Counterpoint to that: assume I’m Andrew and only care about my legacy. I don’t think that applies to Andrew; I think that, while he’s alive, he wants to be out of the spotlight, as unaffiliated with this as possible, not to be prosecuted, and not to potentially piss off old Epstein buddies who might have deeper dirt on him. But assume.

If I do nothing, I’ll be a footnote in the history books. People will most often see me on some list devoid of context as part of the royal family. My crimes will be explored in as much depth as possible in any extensive biography, but who’s really going to be reading one of those? And to the extent they do, surely there’s some room for an overly skeptical person to doubt it. Meanwhile, my name is going to be overshadowed by other figures like Trump for anyone reading history about the Epstein case.

If I confess, then Epstein is not only the absolute foremost thing I’ll be remembered for, but my name is going to come up at the top of and all over any account of what’s easily going to be one of the most scandalous criminal conspiracies of the 21st century. Even the dumbest, most overly skeptical idiot won’t be able to deny my involvement – of which I’m sure I’m going to have to go into gruesome specifics under oath to be permanently documented. Sure, maybe the five people who read a biography about me might see how I stood up and brought down the conspiracy and think, “Wow, he sure was slightly less of a monster for doing that!”, but the reality is that I’m probably making it much worse for the incurious general public who would otherwise, at best, see and forget me.

China has executed 11 members of the notorious Ming family criminal gang, who ran mafia-like scam centers in Myanmar and killed workers who tried to escape, Chinese state media reported on Thursday.

The Ming family was one of the so-called four families of northern Myanmar — crime syndicates accused of running hundreds of compounds dealing in internet fraud, prostitution and drug production, and whose members held prominent positions in the local government and militia aligned with Myanmar’s ruling junta.

Still 100% against state-sanctioned murder and would’ve preferred life in prison, but I can’t shed any tears. Apparently Wikipedia has a whole article on scam centers in Myanmar for further reading.

More established Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have refrained from reporting total death counts amid the uncertainty caused by the internet blackout.

That’s fine, but they have been abundantly clear that there are ongoing country-wide massacres. HRW ten days ago, for example:

In the capital, Tehran, videos show a heavily militarized response to the protests as they grew. Human Rights Watch verified videos that began to circulate on January 11 of body bags and bodies piled up in and around the Forensic Diagnostic and Laboratory Center in Kahrizak, south of the capital. The bodies were placed there for families to identify their loved ones. Human Rights Watch counted at least 400 bodies visible in several videos from that site alone. This number is an undercount, as bodies were piled on top of each other, making counting difficult.

Witnesses also said that many bodies were at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery Complex, 600 meters from the Kahrizak morgue. One person who went to identify the body of a loved one on January 10 said: “When we got close to the [large] halls, we saw bodies piled on top of bodies. They were in body bags, and some had tags with identification details. From the size of the halls, I could estimate that between 1,500 to 2,000 bodies were held there.” The witness said that more bodies were arriving by refrigerated trucks in the late afternoon when they were leaving the cemetery.

I think based on what you wrote that you do actually care about Iran’s civilians and denounce their massacre by Khamenei’s regime but don’t want fascists to use it as a pretext for invasion, so I assume you can, in good faith, acknowledge that this BBC News article isn’t just “manufacturing consent” and that civilians really are being murdered by the thousands by an authoritarian, theocratic regime.

Hey, if you remember, the last time you whined about this, I appended the most recent 2025 position to the bottom of the list – just to soothe your oh-so-good-faith concern that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics might’ve decided between 2016 and now that “actually, modern medical research is bullshit and plant-based dieting is unhealthy”.

Adding to what you said, I’ll just drop this here.

Trade tensions between the US and Europe had eased since the two sides struck a deal at Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland in July.

God, even amid everything else, this sentence is so fucking rancid.

“Opinion articles may be removed.” What do you think an editorial – “an article or any other written document […] that expresses the publication’s opinion about a particular topic or issue” – is exactly? The Le Monde article even says “OPINION ● IRAN” at the top in case you were confused somehow.

Rule 3, OP. Editorials aren’t allowed.

OP, for the love of fuck, when tensions are this high, please post anything other than an article from the Daily Mail.

Also, this is a repost from earlier.

I mean they were probably equivalent anyway, so I think you were okay.

I didn’t think footballs were capable of either?

I was going to say: fear of international retaliation is not what’s holding China back right now. Any “successful” invasion of Taiwan would turn the island into the surface of the Moon and be akin to a Zapp Brannigan “Killbots have a preprogrammed kill limit” strategy in terms of casualties.

Donald Trump is far too corrupt, stupid, and unpopular to lead the kind of international retaliation that would actually make China hurt. If they wanted to invade but felt pressured, they would’ve done it the microsecond that sack of shit entered the Oval Office.

Could you even imagine if Palestine sent truck bombs into Israel? “Hamas TERRORISTS commit TERRORISM to TERRORIZE Israel” would be in the news for a week. And those headlines would probably be correct, even in spite of the fact that Israel is an invading, genocidal apartheid state. Meanwhile, this extremely in-depth Reuters article but will quickly be forgotten.

These aren’t just truck bombs, by the way: they’re made from M113 APCs. Just another way the US is a party to this terroristic genocide.

One of the best side effects of having gone vegan is that the cost of food has gone through the floor. Plant-based staples are dirt cheap and extremely shelf-stable, and because most times it’s easier and more interesting to cook for myself, I learned a lot of insanely cheap, yummy, and healthy foods to cook. I just bought 8 lb of Desi chickpeas and 20 lbs of basmati rice – enough to feed the fucking Artesh for a year – for about $30 (and I wasn’t trying to penny-pinch). The spices, herbs, sauces, oil, nuts, etc. that go into making that, meanwhile, barely even factor in cost-wise.

Even with a non-plant-based diet, you’ll find cooking staples like chicken at home saves you a fuckload of money.

“dude” as an interjection is widely used gender-neutrally in modern slang, although there are still faint connotations of a male listener.

“We can’t do protest because the ultra-wealthy pay the working class to clean it up. I am very enlightened.”

Article is good, but here’s the original Nature article, as BBC News doesn’t link to it.

Here’s the link to the mentioned Reuters article.

So vindicated.

It’s a soft paywall based on the number of articles you’ve read. I can read it just fine, for instance, but archive.today is there if the wall shows up for you.

I think he usually works for Zelda.