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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • “Tit for tat” strategies only work between rational actors that are primarily concerned with the best interests of their people.

    People that derive power from extremists fascist strongman narratives often don’t behave in the best interests of their people, but in the best interests of themselves.

    Iran doesn’t actually care how many Palestinians dies, they don’t care about how many people die in Lebanon either. Organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah have to fire rockets at Israel or else Iran will start supplying some other group that will with weapons and aid. Iran can do and infinite “tat” strategy because the reciprocal “tit” has no impact on them.

    So “tit for tat” between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah isn’t going result in Iran deciding to stop supplying terrorist groups with weapons to fire at Israel. But a “tit-for-tat” strategy between Israel and Iran directly may.


  • Are you saying all of those muslims are all the same and therefore should have the same interests? Seems a little racist to me.

    Try to remember these are people with unique life experiences. If you were someone that had barrel bombs dropped you in the Syrian civil war, you’re probably not going to be siding with the people that did that to you.

    The over half a million deaths in that conflict probably weight more heavily on people’s minds than the 40K deaths somewhere else. Nasrallah’s death was celebrated in parts of Syria, and for good reason.

    This isn’t a conflict between Jews and Muslims no matter how much you want it to be. It’s a conflict between Israel and Hamas (one of Iran’s proxies) that has expanded to include other Iranian proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis) and potentially Iran itself. Iran’s government sucks and is causing a lot of horrible things to happen throughout the Middle East. One of their proxies took things too far and Israel isn’t fucking around anymore.




  • Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they’re the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.




  • Yeah so Israel is a democracy. You’re saying a democratic country is a Nazi country.

    I think a common thing among Nazis is to try to de-legitimize democracies. Trump does it, Putin does it, and you’re doing it while claiming they’re the Nazis. What does that make you?

    Also Hamas came into power by winning a plurality of the votes and refused to hold elections after that. Their goal is to at best ethnically cleanse and at worst commit genocide to remove people of a certain ethnicity from a region. They use extreme violence and a narrative about past injustices to maintain power. They keep people in a perpetual state of angry fervor to control them. That all doesn’t seem just a little fashy to you?

    How do you know when you’re not the one being a Nazi accusing your enemies of being a Nazi? Is it just that you’re always not the Nazi and everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi? How are you different from Trump, Musk, Putin, etc?


  • What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.

    They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.

    And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.

    Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.




  • Yeah it is. Most computers come with windows pre-installed so most people never do this kind of thing.

    And there’s also things people need to be careful of. Like wiping all out all of their cherished photos by formatting the entire drive. Considering that casual users probably shouldn’t attempt to do this. Not trying to gatekeep or anything, but there is potential for data loss for a user that doesn’t back up their data properly, which is common for casual users.





  • From an economic perspective, it’s mostly positive. Raising a child is expensive, and those costs go on for about 20 years before you have a person that’s economically productive. Most Immigrants are adults and can join the workforce immediately. The economic costs of their childhood was paid by the country they came from. It’s a negative for the country they came from, this is refereed to as a “brain drain.” But for their new country, it’s like a tax paying worker just appeared out of nowhere.

    As for the economic negatives, the big one is housing. Too much immigration all at once can result in a shortage of housing. It can also put stress on public services and infrastructure. Businesses may not have the capacity to serve a larger population. These things can adapt of course, but you can’t instantly build a house and you can’t instantly expand public services, etc. So you might want to limit immigration so an area can adapt to all of the various economic needs of a larger population. An immigrant will work and pay taxes and contribute to the local economy, so long term it’s all positives, but there can be a lot of short term problems if a population grows to rapidly.

    As for social… well I’m not really much of a sociologist, but just from I can see, people who already live in an area might be uncomfortable being around people of a different culture. Might say crazy things like “They’re eating the dogs!” Yeah that’s crazy, but it is a problem. Not caused by the immigrants themselves, but it’s a problem that does happen when there’s immigration.

    But there’s social benefits. Can learn from a new culture. May get some new options for restaurants to go to.

    Generally the young will enjoy more social benefit (going out to the different restaurants and learning about different cultures), but the older people will tend to be uncomfortable with it. But that’s just the tendency.

    So overall I’d say you do need limits on immigration to mitigate the short term issues, but it’s all positives in the long term.


  • So you’re encouraging people to commit violence based solely on some shit they’ve seen on the internet?

    What makes you any different than any other nutjob that does some crazy shit because “they did their own research” on the internet?

    You aren’t going to have an impact on the violence that’s happening on the other side of the world by doing violence in your own country. Get some perspective. You’re saying that people should bring an end to violence by using violence. How does that make any damn sense?