I don't think it will be a big win for the Palestinians. One reason why this hasn't happened in the past is that there is no reliable, functional government in place that governs over all of the territory. You had Hamas in Gaza and the PLO in most of the West Bank and they don't see eye to eye. This hasn't changed. It will be difficult for these established governments to cooperate with a a fractured non-functional one so the benefits for the Palestinian people will only be patchy and homeopathic.

So I fear recognizing a Palestinian state is actually an impotent, diplomatic gesture - like: "we see what's going on there, it's horrible, and we don't have the resolve to do anything else to bring Israel back to the status quo ante." It's finger wagging at Israel more than actual support for the Palestinians. It's a gesture that can easily be reversed as well, like the orange one moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. And I think that's why these announcements of recognition fall on very deaf ears in Tel Aviv. It's political theater for the audiences in the countries whose governments have announced this. "Look, we are doing something! (But we're doing not that much really, we could do other things as well, isolate the Israeli government and/or cut it off palpably from necessary economic and military supply chain support. But we won't. It's a complicated conundrum, that Middle East. And we're not quite ready to jeopardize the existence of Israel over this.)"

I think it is hard though, legislatively, as the RTBF already proves. It's a terribly vague set of rules that put search engines in the position where they have to evaluate a claim and then sit in judgement over it with little to no oversight and then only a public form of objection if this somehow ends up in a court. This is not a good process. Adding more reasons to use a bad process doesn't sound like a great idea regardless of how well intentioned they are.

An issue I see are massive Streisand effects. One is occurring if you need to take a Google to court for not following up on your RTBF claim. Nobody really cared about your drunk driving incident from 2019 until you fill the headlines with your court proceedings. Now everybody knows. The other is this: let's say Roberta became Robert. Calling him Roberta would be dead naming him. But if every time I framed it as "Robert Streisand (known until 2023 as Roberta Streisand)" I'm merely stating fact and I don't see how many courts will intervene against that. Why can virtually everybody still dead name Chelsea Manning? Because every time her name was mentioned post transition they added this factual context. So all you will achieve in the end is that all trolls and dickheads will just use the legally defendable boiler plate phrase. And hang a much brighter lantern on the issue.

Just to be clear: I'm not defending anybody deadnaming somebody else. I'm just looking at this issue, the RTBF, and I'm thinking of that road to hell and with what it is paved.

Never accept a pasta served by an "Australian mushroom."

I don't think the people who do the happiness statistic could see past the "forcibly inject" part.

First of all, this isn't enshitification as defined by Corey Doctorow. This has nothing to do with an internet platform getting worse because the priorities of the proprietors changed.

I don't think it's entirely fair to blame Google for this. None of these companies do this for entirely altruistic reasons. At the core of the problem is funding in education. Google saw an opportunity and jumped on it. When given a choice that kids get no computer hardware vs. dumping price Chromebooks I would still vote Chromebook. Get your politicians to set aside less money for tanks and more money for education.

Besides, no one is stopping kids from exploring other platforms. Google is looking for an infrastructure lock-in, get them locked in while they are young, but you can go do other stuff. It's also a question of financial means and interests. And they don't need to do LAN parties because they already have Fortnite and stuff. Life moves on. Your childhood was also markedly different from your parents'.

You are judging work by somebody who doesn't feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

Every flag serves a purpose. This flag's purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It's was the point to be busy.

Why don't they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren't all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that's why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

I don't find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn't the point of it and b) I'm not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don't scrutinize all existing flags by it.

That's unfair to microwave ovens because they have established uses, even in some fine dining establishments. So-called AI has none of that just yet.

Yes, we are. Please stop masturbating. Thanks.

Let's say you're right and you've prevented the birth of Adolf or altered him to send him to another life trajectory. Who is to say that there wouldn't be another mad person, naturally a man, who would rise to power and commit similar if not even worse crimes. It's not only the person that made the fuehrer possible, it's also everything happening in the world, especially politics at the time. So you've bumped Adolf but you've created Anton who was similarly radicalized but he wasn't a landscape painter, he was a physics major and he made Germany develop nuclear weapons much faster. So now you have to go back and disturb Anton's conception. Which brings about fuehrer Armin and so forth. You might be stuck in a time loop you'll never be able to stop because you can't control all the variables.

I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you'll probably have a fifth of the population that's high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they're lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don't want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.

One of them doesn't listen at all. He's also dead so I'm willing to overlook his blatant lack of enthusiasm.

If you want to know where it is going in the short-term, have a look at Orban's Hungary. Rightwing populist voted in and then got to work at dismantling the state. Control judges appointments, curb the power of the judicial branch, silence critical media, pick a group to scapegoat, buddy of Putin. The list goes on. Democracy only works if people defend it and from my outside POV there aren't enough people doing that just yet. It's worse in Trump 2.0 because this time he came prepared.

There are already horror stories about people being caught up wrongly in the deportation efforts. That's using very mild language for very traumatic events here. It's come to a point where erstwhile allies of the US are advising their citizens not to travel to the US. Because they have lost faith in the rule of law there. Take a minute to let that sink in.

If you're a US citizen, resist. The free state is under threat. If you're an immigrant, be careful.