Two men holding hands? A line of people marching in a pride parade? Anyone with Grindr installed on their phones?

Take your pick.

It’s literally just guys in vans cruising around town snatching people. You don’t need anything particularly high tech for that

Life was better when I was younger and healthier and had a wider set of possibilities in my future.

But now I’m talking you, the younger person, and I’m here to explain how I devoted myself to giving you a bright future.

I did do that, right? I wasn’t just chasing my own selfish nostalgic desires, right?

People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.

We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons

This is in India, but coming soon to a country near you

It came here first

Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire

I might argue its a cultural shift as much as an economic one. We spent the 80s and 90s shaming people for having kids before they were “ready”, with “ready” meaning first “graduated high school” and then “graduated college” and then “owned a home” and then “had sufficient savings and health care”.

I ended up waiting to have kids until I was in my late 30s. And I only really have the time and energy and finances to support one. Would love to have a house full of kids, that’s not happening this late in life.

Crazy that virtually nobody is above the 2.3 replacement rate.

That is… until you have exactly one kid and realize how much work it takes. I wonder what happens to that chart if you look at “Hours employed by household”.

Betcha the low end is underemployed and the upper end is full on leisure class.

This comic is wildly inaccurate as it depicts an old white man complaining about a young black man not having enough kids.

Wait, are we talking about Korea or Amazon?

Dems lost the election for many reasons. Supporting Ukraine was definitely not one of them tho.

They shed 12M votes between 2020 and 2024, in large part thanks to failing to deliver on promises to their constituents. While Biden was throwing up his hands and insisting he couldn’t afford to relieve student debt, extend health care subsidies at the tail end of COVID, or defend the civil and labor rights of his constituents, he was shoveling money out the back door for Israel and Ukraine.

Russian bribery and blackmail only works on politicians

They work just fine on American business interests. But then American businesses are perfectly happy to bribe people directly. You had Elon promising to cut $1M checks to GOTV in swing states and TPUSA dropping much of its $85M war-chest across the critical swing state of Arizona in the run up to the election. Both groups pulled their fortunes from the post-COVID asset inflation of the American plutocracy. And they spent the money to buy up voters that Biden had allowed to languish.

Always curious to hear how NK has no electricity, but they manage to hack the systems of a trillion dollar conglomerate on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean.

The contradictions abound.

You can only do so much with forced labour.

There’s a certain irony in this statement, coming from folks who consume it regularly.

Yeah, and its curious to see you getting downvotes for the intra-departmental outsourcing that’s been rampant through the tech sector for a while now.

What we’ve got isn’t some nefarious plot by the Chinese-Adjacent to invade our precious trillion dollar tech industry. Its the deliberate consequence of sanctioning a country to the hilt to devalue local labor, then exploiting the sanctioned locals to extract labor at below market rate.

It’s the steady support of Ukraine that would cause Russia to turn back one way or another.

Has it worked in the last twelve years? NATO has been fully in support of Ukraine since Maiden. Nothing has improved as a result.

If trump and the gop hadn’t been such idiots, and just held the line, Russians would see no possibly advantageous end game and putin would probably be in exile or hung by his balls in red square by now

Dems lost the general election in 2024 because they were more interested in bailing out Ukraine than covering domestic priorities.

These people have made their own bed.

Starving the supply to Ukraine wouldn’t stop this war.

The tens of billions squandered on an ill-managed war would have been far better spent on refugee services and industrial development in the surrounded Eastern European block to absorb displaced peoples.

Rather than aiding actual Ukrainians and fortifying the NATO block against further Russian aggression, Europeans have pissed away a meager military surplus trying to bleed Russia into defeat. Meanwhile, the 7.7m displaced Ukrainians face joblessness, homelessness, poverty and a multitude of legal hurdles and sanctions that prevent them from resettlement.

If Europeans actually gave a shit about “Ukraine” the population rather than “Ukraine” the physical territory, we wouldn’t see Polish political leaders denying Ukrainian expats civil rights

A steady and resolute supply of arms and other resources to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to make Russia’s efforts clearly useless

This is a bald-faced lie. Arms into Ukraine didn’t help the country in 2018 when Trump championed it. It failed to grant Ukraine the ability to retake the Donbas, much less Crimea, even when Putin’s own mercenary company turned on him.

And that’s what this fight is supposed to be about. Zelensky’s government wants the Donbas back. Putin is refusing. And now we’re asking… how many more Ukrainians to die over a real estate negotiation? 10k? 50k? Another 100k?

We’re already talking about a war that’s killed roughly 400k Ukrainians and displaced a full quarter of the country’s 44M population. And we want to keep this up until when exactly? Until Russia stops existing? Until we get a more favorable territory settlement? Until the next US Presidential Election?

This is the same stupid shit we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Korea, too. An endless war against an Ontologically Evil enemy that fuels a massive market bubble for the MIC and still ends in dismal failure.

But Mercs? Come on now.

You’ve got a lot of folks drafted into this conflict on false pretexts. Others are being lured in the face of collapsing economies at home.

Men are fighting on the frontline of a war they have no stake in, with weapons they have little training to wield. Sky News examines how South Africans are being tricked into joining Russians on the frontline in Ukraine.

Thousands of South American soldiers head to Ukraine front line looking for better pay

This war is exploiting the poor and the “undesirables” on a global scale.

At the end of the day, Ukraine is the victim in this war

Ukraine isn’t a person. And the persistent belief that real estate is people is so fucking Libertarian it chills the soul.

There are plenty of Ukrainian natives victimized by the conflict, both through the violence inflicted by invading Russians and the callous ineptitude of the reining Ukrainian leadership. Now that much of the adult male population of the country has been exhausted as cannon fodder, both countries are drawing in surplus males from the international community.

Starving the beast of conflict should be the goal of the international community, not fanning the flames. But because so many of these countries see this conflict as a profit center, and surplus men in their own countries as a threat, we’ve created a real economic incentive to fund the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and the internationally unemployed on one budget line.

The only benefit to beliefs like yours

You’d rather live a righteous lie than recognize the bitter truth? This isn’t a matter of benefit, its a matter of dispensing with delusions. This conflict is not about reconquering the Donbas from an Evil Enemy. It is about war-profiteering and refugee disposal.

I don’t think anyone expects there to be less bloodshed or an end to violence.

That’s right there in the headline. “Money today or blood tomorrow”

Where are the calls for Russia to lay down arms and retreat?

Brother, its all over the EU. But its a hard sell for a country that’s gaining territory in the face of a fracturing and deteriorating coalition of (increasingly il)liberal western states.

I don’t want violence but to act like it doesn’t have a place in our world?

It’s entirely insincere to pretend more arms to Ukraine will result in less bloodshed. At best, you can argue “at least the right people will die” assuming you squint and tacitly ignore all the conscripts and mercenaries and civilians involved in this conflict.

But it’s insane to pretend we’re heading towards an end to violence doing exactly what NATO has been doing for the last three years.

Ukraine aren’t the ones that started the war

That hasn’t spared them from dying in it.

“We need money to buy the weapons”

“Whatcha gonna do with the weapons?”

“Make a lot more blood splatters”