AreaSIX

The US WANTS to be in those bases because it gives them a lot of soft power in foreign relationships

I’d say that military bases within European countries is the definition of projecting hard power. If 40 000 soldiers in a military base are called ‘soft power’, what’s hard power then? Nuking the city?

That’s a problem for the Israeli state to solve, not me. There have been many ways in my view, but that’s not relevant to the question of commiting genocide. I don’t need to be an expert in order to categorically oppose genocide. There’s not a thing you can say that the Palestinians have done, real or imaginary, which would make a genocide defendable to a human being in touch with their humanity.

There’s no reason at all to discuss anything other than stopping the genocide in the current context. You don’t discuss possible long term solutions while a genocide is ongoing. After Israel stops commiting genocide, there’ll perhaps be room to discuss what to do going forward, but while it’s ongoing, there’s only one thing worth discussing: How to stop Israel commiting genocide.

If a people are being genocided and you still have difficulties seeing the black and white clearly, that’s on you. It couldn’t be more black or white than this, the side doing the genocide is always black until it stops doing the genocide. I’m a simple man, doing genocide=black in any context, always.

No replies on the holding the door and smiling being the sign of a swindler? That actually sounds like you live in an exceptionally hostile place. I’m swedish, as in people not exactly known for showing a lot of warmth to each other in public, and I always hold the door, and smile at people very often. The smiling part might be somewhat unusual here in Sweden too, but not unusual as in bad or a sign of a swindler. Most people seem to appreciate these behaviors. Either that or I’m absolutely delusional and everyone secretly views me as a swindler ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And you complain about pro Israel accounts getting banned. Literally justifying the murder of children should be banable no matter what county you’re supporting. Despicable behavior that everyone now sadly expects from rabid genocide supporters.

That’s not a Västgötaspets, looks more like a mixed breed.

There’s evidence of apple cultivation in the middle east from around 5000 years ago as far as I know.

Here I thought I was ancient because it was combat. Seems like there are many of us old farts around here.

“ingrained in the middle eastern mentality”? I’d have a look at my own mentality if I was this comfortable generalizing several hundreds of millions of people like that. It seems like you have disdain for both victim and perpetrator irrespective of which in your mind is which, because they’re middle eastern. Weird.

Spent a year in the south/south east of Africa, and different variations of fermented maize beer were the most common alcoholic drink among locals.

Thobwa is the Malawian/Zambian version, while umqombothi is the South African one.

If so, then it’s just as inaccurate and ridiculous to say that Uganda, India, Algeria and Morocco have regressed in their development. What part of that do you consider controversial? Are you unwilling/unable to have a negative attitude towards the current regime, while also acknowledging that they’ve done more to develop the country than the Pahlavis ever did? There’s no contradiction at all in that in my view, those are just the facts. Iran has raised its HDI by +40% in the last 35 years, going from 0.577 in 1990 to almost 0.8 in 2018, with the international average for countries with high HDI being 0.75. Iran went from non-existent research output during the Shah’s reign to being number 15 in the World, placing 4th in Asia after India, Japan and South Korea. All of this happened within the framework of the “theocratic shitheads”, despite the existence of socially repressive laws, and not during the Shah’s time when the laws were more relaxed and all of the West supported his regime in any way possible. He was just uninterested in channeling that support into things beneficial to the people of Iran, and suffered the consequences of that by steering the country into revolution. So just comparing a picture of a woman in a miniskirt in the seventies to the mandatory hijab of today and concluding that the country has regressed in general seems like the most uncharitable and shallow analysis possible. It’s not helpful in understanding the World at all, and leads to foolish slogans like “they hate us for our freedom”, which in turn leads to disastrous decisions like the invasion of Iraq.

I don’t know why it should be so difficult to acknowledge that there are different degrees of bad, and the record suggests that the current “shitheads” are still far superior to the former. Nothing I wrote was meant to imply that the current regime doesn’t do a lot of bad stuff, there are no governments that don’t do bad stuff. To make sense of international politics at all, I think it’s essential to be able to compare different degrees of bad and grade on a curve. Just pointing and saying it’s all bad doesn’t seem like the best of ideas to me. But to each his own.

Or look at the literacy rates. At the time of the revolution, so past when this photo was taken, less than 40% of Iranians could read and write. And let’s not mention The Celebration of the 2,500th Anniversary of the Founding of the Persian Empire by the Western puppet ruler, spending millions and millions on a tent city for foreign dignitaries in the desert plains, while his subjects were living in abject poverty without access to education or health care. Let’s just look at the mini skirt in the photo and wonder at the enlightenment of those days and the backwardness of today, when the literacy rate has more than doubled in 40 years for example. But they have hijab, therefore the society has obviously regressed. That’s the measure for how advanced a society is, the length of the skirts of the few who are well off.

Hade aldrig hört luftlök! Det brukar stå supersolo där jag bor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_garlic?wprov=sfla1

Alright. I was thinking about bank holidays here in Sweden. They’re generally off days for all workers here. You can choose to work, it’s not like everything is closed. But that’s a voluntary thing that your employer can’t force you to do, and which is handsomely compensated on account of it being a bank holiday. So people in the hospitality sector for example generally seem to like these shifts and there’s no shortage of volunteers to cover them. This is yet another area where the US system is raping US workers it seems.

That’s just an appalling situation for workers in the US. I work in the public sector and get 37 days off a year in vacation time. Admittedly, I work in the public sector and have a generous vacation deal, but it’s absolutely insane that workers in the US have a worse deal than many third world nations. My 37 days are working days, meaning I get almost 8 whole weeks of vacation time, on top of all the other regular bank holidays everyone else gets. The people there often seem to cherish your second amendment, but fuck, what tyranny are you guys waiting for. How about using them weapons for something else than suicides and accidental shootings?

I reside right by your mother’s welcoming pussy, come at me soldier. Bring the recruiter too and we’ll run a train on her, that’s her favorite.

I agree, while the head of state is the more important and powerful position, the president certainly isn’t exactly powerless and handles the day to day business of government. But calling the leader the Ayatollah is slightly misleading. While it’s a requirement in the constitution that the head of state be an Ayatollah, Ayatollah itself is a religious rank, not a political one. So there are many Ayatollahs around, even more since the revolution as many believe that the rank has become somewhat inflated.

Ok. To be fair, it is actually the first time you’re mentioning the German angle and English being your second language, so I had no way of knowing. Also, there are a lot of people online using these terms (politburo, kompromat and the like) in order to cast a subliminally negative light on the subjects being discussed, so I wasn’t trying to be malicious, if perhaps a bit too defensive 😄 My apologies for insinuating that you have a hidden agenda.

How are you this dense and don’t already have your own moon orbiting around you?

Yes, political and bureau are two English words, and if you had used them, they’d correspond to your quote from a wikipedia article. However, you used “politburo”, which is the abbreviation used to denote the political bureaus of the communist parties within the Soviet sphere. You know, like compromising material being an English phrase, while the abbreviation “kompromat” is a Russian intelligence abbreviation from the Stalin era.

It’s odd for someone getting their worldview through Wikipedia to not at least look for the wiki article for politburo. But in any case, I’d suggest not limiting yourself to the non existent nuance in Wikipedia and try to dig a little bit deeper in order to understand the words you’re using to sound smart online.