I have zero sympathy.

Exactly.

I just read that law and it’s far from clear that it requires any aid to Israel at all.

Section 1 just defines the title.
Section 2 provides a statement of findings.
Section 3 covers US policy towards Israel. This is the closest I could find to something requiring assistance. Policy statements don’t bind the president. At best they serve as guidelines for future legislation.
Section 4 talks about actively defending Israel but brackets the whole thing in “should”. That has a specific legal definition that includes, “but it’s not required.”
Section 5 simply extends some deadlines that were going to expire.
Section 6 mandates some reports.
Section 7 defines terms.

The language in the Leahy Act is considerably stronger and more explicit. “No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter…”

Fun fact, there’s a 2008

What law is that? I keep hearing about it but I can’t find that law.

I did find several that prohibit the US from providing aid to countries that commit human rights violations but nothing that requires the US to give anyone any military hardware.

Floyd baby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox735RShneA

In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

Were you thinking of the “fairness doctrine”?

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine

It happens regularly.

I’d also add that I find everyday stories from real people to be vastly more engaging that the completely unbelievable stories I see on TV.

Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.

I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

I just read that list. As near as I can tell they put a lot of words in that don’t actually promise anything helpful. Maybe I’m wrong.

Let’s make it as easy as possible to show this plan in a good light. Instead of finding one bad bullet point in that list and tearing it up, let’s see if we can find one good one.

Out of that entire list, which bullet point do you think has the best chance to actually “counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate?”

edit: grammar

I’m also offended by Israeli war crimes but I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment.

As far as I can tell, the Israeli military is very good at violence. They’re extremely well equipped, they have superb training, and their military personnel tend to be dedicated to their cause.

The main problem isn’t their ability to kill and destroy, it’s their indiscriminate use of that ability.

It’s a valid question and I’m sure the Harris campaign has spent considerable resources trying to get a good estimate of that number.

It’s pretty insane that the Democratic party officials have to say, “We’d love to stop funding a genocide but our members won’t vote for us if we do that.”

There’s quite a lot of disagreements between historians on why there’s an electoral college https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5hv2m/what_was_the_founders_purpose_in_creating_the/

We have a lot of laws that protect people from government. The complement to such a policy is that we reduce the amount of protection government has from people.

If you assume that your government is bad or that it will inevitably become bad then this is a great policy to reduce bad government. The flip side is that if we expect government to protect us from individual bad citizens who have gained a lot of power it’s harder.

edit: grammar

That seems unlikely, since the constitution doesn’t really include safeguards against someone like Trump.

The founding fathers were afraid of a King (at least some of them were). They put all kinds of limits on the power of the executive but they assumed people would follow those rules. They never really considered the possibility of a private citizens gaining so much power that they can ignore government.

Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I’d really like to know more about this. Google shows that there are a bunch of people selling this, or similar things like a rainbow Gadsden flag but it’s not clear to me who is actually buying them or what their intended message is.

Is it a joke? Maybe they’re just trolling everyone?
Do they not know what one or both symbols mean?
Do they actually support the causes behind both symbols? (I saw one post that suggested it might be a different kind of “Southern Pride”)

That sounds cute until some rich asshole sets up his own anti-matter reactor to run their own holodecks with content and filters removed. I’m thinking he sets it up on a remote asteroid and invites his other rich asshole friends. Except he secretly records them and uses it to set up a blackmail network.

He’d probably have to have some weird alien name like, Kah-Epstein.