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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Just art imitating life. Humans aren’t a simple as just “good guys” and “bad guys”. Villains could be awesome people but it’s their bad moral choices that make them the villains.

    We like fictional villains because they’re fictional. Someone liking fictional villains doesn’t mean they’ll like real life villains.





  • For Israel every male in Gaza is a Hamas fighter which is so inherently wrong.

    That is not true. You’re being shown video of a guy that’s dressed like a civilian being killed by a drone and told that’s not Hamas because they look like a civilian. But Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms. They all dress like civilians. So is that guy a civilian or Hamas? Depends on who you believe.

    And that’s the horrible nature of Hamas. You may think that a military having their soldiers wear uniforms and clearly mark their vehicles as military is stupid because it makes them obvious targets. But we do this so in a war it’s easy to distinguish between military and civilians. This results in there being less civilian casualties. You may think that Hamas is being “smart” by dressing like civilians and hiding among the civilian population, but really it just results in higher civilian casualties. We respect soldiers for putting on a uniform because that’s them taking on additional risk to make civilians safer. Hamas doesn’t do this because why would they? More civilian casualties brings more sympathy for them, and more money being sent to them.

    And international law agrees with this. The reason why captured Hamas are treated as criminals and not prisoners of war is because that’s what international law considers them to be. If they wore uniforms they would be POWs, but since they don’t they are criminals. Of course if they wore uniforms the war would be over fairly quickly and there would be much fewer casualties. But this is why international law is the way it is. To avoid long drawn out wars with combatants that don’t wear uniforms resulting in a high number of cvilian casualties.

    Hamas is a criminal organization, and has been declared a terrorist group by most sensible countries for good reason.

    And if we have a bit more critical thinking, even if he was a legitimate fighter, why didn’t they kill him when he was alone.

    That’s not how wars work. It is expected for a military to keep their own civilians safe by building their bases apart from civilians (not under hospitals and schools) and wearing uniforms. The onus isn’t on your enemy to keep your civilian population safe, the onus is on your military to keep you safe. Hamas is doing the exact opposite of keeping Palestinian civilians safe, they’re using the tactic of purposefully putting their civilian population at risk and for some reason you think it’s fine for them to do this. It is not illegal in war to hit a target because your enemy insists on using civilians to protect themselves. Hamas is using cowardly tactics, and telling you this is a good thing to do and you’re believing them.


  • Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value — which I absolutely do not, given Israel’s track record — and entertains the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas has been the governing authority of Gaza since 2006.

    So… maybe he was Hamas, what’s the big deal?

    Yeah if the guy was Hamas, he’s a valid target.

    So there was a lot of outrage over his death by news organizations around the world last week. Israel presented their evidence, and then… silence. That indicates news organizations consider Israel’s evidence to be at least credible.

    And then this opinion column comes out and this guy is saying “He’s not Hamas… and even if he was, it’s ok for him to be Hamas.” It smacks of the Trumpian “I didn’t do that, and if I did, it’s perfectly fine” style of logic.

    The silence of news organizations (other than Al Jazeera and alt media trash) on this and then this opinion piece making excuses about why it’s perfectly fine for Anas al-Sharif to be a member of Hamas… it kinda seems like he actually was a member of Hamas.






  • Yeah but the others are US companies. They can be regulated. Which they don’t want and they will at least make an effort to get rid of at least the obvious disinformation.

    With TikTok, there is no middle ground. Can’t keep them in line with the threat of regulation as they’re a foreign company. Operating in the country that has superseded Russia as the biggest source of disinformation. The only leverage they have is the threat to ban it outright.

    Besides, Zuckerberg and Musk live in the US. They don’t want things to get too bad. Though they’re so disconnected from reality they may inadvertently make things bad. But they at least have an incentive to not have the US go to shit.

    With TikTok, US cities could burn to the ground and they’ll still be fine. And we see TikTok making people particularly unhinged already.


  • The democrats that stayed home are most certainly in the group I called ignorant Americans. People couldn’t see the difference between Harris and Trump, “ignorant” is being generous.

    If people understood how the economy worked at all, then it would have been a strength and she wouldn’t have been on the defensive about it. And do you think the majority of Americans who voted for Trump would have changed their mind if she was running on an “anti-business” platform? Trump who was proposing tariffs would solve inflation?

    We literally had a candidate for President telling people to watch her opponents rallies. Why was that? Because the media only wanted to show pundits arguing over something because ratings. Everyone seeing him as the bat-shit lunatic he is doesn’t give them anything to debate. So they had to sane wash what he was saying to give the pundits something to talk about. Harris has to have an economic plan. Trump, well his plan is batshit so don’t talk about it. Why isn’t Harris doing more interviews? Trump… well he’s not doing interviews because he’s too batshit, nothing to discuss there.

    But sure believe the media when they blame the democrats for not doing the media’s job. If I were more conspiracy minded I might say they didn’t want to explain anything so the dems would have to explain things via ad spots the media made money from. But never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

    The media is failing to explain anything because they’ve been too distracted by Trump for a fucking decade. But as long as they can blame their failures on the democrats (which does have an impact on the dems getting elected ya know) they aren’t going to change.

    This ain’t new either. I had to learn about how vaccines from a youtuber that plays Mario Maker. Despite the covid vaccine being one of the biggest stories of the decade, they didn’t bother to cover anything about it’s development and testing. It was just Trump Trump Trump Vaccine Trump Trump Trump… Why don’t people trust the vaccine? Why oh why don’t people know that the vaccine is safe?

    Same fucking thing this year. Trump Trump Trump TRUMP ELECTED! Trump Trump… why don’t people understand that inflation has been handled and tariffs will only bring it back?


  • Which of these isn’t real?

    • Most of Founding Fathers owned slaves
    • Elon Musk treats workers like shit
    • The Founding Fathers wrote pretty words about rights and freedoms
    • Elon Musk writes words about right and freedoms.
    • Founding Fathers were wealthy because of the work done by slaves
    • Elon Musk is wealthy because of work done by oppressed people under apartheid

    You keep saying I’m divorced from reality, but which of these things do you think isn’t real?