I met my wife while I was shrooming That was 23 years ago We’re still together

He’s mad that there’s a move afoot to sell seized Russian assets and use the proceeds to fund Ukraine’s defense. The signal is: if you buy these things (yachts, real estate, whatever) Russia will see to it as a matter of official policy that you will fall carelessly out of a high window somewhere. The quiet part said out loud, tho, is that Russia now claims that anything it ever held, whether as the USSR or imperial Russia, or the current Russian Federation, is theirs forever no takebacks.

Basically the read on this should be: Russia is having trouble laundering rubles into non-sanctioned currencies (those foreign assets are basically conduits to do that) and is now saying essentially that if they can’t keep our offshore loot they’ll just seize all of Eastern Europe and demand tribute from their vassal territories

…of course, if Russia could actually do any of that it already would have

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

Where the first speech absolutists at?

They’re buying social media platforms and censoring speech they don’t like

I seem to recall that when southern states wanted to prosecute Martin Luther King, Jr for “hate speech” on the theory that his calls for equality amounted to anti-white racism, the way SCOTUS dealt with that was by punting on the question of what hate speech is or isn’t.

By taking the ‘hate speech’ stick away from states, the high court effectively ruled that Nazis had the right to rallies under the rubric of free speech. It was this optimistic dithering on the court’s part (surely, the way forward is free speech and everybody will use that in good faith right?) that is part of why the US’s stance on hate speech diverged from that of Europe and the commonwealth

well after all lots of Russian oligarch yachts have already been seized, so… might as well melt them down for slag and heave them at the Russians

B/c if Israel just stops like it’s trendy to demand, then Hamas will regroup and go again

That’s an interesting prediction I’d like to see tested, honestly. What if, (hear me out here) the only thing keeping air in Hamas’s sails is the perceived need to resist the occupation? Hamas isn’t and never has been popular among Palestinians, in much the same way that Likud is really only politically relevant because someone needs to take a firm hand with Hamas.

Also, if Israel doesn’t stop, like it hasn’t for the last 70 years, then Hamas will regroup and go again, right?

Honestly this has all the same energy of the ‘defund the police/thin blue line’ rhetoric we’ve seen sail through our political spaces; if you listen to the law-and-order narrative the logic is that force must be escalated until those thugs learn their lesson, while that seems to drive up protest movements and that in turn gets the thin-blue-line crowd frothing for cops to use real bullets instead of rubber bullets and tear gas.

There was peace between Jews and Palestinians before the state of Israel began its occupation and settlements. The beef here isn’t religious or cultural, the issue is the occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians of their family homes. One thing Israel could try (that it hasn’t) is not doing that

good bot 😊

I’ve been watching the media and our politicians both-sides the issue in ways that seem contrived to ensure that the occupation and genocide will continue without interference by anyone in a position to do anything about it, especially my own elected representatives and officials.

Reading South Africa’s Application instituting proceedings in the World Court document myself reminded me how thirsty I’ve been to hear from anyone serious about the matter. It’s very human-readable, cogent even- well worth the read.

Corollary data for cyclist fatalities shows a similar increase over the same timeframe https://bikeleague.org/new-fatality-data-for-2021-shows-increase-in-bicyclist-deaths/

Of the 1,230 bicyclist deaths in 2021, 853 died in motor-vehicle crashes and 377 in other incidents, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/bicycle-deaths

One interesting corollary to the bicameral mind theory is that our brains have multiple sentient centers to them- that in turn might explain that feeling of struggling with a decision and being able to see the same thing from more than one point of view. It also explains why different parts of the brain light up in different situations

While it’s nice to hear that Biden is ‘under pressure’ about this, I wish it took something less than obvious genocide and a near-global consensus that these are crimes against humanity for any sort of media to register it.

I honestly don’t understand why Biden is so hawkish on this; it’s not like giving Israel carte blanche will get him support from Republicans, and doing it really does appear to divide the left enough to hurt him politically.

Apparently Russia called for a meeting of the UN Security Council to complain about Ukraine fighting back

LOL no fair when you fight back, it’s violence! /s

Well, good.

LOL the article says Russia lost 1 submarine but are you kidding? They’ve been promoting their surface vessels to submarine status

Russia getting mad about it when Finland beefs up explains why Finland (and most of the rest of Eastern Europe) have been beefing up and applying to join NATO.

Russia having tantrums when their neighbors strengthen their defenses

“We regard you being able to defend yourselves as an aggressive act, so we will now threaten you”

Finland has spent the whole time since the Winter War building up defenses. They’ve got hardened shelters capable of holding the whole population of major cities and their military doctrine is entirely designed around defending itself against Russian forces. If you think Ukraine has been messy for Russian forces to invade, Finland would be an unmitigated disaster for them.

Clickbait title. It means arty can’t be spent on groups of 2 or 3 troops, not that Ukraine’s artillery is “Forced to stop shelling Russians”.

This will be spun in Russia to give Russians the sense that they are winning, and that will make like politically that much easier on Putin.

Moral of the story: when you invade a sovereign country, make sure you have political influence over its allies, enough that if they win political control in their election you can prevail on them to cut funding to support those allies.

Also moral of the story: don’t vote for Republicans, they’re the modern version of Nazi sympathizers in the run-up to WWII that “didn’t want the US to prolong the war in Europe” and that really just meant they wanted to live in a world run by fascists like them

It shouldn’t be, but enough people are either ignorant that it’s a racket or they profit somehow by it that nobody says anything, or they’ll call you a damned commie if you openly question powerful people like that