Jimmy Carter has died

Rape of female prisoners by male prisoners is extremely rare overall because, thankfully, most prisons are still segregated by sex. However, in every jurisdiction that has decided to implement a policy of housing prisoners by self-declared "gender identity", this has - as everyone against such policy predicted - made the problem of sexual assault and rape in prisons worse, because this enables predatory males access to female victims, who are trapped in prison with these men.

This is why we have single-sex prisons in the first place, because of the inevitable harm to women, through violence, sexual assault, rape and unwanted pregnancy, that was committed against them by male prisoners in mixed-sex prison systems. Look up the work of Elizabeth Fry: she and other prison reformers extensively documented the horrors of prisons in Victorian England and in particular the awful impact upon women of being incarcerated with men.

Exactly the same is happening now, in the 21st century, because of these misogynistic "gender identity" policies that benefit males while deliberately ignoring the risks and harms inflicted upon women.

> Also Israel's Jewish population is made up majorly of people not tied to Europe / the Holocaust. Those latter are the minority.

The majority were largely refugees that were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world, so not sure that really changes anything.

> Again, a state built around one ethnicity that by its founding requires people of a separate ethnicity who were equally living in the same land to become stateless, that's wrong and should not happen.

Israel's founding did not require anyone to become stateless. The land was effectively inhabited by two separate groups that did not want to become one state, and rules by the British - then the British gave the UN the task of deciding what to do, and they suggested what everyone else who has ever looked at the problem has suggested, and what any five year old would suggest - split the land into two, and give one to each group. The Jews accepted this split - and the Arabs refused, and started a war to conquer all the area (and let's leave to the imagination what they would've done with the Jewish population in the area).

But, all of that is history at this point. I don't think it matters as much now - Israel exists and has existed for 75 years as a fully reocgnized state. It no more makes sense to talk about "it's wrong for Israel to exist" as to talk about "it's wrong for the US" to exist. Do we routinely look at any other country's founding and talk about them not making sense any more? Many of which were also founded based around ethnicities?

> Now, the Holocaust is nearing 100 years old, does the raison d'etre of the country even apply anymore and does it justify the current state of things which has not changed since then?

Countries don't need a raison d'etre to continue existing.

If by "current state of things" you mean the Palestinians having no state, I don't think anything justifies that. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to change that - multiple attempts have been made at a peace process that gets the Palestinians a sate, which the Palestinians have refused each time. By most surveys or interviews I've seen, most Palestinians do not want peace with Israel - they want Israel gone. And to top it off, the last 15ish years have seen Israel become ever more extreme right, partially driven by the Israeli left's total failure to create a peace with the Palestinians - so it's not like the Israeli side is encouraging peace at this point, in fact quite the opposite.

"Maybe more should be invested in education." Yes, and there's a reason why education continues to suffer when it comes to budget and resources. An educated populace is something nobody wants.

> Pro-Israel, as far as the government is, is inherently an anti-two-state-solution position.

I'm definitely pro-Israel and anti-the-current-Israeli-government. I think terminology-wise, if I said I were anti-US, most would not equate it to being anti-Biden or anti-Trump, but rather anti-the-country-itself. So I think saying "anti-Israel" when you mean "anti-the-current-Israeli-government" is a bad way to phrase it.

> How can there be peace with 2-3 million stateless people who have no way to defend themselves against a hostile nation?

1. They have militias. Much weaker ones than Israel, but not nothing.

2. Israel is not inherently hostile to Palestine, IMO. Hamas (the militia that supposedly doesn't exist?) invaded Israel on October 7th and ran around killing people and taking hostages. Had they decided to stay home on October 7th, there would've been no war.

Now, maybe the situation was intolerable before that - I don't think it was, but maybe. Either way, the way out of it was probably not to further prove to Israelis that they will never be safe with Hamas on its borders.

> You're talking about what Palestinians inherently "want", but that's not really related to peace.

Unfortunately, I disagree. Because the Palestinians have shown, again and again, that they have the ability and the willingness to inflict unacceptable amounts of damage on Israel. Plenty of Israelis want peace, or at least some semblance of it, with the Palestinians. Many sympathize deeply with them. As long as the Palestinians refuse to accept any peace, and insist on making Israeli believe that any territory they control will be used as a base to attack Isarelis more, Israeli will simply not give them territory.

> Peace exists when nations can deter each other.

I think this is both very bleak, and very wrong. The US has peace with the UK. It has peace with Zimbabwe. It has peace with Vietnam, despite a massive war with it. It has peace with Andorra.

None of these places can deter the US. But they're not actively threatening the US - so why wouldn't there be peace?

Peace can also exist when countries don't have a reason to threaten each other.

This is why, fundamentally, I believe the problem between Israel and Palestinians comes down to the Palestinians refusing to give up on most of the territory of Israel. There is a very obvious way to peace - simply agree to split the land along the borders that every agrees with, and... that's kind of it. The Palestinians have refused this again and again, and not only have they refused - they've ramped up the violence every time peace was being negotiated.

> Ultimately it will have to become one in Israel for the situation to change. No matter what Palestinians want, they don't have the firepower to change the calculus.

I agree that morally speaking, Israel must do all in its power to change the situation to arrive at peace.

But the Palestinians don't need firepower to change the calculus - that's the opposite of what they need. They need to stop using firepower to fight Israel, and prove that they will be willing to live side-by-side with Israel without trying to kill Israeli. If they laid down their weapons - the current war would be over tomorrow, and there'd be peace the day after.

It's still used in some projects. I remember seeing a deep dive into a net zero lodge (for vacationing) someone built just a few years ago that featured all of those: solar water preheating & PV on the roof, as well as heat pump HVAC/water heaters. Perhaps now it would be cheaper to just beef up the PV and active water heating but I'm sure they had their reasons at the time, at least.