Trump doesn’t really bluff so much as waffle between committing and backing down because he is too cowardly to ever directly concede he has lost until the system he is contained within shatters apart.

People very dangerously misunderstand Trump when they think all he does is bluff, which isn’t to say that Trump isn’t a bullshitter and that Trump isn’t a bloviating idiot, but understand that what makes Trump so dangerous is that he is too cowardly to ever back down even when it makes no sense not to back down.

It didn’t make them any better as a people though, and other religions haven’t faired so great in the ‘be good to each other’ department either

I am not religious and I am not here to claim that religion has been a net good, but on the other hand many aspects of modern ethics and philosophy that are unarguably good came out of religious schools of thought, or perhaps to put it another way most of what we all accept as ethical and what we frequently point to as philosophical standpoints to begin difficult negotiation (i.e. “we can all agree human beings are all created equal even if we disagree on…”) has come out of or been heavily influenced by religion… which isn’t to argue that these ideas should have stayed confined within one particular religion’s school of thought but rather to point out the opposite.

No religion was the sole source for this logic and development of thought around human rights and the human condition and there is no reason to believe religion was a necessary precursor for these things to form, rather I mean to say our knowledge of these things came as a dawning awareness that the good aspects of disparate religions and ideologies could be connected and translated via shared universal statements of solidarity like “treat others as you want to be treated” and “tolerate your neighbor”. The details might not agree, but it is easy to do the math, draw the shared connections out and confidently say “yeah, they both pretty much think you should be a decent person and try to pursue happiness in a way that doesn’t hurt others”.

I am not saying religion isn’t dangerous however, and in particular I think religion becomes exceedingly dangerous when the followers of that religion become convinced the structures of their formal religious institutions are not inherently political the same way any power structure composed of humans unavoidably is… which is why the separation of church and state (and the associated freedom to practice or not practice whatever religion you so choose so long as it does not hurt others) in a free society is existentially necessary.

Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.

It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.

and I mean it is a job that gets blood on your hands, homie.

If they don’t want that baggage, they can deploy their golden parachute and go head another company/organization.

Stop carrying water for these people.

You can’t just pretend having some arbitrary connection to Kevin Bacon is the same as being all the way at the top of the power structure of one of the most powerful entities on earth that is actively seeking profit from an ongoing Genocide.

Hi, supersquirrel here, are you tired of people scamming you out of money with emails tantalizingly asking you to help start a realllllly profitable business in a foreign country?

Well, I have a solution for you! Pay me lots of money and I will tell you EXACTLY what you want to hear about those scammers/business opportunities!

Whoever has that job also very likely has blood on their hands from being involved in facilitating (or remaining silent about) the Palestinian Genocide with Microslop products like Azure and other computing services, so FUCK them, pile the misery on to them until they crumble into dust as a person for all I care.

Microslop is a tiny scrappy start-up company, give them some slack and patience, they can’t just throw virtually unlimited money at the problem to solve it…

It seems to me a whole lot of really smart, amazing jewish scholars over generations and generations of jews have established a pretty rigorous body of knowledge and wisdom about how to integrate as a potentially targeted minority into society and how to immunize that society against being manipulated into xenophobia and racism/religious discrimination.

What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank… and Lebanon… as confident as I am there are no words to describe what is happening, I am confident there is no god that would ever call for that in their name, I guess that is not a statement I can prove or disprove… but at the same time I feel entirely sure any god that would demand that would be an abomination… so what else can this genocide occurring be, other than first and foremost a betrayal of judaism at a basic level? An insult to god, whoever and whatever you identify god as?

If you think god is a many armed spaghetti ball floating in the ether and I think god is a giant spacecrab, we can disagree about a whole lot in how those two beliefs intersect in political and real world ways, but on the other hand it is pretty easy to establish that whether god is a many armed spaghetti ball or a giant spacecrab, god made the universe and thus doing something that feels needlessly violent and destructive clearly can’t be something god desires to be done, in general… Would the spaghetti ball really want you to do needless violence upon the spacecrab heretics even if they worship forbidden beliefs? Vice versa would the spacecrab desire their followers to obliterate followers of the flying spaghetti monster just because their path to worshiping god erred in the details?

What is happening now goes beyond any distinction between one human and another you can possibly draw, it goes beyond any single evil act anybody or anything could commit to deserve an equally evil response, it is an atrocity and it threatens to drag us into WW3 :(

The darkest irony is this all only puts jews more in danger sigh.

I am sorry I am just stalling for time because I realize you have won the argument, so now I am just bringing up tangential shocking things in order to try to distract from the more important point here that I have stuck my foot in my mouth.

Ughh…

Do you denounce Ted Bundy?

Put him in a little castle for prison, surround the castle with a moat guarded by well paid, trans, synchronized swimmers who get good quality healthcare and support for being employed to keep Merz at bay 24/7 in shifts while putting on beautiful routines for the crowd watching from the far embankment above.

Every square inch of the far embankment of the moat around Merz’s castle/prison must be covered with ethnic food stalls of every type imaginable, all wafting smells that as much as Merz wants to get a Xenophobic hard on from hating… kind of smell good… but Merz will only be fed a narrow diet of unseasoned boiled food in his prison. The prison will be self funding and be Merz’s most successful project as it transforms into a popular international tourist destination for people coming to “pay their respects” by laughing at the sad tiny man finally safe and supreme in his throne…

In this castle will also be a free (unless you are a white man, in which case you must apologize for being a white man to pay for your entrance) Tower of Terror-esque ride where it is rumored sometimes when the doors open on the hallway full of smoke, lasers and theatrical effect to deliver the thematic punch right before the coaster drops into freefall that you can spot the real monster through a real window pane, ugly and mundane sitting at a desk reading Mein Kempf, all alone.

Herero say what?

Where the hell did I say anything about Hamas?

I understand why you project opinions on to others to argue with them, you clearly can’t really construct an argument connected to reality.

Yeah that is exactly what happens.

What I find exasperating is the fact that many rightwing movements harbor antisemitism quite explicitly, including the AfD, and when it becomes politically undeniable how awful and incomprehensibly evil the Palestinian Genocide is, what conservative Germans will inevitably do to avoid reckoning with their hypocrisy and willing blindness to pretend not to see something so massively atrociously bad, is blame the jews for backstabbing them.

It is the same dumbshit story over and over again, I don’t think this is a unique problem to Europe or Germany, it just feels more pathetic when this story is grafted onto a nation that literally already exterminated millions of jews.

I am sure there are plenty of centrist idiots in Germany who think they need to defend Israel because of Germany’s past, so as not to make “the same mistake again” and yet if that is how they really felt with conviction wouldn’t they step back and see that Germany is being set up along with the rest of Europe to recoil in horror at the Palestinian Genocide and then turn around and blame it on jews for making a conspiracy to bring good, christian and righteous nations of Europe into doing evil?

I must reiterate, this story never fucking changes and I hate this story.

edit also lots of rightwing military personnel and leaders in Germany have ties with russians, so part of it is just you know, building up the military to “defend” against the people you actually just want to give all that military tech to…

Merz is a tiny little coward.

Additionally police are often the murderers themselves.

We all saw what happened to George Floyd.

For many cases this is true, see this article on South America for example, but this is a much deeper of a problem I think for Germany.

Meh just accelerate with F-force and then switch to G-force when you are up to speed and vice versa when slowing down, problem solved!