It sounds however your own biases make it sound. This is a dumb game.

Ok, not what I meant at all. Especially the part about making things up (why insert this?). I just meant that there’s no rule that small talk has to stay as such. You’re making it seem like I meant one should be an unhinged narcissist bragging about their life while ignoring everyone around them.

If you have an interesting life then you can commandeer small talk and make it interesting. It’s an opportunity to introduce other material.

“We didn’t start the fire…” But you guys threw a bunch of petroleum and coal and tar sands on it

😂 😂 😂 never heard this one before

To me it feels like every year a new joke from Rocko’s Modern Life that I didn’t get at age 8 becomes relevant.

I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.

This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?

There’s a whole section in The Art of the Deal devoted to how a Saudi guy had a nicer apartment than him and how he built a whole apartment building so he could have a nicer $50 million penthouse.

The fake reason he gives for this suicidal policy is aesthetics, right? So he prefers the sight of a coal fired power plant to wind turbines? Or should I just give up trying to understand?

The objections are about its personality? Who cares, as long as it’s good at coding? That’s the only thing it’s actually useful for.

The thing all of you militarist posters have in common is you’re completely convinced that you have the correct position and you manage to come off as arrogant as well. Enjoy your globe-spanning military industrial complex that wages forever wars and sanctions genocides.

What part of having Japan’s military annihilated, their cities firebombed, and their population starving is “letting them roll over us”? The war was won already. Why was it necessary to carry out a land invasion?

There’s no false equivalence. There is no equivalence at all. There’s absolutely no point trying to figure out the most atrocitiest world power. Atrocities do not justify further atrocities.

In terms of whether the bombings were justified or not, I don’t think it’s impossible to say. Same with the firebombings, which were carried out under false pretenses of total warfare hypotheses that were later disproven.

There was talk of doing a nuclear demonstration in Tokyo harbor before the decision to annihilate two cities was undertaken. Yes, these were decisions made with limited information and lack of 20:20 hindsight, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t war crimes or that the people who made them aren’t mass murderers. This kind of zero-sum my atrocities vs. your atrocities thinking is an intellectual dead end, but it’s great for justifying American exceptionalism.

And so therefore it had to carry out a land invasion? Can you explain why this necessarily follows?

I wonder when, if ever, this narrative will finally be laid to rest. Perhaps, as long as the US military exists as a globe-spanning hegemon, we will always have to hear some version of this story.

No contemporary historian or political scientist takes this view for granted. It is one of many, and I encourage you to read about more than the wikipedia articles about Japanese atrocities. All militaries commit attocities. This is not the point.

The argument you offer is that the United States had a moral imperative to invade and occupy the Japanese home islands. What is the justification for this? Why would this have been necessary? Everyone who has seriously studied the history knows that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Japan and its leadership was preparing to surrender in one form or another. The bombs were dropped because the US wanted to ensure that they were the negotiating party and occupying power.

The justification to avoid further violence is extremely cynical. Nowhere in the rules of war does it say that the only way to end a conflict is to utterly annihilate your oppnent. That rule was invented by expansionist empires. You can go back to the history of Rome’s wars with Greece to see this type of logic (or lack thereof) play out. It is a message. It says that we are not your equal and we will not broker any deals on equal footing. We are your hegemon and we will dictate the terms. And then we’ll blame you for any atrocities we commit, and everyone will know that we did what we did in the name of peace and justice.

How come school shooters aren’t on here?

The article was talking about how Mamdani will have to handle the rich if he is elected. For the rest of us it suggests revolution.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the Republicans are imploding, or the Democrats are imploding…

America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.