That’s such an interesting statement.

Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.

Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.

The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.

The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.

They discovered Porn when they got to Russia and have been chronically exhausted ever since…

This isn’t a “Is killing a person that insulted you right or wrong?” moral conundrum, it’s a “If you could kill Hitler after he had started exterminating people, would that be right or wrong?” moral conundrum.

Most people who would say “it’s the wrong thing to do” for the first one would say “it’s the right thing to do” for the second.

Mind you, the really right thing to do on the situation with this CEO would have been for the State to do its fucking job and protect the people from mass murderers like him, but it refuse to do so, hence here we are in a bad situation.

Well, in the total picture the best option of all would be Justice System which is Just and hence stop people causing massive numbers of deaths for profit, which is not what we have (especially in the US) and is even getting worse.

Ultimately all Just venues (I was going to say “non-violent”, but “lawful” violence is still “violence”, so even in a Just system, Force would still be used on the ones profiting from mass deaths) seem to have been closed in the last couple of decades.

The more options get closed, the more people will only see as options to either meekly accept the death of a loved one (or oneself) due to the actions of the people leading Health Insurance companies or vigilante vengeance, since the State has over the years removed itself from enacting Justice against the wealthiest in society, which would’ve been the best option of all (not least because it prevents the deaths of both the victims of guys like this CEO and of guys like the CEO)

Indeed, dichotomies presented in arguments are more often than not false, but sometimes they’re true.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.

Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.

It’s wonderful how the expression “humble Arch Linux user” manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.

Sorry, but Russia has no legimitate grievances on anything that takes place inside of Ukraine.

Ditto on the NATO expansion and all that “argumentation” line you’re parroting: Russia and Ukraine are different soverign nations and none of them has any right to force the other to do anything, which does mean that it’s not up to Russia and never was the way Ukraine runs their government including which alliances they join, same as, for example, it was never up to the United States how Iraq was run (and why the American invasion of Iraq was just as immoral as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “Saddam was a murderous dictator” is a totally bollocks excuse).

Up and until the point one of those nations actually harms the other, none of the has any right to do anything to the other and as it so happens, it was Russia that harmed Ukraine by invading it, so the only nation there with any legitimate grievances is Ukraine.

In fact since the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, Ukraine and Ukraine alone is the one nation of the two with legitimate grivances against the other.

Your whole “argument” is predicated on the notion that Russia as the large neighbouring nation has a say in the affairs of its smaller neighbouring nation Ukraine, which is just a nakedly imperialist view of the relations between states straight out of XIX century political thinking.

That’s a wierd as hell take.

The first placed was the supposedly Center Left (Partido Socialista), the second was AD - a cohalition of the Center-Right “Partido Social Democrata” and the conservative party (to were the fascists migrated post Revolution) CDS - the third was the hard neoliberal party (Iniciativa Liberal) and the fourth was Chega.

The first 3 parties are neoliberals, curiously from softer to harder (if we ignore CDS, the junior party in AD, which is a traditional conservative party rather than neoliberal) and the 4th is towards the Fascist side of the rightwing.

The Iniciativa Liberal who got 3rd place is almost as far-right as the Chega, it’s just that they’re from the American-style ultra neoliberal side of the far-right whilst Chega is from the Fascist side, so they’re less into moralism, nationalism and statism and more into privatise everything including the National Health Service, remove all regulations and cut the top tax rates - i.e. basically replace the European style social net with the American model on steroids.

Curiously both Chega and Iniciativa Liberal grew from nothing roughly at the same time, both a few years after Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from several very wealthy Americans very openly to “expand the far-right in Europe”.

This was not at all a victory against the far right because the two far right parties, Iniciativa Liberal and Chega got more seats than ever before.

You would need to be seriously deluded to think that a party whose politics are those of the fat-cat rightwing of the American Democrat party (think Finance types and Tech Bros) in an European country like Portugal is to the left of anything but the new Fascists of Chega.

I love it how you just want to do something simple and very, very common and normal with a command but you don’t know the magic flags to get it to do it and they’re not just a logical one (like, say “-a” for all) so you do a man for it and it has something like 50 flags listed in alphabethical rather than functional order, some of which only make sense in specific combinations (which are never show together and have to be found by reading the entries for all 50 flags) and there are no examples anywhere to be found of normal usage scenarios for that command.

So that’s when you use some internet search engine and it turns out the most common simplest use of it is something like “doshit --lol --nokidding --verbose=3”.

There’s an anecdote that goes like this:

An important machine in a factory stops working. No matter what they do they can’t get it to work again.

So they bring in a specialist to solve the problem, for an agreed fee of $1000

The guy checks the machine over and then goes and presses a specific button and the machine is back working again.

So the factory manager goes: “All you did was press a button! Why should I pay you $1000 for pressing a button?!”

To which the specialist answers: “Well, you see, you’re paying me just $1 to press the button. The other $999 are for knowing which button to press”.

It makes sense that a penalty is set proportional to the harm caused, so the 3 months sentence might make sense if the victim was genuinelly psychologically affected by it in a way that lasted a significant period, but for merelly feeling insulted 3 months seems the kind of “Justice not at all trying to be Just” you get when authoritarian moralism is encoded in Law, not at all what law-making should strive for in a country aiming for Rule Of Law were sentencing is guided by harm caused rather than the iron-fist enforcing of moral behaviours.

Of course, this being the UAE, I’m not at all surprised that the Law is not at all about doing what is Just, since unlike in Democracies that country doesn’t even attempt to have real Rule Of Law.

If your intention is to provide an explanation, that’s a good point.

If your intention is to justify that law in a broad moral context then “it’s the culture there” really isn’t a valid justification, unless the point you want to make is that the country’s culture is inconsistent with present day broad moral context, in which case it sounds about right.

You’re so right!

There is nothing more natural that the leader of a nation which abhors Nazism to loudly restate his unwavering support for a nation governed by an ultra-nationalist, racist, far-right cohalition, the very same day the UN announced they had already killed 4000 children in the ghetto they created on occupied land, populated by a different etnicity, who the leaders of said nation describe as “human animals”!!!

I mean, which leader that trully embodied a humanist and anti-fascist understanding of “Never again” would have as prime concern anything else but the right to exist of a state with such an elected government which according to the UN was killing thousands of children of an etnicity they deem “human animals” in a ghetto of their own creation in such a callous way???!

It’s only natural Sholz would aboved all worry about Israel’s right to exist in such a situation: there trully was nothing else more important for a humanist anti-Fascist to want to loudly proclaim than that at the time!!!

/s

When it comes to Corporates it very much is like the Nazi Bar allegory: you let one Nazi stay because he’s beheaving rasonably and not being nasty, and sooner or later the place is going to be full of his friends and turned into a Nazi Bar.

It’s the same dynamic only with corporate logos, advertising, hypercommercialism and eventual enshitiffication instead of swasticas, racist messaging and violence.

Certainly in my eperience of it since the 90s, the Internet changed very much this from its early days and spirit as commercial interests from their original foothold almost entirelly subverted it to serve their interests.

BULLSHIT!

Only a racists who thinks “they’re all the same” would justify killing Palestinians on the actions of Hamas.

Israel is an Occupying Power facing an Insurgence, who have chosen to conduct their anti-Insurgence action using methods with massive rates of collateral deaths and even have operating procedures in place with zero consideration for civilian lives, as clearly demonstrated when they just shot and killed 3 Israelis who were Hamas hostages and escaped and were holding a white flag.

That pro-genocide propaganda technique of yours of “forgetting” all about everything that happenned longer than 3 months ago and profoundly racist trope of trying to justify tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths - over 40% of which children - on 700 Israeli deaths at the hands of Hamas, has long run its course and only morons fall for that crap.

As for Germany, after thousands of Palestinian children had been killed, well past the point when Israeli actions were still justifiable, Scholz was still very explicitly stating Germany’s “unwavering support of Israel”. Fascism might have been kicked out of Germany but it’s still strong in German hearts: they might have added the Jewish people to their lists of “those like us” but their “never again” turns out to not be about stopping racist ultranationalist fascists from murdering with impunity “those who are not like us”, only about Germany not treating the Jewish People as “one of us”. That bullshit less-than-finger-wagging talk you mention means nothing for a nation that still proclaims its unavering support for a Fascist country committing genocide well beyond the point were there might still have been doubts.

We in Europe better be wary of Germany’s remilitarization now that it is crystal clear that they still have no problem with genocidal racist and ultranationalist Fascism, as long as the etnicity of the Fascists is the right one.

If Israel was treated equivalently to Russia they would’ve been under heavy sanctions from pretty much everybody by now, given that just in the first 2 weeks of bombing they murdered several Buchas worth (plus a couple of Mariupols) of civilians.

If there is one thing this situation made clear to most of the whole World when put side by side with the Russian invasion and the reaction to it, is the profound hypocrisy and even racist-genocide endorsing spirit of several self-proclaimed freedom-loving nations, especially the US, Germany and the UK.

I know and have dealt with very highly educated and intelligent people who just can’t do proper thorough problem evaluation and solving, and I don’t mean just hands on practical things, I mean obtaining information, thinking a situation through and coming out with an explanation and possible solutions.

I think it’s really a question of practice in Analytical Reasoning, which people in STEM have lots of because that’s what those domains require (try designing a bridge using persuasing techniques from Business Management and see what happens) so they constantly practice it, but most other areas don’t so people there have little practice in that mode or reasoning (but lots of practice in other ways of thinking).

You see it here tons of times: people who clearly are intelligent and educated arguing via semantics, appeals to emotion and just about a ton of falacies, all of which are noticeable as obviously flawed in logical terms with just a tiny bit of analytical thinking.

One thing I learned from my period of contact with the Theatre world some years ago (pretty much the opposite of what I do for a living), is that there are many ways of being highly intelligent (it was quite suprising for me the intelligence required to be a good actor) and maybe is better not to judge or, worse, to presume.