Rottcodd

It’s safe to assume that one could graph the atrocities committed by the Israeli military, duplicate it, shift it a day or two down the timeline, and one would get the graph of news articles censored by the Israeli military.

Work toward an eventual full withdrawal from NATO and an overt and full political and military alliance with Russia.

I’m not joking.

Cadbury Mini Eggs.

And any decent quality or better saltwater taffy.

They never really did.

It was all, always, just about themselves. They claimed to love the country because they just saw it as a rightful extension of themselves, and they claimed to love democracy because they just saw it as the process by which they got what they wanted.

Now that they’re faced with the fact that the country necessarily also accommodates other people and that democracy means that other people can get what they want, they have no reason left to pretend that they ever really valued either one.

So they’re instead diving headfirst into xenophobic fascism, in the hope that they can recreate a world in which the country exists only for them and the government serves only their interests.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.

He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn’t been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they’d inevitably broken, then try them for that.

That’s how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.

And it’s guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.

The US economy will be much worse than it is already, the country will be at war and the government will be cracking down on civil unrest.

Why would Gazans attack a pier being built to being them aid?

It’s far FAR more likely that the attacks were carried out by Israelis. It wouldn’t be the first time they attacked people trying to provide aid to the Gazans. Hell - it wouldn’t even be the first time this month.

Yes - it is sociopathic.

That’s not a coincidence.

As with so many such things, it’s only a mystery if you start with the presumption that official narratives are true.

If you start with the presumption that official narratives are not true, then the supposed mystery immediately vanishes and everything just falls neatly into place.

I was going to say this, but I figured I could just scroll until I found where someone else inevitably said it.

By the end, I was just letting the drama wash over me and not even trying to sort out which version of who was doing what in which timeline.

And honestly, I suspect that that’s the best way to appreciate it anyway.

It strikes me that, sort of ironically, “infinite” is only a difficult concept to grasp if you’re smart enough to understand it.

Stupid people just sort of take it for granted. “Finite” is the thing they can’t seem to wrap their heads around.

It’s something I was never actually conscious of until I stopped and thought about it yesterday because of this thread. I’ve just always moved the scroll wheel in the way that it seems like it should work, and it works the way it seems like it should.

The thing you’re apparently calling “traditional” seems natural to me.

I’ve never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it’s simple - it’s my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I’d expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn’t the important part because it’s not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the “traditional” way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that’s what’s natural.

…while insisting “I’m not the one who’s out of step.”

That’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.

Good.

I neither know nor care specifically what they were protesting or what they hoped to accomplish - I just want to see every single superyacht immediately vandalized the instant it gets close to any shore, anywhere.

I want to see billionaires made into pariahs. They should be hated - loudly and enthusiastically and universally vilified and condemned and harassed - absolutely everywhere they go, all of the time.

All billionaires are scum, without exception, and they should be treated that way, without exception.

I think all references to Turkish foreign policy should include the phrase “this week,” since next week it’ll likely change. Again.