You should read what I wrote again, because I clearly did not ignore that.

I'm not necessarily going to defend this protest, but criticism of Israel is hardly some "woke Commie" position (whatever the hell that even means). One can sincerely believe Israel's actions against Palestinians is unjust, without, say, wanting state control of the economy.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It's been protected since 1791.

I expect that general anxiety about anti-Semitism is driving this. Like it or not, condemnation of Israel comes with certain baggage, and as can be seen on campuses throughout the Western world, criticism of Israel can turn into anti-Zionism which then turns into anti-Semitism very quickly. The lines are very thin. The business world is very risk averse, and coming down on the wrong side of this particular debate can have a whole lot of consequences. Beyond that, of course, Alphabet is a business, not a society for activists, and while it may tolerate certain kinds of activism that may not be perceived as threatening the bottom line, right now, criticism of Israel is just a step too far.

If I see you for defamation because you claimed I was a thief, that is indeed retaliation.

Well, I'm uncomfortable killing, period. Even if they are terrorists, we should look for another way before jumping in to killing them. In the case of Hamas there may (or may not) be another way, but war is always and everywhere a sad thing.

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

PR. Hamas deliberately organizes things so that children die when Israel attacks. Since the world learned, from Judaism via Christianity, that children shouldn't be killed, it takes issue with those who're actively killing the children. The aspect of those children being put in place to be killed by Hamas has no bearing in this, because Israel is in the unenviable position of being able to opt not to shoot / explode / starve the children Judaism taught the world it's wrong to shoot / bomb / starve.

Yes, this is a Catch-22. Either Israel fully avoids shooting, bombing, and starving those children, giving Hamas a strong strategic advantage it'd need to overcome in some other way (that doesn't involve shooting, bombing and starving children), or Israel embraces the shooting, bombing and starvation of children to uproot Hamas, thus becoming monsters before the very world their great-great-great-...-great-grand-forefathers taught "do NOT kill children".

There are echoes of that. Until the 1930s Christian antisemites regularly accused Jewish people, falsely, of murdering children, which all by itself had led to several Pogroms. Hamas is obviously taping on that. The problem is, nowadays there are photos of the murdered children, whereas back then there were, quite literally, no murdered children at all.

Hence, while the analogy is there, and parallels can be traced, the core difference is that in the 1930s the accusations were false, while in 2020s they aren't. Yes, again, this is deliberately being engineered by Hamas. But there's no sidestepping the fact the world is intensely horrified by the photos of dead children. And the longer this continues, the worse Israel's international image will become.

So, PR-wise, the best approach would be to, you know, stop killing the children. Not reducing the rate of children killed per month of whatever, that doesn't work in a world where the video of one children who dies will be repeatedly shown all around over and over and over. A total, full stop. That's what it'd take, at the bare minimum.

That's basically it. Not a sudden global pandemic of antisemitism, which isn't really happening, no. Dead children. No more, no less.

Maybe Republicans really like dick picks

Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

Exactly. "fast-moving change"?? How often do licenses change???

It takes 5 years to build trust with customers and 5 seconds to lose it.

Heâ(TM)s arguably not wrong that VMwareâ(TM)s offerings outside of their core product are kind of inchoate(though, in fairness, itâ(TM)s not like the âhyperscale cloudâ(TM) guys donâ(TM)t all have a stable of shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks that surrounds the core of services that people actually care about or trust); but that seems like a pretty shabby excuse in this context; where it would have been trivial to just not fuck with what people were using and liked while making the alleged investments in glorious future VMware; then letting the value proposition of that help sell it.

As it is, itâ(TM)s hard to read this as anything other than an awkward(and almost certainly temporary, nobody ever genuinely stops trying to boil the frog once they start); climbdown after recklessly spooking more customers, harder, than intended.

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

That's a terrible take. The only reason Conservatives in the U.K. and U.S. suck so much is because the two party system allows their shitty platforms to exist. When a problem is systemic, blame the system. There might be shitty people taking advantage of the system, and they may appear to be your adversary, but they're not. Get rid of them and they'll just be replaced by more shitty people. Because that's what the system produces. The system is the true antagonist.

In the U.S., the Democrats know the causes they ostensibly fight for cannot be resolved without reforming the political system first. But they don't want to reform the political system because they're one of two in a duopoly.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.