I’ve had some heated exchanges with pug in the past but this is the first time I can say for sure he’s moderated me, and for something extraordinarily tame.

If only that actually mattered.

I was addressing someone saying that ‘rapes of jewish women were widespread’, which to my ears is an unfounded characterization of a report which went to great lengths not to say anything half as definitive. If anyone in that thread was guilty of apologia or revisionism, it sure as fuck wasn’t me.

But you’re right, this isn’t the place to argue about it. Do what you want.

Yea, seems likely

That bucket guy said ‘rape of Jews on October 7th was widespread’, and the ‘widespread’ part fucking got to me.

Not that it’s a huge difference but I couldn’t stand that guy running around citing that UN report that said it found ‘reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence occurred’, which is a fucking far cry from ‘rape was widespread’

But, if I were to be charitable, i could see a mod coming in cold to that conversation just assuming the worst. But im pretty sure it was pug, if the ‘sort by mod’ function is accurate.

Wasn’t gonna bother until after I saw this, but looks like PJ gave me a ban for clarifying UN reporting on sexual assault.

Didn’t think I was posting anything spicy but you never know the crowd.

reasonable grounds to believe

If this is where you’ve sourced your claim then I should probably insist that you amend your original wording to something more appropriate. “There are reasonable grounds to believe there was sexual violence on october 7th”, instead of “Rape was widespread”

The only reason why someone might take your comment as ‘siding with Israel’ is that it’s careless, at-best. Most people will not be that generous. If you actually care about that representation, then you should be more careful.

You will not be seeing me start a drama thread about this.

That is the exact same report I just linked to you.

I’m not baiting you, but I would like you to substantiate your claim that I’m increasingly suspecting is willfully incorrect.

edit: it’s fine if you simply misspoke. If there’s something more definitive than I’m seeing that’s fine too, I just want the record to be set straight

Rape of Israeli women by people invading on October 7th was widespread

Can you specifically cite this? Specifically, I don’t see anything in the report that is as definitive as “was widespread”. The actual words I see in their report is:

there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred

edit: here’s a link to the actual report

From the official report, this is based on patterns that are described as ‘partially or fully naked victims’, but they specifically say that they cannot verify specific instances beyond this type of “circumstantial” evidence or eyewitness testimony. They even say:

It must be noted that witnesses and sources with whom the mission team engaged adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously. Some also stated to the mission team that they no longer felt confident in their recollections of other assertions that had appeared in the media.

Considering that these reports are often cited as justification for various war crimes and acts of genocide, it’s extremely important to be precise with language and delineate what is definitively known vs what is assumed.

As far as I’m aware, the most the UN has been able to say definitively is that there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred’, but that they were unable to establish the prevalence, overall magnitude, scope, or specific attribution. That’s a pretty far cry from ‘UN-verified sexual assault’

They’ve been harping on Israel to let them do a full investigation but they’ve repeatedly stonewalled them.

Yea, this seems pretty dumb as far as disagreements go. The article that felix linked has this to say about the Israeli report:

Prosecutors, the report argues, should not have to rely on the kind of evidence typically associated with prosecutions—witness or victim testimony, forensic reports and the like—but instead should be able to rely on “circumstantial evidence” and general deductions. And in order to find a pattern of systemic sexual violence, it should be sufficient to identify individual cases of such violence and read into them a systemic nature. Completing the circle, those individual cases need not hold up to the standards of typical prosecutions.

Even the link felix posted was acknowledging the credible reports of individual cases of sexual violence - I have to assume that the ‘lies’ they were referring to were specific to the allegations of ‘systemic’ sexual violence. Seems like pug was reading something else into the comment entirely and got upset by their own projection.

If I knew someone had shoved their wife violently I’d have a hard time seeing them in any other way.

A little further down on that page:

But sure, I guess you can insist on a specific definition from that particular definition if you feel the need to make that distinction to the exclusion of certain types of violence you personally don’t think are as severe. I’ll say it again: that distinction is without a meaningful difference. Might be meaningful to you, but not to victims of abuse.

Nah man, I don’t think that matters.

In the context of domestic abuse, it doesn’t matter if your spouse leaves a mark or physically injures you, it still creates an environment of fear for your physical safety. Displaying any willingness to cross that boundary with your spouse creates fear that they could cross it again, or go further. That’s what makes ‘beat your spouse’ such an evocative description to begin with. It isn’t supposed to be a precise classification of the type of violence you committed against them, just that you violated that physical barrier that shouldn’t be crossed. You can play semantic games and try finding a less objectionable term for it if you want, the truth is that even a slap or a shove is a severe betrayal of marital trust, and undermines the feeling of security that every person has a right to in their domestic environment. I think “beat” is a perfectly fine word to describe someone who willing to do that to their spouse.

A distinction without a meaningful difference. Throwing a punch at your spouse but missing is still you throwing a punch at your spouse.

Just because you didn’t make contact doesn’t mean you aren’t a danger

Fuck that, Israel should be carved out of Texas, not Palestine.

It will be much more cost effective to deliver our lethal aid within our own borders rather than across the Atlantic.

physical violence.

actually inflicting physical harm

What am I missing here? You don’t think ‘physical violence’ implies ‘physical harm’?

yup. I haven’t done it yet, but apparently ceiling fan controllers are a pretty standard thing, so usually all you really have to do is replace the whole controller box (they’re like $30 apiece from what I remember), or replace the controller board itself like you mentioned.

I’ve stopped buying appliances from places like Home Depot for this reason, seems like they simply do not stock items that aren’t their brand-name cloud-hosted services, or larger brands like hue.

I’m pretty sure Minnesota imports something like 60% of our energy - i’m at least glad we’re past the worst of the winter weather but holy fuck is it going to suck

Yea, but the problem is that there is no different literal meaning from the dog whistle. What would ‘cultural Marxism’ even mean to a Marxist?

Nobody is questioning your anti-tankie bona-fides here. We’re pointing to the irony of someone trying hard to otherize tankies from other leftists accidentally appropriating a term that’s pretty much exclusively used to malign both for the acceptance of LGBTQ expression.

“I’ve come to view home ownership and healthcare as destabilizing forces in my life,” said Bernie, a 45-year-old network engineer from Minneapolis. To finance owning his and his wife’s $300,000 home and saving for the future, the couple was foregoing medical and dental treatment of any kind and cutting back on expenses everywhere, he said, despite a pre-tax household income of more than $250,000.

I have no idea where in Minneapolis this person is but this is nothing like my own experience in the metro area.

My wife and I bought our home in 2021, for about the same price as he’s describing and with an income far less than theirs, and we’re expending less than 30% on our mortgage payment (including our insurance premiums and taxes). Maybe they bought theirs at the interest rate peak in 2020, whereas we bought ours when the interest rates bottomed out, but I can quite confidently say that our home is not the main burden on our finances.

What is killing us is raising food and healthcare costs, as well as our student loans. Our energy utility announced last year that they would be implementing surge pricing that could almost double our energy costs, and since the utility administers the state solar incentive program themselves, they quoted us a PV system cost almost twice what you can find on the open market (they use your average monthly energy bill to determine how much you can afford to pay for the system, which ought to be criminal). We’re getting fucked up down and sideways, but our mortgage payment is probably the most stable expense we have.

There are a lot of reasons things are shit and financially precarious, but owning my home has been a rare bright spot in our otherwise gloomy financial picture. If we were still renting, not only would we be in the same strained situation as we are now, but we’d be constantly anxious about our rent skyrocketing, too.

Home ownership isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but the alternative of renting is often just as expensive - on top of being at the whims of landlords. They’ve been publishing articles for a decade now trying to convince people that home ownership is overrated and renting is the way of the future, and I really wish I could trust them to report on it transparently.