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6 comments
Strange, it snowed in March. Which basically never happens. Well it’s over now.
I wonder if Israel feels its window for war with Iran to stop their nuclear program forcibly was closing, so that’s why they decided to strike this year. Israel likely needs US support to target certain fortified locations, not to mention the extra weight of fire, but US opinion on Israel has been souring on all places in the political spectrum.
According to a Gallup [poll](https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx) more Americans now sympathize with the Palestinians compared to the Israelis by a narrow, but increasing margin 41% to 39%. Other polls I’ve seen also suggested this to be about even. This seems to be a new phenomenon that started around 2020 among Democrats and to a lesser degree Independents (those who don’t identify with either major party). It looks like Republicans may be joining this shift as their favorability ratings for Israel have crashed 10% since 2024. Perhaps Tucker Carlson or one of the isolationist paleo conservatives started giving narratives less sympathetic to Israel around that time.
There’s a huge age difference as well in the poll with younger people being much more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis (53%-23%) compared to older people (49%-31%) although people of all ages have been souring on Israel. Here’s another [poll](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/support-for-israel-continues-to-deteriorate-especially-among-democrats-and-young-people/) on this. It might be especially alarming for the Israeli government that young conservatives have a much more negative view on Israel than older ones because they would not be able to rely on Republican presidents to support them in the future if such trends continue.
It wouldn’t be the first time changing attitudes caused a side to act recklessly. I think some have suggested Hamas decided to commit the Oct 7th attacks a few years ago because of the Gulf countries normalizing relations witn Israel. They feel that their ability to end this ethnic conflict on favorable terms was receding.
Anyone who has 680 000 euros to spare, you could buy a tiny island that used to be a lighthouse outpost, complete with a cute little cabin. Super idyllic, but having experienced the archipelago on a couple of occasions, I’m sure the 100% constant wind would drive me nuts.
The description starts in Finnish but also has an English version from about halfway through:
[https://asunnot.oikotie.fi/myytavat-loma-asunnot/turku/21893394?rdt_cid=6059223126703921502&utm_campaign=OTAS_B2C&utm_content=reddit_listing_whole_finland&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=reddit](https://asunnot.oikotie.fi/myytavat-loma-asunnot/turku/21893394?rdt_cid=6059223126703921502&utm_campaign=OTAS_B2C&utm_content=reddit_listing_whole_finland&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=reddit)
Mods here don’t approve the questions I ask.
Not sure if the question doesn’t follow the rules or if there’s another reason, but it’s kind of frustrating.
Today is the commemoration day of the victory of Gallipoli. I guess like all victories, it is with big air quotes, since so many lives were lost (nearly 500,000 casualties), including those of ANZAC soldiers. It was also one of the main events that spurred the war of independence.
There’s a memorial at the Gallipoli Peninsula Historical Site. I visited it a long time ago, but I really want to go again. It is such a touching place. However, it seems like [Atatürk’s words about the ANZAC soldiers who died there](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/apr/20/ataturks-johnnies-and-mehmets-words-about-the-anzacs-are-shrouded-in-doubt) may have been misattributed. It’s not implausible since he is the single most misquoted person in history (I think, maybe along with Einstein).
Do you have some famous cases of misquotation or someone from your country who is frequently misquoted?
I stumbled upon some writings by a Finnish philosopher. It was about a certain Finnish verb related to being, how it described a rather unique state of being not found in Indo-European languages and cultures, and what all that meant. This lead me to some work a Norwegian psychologist had done in the 70s about how language affects the way we think, and how some cultures may have markedly different patterns of thought based on their language. His main thing was about Finnish as well, and the difference between Finnish compared to Swedish and Norwegian.
I find stuff like this very interesting. Finnish has only been a written language for roughly 500 years, so anything before that is largely lost to time. Where words come from, where the people come from even, nobody could write any of it down. So it’s very easy to get lost in it, to get caught in the idea that there is some esoteric truths buried deep in this mystical historically oral culture that only vaguely hint at their existence through weird verbs suggesting an asubjective partly forgotten state of being.
Some writings by this philosopher seemed to make sense to me, some seemed a bit dubious. I saw somebody describe him as an “anti-philosopher”, apparently he has abandoned academia, and another wrote “it is not a surprise that his philosophy-hero is Diogenes the Cynic, the father of all edge lords”, which seems to be a dig at his credibility. There was a lot of stuff about European modernity, capitalism, et cetera, brought here by the colonisers, and so on. It’s like borderline bonkers. Not quite on the level of works such as The Key to Kalevala by Pekka Ervast, or whatever Ior Bock hallucinated, but I think it has a whiff of that.