Zompist Bboard Again

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...

I don't get it... so we should not speak of colonialism in britain because most british people were (say, at the time of queen victoria) colonialists? it doesn't make sense to speak of nazism in 38 germany cause most germans were nazis? the dominant ideology of the dominant actor in a process matte...

Same here.

The trouble is, conlanging and conworlding are last on the list, right after everything else I have to do , and that list is incredibly long these days.

I hope things calm down somehow at some point in the future.

There are plenty of Jews here in the United States, and while of course there is anti-Semitism here as there is everywhere, it is generally on a much smaller scale here than in very many places. And while the US itself is a product of settler colonialism, Jews immigrating to the US in practice woul...

All these things were horrible, but the key thing is that did they justify ethnically cleansing the land that they had just immigrated to so as to turn it into an ethnostate? And yes, one can argue that "they were there first", but that no more justifies that than that Native Americans be...

Also couldn't we be the small percent of difference that was left over from a much larger amount of matter and antimatter? I don't think anyone has ruled that out and if they have it would be interesting to know how so. I think the current understanding is that what you describe is exactly what hap...

Like, the nazis also believed that the german people was oppressed and that in order to liberate it from the oppression of the evil jew it *had* to do the whole lebensraum thing, invade poland, expell the jew blabla.... but no one would -hopefully- take seriously a diplomat for the fourth reich say...

Band practice today went fantastic . My collaborator paid me a huge compliment: One of our WIPs ends with a vamped passage for the outro (for the recording it’s supposed to fade out) and I decided to go a little nuts with the ride cymbal, snare, and toms. When we ended it, he had a grin and told me...

It's now been about ten years since I bought the first handful of DVDs that eventually grew into a fairly large de facto DVD collection. I say "de facto" because I never set out to collect DVDs, the way people set out to collect sports cards or action figures. I just thought it would be n...

Turns out the husband of the couple had a stroke a day or two after his wife did. He's in the hospital, too. When it rains... I'm sorry to hear that. Just yesterday my brother and my other brother's girlfriend got into a pretty serious car crash. My brother sustained a concussion and a minor injury...

That sounds like a false dichotomy, when there are obvious options that are neither a Jewish supremacist ethnostate nor Israeli Jews being driven into the sea, which we have discussed in length on the Zeeb, but which I will reiterate here -- i.e. the one state solution (whether in its binational or...

this feels dishonest to me, tbh. "what terms would satisfy hamas"? as if the state of israel was faced with an impossible-to-satisfy, greedy opponent that insisted on demanding and demanding. but let's look at the reality on the ground: we have like 70 years of apartheid, we have settlers...