That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.

The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.

The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.

Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.

And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.

As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.

Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.

You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.

There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/3/24/22982864/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-brian-klaas

Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle

Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He’s a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.

He’s never been “savvy”, he’s just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.

The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.

I’m surprised that they’re still going, but Russia has shown the world that they’re a third rate military, at best.

As to Palestine. It doesn’t matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they’re Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they’re religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.

And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it’s all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.

I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.

Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.

As to Palestinian resistance. I don’t think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.

An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.

From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.

It didn’t work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet… Likely not though.

If it’s an old patent, chances are it’s expired and free to use now.

Yeah, while there are dozens or possibly hundreds of flavors of “wicca”. The first tenent is almost always some variation on “do no harm”. Normally phrased something like “as it harms none, do as thou will”… Which is odd phrasing for something written in the last century.

The main exception is those who follow Crowley. His whole deal was “do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”.

Crowley was mostly in it for the shock value.

And again, Crowley’s “ancient wisdom” is newer than the invention of photography. We even have recordings of him speaking.

X-Men has always been the anti-status quo option…

But now that they’re part of Disney, you can expect the next appearance to be more pro-status quo.

The main reason to electroplate things in gold is that corrosion resistance.

The thinner the coating, the better. Mostly because gold isn’t a very good conductor.

Copper is one of the best conductors available. But the corrosion is the problem. It’s nonconductive.

Also a fun fact. Stainless steel is a better conductor than gold. But gold is slightly easier to use in electroplating.

The Lego Movie was done correctly. The Minecraft movie looks to be a dumpster fire of horrible, rushed CGI.

As anyone who has lived in a Rocky Mountain town can say, Distant bullies are pretty bad too.

But that’s a sort of unique situation. Or it was until Reagan. See, the entire Rocky Mountain range is treated as a sort of internal colony.

Resources are extracted, but the people who own the companies doing the extraction all pretty much live on one of the coasts.

And then every store is also owned by someone who lives on one of the coasts.

This means that any real wealth produced in those states, quickly leaves those states.

A lot of towns in the area never really had a “down town” in the first place, and with the creation of Walmart and such, no one else gets a downtown either.

The answer of course is a bigger government. But it has to be free of corporate influence.

Which might just take a very big government. Like expanding the House and Supreme Court big.

Both are desperately needed.

Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.

He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…

And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.

I’ll add in, Ranked Choice is a bad choice. The “edge cases” mentioned in the post can happen in any and every election using the system.

If Ranked Choice were the only option besides what we have, it would be a slight improvement, but there are far better options.

STAR is simple, and does everything that RCV claims to do, but actually fails to do.

Something to keep in mind for the push to reform voting laws after this election.

Caesar is a slaver. That’s automatically evil.

It actually is thanks to the permanent apportionment act of 1929.

The size of Congress needs to increase with the increase in population. But it’s been fixed at 435 for over 100 years even as the population has more than tripled and we’ve added two states.

Are those houses then listed as corporate rentals? Because that’s super common.

Republicans cannot replace Trump. He’s got the party by the balls. His daughter in law is the chair of the party.

He’s also funneling all donations to the party into his own pocket.

When Trump loses, the Republican party will implode under all the fraud. I’m all for it.

The NYT was shitty long before that. They famously did not cover the Holocaust. Not the run up, and not even during the war.

When the camps were liberated, Americans at home had no idea who was in the camps.

The owner of the NYT was later asked about their failures in covering the Holocaust and the buildup, and said with a shrug “the NYT didn’t really cover the Holocaust”.

As a note the owner of the NYT was Jewish. But didn’t want to be associated with poor Jews.

He hired Joel Kaplan over ten years ago.

Kaplan was a Bush toadie who participated in the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the recount in Florida in 2000 letting the corrupt jackasses on the Supreme Court to steal the election for Bush.

Kaplan has personally exempted right wing “news” sources from Facebook’s truthfulness standards.

Eight years in and I’m still pissed about those fucking hats. I have this nice red cap that a friend gave me almost 15 years ago. It was custom-made, and has a starburst image that a third friend created… and the cap base is the exact same shade of red as those fucking Trump hats, so I’ve not been able to wear it in public for 8 years.

There were actually several zionist military groups. The Irgun, the Haganah, and the worst of the bunch, the Lehi.

And they did more than bomb a single hotel. They were a bunch of evil assholes who massacred villages, which is what started the first Arab-Israeli war.

The Lehi hated the British so much that they repeatedly tried to join the Nazis in WW2. The death camps were common knowledge among Jews who escaped Germany, and yet, the leaders of Lehi still wanted to join Hitler in fighting the British. They also really liked the Nazi writings about wiping out “inferior races” but decided that since they were “god’s chosen” they swap the races around a bit and put Arabs at the bottom.

And in 1980, the surviving members all got medals issued to them by the IDF for their role in helping to found Israel. Issued by the surviving (second) leader, who was the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, and was Netanyahu’s political mentor.

Don’t get me started on Ordinal vs Cardinal voting systems… But the TLDR is that Ordinal is great when you have two options, and shit when you have more than that.

STAR is the best voting system I’ve found so far. (Still looking for better, but STAR is pretty good)