him, God, may He be elevated, will deliver into his hand. And all of the [relevant] verses in Scripture testify to his success and our success with him. And nothing about existence will change from what it is now, except that rulership will return to Israel.

Maimonides advocated that wise men, those who understood the words of the sages, would naturally establish this "rulership" in Israel. Of course he was commenting on the Mishnah which dates back to the second or third century CE. The Christian Zionists' reason for wishing for the Jews to return to Israel is to bring about the end/messianic times. This prophecy first appeared in Judaism.

If you want to get into the specifics of practical & poltical Zionism of the late 19th century, sure it was inspired by European nationalism. But if that's all it takes for something to be white supremacy, then I guess all the various forms of Arab and African nationalism are white supremacy, too. The political, financial, and logistical methods employed by modern Zionists in the establishment of Israel were reflections of the time in which it took place. Had the Holocaust not occurred, the aliyot of the late 19th and early 20th century likely would have fizzled out without significantly effecting the balance of power in the region, like all the aliyot prior.

Are you talking about Palestine? You know… the place that has always had large Jewish communities all throughout the middle-ages right up to 1949?

Yes, lol. Keep up. The Jewish population waxed & waned over the centuries due to waves of expulsion and emigration, and aliyot.

Anyway, modern Zionism doesn't need to be smeared as "white supremacy"; it stands on its own as a terrible idea, that in its full realization requires violence against and the displacement & expulsion of the Palestinian people.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

There’s something I need you to explain for me… have you or have you not noticed that all of Israel’s enablers - all the countries that have proven so fond of the idea of Israel including England, where antisemitic Christians invented Zionism - are literally countries with deep histories of white supremacism, colonialism and… drumroll, please… antisemitism?

Arabs were against Israel and also against having Britain & France controlling colonial assets in their countries. The USSR saw them as valuable allies in dismantling colonial empires to make way for expanding Soviet influence. Western alignment with Israel didn't fully materialize except with the context of the Cold War. It really doesn't have a whole lot to do with ideological concerns beyond the surface level. It's realpolitik. The USSR was even pro-Zionist for a hot minute when they thought the kibbutzim were going to take off.

Also, this...

England, where antisemitic Christians invented Zionism

... is fucking stupid. Jews have been returning to Zion for as long as there has been a diaspora.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Taking an anti-genocide slogan used by Jews across the world and deriding it as hypocritical because one specific country of Jews is full of right wing shit bags... That's uh... that's something, anyway.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Cheers, will have to check this out when I get home.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Bullcrap… I guess you didn’t know that Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism, did you?

It doesn't. The religious-academic roots of Zionism in both religions go way back. Jews were resettling from Europe to Ottoman Palestine in proto-Zionist migration as early as the 1500s.

No - it isn’t. Comparing Israel to Apartheid-South Africa is actually softballing it.

Well, then you should try reading the second part of that sentence before you have a heart attack from being so triggered.

I can literally google Ben-Gurion and produce a laundry list of his quotes that demolishes your argument

Yes, Ben Gurion is one of those hard-liners who is responsible for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations in the 1920s. I wouldn't go so far as to say his views represented the whole of Zionism prior to or during WWI. The situation was salvageable until Britain gave up.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What exactly do you mean by "you and yours" there buddy? Your view is simply ahistorical. Zionism differs from other forms of European nationalism in that it was not primarily motivated by supremacist rationalizations, but by the desire for safety. Intent is important. Today, I agree; Israeli treatment of Palestinians is clearly apartheid, and many Israeli actions are clearly genocidal under the UN definition. The further back into history you go, the less clear the situation gets, though, and is more accurately seen as a conflict between two nationalist movements in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's collapse wherein hard-line elements on both sides stoked conflict. There was a great amount of mutual respect and acceptance of Zionism among Arab leaders prior to the 1920s. I'd suggest you look up the Faisal-Weizmann agreement. The current conflict is a product of British mismanagement of Mandatory Palestine, and the initial failure of diplomacy in the face of racist, nationalist sentiments of BOTH Arabs and Zionist Jews.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Was that in the comment where I said Netanyahu needs to be ventilated?

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers?

Sounds like an open and shut anti-trust case if any governments care to pursue it.

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

The collapse of the Roman Empire led to hundreds of years of conflict and poverty in Europe. We see the same today in the wake of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East & North Africa.

Do you have any reasonable expectation of what happens in the aftermath? Or do you just want to burn it down without thinking about the consequences?

[-] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

If you want to get real nuanced, realize that a lot of people are missing the point. Our aid to Israel has nothing to do with their human rights record. They're a foothold for Western hegemony in a geopolitically significant region. Stop aiding Israel, or Saudi Arabia for that matter, and that is a retreat from the global conflict between West (USA/Europe) and East (China/Russia).

Withdrawing from the Middle East cedes control of the region to the Eastern proxy, Iran. Is a Middle East controlled by Eastern interests preferable to one controlled by Western interests? Does that result in Palestinian liberation? Does it result in peace? Or do we end up with a genocide in the opposite direction?

Of course, there are smaller adjustments that can be made that may pressure one side or the other into pursuing a brokered peace. That's what we've tried and failed at for decades, up until Trump anyway. We were quite close until Netanyahu riled up the crazies and caused the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

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SwampYankee

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