I don’t think that internet technological development is even relevant.

Internet sociological, philosophical, cultural and psychological development is about at the level of the Dark Ages, and that’s the problem that needs to be addressed.

The problem is that the ban is one-sided, and generally boils down to “the oppressed are disarmed but the oppressors are not.”

We actually live in a world in which a corrupt psychopath overseeing a genocide unironically tries to characterize his opposition to the concession of simple human rights to the people he’s mass-murdering as some sort of moral high ground.

Humanity doesn’t need advances in technology - it needs advances in mental health.

I really don’t think there’s a single threat facing humanity that can’t be traced back to the fact that there are so many people in positions of power and influence who are so obviously so dangerously mentally ill that they shouldn’t even be allowed among the general public.

Of course he did - that’s the sort of service they’ve paid him for.

Imitation meats have never impressed me. They get close, but they inevitably fall just enough short of tasting and feeling like real meat that it feels to me like a wasted effort. I think I’d like them better, oddly enough, if they didn’t even pretend to be meat - if they were marketed as something else entirely.

I love the concept of lab-grown meat, and it seems as if it should be without issue, since it basically is meat in all senses, except that it’s grown in a vat instead of inside an animal’s skin. But since I haven’t had a chance to try it, I can’t say.

Netanyahu pressed on with his attacks on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in an interview broadcast Thursday, denouncing Canberra’s “appeasement” of terror groups and their supporters in the West.

He also vowed to go through with plans to take over all of Gaza militarily even if Hamas agrees to a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Rarely see unintentional irony that vivid on that sort of scale.

Rather obviously, the actual “problem” is that after far too many years of appeasing the most violent and deadly terrorist organization in the Middle East, Australia has finally stopped.

And now the head of that terrorist organization is pissed.

Not every tactic - no.

And Russia is introducing some novel tactics of its own, like kidnapping and indoctrinating Ukrainian children.

I have little doubt though that the broad strategy is exactly the same - what they can’t take immediately, they intend to take incrementally.

And in fact, that’s essentially what they’re already announcing to the world. They can’t be unaware of the fact that, to much of the world, stating that they’re patterning the proposed occupation after the West Bank is effectively stating outright that they fully intend for Russia to then incrementally steal everything and to kill anyone who tries to stop them.

I assume that also means that Russia would then send in state-sponsored terrorists in the guise of “settlers” to murder the Ukrainians and incrementally steal their land, and send in the army to slaughter them if they dare to fight back.

He asserts that “our goal is not to occupy Gaza, our goal is to free Gaza.”

That’s not just ridiculously obviously a lie - it’s provably a lie.

Israel has already struck a deal with Egypt to sell natural gas from deposits in Gazan territorial waters. Therefore it must be the case that Israel is already planning on not only occupying but annexing Gaza - they could not claim ownership of those gas deposits otherwise.

Meaning is subjective and not intrinsic, so there can be no such thing as “the” meaning of anything.

The artist can have an intended meaning, but the audience not only can but will find their own meaning in it. It might be the case that the audience gets the same meaning from it that the creator intended, but it might just as easily be the case that they get some entirely different meaning from it.

None of them are right or wrong - that’s not even a coherent concept in that context. They just are whatever they are.

And this is why SUDDENLY IRAN!

For some reason, he seems extra butthurt about getting caught lying this time.

No.

(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.

Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.

It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.

My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.

Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.

I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…

That’d be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

I’m guessing you think

You don’t have the foggiest idea what I think, so don’t you fucking dare mansplain it to me.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken

Expect to see a lot more of that all around the world.

Trump can hide enough of his caprice and his pettiness and his self-absorption behind emotive rhetoric to fool the MAGAs, but none of that works on an international scale. The rest of the world just sees him, accurately, as a petulant, self-serving asshole and raving lunatic who can’t be trusted. Ever. And that’s the way they’re going to treat him, and the US by extension.

Government by a delusional malignant idiot clown.

An entire administration of delusional malignant idiot clowns in fact…

This is why there’s such a determined focus on crushing criticism entirely - because Israel’s actions are literally indefensible.