Well done, Benkei. You need to take a break.

My point being that if you stick your thumb in someone's eye and he in turn takes you by the throat, it is only decent, if you're asking him to remove his hands from your throat, for you to take your thumb out of his eye. That the thumb is hostages makes everything very serious.

Were Hamas just a gang in Gaza I'd mostly agree with you. But Hamas is not just a gang in Gaza. Imo Hamas and their kind are a cancer that should have been removed a very long time ago, but that has been allowed to metastasize to where it will kill its host. By "kill" I mean I expect Gaza soon enough to be a very different place than it is now or has been. — tim wood

And if your young, imagine a time when talking to a new generation of Americans decades from now, when they sincerely ask you: "Trump? Who was Trump?" — ssu

It may not be advisable to talk on LinkedIn about the time I was fired by #ExxonMobil. But here goes.

I am a #climate scientist. I can identify with both climate researchers featured in this worth-your-time article.

I started out as Ms Rebecca Grekin, a climate scientist who earnestly, naively believed that the ExxonMobil of today is a trustworthy actor in the energy transition. I spent more than a decade working for ExxonMobil, occasionally (but not often enough) advocating for combatting #climatechange .

In 2020, I was fired—yes, fired—by ExxonMobil because I reported what amounted to a $10 billion fraud. To put it mildly, that experience fundamentally altered my opinion of whether present-day ExxonMobil can be considered an honest broker in anything, but most especially in the realm of the energy transition, which is a far-greater-than-$10-billion threat to the Exxon's bottom line. I have become the article's more cynical and wiser Mr Kashtan.

Despite what smooth-talking spokespeople will tell you, ExxonMobil continues to fund and be an active member of organizations that are—today—working to decrease political support for government action to curb climate change and decrease the public’s access to and trust in readily available replacements for #oilandgas. They fund PhDs and national labs to burnish their reputation and influence what questions researchers address. #industry lobbyists have convinced large swaths of the public (and most of their own well-meaning employees) that technologies like carbon capture and storage are legitimate recipients of billions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for combatting climate change. Those taxpayer dollars are urgently needed for existing, proven, ready-right-now solutions but instead are funding a massive campaign to enhance oil recovery. Carbon capture and storage is, at its core, a technology for producing more oil. It requires more carbon to be expended to inject #co2 at pressure than it keeps out of the atmosphere. It is not and will not be a viable solution to climate change.

ExxonMobil executives can continue this deception in large part because so many useful idiots, myself included, willingly lend their personal reputations to the propping up of a lie. They can continue this deception because they make an example of people like me (I’m not the only one) to ensure that their employees are afraid to truly challenge the ethics of the company line.

I wish I could tell my younger self that the cynical Mr Yannai Kashtan is right. That idealism and/or a paycheck can lull you into trusting those who say one thing and do another. That we must stop allowing ourselves to be used by a few people who care more about their reserve shares than about doing the right thing. And, most important, that we must, without delay, find the unflinching political will to turn off the #fossilfuels tap as fast as we possibly can. — Lindsey Gulden, geophysicist

No digital games – for me, they automate (eliminate) too much players' improvisational creativity (since all possible actions / reactions are already scripted (coded) in the program), fully cybernetic illusionism / railroading. — 180 Proof

Eating Persimmons — javi2541997

Writing battle raps that will never see the light of day — AmadeusD

Only an epistemological interpretation (old Copenhagen) would say this. Pretty much all interpretations since are metaphysical interpretations with describe what is, not what any particular observer knows. Humans play no special role in wave function collapse, except in that solipsistic Wigner interpretation. — noAxioms

The present Europe isn't sufficiently strong. — jorndoe

And thus by that note, abandon defense, especially sufficiently strong ones? Nah. — jorndoe

Does jamming, dazzling, or damaging a satellite amount to a use of force prohibited under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and customary international law? If so, when? Is it lawful to declare and operate “space exclusion zones,” despite the fact that States are prohibited from claiming sovereignty in space under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty? During an international armed conflict, does a belligerent State have right to capture and detain astronauts when they are also members of enemy armed forces, despite the fact that States are obliged to rescue and return them as “envoys of mankind” under Article V of the Outer Space Treaty? — Woomera project

Maybe? Prophecy aside, that's certainly what the Kremlin would have (everyone think). By the way, acting on what seems like overall "European interests" isn't so straightforward. For that matter, it's quite easy to find anti-EU sentiments within the EU, and some defer to NATO for defense. — jorndoe