There’s always some chud who stumbles in from the wrong instance to say “No You!” whenever Israel commits a new war crime. I’m looking forward to hearing how you’re going to justify
I’ve learned to mentally prepare myself before reading comments and accept that some people will never fundamentally see me as a human being. And that’s fucked up but it’s something I need to understand to be able to explain the situation we’re in to those who are actually worth the time to convince.
Some people will look at photos of war destruction and maybe even feel sad about it. But it’ll never be their cities and communities, so they look at these photos and think it only happens to “those” countries. They’re countries “with war”, “probably because of terrorism”, essentially the “enlightened” understanding is that “these people are born to die from war”.
These people will never understand that the rubble they see on their screens was vibrant communities, places where people who watched the same TV shows and football matches as them lived. War victims aren’t a special type of human who exist only to suffer to make your news segments sad. I struggle to get across how normal these people are.
I think in part I used to be someone who thought this way. Lebanon isn’t Syria, Iraq, Palestine, it’s not an African country undergoing civil war, it’s not Serbia in the 90s and it’s not Haiti after a natural disaster. It hadn’t been any of these things since the early 90s. When I saw cities in Syria getting flattened on the TV it was sad but all those people were War People, not like us, couldn’t be us. (Situation is more complicated with Syria because at one point over a million Syrian people were displaced into Lebanon, a country with an official population of 4 million. I’m sure even the most accepting person of refugees could see how this is unsustainable)
The reason people cheer when Israel murders us is that they don’t think we’re people. It’s that simple. They think we’re destined for the slaughterhouse anyway and that we’re essentially terrorists for standing in the way instead of lying down to make the process easier on the Merkava’s suspension. Just look at that war footage! We are just blood for the blood god.
There’s nothing ironic about how every single person who has been murdered in this war who I personally know are people who hate the “terrorists” who they have been executed for “being a part of”. It’s how this works, it’s murder of normal people who are exactly like you and exactly like me. The cruelty has always been the point.
I’ve looked into wiring decent Ethernet through our walls, where the phone lines are. Wooden flooring isn’t very common here so pulling through the wall ducts that have dodgy AC cables and Cat-negative-1 telephone “cables” is the only realistic option. Personally I even think I’d like to run double Ethernet cables anywhere just so I can have flexibility. When I get my own place someday, the cable duct provisioning will be absolutely ridiculous, I’ve already promised myself.
The ducts are complete trash and it’s a miracle the phone lines even worked for so long. Our electricity is so goddamn noisy here that any Ethernet signal would be affected, meaning I’ll definitely need better cables and end up with worse speeds. So noisy that powerline Ethernet really sounds like a punchline. The WiFi isn’t great because the only place the AP/router has access to the phone line is right where it enters the apartment, which is from the elevator shaft - meaning a giant Faraday cage shields half the apartment from the WiFi. We’ve disconnected the phone lines in the walls because those are completely fried and have started to introduce so much noise that it’s audible on the landline and completely kills any synchronization with the phone center. Like it’s fucking bad. All that headache for 2-4 megabit unreliable DSL. Even for Lebanon, the perennially cursed paradise we call home, pretty goddamn bad.
I’ve looked into coax Ethernet, the problem is that every few years a bolt of lightning hits the TV cable network in my neighborhood and deep fries every TV that wasn’t manually disconnected at the start of the storm. Just awful. I suspect the cable integrity is better throughout the walls though. A lot of splitters though.
The best part? I live in a part of my cursed country where they’ve started connecting FTTH. And for some reason they stopped laying the cables mere meters from my building in like 2020 and just never bothered to keep going. And the fiber company has legitimately blocked every phone number I’ve since inquired from. I’m not joking when I say I’ve considered just suspending a thick thick optic (remember the lightning, there’s no grounding here!) SFP cable along the municipal power poles (let’s not discuss legality here, it’s okay, this is Lebanon habibi), putting a nice switch in a neighbor’s house, and just paying for their internet in return for making sure that one port is nice and snug.
I do think my best bet is (when the fiber finally arrives in 2097) some kind of mesh WiFi with no backhaul, or some kind of Ethernet backhaul that relies on routing the meatiest Ethernet cable I could find on the outside of the building.
Another alternative is paying out the absolute ass for a corporate Internet subscription, but microwave internet is susceptible to the weather, and the whole thing is just so much upfront cost that it can’t be worth it. Although maybe going that route five years ago would have been worth it.
Just awful. At least everyone’s on Netflix and short form video now so data caps have moved past the pathetic 20 and 30 GBs they were only a decade ago.
Counterpoint: I’ve probably saved a significant amount of money by having the odds overwhelmingly stacked against me setting off on my homelab journey. lol