V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic gun with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

Imo it’s the latter. It didn’t start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don’t care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.

Personally I say good riddance, but I’m biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.

You severely underestimate the support for Israel outside of your bubble.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I’ve been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don’t think it had much in common with what we call “terminally online” today. I associate “terminally online” with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that’s omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the “terminally online” problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of “online feminism”, that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I’m not from the US, so I don’t really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I’m closer to the left), but it’s nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it’s normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?

Have they really? Never seen o7 used that way, with o/ it’s more understandable, but since one can easily just use \o (or use an actual unicode swastika) I just don’t see it getting that controversial. Seems even less known than the triple parentheses thing, which is something that most people who don’t spend their lives on the internet never heard about.

I mean Hamas also does that. Israeli Arabs are imo objectively treated better by Israel than Palestinians by Hamas, despite the fact that they’re also not treated that well.

First news from Israeli forensics institute are out, seems like it was not a lie at all: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-769339

Kugel also explained that the age range of the victims spans from 3 months to 80 or 90 years old. Many bodies, including those of babies, are without heads.

Asked if they were decapitated, Kugel answered yes. Although he admits that, given the circumstances, it’s difficult to ascertain whether they were decapitated before or after death, as well as how they were beheaded, “whether cut off by knife or blown off by RPG,” he explained.

https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/1712471782303867144

Spreading “lies” requires intent. Like what Hamas did with the hospital parking lot. With the babies all context points to a professional screw up at best. And there was no screw up or lying required to create justification for Israel’s behavior, slaughtering hundreds of civilians including babies and likely torturing them was enough.

As far as I know, they released some of those photos publicly. I rely on word of others because I have no interest in seeing it, you can google it yourself.

As criminal as that is, I’m pretty sure burned babies and slaughtered and likely tortured civilians were enough for that.

By how much is it worse than burned babies, which were released?

Plus, notice that I said it’s plausible, not that I believe one version or the other. And, again, even if we say that it was a lie and therefora a fuck up and journos did not sufficiently crosscheck the validity and several people who claim to have seen the photos are lying even if it could cost their careers, in the light of the colossal fuckup with the hospital parking lot bombing that endangered diplomatic ties with several countries and started protests in the streets of several countries, this was relatively minor and pretty well handled.

So, why don’t they show these pictures to the world?

Decency? I don’t know that of course, I’m not saying that I’m sure about this, but not releasing photos of people that are too undignified or drastic is a relatively common policy.

Do you by any chance happen to have believed the US lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which the US lied about to invade Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

I’m not from the US and I was not yet following US/international politics at that time. Also none of the people I talked about were americans (“our” ambassador being czech, a journalist-editor from France also confirmed seeing the photos), so I don’t see it as particularly relevant anyway.

People are still spreading the beheaded baby horseshit

Honestly, the only context in which I see it is people complaining about it being a lie, but that may just be that we have different internet bubbles.

Personally I don’t call it horseshit because several people that I consider trustworthy confirmed being shown photos of beheaded babies (though not 40 of them, but I’ve never even seen that claim anywhere, I’ve seen a separate early claim that 40 babies were killed in total, not specifically beheaded) by Israeli officials, one of them being our ambassador, who so far has been a completely trustworthy person as far as I know. We also do know that Israelis only showed some photos privately to selected foreign politicians, journalists and diplomats, because (apart from them saying so) the people shown described those photos and they were later released publicly. It is not inconceivable that the beheaded babies were among those not released to public for some reason.

It’s a basic propaganda technique. You, to great fanfare, release some big fuckoff lie that makes the “other” look bad (“V17 FUCKS GOATS! V17 IS A GOATFUCKER, EVERYONE!”) and then days or weeks later you follow up with the truth to head off any claims that you couldn’t possibly be a REAL journalist (“Our apologies, it seems V17 was only washing his car. There was no goat. He did not fuck the car.”) but you do so in as quiet and half-assed of a manner as possible.

The issue is that is not what happened. Apart from what I say above, the fact that white house representatives pretty much immediately walked back on that was widely reported by mainstream media a day later. Also, the attack was already so brutal that it changed nothing about how Hamas is being perceived. For most people, slaughtered civilians with marks of torture and burned babies (those were afaik released on photos, but I did not want to look to check) were unsurprisingly enough.

Compare that to a failed rocket of palestinian islamic jihad falling on a hospital parking lot, Hamas knowingly lying about it according to a released wiretap and people still arguing that Israel did it in similar threads on Lemmy.

Also I’ll have you know that I fuck sheep, not goats.

This is absurd conspiracy-nut level of thinking. Among other reasons because this will likely end Netanyahu’s career after the war ends, he’s no longer immediately needed and investigations start (Israelis have a history of actually doing those properly because most see it as an existential threat to not have functioning defense mechanisms), and I’m pretty sure that he knows this. Which means that the reason for him to do this anyway would be because he’s so selfless that he doesn’t care about his career or power (even though after losing his career he’s likely to face lawsuits for other things he’s done) as long as this goal is completed. I hope you see how nonsensical it is for a super-populist politician under the threat of several investigations to selflessly give up his career and power.

So random rumors spread by soldiers should be treated as truth (because its pro-team Israel )

I thought that my quote on what happened in that case pretty clearly implied that it was a screw-up. Nevertheless, it was a relatively short-lived screw up which, unlike the claims of 500 killed by a supposed Israeli strike on a hospital, didn’t seem to do any damage apart from slightly lessening the trustworthiness of media or Israel for some people.

reporting on what the ministry of health of gaza, officials in israel, and random israel soldiers all confirm

If you’re talking about the hospital strike, I haven’t seen anyone but the ministry of health of Gaza say what they said, and the ministry of health of Gaza is de facto Hamas. I do see Hamas, a terrorist organization, as implicitly less trustworthy than IDF, even though I don’t trust everything IDF says, yes.

Both are entirely possible, even at once. Also it’s not just “exactly this”, it’s generally a broader range of topics. And, to nitpick a bit, “relatively objectively” is not the same as “totally committed to the most objective possible view”.

For another example of the former, as the guy below you says, years ago this was the exact modus operandi of (the english version of) Russia Today, until it reoriented and started targeting straight up pro-russian conspiracy nuts. Sputnik I think was always a bit out there, but I’m honestly not sure.