anarchiddy

I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days

The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.

The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.

I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.

The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city's solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn't tried scamming me.

FUCK private energy providers.

The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.

• that isn't what they said
• i believe it was tongue-in-cheek

Correction: the government of Israel

Israel (the state) has always given special rights to ethnic Jews. It was founded *as an explicitly Jewish state. Jews have always been given a unique right to freely immigrate and gain citizenship, while limiting Palestinian's right to even return to their homes in Israel after having to flee. It isn't just about the current government - Israel has always been predicated on an ethno-religious immigration campaign. No other nation on the planet is as singularly-focused on the ethnic makeup of its population, to the point that they have an actual program to retrieve the reproductive material of soldiers who die in combat. Zionists will waste no time calling you antisemitic if you were to suggest that Israel should provide equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious identity, or suggest that Palestinians and Jews might live together on their shared ancestral land. It's that idea that Palestinians are so violent that they'd just "destroy all the Jews" if they were to ever be given equal status that is the wildly bigoted and racist one.

This isn't some transient political movement unique to Netanyahu's government, it's been a principle feature of its mission since it's founding.

Again, where was the lie?

They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters

Not according to the state of Israel

The study you're referencing is looking at paternal lineage of Israelis born in Israel, not the ancestral lineage of all Israelis.

A second-generation Israeli would be considered 'From Israel by paternal country of origin" in this census, because their paternal country of origin would be Israel.

The bulk of immigration happened in the 1950's-1970's. The number of Israeli's who's ancestors lived in Israel before the establishment of the Israeli state isn't ~~a known or studied figure~~ a definitively answered question, but it's reasonable to assume that it's a minority given the large migrations that happened during and after the Nakba.

The only real information we have regarding the make-up of Palestine before its partitioning are a couple of censuses done during the British occupation, but it was during a period of time when zionist jews were already beginning to migrate. Here's the topline:

The census found a total population of 1,035,821 (1,033,314 excluding the numbers of H.M. Forces),[2] an increase of 36.8% since 1922, of which the Jewish population increased by 108.4%.[1]

The population was divided by religion as follows: 759,717 Muslims, 174,610 Jews, 91,398 Christians, 9,148 Druzes, 350 Bahais, 182 Samaritans, and 421 reporting no religion.[3] A special problem was posed by the nomadic Bedouin of the south, who were reluctant to co-operate. Estimates of each tribe were made by officers of the district administration according to local observation. The total of 759,717 Muslims included 66,553 persons enumerated by that method.[4] The number of foreign British forces stationed in Palestine in 1931 totalled 2,500.[5]

Where's the lie? Have Palestinians not lived in the area for thousands of years or maintained a distinct culture, even while being occupied by other empires?

Gee I wonder if western media has done this with other conflicts

Judaism is very different from Islam.

Good thing the ME isn't mono-religious

Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture

Insofar as they are both partially defined by being on either side of an apartheid state, sure. But Jews and arabs lived very peacefully in Palestine and throughout the ME long before Palestine was partitioned. The ME was full of arab-jewish communities living alongside Muslims before Israel began their immigration campaign and before pan-arab nationalism spread through the region. I highly recommend Avi Shlaim's "Three World's" book if you're curious how those cultures developed alongside each other, and how they've changed since Israel's establishment.

I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist.

I believe both the people of Palestine and Israel have a right to exist, but neither have a right to exist as ethno-nationalist apartheid states.

There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

Yup, and those Nazis largely supported the Zionist mission of a Jewish state, both because they wanted the Jews to emigrate out of Europe and because they hated Arabs almost as much as they hated Jews. Nazis and Zionists share a strictly defined understanding of cultural and ethnic boundaries, and a belief that geographical boundaries are a reflection of those boundaries (or ought to). It's only really tricky if your understanding of Zionism and Israel is limited to the specific group that is doing the cleansing.

The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.

The jewish diaspora is almost as defined by their shared cultural heritage with their middle eastern neighbors as it is by their origin. You can't draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that's separate from their arabic brothers and sisters. That's exactly the problem with zionism - it attempts to forcefully separate the cultural inheritance of its arabic history and expel it from both the geographical and cultural boundaries of Israel.

People who oppose Israel as a Jewish state do so because they see Zionism as a mission of ethnic and cultural purification, not because it's a symbolic representation of Jews as an entire people. That's what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian

Hmm, I dont think this is true in the most common usage, but it's also not what is meant when people challenge the notion of Israel's 'right to exist'.

Nobody contends that the "shared identity" of Israel has no right to exist, only that Israel as a capital-J Jewish State has no unique or exclusive right to self-determination in Historic Palestine. No state or nationality has a right to deny the self-determination of another group on the basis of ethnic identity.

argue amongst themselves instead of realizing the bigger picture which is to win power and do good things with it

Almost as if people have contradicting ideas about what 'good things' need doing.

But you understand “donors” are just rich fucks

Lmao, idk I don't really think there's anything "just" about being a billionare political donor

Until the NYC/NY Democrat party says “don’t vote for him” then it’s really irrelevant

Unrelated - I have a bridge to sell you

Ok now go look at what the donors are saying.

Mamdani has the majority opinion, that Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights. Zionists have a hard time accepting that as an answer but it's a morally unobjectionable one.