P03 Locke

You imply that Obama had a direct hand in the decision. Instead, the US military fucked up, and Obama issued an apology.

That’s a far cry from writing an article recommending the bombing of Palestinian radio stations.

You’re going to have to back that one up…

From the PR:

Note that this behaviour is configurable. It’s default is a 500 char limit because that is the Mastodon default.

That’s a shit default, and a shitty way to treat a standard that is meant for all sorts of communication. ActivityPub is not Twitter, and it is not just for short-form communication. In fact, a majority of the web is longer-form communication that isn’t a mere 500 characters long.

Retorting with “this behaviour is configurable” is dancing around the issue. Good, sane defaults mean everything in programming.

4Chan was a thing at least 20 years ago.

China doing China things.

Many evangelicals will go down with the Boomers. They are becoming more and more rare by the generation.

As for them getting beaten for “confronting the men”, of course you are going to get beaten if you resist arrest or argue. That’s true in most countries, but particularly in Afghanistan the authorities tend to hit people if they are not compliant.

Your whole post was already getting into a questionable defense of Afghanistan’s bullshit, but then you start defending police brutality and violence against women as something that is “true in most countries”? You’ve already lost me and probably most of the community here.

You think Putin gives a flying fuck about international law?

it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales.

Because it’s already very very hard to scale. It takes only a small group of people to fuck up trust models to such a degree that the whole system falls apart.

If you are not prepared for evil, evil will hold far more power that you and decimate the entire community. Indigenous peoples from every corner of the world have been punished by that hard lesson over and over again.

Lenin’s biggest mistake was thinking this whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase was going to be this magical normal period that no human would abuse ever, completely ignoring millennia of human history, human behavior, and the dynamics of power that would make that sort of thing literally impossible. Not only does absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even if a leader was immune to such corruption, dictatorships are never propped up by one single leader. They are precariously installed by groups of people who have other units of power, like the military, to keep the system in place.

One of those powerful people can simply say: “Keep this dictatorship in place or I will torture you and your entire family while spreading propaganda about detestable crimes, until eventually I’ll feed you to the angry mob and prop up a new dictator.”

And that’s it. The real communism dream never happens. Corruption quickly floods the state, and wealth disparity continues unchallenged and unabated. It’s just more hidden, under the guise of a system of equalative poverty for one class of people and gradients of power for another class of people.

Hell, this even happens with failed democracies, like Russia. Everybody gets behind the new system, but without the right kinds of checks and balances, corruption invades and, eventually, it’s a democracy in name only. But, at least democracy never had any notion of a dictatorship built into the philosophy. Democracies are still really hard to keep in place, but communism is a doomed idea from the very start.

Allied forces didn’t give a shit about death camps until after they invaded Germany and discovered them.

Why are we allowing a random news site from Morocco on this forum? Do we know their journalistic standards? Is the country a democracy with a good reputation for free speech?

Hamas never wanted peace, either. This is just a decades-old hot war arriving at its conclusion.

Seriously, just Google anything about Trump, and it’s all about his grifts and fraud-criming. Name one instance where he helped anybody but himself.

The poor and middle-class, you know, the majority of the population, have been beaten down by the “corrupt elite” for centuries. The problem with using a term like “far-right populist” is that the far-right are always on the side of corporate interests, additional corruption of government to weaken its power, and anything that would further promote the already fucked wealth gap we have between the rich and the poor. They are the corrupt elite!

Just using your example of Trump’s MAGA movement, Trump is just a grifter trying to promote an image of an outsider, but he very much isn’t one. Calling somebody a “far-right populist” is lying about what their true goals are. It is an oxymoron.

People from the Occupy Wall Street movement, even as misguided and directionless as that movement was, were trying to reduce the power of corporations through their protests. They weren’t lying about being populists.

A better example would be somebody like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, whose actions and voting record are consistent with ones who are trying to take power from corporations and give it back to the rest of the public.

Yes, I was very confused by the “far-right populist” descriptor. Those are two very opposite words.

Afghanistan was actually doing much better than it was under Taliban control. Women had rights, and weren’t living in fear. Reforms were happening. The whole country was moving in a positive direction.

Until Trump fucked all of that up and made a deal with the Taliban to regain control again.

To you, me, and many of us, they’re a terrorist group

To all of the groups that matter, they are a terrorist group.

but to those who get stepped on by the Zionist for decades, who have their home bombed, who land got stolen, who families and relatives got killed, they are their only hope.

Then they aren’t living as a government that deserves statehood. If a terrorist group is the one leading the country, that becomes the definition of that country.

Sure, let’s give it to the Russian asset.

So, why does Palestine still house and hold a high opinion over Hamas? A terrorist group just lives over there in Gaza Strip and Palestine doesn’t lift a finger to get rid of them.