Zompist Bboard Again

I won't comment on the protests specifically; I don't know how it is on American campus so can't possibly comment. I have views on what's going on on French campus, but they're so tied to arcane parts of French politics they'll be insanely boring. That being said, a few general comments... Antisemit...

All there really is is an obligation to pay that's funded out of current revenues. The thing with the proposed alternatives is that they mainly just go to greater lengths to hide the same kind of thing. In the US or more generally? Here pensions and our equivalent of Social Security have dedicated ...

The points made in the back-and-forth between bradrn and Linguoboy illustrate fairly well why, while I absolutely don't support Israel, I'm not really interested in supporting the pro-Palestinian movement, either. No, I don't care if people think that that's the worst kind of bothsidism. When one s...

One can insist but its better to have reasons for it. can't fathom how its not colonialism for an ethnic group to take over some land and make the natives second class citizens, but yeah, that's my intuition. I have my reasons, which I already explained -- many of the Jews were persecuted and/or re...

I think causality is still a show-stopper... it means either no time travel or somehow the past can never be changed. Leaving that aside and assuming it's handwaved away or something... Maybe time travel is worked out several millenia in the future, at a time when the Nazis have lost all relevance. ...

IIRC the idea is to have people invest money before they retire, and then live of those investments once they're retired. One of the many problems with that proposal - and that is what many people who are your or my age or younger seem to have trouble understanding - is that the new system would ha...

Thirded!

Social security takes from the young, who mostly don't believe it'll be solvent when they're old, to give to the old, many of whom are members of the AARP, which is a lobbying organization that is good at its job. We hear that a lot from young or young-ish conservatives here over pensions. The beli...

One this that has to be considered is that while israel *worked* (took off, as it were: it could have perfectly been a failure), it probably only worked because it was in the holy land, a bit of land of immense value in terms religious, cultural, touristic, positioning vis a vis trade routes, natur...

I as member of LFI went to a Glucksmann meeting and prefer his position on Ukraine, more coherently in favour of human rights and not blaming NATO for Putin. Same here -- though I'm not a LFI member, even though I often agree with them. I prefer Glucksmann's position on international issues; import...

Both the US two-party system and the presidential system have their issues. I think parliamentary systems are the way to go, especially with some kind of proportional representation worked in. I still think my earlier point stands though -- no matter what system you use, if voters aren't interested ...

mmmm... no, see, not all states are ethnostates, thank god. I'm not so up to date in comparative laws, tbh, but I know about some states: chile, the US and spain (and the EU by extension): does any of those states afford special legal privileges to people according to their race? or their "eth...

I get the impression that people implicitly seem to expect (due to the frankly rather racist view, to be honest) that as a Western (with a big W) country Israel ought to be better than, say, any random less-developed African or Asian country, so when it is not they are apt to criticize it ─ or care...

It's not just the US. It's about the same here, Israel receives disproportionate attention as well. Is France really better at keeping track of the rest of the world though? I'm not sure. I think there are two sides to this. The first is antisemitism, which is real, a lot more prevalent than we thin...

Yeah, but how do all those other groups facing persecution fit into that? There are, for instance, a lot of explicitly homophobic governments around the world. Do we create an "LGBTQ+ Homeland" somewhere because of that? Would LGBTQ+ people even want that? Do we have to come up with a uni...

Yes, I’m aware that the point was a burqa ban. (In Australia we argued about the idea a while back, but it never went through.) And apparently it bans huge crosses too. But I’d say that Jews are the most affected, because there’s not really any alternative to a kippah, whereas Muslims can at least ...

Less dramatically, France declares it illegal to wear a yarmulke and generally makes it illegal to be any kind of observant Jew (even more likely). What happens then? Hasn’t it already banned yarmulkes in some contexts? Yes, at school, and if you're a civil servant. I honestly don't know how mandat...

I'd like to play tabletop role-playing games with some friends, and went to a RPG convention last weekend to meet some, but my experience there just confirmed what I have been feeling for long: most people who claim to play role-playing games really just play skirmish wargames, either abusing role-...

I have written a guide to zeptoscript over the last few days or so and also implemented classes for non-"object" types to enable the implementation of words such as show ( value -- string ), for converting any value into a human-readable string; hash ( value -- hash ), for turning any val...

C'mon, we'r all linguists here, we all know it's never this simple. This is like saying "'capitalism is an economic system based on capital, nothing more, nothing less". Zionism is as Zionism does. You can say that support for settlements in the occupied territories isn't definitionally p...