You can add a Dutch tourist with a caravan to the bottom picture.

My point isn’t who is right or wrong, my point is that this war was preventable. A different security arrangement, for example a neutral Ukraine could have prevented the country from being destroyed. This was not a fringe opinion, many international relations experts and politicians have stated this, yet somehow knowing all this the US pursued. It’s almost as if there is a group of Russia hawks within most administrations that actively seek to escalate conflicts with Russia.

And if you think the US supports Ukraine altruistically you’re delusional, especially after what they are doing in Gaza. (Or Iraq for that matter).

Merkel literally said that adding Ukraine to Nato would cause war, and here we are. Is Merkel a „Tankie“?

The US fucked us so bad. They started this entire shit show by persisting on expanding Nato after the Iraq war, even though Merkel and Sarkozy both said that it would lead to war. Putin stated publicly that Nato expansion would be interpreted as an existential threat, and still the US pushed. They spend billions on pro US propaganda via USAid and the NED (just look up Red lines not to cross Zelenskiy, which is basically an open thread from the US to Ukraine not to sign a peace deal or there would be „civil unrest“).

And even during the peace talks in Istanbul, they convinced (or coerced) Ukraine not to sign it „hey we’ll have your back you can win this war, trust us, we have never cynically abandoned proxies before“. And now they let the Europeans pay for it and the Ukrainians die for it.

Yes, Russias attack on Ukraine was illegal, but the war was also preventable. And I have a hard time to believe that the Finlandization of Ukraine would have been worse than the complete destruction of it. Especially for all the man that have been killed or maimed for a preventable and doomed war from the beginning.

Maybe I‘m being too suspicious here, and should take off my tinfoil hat, but this plastic panic feels a bit like the next distraction by oil companies to stop any movement on the energy transition. Especially these types of articles where it’s said that both are equally bad, or plastic pollution is the next climate crisis.

The climate crisis will render most of the earth uninhabitable within a 100 years if businesses as usual continues. But the plastic pollution crisis is thus far mostly hypothetical, yes it’s everywhere, yes it’s probably not the healthiest substance to have in your body, but most articles fail to mention any proven effects even remotely close to the health effects of, for example, smoking.

Again maybe I‘m completely wrong here, or it’s the classic stupidity of journalists misinterpreting and exaggerating earnest science.

If you think this is cowardice then you must not yet have developed object permanence.

This is the main role of the democratic party, keep the left down and keep the capitalist happy. They will cynically adopt any issue - that doesn’t threaten that prime directive - for a few months, be it black lives matter or trans rights, and then drop them again once it’s no longer convenient.

But if any real leftist candidate (with huge democratic support and winning based on broadly popular policies), ever comes close to power, all defense mechanisms kick in.

Maybe it’s time to restart some some old Greek traditions and propose a law that anyone proposing chat control - from here on out - gets banished for life from entering European soil ever again.

Francine “Penny” Patterson: She is saying that we are all children of Mother Earth and love is the universal language.

Ironically the sign indicates that ONLY busses are welcome in that street. A BBBB+ street (+ stands for bus)

Looking at my username it should be clear that I am not a fan of US imperialism. But, I do think Europe really has to consider how it deals with the security dilemma before it leaves the US security umbrella. At the moment we are still a bunch of nation states with individual armies, individual politics, and following that: individual interests. And especially with nationalism on the rise in almost all of Europe I would rather have a solid answer to the question if European peace was due to „learning from the past“ and the EU, then find out the hard way that it was because of the US safeguarding each country’s sovereignty (and thus breaking the security dilemmas cycle of mistrust).

Breaking news: oil found in Europe.

The Nuremberg trials took place in the context of the winner prosecuting the loser. So long as the current US elite (reps and dems) are in power this is never gonna happen. Only if the US decisively loses a war (very unlikely) or some type of revolution takes place (also unlikely but possible), will such trials be possible.

That reads like a description of the chatgpt start page. Just a prompt to start a conversation with a (mostly) helpful tool. But the moment they obtain absolute market dominance…

The northern elite also didn’t want to win at the start of the war: the union as it was, constitution as it is (with slavery that is). For the northern elite the south was a source of cheap cotton and an export market for finished goods, winning decisively would break that balance.

The end of slavery wad truly a bottoms up movement, that forced the contradiction to be so great that it could not exist in one country.

John Dolan (aka the war nerd) has a great series on this subject on his podcast: Radio War Nerd.

Der Führer schützt das Recht.

It’s a distasteful comparison, but it’s literally the logic here: „We are international law, and international law is us. If we must break international law to protect our interests, then we are protecting international law itself.“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I thought you were done.

It is, please reread the thread if you’re not convinced.

The edits are small wording changes made within minutes of posting them (before you responded to them).

Great job not sounding like a sore loser. 👌

Good point pal.

That is the detail that you got stuck on. The question was: is the US culpable in the Palestinian genocide, or is Israel just a third country?

Watch the news and it should be obvious what the answer is.