“Sit down and stop being condescending.” – someone that doesn’t lecture people

Everyone knows what Trump is. Trump is demanding an increase in military spending with the expectation that the money will go to the US. He’s basically demanding tribute.

Saying “sure we’ll spend more on defense” while spending on our own defense industry is calling his bluff while also getting ready for if and when he starts using the US military to bully allies.

Nobody else in the world needs to be lectured about the problems with the US military industrial complex. We know.

Yeah, it seems they also didn’t mention that it’s a European defense company, not a US defense company.

Europe is investing a lot into defense now and it’s actually a good thing that they’re moving away from dependence on the US defense industrial complex.

Spotify sucks tho. But that’s a separate thing.

Clickbait article.

Sorry best we can do is have the marketing department take over XBox and now it’s just a logo they license out.

You don’t need to wonder, you can just Bing™ it!

Last I checked, the “Communist” Party of China has more than 80 billionaires with a combined wealth of over $600 Billion.

This doesn’t fit the Tankie narrative of China being a socialist paradise so just go on pretending China isn’t run by fascist billionaires just because they have a red flag with some yellow symbols on it. Fascists have never called themselves “socialists” to sucker the left into supporting them before, right?

I think you call it eminent domain in the US. But I think it can still be challenged in court, but wait a couple months.

Yes, the US is becoming China. You put a guy into power that admires Xi Jinping for the same reason China made Xi President for life: wanted a strongman to run the economy and protect you from evil foreigners. And now you’re getting corporate socialism, just like China has.

Amazing how fast you can build stuff when there’s safety standards, no environmental regulations, no labour rights and the government can expropriate property without a time consuming legal process!

Though I think a prefer living in a country where I have rights even if it takes a bit longer to build stuff.

So you’re saying we should stop trading with China?

Seems like it would be jail time if you get caught. Or serious prison time if it causes a fatal accident.

Obviously… but kids aren’t going to stop watching because of some tut tuts and wags of the finger. That just makes them like it more.

I personally think all of these countries suck

All countries in the world suck. I’m from Canada, do you think my country sucks? Maybe not because Canada generally has a good reputation, but I can assure you Canada has done many horrible things in the past. Doing some bad stuff now (pumping out a lot of oil, not good for global warming) but is also doing some good stuff now. Countries are made up of many different people and governments have many departments doing many different things. So Canada sucks and Canada is good. The US sucks and the US is good.

And yes, Israel sucks and Israel is good. Just saw a photo of the hospital in Israel Iran hit with a missile and out in front there was a rainbow flag. It’s the only country in the Middle East where there are gay rights, being gay is illegal everywhere else in the Middle East. Or worse, the Houthis literally crucify gay people.

I’ve just asked this prompt to an unbiased LLM

The thing about LLMs is it’s only aggregating things it finds on the internet. And nation states can (and do!) fill the internet with shit to skew things in their direction. So there’s no such thing as an unbiased LLM. There will be bias within the dataset. If the developers make adjustments to make the answers less biased, that’s just making the LLM match the developer’s bias. Also LLMs don’t really understand things like time and will miss a lot of nuance.

How relevant is a coup in 1953? Maybe to some really old people might remember it, but for most of us it’s just something in a history book. It doesn’t mention the Iran Hostage crisis which is way more relevant. I didn’t mention these (or W’s Axis of Evil bullshit, another instance of a US President being an idiot) because it’s kind of irrelevant once nations make a treaty. The you make a treaty you’re supposed to settle any grudges over the past, otherwise why are you signing the treaty? The Iran hostage crisis might be the one worth mentioning as it’s a big reason why the US won’t be establishing an embassy in Tehran anytime soon. I didn’t mention it because we have phones so it’s probably not that big a deal, but then again the US might be less likely to bomb Iran if they had an embassy there.

Also Israel has tried to make peace with Palestinians in a land for peace deal in the past. It obviously didn’t work out, but the LLM should mention that if it’s going to mention the occupation has been going on a long time. There have been failures in Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat was a lying corrupt asshole. Remember what I said about not being supposed to hold grudges when you sign a treaty? That lying bastard signed a treaty with no intention of following it. This is a major reason why Israel doesn’t trust Palestinian leadership.

See if you compile a list of the bad things a country has done, they will always seem evil. But they aren’t sports teams it’s stupid to support them or be against them. I think it’s fair to say to say there are political groups with this countries that suck. And countries will seem to suck when those suck political groups get into power, but it’s really that group within the countries that suck.

Netanyahu sucks, Israelis in general don’t suck. Hamas sucks, Palestinians in general don’t suck. The Ayatollah sucks, Iranians in general don’t suck. Donald Trump sucks, Americans in general don’t suck.

I’m not? Weird question, guess you just ran out of shit to say. Anyway, I think we’re done here. Try to work on not dehumanizing people when you get upset over things. I hope you can become a better person.

I understood that comment. I legit don’t know what you were saying in the previous one.

Ah so you dehumanize both Jews and Palestinians. So you’re a white supremacist type of antisemite.

The way you apply labels to people to dehumanize them makes it difficult for me to understand what you’re even asking. Like do you call all Palestinians “Hamas people”?

I’m not angry… are you sure you’re not angry?

I have concerns that people on this site where everyone is winding each other up with stochastic terrorism talk universally agreeing that certain countries are evil (and some posts indicate some believe everyone in these countries are evil too). There’s a lot of dehumanizing Israelis, and I’ve met few Israelis in my travels, perfectly normal people to talk to and have a beer with or whatever. Israelis aren’t evil colonizers, they’re people born in an area where a lot of people around them hate them for exiting in that area.

So basically I think “everyone sucks here”, but I do think the US is ultimately responsible for most of the conflict. They’ve been meddling in Iran for decades, and Israel has been essentially an extension of the US’s usual bullying for decades

Well it takes two to tango doesn’t it? Well there’s a lot to untangle about this, it’s the Middle East shit’s always complicated.

For the Iran conflict… kinda. But Iran has responsibility too. In his first term, Trump cancelled the agreement that Obama made with Iran. Countries don’t declare war but they give signals like cancelling treaties and start making ultimatums. Trump did all that in his first term. But the thing with Trump is, he’s an idiot. So Trump essentially declared war on Iran and then… didn’t do the war. And then he assassinated an Iranian General which is an act of war. And then didn’t have a war.

There’s levels of stupid to unpack here. First it would be stupid for the US to go to war with Iran as long as they were following the treaty, which all reports indicate they were. But if you make all the moves to start a war, you’re kinda committed and it’s stupid to not have a war after you committed to it. So Trump created a big mess there.

So it’s kinda strange to assign blame to the US because it was all Trump’s incompetence. But I guess Trump was and is the President, so I guess the US (Trump) is responsible for making a mess of a diplomatic agreement that the US (Obama) made with Iran. That sounds so stupid without indicating the Presidents, but here we are. I can’t stress enough how much of an idiot Trump has been. The US doesn’t have a cohesive foreign policy anymore.

But we can’t ignore Iran’s responsibility in this. They have been supporting a lot of terrorist organizations, including Hamas which massacred Israeli villages, took hostages to Gaza forcing Israel into a ground war in a densely populated urban environment. Hamas tactics are designed to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties in attempt to foment hatred toward Israel. Hamas won the propaganda war, though they’ll probably be destroyed along with a significant part of Gaza. But but they successfully spread of Israel so that’s a win?

So Hamas is responsible for the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas is Iran’s proxy, so Iran is complicit in that. And that brings us back to the Israel-Iran conflict.

So Iran is the ultimate source of all of this suffering and destruction. Throughout the region. So does that justify a war on Iran? Maybe maybe not.

But there’s more… Iran has many times officially stated they want to wipe Israel of the map. So they’ve very publicly declared they want to be an existential threat. And there’s been indication from the UN Atomic monitoring agency that Iran has been hiding things in their nuclear program, not answering questions about things and enriching more uranium than the level they agreed to limit themselves to. They also announced they were going to start testing a missile capable of carrying a 2 ton warhead to Israel.

So whether or not the Hamas war justifies Israel going to war with Iran, all of the nuclear stuff does. This is life or death for Israel, if a country that’s said they want to wipe you off the map gets the capability to do so? They can’t allow that to happen.

So Iran is also responsible for this war. Iran’s proxies attacked Israel, the threats of wiping Israel off the map, the nuclear stuff, all of that means there will be a war.

So I guess in summary:

Trump could have NOT cancelled the Treaty. Trump could have NOT assassinated the general. Iran could have NOT supported terrorist groups. Iran could have NOT threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Iran could have NOT done all the the nuclear stuff.

But they did do those things. So there’s sheer incompetence from Trump and a lot of incompetence and horrible actions by Iran and it’s proxies that all added up to a war.

But most people on these threads just reduce all of this complexity down to Israel=bad, US=bad, Iran=innocent victim of the bad guys. It’s really a mix of incompetence and hatred of Israel that’s caused so much destruction. Sure Israel has done some bad things with the settlements, but the level of hatred feels like it stems from a lifetime of indoctrination under fascist rule. Hatred of Israel hasn’t resulted in anything good for Palestinians and it hasn’t done any good for Iranians. I know it’s a problem for some Muslim sects for Jews to be living where they’re living, but at certain point… just release the hostages and accept that Israel has a right to exist. Israel has been convinced to withdraw settlements, but it’s hard to convince them to concede any ground when everyone around them are trying kill them.

I think a Palestinian non-violent resistance movement would be successful in establishing a Palestinian state. Does it really look like a violent movement is being successful?

But a lot of people are acting like elementary school shitheads constantly egging on their classmates to fight. Violence obviously isn’t working for Palestinians, how many of them have to die before everyone realizes that? It feels like people think Palestinians exist only to be cannon fodder just for their sick games.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - George Bernard Shaw

In the British Empire, slavery was ended by the abolitionist movement, which involved a lot of labour unions. The British Empire ended slavery a generation earlier than the US did, this was accomplished through non-violent resistance. The British Empire went from the biggest slaving empire in history to being the biggest anti-slaving empire in history. The ending of Amistad where the Royal Navy is detroying the slaver base? That happened… except it was many different bases they destroyed. The Royal Navy put an end to the international slave trade.

It’s weird how history is isn’t it? The British Empire was both evil and good at the same time. Seems things are more complicated than nation good or nation bad.

I forgot to mention before, that one “oppression” that your founding fathers chaffed at was the fact that Britain had treaties they made with indigenous people that fought on their side in the French and Indian war. This meant the 13 colonies were prohibited from expanding westward. Your great Founding Fathers fought for the “freedom” to genocide Indigenous people so they could expand their slave plantations westwards. Great guys!

Anyway after slaver was abolished in the British Empire, an abolitionist movement started growing in the US. One Abraham Lincoln was in that movement and he got elected President. His goal as President wasn’t to end slavery immediately though, but to move the country in a direction where it would eventually end… a generational kind of transition.

Southern states didn’t agree with this government policy so the violently rebelled with the cause of slavery forever. As the war went through the democratic process of what was left of the US, they made the Emancipation Proclamation. When the South was defeated they were forced to end slavery. Abraham Lincoln was shot by a violent protester.

Of course it didn’t really end there. Jim Crow laws segregation and all. But those were put to an end by the Civil Rights movement, a non-violent resistance movement.

So no, slavery was not ended by a violent resistance movement. There was a significant violent resistance against the ending of slavery though.

Are you sure you’re not pro-slavery? You seem to always be picking examples of violent resistance movements that were pro-slavery.

Sorry but history just isn’t on your side on this. Violent movements tend to have violent people leading them. When they “succeed” you have a country being run by violent people. This isn’t likely to lead to good results for the people living in those countries. It certainly hasn’t had a good result for the people of Gaza having violent people leading them, has it?

This isn’t university, you can talk normal here.