It takes effort to make aliens actually feel alien, and then build a good story around them.

It’s far easier (and possibly more engaging for most people) to make aliens by exaggerating human characteristics, and then have a story about humans facing against their worst or best traits.

There’s been at least 4-5 super-massive country-wide protests in the US, in the last decade. How much have things changed? At least how much have the elite even been shaken and made an effort to minimize squeezing the people? The answer is negative. Every single protest has not just failed to bring about one iota of change. They actually led to opposite effects:

1. Various organizations sheepdogging angry and desperate people back to the old political mechanisms

2. Protests have been highly infiltrated, to the extend where they die out from infighting and disorganization, or provocateurs and saboteurs.

3. Reactionaries becoming more and more inflamed and putting their own politicians in power, who are working precisely against what the protests wanted to achieve in the first place.

4. Reactionaries being used in establishment propaganda as a tool of fear, in order to herd protestors back in line to vote and back up the status quo again.

Literally, what is a protest? A protest is a WARNING AND A THREAT OF VIOLENCE. A protest is a show of force, a flex targeted at the elite and the rulers saying “You see how many of us are here? If we choose to come for you, you can’t stop us. So you better take notice and change course, or next time we are laying down the placards and the flags, and we are coming with fire and pitchforks”.

Every single protest that has ever worked, has either worked because the protest targets got SCARED(see Roosevelt’s reforms in the 30s, Nixon’s reforms in the 70s), or because it transitioned into a full-on VIOLENT REVOLUTION.

So when libs go about organizing their peaceful demonstrations and marches, the action is destined to fail, precisely because it is peaceful. US senators, and US congresspeople, and US presidents, and US billionaires, understand this very well, which is why their answer to protesting is to silently ignore them.

The US is just an example here. This applies all over the world. If peaceful protest worked, then judging by the scale of worldwide protests, by now Israel wouldn’t just have stopped bombing Gaza, it would have given Palestine its independence and then disarm itself.

When libs go on about how violence is bad, and doesn’t solve anything, it’s good to remember that the reason we even have a semblance of democracy worldwide right now, is because hundreds of thousands of French men and women got out in the streets, stormed the guardhouses and the gates, took the aristocrats out of their palaces, beat the crap out of them and then chopped their heads off in plain view. And while the French revolution didn’t go so well afterwards, what ended up happening is that the nobles of Europe got scared shitless that their own serfs would do the same to them, so they granted them constitutions and democratic processes.

It’s also good to remember that the reason we have universal healthcare systems, free public education, subsidized households, retirement funds, unions, worker rights and protections, is because hundreds of thousands of Russian men and women improved upon the example of the French, and not only overthrew the nobles, they also chained up the capitalists and put them to hard labour for all the evils they did upon them. The European capitalists got scared shitless, like their aristocratic cousins a century prior, and decided to ease off on squeezing every single penny out of every single pound, and tried to buy off the European proletariats by emulating some aspects of the Soviet experiment.

Yeah, it’s good to protest. It’s good to also remind ourselves that we are many and can achieve things. But protesting isn’t the end-game. The end-game is overthrowing the system that produces injustice. You can’t fix what is designed to be broken. Protesting is one tool we have, but it’s a middle-of-the-road tool. We should never lay down our capacity for violence, because by declaring our docility, we might as well proclaim our defeat.

Isn’t it curious how once the French were evicted from the area, suddenly all these terrorist groups became incompetent and vulnerable? Very weird!

One would even think that the French were somehow aiding these groups! Inconceivable!

Also, there’s absolutely no vegetation or rocks on the ground. It’s all the same texture and same evenness. There’s no burn or skid marks on the ground. There’s no other debris or wreckage strewn about the area. The afterburner colours look exactly like the first image on a Google search for “F35”. The plane’s surface looks rough and matte, sort of like an F16, whereas F35s have a really slick, almost shiny surface. The fuselage of an F35 is much less cylindrical and more ellipsoid (again reminds me more of an F16 or F15).

Probably some news website made the image to accompany their article. Maybe they even mentioned in the caption that it was AI generated. Then other websites picked up the picture hastily and used it without question.

Look for the user comrade-ki.m1950. They will hook you up

And there seems to be a sort of monopoly trust going on for the past 30 years, with companies agreeing with each other on what game prices will be across the board. They are even openly admitting that they are waiting for a big release like GTA 6, to raise the standard release price of games.

Not just any industrial powerhouse. Germany is an industrial powerhouse. Italy is an industrial powerhouse.

Socialism produces industrial powerhouses that are putting people into space, building nuclear reactors and inventing revolutionary technologies.

To be fair they are somewhat copying the Russian Army. The Russians offer bonuses for every piece of equipment destroyed and for killing or capturing Ukrainian officers and NCOs, or members of certain formations like Azov.

Furthermorr, if you follow Telegram channels of various Russian formations they regularly post calls for donations and fundraisers that they use to buy extra medical equipment and food, as well as motorcycles, buggies, civilian cars, drones, specialized equipment not issued by the Army and the spare parts to maintain them. It’s also widely publicized that along with this crowdfunding, most Russian formations require their soldiers to contribute a % of their wage to a communal fund for such purchases.

Some formations even use such funds as a sort of additional life insurance and healthcare coverage for their heavily wounded and deceased soldiers and their families, aside from what is offered officially by the Russian Federation.

Thanks for joining comrade! Enjoy your stay!

Winter was dedicated to all the maintenance stuff mostly, and there was mostly no other field work during that time. They had way more holidays as you say, and they also had a lot more breaks during the day. Historians have done studies on this. An average 8-hour labourer today works about 1800 hours per year, accounting for breaks and holidays. An average medieval peasant would work significantly less so. English peasants had it worse at 1600 hours. French and Germans would fluctuate at 1300-1400 hours. Italian and French would also fluctuate at 1200-1300. Byzantine peasants (whose majority were not serfs and worked on their own land) would work much less at 1000-1200 hours per year!

The point of the meme is that a modern-day wage labourer is exploited way more than a medieval wage labourer. There’s nothing there about famines, plagues and wars (which by the way only went away from Europe to an extend for the past 80 years, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be staying away).

Also don’t forget:

Medieval peasants worked on average (depending on the area and era you are looking at) 30-60% less hours per year than present-day wage-workers

Medieval peasants who worked on someone else’s land could elect not to go to work on any particular day and just not get paid for it (that’s how weekends were created)

Medieval bosses (i.e. land-owners) were responsible for feeding their workers for the day with breakfast and lunch.

Usually lunch during field work was followed by a customary 2-3 hours nap.

Crackers be jealous that they can’t figure out how to get paid multiple wages, while ALSO getting paid multiple benefits, while ALSO getting paid mad money by peddling drugs and doing all the crime and somehow getting away with it, while ALSO somehow having the time to sit around all day on the street doing nothing and making passerbyes “scared”.

This is what it means to be free! I might not like it, but I’ll defend to the death the right of that municipal authority to oppress poor 80-year-old widows! Fuck yeah!

He bought into Trump’s promises for peace pre-election and now he can’t believe he was wrong. To be honest, a lot of otherwise reasonable good commentators have gone down this path.

High resolution version

I think it’s time the world stepped in and liberated North Mexico

To survive as an up-and-coming epic fantasy/sci-fi author, he had to get a second job writing press releases for the US government.

Russia hosts the most Ukrainian refugees out of any other country. If Ukrainians wholly viewed Russia as the problem would they really move into Russia? The reality is that there’s 2 types of Ukrainians: those who see Ukraine as a continuation of the Ukrainian SSR, and a brotherly people to the Russians, and those who see Ukraine as a new nation that has been liberated from the clutches of the evil Russians, and can now forge ahead, pure and independent, as Bandera envisioned. Your friend’s Ukrainian friends are likely of the second type.

The problem with your friend, like many other people, doesn’t really understand the complexity of the issues and doesn’t know much about what’s going on, besides what they are being told by mainstream media. And it’s very likely they instictively trust mainstream media. By nature, humans are open to adapting the first opinion they hear about something, and then they become really defensive when other contradictory opinions come in.

Trying to convince people of something is a very slow process, and it doesn’t happen while you are around. All you can do is present them with the evidence, give them an easy-to-follow rundown of the nuances, and explain why their opinion is uninformed. Patience and calm is actually more helpful in getting them to open up and listen to you. If you get angry, they get angry, and nobody can be convinced of anything while angry. During your discussion, they are still very unlikely they’ll actually turn around their opinion. If you did a good job presenting your view, then there’s a chance they’ll keep thinking about it. Eventually, they might do their own research. And then they might decide they agree with you, or not.

A nice way to induce this self-assessment of opinions held, is to ask questions. When they tell you something that’s blatantly false, ask them questions about it. This helps to lower their defensiveness, and helps them realize they probably shouldn’t be so certain about what they heard.

That’s the only advice I can give. Don’t start these discussions expecting to convince anybody else. Start them because you want to discuss what’s going on. Don’t hang up on things you disagree. Just use it as a jumping point to discuss the situation further. If you are lucky, then maybe you’ll turn them around. But that’s not something you should worry about while holding the discussion. It just makes things frustrating.

This is capitalism trying to solve itself.