#i didn't stand on the beach in rhode island and go 'hm not far enough. next stop: france' which says a lot about my derison for europe

[yellowocaballero]

rip to you for the COVID hope you feel better soon! and I hope you have fun playing the Sims! ฅ⁠^⁠•⁠ﻌ⁠•⁠^⁠ฅ🌻🪻🌸💜

Thank you so much that's very sweet!! I was so pissed off about it. I went FOUR YEARS without getting COVID and I was finally hit by the dodgeball like TEN DAYS before my trip. But I'm up to date on my vaccines and I felt mostly fine. Vaccines lose their efficacy after 6 months, my recent vaccine saved my ass, please check to see when your latest vaccine was.

Unfortunately I continued to be dead (Sims, writing obsessively again, preparing for my trip) and I will continue to be dead (I am going to be in Hawai'i for a week). I need to tweak some things about the chapter so I'm going to wait until I have time to do so before I post it. I try not to be on my computer a lot during my vacations, so it might take a minute.

Since I graduated college, I pretty much have a habit of feeling an insane need to flee once every three or four months, and I call up a friend who lives Wherever and take a trip to hang out with them (internet friends, 80% of the time - love you guys!). But I guess my Big Move six months ago satisfied my need for novelty, because I've only travelled once since then to visit my mother on Thanksgiving. Objectively feels weird to only take one trip in six months, so I'm happy that I'm taking two this month. Hawai'i is going to be extremely good because I have not Seen A Tree In The Wild for six months (it's either city trees or...corn......there's no fulfillment in corn....) and it's probably doing weird things to my psyche.

What the fuck do you do during a ten hour plane flight? Hopefully the Sims? What happens? Insane.

[tcmmykinard]

it's actually hysterical for her to try and bring up 9-11 as a comparison, is if any leftist in the us is like "yay for the iraq war! it was wonderful and just and we support our government for starting it!"

i am proud of you for standing up to her and also proud of you for giving up and just cutting all ties :))))

yeah omg. and you know what, i actually unblocked her for a second to go through our dm's again and one bit that i didn't entirely screenshot is just so........hm

anyway so i copied the text and here ya go

"Regarding 9/11, I mentioned it as an example of an act that is, in itself, clear cut. I said things around it can be debated, but the event itself is clear, and it is EVIL. I don't care what excuse people come up with (and I have seen people on Tiktok trying to use anti-Israel sentiments Bin Laden expressed to justify his actions, while also conveniently skipping the part where he claims Jews control everything, so yay for siding with an antisemitic terrorist just because he once wrote a letter, after the fact, blaming the Jewish state for everything), what al-Qaeda did to almost 3,000 people was HORRENDOUS and MORALLY DESPICABLE, and to me there is no discussion to be had there, and I am in a state of shock that there are people who would justify it. That said, 9/11 is not like Oct 7. And I do not mean to belittle the pain and horror of 9/11 one bit. I watched the footage, I cried over the people killed that day. But there are several ways in which Oct 7 impacted Israel in a far worse way than 9/11 did the US. First, in terms of the percent of the population affected directly. Based on recent demographic info that in Israel we have 9.8 m people, and based on Google telling me there are 331 million Americans, then 1,200 murdered in Israel is akin to over 40,500 Americans. That's roughly 13.5 times 9/11. Now also take into consideration that Israel is much smaller than the US. We're talking about a state the size of Rhode Island. There is basically NO Israeli that hasn't been impacted by this in some way. And that's before we talk about the wounded (over 5,000 on Oct 7 alone) and those who are still held hostage, and the soldiers who keep getting injured and killed in Gaza. Now add to that, that unlike al-Qaeda operating from the other side of the world, Hamas is on the other side of a border, that they proved is indefensible. Now add to that that the attacks on Israel haven't stopped since Oct 7. It took several days to eliminate all the terrorists who invaded Israel. It took the ground operation in Gaza (weeks into the start of the war) for Hamas to stop trying to use the over 30 points where it destroyed the border fence on Oct 7 (and which could not be repaired right away) to invade again, or to land boats on our southern Mediterranean Sea beach, Zikim. And they also keep firing rockets at us. Each rocket is a murder attempt of civilians. Each one is a war crime. And there have been so many rockets fired into Israel, I lost count after 10,000 which was about a month into the war. We're now at almost 3 months. For Americans, 9/11 was one day. For us, Oct 7 never hasn't stopped yet. The worst was the first 36 hours, but it's still an on going attack. Now you wanna debate whether the Americans reacted right to the attack? I don't know the subject well enough to debate it, which is also why you won't see me reblogging posts either way. Because when I'm uninformed about something, and I also know I do not have the resources (even just emotionally) to properly dig in and understand all of the nuance and history and consequences behind each aspect, I do not speak up as if I did understand everything, and have any moral right to make judgments about the people who were there, and lived through it. Maybe they were in the right, maybe they were in the wrong, IDK. I honestly don't know, and I readily admit I do not have the resources to delve in to find out. But two things I can day is that, assuming they did dismantle al-Qaeda, even if it took a while, Americans didn't have to live with the fear of what those terrorists were capable of pulling off next. Israeliis have lived with Hamas' terrorism since the late 1980's, with its rockets since 2001, with it ruling Gaza since 2007, and we didn't dismantle it. Which means we all have to live with the guilt over how many lives could have been saved, if only we dismantled Hamas at an earlier point. Less Israelis would have died. Maybe less Gazan civilians as well, since Hamas wouldn't have had as long to embed itself into every civilians structure in Gaza, and to arm itself so much.

anyway the vibe i was constantly getting from her was 'this is the pain olympics on whose death was more horrendous or which country had the most casualties' regardless of my entire point being that people should not be killed. full stop. like you'd think that was hard to grasp or something.