They are behaving as if someone promised them to outlaw FOSS operating systems.

And it’s fine when there are states behaving with the responsibility of an RTS player. Will read, thx

It’s the usual catch - the leader of the losing side doesn’t get the post, but keeps power of his faction.

While if that leader is no longer a leader, their personal power would be less even if the faction wins.

Western Roman Empire had a similar story with Stilicho’s conviction and execution. The empire loses, but those who ate him get some power.

What a weird modern landscape we’ve made for ourselves.

Every generation ever. Well, maybe since inventing the wheel

I should have added that practical Catholicism in South America doesn’t seem to have this kind of weirdness, so indeed it’s Puritans or even more generally, the spirit of a closed small sect, where the religion itself is not as important as the sect loyalty and uncritical following. Only it’s neither closed nor small.

It requires very rigid discipline to threaten your enemy with MAD. The more tasks you can solve without testing your own faction’s discipline, the better. If every parking place argument gets to threats of nuking the opponent, because you can’t threaten anything else, either eventually you’ll have to use MAD for such a small cause, or you’ll step back on that and then there’ll be something a bit more important over which you’ll threaten MAD.

And so on, until MAD is in practice useless for you.

Forcefully drawing a border less encouraging of violence against native population. Also forcefully stopping all their meddling in the form of military occupation, blockade, block posts and so on. Arming their neighbors so that Israel doesn’t have such a military advantage.

Even Yeltsin made a few nuclear threats in his time.

And frankly those threats were more meaningful, with all the bravado of today Yeltsin’s poor depressive Russia was much stronger militarily than the one we have.

Yes, opposing the establishment of a new state with a new population where someone else already lived would have been appropriate in the late 1940s.

Unfortunately it’s 2024 now, Israel does exist and time is linear.

That means that if you commit a crime and wait long enough, it’s legitimized. No way in hell.

Looks cool.

I really like it when people solve complex tasks with simple and natural means.

Same goes for analog electronics and 60s-80s ideas of the future of technology.

Only about keeping the grass short - why? Is it for the ground to dry faster?

What’s that heathen land where lamb is not considered the best meat?

Just being religious doesn’t require you to join that crowd with its weird main rabbinate and preferential treatment in laws and state funding.

So it’s basically lots of uneducated idle fundamentalist morons. Their worldview is too simple for comic books, and at the same time their level of life is kinda normal.

I don’t think such people make useful soldiers, but being that stupid you usually support whatever you hear from your leaders.

A friend of mine very easily repeats stupid shit of that kind and has recently passed an exam to become a rabbi. Still to “maybe Israel shouldn’t have invaded Lebanon twice” in a conversation about Hezbollah he answered “ok, maybe they shouldn’t, I agree”. That’s a fucking qualitative difference. If he manages to repatriate and meet those people, I suspect he’ll experience “Idiocracy” firsthand.

That said, secular (but nationalist) Israelis have quite a few slurs for them and in general don’t like them. So use as a cannon fodder, say, in case of attacking Lebanon, - is kinda possible.

Nukes are good, but in fact full arsenal, from home-produced small mortars to MRBMs, and a standing military. Actually, if possible, all the means of power projection the big guys have. Including even proxy militants. Because the big guys back up their words with the blood of the small guys anyway.

No, it was bought by MRG after AOL fought its users and won, so they all left for Skype.

EDIT: Or maybe first by Rambler and then by MRG. Rambler was the Russian search engine I used in 2005, btw. Was an email provider too. I had an email account or two there, don’t even remember which. Also narod dot ru (free web hosting, similar to geocities) hasn’t yet been bought by Yandex then, and there were ucoz dot ru sites, and borda dot ru free web forums (something like phpbb). ICQ (and later Skype) would be used for real-time conversations in all of these communities. EDIT2: … which you’d make forums for.

Yep, starting with the first paragraph. The author might have skipped his Sunday school or something. In Christianity it’s considered that “God’s chosen people” has been extended to the whole humanity.

“I don’t think these people even know what that truly means” - maybe most of them don’t, but they are using the designation correctly.

“Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens” - well, the statement is kinda true ; technically false due to Israeli laws being a patchwork of weird shit with some inheritance from the Ottoman millets system, which is the same as apartheid give or take, but that’s not why the author is wrong. It’s just that most of Arabs living under Israeli military control are not citizens of Israel.

Why am I even commenting that, there are sometimes outrageous texts with which it’s a dubious, but still pleasure to argue with. This one is just some jellybrain’s product.

He wasn’t as good to them either, look up Dersim rebellion and such. Erdo started as a democratic change with a small flavor of Islam. Because that secularism was about creating a fascist state and a social layer of Kemalist privileged elite (military mostly). But that’s something a Turk may explain better.

OK, makes me feel nausea. Even better.

I did read it a lot, it’s just that Christianity over the pond is weird. Weirder than in China and Japan, I can understand where their traits of it come from, but in USA it’s something hard for me to emotionally grasp.

one the Turks still refuse to acknowledge

That’s actually imprecise.

They acknowledge that “something” happened, but deny various separate traits, like intent or numbers or relevance for today or even just say that genocide wasn’t illegal then. There’s also that “it didn’t happen, but they deserved it, and we’ll do it again” thing. Which gives a very special feeling, considering they are well in position to do it again.

And it’s illegal to publicly recognize it in Turkey, so not only malevolent, but also benevolent voices seem to be kinda in denial, while in fact not.

Still had Germany not lost WWII so conclusively, I suspect we’d be amazed at how self-conscious a lot of Turks are as compared to Germans.

Israeli dark money

… is something important enough to kill a 100 JFKs for.

It’s a state sporting F35s and such.

and the political influence of evangelical millenarians

Can’t speak about them, I don’t live in the US and the fact of such a group existing is wild for me.