Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies…

And it’s certainly not a coincidence that those isolationist and extremist policies are being actively promoted by the MAGA Republicans.

A white cat to go with the blue horses…

I’d never seen this before - thanks.

Good luck convincing cats of that.

Mmm… yes and no.

College towns are more lively and interesting, and notably more likely to have cultural things that similar-sized other towns don’t have - bookstores, galleries, music venues, museums and the like. That’s appealing.

But there’s a downside to living in a college town as a non-student. The town is mostly geared toward serving the students, and that can get tiresome, since it’s near certain that some significant number of the students are going to be… well… assholes.

Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned tourist towns and their similar appeal, and I’d agree. But with the exact same proviso.

The survivors, after the ones that Israel has already killed and the many, MANY more the deaths of whom by malnutrition and disease they’re currently very deliberately engineering.

Yes.

Broadly, the whole situation is only murky and complex if you grant some credence to Israel’s rhetoric. If you start with the presumption that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies are lying and that conquest has been the goal all along (and not just from the beginning of the current hostilities but for years now), then everything falls neatly into place and it all makes perfect sense.

That’s certainly not a coincidence.

That’s rather obviously been one of Israel’s primary goals from the start - to destroy as much infrastructure as possible, to create as much hardship as possible for the Palestinians.

And rather obviously, that’s in service to their longer term goal of taking full and direct control of Gaza. They want to render it uninhabitable, so that they can cast their planned occupation as a practical or even humanitarian necessity, rather than what it in fact is - brazen, and brazenly illegal, conquest.

The central point to keep in mind as far as all of that goes is that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies have, at every turn, entirely rejected a two-state solution and any form of Palestinian autonomy. To just the degree necessary to maintain a PR facade, they claim that conquest is not their intent, but if it’s not going to be a two-state solution, conquest is literally the only alternative, so it is and can only be their actual goal, and their claims to the contrary are and can only be quite simply lies.

And not coincidentally, the wholesale destruction of Gazan infrastructure in which Israel has self-evidently engaged fits right in with that interpretation.

Right-wing political elites strongly believe in personal freedom and states’ rights. Right-wing regular folks believe strong in personal freedom.

Curiously, this is demonstrably false.

At this point virtually every time one sees somebody call on the government to step in and interfere in something, it’s a right-winger.

As with so many things, they actually are exactly what they claim to oppose - fragile babies who constantly cry for mommy and daddy government to protect them

I think it’s long past time for a serious international conversation about profoundly mentally ill politicians.

…Iron Truth volunteers conflating Palestinian advocacy with material support for Hamas…

So Iron Truth lies.

How unsurprisingly Orwellian…

I would say that it depends on how the other person feels about the thing in question.

If the person you say it to is sincerely lauding something, then yeah - I’d say it’s necessarily insulting, since you’re implying not only that they have no taste, but that they’ve been indoctrinated into mindlessly singing the thing’s (nonexistent) praises.

But if the other person is simply asking about the thing, or better yet, has already signaled their own disdain for it, then it’s just a potentially appropriate potential witticism.

I’m sold.

Certainly.

I saw in another post that AMA is apparently copyrighted (which is ridiculous, but I guess rent-seeking fuckwads are gonna do what they’re gonna do). At worst, what that means though is that if the fuckwads at Reddit care enough, they can arrange for a DMCA takedown if someone uses it.

And unless they’re even more stupid than I cynically presume, Reddit isn’t even going to do that, since the last thing they should want to do is try to establish a precedent of criminal sanctions against forums that host copyrighted material.

I say use whatever the fuck words you want to use.

IMO the only relevant issue is whether or not they accomplish the task of communicating the thing you wanted to communicate in the way you wanted to communicate it. If so, then they’re as right as they need to be, and any objection anyone else might have is only your problem to the extent that you allow it to be. If you care what they think then it matters, but if you don’t then it doesn’t.

I doubt you’d even get a coherent sentence. Just random strings of emotive nouns and adjectives with irrelevant verbs sprinkled in here and there.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but this is a fairly obvious consequence of the Israeli propaganda machine’s ongoing efforts to conflate opposition to Israeli government policy with anti-semitism - some number of violent fuckwits are going to equate support for Palestinian genocide with pro-semitism.

“Failing” implies that it was unintentional.

The evidence quite clearly indicates that it was not - that it was instead a very deliberate choice made in pursuit of long-term goals

Netanyahu explicitly rejects a two-state solution. His goal is to annex all existing Palestinian territory.

The Palestinian people are justifiably unwilling to submit to that, because they know that that way leads to them being made second-class citizens of an apartheid state.

The only alternative then is for Israel to conquer those territories - to kill enough Palestinians to terrorize the rest into subjugation. And that is, certainly not coincidentally, the exact strategy they’re pursuing at this moment.

And the Hamas attack is the specific thing that made it possible for them to do so with at least some colorable semblance of justification.

Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion is that when the Israeli government learned of the planned attack, a deliberate choice was made to not move to prevent it - to allow it to happen, because it would serve Netanyahu’s purposes when it did. As it has.

Yes and no.

My parents are thankfully at the age at which they just don’t give much of a shit. They think that there was a lot of shady political shenanigans surrounding the whole thing (and I’d say they’re objectively correct about that), but they cynically expect that and mostly ignore it. They talked to their doctors and came to understand that covid is real, and dangerous, and that the vaccines do have some risks, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and that was enough for them to take it seriously and take proper precautions.

My brothers on the other hand…

I’m the oldest of three, and they’re both… well… angry, spiteful, delusional, Fox News and talk radio consuming, gun-toting, Trump-voting, road-raging reactionaries. So they both lined right up and marched in lockstep with the expected dogma, to my complete lack of surprise.

So yes - our relations have been strained over it, but really it’s not quite accurate to say that it’s because of that, since that’s just one of the many, many MANY things on which we disagree.