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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • This is a real advertisement from an Israeli property development firm advertising their plans to develop and sell land in the Gaza Strip to Israeli settlers after the Israeli military evicts or kills off the current residents.

    This is the heart of the evil of these Israeli settlements. It gives the people of Israel an incentive to oppose justice for displaced Palestinians. After all, if the Palestinians regain control of their territory, what will happen to these settlements? Is the land going to be returned to the people it was taken from? Oh, no no no! You can’t allow that to happen! You paid hundreds of thousands of shekels for this house!

    Say what?? The Palestinians want compensation to those whose lands and houses were taken from them? Oh, no no no! You can’t allow that to happen either! Your taxes will go up! Why should you, an innocent taxpayer, have to foot the bill?

    And even to the Israelis to whom none of this directly applies, they probably know someone to whom it does, or at least the sympathise more with their fellow countrymen than with Palestinians, who for decades their government has been describing as less-than-human savages who would kill them and their family and grind their bones to make their bread. Someone’s going to be losing a million shekels either way, better those Palestinian terrorists than a fellow Israeli, right? Or so the thinking seems to go.

    Propaganda and decades of indoctrination and dehumanisation are a powerful thing. Is it any surprise why even seemingly normal Israelis hold such extreme views regarding Palestinians?














  • The media will always exist and people will always base their decisions on the information they receive in the media. This is inevitable in any society with the degree of complexity we have today. It is just not possible to gather all the information ourselves about any but the most personal of topics. That is why free, unbiased, and independent media is an extremely important part of liberal electoral democracy. And for the greater part of the past two centuries, this is what we more or less had. Yes, major media outlets have always been somewhat controlled by the upper class (whether in the form of media companies or local media magnates), but until quite recently, most of them didn’t care about using those outlets as propaganda pieces; they just cared about continuing to collect their subscription money, which is likely the best-case scenario for privately owned for-profit media. It is astonishing that this system lasted as long as it did.




  • For those confused, “virgin” olive oil means olive oil that has not been mixed (“adulterated”) with other substances. “Extra virgin”, in the United States, refers to olive oil that has the lowest acidity content and the strongest olive flavour, and this comes from the freshest and most quickly-pressed olives. Olive oil that is merely “virgin” is still unadulterated but may be used from olives that are not in their prime in terms of ripeness or have been sitting around for a few days, and thus has a higher acidity level.

    “Refined olive oil” is virgin olive oil that has been chemically refined to produce a more stable oil which generally doesn’t have the taste of virgin olive oil nor the health benefits.

    “Pure olive oil” is a mixture of mostly refined olive oil with a small amount of virgin or extra-virgin olive oil.

    “Light olive oil” is olive oil that has been adulterated with other, cheaper oils.