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On December 03 2025 06:49 mindjames wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2025 06:31 blomsterjohn wrote:There are plenty of areas within this topic/thread where one could take a nuanced form of perspective, but this one really aint? So it's just very strange to see you seemingly insisting on dying on this hill so aggressively You came into the discussing, about children getting killed over a very very low and dubious bar, saying: On December 02 2025 11:15 mindjames wrote:
I haven't read the last page or two but I will caution anyone attempting to have a good discussion right now to try and avoid the 1-Liner Brigade. The amount of substantive and charitable engagement you can expect from them is very limited. Heads up. Followed by a stream of - if I may - very much "low quality / unnecessarily smug / unproductive posts". It's hard to even gauge what your actual point it, and why you felt it so necessary to insert it (whatever it is) here and now. I'll spell it out for you because you don't seem to get it. Every single time I've come here to try and argue my actual positions, I received a barrage of unbelievably bad faith, snide and smug responses, sometimes replying with a single line, to posts that I put a lot of thought and effort into; often completely mischaracterizing what I said or reducing it to absurdity, and very often attempting to scold me with performative moral indignation. So I decided to follow the example of this website's mods: never answer any question directly, never engage substantively, always make the worst assumptions about the other guy's position, and always make sarcastic jokes. By calling out my posts today as low quality you are LITERALLY MAKING MY POINT. Just look at what happens when literally 1 more person deliberately acts like this. The whole board becomes smug one-liners. You guys all participated in this, I didn't have to do much at all. To be clear, I'm happy to engage with people like Cuddly, Ryzel, or anyone who don't seem as ridiculously partisan as Nebuchad or as abhorrently bad faith as Kwark. I promise to actually do that once they either stop defending Kwark's behavior or agree to push for better discourse in this thread, hopefully moderated by a responsible adult. Until that happens, you can't point at my posts and go "hey that's unproductive" when I'm literally mirroring people whose behavior you haven't called out before, perhaps because their zingers were to your liking.
With all due respect, I think your playbook is a little dated there. It was always stupid to call me too partisan to discuss, because I could always have sided with Hamas and I never did, so I was always less partisan than the people who sided with Israel and defended their ethnic cleansing for 1+ year. But especially today that the public opinion is shifting toward my opinion and away from yours, I don't think you're really ready. The other day on Bluesky I was making an unrelated comment to someone, I said "I don't think you're really in favor of this, cause if you were you would also be in favor of bombing Israel today and I know you're not", and I got targeted for this by like 50+ people who yelled at me that actually, they were in favor of that.
So, you know, maybe prepare for the world where I'm a moderate. It might be coming.
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Aight, I think I'm just about bored with this. I'll be around. All the best.
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Probably best for you (and discussion) is if you want to post about the topic, do it on the US pol thread. There is more people there (and some are not) so it is a little better. Or open a blog and than you can moderate the discussion yourself. I get that neither are ideal, but here is not changing.
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Bombing Israel just seems to be consistent with how rogue states are usually dealt with for decades. Israel even did it themselves in Syria to prevent their new government from having access to more advanced military equipment. Thus, destroying Israel's military capacities and eliminating dangerous military and political leaders seems a reasonable thing to do. Any innocent civilians are just the usual unfortunate casualties of war, like in any other case. Not dealing with Israel this way would seem like favouritism. Such intervention would, of course, be harder considering all the weapons given to Israel, but acknowledging that should mean that other rogue states are correct in arming themselves, even with nukes.
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Northern Ireland27464 Posts
On December 03 2025 11:45 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2025 06:49 mindjames wrote:On December 03 2025 06:31 blomsterjohn wrote:There are plenty of areas within this topic/thread where one could take a nuanced form of perspective, but this one really aint? So it's just very strange to see you seemingly insisting on dying on this hill so aggressively You came into the discussing, about children getting killed over a very very low and dubious bar, saying: On December 02 2025 11:15 mindjames wrote:
I haven't read the last page or two but I will caution anyone attempting to have a good discussion right now to try and avoid the 1-Liner Brigade. The amount of substantive and charitable engagement you can expect from them is very limited. Heads up. Followed by a stream of - if I may - very much "low quality / unnecessarily smug / unproductive posts". It's hard to even gauge what your actual point it, and why you felt it so necessary to insert it (whatever it is) here and now. I'll spell it out for you because you don't seem to get it. Every single time I've come here to try and argue my actual positions, I received a barrage of unbelievably bad faith, snide and smug responses, sometimes replying with a single line, to posts that I put a lot of thought and effort into; often completely mischaracterizing what I said or reducing it to absurdity, and very often attempting to scold me with performative moral indignation. So I decided to follow the example of this website's mods: never answer any question directly, never engage substantively, always make the worst assumptions about the other guy's position, and always make sarcastic jokes. By calling out my posts today as low quality you are LITERALLY MAKING MY POINT. Just look at what happens when literally 1 more person deliberately acts like this. The whole board becomes smug one-liners. You guys all participated in this, I didn't have to do much at all. To be clear, I'm happy to engage with people like Cuddly, Ryzel, or anyone who don't seem as ridiculously partisan as Nebuchad or as abhorrently bad faith as Kwark. I promise to actually do that once they either stop defending Kwark's behavior or agree to push for better discourse in this thread, hopefully moderated by a responsible adult. Until that happens, you can't point at my posts and go "hey that's unproductive" when I'm literally mirroring people whose behavior you haven't called out before, perhaps because their zingers were to your liking. With all due respect, I think your playbook is a little dated there. It was always stupid to call me too partisan to discuss, because I could always have sided with Hamas and I never did, so I was always less partisan than the people who sided with Israel and defended their ethnic cleansing for 1+ year. But especially today that the public opinion is shifting toward my opinion and away from yours, I don't think you're really ready. The other day on Bluesky I was making an unrelated comment to someone, I said "I don't think you're really in favor of this, cause if you were you would also be in favor of bombing Israel today and I know you're not", and I got targeted for this by like 50+ people who yelled at me that actually, they were in favor of that. So, you know, maybe prepare for the world where I'm a moderate. It might be coming.
Yeah, interesting point. I’m feeling that, right now in real-time. I’m finding myself getting more and more friction for being too pro-Israel these days.
Just for context my dad’s side of the family have a good few very politically active, very left wing folks amongst it. My aunty and grandfather especially. Which included being active in British Labour before it got co-opted, in unions, and in the BDS movement.
Regulars here can no doubt draw the link to my own politics haha.
Anyhoof, yeah Palestine was on my radar, I went to the odd solidarity event or whatever in my teens (I’m now 36, argh!). I wasn’t chaining myself to railings or anything, but it was something that concerned me.
Of such cohorts, I’d say the broad consensus vaguely (and my position) was, it’s complex, Israel shouldn’t do shitty things, Israel has the power so gets critiqued more. But that broader Israeli society across the board wasn’t monstrous, and it was a matter of pressuring on a few points and maybe change was possible.
Nowadays it feels a bit different. October 7th and the response henceforth has radicalised a lot of people. Either people in the cohort I previously describe into being more vehemently anti-Israel outright, or, and probably more impactful, a whole new cohort of people into play. People who have no truck with any kind of nuanced discussion of anything on the topic.
I’m not sure this really matters politically as per this conflict, I doubt it moves the needle much. I don’t see international opprobrium ever rising to a level that supersedes the US’ basically unconditional support
It is probably a pretty shitty time to be a reasonable Israeli online though. Just as we see it’s a pretty shitty time to be a reasonable Russian.
One can see the tides shifting towards Israel being a complete pariah state in the hearts and minds of many. Even people who initially supported reprisals after October 7th, many eventually flipped given the reality of how that was conducted. At least in my locale, the main pro-Israel holdouts mostly hold that stance because they really hate Muslims.
It’s up to Israelis to fix, and I know many absolutely are trying their damnedest and it’s always important to recognise that too.
But, this became a bit more rambly than I intended, that central point yeah, 100%. Folks like you, myself seem to be rather quickly becoming moderates, and it’s not for changing, it’s things getting more extreme around us.
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United States44393 Posts
I consider myself pretty strongly on the side of Israel having the right to defend itself but that doesn’t apply when Israel is doing things that aren’t defending itself. I’ll happily defend Israel when they do something remotely defensible, but they need to meet me halfway.
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On December 04 2025 05:38 Legan wrote:
Bombing Israel just seems to be consistent with how rogue states are usually dealt with for decades. Israel even did it themselves in Syria to prevent their new government from having access to more advanced military equipment. Thus, destroying Israel's military capacities and eliminating dangerous military and political leaders seems a reasonable thing to do. Any innocent civilians are just the usual unfortunate casualties of war, like in any other case. Not dealing with Israel this way would seem like favouritism. Such intervention would, of course, be harder considering all the weapons given to Israel, but acknowledging that should mean that other rogue states are correct in arming themselves, even with nukes.
I question the effectiveness of bombing a country that is engaged in far right activities in an effort to make it less far right. History tells me that almost all the time the opposite happens, the far right of the country is galvanized by this exterior force attacking them, and then they become more popular, not less.
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On December 04 2025 08:10 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2025 05:38 Legan wrote:
Bombing Israel just seems to be consistent with how rogue states are usually dealt with for decades. Israel even did it themselves in Syria to prevent their new government from having access to more advanced military equipment. Thus, destroying Israel's military capacities and eliminating dangerous military and political leaders seems a reasonable thing to do. Any innocent civilians are just the usual unfortunate casualties of war, like in any other case. Not dealing with Israel this way would seem like favouritism. Such intervention would, of course, be harder considering all the weapons given to Israel, but acknowledging that should mean that other rogue states are correct in arming themselves, even with nukes. I question the effectiveness of bombing a country that is engaged in far right activities in an effort to make it less far right. History tells me that almost all the time the opposite happens, the far right of the country is galvanized by this exterior force attacking them, and then they become more popular, not less.
It would, of course, be as effective as it has been before. I don't think Israel's being far right has that much to do with effectiveness. Results would probably only come after widespread destruction like before. Bombing would just be a consistent way to deal with things. However, I doubt that people would realise that bombing campaigns have been the wrong way to deal with problematic states. Much more likely that this campaign would be viewed as uniquely wrong and a failure instead of reflecting on the past ones.
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On December 04 2025 07:29 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2025 11:45 Nebuchad wrote:On December 03 2025 06:49 mindjames wrote:On December 03 2025 06:31 blomsterjohn wrote:There are plenty of areas within this topic/thread where one could take a nuanced form of perspective, but this one really aint? So it's just very strange to see you seemingly insisting on dying on this hill so aggressively You came into the discussing, about children getting killed over a very very low and dubious bar, saying: On December 02 2025 11:15 mindjames wrote:
I haven't read the last page or two but I will caution anyone attempting to have a good discussion right now to try and avoid the 1-Liner Brigade. The amount of substantive and charitable engagement you can expect from them is very limited. Heads up. Followed by a stream of - if I may - very much "low quality / unnecessarily smug / unproductive posts". It's hard to even gauge what your actual point it, and why you felt it so necessary to insert it (whatever it is) here and now. I'll spell it out for you because you don't seem to get it. Every single time I've come here to try and argue my actual positions, I received a barrage of unbelievably bad faith, snide and smug responses, sometimes replying with a single line, to posts that I put a lot of thought and effort into; often completely mischaracterizing what I said or reducing it to absurdity, and very often attempting to scold me with performative moral indignation. So I decided to follow the example of this website's mods: never answer any question directly, never engage substantively, always make the worst assumptions about the other guy's position, and always make sarcastic jokes. By calling out my posts today as low quality you are LITERALLY MAKING MY POINT. Just look at what happens when literally 1 more person deliberately acts like this. The whole board becomes smug one-liners. You guys all participated in this, I didn't have to do much at all. To be clear, I'm happy to engage with people like Cuddly, Ryzel, or anyone who don't seem as ridiculously partisan as Nebuchad or as abhorrently bad faith as Kwark. I promise to actually do that once they either stop defending Kwark's behavior or agree to push for better discourse in this thread, hopefully moderated by a responsible adult. Until that happens, you can't point at my posts and go "hey that's unproductive" when I'm literally mirroring people whose behavior you haven't called out before, perhaps because their zingers were to your liking. With all due respect, I think your playbook is a little dated there. It was always stupid to call me too partisan to discuss, because I could always have sided with Hamas and I never did, so I was always less partisan than the people who sided with Israel and defended their ethnic cleansing for 1+ year. But especially today that the public opinion is shifting toward my opinion and away from yours, I don't think you're really ready. The other day on Bluesky I was making an unrelated comment to someone, I said "I don't think you're really in favor of this, cause if you were you would also be in favor of bombing Israel today and I know you're not", and I got targeted for this by like 50+ people who yelled at me that actually, they were in favor of that. So, you know, maybe prepare for the world where I'm a moderate. It might be coming. Yeah, interesting point. I’m feeling that, right now in real-time. I’m finding myself getting more and more friction for being too pro-Israel these days. Just for context my dad’s side of the family have a good few very politically active, very left wing folks amongst it. My aunty and grandfather especially. Which included being active in British Labour before it got co-opted, in unions, and in the BDS movement. Regulars here can no doubt draw the link to my own politics haha. Anyhoof, yeah Palestine was on my radar, I went to the odd solidarity event or whatever in my teens (I’m now 36, argh!). I wasn’t chaining myself to railings or anything, but it was something that concerned me. Of such cohorts, I’d say the broad consensus vaguely (and my position) was, it’s complex, Israel shouldn’t do shitty things, Israel has the power so gets critiqued more. But that broader Israeli society across the board wasn’t monstrous, and it was a matter of pressuring on a few points and maybe change was possible. Nowadays it feels a bit different. October 7th and the response henceforth has radicalised a lot of people. Either people in the cohort I previously describe into being more vehemently anti-Israel outright, or, and probably more impactful, a whole new cohort of people into play. People who have no truck with any kind of nuanced discussion of anything on the topic. I’m not sure this really matters politically as per this conflict, I doubt it moves the needle much. I don’t see international opprobrium ever rising to a level that supersedes the US’ basically unconditional support It is probably a pretty shitty time to be a reasonable Israeli online though. Just as we see it’s a pretty shitty time to be a reasonable Russian. One can see the tides shifting towards Israel being a complete pariah state in the hearts and minds of many. Even people who initially supported reprisals after October 7th, many eventually flipped given the reality of how that was conducted. At least in my locale, the main pro-Israel holdouts mostly hold that stance because they really hate Muslims. It’s up to Israelis to fix, and I know many absolutely are trying their damnedest and it’s always important to recognise that too. But, this became a bit more rambly than I intended, that central point yeah, 100%. Folks like you, myself seem to be rather quickly becoming moderates, and it’s not for changing, it’s things getting more extreme around us.
Israel and the middle East is just a clusterfuck, there's no real good solutions here.
Historical, social, religion.
Some of the most impossible things to negotiate around.
At least with ukraine and russia, many things are clear.
Russia invaded ukraine without good cause (yes even if ukraine is actively suppressing russian culture and influence, there are many other means to raise the flag).
The outcome is just gonna be both sides lose enough and sign some deals to wrap it all up. Money, power balance, land etc
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I'll call it brave when they do something consequential like close its embassy in Israel or resource and staff an embassy in PA or Gaza outside of Israeli military protection. That would be brave and come with big costs. Eurovision is a pop culture event that will continue without a minority of nations leaving the contest.
Contrast that with activist nations on the other end. Germany's leader said the reverse: that they would boycott should Israel be excluded (Merz). France, Austria, and Australia spoke against excluding Israel. The words and the cultural protest are just too cheap to matter.
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On December 06 2025 01:38 dyhb wrote:I'll call it brave when they do something consequential like close its embassy in Israel or resource and staff an embassy in PA or Gaza outside of Israeli military protection. That would be brave and come with big costs. Eurovision is a pop culture event that will continue without a minority of nations leaving the contest. Contrast that with activist nations on the other end. Germany's leader said the reverse: that they would boycott should Israel be excluded (Merz). France, Austria, and Australia spoke against excluding Israel. The words and the cultural protest are just too cheap to matter.
Unsurprisingly, public broadcasting TV channels do not have the power to close embassies.
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Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in.
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On December 06 2025 01:46 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2025 01:38 dyhb wrote:I'll call it brave when they do something consequential like close its embassy in Israel or resource and staff an embassy in PA or Gaza outside of Israeli military protection. That would be brave and come with big costs. Eurovision is a pop culture event that will continue without a minority of nations leaving the contest. Contrast that with activist nations on the other end. Germany's leader said the reverse: that they would boycott should Israel be excluded (Merz). France, Austria, and Australia spoke against excluding Israel. The words and the cultural protest are just too cheap to matter. Unsurprisingly, public broadcasting TV channels do not have the power to close embassies. It was strange to hear public broadcasting TV decisions described as "brave actions," but maybe you disagree or thought the description was meant ironically.
On December 06 2025 01:51 Nebuchad wrote:
Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in. I gather that member nations are tightly divided on the issue, given how many voted to not put Israel's participation up to a vote. Shouldn't the default be that if they win, it will be because people voted for them to win, and the core audience won't change in any major way? I gather the EBU already fixed state-sponsored campaigning for this contest. At least that's what I read in the articles I found.
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On December 06 2025 01:51 Nebuchad wrote:
Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in.
I mean we can hope it happens but I think the chance is low. 
But yeah, the guys running Eurovision have no idea how to handle this and probably hate the entire situation.
If they were a bit creative they could do something outside the box. Change the inclusion criteria for Israel to "all recognized entities inside the territory of Israel" and recognize Palestine for Eurovision as long as Israel participates.
100% chance of Israeli boycott, per the rules Palestine can't compete and the problem is solved. :D
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Isn’t Eurovision for Europe anyway? Seems like you could get rid of them pretty easy even if you didn’t want to take a stand.
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On December 06 2025 05:09 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2025 01:51 Nebuchad wrote:
Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in. I mean we can hope it happens but I think the chance is low.
Oh we do? :'/ I kind of like Eurovision, obviously most songs aren't good and the contest is silly but I have a few on my playlist and you couldn't create stuff like this anywhere else
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On December 06 2025 06:18 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2025 05:09 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:On December 06 2025 01:51 Nebuchad wrote:
Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in. I mean we can hope it happens but I think the chance is low. Oh we do? :'/ I kind of like Eurovision, obviously most songs aren't good and the contest is silly but I have a few on my playlist and you couldn't create stuff like this anywhere else
It's mostly a joke but they push it pretty excessively in Sweden. Like 5 competitions on the size of what most countries do for their 1 and then a final on top of that.
Even if you try it's hard to completely screen out the media coverage. Plus we win a lot and it costs a ton of money to host the damn thing.
I would not mind them toning it down a bit.
Isn’t Eurovision for Europe anyway? Seems like you could get rid of them pretty easy even if you didn’t want to take a stand.
Yeah but we don't want to lose Australia which is also technically not part of Europe. :D
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Northern Ireland27464 Posts
On December 06 2025 05:32 Billyboy wrote:
Isn’t Eurovision for Europe anyway? Seems like you could get rid of them pretty easy even if you didn’t want to take a stand.
Germany, and I think some others said they’d pull out if Israel got the boot, so it wouldn’t be pain-free in that sense.
I mean I’m personally less than invested in Eurovision, but it is quite a big deal to many folks I know.
I’m not sure of other nations outside of Spain, I know it’s not just a case for them that they’re not competing, but also not broadcasting it. Or at least, the traditional broadcaster ain’t, so there’s a potential commercial hit there for Eurovision.
Last 2 points weren’t in response to you but didn’t think it worth making two separate ones
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Norway28911 Posts
On December 06 2025 03:08 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2025 01:46 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2025 01:38 dyhb wrote:I'll call it brave when they do something consequential like close its embassy in Israel or resource and staff an embassy in PA or Gaza outside of Israeli military protection. That would be brave and come with big costs. Eurovision is a pop culture event that will continue without a minority of nations leaving the contest. Contrast that with activist nations on the other end. Germany's leader said the reverse: that they would boycott should Israel be excluded (Merz). France, Austria, and Australia spoke against excluding Israel. The words and the cultural protest are just too cheap to matter. Unsurprisingly, public broadcasting TV channels do not have the power to close embassies. It was strange to hear public broadcasting TV decisions described as "brave actions," but maybe you disagree or thought the description was meant ironically. Show nested quote +On December 06 2025 01:51 Nebuchad wrote:
Eurovision is just run by stupid people. Israel is quite likely to win any Eurovision contest it enters because of how people vote + likely manipulation of the televote. If Israel wins the contest, Eurovision is completely over, their core audience will leave over it. Any vaguely competent organization would have excluded Israel purely out of self-preservation before boycotts came in. I gather that member nations are tightly divided on the issue, given how many voted to not put Israel's participation up to a vote. Shouldn't the default be that if they win, it will be because people voted for them to win, and the core audience won't change in any major way? I gather the EBU already fixed state-sponsored campaigning for this contest. At least that's what I read in the articles I found.
The thing about the voting is that you can vote for a country/artist, but not against a country/artist. If there are 30 competing nations (I dunno) and 10% of people give a vote of political support for the Israeli artist and 90% are voting for 'not Israel even if they are the best', then those 90% end up being spread out across different countries/artists while Israel gets a huge boost even though you might have a huge majority that is 'opposed'.
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EPT
