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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2025

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  • My sister once tried to tell my aunt that there was 0 difference between tea which had been heated up in a microwave with the tea bag already in it versus tea that had been made to my aunt’s specifications (boil the water, not in the microwave, and then put the tea in it and let it steep).

    They had a vigorous disagreement about it, which ended with my sister making up two mugs of tea as a blind taste test and then presenting them to my aunt. My aunt instantly told her which one was the microwave tea and which was the proper tea. My sister admitted to the correction and from then on made the tea according to specifications.


  • Boy, you must be super pissed at Russia and critical of a lot of their people then. If support for arguably-neo-Nazi figures is the metric. I mean, lots of them speak highly of Stalin, they have statues of him for fuck’s sake, and he made a deal with actual Hitler and fought alongside him to invade Poland. He wasn’t just a cosplayer.

    According to Vyacheslav Likhachev of the Institut français des relations internationales, members of far-right (including neo-Nazi) groups played an important role on the pro-Russian side, arguably more so than on the Ukrainian side, especially during early 2014.[240][241] Members and former members of the National Bolshevik Party, Russian National Unity (RNU), Eurasian Youth Union, and Cossack groups participated in recruitment of the separatists.[240][242][243][244] A former RNU member, Pavel Gubarev, was founder of the Donbas People’s Militia and first “governor” of the Donetsk People’s Republic.[240][245] RNU is particularly linked to the Russian Orthodox Army,[240] one of a number of separatist units described as “pro-Tsarist” and “extremist” Orthodox nationalists.[246][240] ‘Rusich’ is part of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary group in Ukraine which has been linked to far-right extremism.[247][248] Afterward, the pro-Russian far-right groups became less important in Donbas and the need for Russian radical nationalists started to disappear.[240]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism#Ukraine

    Or is that side of it not a big deal?

    Only the side where it makes Ukrainians look bad in some way? For some reason?

    BTW, I just gave $50 more to Ukraine via https://u24.gov.ua/ on the big “Donate Now” link in the top right. Hopefully they can buy some weapons with it, and keep playing Bandera songs if that’s what they want to do while they are blowing up Soviet-era equipment that’s trying to kill their people.





  • However this does not give Putin, or any other neighbouring country, the right to invade and all willy-nilly demand territories from Ukraine.

    Almost as if it is possible for two bad things to be happening at once at the same time, without it meaning that one of them is actually a good thing now.

    I’m reminded of the run-up to the 2nd Iraq War, near enough to the dawn of the mainstream internet that there was one Iraqi blogger who was well-known in the West. He was kind of a minor celebrity and people read him attentively to figure out what the reality was like for people in Iraq, up to and including the beginning of the war. One thing that he said that always stuck with me was, more or less: Yes, things are bad here. Some of the things the US is saying are true. But it is INSANE to think that anyone here wants the US to invade to “save” us from any of it, or that there’s any chance that it will make anything any better. It will make things ten times worse. It’s insane to me that people who are supposed to be qualified at world events are saying that the US is trying to “help,” or that anyone wants this or will “welcome as liberators” the people coming to bomb our cities and make our government even worse.




  • “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” -Carl Sagan








  • There is absolutely a push by those people to do that. Why do you think the only solution that gets proposed for this problem is to build more housing for them to buy?

    The people in government proposing it are not required to wear labels showing their sponsors like Nascar drivers, so the linkage is not overt or public, but I absolutely believe that is why that solution is always the one presented in media and government. And, like the dummies that most Americans are, they see it in the media and start pushing for it themselves, because someone told them that’s the answer.