On a less jokey note, pretty much every living mammal has been subjected to domestication attempts at some point in history. Bears, elephants, tigers, hippopotami, moose… More often than not, there’s some kind of inherent physiological reason why it doesn’t work.

Some animals don’t breed well in captivity (pandas, famously, but cheetahs are another classic case). Some can’t handle captivity at all - the few efforts at keeping Great Whites in captivity ended with the animals bludgeoning themselves to death on the walls of their enclosures. Others are consistently too aggressive to effectively tame (zebras, coyotes, chimps, elephants, and pythons are notable for all the historic instances domestication failed for these reasons). And some simply aren’t pleasant household companions - skunks, raccoons, and foxes are all notable for their powerful odors and their propensity to destroy the interiors of homes.

There’s some speculation as to whether cats ever were actually domesticated successfully, or whether we’ve simply chosen to ignore their feral habits as such.

They’re called raccoons and they put holes in your drywall.

Me: “Haha, how cute. My cat has a friend. I bet they go on all sorts of adorable adventures together.”

The Cat:

That’s a completly different argument than the one you started with.

It is not.

In almost all polls made before the 7th vast majority of Israelis agreed to the separation to two states solution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass

This is a policy supported by multiple prior Israeli governments that amounted to the extrajudicial assassination of any Palestinian or Lebanese resident suspected of being a militant. This is the “two state solution” that Israelis supported. One in which the Israelis can launch rockets and fire bullets out of Israel uncontested and Palestinians are expected to accept that anyone an Israel kills must have deserved it.

The Israeli people were fighting them the last year trying to prevent the country from becoming a dictatorship.

The bulk of the Israeli public was perfectly happy with the treatment of their Palestinian neighbors up until this point. Settlers on the border shooting into Palestinian lands, attacking Palestinian farmers, bulldozing homes, and setting fire to groves is nothing new. It goes straight back to the Nakba of '48.

What has the Ashkenazi branch of the population in a lather is the threat of Sephardics and Mizrahis increasingly dominating the Parliament and the various state agencies. The country has always been a military dictatorship from the perspective of the Arabs. Only recently have the more Western and secularized Jewish settlers found themselves exposed to the iron fist of Israeli rule.

Apartheid states don’t get to exist in a functioning democracy.

They shouldn’t get to exist. And yet, here we are.

One of these is responsible for the Oct 7th Protest

“The logic of Israel was that Hamas should be strong enough to rule Gaza,” he said, “but weak enough to be deterred by Israel.”

The tiny bodies of babies, several still attached to wires and tubes that were meant to keep them alive, decomposing in their hospital beds. Milk bottles and spare diapers still next to them on the sheets.

And I’m pretty sure its not the Israelis, because suggesting that would make me an anti-Semite.

Funny, because that was the exact same attitude the Russians had when they began bombing Ukraine.

There’s a 10-story tall billboard of Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, adoring the Likud Party HQ in Tel Aviv and I can’t help but notice their friendship has lead to some enormous overlap on attitudes toward recalcitrant neighbors.

When you’ve got the Israel Defense Minister calling residents of his country “human animals” and Israeli assassins shooting up hospitals and a the Israeli air force launching rocket strikes aimed on ambulances, its abundantly clear who the terrorists are.

the perspective of someone who has no issue with terrorism being used to achieve political goals

Apparently you can sponsor a missile strike on behalf of the Israeli government in Gaza.

I’m sure you also believe that the far right is fully within it’s rights to kidnap senators and storm capitols?

They’ve gone far beyond that. Just this week, a team of IDF gunmen broke into a hospital and shot the place up because it hosted injured Palestinian politicians.

Well in the medieval textbooks it was a valid strategy…

Embracing medievalism to own the heretics.

Seems to be a humanitarian crisis of their own doing…

Houthis saying the exact same thing as the traffic through the Suez declines by 82%

Sending my nation’s professional wet works crew to the other side of the world in order to assassinate some guys who took over a ship flagged to Panama, because it serves a national security interest to keep a cargo ship full of fleshlights from doing an end run around the Horn of Africa.

And if you question any of this shit, or suggest other nations can do it now too, you are no better than that guy the CIA backed to do freedom fighting in Afghanistan back in the 70s.

If you’ve ever fallen off a boat into the water and been sucked under that boat and had to claw yourself back out again, you will understand why this is surprisingly non-trivial.

If you’ve been awake for 72 hours, jacked up on a pharmaceutical only God and the six most sadistic chemists at the Pentagon know about, and you just pulled yourself up on board a ship in the dead of night after tailing pirates for days, I have to image its even harder.

The Navy does prefer to kill their best and brightest in helicopter crashes. But its still very possible to get drowned to death on the job.

Might be nice to revisit that whole “benefits of Open Medicare Enrollment” rather than going a full six months hovering around the Iowa Fair grounds and fixating exclusively on corn and soy futures.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, will split their electoral votes based on their popular vote.

Only Maine splits their vote. Nebraska awards votes by congressional district, allowing the state to effectively gerrymander the electoral college.

if it was a popular vote, the parties would apply entirely different strategies in elections,

Sure. Strategies would change to appeal to popular opinion rather than focusing forever on maximizing campaign contributions.

There is a lot of truth to “Jews control the media”

Not… really. This is where you run into the old saying “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools”. The idea that “Jews” control media is horribly misplaced, because for every given adherent to the faith with some amount of clout, there are millions utterly devoid of swag. You could just as easily claim “Australians control the media” by pointing to the Murdochs or Packers. Or put the blame on the Germans by way of the Hearst family. If you wanted to be particularly smarmy, you could put the blame on the Americans themselves, as an ethnic cohort.

But we’re way past any kind of root cause analysis when we just try to blame a single ethnic cohort, while ignoring how much division exists within that cohort. Certainly, the Beta Israelis don’t control the media. And we can find plenty of anti-war Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, and even just anti-Netanyahu Jews as counterfactuals to the current media narrative.

Zionists definitely have a disproportionate amount of influence

A certain select group of people with a Zionist position have either direct ownership stake or indirect financial influence over a number of major publications and broadcasters. And as media ownership has consolidated over time, they’ve gained a larger voice.

Some of those people might be described as Zionists, such as Jonathan Karp and the Adelson family. But others, like the highly influential head of the Second Baptist Church of Houston - Ed Young - are quite literally selling people on Zionism as an end to Judaism by way of a nuclear holocaust that ushers in the Second Coming of Christ.

Not Jewish. Not really Zionist in the conventional sense. Enormously influential in US - and by extension global - media and politics, purely by way of his command of a wealthy congregation in a set of heavily contested electoral districts.

Republicans are actively blocking any funding for Ukraine.

I don’t even think this is strictly true. Republicans simply don’t have a majority to pass a budget of any kind, and no one in the party is willing to compromise with the Democrats to pass a bipartisan bill. Even when the GOP has all three branches, they struggled to pass anything. They’re just bad at legislating.

Ukraine is collateral damage.

they have a large and modern army

They’re hemorrhaging money and manpower to fight this war, particularly in the wake of the Houthi’s shutting down travel through the Red Sea. If the US were to take a hard line against Israel (as Reagan did when Israel launched a war against Lebanon back in the 80s), the Israelis would be forced to back down for fear of exhausting their supplies too quickly.

Let them sort their own shit out, while focusing support on a country that absolutely needs it.

The US has never prioritized needs over political expediency. And the Israel lobby has far more pull in the American Congress than anything Zelensky is fielding.

Failing to support Ukraine means you’re a bog standard Republican. Failing to support Israel means you’re going to lose your job in either party.

Conservatives should really be running with this.

They’ve spent the last 23 years running on the “Arabs are scary and we need to kill them” platform. Why would they support a measure that’s anti-genocide?

They could use it for their impeachment attempt

If they’re going to run bullshit impeachment efforts that die in the Senate, why waste effort and pick a fight with AIPAC when they can just hold up a picture of Hunter Biden’s dick pick and call any Democrat who votes against impeachment a pedophile?