Vashti

So your position (besides implying that I’m a cheerleader for Netanyahu) is that a good working definition of antisemitism is bad because people misuse it? What’s your take on how to counter the very real antisemitism that exists in parts of the anti-Israel movement? Also, I’m sorry, but your quotation is obviously bullshit:

applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation

China is a democratic nation now? Saudi Arabia is a democratic nation? Come on. It’s obvious what that means, and it should be obvious why holding Israel to a uniquely high standard among democratic nations, as the definition says, is antisemitic.

Yeah, I thought that was it. The definition is clear that criticism of the Israeli government that’s comparable to criticisms aimed at other governments isn’t antisemitism. You should be able to criticise Israel in the same terms you criticise (e.g.) Russia and China, or for that matter America and the UK. But if you exclusively criticise Israel in virulent terms, or say that Israel is some sort of uniquely evil entity comparable to the Nazis, or imply that all Jews worldwide are agents of the Israeli state, or say Israel as a nation state should be wiped off the map—that’s antisemitic.

This should all be pretty uncontroversial.

Zionists

It’s okay, we know you mean Jews.

Is there a reason this article bashes (adjusts glasses, checks) the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in its opening para?

Always amuses me a bit when people say Kindles don’t support EPUB, since I’ve been stripping DRM from my books and storing them in Calibre (enabling transparent conversion between EPUB and Amazon’s formats) for thirteen years without a hitch. You should be doing this on any platform if you want to keep your books.

It’s beyond me why anyone who so much as knows what FOSS stands for wouldn’t do the same.

She has accused him both of rape and of grooming her. What on earth do you think her punching him in the stomach while he forcibly deep throated her was supposed to be?

This has been highlighted in the news coverage.

Both child grooming and emotional and sexual assault are illegal in the UK, bizarre as this may seem to you.

I mean, I’d never use Notepad. Download Notepad++, it’s better in literally every way.

Doesn’t have formatting, unless Notepad has got really adventurous at some point in the last decade or two.

Slightly annoyed about this, as I do use Wordpad (it’s lightweight and useful for quick notes that I want to mark up with bold and italic). I don’t always want to watch Word or Libreoffice load for twenty to thirty seconds.

Shitty decision, happy to be Wordpad’s one fan.

So are Irish conditions different from conditions over the sea in Wales, or…?

From what I can tell, the secret is rubber boots.

…for entertainment. For fun.

I don’t think many of us would come here if it wasn’t fun.

Linehan being attached to something isn’t a plus these days…

I promise you, we had massive generational debt all the time I was growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and when my mother was growing up in the 50s and 60s. We had way better public services then than we have today. Whether or not the government is making debt repayments has no bearing on public services—that’s all about the attitude of the government, and a government that wants to privatise everything and destroy the public trust will always find some pretext to do so, such as the triple lock being the biggest votewinner in the land.

Seems like only yesterday I was co-admining my first public server in 1996.

Fun times.

It depends on the period of time they’re paid over, doesn’t it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It’s not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren’t the only country involved.

Plus, if that’s what you think, I don’t think you can have seen the state of the UK’s roads, hospitals and railways.

Just cook the chicken and eat it. You won’t notice the feathers.

Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!

This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.

I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.

The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We’ve still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.

So yeah, we owe those people’s descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I’m not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.

It was, but in its sense of flooding with unwelcome online content, it was a Usenet meme first. Goes back to the green card spammers.