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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Kosovo was UN not NATO. Only NATO engagement was Afghanistan and the Taliban had claimed responsibility for an act of war against a NATO member. Now the actual war was fought entirely in Afghanistan but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a defensive war. It just doesn’t feel like one.

    Don’t take this to mean I supported the war in Afghanistan or the many horrible things US troops did while there. (nor do I support the Taliban or their practises and tactics). But NATO is by rule and charter very much a defensive alliance. So much so that if Trump attacks Greenland he will have to face the rest of NATO. Which is something I don’t think he comprehends, it’s obvious that to him the US is the ruler of NATO.




  • Yes, I am ignoring the US military; because it is irrelevant. It’s like arguing that a man’s car can’t be stolen because he’s a heavyweight boxing champion. How many bases do you need to build before the US is immune to sabotage and subversion? How much money do you need to spend on guns before disinformation campaigns don’t work? It is not as simple as one country being weaker than another. Different countries have different capabilities depending on what they have focused on. Russia has been building it’s disinformation pipeline for a long time and has always been very good at exploiting corruption. The US is not very good at defending itself from those kinds of attacks as experts have been warning for frickin decades. This is not a video game where election interference is only targetable on nations in your level range and national strength can neatly be condensed into a single number and compared.

    Or have I misunderstood your argument and your arguing that Putin has nothing to force Trump to obey him? Yet still in that argument the US military and the assassinations are still irrelevant. Trump is Putin’s puppet not because Putin is a master manipulator dangling some blackmail over Trump’s head. Putin’s an unhinged, cowardly nutjob who spends most of his time hiding in a bunker marinating in the propaganda he himself commissioned. No, it’s because Trump is a moron who accepts simple answers and lashes out at anyone who tells him he’s wrong. Trump is a stupid man smart enough to know he’s an idiot but terrified people will realise he’s an idiot. He is a weak man desperate to be recognised as a strong one. So when someone who he views as a strong man dangles the potential for their approval in front of him he wags his tail like a good little dog. The former Australian PM talked about how Trump looked at Putin with awe to the degree that it was creepy. That is why Putin worked so hard to get him elected, why Trump spends so long on phone calls with Putin and why the military might of the US has no bearing on whether or not Trump will do as Putin tells him to. Trump is also very, very willing to accept bribes in whatever form they take and shown no limits to what he is willing to sell out for those bribes.



  • This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn’t involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it’s something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it’s the option they want everyone to go with. And they’d prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.


  • The thing is they’ve actually made a mistake charging him with terrorism. It is surprisingly narrowly defined so even without a sympathetic jury he might get a not guilty verdict for it and it weakens the whole case against him. But most of all by including it they’ve made all his intentions and politics central issues to the case. All the evidence and his statements about this will have to go into the public record. If he had pleaded guilty that wouldn’t happen nor would there be a chance for jury annulment. Pleading not guilty is simply the smarter option to take.




  • Allow me to address a question the pro-Russian guy keeps dodging; Wagner is no longer participating in the Ukraine war. I don’t know the full details but after their mutiny, they were sent back to Africa and other foreign countries far from Russia and have been working to shore up Russian-friendly dictatorships and regimes. But they have been kept well away from Ukraine and Russia ever since. Part of what they’ve been doing is selling and advertising their services as consultants and support to keep people in power. This helps Russia build influence which is something it desperately needs right now. Wagner being in Venezuela would not be strange. It would mean the guy who is yelling about the CIA trying to overthrow him has accepted Russian help. In fact considering how active Wagner has been in involving themselves anywhere where they can get a foothold it’d be weird if Wagner weren’t in Venezuela.


  • I have seen so many talks by and interviews with people who claim to have deconverted from evolution. They all claim pretty similar stuff. Sometimes eeriely similar. Often they talk about being angry. Then they’ll go on to claim that they directed that anger at god, that that was why they bought into the ‘lie’ of evolution and that all atheiests are just like they were, angry at god. It’s funny how closely what they talk about resembles the strawman young earth creationists believe about atheiests and secularists and all those things those people wish where true about us.

    I find this very strange because with such large numbers involved on both sides there should , purely statisticly speaking, be a reasonably decent pool of converts each way just down to chance and circumstance. Yet they keep resorting to pushing people who don’t remotely understand the mindset of the groups they claimed they once were part of. Despite that they keep troting them out like they’re a prized bull.

    I have seen incel channels full of interviews with random people on the street where they were pushing a narrative of rampent misandry. Interview after interview of women chippily admiting to very hateful stuff about men on camera without an ounce of shame. But of course they wouldn’t have shame they were answering very carefully crafted hypotheticals that they thought were asked in good faith. A few decptive edits to remove their reasonable response’s context and all of a sudden the incels have justification for their anger. The interviews get shared around and around by people who have already decided where they stand but want vindication for their bigotry. ‘Look how common that hate for men is’ they cry, clearly showing how rarely they talk to other people.

    I have listened to talks by people who have claimed to have seen the edge of the world or have claimed to have the alien corpses kept at Roswell. I have read statements by someone claiming that they went to a cancer ward, convinced the doctors to inject all the patients with their essential oils which cured everyone of their cancer. I have listened to interviews with anti vaxers claiming to have personally seen wards full of ‘vaccine causalties’ that’s being covered up somehow.

    Have some people switched from accepting evolution to young earth creationism? It has to have happened at some point. Are their some misandrists out there? There has to be. Are they anywhere near as prevelant as either of those two groups pretend? Absolutely not. They have a vested interest in pushing the idea that both those things are far more common than they are. Interviews are just ancedotes and no matter how many ancedotes you horde they will never coalesce into evidence.

    Do some transgender people regret transitioning? It has to have happened at least once just based off numbers alone Are there a lot? No there aren’t. To an actually surprising degree. But that surprising degree shouldn’t actually be that surprsining; You see before all the irreversible medical procedures there is a bunch of indepth psychological evaluations aimed at filtering out people who would regret it later. We’ve actually gotten pretty good at that. Not that it’s that hard there tends to be some strong and obvious indicators. So I will pose a hypothetical of my own; Even if there was a lot of regretful trangender folk is the answer to ban trans health care altogether or invest in better evaluations and better understanding of it?


  • The US and international pressure. So optics basically. Kind of like how they made ‘efforts’ at peace and a two-state solution over the past decades just to show they were trying. Those deals involved things like all the Isreali settlers remaining in Palestine, continuing to live under Isreali laws despite living in Palestine and for the IDF to be the defense and security forces for both countries. Or things like all the arable land going to Isreal and Palestine getting cut up into multiple enclaves.

    Isreal has been obstructing aid from crossing the border for the longest time. The US even started airdropping stuff in because the Isreal was disrupting aid convoys from crossing into Palestine. They even had to start building a pier because Isreal wasn’t letting in any aid. After a lot of international pressure Isreal relented and stopped deliberately screwing up the aid convoys. Except the moment that happened settlers suddenly started knowing when and where every aid convoy was crossing into Palestine and started attacking them.


  • No, no it doesn’t. Suicide is a sin but Christianity absolutely glorifies self-sacrifice for the religion. I mean you’ve heard of martyrs right? It became a core tenant of the religion in the early roman days that dying for the faith gets you straight into heaven. Glorifying dying for the faith is a massive part of Christianity too. In Islam committing suicide is a sin unless you’re self-sacrificing yourself for the faith and dying for the faith also gets you straight into heaven. Just like in Christianity. They’re both Abrahamic faiths and have a lot of the same roots.

    So yeah what the fuck are you talking about? They are no more self-sacrificing than anyone else. They’re just fucking people. They’re all just people. Why can’t we just treat them like people?


  • 50% of the population of Gaza was under 18 based on Israeli numbers for Gaza prior to October. This means 50% of the population wasn’t even alive when that vote happened since it happened 18 years ago! Fun fact about that vote; Hamas represented themselves as significantly more moderate in the run-up to the election only to drop that the moment they got elected and murder all their political opposition. They have since continued to murder outspoken political dissidents and quash any efforts for new elections.

    A twenty-year-old election that was run on lies tells us nothing about the feelings of the people of Gaza in the current day. It doesn’t tell us how much they support Hamas now and it certainly tells us nothing about how much they value their lives.

    Though your twisted rationlisation tells me a lot about how you value their lives.



  • So if your home was invaded in a war that became an unrelenting meat grinder you’d advocate surrender and submission? You’d happily allow things to degenerate into a decades-long insurgency? You’d happily endure the heavy-handed crackdowns the invading government enforced on anyone and everyone who held even the slightest shred of sympathy for the insurgents? You’d accept that the bloody and brutal insurgency was better than the full-scale war despite the constant uncertainty? No, you wouldn’t, would you? You’d advocate surrender and submission again. You’d tell the insurgents to lay down arms because people were dying, you’d tell them that enduring the invader’s harsh rule was better than the suffering inflicted in the fight. You’d tell them to give up.

    I do not understand how you do not see the stance you take as the insult it is. I do not understand why you think people should stand down as their freedom is stripped away from them. Putin has made it clear, in a great many speeches, that they resent and reject the idea of Ukranian identity. Yet you tell the Ukranians to surrender and hold no ire to the Russians who levelled so many Ukrainian cities with artillery.