I’m not arguing for the BRD and how not fucked LGBTQ and women’s rights were. I’m arguing against a picture that the GDR had better rights in general when in fact most people who didn’t strictly follow the party line were heavily suppressed and observed.

Edit: forgot women’s rights

I’m not arguing for the BRD and how not fucked LGBTQ rights were. I’m arguing against a picture that the GDR had better rights in general when in fact most people who didn’t strictly follow the party line were heavily suppressed and observed.

Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently

Do you seriously tell yourself the GDR was a democratic socialist country? The GDR not being democratic was exactly it’s problem and why it couldn’t reform its problems. And yeah, the people only wanted to get oppressed by capitalists when they protested in Leipzig and Berlin. If you really believe that I don’t know what to tell you. Are you some Wessi who doesn’t know shit about life in the GDR?

And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh.

Man, they wanted something better than the shit show that their life had become. They had many ideas about how they could reform their country. A new socialist constitution, a emancipated reunion with the West etc. All they knew was that it couldn’t go on with the current SED clique.

How did the SED respond? Fucking off with the last money. They left their population with no help when they negotiated with Kohl. But hey, to you that’s just capitalist propaganda probably. Now it’s the people’s fault that they got screwed by the capitalists pfffff

Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.

Holy shit bro. Do you think Hohenschönhausen was filled with right wingers and capitalists and that your beloved party didn’t oppress the population? First of right wing networks were left alone all over the country. What we see now in Thüringen and Sachsen didn’t just hop over from the BRD after the wall fell. It merely got reinforced. Second, do you really think only right wing dissidents got suppressed? My father got in trouble because he stepped into the voting booth, NOT casting his vote openly for the SED. Democratic my ass bro, righteous suppression of right wingers lol. 100k Stasi agents 200k informants just for right wing dissidents, yeah right

Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.

A war in Lebanon is actually bad for Netanyahu. His interest is a slow-burning war so he can prolong the current situation as much as possible

The current situation is that he’s in a war in Gaza and that is keeping him in office. He can still spin this as “we are fighting against an existential threat”. Rocket defence and retaliation strikes aka the slow burning war in Lebanon is not enough for the Israeli society to unite behind Bibi. Only if they seriously attack. And I think Netanyahu wants to provoke such an attack.

Sending thousands of bombs God knows where they land is not a proper defense. It’s a huge escalation where Hezbollah will answer. I think the best argument against this strike has been thrown around everywhere: What if Hezbollah made such an attack where 3000 bombs where sent to IDF people. We would talk about a terrorist attack. Why is that different now?

Why is it okay for them to bomb Lebanon as well?

Bibi really wants a war with Hezbollah, doesn’t he? I mean you can’t call it defending Israels safety anymore when you provoke any and all responses every other month with a missile here, a bomb there and now thousands of bombs everywhere. This is just another measure to keep Netanyahu in a conflict so that he doesn’t have to bear the consequences of multiple corruption cases against him and the dissolving of his coalition outside unity cases in a war. Why is Europe and the US still covering for him? What is the rest of Israel doing?

In my experience vegans never tell others out of the blue they’re vegan. Most of the time they get interrogated about their nutritional intakes or about if they dared to inconvenience others around them

Israel doesn’t seem to give a shit about innocent people so don’t give this shitty IDF PR line about what a tragedy innocent deaths are. 40k dead that are counted in the hospitals that aren’t running anymore. Probably at least 100k more beneath the rubble. Just because Bibi doesn’t want to face the end of the war and his downfall. Maybe he can incite a new war with Hezbollah or Iran before Gaza is a wasteland, so he has more time. My government will surely support that as well. Just awesome shit man.

And there is a huge gap between letting Hamas be and bombing the living shit out of a school full of refugees with some Hamas members in them. Maybe it’s just that my and most people’s standards of not regarding Palestinian civilians as worth nothing are too high for the Israeli government.

I actually liked TLJ as well. Like others said, I liked these Force Connection scenes with Rey and Kylo, I liked how it dispatched Snoke, dismissing the idea of yet another Star Wars conflict being controlled by an evil old wizard and instead gives sets the way for a new story by giving Kylo Ren the reigns of the new empire (which was thrown in the trash by JJ in ep 9, which is the gravest sin for me of that film), and gives a plausible take on the seduction to the dark side and to the light side. I know these ideas were poorly implemented e.g. the proposition Kylo makes to Rey “Hey, look, I’ve killed the evil emperor! Join me and we can take this whole thing over. Let’s start by killing all your friends!”. What a great offer, Kylo. But still I liked that this was something new and more than just a rehash.

What I also really loved is that not every character has to be related to the Skywalkers or another character of the other trilogies, again something JJ threw in the trash by ep 9. Why does Rey have to of some ancient magical lineage? I liked the idea that the force was running through people everywhere, even through slave kids on the casino planet. Everybody can be a hero, even if your parents or ancestors weren’t. Wait, what’s that, JJ? Everything was Palpatine all along? Never mind then.

Netanyahu really doesn’t want these negotiations to come through, does he? How can he go to the hostage families and tell them he’s gonna get their relatives back when he bombs the shit out of the country they’re hidden in, has blown up and wanted to funnel sea water into the tunnels where they are most likely held (from an outsiders perspective) and now basically shot someone in the face across the negotiating table?

Tell me how that makes sense.

until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.

That’s a common misconception. If frogs are thrown into boiling water they almost die instantly, if they are placed in a pot that’s slowly beginning to boil, they desperately try to escape after a while

Water and Flying Pokemon gotta be beware man

“I’ve heard statements [from other soldiers] that the hostages are dead, they don’t stand a chance, they have to be abandoned,” Green noted. “[This] bothered me the most … that they kept saying, ‘We’re here for the hostages,’ but it is clear that the war harms the hostages. That was my thought then; today it turned out to be true.”

This right here low-key bothers me most about the Israeli position. This war isn’t about freeing hostages. You wouldn’t blow up every building, every Hamas tunnel when you knew that somewhere these hostages have to be held AND you cared about their well-being.

Absolute insanity. When I’m seeing these things around the world and now in Ukraine I’m always trying to see a logical explanation, some twisted cynical reasoning for why you bomb these vulnerable civilian targets, and I can’t find anything. It’s just cruelty. Ukrainians aren’t going to surrender because of this, people and nations never have before. It just makes resistance to your war that much more defiant. If you bomb a childrens hospital, it’s just because you want to punish people for not letting you win.

The second part that hurts is that this changes so little in the grand scheme. Maybe some guy who was living under a rock who was skeptical changes his mind about this invasion. But the vast majority of Russian internet propagandists, pro-Russia politicians in parliaments in the EU and around the world and people blinded by Putins lies will find some pathetic excuse to deny and deflect. And in a week the next atrocity occurs somewhere

Yeah, when you sell loot boxes of digital skins that are widely used on 3rd party illegal e-sports gambling sites, you make billions. Great job, Valve. Ever wonder why e-sports teams have these “BETKING360”-sponsors? It’s because young men have money to gamble with and the potential for being the next generation of gambling addicts. Valve knows that, it just doesn’t facilitate gambling directly. It just plays bank

I have no love for Gabe Newell, even if he has these charming video skits he sometimes does for TI or whatever