Just because they aren’t faceless doesn’t mean they aren’t as bad. In case of corporations, at the very least, anyone up to CEO could claim they were doing what their boss/investors told them/expected them to do, they have the mirage of fabricated innocence. The guilt is also spread more thinly, with many, often low paid employees contributing a small portion towards the greater legal crime.

Small landlords have none of those delusions available, though from my personal, anecdotal experience, higher management in large corporations also often personally own real estate and rent it. I’m working in IT, but I have no reason to think it would be in any different elsewhere. I was led to understand it was “normal” and “smart”. So I’d say it’s the same kind of people that make decisions on top of the real estate corporations, and the petite landlords. And yeah, I’m excluding from that, obviously, renting a flat you’ve gotten as inheritance from your grandma or something, though I have more fundamental issues with the inheritance thing itself.

Russia invaded Ukraine under a very weak pretense of de-nazification, and buldozed over a lot of privately owned means of production, including foreign owned. They had some reputation to lose back then, now the worst that could happen would be Trump getting pissed at them and threatening them to escalate the war, but never doing so, because he’s still beholden to the capital interests, and this war has been extremely lucrative for the world’s main exporter of weapons. At best(for Putin) Trump would claim that Zelensky is using private contractors as human shields and that Zelensky broke the deal because the yield of the mining operations was lower than promised, and because of that USA will help Russia deal with the terrorists that overtook the land.

As for the nuclear war - billionaires that push this war forward for their profit aren’t interested in living in bunkers, they want to lie on beaches and be sucked off by sex trafficed slaves. The war will never escalate beyond the point where it would endanger their profits, and definitely not to the point where they might worry for their lifes. No major player in this conflict that’s capable of employing a nuclear armaments will ever do so for those reasons, not to mention the soft power they would lose if they did - not that Trump and Putin are very concerned with soft power…

Russia doesn’t mind continuing, USA doesn’t mind either, it’s just that Trump lied in his campaign promises that he did, and now he’s making a stink about it not being possible because Zelensky is a dictator. If they can cause an election in Ukraine and do a coup once Zelensky wins, or forge some different series of events that leads to Ukraine changing it’s president to one aligned with Russia, then it would be a preferable outcome for them, but it’s going to be difficult without losing a lot of influence and power, and Trump is already very unpopular, so I feel it’s unlikely they would try, but I wouldn’t put it past them. Trump antagonized both the world and his own citizens, and the backlash is growing to a degree where he might lack means to control it. Zelensky probably saw that as his most viable way out, so he chose to argue with Trump and J. D. Vance, and hoped that the backlash will limit their further meddling. Not that he had any good option there, but out of bad ones this one at least didn’t lock all Ukrainian cards in a bad deal. At this point Ukraine can try dealing with Europe, Turkey (was it Turkey? I think so) or even China, and they still have those tasty minerals that Trump helped advertise.

Europe in general has to rethink their means of defence, and if Ukraine has something valuable, a new military alliance with more hawkish stance against both Russia and USA, one that would include security assurances for Ukraine and other member states, is not out of question. If fascism in USA keep getting worse, then Europe will definitely need it. If the bubble bursts, they may include USA in this alliance in the future, though probably without as much sway as it had in NATO. Not saying that it will happen, just a wild shot in the dark, but there are more options for Ukraine now, than if Zelensky went along with the farce, and, I don’t know, apologized for being a dictator and promised to be a good boy.

The idea that any deal with Russia that wouldn’t include rock solid security guarantees would lead to stopping the killing, much less any sort of peace, is extremely naive. This issue is ongoing ever since Russia annexed Crimea, there have been many deals and all of them failed to stop Putin from breaking them. The issue is very simple - Trump can not (and absolutely doesn’t want to, from the looks of things) convince Putin to stop the war, because Putin doesn’t want the war to stop. It was shown time and time again that they aren’t willing to stop their invasion, and only thing that ever thwarted their progress was military opposition. There is no reason to believe that Russia wouldn’t just continue the invasion after the deal with USA is made. And Ukraine wouldn’t have any benefit from this kind of deal, so why would they go through with it?

Since you watched all of it, as unbearable to watch it was, you probably also heard the comments of Trump in the interview afterwards - that he organized and prolonged this discussion to show the world that Zelensky can not be negotiated with. Whatever you might believe in, it’s hard to imagine that as anything else other than admission that Trump never expected his “deal” to go through. They jumped and insulted the president of soverign country and blamed him for the war their close friend started. If your reaction to that is “he shouldn’t have reacted to the provocation”, then you’re missing the point of why they provoked him in the first place. This way, at the very least, he made sure the world despised Trump and that all other allies of Ukraine were sympathetic. His only choice is to weather this storm until the fascist bubble in USA bursts and there is some chance for diplomacy in the future.

As for the economic entanglements, they mean nothing in times when USA is incapable of diplomacy and Russia is unwilling of adhering to any deals. Speaking of any trades where Ukraine is giving up their minerals before USA promises to push Russia outside of Ukraine borders is meaningless, and Ukraine wouldn’t get anything out of that.

So in your view Fox News should be banned because they’re propaganda machine for the right wing, calling out Dems for their faults and praising Reps for anything they did? Or because they’re lying pieces of shit that helped manufacture a false narrative that eroded democracy and allowed fascists to get in power? Because, as far as I know, tiktok didn’t do the later and it’s the platform that got banned.

And how is it different than Dems calling Trump Hitler, regardless of how accurate it was? Should they also be tried for “propaganda”? And how about goverments claiming they’re doing well, should they be tried for propaganda? How about the entire red scare propaganda? How about anti-arab propaganda? Putting someone on a trial for “propaganda” is a dangerous violation of free speech. If you can prove they’ve been lying, then at best they’re at the same playing field as the government suing them, and in case of tiktok as far as I am aware there is no evidence that they were spreading any lies. It’s just that they weren’t censoring the genocide Israel commited in Gaza, unlike platforms aligned with USA, like Meta or Twitter. Which censorship was most definitely a propaganda, but instead of them it’s tiktok that’s being punished for not doing it? It’s nonsense. Boosting negative commentary about foreign country is basic freedom of speech, and attempting to silence that feels very dictatorial. It’s what China did with a lot of internet for spreading propaganda against them, don’t you feel like removing Youtube access in China for making anti-chinese material available was bad for free speech? I wouldn’t mind tiktok getting closed for spying on people, but it’s obvious they don’t want a precedent for that. Blocking propaganda? Bullshit.

As for me “being fine with” other peoples freedom of speech, I dislike what they had to say and I’d want them to be punished for lying, but I’d never advocate against them having option to speak. You end up living in a dictatorship by doing that. I’m not a free speech absolutist, by any stretch of imagination, but banning platforms for containing content casting bad light on you is going too far for me. Especially since there are much better reasons to do so.

There is no difference, neither should be allowed to do that. Person I replied to claimed the issue is chinese propaganda instead of any actual security risks.

The issue for common people regarding tiktok is more along the lines of foreign adversaries obtaining personal information of the users or using it to spy on the government. The idea that chinese propaganda would be in any way a threat is absurd and shouldn’t even need to be defended in any way. “America bad” is hardly a hot take and they don’t need to spread any lies to get that point across.

I’ll let you know that as a Pole I feel grateful for your research and terrified of it’s results.

As an awkard person I’ll admit that it would reassure me somewhat. I mean, I wasn’t going to but I’m glad it’s an option. It’s like feeling being accepted despite messing up before potentially messing up, which allows us to skip that dreadful moment between messing up and being either forgiven or despised. And come on, imagine shitting in a closet by, uh, mistake, and not fully expecting that your entire social live is now in ruins and you need to delete all of your social media and move to different country. It could be worded better, sure, but it’s a neat gesture.

Well, check Jeffrey Dahmer media portrayal. It fed well into the “gay panic” of the times. Check this article from 1994: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-29-mn-2780-story.html Emphasis of the lust, homoeroticism etc. being the driving factor of the murders, while there are no mentions of diagnosed mental disorders. And yeah, “murder gay” sold far worse than, for example, “murder black” which is a timeless classic media go to each time any socioeconomic strife involving any black people happens. Seemingly the public was less receptive of the “murder gay” narrative so they eventually moved on.

You seem to misunderstand humor. It is humorous specifically because there is no link between murder hornets and the aformentioned groups of people that USA “waged wars against”. The fact that you’re stressing that the joke “took extreme liberties” is kind of absurd - that is the point, to subvert expectations. Which is a part I already explained in the comment in which I explained the joke once. Let me go in for a deeper dive.

The language of “USA waging wars on XYZ” is often used by media to fabricate distorted view on reality, in which a group of people is presented as threatening to the country despite the opposite being the case. That language is well known and it is well estabilished as a useful propaganda tool. Reaction to usage of that language in cases that warrant outrage (as in, for example, for groups of people I’ve mentioned in my first comment) would often be one full of sympathy towards the victims and, at the very least, distrust towards the media outlet that used it. All of that sits well within the expectations of the reader.

The aptly named murder hornets however murder bees, which almost everyone knows is a bad thing for the world in general. There isn’t much things that would make people in general think “that’s bad”. They do not have a good reputation and none reedeming qualities.

They’re not what you would expect one to defend, you would not accuse USA of a psy op to smear their name, and you would not think that they perhaps have a stockpile of oil that that old, dastardly United States of A wanted to steal. And that’s the subversion of expectation, portraying the murder hornets as victims of USA propaganda and comparing them to unjustly prosecuted people. That’s the humorous part. Do you get it now?

You’re trying to somehow tie it to the work of people that pulled this off, but you only could go for calling that disrespectful if you believed any disrespect was meant, and that would require you to believe my (already explained) joke was meant as serious defence of the hornets. And I’m sorry, but that’s just dumb. I don’t feel like you misunderstood the joke, but rather that you’re trolling for the sake of rage baiting. I’d appreciate it if you stopped.

And if you understood all that and still feel like my joke wasn’t funny, I’m sorry, it does seem you aren’t a part of audience that this joke was meant for, and my frivolous joke-comment written while morning-pooping did not brighten your day. I’m sure something else will, as long as you put effort to find it. Good luck!

Funny, that’s exactly a reply one would expect from a 4chan dweller. Is there a miniority or other group of people that USA demonized for profit that you’re angry I’ve neglected to mention in this joke about imperialism and hornets, or was there something else that triggered you to go in swinging with insults? Apparently at least one other person found it funny, so I feel like the reason the joke didn’t land with you might have to do with you not being the target audience, whatever it might be.

I appreciate that, thank you.

That was a joke about USA assigning threatening labels to anything it threatens or exploits to make public afraid of it instead of being supportive of it. As most jokes, it based on the subversion of expectations, which in this case was the suggestion that hornets are good and misunderstood. Comparing them and what they’re doing to bees to gay or black people was intended as a sprinkle of dark humor, implying their (hornets!) destructive nature finds parrarels with the multitude of oppressed kinds of people.

Way to tell me I’m unfunny and my sense of humor sucks, man (jk)

Yeah sure “murder hornets”. Like “murder japs”, “murder communists”, “murder vietnamese”, “murder gays”, “murder blacks” or “murder arabs” before. I think I’ll hold off celebrating until I know how much oil those hornets had in stock.

Jesus you folks must have wild roaches in Denmark. Sounds like “don’t go out at night” or “make sure your gun is loaded before entering the woods” kind of thing. Stay safe.

So, listen, I’m not making a case for all of them, but…

Seriously though white people fucked stuff up for native americans and africans pretty hard, and just because it’s not discussed in the slightest and everyone (white people) pretend it’s not an issue, it doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It’s less about white people though, and more about capital class that upholds the status quo, the by-product of which is the white supremacy - and that is very parrarel to the zionist claim.

Her?

How do you reconcile the understanding of her not being a good person and doing harm to the world with being a Swiftie? That’s a genuine question, I find identifying with the group supporting or admiring the person or idea I myself am opposed to on the ideological level hard to imagine. I can understand it being the case if one is defending the lesser evil, as they are coerced to do so by implied existence of the greater evil, but while I’m not well versed in the Swift lore I believe there isn’t any evil twin running around that she needs to stop. Unless.

That’s not an attack, I believe that being a Swiftie might mean something else than what I understand by this term and I am making a fool out of myself. Still, it does seem to mean supporting what you’re opposed to. How do you resolve that contradiction?

Yeah, it’s bad enough that it could happen, the fact they allowed that to happen so easily is far worse.