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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • When the likely outcome is death, most people don’t want to fight. If people were just allowed to flee to some other country, not only the bully country gets a free and repeatable pass but the neighbouring countries get some immigration crisis which lead to not-so-fun rhetorics.

    The Finns were some of the most vigorous defenders in history, but if they just had the option of moving en mass to Sweden, consequence-free, they probably would. If that was to be the case every decade or so, today’s Russia would be bigger than the USSR ever was and without any republic whatsoever, only Russians given that everyone else fled. They have quite the history of chomping territory; that’s how they got this big to start with.

    You probably understand that this wouldn’t fly. That the other countries wouldn’t allow it to happen anyway. But at the end of the day, you need boots on the ground to do anything about it.


  • Everyone considers stealing wrong. Everyone condemns big fat pigs robbing millions from the financial system wrong. If I had to place a bet, most people would of they had the chance. The fact people are hypocritical doesn’t mean it is not condemnable. DiCaprio is a piece of shit in a lot of people’s mind, just not in the judicial system.

    No shit that a lot of middle-aged or maybe elderly man would enjoy 16 year old teasing them. Not so much for woman but if I had to bet it would happen as well. Our sex drive plays a lot here. Back in the we’re animals in nature thingy, putting dicks into young women was almost always a “good thing”; propagating genes and stuff. Just so happens that we’re trying not to behave like wild beasts anymore.

    The brain would ideally be fully matured before one is to take life-long decisions, however 25 years is an awful lot of time. My armchair sociologist says that people would not tolerate that for the same reason people do not tolerate expecting for their kids to be 25 before allowing them to cross the road by themselves. Maturity is not a linear thing. At the age of 5 you’ll try to kill yourself every now and then. At the age of 10 you barely do that. 18 is an arbitrary line, yes, because it is believed that most people at that age are able to figure life long decisions well-enough. People still get some sparks of development after 18, but it is nowhere compared to the 5-10 or the 10-15.

    You state that age differences at the time were far more common. Well, at the time most marriages were arranged and considered plenty of things above the wellbeing of the brides.

    In any case, we’re working around my key argument. We’re all silly animals, but god and it’s prophets are supposed to be perfect. You can point a finger at them for that. Yes, fuck Francis. That guy is a piece of shit as well and points fairly well at the bullshit that Christianity is. This is not a anti-muslim rant; it is a “can we condemn condemnable people that were supposed to know what they were doing as they were ‘perfect’?”


  • That’s not the case in my western country but sure, hit that scarecrow. I personally know underage people dating 25-ish people.

    What is frowned upon is people in completely different levels of maturity creating a tremendous imbalance, and usually abuse. DiCaprio dating teens is not a “we stand on an equal footing and love each other” kind of thing, is a “I’m famous and will use this fact to mess with teenagers”.

    An elderly hardly has a healthy relationship with a teenager, and this is particularly true for arranged marriages.

    This western civilization thing of your already had that in the past. We stopped doing that rather recently as we figured it creates more trouble than not. Let’s not pretend that “western” is some sort of axiom that just appeared and not the product of the evolution of some society. Just like eastern societies have such evolutions in some aspects. For example some eastern civilisations figured that clean spaces are better and so they try real hard to try to keep them that way. Of course you’re free to argue that this cleanliness is not needed so it is a purely subjective thing of these societies and not necessarily better, but sociologists night disagree.

    As for “ok if the victim preforms the deed”, that’s irrelevant. The same criteria applies. Promoting healthier relationships promotes a healthier society. If some 14/yo teenager is obsessed with dating way older men for whatever reason, chances are people are going to judge it, legal or not, no matter the society.


  • I didn’t even specify any religion. I just said that god, any god, by definition, can’t evolve.

    This ain’t Hercules adventures where gods are just sky humans with perks. Mainstream gods (&co) are all perfect in their “mysterious ways”.

    As such, if a prophet was into pedophilia, then either pedophilia is right (which I personally find odd… but them I’m merely human…) or that prophet wasn’t exactly the most exemplary lad.

    Whatever the case, people’s lives are worth of dignity, be it Palestinians, Israelis, South Africans or Santa. That’s not what I was arguing against at all. We can defend people while, at the same time, pointing the finger out at some bullshit they do.

    The west is also full of bullshit. So what? We can also point the finger at that. Be my guest. I never said that we were perfect.



  • I don’t think you’re envisioning physics in many of these situations. Might not be the case in Barcelona which is pretty big and growable but let me give you another example to point out why that generalization doesn’t stick. I’m from nearby Sesimbra, a 5k pop village in a very very cool-looking place.

    If I had to bet, Sesimbra receives like 50k tourists a month, many of which want to stay in hotels and tents and illegal caravans. If one expands Sesimbra, the beauty of the place gets destroyed for everyone. If one does not, the fisherman (yes, it is a fishing village) are now competing with 50k other fellas for land, in a village that can’t sustain any other industry.

    Even if you tax the hell of tourists and only a fifth keeps going, that is already too many. It literally is destroying both the nature and the livelihood of people that were there for centuries.

    I get the idea that people want to see fancy places and we don’t have that many Sesimbras in the world, but this massification is basically forbidding people from living anywhere that happens to be pretty and has a good weather. The richer tourists stay in the hotels (which lay on top of bulldozed homes) and the locals are now 20km away because physics couldn’t care less. 50k ain’t gonna stay in that tiny valley, people do not fit.

    We have huge chunks of the coastal dunes destroyed (and those take a long time to recover) because of such misuse and overuse. Everyone wants to go to the beach and everyone wants to have resorts or whatever, and yet the places and the populations are taking very hard beatings. No amount of policy making solves some of those situations given that you can’t just have quotas of people allowed to visit a city within the EU. The entire region of Algarve is a disaster.

    And yes, there are airports with tourist taxes, but Portugal doesn’t have all that many airports. These villages (Sesimbra, Sintra, Ericeira…) are serviced by the same airport as Lisbon. Can’t hit tourists with a tax without hitting businesses and others.



  • Has it occurred you that they do not want it at all? Tourism money is not a blessing. It results in terrible jobs that pay miserably and prevents better jobs from appearing as the living costs skyrocket.

    Tourist season begins and boom, surge of 110% minimum-wage jobs. 6 months later, everyone is fired and invited to live 6 more months off the sun. People are pretty fed up with this new form of bellow-minimum-wage slavery you can’t possibly imagine.

    Source: Engineer who lives in Lisbon and does not need to submit to it but still needs to pay 150% minimum wage for rent. There isn’t a single person besides bribed politicians and tourism-related business owners who wants this.





  • The kind of rhetoric that you should be able to say anything you want consequence-free flies well in the US. Not so well anywhere else. If you praise the Nazis in most of Europe you get in trouble, especially in Germany. I don’t quite see how it would be different in South Korea.

    People should be able to declare some speech as dangerous speech, because it does way more harm for society than good. The usual problem is that sometimes people try to do this with speech that is not dangerous. Dangerous is very subjective and there should be no such thing as the Ministry of Dangerous Speech.; but if 99% of people agree to something, well, it is a bit less likely that the “dangerous speech” is just an autocracy of the masses. If you disagree so profoundly with 99% of the people around you, then maybe there’s some other society more fit for your views.


  • Can you source that? Cuz there’s plenty of evidence about most of the West Bank being segregated to the point of Palestinians not being allowed to use streets that everyone (Israelis, tourists) can, Palestinians being forced to live in slums covered in nets to prevent debris from Israelis to hit them, Palestinian houses outside of Israel being demolished whenever Israel feels like it.

    I don’t even know about Gaza. All of this was a mess way before the Hamas attack. Not too long ago, there was a visit from an American journalist with Palestinian parents to west Bank cities, to test waters. She was guided by Israelis who denounced the Israeli government. They were literally doing nothing, yet the moment they set foot in the West Bank they were raided and bullied by the IDF. It is reported that this is a thing that has been happening to literally every Palestinian. They had to be let go since they were not Palestinians and toured one of the major west Bank cities to show what it looks like in there. It gets stupid to the point that Palestinians who live next to the whole lot of checkpoints can’t have visits at home since checkpoints do not allow for anything but to pass from one zone of the city to another, not to houses next to them. It was a very heartbreaking thing to see, the whole tour.

    Add those living conditions to a lack of education and one can very well understand why they voted for someone that promises them to get rid of their aggressor, even if that someone is a terrorist organisation. They know no better, all they have seen in their lifes has been bullying and hell on earth.