Step one: gather your ingredients.

Step two: shove them firmly up your own backside.

Today the high was 67 and it will top out in the low 80s through the next week.

In the winter months it’s humid. In the summer the Willamette Valley isn’t very humid. Currently it’s 46% humidity as I type this.

<Laughs in Willamette Valley.>

He’s correct. The Israelis have worked for decades to ensure that an independent Palestinian state is not a possibility. And they have accomplished that goal.

People outside Israel really need to let go of the fantasy of the two state solution. Trying to make a unified nation out of the handful of ethnic enclaves the Palestinians occupy would be like trying to make one viable independent nation out of all the US’s Indian reservations. That will never be possible, and the reason is that it was deliberately designed to make it impossible.

The two state solution is thoroughly dead and buried. There are only three futures for Palestinians at this point:

1. Slavery (Apartheid.)

2. Ethnic cleansing/genocide.

3. South Africa-style national reconciliation.

The rest of the world needs to move on from the two state solution. We should be demanding complete and equal Israeli citizenship for every Palestinian.

100 years from now, there will only be one nation in Palestine. Maybe that will be called “Israel.” Maybe it will be renamed something else as a reunified state. But there will not be a Palestinian-only state. It’s time to let go of that dream. At this point, seriously discussing the two-state solution just enables Zionism.

There are only three potential futures for Israel/Palestine:

1. Apartheid (the status quo.)
2. Genocide/ethnic cleansing
3. A unified secular state representing all ethnic and religious groups (the post-Apartheid South Africa model.)

I would prefer option 3. I know some campist clowns will say things like, “Israel should be destroyed!” But that’s fantasy. Israel has a population of 10 million people. 80% of them were born there. You’re talking millions of people with nowhere to go. Oh, and no one can force the Israelis out, as they have hydrogen bombs.

I hope for a better future, and that’s the only one that isn’t a nightmare. There is a national identity waiting to be forged there, if things could go that way. The Israelis are very much the spiritual descendants of ancient Israel, while the Palestinians are the genetic descendants of ancient Israel. There’s a path there to a shared national identity.

The rest of the world should not be demanding a two state solution. The Israelis themselves have made that approach impossible. Instead, we should be demanding full freedom and equality for Israel’s slave population (which is what the Palestinians functionally are at this point.) Palestinians are used by Israelis for their labor, but they have no control over the laws that govern them. They’re born into this status and have no way to escape it. They have severely restricted freedom of movement and are carefully controlled and surveilled. What are they at this point other than a slave caste of the Israelis?

We should not allow a nation to keep millions of innocent people in bondage. That needs to be the central moral call. Independence for the Palestinians isn’t possible (unless they want to try and carve a homeland out of Antarctica.) The Israelis themselves aren’t going anywhere. So there are your choices. Slavery. Genocide. Equality. I choose equality. We should be demanding that every resident of the West Bank and Gaza be granted full and equal Israeli citizenship. Israel deliberately made it so these people couldn’t form their own state, so they can just be Israelis. Countries should demand this and start cutting trade and diplomatic ties until ends this nightmare.

Really, at this point, the only positive outcome for the Palestinians is full and equal Israeli citizenship.

I’m talking about actual poll results:

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

It’s Reform as the clear favorite, with Labor and the Conservatives dueling for the third spot, and the Conservatives have been ahead most frequently in recent polls.

So, lesser of two evils is the game? If that’s the game we’re playing, than will you be voting for Reform or Conservative? Because we can’t vote for third parties like Labour. That would be throwing your vote away. The two top parties in the UK right now are Reform and Conservative. If you believe that red lines don’t matter, and that all that matters is choosing between one of the two parties that will win, then that means your choice currently is between Reform or Conservative. Labour is a third party. Labour is not a valid choice for anyone trying to be strategic and choose the lesser of two evils.

So, will you be voting Reform or Conservative next election? Or suddenly will the lesser evil no longer apply?

The only way anyone can support Labour right now is if they reject the lesser evil approach. Of course, if you do that, then you have no place whining about the red lines other voters have.

Anyone still advocating for a two-state solution is a Zionist enabler. People only bring that up out of ignorance or as a shiny thing to point at to prevent real progress.

Sorry, but the “two state solution” has been dead and rotted in the ground for over a decade at this point. No serious person could look at a map of what used to be the West Bank and conclude that a two-state solution is anything other than a distraction technique in 2026. The West Bank is a Swiss cheese, the Palestinian population crammed into small ghettos isolated from each other. Trying to make a unified sovereign nation out of the West Bank would be like trying to make one out of the US’s Indian reservations.

https://www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/12_bia_regions.pdf

A separate Palestinian state in 2026 is as delusional and enabling to fascists as a hypothetical liberal in the 1970s arguing for that South African Apartheid should be solved by giving the Bantustans independence.

South African Bantustans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan#%2Fmedia%2FFile%3ASouth_Africa_=&_South_West_Africa_Bantustans_Map.svg=

Current state of the former West Bank:
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/west-bank-access-restrictions-map-december-2025

Feckless liberals love the two state solution. They love it because it requires them to advocate for nothing of substance. You don’t have to actually do anything to “work towards” a two state solution. You can advocate for it without angering many people. But in practice it just enables Zionism. The two state solution made sense decades ago, while there was still a unified geographic area called the West Bank that could serve as a seat for a Palestinian state. Now “The West Bank” is a series of tiny ghettos landlocked within the Israeli regions of Judea and Sumeria. This is the reality the Zionists created on the ground while everyone else was fellating themselves about the two state solution.

Maybe you can get your straw man to vote for labour!

Well that’s literally what these laws are requiring. You can speculate on future laws, but you can imagine innumerable horrible futures. It’s important to stay grounded and not get lost in the dooming. And I see nothing wrong with an optional feature that lets you set an age on a child’s account. As long as it’s something I control, then that’s actually giving me more control over my hardware, not less.

Yes, there will be people pushing for more invasive methods. But those are the laws you should oppose. Not these. People tend to think in binaries. And they tend to lump everything called “digital id” into one bucket devoid of nuance or discernment.

If anything, lumping all digital id into one bucket without any nuance only helps the opponents of privacy. Simply giving the parents the option to enter an age is a perfectly reasonable policy. If you oppose that because you cannot recognize nuance and consider all id laws equivalent, then you’re hurting your side. People see you appealing to privacy when opposing something that reasonable people will not see as a violation of privacy. Again, we’re taking OS-level controls that actually give you more control over the machine.

You risk a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. You turn everyone against you fighting something that really isn’t an invasion of privacy. Then when someone does actually try to pass a law mandating facial recognition be built into apps, people will ignore you as they already consider you an irrational radical.

But that’s literally what these systems are. There is more than one form of age verification. The type we’re discussing here literally is just “enter your name in a box.” It’s important not to muddy the waters. If you don’t know what you’re opposing and choosing your battles carefully, you can’t effectively fight infringement on privacy. And I really don’t see anything wrong with a law that just says, “every OS needs to have a feature that lets parents self-report age on a child’s account.”

Yes, there are other forms of digital id laws. But we’re talking specifically about OS-level ones. This literally just be a more effective parental control, giving people more control over their own PCs, not less.

Again, try to focus on what specifically we are talking about, not similar-sounding but unrelated technologies.

I don’t really get this. Why is it such a big deal if your OS has setting where you enter your age, and the OS then sends that to websites? Face scanning or demanding uploads of photo IDs is an immense privacy violation. But simply having your OS have a setting you can use where you provide a number, a number that you’re completely free to alter or report whatever value you want? I really don’t see the issue with this.

This seems like a pretty easy way to give parents some control over their kid’s online activities while also not infringing on privacy. The parents can set up the OS and give an account to their kids that lists their ages as under 18. If they want their kids to access the web without restrictions, they simply don’t have to create an under 18 account on the computer. And even if your OS has to report an age to access a website, if it’s all based on self-reporting, you can just self-report a false age.

We tend to think in binaries, as this is convenient. We tend to view all digital age verification as horrible and equally horrible. But this? Just giving parents a way to give their kids a minors-only account, and have websites respect that OS-level flag? This is nothing like bills that require uploading face scans or photo IDs.

Sure you can speculate a slippery slope. But that is a fallacy for a reason. It tends to wash out all nuance and make you conclude everything is absolute evil forever.

That’s just a consequence of shitty bathroom design. In civilized places, bathroom stalls have actual walls and doors that go to the floor and ceiling.

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you’re a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

The only thing that worries me is that we don’t actually know how the human brain works. There’s an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov’s dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.

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

The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?

IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it’s “just” circuits, but your brain is “just” cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It’s deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can’t be reproduced in a machine.

Eh. It’s par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren’t going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn’t going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.

So? They need to be oppressed. I think we should start talking a hell of a lot more about overtly stripping the rights from religious freaks and TERFs. Oppression is a tool of politics, and we’ve been unilaterally disarming ourselves for far too long.

We’re currently in a one-sided war. The bigots can tirelessly work to strip the rights of everyone else, and they can sit comfortably knowing that no one will ever come after their rights and their liberties. After all, good liberals like yourself don’t want to get their hands dirty, and they hem and haw and, cluck and peck at the ground, saying “wait, wait, we can’t stoop to their level. They go low, we go high!” Then they maintain the moral high ground while the lives of vulnerable minorities are destroyed one piece at a time.

Fuck that. Here’s an idea. Let’s declare conservative churches as inappropriate for children. Kids shouldn’t be exposed to the filth that’s in the Bible after all. There’s murder, bestiality, genocide, incest, and any number of disgusting things in that book. Maybe by law you should have to be 18 to read it. No more baptism for anyone under the age of 18. Hell, let’s not even allow kids in churches until age 16.

Or here’s an idea. Let’s declare denying your kid gender-affirming care to be legally child abuse. Frankly, this isn’t even a stretch. I want to see liberals pushing to take queer children out of the homes of religious bigots. There should be a form where kids can go online, out themselves as a queer kid living in a bigoted home, and have child protective services immediately come and find them a supportive place to live. Bigots don’t deserve to be parents.

Or how about we pass a law that says trans people can sue cis people who make them uncomfortable in bathrooms. Do you harass a trans person or confront them about being in the “right” bathroom? That trans person should be able to sue you for an absurd some plus attorneys fees for a violation of their rights.

We need to start stripping absolutely every right we can from these animals. This is the only way we will ever see the right stop trying to take away everyone else’s rights. Rights are meant to be a peace treaty - you let me live my life and I’ll let you live yours. The problem is right now, conservatives are fucking over everyone else’s lives, but no one is fucking with conservatives. I want them to feel the fear of their victims. Only then is there any hope of actually declaring a cease fire and ending this game of attacking rights of all sorts.

Is dehumanization a tool of oppression? You’re fucking right it is. And we have some people that are in dire need of oppression. Conservative Christians love to masturbate about being “oppressed.” It’s about damn time they learned what real oppression felt like.