Why am I now picturing a chain smoking Forrest Gump? “Life is like a pack of cigarettes, you never know what’s gonna blow up.”

History is like a mystery book that you’ve read the last chapters first and know how it’s going to turn out. The colonialism done by European powers hadn’t yet happened at the time of Crusades. In fact had the various warring factions in Europe hadn’t found common cause, their religion and culture would’ve been wiped out by Muslim colonialism. Yup, the Caliphate was conquering the Christian lands in Iberia and Anatolia and colonizing them. This is what triggered the Crusades.

The Crusades were an anti-colonialism movement, and if they hadn’t found something to unite over, then their cultures, languages, and religion would’ve been wiped out and the whole thing would’ve been a minor footnote in history. They had managed

In the end, the Muslim colonization of Iberia was defeated (with the Spanish and Portuguese becoming brutal colonizers afterwards) while the Byzantine Empire ultimately fell to Muslim conquest and colonization. Today, there’s only a few hundred thousand Christians left in Anatolia because of assimilation and genocide. Some of that has been relatively recent… you ever hear of the Armenian genocide?

So yeah, not exactly a clear cut good guys vs. bad guys kind of thing as popular narratives suggest. The crusades were triggered by Muslim aggression into Christian lands. While that doesn’t excuse the atrocities committed by the Crusaders, the Crusades also don’t excuse the atrocities committed by Muslim empires either. History is complex, and reductive bias towards europe=bad or religion=bad just results in not actually learning anything from history.

Tankies are permanently stuck in backwards day. Left is right and right is left. They do this because they’re just fascists that don’t like to be associated with other fascists. So they call their fascist group “leftist”, but they hate democracy, liberalism, the jews, etc just as much as any other fascist.

I’ve heard a carwash will take them out.

Yeah this is more of a situation where because more applications are built for windows you’re more likely to encounter poor quality application level software on windows than on Linux. Especially if you stay within the walled garden that most distros provide.

People see a pattern with having a lot more problems with applications on windows than they do on linux and wrongly assume it’s because of the OS.

It’s really silly since there’s plenty of real bullshit going on with windows people could meme about. There’s no need to make up shit about windows being bad at something it actually does ok with.

Obviously you need to consider how much ravioli you’re making when choosing which ravioli pot to take down from your ravioli pot shelf.

Removed by mod

Pretty obvious the ICC overstepped, and their politically motivated actions have hurt their reputation. The ICC’s ability to perform their purpose of justice has been significantly diminished by their political activism.

It’s true that it can’t replace a skilled profession. But I honestly believe you could replace most middle management with AI already. Of course the bar is incredibly low on that.

It doesn’t cost $8 per copy to manufacture. I can get a writable 64GB SD card delivered to my door for less than that. And a plastic case is pennies to manufacture.

It’s more about preventing people from trading or selling games with other people after they’ve finished playing them.

Yeah there’s no better reason to use jury nullification than when government wants to kill a guy for political reasons.

Yeah, if the pro-Palestinian movement was a non-violent resistance movement I’d be on board 100%. But unfortunately that’s not what it is.

Odai Nasser Saadi Al-Rubai is someone we should support, someone who wanted peace. But he’s dead now and those who claim to want peace for Palestine seem to want to erase him from existence. He was inconvenient to their narrative so they will pretend he didn’t exist.

How can someone claim to be to be pro-Palestinian if they have no empathy for Odai Nasser Saadi Al-Rubai, a Palestinian that wanted there to be an end to this war? It doesn’t seem like a pro-Palestinian movement to me, it just looks like an anti-Israel movement.

Have you seen a photo of what tanks in combat look like these days? They have cages welded on top of them. Also the hatches can be closed. A lot of tankers like to have the hatch open so the commander can have have more visibility, but it’s not a necessity.

There have been ways to take out a tank with missiles for a long time now. The reason why they’re still used is that air defenses exist and nothing beats the cost efficiency of moving a big gun close to the enemy and firing a lot of cheap ammunition at them.

Also are you going to tell civilians they can move back into their towns based solely on drones? If the civilians are behind a bunch of tanks, they’re safe because the drones will go after the tanks before going after the civilians. You need soldiers to hold ground. A soldier in a tank is going to be harder for a drone to kill than a soldier that’s not in a tank.

Yes drones are effective, but drones can’t hold ground and keep civilians safe.

We all hope for peace, but some of us understand that Hamas is incompatible with peace.

Yes because Russia will build more tanks and other equipment in the next decade. Not a problem if Europe builds up too. But that will be a problem if Europe does nothing.

If Russia were an immediate threat, Europe would have no choice but to give Trump whatever he wants so the US will protect Europe. But with Russian forces being decimated by this war, Europe has the opportunity to build it’s own arms industry to be able to produce it’s own weapons to be able to counter Russia in a decade’s time.

Drones don’t hold ground, soldiers do. Soldiers that have tanks are going to be more effective than those without them.

ITT: A lot of of leftists seeing evidence that they have supported fascists and having to choose between remaining a leftist or going full tankie.

What’s bullshit is that you believe that people capable of the horrific things that happened on October 7 would never ever torture and kill people that threatened their power.

Hamas is a fascist organization, and this is how fascists roll.

Your comment might carry more weight if this thread wasn’t full of people being outraged and claiming that anything that suggests Hamas aren’t good guys must be “zionist propaganda”.

You may not support Hamas, but maybe ask the people in this thread that are clearly pro-Hamas whether or not they consider themselves to be pro-Palestine.

The contents of this thread suggests there are a lot of people that are part of the pro-Palestine movement are indeed pro-Hamas. And there is little push-back within the pro-Palestine movement for people that take pro-Hamas and even anti-semitic stances. Anyone who does gets labelled a zionist and gets harassed and threatened.

Sure not everyone in the pro-Palestinian movement are pro-Hamas, but Hamas is a significant part of that movement. And when you have violent extremists in a movement, they are the ones that control the movement, not the pacifists. Because as we can see, the violent elements of a movement are willing to kill the pacifists if they speak against them.

Unfortunately trust doesn’t work that way. When you betray alliances, trust is broken and it would take a fundamental change in the US political system and many decades to rebuild that trust.

This isn’t Trump’s first term. This isn’t an interruption of America being it’s true self. Biden was the interruption, Trump is the new normal of what America is to the world. Even if a Democrat wins the next election (if there is one) no one can trust that the US won’t go back to someone like Trump in a future election.

The US is at best an unreliable ally and at worst an adversary. That’s just how it is now.