President has wide latitude in matters like this. Air strikes in this context are legal for him. He can even deploy troops as long as their deployment isn’t longer then 60 days.

That critical mass will never come because people don’t feel the data has been stolen from them.

Rather, it’s traded in exchange for whatever online services they use.

And to them it’s a decent trade.

I never watched x-files when it aired.

I tried to watch it a few years back but only made it to season 2. Maybe it gets better later, but the show was so formulaic that I grew bored of it pretty quick.

If anything, that supports the idea that the poll numbers should be even harder against the war than they are reported.

It was all part of an effort to economically hurt Russia in response to the war.

Best case scenario was Russia deciding the hit to their economy was not worth the war and back pedaling. No one realistically thought this was going to happen though.

The next best case scenario was for the changes in quality of life for the average Russian would create enough internal pressure that the war would be called off.

This hasn’t happened yet but internal support for the war has been dropping over the last year and some of that is attributed to the dismal state of the Russian economy, which is a direct result of things like Lush pulling out.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/02/russians-support-of-ukraine-war-collapses-finds-poll

And even if neither of these come up fruition, the more Russias economy is damaged the harder it is to fund their war effort. This gives Ukraine a bit more breathing room in their war effort.

While the effect of a single company like Lush is unnoticed, it’s the collective effect of everything from these pullouts, to trade sanctions and other soft power diplomatic plays which total up to a noticable effect.

A lot of people.

Just because things don’t turn out how you hoped doesn’t mean you didn’t make the right decision at the time with the information that was available.

Too often we judge past actions only through the lens of hindsight. It’s useful for learning what went wrong but it’s not useful for judging if something was the right decision or not.

Yes, the early days when games where literally 10 bucks an hour to play.

I miss you, Cyberstrike and Airwarrior.

To what end are we bringing it up though?

Is there a point, or is the only point to degrade the actor in some way?

I feel this is one of those situations where I can say ‘You aren’t wrong, but you’re an asshole’ if you are bringing it up without a greater reason.

I don’t think the dude would be ragged on for taking advantage of the opportunity afforded to him.

The irony of the whole Azov thing is a majority of their members are ex Russians who moved to East Ukraine because Russia wasn’t being Nazi enough for them.

Florida here checking in.

Our government is hard at work on this.

Check out this pending bill up for vote during the next session: https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf

Essentially it makes it illegal to be transgender and have a job in government or government adjacent.

Here is an excert: It is the policy of the state that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex. This section does not apply to individuals born with a genetically or biochemically verifiable disorder of sex development, including, but not limited to, XX disorder of sex development; XY disorder of sex development; sex chromosome disorder of sex development; XX or XY sex reversal; and ovotesticular disorder.

An employee or a contractor may not be required, as a condition of employment, to refer to another person using that person’s preferred personal title or pronouns if such personal title or pronouns do not correspond to that person’s sex.
An employee or a contractor may not provide to an employer his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.
An employee or a contractor may not be asked by an employer to provide his or her preferred personal title or pronouns or be penalized or subjected to adverse personnel action for not providing his or her preferred personal title or pronouns.

It continues on about not being able to fire people for thinking being gay is a sin and so on, but I don’t want this to be a novel.

Apparently I’ve been listening to the new Gunship album too much, said I was in the top 1% of Gunship listeners.

How are they not?

‘the allies did worse than the Holocaust’ is certainly a hot take.

Same thing applies to humanitarian aid.

If Hamas has hijacked or is operating in those places then they become military targets.

As far as white phosphorus, it depends on how it’s deployed. If it’s deployed for masking, tracing or identifying then it’s legal.

If it’s being directly used as an incendiary then that’s illegal.

As far as international law goes no this is not a war crime.

If your military takes refuge or uses a civilian center for military operation then that location becomes a valid military target regardless of the risk to civilian lives.

Basically Hamas is commiting the crime by purposefully setting up in these areas. Once they do that then civilian death is acceptable collateral damage, legally speaking.

Something like that, yes.

No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.

The question of ‘Why doesn’t Israel integrate the Palestinians?’ is a good one. The answer is numbers.

Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.

If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.

I don’t agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.

… But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.

I’ve gone to playing Project 1999, an OG EverQuest emulator server.

It’s only up to velious and it’s as close to how the game was back then as you can get.

I don’t recommend it to people who never played EQ back in the day - games have changed far too much for this ancient game to be fun for most people who don’t have nostalgia for that era of gaming.

But sounds like you might, so I thought I’d suggest it to you.

Tell that to the dude who will probably never have a partner.