Posts by JLV

Apache OpenOffice, the Schrodinger's app: No one knows if it's dead or alive, no one really wants to look inside

Re: Reminder for macos users

@79.95 per year

There, fixed that for you ;-)

Google Cloud chief joins Saudi shindig exodus over journalist's worrying disappearance

Yup, cuz rogue dudes can really go in and of consulates at will and abuse people inside. No problemo. Happens all the time, I tell ya.

Why did he feel he had to make that comment? He even says in it he doesn’t know. Why not wait and keep his mouth shut? just once?

I feel bad for normal Republicans - the level of stupidity coming out of the Orange One’s mouth and Twitter at any given time is massively embarrassing. Y’all deserve better than him, or Cruz, and shouldn’t have to hold your nose while voting just because your primary voters lack judgment.

Hunt for Red Bugtober: US military's weapon systems riddled with security holes – auditors

Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Network-enabled Operations

Geez, folks, it's not like any potential peer adversary of the US ever does DDOS or cyberattacks. Assymetrical warfare is only about IEDs and terrorists, any honorable enemy will slug it out toe-to-toe, as planned by the geniuses who brought us the F35.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

McLovin FTW

AI's next battlefield is literally the battlefield: In 20 years, bots will fight our wars – Army boffin

Re: Humans will always have the most important battlefield role

I expect the next insurgency war - a la Afghanistan - to show how these systems can be gamed into killing civilians. Losing both hearts and minds and political support in the home country. In that context, pervasive small recon drones allowing easy identification of rebels would be more productive, IMHO.

Forever Peace, by Haldemann, explores just these concepts. Although, strictly speaking, it also has more in common with our current use of killer drones.

Scifi is probably a good place to get insight. Unfortunately, Military SF is a well established subgenre with many cliches and little military relevance (think Soldier of Fortune in Spaaaace, mostly).

There are only few authors who write insightfully (in the miltary sense) in it. Haldemann, Linda Nagata - The Red, Last Good Man. Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision (tho a bit over the top).

That's about it. Anyone recommend others?

Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials

This is an interesting story for sure. The same way the Ken Thompson compiler hack pointed the way. Who looks at their compiler or it source? Seriously? At some level you have to trust, until you've learned not to trust anymore.

Did anyone get hacked? The way Bloomberg described it? Quite possibly not. Howeve, not that much of the denial is theoretical in nature - as in, it couldn't possibly be done. Instead we are told that the particular claims are weakened by directly affected parties stating it did not happen. Vigorously. Certainly, the various military industrial complexes have little to gain by worries about their supply chain - there's enough budget overshoot on certain projects that going back to square one on your chips may finally get the frogs to jump out of the water.

I fear that it will take a while before the dust settles down and we are less in the dark. From 100000' up it looks no less credible than the idea that chip branching optimizations would open up a large, and theoretically hard to plug, hole in silicon-level security. At some gut level, it makes an evil kind of sense, that million-transistor chips and motherboards might spare a few to do sneaky things.

None of this means that I have the least inkling of a clue. Unlike the Bloomberg scribes or whomever fed them a massive line of BS.

We are indeed living in interesting times.

The secret history of Apple's Stacks

Re: Desktop clutter

Ouch, but did they commit the ultimate sin and include spaces?

Sync your teeth into power browser Vivaldi's largest update so far

Re: More RAM

disagree. In a developer context, if your browser is constantly grabbing RAM it’ll eventually force more important processes, like your database and application servers to cache to OS virtual memory.

Ditto if you’re Photoshopping or whatever.

I certainly don’t care if I have to wait 0.5 secs or so longer, sometimes, in a broadband context. There’s really no excuse for >1GB usage, like Firefox and Chrome are wont.

Go, Vivaldi, go. Your low RAM use is much appreciated.

(Vivaldi v1.15, been using as secondary browser for 1-2 years. I only use Chrome for CypressIO testing nowadays).

If you add up Firefox + helpers in the RAM usage I usually quickly get to 1.5G. Ditto same exercise on Chrome.

Vivaldi and helpers usually stick to 500MB. Really no idea why the difference with Chrome's bloat on the same code base.

If I had NoScript there, I might make it the primary. And, yes, I might pony up a one time payment to support. (Paypal or Amazon pay, rather than spaffing my CC on another site)

Mega-bites of code: Python snakes into 1st place for cyber-attacks

Re: So, is this a surprise?

APL. Once upon a time I worked thru an agency. You know, the ones that always claim you are an expert and privately tell you to shut up if you disagree.

One of my colleagues got sent to a gig, as, if not an expert, at least knowing APL.

She was back by lunchtime. Seems she innocently expressed surprise at the custom APL keyboard - “what’s that for?”

Re. Python, I believe it’s not only simplicity, it’s that it's a language intended for close interaction with the OS. A lot of it seems BASH-inspired and considerable attention has been given to both calling into C, launching processes and interop in general.

Contrast that with Java and Javascript. The first keeps itself pretty aloof of non-JVM considerations. And the 2nd is deliberately sandboxed in its most common form.

Ruby could probably be used too. Chef and Puppet’s job is to manipulate and introspect systems, after all.

PERL would work, but hackers also want to read their code after writing it.

As much as I like Python, things like this make me think twice about it becoming supported in browsers, a la JS, or in Office, as a VBA replacement. Neither of those 2 vectors really needs a boost in attack capabilities.

Oracle pours a mug o' Java 11 for its addicts, tips pot of Binary Code License down the sink

eh, eh, I do know, and appreciate, regex - and often see them underperforming index or pos-based string manipulations... Not surprising, if you look at the state-machine underpinnings of regexes. They’re a brilliant tool, for particular cases.

As a wit once said:

“You have a problem. Which you’re going to solve with regex. Now you have 2 problems.“

Strip blanks with regexes cuz the #1 language took 23 years to have String.strip??? Do you know how error-prone and perf-stupid that is?

“Hahahahaha “

Open-source software supply chain vulns have doubled in 12 months

he he. we agree on something. on debug mode django dumps out stack traces to the browser. all daemon-visible server env variables too, for extra transparency, though there’s i believe a regex to scrub out ‘.*(secret|password).*.

django 101: debug = True ’s only for dev. if someone’s too dumb to know that it’s like someone not knowing you should always assume a gun is loaded.

This makes sense. Yes, it's open source, but in practice they're much like binaries - many install scripts have active payloads on install - you have to trust the code before seeing it (though you could browse what's _hopefully_ the same code on GitHub).

Open source collaboration is too valuable, and even high quality closed source is not sufficiently superior wrt security, for us to seriously roll back in time.

But this trust by default reminds me a bit of when we were still exchanging EXEs and active VBAs in Outlook. It was only a matter of time till someone got hurt.

What gets my goat is when StackOverflow questions on how to do something simple in Python, JS, Chef, Ansible, Django get answered with "oh, don't worry your pretty little head, install package XYZ". Who cares if the code you'd need to write yourself would be <20 lines vs installing a package that's 4 yrs old, has 1, unknown, author, and only 200 downloads?

As one Microsoft Windows product hauls itself out of the grave, others tumble in

Re: Wait until the last sentence

on the Mac, the you can then fire up Preview.

Command-N pastes your clipboard as a png. Preview then provides an annotation mode allowing you to quickly draw arrows and text - good for quick and dirty UI notes.

And the screengrab function also has a terminal command, ‘screencapture’.

Got any ecsta-sea? Boffins get octopuses high on MDMA – for science, duh

an alternative to sacrificing a virgin?

for the next time Lord Cthulhu awakes.

A spot of Python in your Azure automation? Step right this way, sir

Re: Python 2 support

it relies very heavily on multi-field attrgetter/itemgetter from the operator module. Could be that was optimized.

besides async, 3.7 has cut function call overhead by 20% supposedly

FWIW 3.x has been outperfoming 2.7 for a while (3.5+ ?) in many use cases.

https://speed.python.org/comparison/

Re: Python 2 support

Yes. I'm still on 2, but did a lot of prelim porting work to go to 3 (which went surprisingly smoothly).

I have some heavily optimized code that joins large data sets from different sources. It's only about 250 lines of code and I've tried hard to wring any performance I could out of it. 3.6 surprised me by cutting Python2.7's time pretty much in half. Supposedly 3.7 would be even better.

MS is nice to support Python, but doing 2-only is an odd choice. Maybe they rely on Fabric, whose main implementation is also currently 2-only?

Deliveroo to bike food to hungry fanbois queuing to buy iPhones

I am really bemused at this sudden Instagram adulation of the avocado on toast thingy.

Might I however suggest (it tastes waaaay better than it sounds):

- crushed ice

- shot of espresso-strength coffee

- generous dollop of sweet condensed milk

- avocado. make sure it isn't overripe.

- for extra credits add a shot or two of bourbon or dark rum.

Blender all. This is a play on Vietnamese coffee.

Tech to solve post-Brexit customs woes doesn't exist yet, peers say

Re: The answer is...

Actually, Virtual Reality seems to have been more relevant to the original question.

Yes, my coat, I know.

Man cuffed for testing fruit with bum cheek pre-purchase

()()

Bootnotes Buttnotes

FCC boss slams new Californian net neutrality law, brands it illegal

Awww dont the last natural plants on Earth in a soon to be decom'd orbiting USS Valley Forge Korean war aircraft carrier, due to budget restrictions, beat a fairly run of the mill King adaptation? Really?

As someone who loves a lot of King's books.

Raising you an Altered Carbon

Re: On track to get fired

it’s pretty harsh when one’s cheering for Trump to fire someone as a clever move.

as opposed to gloating at another example of El Trumpo’s “management style”.

+1+1

Rollerball I get. but did you mean Silent Running?

States' rights! States' rights!

except when it doesn't suit us.

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

Re: I blame the source code management...

He, he, it's a bit more involved than that. I don't recall seeing whether Linus thought the kernel community had acted in good faith or not, but he's the one who had advocated Bitkeeper so he worked out an alternative.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2670360/operating-systems/linus-torvalds--bitkeeper-blunder.html

and, yes, this article was written before git came out.

Re: @Steve Davies 3 Don't let the namby-pambys run the Kernel, Linus!

+1, but, IMHO, you can achieve the same results more dispassionately.

"Your code is inadequate, badly designed, has repeatedly caused problems and we will not accept your contributions anymore"

(feel feel to prefix with, "Dear Mr. Poettering,".)

If you add a few F-bombs, even if they are well-justified, that detracts from the message. "Oh, yeah, Joe, he's always a bit colorful, ain't he?". The polite version is a more effective professional-level torpedo, because it is all about the code and the person delivering it, not about the gatekeeper's conduct. Note that it is not even "only about the code", but also about the person's work. As it should in egregious cases.

In the case of Poettering, Linus has never hidden his dislike of P's contributions but has still not managed to keep it from creeping into, and coupling (tech-wise) heavily with much of Linux. Perhaps a more stick-to-the-point approach, less liable to be brushed off as temperamental, might have kept systemd in its place (i.e. limited to being a _humble_ service manager). I don't know. I do know even Linus' uncompromising position did not avoid this regrettable outcome.

The new CoC is pretty short and quite fluff-free. It would be refreshing to see something like it replace many other projects' tedious CoC.

However, I do wonder one particular line of the CoC, under the examples section:

"Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks"

"insulting/deregatory" seem well-aimed at Linus' occasional outbursts and liable to whack him if he steps out of line again. I wonder if we, as Kremlin-watchers of old, can infer a palace coup.

Linus is probably among the top dozen or so people that have achieved major technical changes in the last 20 years. He's shown, with git, that he isn't a one trick pony and can truly innovate. I hope that he can take this gentle remonstration, remain intransigent when needed while remaining polite and continue his excellent work.

If he gets sidelined, then I fear we've lost more than we've gained, despite the kernel contributors' right to be treated in a civil manner.

Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms

Apologies

Haven’t paid enough attention to this severe atmospheric disturbance in a warm water individual consumption container, but...

Is the line being drawn at _not_ breaking user code? Possibly by not touching API or by aliasing master/slave to umbrellas and whatever? I get the sense, from the blurb about APIs, that this is mostly doc-level, but...

Also, whatever the motivation for this, it would be best to put determination of adequate, preferably industry-wide, replacements as a much-preferred prereq. Perhaps ‘subordinate’ for ‘slave’?

Otherwise we’ll end up w stupidly unclear euphemisms up the wazoo. Umbrellas indeed.

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

Re: My hovercraft is full of eels

Google translate:

> Laisse tomber ta culotte Sir William, je ne peux pas attendre l'heure du déjeuner

Deep L:

> Lâchez votre culotte, Sir William, je ne peux pas attendre le déjeuner.

Which brings me to a very important question. When going from a language with no/few familiar/formal pronouns forms, like English, to a language that is picky about them like French (or, worse, Korean), should the computer assume familiarity or not?

Sir William implies a certain formalism, IMHO, whereas drop your panties implies familiarity.

Re: What's the problem here?

You are aware, of course, that your query has a number of syntactical errors which would preclude its use by even the most permissive parser ;-)

Re: What's the problem here?

Why not, if you care about gender equality, just use `she/her` instead of `he/him` on occasion? Perhaps 51% of the time, according to demographics. 36% of the time as prescribed by BLS. 99% of the time because you feel like it. That's what I do, 1/4-1/3 of the time.

No one is going to step on your toes for doing so, you can easily call them out as a sexist for insisting that a generic customer/computer user automatically be assumed to be a man. And, IMHO, you are indeed calling into question why that assumption should be codified in the first place.

Instead of insisting on pretend neutrality why not go all the way and just promote female presence?

Were your CIO to chastise you for it, you could easily tell her off.

Case solved, without me having to mangle my own speech in a use that seems mandated by people who like to tell us what to think and how to say it. I respect, somewhat, the intent behind using `they` but find its actual use awkward at best and symptomatic of people who doth protest too much.

Re: Correct translation

Waitaminnit... it’s almost as if you’re not fully sharing the outrage here.

Silicon Valley CEO admits $1.5m wire fraud: Bouxtie boss forged signatures to investors

"worth more than $100bn in America" ??? inquiring minds want to know

100000000000 / 300000000 => $333.33

I know gift cards are a big deal and I also guess it's a market that could be disrupted. But do you really mean to tell me that each American spends, on average, about $300/year on gift cards? Or is the combined market cap of the main actors $100B? Which is a very different number.

Otherwise, great article about gullibility, fluff pieces and the mendacity of some bad actors.

make all relocate... Linux kernel dev summit shifts to Scotland – to fit Torvald's holiday plans

Re: Better option anyway.

David Johnston

+1 read the wiki entry on him. Very few people died in that eruption. Not because it was small - I’ve visited the site - that mountain decapitated itself. And it is a big mountain. Forests got flash broiled 30km away.

No, Johnston and others got the governor to _force_ an evacuation, weeks in advance. Very unpopular, stupid nanny government stuff. Until St Helens blew and it saved thousands.

Something to ponder about in these times when being an expert is so unfashionable and anti vaxxers and alt facters claim oppression ;-)

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Re: Why not take it a step further..

I see it as part of a broader trend from some of the tech providers to make us more reliant on their technology by abstracting address information away and setting themselves up as the needed gatekeepers.

- iPhones will display actual phone numbers as little as possible, making their Contacts your crutch. I was really happy to get those back on my (late, regretted) BB10 phone. Gmail requires a few (simple) steps before it shows you the actual email addresses (and no it's not like the screen space needed optimizing).

- Windows now makes it difficult to see a directory's path in Explorer, unless you click on the address bar to show it. Mac's Finder has always more or less privileged that behavior. Windows is now extending that to programs as well, which are more easily searched for than pinned.

Letting alone the Cortanas, Siris and sundry other AI "assistants".

- Chrome is now doing that with the URLs.

If, visually, you can't see where things are, then it makes average Jane more leery, and less capable, of leaving their existing phone/browser/desktop provider and experimenting with alternatives.

In some ways, this is beneficial, by making a computer somewhat less complicated to use. But it's not just done for our best interest.

So, 'Marketing', may not be far off or whichever department retains behavioral experts on user retention/lock-in.

For some reason this reminds me of Windows Explorer's "clever" choice not to trouble us with those, pesky and unnecessary, file extensions.

Which hasn't made life that much easier and has had a number of wholly-expected security effects.

Hopefully, like in Windows, you can tweak Chrome's settings to disable this behavior.

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

Before you go all "clever" shooting down relativity because of this article (which starts out by saying it's an illusion), this Youtube explains this type of illusion. It's not hard to follow, though the exact mechanism in this instance is going to be different than that in the video (the presenter says there are different classes of superluminal phenomena).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=IsEDigUHsOQ

Trainer regrets giving straight answer to staffer's odd question

Re: My rule on tools:

"197 pieces" sounds like Home Depot's wares. Starts falling apart on the first bolt it sees.

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

>the same menu location that it is in Office.

Menu? Office?

Mozilla changes Firefox policy from ‘do not track’ to ‘will not track’

Totally +1.

I've installed Cookie Autodelete and am learning to work with it. It basically frags a page's cookies as soon as you leave it (including going to another page on the same site, I think). You can whitelist. A bit annoying at first, but not dissimilar to the handholding I need to do with NoScript, except that most of the times the full-on frag doesn't break anything.

Re: It's about time

>Safari (Doesn't exist on non-Apple platforms anymore.)

In for a penny, in for a pound, eh? Besides being incorrect about Firefox, you realize that Safari could have quite a bit in common with Chrome, at least in older code, as Chrome and Safari both used Webkit until 5-6 years ago. Which itself came from KDE's Konqueror, IIRC.

It doesn't take rocket science to turn a menu back on permanently. Easily done with Firefox. Edge on the other hand has no menu option that I can recall.

Vivaldi looks very different from Chrome and I quite like it, despite never having warmed to Opera.

I still blame the whole mess on Jony Ive @ Apple for the dumb flat look. Coincidentally that was also when the macs really started going downhill as far as serviceability and upgradeability went. Just as noxious an "influencer" as Sinovsky IMHO.

Full-on skeumorphism is distracting and pointless, but a modicum of shadows, colors and 3D buttons/bars can enhance UI affordance significantly.

As far as this article goes? Good job FF!

Windows 95 roars once more in the Microsoft round-up

and how was that Win 95 ported?

https://github.com/copy/v86/blob/master/Readme.md

check out the underlying language for the LOLs. Rodney Dangerfield.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Re: losing club gear access

I'm French originally and I can "put myself in the position of others" well enough to understand Europe playing hardball on other negotiation points, thank you very much. Galileo-related squabbling however seems highly counterproductive.

What you don't seem to be capable of doing here is to realize that, in objective terms, it is in Europe's best military interests to have its military well-integrated with UK system. Because of the relative importance of the UK's armed forces in Europe's defense capabilities. Replace "UK" with "Italy" for example and I would not offer this opinion.

There has already been a precedent for this type of screw up and it was the lackluster integration of French military systems to NATO gear, once France left NATO. That, I believe, has been somewhat corrected, but it has hampered both French operations and weapons sales.

There have also been enough friendly fire incidents in modern wars that the troops themselves probably don't see incompatible satnav systems as a genius idea.

That has very little to do with Brexit per se. Nor does it have much to do with giving potential adversaries access to one's sensitive military secrets, unless you'd stretch your point to say that the UK should now be considered unfriendly.

losing club gear access

Far from me to say that Brexit wasn’t a fine bit of democratically-decided foot targetting.

However, as the UK military is -carriers aside - quite a lot more veteran and capable than the next big European combat fish, France, the EU choosing to cut off Galileo access as a matter of principle seems rather unwise.

One would almost suspect immature political peevishness or the lobbying of other European arms suppliers.

Or both.

No do-overs! Appeals court won’t hear $8.8bn Oracle v Google rehash

Re: No Trolling

Without in any way supporting Oracle here, Sun had already pulled a bunch of shady tricks wrt “standard, open” Java for marketing purposes while asserting control by any means possible.

Anyone remember Sun’s Java compatibility tests, where they basically decided who’d get annointed or not? This crap went on way past the MS J++ sliminess that might have justified it in the beginning.

re copyright. code/implementation, by all means, depending on license. API - no way, that would have such a stifling effect on software innovation, would strengthen monopolies and cartels. and it fundamentally contradicts the stated purpose of _public_ ways to interact with software artifacts.

Who would benefit?

Cobbler feels the shoe-leather: An IP address is still not a human

what’s with Adam Sandler?

Granted, not the greatest thespian. Not a great challenger to Steve McQueen, Tom Hardy, Peter OToole et al. Never starred in a Kubrick, probably won’t be in the next Fincher, Villeneuve or even Tarantino.

But if it was him or a Tranformer movie, I’d know my pick. Ditto the latest installments of a certain Disney franchise. Click and Spanglish were even halfway clever but most of his movies, even if quite lowbrow are fine as formulaic un-intellectual comedies.

Seems kinda snooty to always pick on him. There’s plenty worse stupidity on the screen nowadays, including many that take themselves way more seriously.

Redis has a license to kill: Open-source database maker takes some code proprietary

Re: Jolly Good Journalism, El Reg.

Well, one argument between BSD/MIT/permissives and GPL goes like this. If you were to move from BSD to a freemium model of some sorts which restricted users' rights to some extent, you could.

If on the GPL, you could as well, provided you were the only contributor to date. Or got all your past contributors to agree to that move. Otherwise, you'd be in violation.

Where you see the grass as greener with that particular fence is entirely up to you.

BTW, I agree with AC "EDIT: technically they're not "closing source"" after reading the license @ https://tldrlegal.com/license/commons-clause

Unless the core Redis system remains unemcumbered, Redis becomes unusable. If this is for nice-to-have modules that mostly apply to big, special, fish, then no big deal, except that another fork could take over.

Re: Why....?

See, I don't fully subscribe. The article would be much better if we were told a bit more about the context rather than just citing critics.

OK, Redis wants to make money. We get it. So, what is going on?

What is Redis's license on their code? AGPL is mentioned, but the main github repo is BSD-3. Redis Lab modules are Apache. https://github.com/RedisLabsModules/RediSearch/blob/master/LICENSE. Is there any GPL anywhere? AGPL, by its nature, should have the topic of "giving back code to the community" covered, even for cloud vendors. Though it would do nothing for Redis' coffers.

What is the Commons Clause thingy and what does it do? How does it compare to the other licenses? How does it interact with GPL, or BSD, if applied to the same code? What is Redis biz plan and how are they transitioning the code (if it was *GPL*)? Are they respecting their contributors' rights? (yes, if BSD, possibly disputable if GPL, but we need to know more about Commons Clause). Is this a freemium deal where you need to subscribe to use the latest stable code but older versions are up for grab? Walled-off modules that will be pay-only? Dunno. Why should I agree/disagree with Google's stance here?

No, most of the extra info here is quotes from people who don't like the move, at length. I don't mind them quoted, but that's not the only side to this story. As we've learned from Github, having a massively popular OSS product/service does not magically make you immune to having to pay your bills and salaries and it behooves us to recognize that, unless you want to see more takeovers or disappearances of valued OSS ecosystems.

You want how much?! Israel opts not to renew its Office 365 vows

Re: I think you just put yours in the shredder

Terry, that is a very valid point. And I certainly would not deny that many people still hate Jews. Coming from Westerners, like me, whose culture enabled the Holocaust, antisemitism is vile (Arabs, currently, have IMHO more valid reasons to be less than happy with Israel).

But you also need to consider in your argument that, for many critics of Israel, applying the metric of whether we condemn Myanmar, Pakistan, etc is a red herring. Of course we do, but I also think some of those countries epitomize the Orange Buffoon’s “shitholes”. Would I expect any better of Pakistan (not Pakistanis abroad)? Saudi? Myanmar? No.

It’s like a teacher wondering why the kid spending his time sniffing glue isn’t getting differential equations. They don’t and teachers don’t expect them to.

Jews, and I am paying them a compliment there, we expect better from. They are smart, have contributed massively to Western culture and known the evils of (our) persecutions. Many of us have largely positive opinions of Jews.

We expect better from Israel. It’s like that good friend, not the glue sniffer, who massively sucks at math, despite being really smart. Embarrassing - you had much higher expectations.

When we don’t turn around and say “of course, Israel’s no worse than Sri Lankan Buddhist fundamentalists screwing Tamils after the war” that may be because that goes without saying and it would be flogging a dead horse. Do you want Israel human rights discussed on par with Uzbekistan’s? Thought not.

Automatically dismissing all criticism of Israel's human rights records wrt to the Palestinians, as only motivated by Antisemitism does the person arguing so little credit. It's also gradually losing its steam. Didn't say _you_ did, but it is a common avoidance mecanism.

I like Jews, still do, and would really prefer Israel, which is otherwise a largely admirable country, to regain its honor by negotiating in good faith towards a two state solution and treating Palestinians more fairly.