Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]

While piracy isn’t stealing, piracy does decrease profits of the rightful owner.

Only if you would otherwise have bought it. If you never had any intention to buy the thing, the rightful owner loses nothing.

IIRC, Japan doesn’t have punitive damages in civil cases, so the couple would have to prove they’ve been financially negatively affected to be awarded anything.

The bible is not a credible historical source, and is also missing the 2000 most recent years of history. The middle east has had long periods of peace and prosperity.

Regardless of his intent, he is correct as to the law.

There’s an element selector tool, looks a bit like the colour picker, click that, then click on the missed ad.

You can be wise, observant and faithful all you like, but your personal conviction and interpersonal skills aren’t going to help you recall obscure holy texts purely from memory.

in reality most socialists really hate the russian federation.

They are dancing around wearing the skin of a better, dead, country. Every moment the Russian Federation figuratively draws breath is an insult to the people who died to build a better world for their descendants.

His motivations are beyond our understanding

Our standard for confirmed deaths is stringent—it requires an official publication or social media post from a relative with corresponding details, accompanying photos or dates of burials from local messaging groups, or photos from cemeteries.

Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it’s important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn’t be represented in those statistics at all.

Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.

Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we’re looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.

If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can’t just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.

Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.

This isn’t contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.

The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.

Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they’re a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.

Ukraine’s not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.

I love the game and completely agree. Apparently, there was a complete rework of the main narrative somewhere in development, with the original idea not including the emperor at all, but instead having a character called daisy, who you’d have a number of dialogues with throughout the game in a dream sequence at the bank of a river.

Daisy being the representation of the tadpole, she’d try to convince you to stay down by the river with her, and the final decision of the game would be whether or not to give in.

Not sure how accurate what I’ve read is, but I like that idea better.

My guess is Canada

or they live under a secular, democratic Palestinian state from the river to the sea where both the Jewish and Arab population live as equals.

I don’t see the people who voted in and fully supported:

the Zionist settler-colonialist project and it’s ambitions, the full extermination of the Palestinian population.

Participating in a secular democratic Palestinian state in good faith. I also don’t see the religious and nationalist zealots that make up the current government and its core supporters agreeing to leave.

but they are all in a United Front against the Zionist regime.

United fronts don’t tend to outlive the enemy they are united against.

I also don’t understand what the your alternative is? Palestine is unstable as fuck under two states. so what are you proposing?

I don’t see how a single state including all of these groups, under a secular democratic government can come into existence.

The sort of societal change necessary would require tactics similar to revolutionary China or Russia, full wealth redistribution, some form of widespread re-education and some form of vanguardist government to oversee the transition. The majority of people in Palestine would not support those measures, and neither would the surrounding powers.

I really hate people who speculate and criticize without offering any actual implementable plans.

My lack of ability to think of a solution to the problem does not stop me from seeing the issues with the ones that are proposed. (Or rather skipped past in most cases.) We all, I would hope, want to see an equal, democratic and secular Palestine from the river to the sea, but how does that happen?

The 90s saw some 20% less violent deaths during the troubles than the 80s did, though it’s true that the 70s were the worst period.

The years of lead weren’t bloodless, but relatively few people died even compared to the troubles, let alone something like Chechnya

The uprisings were relatively bloodless though. The troubles continued well into the 90s so it’s not really point towards either side. Russia had an attempted coup in the early 90s.

The 90s were comparably much more sanguine.

I really don’t think they were.

One Palestine is not a recipe for a stable state imo. You can deport the settlers back to their countries of origin, at least the European ones, but that still leaves a sizable contingent, something like two million IIRC people/descendents of people who migrated/were forced out of the neighbouring Arab states.

You have the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, a great number of whom have, at least to some degree, been complicit in the oppression of those in Gaza and the west bank. On top of that, they are considerably more materially wealthy and educated. Wealth redistribution could fix this, but would create resentment. Not doing so would create resentment on the other side.

You have a rift between the secular and non-secular populations, significant differences in beliefs and politics between the west bank and Gaza, you have secular socialists and zealous theocrats, all militarised (by necessity and justly, but militarised nonetheless).

A two state or three state solution is not just, but even with Israel destroyed, could a one-palestine survive even briefly?

I was more referring to prosperity when mentioning Russia and Ukraine. The decrease in living standards, and massive increase in alcoholism and deaths of dispair hardly paints a prosperous picture.

Unless I’m forgetting some especially disastrous conflict in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, I don’t think you could argue that the 90s were more peaceful than either.

peaceful and prosperous

Unless you’re Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian or anywhere in or around Yugoslavia.

Outdoor cats are destructive to the ecosystem, keeping a pet is the exploitation of an animal and is therefore not vegan, and forcing a vegan diet on an obligate carnivore is , depending on how you do it, either pointless or animal abuse.

While I provide no further argument or justification for these points, understand that I am unchallengably correct as I am the one true Marxist.

Bey-once