This is such a tired old line based on the aircraft carrier rhetoric from the 60s, outdated since the Iraq wars and our own airbases going up all over the region.

Also the idea that Saudi Arabia trades in dollars because otherwise Israel would attack them fails to take into account that much of the rest of the world uses them too, since people like a stable currency that everyone else already likes.

You guys really need to update your rhetoric.

The Saudis barely participated in Yom Kippur, from some brief googling they deployed a single battalion that saw a little bit of fighting in the Golan Heights. I honestly wasn’t even aware they had participated militarily.

Their much bigger impact was the oil embargo against the US, which caused rather famous gas shortages here and one of the most severe recessions we’ve ever had, during the Nixon years. Perhaps seeing the rest of the coalition demolished was enough? Though there were clear reasons for the Israeli victory that aren’t that difficult to understand. It’s far more specific than just Israel strong or something like that. That oil embargo ended up proving the power of OPEC though, dramatically strengthening the Saudi’s position on the global stage, which persists to this day.

Regarding NG, the main pipeline through the area for exporting Egyptian NG actually takes some pains to go around Israel, rather than through it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Gas_Pipeline

I guess you don’t think our politicians care which of them are in charge? And I’m not so sure about ironclad, we’ve withheld aid in past decades.

I really question exactly how Israel has significant influence over Egypt. Much less Saudi Arabia, which isn’t even a neighbor and has significantly more wealth and influence than Israel does.

If Israel was that useful as a tool to control Egypt, sure would like those billions of dollars back…

And I have a feeling they’ll have some consequences. We may not all see the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict the same way, I have a feeling you’re not aware of any of the Arab atrocities from the early 20th century, before Israel was ever a nation. But this time they’ve lost a lot of support in the US for the first time in our history, and that will likely have an impact on future political calculations.

This betrays a startling lack of awareness of just how extensive US partnerships are across the globe. The US has sent tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Egypt. Close ties with Saudi Arabia. Close ties with Morocco. Most Mediterranean countries are in NATO, actually. This isn’t even to speak of our own military bases littered throughout both Africa and the Middle East.

Does anything going from Asia to Africa even go through Israel? I’d think they’d usually take sea routes through the Indian Ocean. Do we really need some unsinkable aircraft carrier anymore when we have literally dozens of our own airstrips all over the region?

That said, I do agree with your first two points. Ukraine is a proxy war, and supporting Israel is the point. Not sure it’s actually more important than any actual US territory though.

Very succinct. Though a little outdated in our post-qanon world.

No, that’s not what a strip club feels like. lol Little, uh … grimier. Your sense of smell is being assaulted by cheap fragrance and your sense of hearing by bad music, as opposed to “awesomeness”.

Not that I’d say a person shouldn’t go, at least once, but you don’t want your expectations too high or you’ll just be disappointed.

Another advantage of text, for me at least, is that I can read much faster than I can listen. This is why I prefer text articles to news videos, even though video can often offer extra visual information over what photographs can offer.

That said, I do somewhat agree with the article’s concern that live conversation is an independent skill and potentially has its own unique side-benefits that might be becoming rarer.

Yeah, there’s definitely a hassle vs reward calculus that quickly gets figured. Usually the hassle side of the equation is a little too high unless its something that can be quickly and easily fixed. Like if they forgot something it’s very easy to just go “oh, and can I please get …” which usually immediately reminds them and they go grab it.

Or if the food got royally fucked then engagement can become worth it, even over something harder to fix. Like, if my steak is well done and I ordered med rare, I kinda want either a new steak or a comped meal.

We would have called it a fling. It’s less stable than a FWB thing, but more stable than a one night stand.

Yeah, it’s an election year. Sorry about that, everyone who doesn’t have an election this year.

Personally I think discussion should certainly be permitted, so long as we try to remain somewhat civil about it.

I did get to the thread a little late, the top comments were already in place. I also did make the choice to drop my reply in support of someone that was saying something valuable that wasn’t getting much attention, instead of my own op reply.

It’s Lemmy though, I have a feeling most of us read everything just due to how little there is to read. But yeah, we do share the natural first-commenter advantage thing that reddit has, it’s a weakness of the overall format. AskHistorians created their highly successful sub mainly due to how much this irritated them. lol

This.

Avoiding plastic in your day to day might prevent leeching, which is nice, but you’ll still encounter it in the natural environment.

The problem is the plastics never really chemically break down. They do undergo mechanical weathering though, so it all breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time. Eventually these particles are microscopic, and make their way into everywhere and everything it seems, from soil to rainwater to your breakfast cereal and your testicles.

You can probably filter it out of your water, I imagine reverse osmosis is likely effective since plastic molecules are somewhat chonky. A HEPA filter should get at least the larger particles out of the air. I don’t know how effective it’d be with smaller particles, sometimes called nanoplastics. Avoiding synthetic fabrics probably would help somewhat, but I haven’t read anything about this.

You can’t get it out of your food though, we don’t know enough yet about reliable ways we could keep plants from taking it up through their root systems. From plants it gets into the food chain, and much like mercury with fish, it’ll likely end up concentrating in animals, like us. You could potentially grow your own food via aquaponics using filtered water and maybe keep it plastic-free, but this is a real reach here. And you’re basically vegan now and have to literally grow all your own food.

Note, I’m largely speculating regarding methods.

Some reading material, this first one is about plant uptake:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8618759/

Water filtration:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10054062/

I doubt it actually. They do allow some food aid in, just not enough. If they didn’t, then everyone in Gaza would have starved already. They have no local food production anymore and a human cannot go 6 months without eating.

Stopping a single boat of food aid is probably not worth the diplomatic blowback it would cause.

That’s a really good idea. Kudos to them, hope their voyage is safe.

The key is to actually have fun with the arguing. You have to enjoy the process of verbal fencing on its own, isolated from any other wishes you have.

Yeah, it’s always surprised me a little bit just how strong they still are. While the often-online do tend to shy away from it, it’s actually still a preferred platform for the less-online, due to how easy it makes coordinating real life events. Also not the sort of segment that usually cares much about data privacy.

Depends heavily on the item. With artillery shells most notably, we haven’t been making them in really significant numbers for a lot of years. Something like small arms ammunition isn’t so much an issue for us though.

Because they’re at war and we’re not. Without a command economy, if we want to bump up our shell production for instance, we need a business that is willing to build a factory that makes and sells shells. But what happens to that business after the Russo-Ukrainian War is over, and the shell consumption dries up? Who buys the shells, and what happens to those investors that paid for the factory? Will they pull a profit, or won’t they?

This makes it more challenging to simply “build more shells”. It’s also why S Korea being willing to sell shells would be very helpful. Unlike most of NATO, which prefers to drop explosives from aircraft rather than shoot them out of tubes when an enemy needs blowing up, S Korea has a massive artillery-based army, and routinely goes through large numbers of shells just over the course of regular training for their mandatory military service. They’re the only ones in our entire alliance sphere that could potentially satisfy much of Ukrainian shell hunger without some huge, economically impractical build-up. They have laws against war profiteering, however.

This is why getting Ukraine our jets is so important. Jets are our thing, we have those munitions factories already, nobody will simply go out of business after the war is over and Ukraine stops needing missiles and JDAMs.

Anyways, I assume that’s more or less what the article said. It’s not a complicated concept.

Probably the UK, mainly due to the history. You’ve got archaeology going back to the bronze age and before, well-preserved ruins from throughout the medieval era, and a very well-documented pre-modern history record.

They had a fairly unique path through global history, from the darkness of the colonial and imperial era, to being the bastion against Napoleon and then European fascism, to the seat of the voluntary and cooperative Commonwealth nations today. They’re one of the best examples of just how much a society can evolve, and are still one of a handful of European nations where the far right is struggling the most to gain a foothold. I admire that greatly.

Oh, and I never did quite grow out of my longbows-are-cool phase. And ships. Ships are cool too. And British humour is entertaining. And they like to insert a random letter U here and there for no discernable reason.