Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]

So offending the state in China invokes the punishment of getting to experience the American reality?

It provides enrichment for the kids, as they figure out how to get past it.

It’s not even marginallymighty

The bible is not a credible historical source, and is also missing the 2000 most recent years of history. The middle east has had long periods of peace and prosperity.

Our standard for confirmed deaths is stringent—it requires an official publication or social media post from a relative with corresponding details, accompanying photos or dates of burials from local messaging groups, or photos from cemeteries.

Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it’s important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn’t be represented in those statistics at all.

Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.

Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we’re looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.

If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can’t just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.

Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.

This isn’t contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.

The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.

Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they’re a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.

Ukraine’s not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.

My guess is Canada

or they live under a secular, democratic Palestinian state from the river to the sea where both the Jewish and Arab population live as equals.

I don’t see the people who voted in and fully supported:

the Zionist settler-colonialist project and it’s ambitions, the full extermination of the Palestinian population.

Participating in a secular democratic Palestinian state in good faith. I also don’t see the religious and nationalist zealots that make up the current government and its core supporters agreeing to leave.

but they are all in a United Front against the Zionist regime.

United fronts don’t tend to outlive the enemy they are united against.

I also don’t understand what the your alternative is? Palestine is unstable as fuck under two states. so what are you proposing?

I don’t see how a single state including all of these groups, under a secular democratic government can come into existence.

The sort of societal change necessary would require tactics similar to revolutionary China or Russia, full wealth redistribution, some form of widespread re-education and some form of vanguardist government to oversee the transition. The majority of people in Palestine would not support those measures, and neither would the surrounding powers.

I really hate people who speculate and criticize without offering any actual implementable plans.

My lack of ability to think of a solution to the problem does not stop me from seeing the issues with the ones that are proposed. (Or rather skipped past in most cases.) We all, I would hope, want to see an equal, democratic and secular Palestine from the river to the sea, but how does that happen?

One Palestine is not a recipe for a stable state imo. You can deport the settlers back to their countries of origin, at least the European ones, but that still leaves a sizable contingent, something like two million IIRC people/descendents of people who migrated/were forced out of the neighbouring Arab states.

You have the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, a great number of whom have, at least to some degree, been complicit in the oppression of those in Gaza and the west bank. On top of that, they are considerably more materially wealthy and educated. Wealth redistribution could fix this, but would create resentment. Not doing so would create resentment on the other side.

You have a rift between the secular and non-secular populations, significant differences in beliefs and politics between the west bank and Gaza, you have secular socialists and zealous theocrats, all militarised (by necessity and justly, but militarised nonetheless).

A two state or three state solution is not just, but even with Israel destroyed, could a one-palestine survive even briefly?

Outdoor cats are destructive to the ecosystem, keeping a pet is the exploitation of an animal and is therefore not vegan, and forcing a vegan diet on an obligate carnivore is , depending on how you do it, either pointless or animal abuse.

While I provide no further argument or justification for these points, understand that I am unchallengably correct as I am the one true Marxist.

The internet outside of hexbear is generally hostile to many of our views, so it’s not like we can easily go elsewhere.

If they’d endured as independent groups into the 21st century without being colonised by Europeans, as the map shows, they would almost certainly have developed defined borders.

The Aztec empire being the dominant force on the continent could be a very unfortunate situation for everyone living there.

They were so unpopular with every surrounding nation (because of all the murdering and kidnapping and human sacrificing) that when the Spanish showed up, the vast vast majority of the soldiers that fought against the Aztecs were from the local peoples.

Sadly, the design is unfeasible as eventually the rotational force either separates the bread from the butter, or liquidises the internal organs of the cat when they reach peak generating speed.

The rapid disassembly of the mechanism can cause quite an amount of damage as well.

Russia did attack from the northwest to start with, but that failed fairly spectacularly

Statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks in my country.

Meat is generally spiced more heavily in warm climates because it spoils faster and hot spices both preserves meat by killing bacteria and disguise a certain degree of spoilage.

I would be surprised if the trend towards hot spices in a country that is generally both warm and humid is because of a difference in palette rather than the reasons above.

how much fake seafood do you see engineered out there?

Crab sticks are usually fake, but generally, fish is harder to immigrate accurately than other meats, and there’s less demand for it since people in the west don’t generally eat tons of fish anyway.

Less demand for real fish means less demand for imitation fish, though there is apparently a company somewhere making lab grown salmon and tuna.

The fake stuff (and cultivated meat for that matter) are getting closer to parity every year. You don’t go back to something “for the taste”, if the alternative you switched to offers a near identical experience.

I don’t want to stop eating meat, I want to stop the exploitation and suffering of animals.

While I want to stop the exploitation of animals more than I want to eat meat, if there is a path that allows me to do both, I will have a preference for that path.

The same goes for leather. It’s use isn’t worth what has to be done to create it, but it is a fantastic material with a lot of versatility that’s better than near all alternatives in plenty of applications. Fake leather and synthetic leather are wonderful innovations because we can enjoy the benefits without the negatives, and that’s something to be encouraged rather than avoided.