Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I've heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you've had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you're 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you're 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it's easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I'm happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it's quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I've heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating "if I really have to use it, there's no reason why my family should go deaf in the process", heh).

Imo it's the latter. It didn't start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don't care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.

Personally I say good riddance, but I'm biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.

including Pizza; Frozen meals

I have to wonder why that is or if it applies to everything in this category, because some frozen food is literally just normal food, only frozen. I recently bought and ate two cheap frozen pizzas and took a look through their ingredients to see what kind of crap I'm ingesting. One of the pizzas contained the same ingredients that a homemade pizza of a similar type would have, with only one exception, which was a tiny bit of citric acid. Harmless. The other contained added modified starch in the tomato sauce, and surprisingly a bit of dextrose in the dough and on the pieces of chicken meat. That is not great, but since it was listed in the last place and ingredients have to be sorted by the amount present in a descending order, I know that there was less dextrose than salt in the dough, which means the amount was quite small. Still, no preservatives, colorants or flavor enhancers.

There is one difference - making a homemade pizza takes me about an hour because there's a lot of prep involved, whereas this is done in 15 minutes, so I eat it more often. But I have no need to restrict caloric intake, so that's not an issue for me either unless there is some other way in which this is unhealthy.

You severely underestimate the support for Israel outside of your bubble.

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

Deimos is a dumb piece of shit. Evidence is that Tildes is somehow still invite only after like five fucking years.

Why do you think this is a bad thing? The best discussion board that I've been a member of by a wide margin (not mentioning names, it's all in Czech anyways) has been invite only for 20 years now. It's a tried and true way to limit eternal september as long as the community is active enough to not die out, which hasn't happened yet on Tildes.

Well the rules are pretty clear in that you can call other people's ideas stupid, but not other people stupid. Personally I prefer spaces with hands-off moderation and focus on free speech, but those generally don't work in a general discussion platform without any implicit gatekeeping to keep idiots away, so I'm giving this style a chance and so far the results have been far better than most places on Reddit on Lemmy.

Did you mean "social democracy"? I don't think there's actual socialism anywhere there - that's still capitalism, only with a strong welfare system, which has downsides, but it's obviously viable at least in some societies.

I'm mostly staying in an invite-only board in my local language that's been functional for like 20 years now and is smarter than Reddit has ever been, but I'm also spending some time on Tildes, which is honestly not bad. Like lemmy, it has a pretty strong leftist bias (which is a problem for me because not being from US or western Europe I don't really fall into their left-right division), but it's much smarter and less toxic, so disagreement without too much bullshit is possible.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I've been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don't think it had much in common with what we call "terminally online" today. I associate "terminally online" with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that's omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the "terminally online" problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of "online feminism", that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

I don't think you understand what I mean, so I'll try to rephrase.

Knowing that bad shit is happening and accepting that it's bad shit is one thing. Wallowing in it and pointlessly arguing about it (not normally discussing it in a measured way) is a separate thing that is not necessary and helps neither the ones participating nor the community in general. It's possible to do it differently and many are capable of it.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I'm not from the US, so I don't really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I'm closer to the left), but it's nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it's normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

The problem is that the people OP complains about generally don't want to see anything else and pointlessly argue with you if you do it. Personally I'm slowly ending my Lemmy experiment and posting somewhere where the majority cares and is capable of normal discussion.

This is the problem though. It's fine to mention them and be informed, but there is no need to wallow in how horrible the world is and shut down anybody who disagrees, which is what OP is complaining about (and what IME really is happening in news-like and political threads). Those are two separate things, the second one is a choice and there are places where it doesn't happen.

Again though, my point is that Hamas as an entity wouldn’t exist if Palestinians were considered regular citizens and not forced off from their own property.

This may be true and it would be good to consider this when deciding what to do after Hamas is gone, but it doesn't change anything about current situation. The fact is that thinking a military checkpoint would filter out terrorists is incredibly naive, and whether Israel cares about the lives of civilians or not likely wouldn't change this particular issue at all.

The people IDF is targeting are Hamas leaders or "officers", who need to communicate a lot and sometimes even show in public, so they can be tracked with enough time. Boots on the ground soldiers are a completely different problem and Israel doesn't even have the resources to track all of them because there are so many. How is that not obvious??

You are extremely naive if you think that a military checkpoint would solve this problem. Egypt was not able to stop Hamas terrorists and their supplies going back and forth through the Rafah border crossing to commit acts of terror in the Sinai peninsula for example. And that was during "business as usual", not in a situation where potentially hundreds of thousands of people would likely have to go through.

Radical kindness will specifically tell Hamas "yes, brutal terrorist attacks work, keep doing them". That is unfortunately not an option. It's also just a fantasy because it would understandably never be supported by Israeli population for this reason.

I'm interested in seeing alternative solutions that could actually work and be realistically implemented, but outside of understandable positions like "ease off with the fucking bombing and do more work on the ground" that don't change the goal of what is being done I have not seen any.