I suppose we wouldn’t but I know he’s got people in his corner and they’re the ones saying they have proof of life. Literally at any point though that ciuld change.

I suppose it’s good that he wasn’t just outright assassinated. Not that this won’t occur if putin sees the need for it.

Here’s hoping 24 will see putin finally answer for his many crimes and this man set free along with so many others.

You’ll never alleviate that. Most people are dumb as fuck. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it can be exploited. In the new age of constant misinformation if you want to get people to vote against their own interests you need only start a gas lighting campaign and without too much effort you’ll find success.

Only so much you can do when you have to source your information from the dickheads that trump surrounded himself with.

Mmmmmm no. This is the justification many trump voters used. It implies voters are completely off the hook for the consequences of their actions and it’s only the ‘scheming criminals’ who fooled them that can be held accountable.

Just as ignorance of the law does not get you out of your speeding ticket, allowing yourself to be fooled as a voter doesn’t absolve you of the poor choice you made with your vote. It’s a collective fuck up. Own it.

I think you underestimate Russian cruelty. A country that can normalize sending its citizens into an absolute meat grinder has no problems being beyond barbaric with its POWs. I have no doubt Ukranian prisoners are suffering a fate even worse than we can imagine. In circumstances like that suddenly it might just be worth it to accept your fate being killed by your countrymen. Hell maybe you can even get back to them.

The Germans did the same thing in ww2 and in many instances the soldiers either killed their captors or surrendered the first chance they could.

Nah see you’ve got it wrong. You are correct that things happen or don’t happen based entirely on the wealth that is generated for select people. But the people who would benefit from the domination and removal of Russia easily outbid the people who would benefit from their success. The major companies that are already making insane money sending weapons to Ukraine would be happy to see a ground war kick off into Russia. Yeah there’s some right wing grifters that are pro Russia but they’re small potatoes. The money Russia is throwing around is a fraction of a percent of the money that nato aligned arms manufacturers and whatnot are throwing around.

If Russia did not have nuclear capabilities we would have invaded Russia about a week after they invaded Ukraine and by now we would be well into the war crimes trial of putin.

The west can’t get pulled into direct conflict with putin because we would win. Handedly. And putin would inevitably deploy his nukes as his situation became more desperate. We would have to respond in kind and that’s the ballgame.

You can’t even have your mobik bro suck your dick behind a bombed out building without someone filming you both getting blown up. I suspect we would know fairly quickly if they had them up and running. Not saying it’s not possible but I’d be very impressed if they did and we had not seen them on the internet by now.

Seems like you’re the one flirting with a little anti semitism. We’ll why can’t I just hate the jews just a little bit!

Its not a straw man if people are literally saying death to jews. Yeah not everyone. But there’s plenty of other speech that’s in the same realm of death to jews that people are facing consequences for, and also people who simply condemned the Jewish response and also got fired. Obviously one deserves it, the other does not.

I mean thanks for proving my point. It’s just such an insanity inducing topic that no one can have a conversation about it.

Oh for sure companies are going overboard. I just think it’s way too contentious an issue for companies to go all in on one side vs the other.

I definitely don’t think being pro Palestinian warrants losing your job and all of that. Just as being pro Israel should not warrant it. But there’s a limit. Are you being pro Palestine or are you screaming death to the jews. There’s a big difference. Seems people get caught up in the heat of this extremely contentious issue and forget that neither side in this decades old conflict is without sin. People become extreme in their beliefs and go overboard. If you fuck around like that, well, you get what you deserve.

I had not heard that. That is just madness. Its got to be one of the worst cases of unchecked hubris in history. I mean in the 1600s someone would have plunged a dagger into his neck by now. Usually people see the writing on the wall and get to finding a more competent leader but he’s spent decades building this impenetrable circle of loyalists that know they must be absolutely devoted or they’re going to be next on the defenestration block.

No one dares tell these men about their collosal fuck ups. Nope, everything’s going great, we will have this done in 2 more months sir!

If not for nukes I think he would have been long dead by now. If not by the Russian people then surely nato would have rolled over Russia and we would be well into the process of ‘denazifying’ the country.

Frankly I don’t care. The US wastes trillions of dollars on military spending. We have the most advanced military in the world by a mile but all too often it ends up using it to defend someone else’s financial interests or to pad the pockets of people that make their money through a war economy.

Russia can get fucked. Every cent spent on the defense of Ukraine is a fully realized fuck you to our enemy. Ukraine did what we could never do. They essentially removed Russia from the equation. Yeah they have many poorly maintained nukes but they know we will fuck their ass if they touch them. They will not be posing a real threat to anyone for generations.

We aren’t spending this money on the American people and we never were going to do that anyway. Our choices are we fund people actually fighting for their life or we allow that money to get sucked into the military industrial complex for no real return. They’re already getting theirs out of this, the only question that remains is do you back Republicans that have made up a nothing burger about this money because they’ve arbitrarily decided this is the 96th hill they’ll die on, or do you you want to see the money you pay in taxes actually get put to a meaningful purpose.

They’ve lost the war. As soon as this all rolled out I started looking for an alternative. It isn’t so much that they lost one customer, but they’ve created an environment where they will lose customers. Silly mistake. All they had to do was nothing and they would have kept me as a customer. But once again they felt the need to learn the most important lesson in tech. If it ain’t broke don’t fucking fix it.

As long as Israel has Uncle Sam parked off the coast there is no destruction of Israel happening anytime soon. The us could decimate every nation surrounding Israel and then some, probably with just the assets we have in the region alone. They know that so there won’t be any mass attack on Israel. Hamas planned to trigger Israel into a genocide and then have all of the terrorist groups/ Muslim nations launch an attack on Israel. They want a massive world war. But that’s just not happening with where global politics are at. The us is going to provide the protection for Israel to do essentially what they want. We are too chicken shit to pressure Israel into stopping this genocide so we are stuck.

I expect to see terrorist groups in all of the surrounding nations continue to try to trigger a global conflict by attacking Israel and US assets in the region, but its just unlikely to go anywhere.

So Hamas poked the hornets nest, gets nothing but thousands of their people dead. Israel is revealed to be the hard right genocidal dictatorship we have all known it to be. The US continues to sink millions into foreign wars. Round and round we go.

You’re going to have people that will never see any merit to the other sides position no matter what. You want to know the flat objective truth? Both parties here fucking suck. Both parties are committing war crimes and atrocities. Every retaliation by either side is vehemently defended as justified because of a prior retaliation which was in turn defended because of the retaliation before it. Over and over again.

Global politics being what it is only ensures that no matter what we are going to ride this roller coaster into oblivion and a lot of people are going to have to die for no justifiable reason. Each side is pushing hard to justify their actions and to be presented as the victim. Both sides have decades of experience working the PR front. In 15 years we will be discussing the latest violence in the region.

Pessimistic perhaps, but I’d just say it’s realistic.

I didn’t make assumptions about that specific event because it could be totally unrelated. I didn’t imply I never make assumptions or that the following statement would not include assumptions about something else.

You know sometimes people try to chime in with smartass comments but they fall flat because they don’t have basic reading comprehension skills.

I’m not making any assumptions about who did this since we have zero information. But. As an aside. I do expect that in the future as information comes out about who was behind the Israeli attack, those people will be meeting Israeli intelligence operatives first hand. And I speculate that some of those people are going to be in Iran.