Sure, interesting. You already know their populations are the same. What’s the population of Nigeria? Brazil? Totally necessary to understand the map.

Totally useless because not pro-ratized to population. Of course India is going to produce a lot of babies, India has a lot of people.

Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

stopped recognising

Of course they didn’t. But this is about an initial recognition. This one feels unseemly to me personally.

Not saying it’s wrong in principle. It certainly feels like a “sympathy recognition”, much like Kosovo and indeed Timor Leste itself. But in those cases the putative independent states were not run (even partly) by religious extremists with overtly genocidal intentions.

Still, I will agree that things are not black and white.

I assure you

Who cares what you assure me? We’re talking about definitions. Yours are not those of the people who study these things closely.

Pogrom (a Yiddish word) in the proper sense means against this particular ethnic group - so correct term. But okay, by the generic definition, that’s a fair argument.

Personally I don’t see humanity as dominators and dominated, but rather in terms of individuals. The intentions of Hamas against individual Israelis are very clear from their words and deeds. All that they lack is the means. That’s why I will not be celebrating statehood for a nation run (partly) by this group.

This seems to be your personal definition of “totalitarian”. From what I understand of the consensus of actual political scientists, North Korea has been totalitarian for decades and Russia and China both now pass the bar too (since the Ukraine invasion and Xi’s tech authoritarian ramp-up, respectively).

with friendliness, suggest you think about

Difficult to finish a sentence with condescension level at this pitch.

plenty of other governments are recognised while committing horrific acts

Citation needed. I can’t think of anything comparable, certainly not since the UN’s founding.

this is recognition of Palestine, not Gaza

Fair point.

Admit that I’ve got what wrong? I’ve only ever stated established facts. Many dictatorships are collapsed democracies. Russians also chose to abandon their democracy, having voted too many times for Putin.

Sure, the current situation is particularly unfair on the (very many) Gazans who were too young to vote 19 years ago. I’m sure we can agree on that.

Given that you’ve clearly just looked these things up to justify yourself post-hoc, you should now know that there’s no comparison with sham plebiscites in totalitarian countries (China holds proper-ish elections, at local level only, and only for vetted Communist Party candidates).

My point stands. The people of Gaza chose Hamas, a genocidal terrorist group, in a free and fair election. That doesn’t justify what’s happening to them today, but it’s a fact.

North Korea does not hold elections. China does not hold elections outside its ruling Communist Party. Russia holds occasional sham elections with stooge candidates.

The Palestinian election involved numerous parties and candidates, including leftist and liberals, and the Hamas victory was generally recognized as fair.

Clearly you have very little idea about this whole subject. I’d guess like most others here.

The people of Gaza voted for Hamas, an overtly terrorist group with a genocidal manifesto, as their elected government back in 20072006. Naturally that was their last election.

I’ll inconveniently only have it online when I’m at home

So this is like a dial-up website where you have to hope that the webmaster’s in?

Recognizing a state whose legitimate elected government launched a literal pogrom just a couple of years back. What a thing you’re all celebrating.

Sure. But social media is becoming a nightmare. It’s literally destroying democracy. As things stand, I’m not even convinced the fediversal version is an improvement. And if it’s not, then personally I don’t care how many people are pushed away. In as far as technical fixes are possible to the myriad problems of social media, I believe these might be a couple of them. That’s all I’m saying.

Sure. But in theory, with (slightly) better resources, this would be my solution.

On posting, crawl the link and cache its content. Compare with quote on the basis of some generous threshold of similarity.

do I just want to shit on ai in the comments

Laudable honesty. The problem is that other people have to read the shit.

But to vote without engaging with the actual content is just to “sort” posts based on feelings. Who cares?

It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article

This is the root problem. Upvoting and downvoting headlines on the basis of vibes. It adds zero value. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not least the upvoters and (especially) downvoters themselves, who get nothing out of it but the tiniest of vacuous dopamine hits. It’s the original sin of social media.

My preferred solutions:

• no voting at all without a registered click on the linked article
• no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article

Deep-seated problems call for radical solutions. Both of these are technically feasible.