Stop it, Valve! I can only get so erect!

Historically occupations tend to be troublesome affairs. The west spent 20 years in Afghanistan and got nowhere. I agree that the mafia state must be dealt with, but going by the west’s ability to run an occupation that doesn’t turn the inhabitants against them, is practically nil.

My point was to sort the good from the bad. To support those who are against evil and fight against those who perpetrate it. Shooting unarmed prisoners of war is nazi like, and while as you say, such things are done by all militaries, it is a thing of evil and should be hindered, in the same way that we should hinder the nazis from shooting people.

I think for some people the scale of God simply doesn’t compute, which is why old man with big beard image persists. Look at the size of our galaxy, and the size of the universe as a whole. If any being was the creator of such a vast and complex universe as ours, that being would be to us like we are to a “Hello world” script.

The analogy is flawed, but that is what we are saying if we believe in a being capable of creating our universe, defining its laws and bending them to create us. We could not truly begin to comprehend such a being, and largely we are left to our own. However, if you believe, then this being does care about us in some way. And it has shown us this through inspiring humans to share its path for our improvement.

That is the reason I believe in the teachings of the Christ. The path of loving your enemies, of caring for everyone as one would your own family, forgiveness, that is the path to a better world, revealed to us through a man and his story. I am unable to fully live up to such ideals, but like Data says, the struggle yields its own rewards. Those who take such ideas to heart are worthy in the eyes of the creator, because if all people were such, there would be little suffering in our world. We have the means to reduce our suffering, but we choose not to. God could, remove it for us, but then we will not become the free and good beings we are meant to be.

You don’t need God to have such ideals as the Christ demonstrated, but I find such ideas so much better than any of the alternatives, that I suspect they have divine origin. And even if they don’t, if I follow them, then I will contribute to making the world better regardless. God could take away my struggle and suffering, but that would leave me still flawed and unable to improve, and so it would be for all humanity as well.

Nice Germans who who are respectful and tolerant are welcome. Nazi Germans get shot at. That’s what your granddad would probably say. Listen to granddad.

Based on her position and annoyance I think you misspelled ‘shait’.

Thank you, cake sounds like a good idea 😊

I’m gonna piggy back mine on this one. Before the invention of writing, the only new thoughts you could ever encounter, were from the people you would meet face to face.

It’s really simple, either all the people benefit or the people become divided. The conflict that comes from that is usually a path to destruction.

Only a Russian would misspell ‘bed’ as ‘bad’. Nice try kaputchnik.

I have the ungrateful job of teaching English. I have two types of students. Screenies and non-screenies. The former are like this meme, they pick up a lot from popular culture, games, etc, and are often bored with classes. Then you have the latter group, they have very little exposure to English and usually very little interest as well. A third group exists, and they’re the kids that are in between and do the work in class.

Now one would think that getting everyone into the first group would make my job easy, however, those kids are usually a special subset of kids who will learn independently just from their interests. The other two groups could do hour for hour exactly the same as the Screenies, but they would never reach that proficiency level without other instruction. On the other hand, a lot of screenies do poorly at formal English, like grammar, spelling and word choice, because much of their learning is casual.

So long story short, to the meme, yeah, I know.

Which part?

The main idea as I understand it, is that the workers produce value and that value will never be fairly distributed back to them unless the workers themselves are in charge. This is an analysis of human nature, the owners are fundamentally selfish and will try to maximize their profits, workers to them are merely a means to that end. Therefore workers will be underpaid for the value they create and in the worst case, horribly exploited. I agree 100% with this analysis, as it can be seen a thousand different cases of in history.

The answer to this according to communism is that the workers, who are the majority, take over, become themselves the owners, and distribute the value they create fairly. As a person who believes in democracy, not just in the political sphere, but also in the economic sphere, this seems a good idea.

Communism then branches into multiple factions on how to achieve that goal, coercion and violence, or use elections and the power of the state. In the former cases, such as the Soviet Union, such situations open up for power grabs and authoritarian leaders, which I dislike.

The latter tactic created the European, and especially the Nordic welfare states, through democratic means. These states are not communist, as they abandoned the goal of workers in charge, and went for regulated capitalism instead. While better than most, these states now struggle, as even regulated capitalism distributes wealth from worker to owner.

In these states the workers are again exploited for the benefit of the owners. This is not explicitly understood, because this understanding and its terminology is considered a failed system, reference the Soviet system. Instead the exploitation is warped into other grievances, such as anti-globalism or anti-immigration, leading to a takeover of power by the political fringes. The fringe supported by the owners will have more funds and therefore better chances. And while that fringe may portray itself as pro worker, it will in fact represent a true capture of the state by the owners, leading to the opposite, based on the analysis of human nature as mentioned above.

Tldr: don’t ask questions if you can’t be bothered to read the answer 😅

In some ancient text I read it talks about how the ancient Greeks had stopped wearing swords all the time for protection, but there were still some primitive areas where they did. Civilization reduces the necessity and the rate of return on individual violence it would seem.