Stuff like this wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact states (like mine) are lowering the working age to 14, and it’s all my damn students talked about when I taught middle school - how excited they were to make money. If we still had some semblance of child labor laws, then something like this would be pretty benign; I wanted to work fast food when I was a kid, and plenty of kids like to pretend they’re store clerks or chefs. Not surprised it’s Chik Fil A.

I’m trying to get into factory work. I’m looking at going to tech school and getting a job as a technician. Everything else has kind of fallen through.

It’s remarkably easy to deceive most Americans, at least, when it comes to certain countries. We’re pretty indoctrinated about what it’s “really like” in countries we don’t like. From cartoons we watch as a kid, to what they teach us in middle and high school, to what we see on news/documentaries and social media. By the time they claimed Russia was invading Ukraine for no reason other than Putin wanting land, that was all the information Americans needed. They happily accepted every pro-Ukrainian narrative and rejected every fact that contradicted it. The only media opposition were MAGA outlets who love Putin for conservative reasons, and this unreliable media minority was used to dismiss the truth as fringe conspiracy.

I can’t see it happening any time soon, tbh. All the shit with Trump is purely spectacle. If it does wind up coming to blows, it won’t be a civil war so much as the government/capitalist class dealing with pawns they can’t control. They like having this tension and media circuses about voting - it’s good distraction from all the wretched shit we’re doing, and if anyone talks bad about US foreign policy, they can be accused of supporting Russian and/or China. However, it’s possible some MAGA dogs might slip the leash if Trump doesn’t win, convinced they need to “save democracy”. In which case, I guarantee, the politicians on both sides will disavow Trump and push for a bipartisan crackdown on the “radical insurrectionists” - most of whom will probably get pretty light sentences or deals, after seeing a few (if any) of their comrades get killed by a police/military response. Then we’ll probably see new legislation cracking down on “radicalism”, which will be used to target leftist media and literature.

There is the slight chance, I suppose, that Trump has enough popular support from people who would do something about it, and that the US might be too shocked by a widespread insurrection (an actual one, not that pathetic display on January 6th), that they actually force a response. Just speculating here, but I’d wager it’d just lead to a fascist transition with Trump as some kind of Mussolini so the capitalists and their politicians can stay in power, nobody in power willing to wage a civil war over it. After that, you could make an argument for a war of resistance, but we’re already making too many assumptions here.

Gee, thanks, lol

But I suck at math.

I’m surprised nobody has brought up the smallpox blankets yet when talking about the disease…

As a very white Potawatomi, I always select “two races” if it’s an option, and “Native American” if it’s not. But that’s not shifting the demographic much, sadly.

They’ve got some demons.

If it’s that important, just have 501 other guys have a kid in his place. Probably better from a gene pool perspective than having one guy produce that many children.

Also, if it’s that important and we have a trolley that smart, maybe we could just use some kind of medical science to rebuild the guys balls after the fact. Stem cells or cloning or something.

How is this an ethical dilemma?

I saw your comment pop up, 30 seconds new, and it already had a downvote. Wtf?

EDIT: I think I misread your comment the first time around, because I thought you felt bad for Palestinians because Iran was the only government attacking (i.e., no one else was), not because you think Iran’s government is bad. Whoops.

Also, my comment was about how weird a comment could get a downvote so quickly, even then.

I live in the freest and most powerful country on Earth, and certainly not a crumbling dumpster fire of a dying empire.

From what I’ve read, most modern scholars agree it was likely a sperm whale. The Roman records about how it sank ships, and descriptions of the body after it washed ashore (before being butchered and consumed by the locals), support the idea.

This video is a good breakdown of it: https://youtu.be/K9rZ9OFQEgw?si=7rF8KuHKQfMi-Joc

Mostly the new Space Marine game, I guess. A few other games I’m following don’t have release dates yet.

I feel your pain. Reading and understanding ML theory while growing up in the Imperial Core is a uniquely painful experience. Thank God for spaces like Lenmygrad, where we can actually communicate and realize we’re not going insane.

I’ll confess I don’t know the full details of what went down there. I definitely need to do more research.

I think what upsets me most about the heap of failed logic surrounding Poland for liberals who subscribe to the Horseshoe Theory is that they don’t really expend much mental energy on it. They believe that the Nazis and the Soviets were equally terrible in Poland, that both worked together to steal land from Poles, killed lots of people, and tried to erase the culture, and that they did it for basically the same reasons.

But then there’s all the extra details they don’t know, or don’t choose to factor in when making their opinions. The Nazis, as you have broken down for us, had a very clear and published plan for the removal, extermination, and/or conversion of the entire Polish population into a German settler state. They had a very explicit plan and clear intent to take all the land from whomever they deemed subhuman. They didn’t hide this, this was well-known and their views were even shared by many in Europe and the USA.

The Soviets, meanwhile were the last of the major powers to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, but people focus on the “Secret Plans” to divide Poland as if this is proof positive that they were secretly Authoritarian Best Buddies. To me, however, if you take in the facts that 1) Germany was preparing an invasion of Poland, a country the USSR shared a border with, 2) the USSR was the last major power to sign a NAP with Germany, and 3) the territory the USSR wanted from Poland was territory Poland had taken in the Polish-Soviet War… it suggest more that the “Secret Plans” were conditions for the USSR to agree to a NAP in the first place, guaranteeing the reclamation of the territory lost. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s all accurate to the best of my knowledge, isn’t it?

Additionally, the Polish government was committing cultural genocide against Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others in the territory they had claimed. When the USSR invaded and claimed the territory, “murdering” the intelligentsia there, how can libs not consider the fact that this likely had to do with the fact that the Polish nationalists in the region were the ones purging it of non-Polish ethnic groups? You can make arguments of excesses in the executions, but to just pretend that it was all a bunch of harmless Polish liberal authors, professors, that the USSR was just trying to control everything, is really missing the point.

From what I know about the motivations and policies of the Nazis and the Soviets in Poland, the two are completely incomparable except on the most meaningless surface level. Yet, the words of collaborators apparently hold the most stock in post-Soviet history books. It’s just… upsetting.

They’re irrelevant because the Ghost of Kyiv is single handedly trashing Russia’s air force. /s

This is also reassuring. Validating, even. Thank you.