I absolutely agree.

Technically I didn’t, so who is putting words in whose mouth?

The Chinese government are a ruthless immoral authoritarians. Say what you want about economic systems, but fuck authoritarians.

I just don’t want to have cash on me. My wallet is already quite a stack of cards. Two debit cards, a credit card, two vehicle registration cards, a roadside assistance membership card, a driver’s license.

Er means that in English, Frisian, and Dutch too.

I get that country/state is a loose concept, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

The existence of foreign military bases and whether a political entity has committed war crimes are not typically considered in most accepted definitions of statehood. 85% of the countries on earth, literally a majority, recognize Israel. Going by for instance the criteria of the Montevideo Convention (permanent population, defined territory, government, capacity to have international relations) only the defined territory is debatable.

The thing with geopolitics is that international laws are more like guidelines. If a political entity can afford to exist through whatever means, and if it ticks most of the boxes of what we generally consider to be true of statehood, it is a country/state for all practical purposes.

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read today. The majority of countries on earth are former colonies whose borders were drawn up by Europeans thousands of kilometers away. Not only that, Israel is a self governing geopolitical entity that has formal relations with the majority of countries in the world and can defend itself fairly well.

The US is a country despite the fact that the colonisation of North America was a net wrong.

You would have to define what a real country is, and how it is not the same as the geopolitical status quo of Israel. By any useful contemporary definition Israel is a country.

Claims in religious texts don’t mean anything if you cannot independently verify them. What matters is what people (with some power) believe, and a lot of people do believe it does and ought to exist. Enough for it to exist anyway.

One significant difference, though, is that you can’t blame a jewish Israeli for being born in Israel. In that sense they’re much different than the Western muslims who moved to ISIS territory.

Maybe Israel shouldn’t have existed in 1948, but we have to deal with the fact that it does.

That does of course not excuse West Bank colonialism and apartheid. But if I had a workable solution to that I’d not be writing Lemmy comments on the shitter.

*to make sure it was insane enough.

It’s The Mirror we’re taking about.

That’s roughly equal to losing Germany, France, and Italy, the three most populous EU countries.

I think it’s a clever way to get rich people to pay high taxes. Singapore is just not a place suited for private cars for the able bodied. The same policy in other countries wouldn’t be fair, but I could probably see it work in Manhattan or in the canal district in Old Amsterdam.

Handle yourself, doctor.

Isn’t the more likely explanation that they have more to gain from a second Trump term, lowering corporate taxes?

The more they undermine Biden and Ukraine, the likelier it is in their view that Trump makes a comeback.

“I guess I shouldn’t have brought my 50kg tote.”

You make a lot of assumptions here.

The poorest don’t fly at all

ASML had to put in a decades of r&d to make EUV work too. It wasn’t like they could just go over the research and start building. So yeah, it’s difficult.

*self-inflicted gunshot to the back of his head

It’s not even 2.4 million USD. That’s not nearly enough.