“AntiZionism Is Not AntiSemitism”

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 202024
 

Quoting a university poster from many years ago written by the Jewish (student) society. Which is not quite what this is about but close enough.

In recent weeks it has become the trend to accuse those who criticise Israel’s policies in Gaza, as antisemitic. It is possible of course – the dumber out there are genuinely antisemitic. But there’s a whole other bunch of reasons :-

  1. They’re anti-zionist and anything that Israel does can be condemned.
  2. They’re anti-certain kinds of government policies and Israel uses those policies.

Always accusing critics of Israel of antisemitism is essentially saying that Israel cannot be criticised no matter what they do. Is that right?

Sure Israel has to defend itself from Hamas terrorist attacks, but it has to be done right without breaking international law. And even if you think Israel’s response is “reasonable”, you can’t reasonable silence criticisms of Israel by using the antisemitism label – it’s dishonest.

Ultimately what Israel wants is to be in a privileged position where none dare criticise them because any criticism will be seen as antisemitic. It’s equivalent to the British claiming that anti criticism of the British Empire is just anti-British.

In The Crack

Switching To Linux

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Dec 152024
 

This probably isn’t the one you should read; I didn’t switch to Linux. I’ve been running Linux since the kernel version was 0.96; before Linux distributions. I haven’t run Windows at home until I could run it in a virtual machine … and almost exclusively for work.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few thoughts on it.

Don’t Switch

Is the thought of replacing Windows on your machine making you a bit nervous? No wonder! So don’t do it.

If you have the space and money to do it, pick up a refurbished laptop from Linux – refurbished laptops from manufacturers such as Lenovo or Dell can often be obtained for cheap. Performance will suffer a bit, but it’s only bleeding edge applications where that matters – the latest games, video production, and local AI. Anything more mundane will work fine.

The cheapskate option is to run Linux as a virtual machine on your existing machine; there’s plenty of options here from VirtualBox to VMWare. Or even libvirt (a gooey for QEMU and others) which is the one I use. This has several advantages – you can switch back and forth very easily, and even access your files on your C drive.

What Distribution?

You might get the impression from Youtube that the choice of which Linux distribution you choose makes an enormous difference. No it doesn’t.

Sure different distributions look a bit different, but when you come down to it, when you’re writing your Will in LibreOffice you will have a hard time telling the difference between the different distributions. Even in terms of appearance you can often make distribution X look like distribution Y.

That’s not to say you can’t have fun selecting different distributions, but just don’t think it is that important. Choose a popular one (such as Ubuntu) so searching for answers will be more likely to get an answer that works for you.

Use It

Probably the most obvious advice is to use it. Every task you do with a computer, try to do it with Linux. Cheat if you need to but add what you resorted to Windows to use to a list of things to find out how to do.

Linux is different and it runs different applications, so it will take some learning to become as effective (or even more so) as you would be with Windows. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to switch over – there’s nothing wrong with it taking 6 months.

And have fun doing it!

Brian Won’t Be The Last CEO Killed

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 102024
 

I’ve missed most of this story – how someone gunned down the CEO of UnitedHealth. That’s because I’ve had my own healthcare issues ironically enough. And was taken care of by the NHS.

I’ve even missed most of the social media response which was apparently less than totally sympathetic.

Killing someone is wrong; even if you see it as some form of justice. Justice involves a trial with members of the community involved in the decision of guilt or innocence. Without that it becomes just personal revenge.

But what if the community won’t prosecute and judge someone’s crimes? The US health insurance business has plenty of incidents that victims could easily perceive as a crime – for example health care bankruptcies.

It just becomes a little harder to condemn someone seeking revenge if there is no real chance of getting justice.

It’ll be interesting to see the trial of the alleged killer – it could well result in Jury Nullification where the jury finds the defendant not guilty because whilst they have broken the law, the jury feels it was justified.

In Remembrance
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