It's a pretty straightforward argument; I'm not sure why it seems so difficult for you to understand.

Because--unlike free speech--those are not essential to freedom and democracy.

Care to answer my questions?

Everybody has a right to free speech, and free speech frequently requires anonymous speech. This is why the protection of journalists' sources is so important, and why principled journalists are willing to go to jail to protect them.

You yearn for the end and couldn't care less about the means. But there are also those who couldn't care less about the end, but yearn for the means.

How can you distinguish between the two? And which do you think best describes the parties behind this global push to de-anonymize the Internet?

Which is obviously why "Free Palestine" marchers regularly show their solidarity with the Germans genocided by Poland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...

Free Danzig! Down with the settler colonialist genocidal state of Poland!!1

If Israel learned from them and creatively used all means available to them to kill every human in Gaza that they could reach, this conflict would have been definitively resolved years ago and the accusations of genocide would actually be true.

But if y'all keep spuriously accusing Israel of committing genocide when they're not, and Israel is "doing the time" anyway, they might just decide to actually "do the crime". As I said, it would certainly resolve the conflict.

So good work! Keep it up! The more you repeat the lie, the more likely you are to turn it into truth.

Once they have a state, the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank will finally have defined borders and a single sovereign. And history shows they can be relied upon to launch another genocidal war on Israel more or less immediately.

Then it will be a war between two nation-states, not a nation-state vs. an unaccountable terrorist organization that pretends to be a proper state when convenient.

The Israel vs. Palestine conflict will then fall neatly into the framework of Westphalian nation-states and when Israel proceeds to utterly defeat Palestine, demands their unconditional surrender, kills all who resist, annexes their territory, and forcibly re-educates any who remain (post-WWII style), it will all be 100% kosher according to customary international law.

How about a healthy native birth rate and relatively low levels of immigration?

But to create that many strategies, you're gonna need a huge EU bureaucracy. So better create a strategy to reduce the growth of EU bureaucracy, too.

But I find these arguments a bit tired. I'm not familiar with Sati but I know the Indian subcontinent has been civilized, if not united, for thousands of years. The British brought different values and culture, for sure, and a plethora of benefits. But I can't agree that they had a "civilizing effect" on a people who already lived in a civilization.

> Empires can have a beneficial and civilizing effect on peoples

You can't trot out Kipling's "white man's burden" without at least acknowledging the historical and racial context around it. And in my opinion, justifying imperialism because it's civilizing a lesser people is a sure route to the cruelest forms of domination via chauvinism and white supremacism.

I think it would be better justified as a sort of corporate merger: Your company organization sucks and we think we can get better outcomes for both companies if we put your company under our management.

> The British Empire was a huge force in halting the slave trade.

This is true. At the dawn of the industrial age, those pioneers of industry outlawed their chief competition in the most noble, high-minded, and selfless act of compassion in human memory.

> The Spanish—allied with surrounding tribes—put an end to the murderous and psychotic Aztec elite

Also true. Of course, they then proceeded immediately to set about extorting and exploiting the locals.

I said CS PhD students have been doing this forever, and you dismissed that as techbros patting themselves on the back. But once I pointed out that LaTeX was created by Serious People, apparently CS PhDs aren't techbros any more.

So which is it? And who exactly do you think is a self-congratulatory techbro here?

It is indeed indisputable that education is not well-run here. But it's not going to be easy to fix. For starters, nearly 100% of the people I talk to about this issue believe, like you, that the problem is Prop 13 and underfunded schools. I don't know where this idea came from but it's remarkably pervasive and consistent across demographics.

But the biggest problem IMO is that the education administration mafia has a stranglehold on our one-party state and things are broken just the way they like it.

No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).

> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate

Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.

It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.

> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think).

This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0].

California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop 13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards schools with more disadvantaged students.

In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that period[3].

[0]: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/

[1]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...

[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...

[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/

I think that would go a long way.

> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster

Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98, which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to "the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]

Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years 2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which further increases per pupil funding." [0]

Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13) and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth adjustments.

Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly doubled "super COLA".

The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.

The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel. Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop 13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?

[0]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...

[1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp

[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...

[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/

I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all.

What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs.

Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...

> A speech by Raul at the University of Havana on 20 April [1959], however, attacked the United States as an "enemy of the Cuban revolution," in sharp contrast to Fidel's concurrent speeches during his visit to the United States.

- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R0027000...

But don't worry, Fidel dropped the mask:

> Cubans are admired for their spirit, for their deeds, for their courage, for their enthusiasm, because the Cubans are a people who, when they are told "it is necessary to meet to respond to aggression, to show the enemy of Cuba that the people are with the revolution, to show that the people have no fear, so that they can see that the people are ready to carry out their pledge of "homeland or death"!" (SHOUTS)

- https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/resources/declarationofhavana...

> And that is also our position on Laos, and North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. (Applause) We are a small nation, not too far from the shores of the imperialist homeland. Our arms are eminently defensive. But our men, wholeheartedly, our revolutionary militants, our fighters, are prepared to fight the imperialists in any part of the world. (Applause) Our country is a small one; our territory could even be partially occupied by the enemy; but that would never mean a cessation of our resistance. > But the world is big, and the imperialists are everywhere, and for the Cuban revolutionaries the field of battle against imperialism takes in the whole world. (Applause) Without boasting, without any kind of immodesty, that is how we Cuban revolutionaries understand our internationalist duty. That is the way our people understand their duty, because they realize that the enemy is one and indivisible; the one who attacks us along our shoes and on our land is the same who attacks the others. Hence we say and we declare that Cuban fighters can be counted on by the revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth. (Applause)

- https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1966/01...

> The enemy had to be shown and the enemy had to be taught that there can be no fooling around with the people. The enemy had to be shown that there can be no fooling around with the revolution. [applause] The enemy had to be shown that a people cannot be offered with impunity, [applause] that a people cannot be threatened with impunity. [shouts of `No"] And this image, this image is what they dreamed of destroying, the image of what the people are, the true revolutionary people, the proletarian people, the working people, the peasant people, the combatant people, the student people. [prolonged applause, indistinct chanting] > Perhaps they thought the revolution has weakened and you can see what weakness of the revolution they have uncovered. [rhythmic applause, indistinct chanting] You can see what type of a revolution they have found. That is why it was necessary to wage this battle. > As you know, over recent months our party and our people have been waging a tenacious and selfless struggle for exigency, to overcome inefficiencies, to overcome difficulties. This work was being done quietly and insistently for months. It could be said that our revolution, our people and our party were devoted to this work and to productive activities, especially the sugar harvest and the planting [of sugarcane], coping with the problems of the diseases of tobacco and sugarcane and the swine fever which mysteriously, mysteriously appeared almost simultaneously in our country. We were tackling various problems of our revolutionary process. We were struggling for development, struggling to improve everything within our material capabilities, and preparing for the congress of our party. We were involved in that task. But, why does this situation emerge? It is not a coincidence; it is not a coincidence.

- https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1980/05...

> 2) Are you sure it's USA's interests, not just a few very rich people from USA?

First of all: This is just splitting hairs. A few very rich people from USA are in charge of US policy. And a few very rich people from Cuba and Iran are in charge of Cuban and Iranian policy.

When I say that Cuba and Iran are USA's enemies, I mean that in the geopolitcal sense. I don't mean that all citizens/residents of Cuba and Iran are enemies of all citizens of the USA.

Second: Significant fractions of both those countries' citizens are--unlike their few very rich policymakers--quite friendly to the US. This encourages US policy of regime change.

The misalignment of interests you point out cuts both ways.