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Discussion of Israel/Palestine

Just recently had to break it down in a group because it's been flaring up, figured a post would be nice.

This may seem like a Jewish specific topic, but it is important for non-Jews to know as well.

Zionism vs Anti-Zionism.

First of all, if you're a non-Jew it's best to identify with neither as for non-Jews is almost always antisemitic. (And yes I mean both).

This is a one of the biggest bones of contention in the Jewish community and is absolutely a loud argument right now due to current events. Worse yet, it's generally so because of a mix of misunderstandings and extremism.

Zionism
Originally this was the belief that the only way Jews could find some stability and safety would be to form a Jewish state. Once the state was formed, this turned into rabid support for Israel. For the milder of them, it basically boils down to patriotism... for the extremes it's nationalism

The loudest and most well represented of Zionists, however, believe basically that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic, even by fellow Jews.
(How can this be antisemitic for non-jews? Short answer without derailing: Nazis are often Zionist)

Anti-Zionism
Originally this was opposition to the creation of modern Israel, though each person had their own wildly varying reasons.

After the creation, many Anti-Zionists became Zionists. For the rest it mostly transformed into minimizing and addressing the damages caused by the creation of the state (ie. the occupation of Palestine). Many do dream of the potential of dismantling the state, but don't see it as feasible because creating a new humanitarian crisis to solve another isn't an acceptable solution.

They're generally painted by Zionists as if they want to abruptly end the state without addressing the crisis it would cause. (As such even mild Zionists often believe Anti-Zionism to be inherently antisemitic)

(Non-Jews can criticize Israel, but being/identifying-as Anti-Zionist is pretty much reserved for Jews; the exception being victims of Israel)

#IsraelHamasWar #Israel #Zionism #AntiZionism #AntiZionismIsNotAntisemitism #Hamas #Judaism

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Shiri Bailem
Discussion of Israel/Palestine

@wboucek @Gary @Charlie Stross @jimkennedy the problem fundamentally is the specificity.

If you're specific to Israel it's impossible to divorce yourself from the antisemites without being a Jew. So the only real alternative is to call out the behavior.

It also addresses hypocrisy because many will call out Israel on it's bullshit, but completely ignore it when other countries do it.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Discussion of Israel/Palestine
@Shiri Bailem
I'm definitely an anti-zionist. Jews and Arabs and everyone else who calls that area of the globe home should be equally free to live their lives without oppression etc. Civilians don't belong in military prisons even if they are Palestinian. Etc, etc.


Nothing like making a small mistake that knocks all your servers offline for 10 hours... dear god that was slow...


I made an oopsie


My apologies to everyone for the long extended outage yesterday.

For background, 2 of the hard drives in the storage array this site is using have gone bad. I got replacements in and set to work migrating storage.

Unfortunately I was overconfident in the process as I had never actually needed to perform such a migration before, let alone in a live environment used by others.

I made assumptions in how the tools would operate in swapping out the drives (I used 'pvmove'...) and didn't realize that the tool I selected would lock the entire filesystem until it was done. (it took ~10 hours to transfer a single disk...)

This was made worse by the fact that the second replacement drive was DOA (it actively prevented the system from booting, so I spent a couple hours troubleshooting that before I realized I hadn't knocked something loose... the system was basically just rejecting the new drive).

There's sadly more downtime to come before this is resolved *but* it should be drastically shorter. Next time I'll be using a different tool to transfer without locking the system, so the downtime will just be 2 reboots (1 to put in the new drive, 1 to take out the old).

The replacement to the replacement drive will be arriving on Tuesday.






Dear lord I can't win lately... NAS went down and I basically had to kick it to get it back up, likely related to a dead disk...

Here's the tally of my environment:
* 2 Proxmox servers
- 1 server failed, I need to send it in for a refund under the protection plan
- I bought a server to replace it already... that server came with a busted ram slot meaning it's already on degraded performance (need to refund it, but want to get a replacement before I send it off...)

  • 1 old desktop running as a NAS
  • 1 hard drive is throwing non-critical block errors, threatening to fail... I got the warranty exchange set up already but...
  • 1 hard drive failed entirely after setting up that warranty exchange and now I don't have the parity to spare a drive, so I need to spare drives before I can start exchanging drives (those drives should arrive on Saturday)

And in all of this... spending way too much money I really shouldn't be spending at all...

And before someone thinks I'm throwing around a few K here... everything I'm getting is renewed, which is probably part of the problem but I sure as hell can't afford new. (Proxmox servers are around $100 each, drives around $45 each)

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Oh, and the NAS going down is critical because those $100 boxes (a) don't have enough disk space for everything and (b) it's how I'm maintaining the ability to high(-ish) availability transfer between the two nodes (this saved me when the one proxmox system died).

Those are tiny form factor systems, but they have room for a second hard drive. I need to get a couple of hard drives to drop into them so they have better local storage, afterwards I can set them up as ZFS and use proxmox's features to sync the drives between the two nodes... that way they're not relying on the nas for anything that's not just large.



Reduced Performance / Reliability


One of the servers went down from hardware failure, thankfully since I run this across multiple boxes with failover it means the site is (obviously) still up.

It might occasionally get a little spotty on connection and especially on performance until that server gets replaced as it means the remaining server is a tad bit overloaded.

It'll probably be a few weeks unfortunately as I don't have the spare funds to pre-purchase a replacement (the protection plan I purchased will cover it, but I've got to mail off the unit, wait for the money, then wait for financial stresses to pass enough that I can order the replacement... then a good week or two delivery time after that)



Short Planned Maintenance Tonight


My apologies if this is inconvenient, I opted to do it on shorter notice without a set hour because (a) there's not a lot of activity on the server and (b) I'm really impatient.

I'm doing a hardware upgrade that requires rebooting the network storage backend which will bring down everything for a short time. It should take well under 30 minutes to do the hardware swap and most of the downtime is just going to be the database starting back up (which often takes in the range of another 30 minutes).

As part of this I'll also be deploying some software updates that require a reboot to take effect.