My friend got by on 7 years in Germany only knowing

“Ein bier, bitte.”

and

“Willst du fich mich?”

Yep. The Romans fucked themselves sideways doing this a few times. You can have all the soldiers or you can have some farmers and skilled laborers. You can’t have both.

Imagine Vietnam-era US, but it was willing to sacrifice every warm body within its borders to win.

Like the US, I think Russia is on a collision course with failure. But they’re going to take it a lot farther before waving a white flag. So much so that it will take the country decades to recover.

And Ukraine won’t be looking too hot at that point anymore, either.

Yvette Dead Tooth

That’s actually really fucking metal. I love it.

It’s a terrasque in a Girl Scout uniform.

Roll a WIS save to resist its thin mints.

No no.

See, we ran the Numbies.

China Numbies Go Down.

Numbies supposed to Go Up.

China is doom.

/s

This strain of brainworm never ceases to amaze me. I’m not a tankie, either and I hate the mainland with a passion. But counting China completely out when it’s clowning the rest of the world on infrastructure right now is just plain mouth-breather stupid.

You ever watch Requiem For A Dream?

Also, Estonia and Lithuania fucking rule.

It wanted to stop Belgium from having all the fun.

I live in Taiwan.

Can confirm that plenty of shit is slathered in cheese and/or mayo, milk is readily available at any store, there’s an absurd amount of Häagen-Dazs, and milk tea is the most commonly purchased beverage in the whole country.

Butter can be a bit scarce, though, strangely.

Go for it, bud.

Explain it so my inferior intellect can understand.

How do free market economics completely circumvent digital piracy?

I am all ears.

I dunno about you, my dude, but the only people I’ve seen fucked up by antifascists were not saying that they didn’t want to bake a gay cake.

But I’ve seen the people who didn’t want to bake a gay cake be called pieces of shit who should do better. And I think that’s just called social consequences.

Right. And piracy is legitimate competition that enshitification drives users to.

Just following that free market, right?

This is where I tend to disagree with Marx as well.

Capital is a fantastic book full of scathing and prophetic analyses of capitalism and its innate degradation of value and connection.

The Communist Manifesto is a book with some good ideas but some implementation that I find flawed. And that’s not a knock on Marx-- critiquing problems is a significantly easier prospect than offering solutions.

But a lot of Marx’s proposals for the implementation of Communism are rooted in authoritarianism, even if their end goal is the dissolution of the state and capital. Also, for an ideology versed in the formation and interdependence of worker communities, the Day of the Rope is kind of antithetical to establishing solidarity and mostly serves, I believe, as masturbatory schadenfreude.

But hey, I’m willing to fix some of the stuff that doesn’t work instead of throwing more fuel into the machine that over-harvests people and our planet to the point of destruction.

I really like this nuanced take, btw. Thanks for posting it.

Tell that to anarchocommunists.

I’m sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.

The Wheels On the Bus on loop and full blast is part of my shock and awe strategy.

Sunfish.

They are enormous wastes of flesh and evolutionary effort.

I guess that makes me number 3?

The ending was a bit silly, but the Qunari storyline was fucking incredible.

I didn’t know electrical equipment could be vampires.