Nobody and no system should be expected to be perfect all the time, I would anticipate some mistakes over a course of decades.

Have you checked for any times they were critical of US foreign policy within the same timeframe?

“Consistently” and “in-these-specific-cases” are different things.

I’m a big fan of Magnus. Dude is overall a good role model, respectful and serious most of the time, while also being meme-ey, approachable and fun. Unique playstyle to boot.

He’s actually largely responsible for me personally starting to pay attention to the game again. I hadn’t even played in years.

Bullshit.

Israel is a nuclear-armed nation, it is as immune to large-scale ground invasion as N Korea or Pakistan. They do not need our thousand pound bombs, nor our military alliance. This just isn’t the 80s anymore.

Similarly, Reagan wasn’t facing a criminal trying to take down his own justice system, relying fully on being propped up by ethno-nationalists that want Palestine, all of it, exterminated, just to maintain his own position.

We could probably stop them, if we threatened them with severe economic sanctions. Cutting off the weapons would simply make Netanyahu use even more indiscriminate tactics though, like starving them all, or firebombing the whole place. He can’t accept a permanent cease fire though, because one would cost him, him personally, everything he has left.

That’s the problem with strongmen. They don’t actually give a fuck about people, just themselves. And they’d rather be an evil tyrant than a loser.

Probably can’t fix that with a phone call, don’t you think?

If you don’t want to parent your own son, there is someone out there willing to do it for you. They will not do a good job.

No one wants this war, or wishes it on anyone,” said Tal Beeri of the Alma Research and Education Center

Bit naive imo. Netanyahu is a bit of a strongman that catastrophically failed to keep his people safe, which betrays the most foundational appeal of such a figure. His approval rating demonstrates this, and he’s facing criminal charges to boot.

He has one route forward for personal preservation–more war.

Somebody has to fill this place with content…

Paywall blocked me out. My response to the synopsis though:

This is a fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t thing. Militaristic thinkers, because they only care about winning, are often very good at maneuvering their opposition into untenable positions, catch-22s. They’re rationally inescapable, that’s the whole point, so it’s best to fall back onto your feelings, as much as I hate to say it. To paraphrase popular youtuber Ryan McBeth, don’t give your enemies problems, because problems have solutions. Give them dilemmas. That’s what they’re doing to us. When you find yourself in one, just acknowledge pain is your future, and pick something.

I’ve also slowly begun to suspect that there’s Russian intelligence penetration into our broader media ecosystem. I cannot otherwise explain the prevalence of Russian war propaganda coming from western outlets, and how certain American churches seem to be drifting closer and closer to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Let’s just keep our eye on the ball here. We’re trying to prevent the full might of the US military from falling into fascist hands unchecked by any Mike Pence type figures. It’s gonna get really ugly, but we can still win this with political activism and words. We need to remember our ground game. Nobody fully trusts these glowy screens we’re looking at, so its talking to your friends, knocking on doors, getting people registered, volunteering to drive voters to the polls, etc.

We win this one face-to-face, with the good ole fashioned democratic party ground n pound. It’s our greatest strength anyway. Find a couple people somewhere, and talk to them, preferably nicely. Don’t try to make them angry, try to get through to them.

If they’re religious, you can try to gently remind them of Jesus’ teachings, and how he said to pray for your enemies, to forgive others, to be kind and charitable, how the meek, not the strong shall inherit the Earth, how it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, how he whipped the Pharisees for using the temple to make money, how he sacrificed himself and not someone else to save our souls, how he asked us to follow him.

There’s so much more too. The height of irony in this day and age is how our greatest ally is actually probably the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Sometimes you just have to meet people where they’re at. Frankly though, if you support people like Ghandi and MLK Jr, nothing Jesus says should be too strange to you. Maybe the praying stuff, he was pretty big on prayer. Philosophically he was just ahead of his time though, and honestly fits fine into the modern world as a broader philosophical alternative to materialism. He shouldn’t be blamed for what people did in his name after he died though, and his direct words are probably the only possible thing that could get through to certain sorts.

If we can remind evangelicals what it means to be a good person instead of a frightened person, though, we’ll sweep this election in a landslide. If by any chance you were raised in the church, there’s a very good use for those skills still. I know they’re still in there, even if it upsets us a little bit because of the shitty actions of various churches in the intervening 2000 years. Jesus didn’t do those things though, he just told people to play nice in a lot of different ways.

JK Rowling also writes as Robert Galbraith.

At least they sound like a viable game animal. Invasive species to you, 100lbs of free pork for Billy out in the woods. We use it to control deer populations from exploding in certain areas where we’ve removed the top predator though, and we just kinda take its place. Can potentially help with any animal that has the misfortune of being both tasty and economical to go out and hunt for.

Won’t eradicate them or anything, but will help keep them in check. It’s a facet of that old alliance between hunters/fishermen and environmental activists.

I don’t usually bother to click these to open them unless I know the poem, but glad I did this time.

That was good.

Something tangential I’ve been wondering…

Are the profession of doctors ethically allowed to go on strike? People would die if they did. Probably lots.

Yea that makes sense.

Just out of curiosity, what’s the advantage to them having their account on the same Instance as the community?

Yeah, if I’m really genuinely even on a choice and none of my standard tie-breakers apply. Following through is no issue, as I am legit torn, so have no strong preference.

This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.