They discovered Porn when they got to Russia and have been chronically exhausted ever since…

In my country, to crack down on tax evasion by small businesses people can give their tax payer number when they buy something (say food at a restaurant) and a copy of the receipt automatically gets passed on to the taxman (there’s a lottery on those and people can get some money from it, which is how the State incentivises people to do this, plus you can get some tax discounts on some kinds of expenses such as medicine).

All this to say that the idea of the taxman getting a copy of an itemized receipt for sex work services is just delicious.

PS: Around here sex work is unregulated, meaning not illegal (though profiting of other people’s sex work is illegal) but not explicitly legal and regulated.

And let’s not forget their “Western Values”.

This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.

Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.

It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.

Surelly as the descendants of the Vikings it’s not completelly senseless to think they might be fine with boarding ships on the high seas to take their stuff and with a little plundering of ill-defended costal villages!???

One would expect that any competent national leader would’ve requested an intelligence folder about Trum,p at the lastest when he was elected POTUS, and this being Germany, they have the capability to produce one which is very complete and beyond what we common mortals can deduce about the man’s nature.

Whilst a politician in such a high position in a country isn’t necessarilly more capable of analysing things than a common mortal (though it’s logical to expect they’re significantly better at judging people than most, since that’s a requirement in their profession and to reach such a high position they must be top performers at it), they most certainly have access to much better and deeper information than any of us and to people who can do the analysing for them.

Let’s be fair: “I was wrong about the bad nature of somebody else” is pretty much the lowest, mildest, weakest possible form of self-criticism there is, to the point that it’s quite common for posh manipulator types to use “I was wrong about your ,<proceeds to criticized the other person>” format of discourse to criticize others.

It’s funny how the criminal immediatelly implied that it’s a Jewish characteristic to be a criminal like him, just like he and his minions (which includes the American Administration) have been continuously implying that commiting all manner of horrid crimes, from theft and rape all the way to Genocide and purposeful child mass murder, is a Jewish chacteristic.

Like the last bunch of Nazis, these people aren’t merelly immoral, they’re so depraved, disgusting and devoid of even the most basic humanity that they’ll slander millions of those they claim to defend in order to avoid the consequences of acting like the most extreme and out of control psychopath (far beyond mere Serial Murderer and well into Hitler-level).

The country moved to the far-right, the Industry I was working in - Finance - lost 40,000 jobs, Britain got general Economic stagnation worse than the EU, the value of the British Pound fell significantly against the Euro after the vote (fortunatelly I moved all my savings out of Pound-denominated assets evern before the Leave vote, so I personally was alright) all of the sudden as an EU immigrant you became a second class citizen with lots of extra hassle for living there (inside the EU, EU immigrants have the same rights as the locals, so when Britain left, they lost that), significant decay and problems with their National Health Service, really bad mishandling of COVID (especially in the beginning) and so on.

In some ways the place turned into a mini Trump’s-America, only with the extra nastiness of already being very classist country with very low social mobility from the start and a heavy “know your place” mindset - which is extra hard for immigrants because Britons see themselves as superior to all foreigners but Americans, so “Immigrant” is the lowest “social class” for them - and without the upsides that American has (mainly space and scale, natural resources and at least in some places good weather).

Mind you, most of those things are trends predating Brexit which were heavilly accelerated by it.

The original Nazis would always claim that they represented the Arian Race and that any criticism of them was “against the Arian Race” and the Zionists, a Neue Nazi group, do the same only using a different ethnicity.

This is far from the only way in which these Neue Nazis are the same as the original Nazis.

As an EU immigrant, left the UK after the Leave vote but before Brexit and Covid.

It’s not a bullet but more like a whole lot of bullets.

Mind you, most of it was entirely predictable back then.

By this point it’s more like a new Holocaust, using starvation rather than gas chambers.

I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program again (it’s one of those games you tend to come back to after a while without playing).

You can buy it from stores like GoG or even the maker itself.

Same thing for Factorio (jokingly called Cracktorio by many).

Both are about finding ways to create complex functional things from simpler elements to achieve goals.

The “Most moral army in the World” really showing their country’s “Western values” there…

Well, I for one am fine with them attacking foreign military navy ships of their own coast.

Not the the attacking of civilian vessels though (unless we’re talking about Israeli owned or Israeli bound ones were I’m a bit more conflicted - there should be a blocade and sanctions of Israel, but attacking civilians is wrong) and if they’re indeed extorting shipping companies then that’s just criminality rather than any sort of resistance.

I think you’re confusing rich people with common people.

Those making money in the “homeland” from colonization weren’t the peasants.

I live in a country - Portugal - which when I was born was still a Fascist dictatorship and still had colonies in Africa and back then the vast majority of the population in the country was incredibly poor (to the point of the country getting food help from The Netherlands) but 7 families were incredibly rich (and the white landowners in the “colonies” exploiting the locals and the land they had stolen from them too were rich).

Somehow I don’t think my mother (who walked to school barefoot in Winter as a child) was getting any of that “stolen wealth”.

Blaming the entire nation and everybody in it for colonization done by the country during times of autocracy is just how the wealthy who inherited wealth their ancestors amassed by exploiting people in faraway lands ditch the blame into the sons and daughters of the people who back then were poor and powerless.

Compensate the actual people who suffered (or their close descendands if still alive), not the parasites in power in lands which happenned to have been occupied, and do it with the money of those who gained from their suffering (or the inherited money from close descendants), not the usual Identity Politics bullshit of diluting the blame of a few by blaming whole nations and ethnicities to de facto benefit people who were not victims or descendents of victims but instead just happen to share nationality or ethnicity with the victims, all the while avoiding like crazy talking about the wealthy who were the ones amassing most if not all of the upsides of the pillaging.

It’s curious that the “terrorists” are actually targetting military targets whilst the military are killing civilians.

In my experience, how many people vote tactically massivelly depends on the voting system and whether it’s a presidential system or not.

The kind of utilitarian votes that sees one vote for somebody one does not like is not quite an Americanism because it doesn’t happen only in the US (for example, the UK, even though it doesn’t have a Presidential system, has a lot of tactical vote because they use First Past The Post for Parliament so each parliamentary seat is like a mini-presidential election where thare can only be one winner), but it’s not really common in other countries.

As I said, I was involved in Politics in two countries, including canvassing and leafletting, and from talking to people (as well as observing how my family, friends and party colleagues did their “politics”) voting it’s far more often an affair of the hearth than of the head, starting by how people chose which politicians to trust given that they all promise nice things to them.

The cold and rational pondering about who to vote is not actually that widespread and many of those who try are still being swayed by emotional factors (for example, via who they chose to trust and how much) and people tend instead to vote on who they like and trust (or dislike and distrust all of them hence refuse to vote).

Further, even the cold and rational pondering is often not that rational because when it comes to such complex subjects with such a high level of uncertainty and misinformation, most of what one choses to believe as informations and one’s own most favored forecast, is chosen based on less that scientific proof. (There is so much misinformation, disinformation and outright lying that chosing not to chose - i.e. not to vote - might be the most rational option of all).

What I’ve learned from decades of trying to go at things in a rational way is that we can never be fully Objective so it’s a good idea to be aware of and keep track of the Subjective elements in one’s decision making. Sure, it’s valid to try, just don’t decieve yourself that you have a perfectly logical decision making process and that everybody should be reaching the same conclusions as you.

From were I stand, your idea that you have a valid tactical approach and that it THE superior approach without question is just you misleading yourself about the nature of your information gathering and your thinking processes, hence you passing judgment on others for not going through the same obstacle course you do to end up making a decision which was de facto contaminated by subjective elements such as your choice of what information to trust and what forecasts you judged more likely, is like the blind criticing others for not seeing.

You really are not standing on top the moral high ground you think you’re standing on.

Not just me. This is common in other countries. People most definitely do not treat their vote as an endorsement. You can believe me or not or say I am bad, but this is a matter of fact.

Being from an “other” country, having lived in another 3 of said “other” countries, an even having been involved in politics in 2 of them, what you wrote is complete total bullshit.

Plenty of people do indeed have an utilitarian view of their vote, but lots of people, maybe even most, treat their vote as an endorsement.

In fact from my own experience in various countries the utilitarian view is more common in countries with less Democratic voting systems with few actually electable choices, similar to the US (so, for example, Britain) whilst the endorsement view is more common in countries with highly Democratic voting systems with lots of choices (such as The Netherlands, which has Proportional Vote).

I’m sorry but whilst you having an utilitarian posture is perfectly valid, your idea that it’s the only valid posture and other people don’t have different postures is complete total mindless self-centred bollocks.

Israel is literally a “Nation for Jews” in its constitution were it says roughly that all Jews and only Jews are entitled to Israeli nationality, hence why any Jewish person can just land at Tel-Aviv, ask to get Israeli nationality and get it.

That said, Israel, pretty much uniquelly in the World, separates Citizenship from Nationality and assigns different rights to both, so non-Jews can get Israeli Citizenship but not Israeli Nationality.

Limitations on the rights that people get from having Israeli Citizenship without the Nationality include, for example, limits to where they can live.

Appartheid in Israel is already officially implement, since the very beginning, so even if the Palestinians were given Israeli Citizenship (highly unlikely given Israel’s track record on this: for example tens of thousands of Arab residents in Jerusalem have for decades been refused Israeli Citizienship even though they were born there and lived there their whole lives), they would still have less rights than Israeli Jews or in fact any Jew in the world if they came to Israel.