It’s quite obvious that Iran (or at least its current regime) is fighting a war of survival. If the current regime stays in power and gains the ability to open and close Hormuz at will, that should be a win for Iran. If the US cannot guarantee safe shipping through Hormuz, that is a loss for them. In my book that seems pretty straightforward.

And here I was thinking that it takes one side to start a war but two to stop it. The US seems to be in a no win scenario. Either they just call it a day while publicly claiming victory, which in practice results in an Iranian victory, or they commit to a ground campaign, which is Afghanistan all over again but much bigger in scope.

Oh Boy. A keyboard warrior who tries to compensate for a lack of courage with a wall of text. Have a great life. I hope you come up with something good to do during the rest of it.

That’s a very sad point, if true. I’m old enough to remember coverage of that event on the evening news. How can a clear and obvious case of ethnic cleansing be downplayed?

I was in Afghanistan, first serving with the Dutch armed forces and later working for a company that built clinics and schools. After that I worked in eastern Africa for a rural electrification programme. While parts of these efforts may have been fruitless in hindsight, I still stand by these choices.

What have you done? I feel like I was (and am) willing to work towards putting an end to atrocities, at least within my limited influence. I am willing. Therefore I expect a similar level of caring for the lives of others from others.

It’s so frustrating that we are living through an active genocide (again) and doing absolutely nothing (again). In my youth, when there wasn’t yet a 24 hour news cycle and I learned about the genocide in Rwanda as a teenager, it was my naive belief at the time that a lack of knowledge was the main reason for the general indifference in “the West”. A year later the genocide in Bosnia, especially the massacre at Srebrenica, was headline news in my home country of the Netherlands and yet people seemed to collectively just shrug that off just as quickly as it happened. Now, many years later, I’ve become much more cynical. If you want people to care about unjustified murder you should either make sure to have your country located really really close to “the West”, but even that is just of limited use to Ukraine, or make sure that the killing happens to take place at the hands of mostly Jewish people, although most Palestinians can attest to the fact that while media attention is good, action is still lacking.

She must be lying. After all, she’s talking.

Yes, the IOC, along with FIFA and other major organised crime syndicates with sports as a cover story, is fine with authoritarianism, often even openly supportive.

I misread Program as Pogrom for second and wasn’t even all that baffled.

I absolutely cannot stand the kind of people who answer a brief and simple yes or no question with a wall of text or a two minute voice note. If it’s that complicated, because your pet chihuahua just had a stroke and you then fell in love head over heels with the veterinarian and that you’re currently at the airport to fly away for your spontaneous honeymoon, just say no and tell me about the details in person.

Thank you for this great answer! It’s something I intuitively felt but couldn’t put my finger on with the same surgical precision you just did.

Anyone who doesn’t have children is breaking a million year old family tradition. I regard it as willfully dying out.

The United States have nothing more than a controlled opposition. This is part of the problem with the political system there and will not change unless there is root and branch reform, so basically never.

I’d rather interpret that as the rational actors trying to increase cooperation among each other in order to reduce the risk from and exposure to an increasingly irrational actor.

While asking an LLM can yield results, it may just as well kill your OS entirely. Consulting old forum posts or engaging with a supposedly snobbish in-group also has issues. I see your point.

However, I believe the key drivers that make Linux more accessible for average users are the increasingly stable nature of out of the box style solutions like Mint, an ongoing trend to make applications browser based and therefore much easier to use across platforms and, finally, a real push by valve to finally break the gaming barrier.

Yeah, the regular election cycle is apparently coming up in a few months.

Italians have a proud history of hanging fascists in public spaces. Maybe they can try and tap into that part of their history?

I believe there won’t be elections any more. And if there are, they won’t be free. And if they’re free, the count will be falsified. And if it’s not, it won’t be certified. And if it is, it will be dismissed by a regime-aligned court…

Much like fascism elsewhere, it’s not going away with elections. There was still (just) enough institutional cohesion last time. Even then, it took Mike Pence to, probably for the first time in his life, do the right thing. No matter the “election” result, the current set of muppets is never going to give this power away peacefully. Just imagine VP Couchlover in the place of Mike Pence on that fateful day. We’d probably have gotten a coup right then and there.

I recommend carpet bombing the entire country for a few years, either dropping two nukes on it or granting about a quarter of its territory to neighbouring countries (including ethnically cleansing those areas) as well as splitting the rest in half for a few decades, and finally keeping foreign troops around for the next 70 years and counting. It worked wonders for Japan and Germany, both of which have since become positive additions to the world community. Perhaps we should give that a try for the US? (this is obviously satire; I’m obviously not in favour of mass killings and ethnic cleansing…)

The United States don’t have an opposition any more. The current situation more closely resembles the bloc party system (“Blockparteien”) of East Germany and several other socialist countries.