Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
It can be true that US involvement in world politics has blowback effects without it also being true that all modern terrorism is a product of western meddling.
I'm not saying that everything the US does is appropriate, but I am saying it is a fatal naivete to imagine that the rest of the world just reacts to western aggression and has no regional or global ambitions of their own and that those ambitions are interested in promoting individual rights as understood by you or me.
The fact of the matter is that any large enough society is going to come into conflict with other large societies and not for anything more than it's people just trying to live their lives. This is an unavoidable aspect of human existence. The US could remove it's military presence from the world, it could stop all foreign aid, and it would *still* come into some form of global conflict.
Is this the point where people in the US are allowed to morally say "fuck you" to the one's complaining about our behavior? Seriously, at which point are we allowed to say "No, I'm doing this thing I want to do because I'm allowed to, and if you try to stop me, I'm going to defend myself and my friends"?
Because if, in your mind, such a situation can possibly exist, then you're ultimately talking about the US signing bomb shipments.
This is all to say nothing of the fact that some people are, in fact, bad. Bad people deserve rejection and frustration of their goals, which are bad. I am comfortable saying this because I am not a moral relativist.
We could be like Panama (although, we do use the threat of our bombs to protect their canal), but there are likely real consequences that involve eventual large-scale violence if the USA just abandons the world stage.
Would it have been inappropriate for the Allies to booby trap Nazi radios during the Battle of the Bulge?
Except for basically everything that Hamas and Hezbollah have been doing for decades.
Just add captchas to each post?
Then you realize that they weren't that wrong after all.
I am once again humbly requesting that would you please not?
In my opinion, the most important feature of Monero is that it prevents blacklisting your coins.
Bitcoin maxis tend to think that the state is just going to accept defeat when Bitcoin use becomes ubiquitous. In reality, the government is going to do forensics on the chain to determine who owns which coins which they will then blacklist for whatever reason they want.
If you guys all think "de-banking" is bad, just wait until the literal unit of money you're trying to use has been deemed illegal by the government.
Unless someone can figure out how to anapnymize the blockchain, then I think the more likely scenario is not that Bitcoin frees us all from government overreach, but becomes the noose with which it strangles us.
Oh wow, flex on blind people, jeeze.
You're begging the question.
There is a qualitative difference between dogs and people. That difference is the capacity for judgement. Reason. The capability of moral understanding. A dog (especially one infected with a disease that makes it rabid) is not capable of moral judgement. You shouldn't "hate" a dog for acting according to its nature; a nature fundamentally incapable of understanding the meaning of its actions in any moral sense. This is the same reason we don't judge a child the same way we judge a full grown adult.
Humans are different. An adult is capable of understanding the meaning of his or her actions. There is no "affliction" unless they are rendered incapable of exercising their own agency (in which case, yes, we wouldn't consider their actions in the same light).
Whether or not you should "hate" people who engage in evil behavior is not necessarily a required reaction to facing evil (although if there is a valid use for hatred, it is probably of evil per se).
Nevertheless, it is certainly incumbent upon each of us to oppose evil honestly. That means recognizing it that it exists and that fully coherent humans are capable of it. If that means you go to war in order to protect yourself, your family, your friends, your community, your country, etc - then that's what it means. Pretending the problem away isn't going to solve anything.
How do you do, fellow hotel worker?
Pic unrelated
This is ridiculous. This was one the most targeted anti-terrorism operations in history. They targeted literally only members of Hezbollah and as of my last check, that's almost exclusively who was injured or killed by this attack. Simultaneously, Israel took out the comms of an enemy combatant.
Big Snowden L here.
Frankly, criticizing Israel for this, at this point in time when all information appears to demonstrate this operation as damn near surgical, is fishy. It begs the question as to whether Snowden just doesn't like that anti-Israel forces took a huge loss.
So your problem is the corporate tax cut? I guess it doesn't matter that the corporate tax is notorious for being passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Regardless, the idea that reducing (not eliminating, but reducing) the corporate tax has so dramatic effect on the income distribution as to be describable as "selling it the 99%" is just brazen hyperbole.
Regardless, it is an out-and-out lie that the lower and middle classes pay more in taxes than the upper class. The top 10% of income earners fund something like 90% of the entire federal budget. That was true before and after the Trump tax cuts. In fact, the biggest relative cuts landed on the middle class!
Also, the idea that the majority of Americans are poor is laughable. The median income in the United States is one of the highest in the world, as is the GDP per capita. Americans, even the poorest ones, are some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Donald Trump has been incredibly normal from a policy perspective. The only thing he did that you could even begin to consider as beneficial exclusively to the wealthy were his tax cuts, but that's only if you ignore that he cut everyone's taxes.
His most controversial policies, like banning nationals from Middle Eastern warzone countries, or extending the Obama-era detention policies of illegal immigrants in border states, can't be considered a "1%" program by any stretch of the imagination.
It is interesting that Trump is the pro-1% candidate while Harris is literally stealing Trump's pro-middle-class policy ideas like "no tax on tips" or increasing the child tax credit for new parents. She also has the backing of major banks, hedge fund, and the like and her administration has made zero effort to do anything remotely opposed to "the 1%".
