No, I think he should escape into myth. I hope that he had a planned exit strategy for the end of this, and that he manages to flee the U.S. If he is caught, I believe he will be made an example, a metaphorical head on a pike to scare people off.

I want my skin and muscle tissue removed, and then I would like to be shot into space.

It’s playing a long con, and I might fall into a star before I ever get the chance, but it would be really funny if some space explorer encountered a floating human skeleton and got spooked.

Why do they have all this zeal now? Trump just won the U.S. election, Putin knows the war will get easier in the near future. Shouldn’t they being falling back and concentrating their power on maintaining positions? Are they just trying to purge out the last of the conscripts?

I’m not counting on Trump for anything. I’m expecting other member states of the UN and especially the EU to act as the actual hard line for Israel, as they have for the past five decades. It’s already starting to happen, and once sanctions are in place Bibi will finally start to become unpopular and can finally be replaced.

It’d be very nice if those sanctions started with the U.S., but it was never going to happen under either party. The number of lives lost will be the same. The U.S. has never been what has stopped Israel, it has always been global perception.

You know there’s an entire rest of the world that exists right? A rest of the world that has already started preparing sanctions against Israel if the conflict continues to escalate?

Realistically, we’ve seen this all beat for beat before. Israel treats Palestine as an apartheid state, eventually a group forms to try and resist Israel, Israel crushes that group’s bones into dust for a few years, and then once they can offer no more resistance, Israel returns Palestine to an apartheid state. The pattern has repeated itself several times now.

To start, we have to understand that the genocide of Palestine started before the October 7th attacks. Israel’s rampant illegal settlements in the Gaza strip may have been the final straw that provoked Hamas to make a move, but Palestinians have been abused, forced into ghettos, and murdered by private citizens for decades. All of this, and nobody in the West ever really batted an eye at the suffering except for a handful of informed leftists.

If Harris had won, the most likely outcome is that the immediate conflict would eventually be paused, just like it paused after the second intifadas. No land would be returned, no settlements removed, but Hamas’ forces would be decimated to the point they could not fight back and Israel would return to their quiet slow genocide until the stars align to renew their attack once more.

Now that Trump has won, the most likely outcome is…that the immediate conflict will eventually pause, just like it paused after the second intifadas. Israel isn’t an island, if they ramp up their aggression ever further, eventually other parts of the world will push for sanctions on Israel. A Trump win doesn’t suddenly give Israel carte blanch to build the gas chambers, they still have to pay lip service to international law. Israel will inflict a grievous wound on Hamas, deep enough that it will take another generation before conflict resumes, and go back to expanding their settlements.

This genocide has been happening since before I was born, and multiple Democrat presidents have had an opportunity to say something or work towards curbing Israeli aggression. They’ve all vaguely promised to work towards a two-state solution, knowing that the current two states are what they want. If Kamala Harris couldn’t even call it a genocide, then she was no different, and it would be foolish to think she would actually take any steps towards meaningfully stopping Israel.

So why was Harris’ answer to adopt a strong anti-immigration stance?

Everything the right was harping on about was a lie, but the Dems response was to amplify those lies and say “We hear you and will crack down on illegal immigration,” fully knowing there was nothing to crack down on.

Not that you’re wrong with your conclusion, but you picked a bad issue to go on. Democrats won’t solve immigration because there’s nothing to solve. Immigrants are not committing crimes at a higher rate than the rest of the population, and while America gets a lot of migrants, we also have a collapsing birthrate and need a growing populace for infinite shareholder growth.

The problem is that Republicans keep making up lies about immigration, even nonsensical lies like “they’re eating the dogs,” and the Democrats do nothing to dispel these lies. They don’t sit down with the charts that verifiably disprove the Republican bullshit. Instead, they pick it up, and promise they’ll be tougher on immigration next time, giving legitimacy to the lies.

I’d never take that bet, they already started today You can find them in threads across the fediverse.

It was such an easy lay-up to fumble. Hell, she raised millions in personal donations compared to a Trump campaign that ended up stiffing locations on payment because they’re so broke, it was the rare election where the Dems didn’t need their corporate donors. They could have accepted some long-term financial losses in the face of potential greater long-term gains if they could maintain similar levels of personal donations from energized progressives. I remember the energy in the air when Harris/Walz was revealed, it seemed like a progressive ticket could seriously exist.

And then it all vanished. Thanks for taking my $20, assholes. Wouldn’t have bothered if I knew they’d just dance to their owners demands anyway.

between this and the enshittification of big tech and gaming, it feels like 2024 has been one big argument in support of gatekeeping.

Because the Democrats picked it up and used it as an issue as well. Instead of dispelling the myths of “Bigrant Crime,” as if that would be a challenge, they took an anti-immigration stance as well. Honestly, Trump had a rare master class attack on the Dems with the whole “they’ve been in power for four years, why haven’t they already done everything,” because it called out just how shallow the Dems bending to conservative anti-immigrant policy was. It was almost certainly an accident on his part, especially since his party was the reason Dems couldn’t be as hard on immigration as they wanted, but it turned into effective messaging.

How has nobody mentioned Rimworld? Such an incredible soundtrack!

Oh thank god. Just when I thought the eastern games industry was mostly insulated from the massive layoffs plaguing the industry, Bandai Namco is here to let me down! Still in such a creative and batshit insane way, but very clearly the same kind of corporate fuck-up effecting the western industry.

It’s a shame that I’m a quivering pussy, because I think the combat against the replicants in FEAR fucking rules. The shooting feels awesome, slow-mo karate is awesome, the game feels awesome to play.

…and then the game goes quiet after the shooting stops, and it delivers some of the spookiest atmosphere I’ve experienced even after two decades of age. A single light fixture moves suddenly, showing the shadow of something just behind me, and I jump out of my skin and have to take a break from playing.

The boring answer is that Mossad probably were the ones who convinced Hezbollah to move to pagers in the first place, likely through double agents, and likely also controlled the supply chain from the beginning. They probably also didn’t actually care about who specifically had a pager, and just made sure they were distributed thoroughly within Hezbollah.

I think the record still goes to Amazon’s Crucible, which was cancelled before release after a closed-beta that nobody played.

Yeah don’t fucking do this if you care about your friend. These scams can end up putting people in life-threatening amounts of debt, and the shame of being scammed by someone they thought they loved has driven people to suicide.

OP, if you and your friends all really care about this guy, you should talk to him about it and try to prevent him from sending any more money. Maybe bring some research on “pig-butchering” schemes, which is probably what your friend is falling for unfortunately, and show them the similarities. If you still can’t convince him, try and remain sympathetic so you can pick him up when the scam is finished.

It’s really only the Russian military who has been awful, and it’s almost tragic how much Putin and Russia’s military doctrine have destroyed these kids’ minds. They turned children into monsters, then justifed their actions by claiming the enemy is just as monstrous. Meanwhile, all of us outside Russia can’t even imagine why a conscript wouldn’t want to surrender to the Ukrainians, who have consistently shown themselves to be excellent people who are willing to care for these conscripts even despite some of the things they’ve done.

Well it was presumably a Russian made grenade, maybe it didn’t have any fragmentation due to cost cuts. also presumably the Ukrainians were quick to find the two and treat them before they died to blood loss.