A country can be losing but in an existential conflict seem to rarely outright surrender. Ukraines position, while dire, is far stronger than the talibans after the US invasion of Iraq. 20 years later, they were still fighting and ultimately prevailed.

In my mind, this Inevitably is in ukraines future if allies don’t continue to materially support Ukraine - either way the Russian occupation ultimately fails, the question is does Ukraine defend itself and remain a sovereign nation or do they fall and an insurgency later force it’s reinstatement.

This is the first result from Google. It’s I guess ancient history now being it was the labor rights push to (probably) unintentionally discredit kevin07, but internal politics aside Conroy (famous for his opposition to adult rating for videogames) was for aong time a candidate for ‘biggest piece of shit in Australian politics’. Stephen Conroy was the face of it, so search for him and firewall to your hearts content. The Alana and Madeline foundation were involved in some of the testing that damned the project, if I remember right (as if common sense hadn’t already damned it with seconds of the sales pitch).

Theres a scale of influence, with a big difference between foolproof and entirely unenforceable.

In this case, it’s effectively unenforceable, so what’s the point in wasting time and effort drafting something that won’t actually make any difference?

A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.

It’s unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the “are you 18+” checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.

The first one where he was a drifter somewhere in the Pacific Northwest getting taunted by cops? I think you mean the 2nd or 3rd.

Part of the problem for the US is that such a huge amount of gdp is buried in the masses of beauracracy that makes up the US healthcare system, it’s essentially acting (economically) as proxy government spending to prop up a failing economy. The average US citizen is so heavily propaganda’d into hating government run projects that the sensible economic stimulus (government infrastructure projects or public services) are well and truly off the table.

What this ultimately means is fixing healthcare isn’t just breaking up the cartels, preventing price fixing and untangling the web of nonsense that makes up the US private system… unless you want to inspire a massive crash (which absolutely has real human cost), it also means redistributing government spending and implementing (unrelated) government run services and/or projects to keep all these people employed (which would also mean re-training and potentially relocating) - all of which needs to be done against the overwhelmingly loud voices screeching “government employee bad”.

The court found him guilty, and then in a super sketchy, never before seen, closed door jury free appeal, a federal judge overturned it. Regardless, throughout Francis maintained support for Pell, including the period between his conviction and his incredibly sketchy appeal. There’s no lense where I can accept anybody as moral, Catholic or otherwise, when they have publically supported a convicted abuser of children.

This is also only a a single example, there have been numerous cases of the vatican, under Francis, offering insultingly low settlements to silence victims based on their inability to afford to pursue what’s fair (the average is $268,000). There’s a clear pattern of the vatican, including during Francis’ leadership, of shirking the victims of their organization. This suggests is what little progress they actually do (very publically) achieve is more about marketing than justice.

There are lots of ways the Pope behaves that make it seem like anything he’s doing to address child rape by clergy is theatre.

Pope Francis stood by George Pell and even let him have his funeral at the vatican. Standing by someone who’s been credibly accused of sexual assault of a child (and has definitely facilitated it by others) isn’t, in my view, something that can be done in parallel with an honest and good faith attempt at fixing the problem. It looks even more shady if you look at the conditions of Pella conviction being overturned (definitely special treatment because of his connections).

Children should be raped, but not killed

-Pope Francis (probably)

With the respect, the Trump team failed to invade the US Capitol when they controlled it’s defense apparatus, they are more likely to kill themselves than succeed in any ground invasion.

If you just look at numbers maybe, we can see from Russia (large navy) vs Ukraine (no navy) that there are serious disadvantages when waging a war of attrition, even with relatively near distances and supply lines.

The Israeli navy has no meaningful capability control Norwegian waters and they would be insane to try.

Norway having a small military and being easy to bully sounds familiar, perhaps the Russians remember how that goes and can explain.

*words hahaha

Only the first 7 letters words of this headline are needed.

To be clear, what I said was “I think that’s a strange comment” to someone saying “Americans want to kill me” in comparison to those in the Middle East.

If you read that back carefully, you might notice that I was careful not to say “I support the systematic and brutal murder of millions of people” - that’s because, like any sane person, I see that what Israel are doing is abhorrent. I never argued or insinuated that lgbtq people should support the genocide of bigots, but again for the sake of clarity my position is that only a literal insane person could think that. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

So, with that said, your post that I responded to seems to imply that you think Americans (in general) hate you in the same way that many in the middle east hate you. To me, that is an incredibly naive view, and a very strange thing for someone who’s never lived there to make.

I think that it’s possible to condemn elements of a culture, in an honest way ie. that the Islamic attitude to LGB is worse than that in western countries, however bad western countries often are (for some reason I think there’s sometimes less hate for the T in Islamic culture) but pull short of supporting the worst elements of western culture (like islamophobia) and absolutely without endorsing literal war crimes.

Have you ever spent time in a middle eastern country and been visibly “out”? (I’m assuming you’re saying this in reference to existing somewhere on the lgbtq spectrum)

If the answer is no, but you have spent time in America, then I think this is a strange comment.

XP sp1 and 2 were more or less the same as me with an updated UI and non existent 64 bit. However flawed vista was, it added an actual tangible benefit for 7 to further improve on.

I’d argue 7 was the last windows os that could be described as “better” in some way than what came before (which most, even the ones we remember as “bad” at the time, did offer some real step forward which isn’t true for 8/10/11).

Poland is one of the largest militaries in NATO and have a special hatred of Russia. I imagine alongside the UK and France, Russia has nukes aimed at Poland already.

They are plenty threatening already, though obviously adding nukes, even if American controlled, exacerbates things.

Hard to see something if you’ve got your eyes closed. There’s plenty of liberal support for Assange, just this week the centre right led government of Australia passed a motion to urge the UK and US to return him to Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-15/motion-to-urge-us-uk-to-allow-julian-assange-return/103469226?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I’ve not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn’t look like a smartwatch).

I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I’m sure competing products are used a lot and you just don’t notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.