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.

Honestly, the BBC never report on protests, and the people behind the protests always get mad about it. They just aren’t newsworthy unless something happens besides the fact of a protest.

Essentially, this story is free advertising for the protest.

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

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

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.

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.

The thing is you aren’t the audience. Discussion about anti-Asian racism in English tends to be focused on the experiences of e.g. Asian-American people and on the racist abuse they get from white people.

It’s actually that exact kind of self-moderation, surely? “hang on, doesn’t this word suck, let’s not use it”?

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.

Usenet was absolutely swarming with memes. They were text-based rather than image-based but they were definitely memes.

As a counterpoint, I’d like to mention that people often scream “reading incomprehension” when actually, what they wrote was ambiguous or unclear.

Not saying you do this, just that I see this far more often than I see people misreading anything.

The word you’re probably thinking of is kichigai. But there are oceans of words that you can’t use on TV in Japan as I understand it, and there have been since the 70s.

m*nko begs to differ.

This reminds me of the not-very-edifying-at-all moment when “joey” became a universal term of abuse in UK playgrounds.