I didn’t say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.

I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.

Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.

The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.

I’m used to that having full articles

Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:

Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.

Helluva headline given the story is about tied labour.

You think there’s going to be civil war and also, you want to maximise the numbers fighting for the fascists. Cool, cool.

Because handing election victories to fascists is a really, really bad idea.

Because there is no mirror image.

@[email protected] has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.

Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.

You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.

You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.

You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).

Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.

So the fuck what?

What did you think this bit meant?

(He’s likely on the spectrum.)

The event is called the Madrid Open.

It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).

Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.

I think you overestimate the amount of ‘thought’ going on here. (ref}

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

What high profile court case?

Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.