Okay, sure, it’s a greatsword made of pure blackness named “Soulripper”, and yeah, you constantly hear faint screaming when it’s within line of sight, and maybe it tried to consume Dave’s barbarian when he picked it up, but it’s also a +6 greatsword with flametongue and dragonbane! It’s not like we can sell it, so I might as well use it!
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Did someone say 
To clarify my stance, I want the war to end as soon as possible so that all the people on the ground can stop killing each other for no reason. I also agree that Russia invading was, in addition to being wrong because war is bad, incredibly stupid and needlessly damaging to their own position (I was one of the people saying they wouldn’t launch an invasion because it seemed like it would backfire). We’ll see how the economic and geo-political damage ends up shaking out in a decade or so, I imagine. And of course it’s understandable for Ukrainians to take up arms to defend their land, though it will likely only prolong the suffering, especially if we agree that life on the ground under the Ukrainian state would be little better than living under the Russian one. I also recognize that Putin claiming the war was necessary for de-nazification etc was the equivalent of pretending to care about human rights to sell the war to the populace; yes there are nazis and the far right is a huge problem in Ukraine, but that isn’t something Russia actually cares about (beyond a potential insurgency, anyway).
However, the point of my comment was not to condemn Ukraine. Instead, it was to point out that the US is not interested in helping Ukrainians (something we clearly agree on), and that in fact they are more than willing to sacrifice them in a conflict to achieve their own ends, namely isolating/weakening Russia and opening up Ukraine to even more voracious imperial extraction.
It’s also worth noting that the soviets placed nukes in Cuba in response to NATO placing nukes in Turkey.
It’s not pretty but this is how the world works. If a man is holding a gun to your head, and says he’ll kill you if you don’t give him your wallet, do you hold onto the wallet out of principle because robbery is immoral?
Well, BRICS isn’t really a formal alliance but if it were? Yeah, joining a hostile alliance while sharing a border with the US is asking for trouble, and the US has committed all matter of atrocities in latin america. I do think an outright invasion would be less likely than their usual method of military coups and death squads.
At a 2008 summit, NATO stated that it would attempt to expand to include Georgia and Ukraine, despite Russia having stated that NATO membership for those countries was a red line for them. Georgia was immediately invaded by Russia in response. Imo this makes it clear that NATO membership for either of those countries was so unacceptable that Russia would rather invade.
If we assume that Russia (and Putin in particular) is acting violently and irrationally like a wild animal, why did NATO continue to agitate Russia when the only possible outcome would be violence? Surely a neutral or even Russia-aligned Ukraine would be preferable to a war-torn Ukraine? This is proof that the US and NATO don’t care about the average person actually living in Ukraine, and indeed don’t care about the Ukrainian state beyond it being a useful (and profitable) proxy against a geo-political rival.
To be clear, I’m not excusing Russia here, but geo-politics aren’t about what’s “fair” or “right”, and if they were, the US would be a global pariah.
Just a stand in for piracy in general imo
IIRC the feds have had a harder time dealing with anarchist orgs because they’re more decentralized and harder to infiltrate from the top down.
Stop, stop, friendly fire!
The ban was allegedly for “promoting hate”, but in reality it was just to quash such a large leftwing sub. It’s worth noting that they were only “promoting hate” against slaveowners, who are in my mind a completely fair target. When the sub was first quarantined, the mods made a series of posts over a week or so outlining their attempts to contact the admin team so that they could address the issues that had lead to said quarantining. The admins were non-communicative, and provided no real examples justifying the quarantine, nor possible actions the mods could take to undo the quarantine.
We should eat landlords.
One issue with this type of system is, who defines what the truth is? If it’s the government in power, then it’ll flipflop immediately whenever the other side wins. Any sort of “independent bureaucracy” would also gradually be undermined.
This is also ignoring that lying in the house of commons is likely not a major cause of political polarization, given that I imagine very few people actually watch the sessions of parliament. I would attribute the rise of political extremism mainly to decreasing quality of life, which arises from a combination of the housing crisis, heinous wealth inequality, and the looming specter of climate change. After all, if the status quo doesn’t work for the average person, they will naturally look for alternatives (or get politically disengaged). The right wing has the edge here, as they have a multi-billion dollar propaganda complex that is very effective at getting their word out, and they have no end of scapegoats to blame. The left has no such network, but we do have the benefit that most people aren’t massive racist assholes, and it doesn’t hurt that the actual facts back us up.
It is also worth noting that this type of polarization cannot be avoided under the system of capitalism, which broadly pits two groups against each other: the working class and the capitalist class. The working class broadly seek to live comfortably, to receive as much money as possible in pay, and to work no more than is necessary. The interests of the capitalist class run directly counter to this: they seek ever-increasing profits, and would like to pay the working class as little as possible and have them work as long as possible in exchange. This adversarial relationship can be overcome temporarily by a social contract that enacts high taxes on the capitalists to pay for a welfare state (note that even this arrangement does require exporting suffering to the global south through the mechanisms of imperialism, which I’m going to ignore for brevity), but eventually the drive for ever greater profits will drive the capitalists to destroy that social contract. Two relatively obvious examples of this are that wages have become stagnant for the last 50 years despite massive increases in productivity, and the movement to destroy public healthcare.
In sum: if we are to eliminate polarization, we must first eliminate capitalism. 😊
Did Jordan have a kink for this kinda thing?
From this and other instances I think it’s pretty clear that he was into spanking and femdom.
Corporations gradually making something worse so they can sustain profits?
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Even a sub is unnecessary, we just need a satisfactorily deep pit and let gravity do the work.
Also to give back the money we stole from them that’s exacerbating the famine there.