I am talking about the two stories that Greta posted. I am checking her account because I felt you would be happier if I started doing that, and this is a consequence. I have no reason to think that you don't want me to check her Instagram account.
Any time that a sad thing happens to a group of people: "what if they were all very rich?"
What if Satoshi Nakamoto, who once controlled wallets that have 1.1m Bitcoins, were to give 0.5 Bitcoins to each person living in the Gaza Strip? At current prices, that would be $35k, which is 70% of the wealth of the average 'black' family in the US. A quick search says that a middle-class person in Nigeria earns around ₦280k per month. This is around US$200 (site quotes similar rates from central bank as from black market); the article quotes an exchange rate that would convert it to $155, even though the currency site shows minimal changes in exchange rates ($193 in early Dec 2025 when the article was written, $202 now).
Anyway, $35k per person would not make someone rich by US standards, but someone with that much would be rich in a lot of other countries.
But let's say that not only Satoshi Nakamoto, but other people gave cryptocurrency to people in Gaza, enough that all of them were rich (note that there are over three times as many 5-year-olds in Gaza as there are 50-year-olds, so that would be a lot of rich babies).
Would the way that people talk about Gaza change?
One of Greta's Stories is about people getting deported from Germany Sweden. I note that immigrants in Sweden are much more likely than native males to commit r***, and I feel like this is one of those cases where prejudice is good. Do immigrants who think that it's possible that someone they know might try to r*** someone do anything to prevent it? Is the importance of following laws, and not committing crimes, a topic that is frequently brought up in social interactions that immigrants experience? Or do immigrants just ignore the crimes caused by other immigrants, even when it leads to immigrants who didn't commit any crimes being deported?
But anyway, what if the immigrants who are being deported were rich, and possessed 10 Bitcoin each (worth US$700k)? Would it still be a story that's worth paying attention to?
Greta's other story is about Israel's torture of Palestinians.
I don't know if Israel does anything worse than what the US did, like in the Abu Ghraib prison. It probably is worse. But it's really just a consequence of war. US soldiers would joke about Iraqis, and use words like "ragheads" to depersonalize their enemies. This is really the kind of thing I don't want to say, and I'm only talking about it because Greta posted the story, which she wouldn't have needed to if you had shared the idea (doesn't mean I'm trying to get you to share it), but someone from my military unit mentioned how on the unit's first deployment, several years earlier, they had see through a night-vision device an Iraqi male doing illegal things with a donkey.
So I did a search for "has israel used conscripts to fight in gaza" and it showed this:
It's a premium article, but it leads with this, which seems to answer the question:
Sent into Gaza straight from high school, five young Israeli conscripts describe the brutal, exhausting reality of the war with Hamas – a world of despair, rage and crippling fear, with no end in sight
I still have open the NieR: Automata video that I linked in the previous post — I would have watched it if Greta hadn't posted any stories — and this reminds me of it. I didn't want to link an English version of the opening quote because the voice acting is worse (apologies to the English voice actor, it's just hard to convey some emotions in English when people's expectations are guided by beliefs that Japanese people would consider stupid, without being so rude or confident enough to actually say so), and the translation is also bad. The expression used, "yumi wo hiku":
2. To nock an arrow to a bow and shoot it; to shoot a bow.
3. To rebel, disobey, or defy. "We cannot afford to defy our parent company."
Consider it in the context of my previous post: people fighting. Rebelling, in this context, can mean not fighting, as 2B in the story of NieR: Automata encounters other entities doing, like in the forest. The English translation was just "kill".
Anyway: Russia is not sending conscripts to fight against Ukraine. It is of course mostly or entirely males who are doing the fighting (remember the female Ukrainian helicopter pilot who was captured, and held captive in Russia for a while?). Males also don't want to die, but when they do die, their comrades won't develop grudges as when a younger person, or females die.
A search for "how many female israeli soldiers killed in gaza" turns up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Gaza_war#Women_in_the_Israel_Defense_Forces:
In the October 7 attacks, 14 field observers from Battalion 414 at Nahal Oz base were killed, an unprecedented number of female field soldiers killed in battle. Seven field observers were taken hostage.
It does not seem likely that many females were involved in the subsequent 2-year war, but from the Haaretz article, it seems male conscripts, at least, were fighting. So unlike with Russia, where a lot of the males who joined for the fighting sort of considered themselves 'expendable' and were older, Israel seems to have more soldiers who are of an age where they haven't lived a normal life yet.
So, even if Israel's civilian casualties have been low, people still get upset. If what the US did in Abu Ghraib, or at prisons in other locations, was not as bad, it's just because the personnel there (not always military) hadn't experienced the same losses.
The US did have its drone strikes, that killed many civilians in Pakistan.
Anyway: remember when Lea Schlosberg said on Chirp Club, "no forgiveness for terrorists"? (Or something similar.) She said it like a statement, but let's treat it as a question. Both Israel and Palestine have been home to people who acted like terrorists. Israel's actions are public; other countries could do stuff to stop it, but don't. Some people might consider the rockets fired by Palestine towards Israel to be terrorist actions, even though they almost never cause casualties, but even if those don't count, Palestine does pay money to the families of 'martyrs': not planning and sponsoring terrorist attacks, but implicitly condoning and rewarding people who do.
So can the terrorists be forgiven? I want to say "forgive each other", but that would imply that they are all terrorists, and it's a controversial label.
Or is it time to finally try to end the blockade of Gaza, without first sharing the idea?
(I was going to say something about how the UN released a report that said THIS IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION and then everyone was like THE UN JUST RELEASED A LEGAL OPINION)
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