“Nothing compares to the excitement of stepping foot in the airport for the start of a summer holiday, and this new soundtrack perfectly captures those feelings,”

This is what happens when you don’t have enough bullying in your schools

Q: What about that massive photo of Trump and the backpack checks for DEI literature

A: That’s fine why do you ask

Next you’re going to tell me people aren’t signing on to “Arabian Gulf”

I was once on a farm, laughing at something, and a horsefly came up and bit me on the tongue.

I had no idea why it happened, still don’t, but it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me at that point in my life.

If the heartbreak I feel didn’t come through about the destruction of our home and everything that makes survival on it easy, the possibility of our total extinction and the certainty of massive scale suffering of every living thing on the planet, then let me make it clear: Yes, that’s a bad thing.

The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.

The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.

There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.

I’ll speak for myself, I was well aware.

I cannot possibly imagine that they are not planning to make the attempt.

Not really, at least the carrier was not actively being shelled while he was doing his big thumbs-up.

Fun fact, also, they had to spend time flipping the carrier around in the water so that San Diego wouldn’t be in the background and people could assume that he was in the middle of the Persian Gulf I guess.

While researching that last little bit, I also found this:

The White House claimed that the banner was requested by the crew of the ship, who did not have the facilities for producing such a banner. Later, the administration and naval sources said that the banner was the Navy’s idea, White House staff members made the banner, and it was hung by Navy sailors. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN, “We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.”[11] According to John Dickerson of Time magazine, the White House later conceded that they hung the banner but still insisted it had been done at the request of the crew members.[12]

Oh, for those innocent days when we thought that was a big crew of morons and liars who were fucking up directing the ship of state.

The applicable word is “pick-me”.

It is precisely like when Russia’s currency tanked like a stricken submarine, which meant their PPP-adjusted GDP shot up the rankings and became one of the highest numbers in the world, which all the tankies promptly seized upon and used as an example of why the sanctions are actually helping Russia, by boosting its domestic economy, which is why everything is going great.

You picked which bus to ride on, you don’t get to complain now that it’s full of dingbats and losers and going somewhere you don’t want to go. There are people who lost much more than their jobs, and you were happy as a clam with that and wanted to create more of them on your side of the border. And so, out you go.

What are you on about

Multiple people told me I was being “antagonistic” when I spoke to the Hexbear people on the topic of Russia and Ukraine. I think I’m okay with that.

As I understand it, his logic here is:

• Iraq War: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
• Israeli occupation: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
• English oppression of Ireland: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
• Ukraine war: Well you see it’s complicated, Ukraine is not innocent and anyway Russia was provoked

(Actually, if I’m being serious, I think the point was to tear down the very notion that matters of geopolitics can ever involve “right” or “wrong” and erode the reader’s sense of justice, depress them, make them disengage, and thus provide a narrative safe space for all the killing, torture, and destruction that Russia wants to do for as long as it wants to do it. But, if you take it at face value, that up there is what he’s saying.)

Yeah. I know 100% what you mean. It is hard to maintain good humor. If it helps:

1. It’s fun to deal with the ones that are doing a really shitty job. I was happy seeing this guy come in and instantly trip over his dick trying to say “all NATO’s fault” in this obvious and incompetent manner. I don’t think it actually needed debunking really, but maybe a larger number of people laughing at him in the comments will result in a bad performance review or something along those lines.
2. Don’t feel like you need to deal point-by-point with their horseshit. You don’t need to be evasive or deceptive or anything, but they don’t deserve the courtesy of a detailed and factual counterargument. If you answer one argument, they’ll just pretend you didn’t and raise another. You’ll notice that except for the end, I basically ignored almost everything he said, because it’s not like it really needs debunking. I just took the chance to talk about some stuff that counterbalanced their narrative and I felt like talking about.
3. Don’t feel like you need to be polite. I’ve actually seen some writings that dealing straightforward-factually with this kind of stuff actually is just not effective and more or less gives them a platform, and I can completely believe it. Don’t be unhinged or hostile, but also, don’t pretend you respect them. The social contract goes both ways, and honoring it with someone who’s breaking it is just being a chump and sending the wrong message to people reading.
4. If they do decide they want to debate, I love to just ask straight questions. I recently got banned again from Hexbear because of some participation that included:

• Hey, quick question: Why did Russia swear before the invasion that they were not going to invade Ukraine, and any reports of that were just Western lies?
• Why did they change the goal from “denazification and demilitarization” to “we need to keep all this extra land on the border because it’s ours now and we’ll keep killing people until someone gives up and lets us have it”?
• Is Russia’s current set of actions more likely to produce the result: More motivation to join NATO by neighboring countries, or less motivation?

There were a couple of other ones, sort of detail questions related to what we were talking about. They really get irritable when you just ask straight questions that their framework doesn’t like the answers to. Zero of my questions got answered even when I pointed out that maybe they had overlooked the question or meant to respond to someone else and politely asked it again, and they accused me of “JAQing off” and said it was a horrible thing to do to ask them these things. (Killing people apparently is okay.)

Be sarcastic. Be insulting. After all, they are wrong, and they’re killing people. I’m not trying to be embittered about it or anything (and sometimes I am not successful in that) but it’s okay not to be nice to them.

I think this falls into the “never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake” category.

If they want to fill our channels with random malicious nonsense in service of the idea of killing a bunch of innocent people and taking away their home, and they want to do such a bad job of it that it’s transparently obvious horseshit that everyone just laughs at or dunks on… I say welcome. Come on in. Tell us all about your theories, good sir, I can’t wait to hear.

I don’t think anyone is being fooled, based on the speed and unanimity of the downvotes.

Well… it’s filled with NATO arms and munitions

Fun fact: Do you know what the ratio is of money Russia’s spent on the war, as compared with Ukraine plus allies?

It’s about 2 to 1. When you factor in PPP, that means in real material terms it is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to one. Russia has mobilized basically the entirety of its economy to try to win this thing, about half their federal budget every year now. While Ukraine is surviving on occasional drips of Western aid whenever their governments can get roused from their campaign-contribution-induced torpor of corruption to be reminded that there are actual real things happening in the world.

Basically, it is a war of Russian money, Western technology / intelligence support, and Ukrainian blood. Also Ukrainian ingenuity. Necessity being the mother of invention, Ukraine is probably at the forefront of the world at this point in being able to fight a modern war (meaning a drone war) and produce and strategize based on what’s needed for one (meaning drones).

There’s also the significant factor that without Western restrictions being put on Ukraine, stopping them from fighting back in several meaningful ways even to this day, they would have mopped the floor with Russia and been bombing strategic centers deep over the border for years now. Their invasion of Kursk and Belgorod isn’t even the main thing, it is being able to blow up strategic centers inside Russia’s borders.

Having fought a country one-twentieth their size, outspending them ten to one, Russia has managed to get stuck on the border for longer than the US’s involvement in World War 2 with Ukraine fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Think on that for a minute. It is a wonder. There are reasons, of course, mostly having to do with the inherent unfeasibility of a gangster-capitalist state to operate with any significant level of success against actual real challenges. We’re about to become very familiar with that, in the US, I am sad to say.

But not once from the US invading Iraq/Afghanistan. Or England’s occupation of Ireland. Or the Israeli presence in Palestine.

Yeah I never heard any of those things. It’s a wonder. You can look the length and breadth of American political thought, and never find even a single person who thought the Iraq War or the Israeli occupation was anything bad. You would think there would be some kind of dissenting voices somewhere to be found. Hell, you can’t even talk about such things on Lemmy, you’ll be banned for it.

I mean that is one among a few different things that’s wrong with his mental model lol