dagav

Israeli company's gun used to target LA based gangsters... nevermind who bought it and who's pulling the trigger though.

Physical money has value because we have an economy. If you have a USD, you can come to the US and spend that dollar. Bitcoin doesn't have an economy, it is literally a meme. The only thing you can do with it is trade it for real money.

The value of USD is based on the US economy. The value of Bitcoin is based on people's perception of the value of Bitcoin.

The odds that this is a coincidence are approaching 0.

I said it was hard to develop a nation in the desert, I didn't say it was impossible. Israel is a world leader in agricultural technology [1] precisely because of this problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Israel

Population centers are only one concern when you are building a nation. For example, where do you grow your food?

It is an objective fact that 55% of the land area of the State of Israel is the Negev desert.

I suppose, I just have a feeling that the most powerful capabilities of cyber super powers are yet to be seen.

Israeli intelligence is working around the clock to disrupt the actions of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. There are countless terror factions who's sole purpose is to destroy Israel and execute a second Holocaust. You don't hear about the terror plans which were foiled. You don't have sympathy for Israel because they are winning.

What if you could shut down their water processing plants? Their electricity grid? Their internet? How long would it take for that state to collapse?

Why invade a country, when you can shut down its infrastructure and force them to surrender? War isn't won by killing, its won by conquering. I also suspect that machines will be so effective at killing, that you won't be able to find soldiers stupid enough to fight them head to head. We have yet to see the full capabilities of a cyber super power.

Literally every intelligence service does this, they're called "assets"[1]. Right and wrong isn't as black and white as you may think.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_(intelligence)

More than half of Israel's land area is desert. It's quite hard to develop a nation in the desert.

Writing code is a great way to make money in the desert. Israel is essentially an island. Also, warfare in the future is likely to be primarily digital, and Israel has many enemies. Israel will lead the cybersecurity and cyberwarfare industries out of sheer necessity.

The Palestinians agreed in the Oslo Accords t govern themselves. They don't vote in Israeli elections, and Israelis don't vote in their elections (if they had any).

Consciousness allows us to make decisions outside of our animal instincts. Why is religious fasting a widespread practice?

I've found that this strategy doesn't work over time. My goal isn't, "make the best meal ever tonight", my goal is, "shop, cook, and clean every week in order to have a good home cooked meal every night". Those are two very different challenges, where the latter requires a more pragmatic approach to time and energy management.

Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.

That's just what people who belong to a team think. It's actually possible to think for yourself

IQ is one of the most statistically reliable psychometrics we have

A lot of assholes have started a lot of things

They don't threaten your freedom, but they threaten the freedom of the people who live in the Middle East

It's possible that they fake enough votes to ensure a victory (like 51%), and then the real votes come in and turn the result into something unrealistic.

I'm not sure your first point matters. There is one canonical Jewish nation today who live and die by the Torah.

The history of Jews isn't them committing violence against others, but of violence being committed onto them. The Jews in the diaspora weren't going around stealing people's land and possessions, they were merely trying to live in peace, integrate into whichever nation they were a part of, and suffered pograms, massacres, and blood libel for trying. The violence in 20th centruy started to defend their nation from a second Holocaust, once the lesson had been learned that integration into another nation was impossible. Your impression of Jews as violent people is horribly misguided.

I'm not spouting whataboutism, I'm giving some much needed context to a conflict that very few truly understand. No one in the West understands the Jewish side of the story, but it's important if we want peace.

It's Jews vs Arabs. And this isn't my opinion, this is precisely how the conflict is perceived by both the Jews and Arabs involved. I'm not really making any statements about the article, but I tend to believe my ancestors over articles I find online, considering the sheer amount of anti-Israel sentiment that exists in the world. And the Arabs raiding their villages weren't Bedouins, they were Palestinian Arabs who weren't happy to have them as their neighbors. This is why the Haganah was created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah

You're right that it was Palestine, they even have Palestinian immigration papers. But that land was always called Israel by the Jews, and on those same papers it says "Eretz Israel" in Hebrew.

The Jews and Palestinians could have lived in peace. The land was settled legally, and the Arabs never controlled it. They chose war instead of peace, when they could have chosen to live together as two nations.

Calling it a "settler colonial ethnostate" is precisely the political lens that I'm criticizing. It does not properly capture the complexity and nuance of the conflict.

For example, what you would call an ethnostate, I would call a reconstitution of the Kingdom of Israel, after the Nation of Israel fell into exile 3000 years ago, and its people scattered into a global diaspora. The Jewish people are already a nation, and this is why the Law of Return exists. Plus, how can a state be an ethnostate if Jews come from Yemen, Iran, Morrocco, Argentina, Spain, Germany, etc?

Picking out a population of thousands to say "some Jews oppose Israel", and then conclude that the state of Israel is extricable from Judaism, is extremely disingenuous. Almost all Jews globally support Israel, half of the world's Jews live in Israel, Israel is built on Jewish laws and values, and you need to contend with that.