Dense Texas thistle colony

 

From April 22nd at the Wildhorse Ranch subdivision in Manor,
how about this dense colony of Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum)?

  

  

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The Oversight Board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is reviewing whether Facebook should keep letting users post slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” which have proliferated since October 7, 2023, after Hamas slaughtered 1200 people in Israel, torturing and raping many of them in the process, and continuing the mayhem by taking over a hundred hostages. In deciding whether Facebook should still allow such slogans or should ban them, the Oversight Board is soliciting public comments through May 21st. You can follow that link to submit a comment if you’d like.

A friend alerted me to this yesterday, and here’s the comment I left:

 

Many people repeating the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” have no idea what river and what sea they’re chanting about, nor what the implications of the chant are. The river is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean. The slogan means that Palestine will be free of Jews everywhere between those two bodies of water, which is to say everywhere that the modern state of Israel exists. Whether the Jews who live there now are to be “merely” expelled or outright murdered, the chant doesn’t specify. Either way, the fulfillment of the slogan entails committing millions of individual crimes.

Facebook has three choices. One is to do nothing and let users keep posting the slogan. That perpetuates the call for the expulsion or killing of the people in a sovereign nation, and is therefore not a just course of action.

A second option is to ban the slogan and all variants of it. That eliminates the particular call for the expulsion or killing of the people in a sovereign nation, but it comes at the expense of Facebook users’ desire to express themselves.

A third choice, and the one I recommend, is that whenever a user cites slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” Facebook should attach an explanation containing the substance of what I said in my opening paragraph. That way everyone who reads a post containing those slogans will know specifically what’s being called for: the commission of millions of crimes by expelling or killing the people in a nation. In order to do something about such a dangerous threat, we have to know that the threat is being made and who is making it.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman