NPR is pretty great for left leaning media.

I’m as tankie as they come but I love shitting on Russia. Call it CIA brainwashing, its my absolute pleasure.

A core tenant of socialism is a democratized workplace, being able to vote for your wage and company policy, like an Engineer choosing when to launch the rocket instead of some MBS degree.

Last time I checked I dont think factory workers in China that make all our shit can do that.

Its open source isn’t it? It still has the same problems but on a privacy level, having it be open source is much better.

Absolutely!!

There are video games that work like card games, you’d love Balatro or Magic the Gathering.

If you like puzzles, Tetris is the perfect start, its the greatest puzzle game of all time. Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 are good recent games for that.

If you want to graduate from Puzzles to something more gamey, I’d recommend any Mario or Zelda game, and to develop a game mind, Metroid and metroid-like games are excellent.

Many games work like movies too, so if you like movies those are nice.

If you like books, there is a genre of game called a visual novel, (most of those are from Japan though, but many have an English option for text)

A lot of people dont understand US foreign policy. Do not interpret my post as taking a stance.

US foreign policy is all about 3 key issues, carrot and stick diplomacy, containing China and Russia, and protecting the global market.

Carrot and stick diplomacy is using positive reinforcement to make changes in totalitarian governments.

Containing China is all about making friends with countries near China and putting a base there, along with allowing companies, military arms deals, and joint intelligence to happen in that country.

• That is why the US wants Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize. And do to that, the US turns a blind eye to tons of bullshit done by countries in the Middle East. If they were to normalize, then a solid logistics chain from Europe to the Gulf can be established, and the two countries would bolster the front there. Then the US could pivot its power projection over to Taiwan.
• The US is powerful, but its not tactically sound to manage three fronts at the same time.

If you remember how pissed off the US got when Russia put missiles in Cuba, then you can see why China and Russia will team up with everyone they can to foil this plan to contain them.

Since the world is now globalized, the US has to protect lots of boats carrying oil, chips, and food. If something fucks up, then everyone pays for it. Of course, if youre resisting western imperialism then its in your best interest to make people suffer by blowing up the boats.

Now geopolitics makes sense.

From here, then if youre an idealist, you can make an informed opinion on US foreign policy. Should the US continue its world police campaign at the expense of people suffering under its allies?

Can you achieve US foreign policy goals without suffering?

Will a reversal of US foreign policy lead to more domestic suffering in the West due to economic turmoil?

These questions should be debated and examined thoroughly.

I’m not justifying anything that Israel has done in the past. The main point of my comment is that Hamas made a really poor decision here on behalf of the Palestinians. There is absolutely no doubt.

There is no moralizing or whataboutism.

The fact of the matter is that this caused a divided Israel to unite in anger. And support for Palestine has been cut by all European nations and Australia. Palestinian sympathizers and charity leaders have been among the victims.

The question you should be asking is if you support the Palestinian people is…

What the actual hell is this bonehead decision-making by Hamas? There is no scenario of success in this endeavor unless the Western world decided to withdraw all support from Israel and give it to Hamas.

Was that going to happen? No. Hamas never tried to establish good diplomatic relations with anyone.

The world stage is a democratic club, and Hamas rejected it all. Hamas burned every single bridge with other countries no matter how many citizens of those governments complain.

Depends on who you ask, there’s 50 Senators and 221 House Representatives on the Republican party.

Despite the substantial erosion of decorem on the right, there are still some who operate with civility and reason, though they are not as vocal as they should be.

Before you respond with semi-justified cynicism, it’s not an assumption. Republicans know they’d align mostly with Democrats on Israel.

I mean it’s very politically divided, but in terms of securing Israel, most opposition leaders called 9ff protests and united behind Netanyahu since there are still Hamas militants in Israel.

Let’s not forget that the act of using civilians as shields is a warcrime in the first place to prevent this kind of situation from occurring.

If Israel tells Palestinian civilians to evacuate because there’s Hamas military targets in that building, and Hamas troops tell them no. Then they die, and Hamas can cry wolf.

It would be Israel who is following international decorem and Hamas making it difficult for any country to support them.

Just now, Austria cut off aid to the Gaza region. Is that Israel’s fault? Nope.

Hamas had good PR going and they fucked it up by escalating with brutality.

Morally, it’s a complicated situation.

Geopolitically, Israel probably has the support of most Western nations simply due to the fact that they engage in diplomacy and have proper decorem, with a government system that is a relatively modern system despite political leanings.

Additionally, Israel has a better human rights record DOMESTICALLY than Palestine and the Gaza region. It’s still dominated by religion, terrorist leaders, and its own population’s semi-justified bitterness. Freedom of expression and freedom of press is heavily restricted, just like any other Islamic religious state in the middle east.

The sole responsibility of the escalation and subsequent destabilization of the region lies with Hamas. The sole responsibility of the withdrawal of Palestinian aid from countries like Austria, lies with Hamas.

And with all the videos popping up over the treatment and killing of Israeli civilians, it’s hard for the Western world, and especially Western governments to garner the sympathy for the Palestinian people that they had 1 week ago.

Both sidesing isn’t correct, whataboutism isn’t correct, blindly supporting either side isn’t correct, supporting efforts to contain the conflict is correct. The best way to do that is to monitor Israel’s progress in containing Hamas.

We know that Hamas hides in schools and civilian buildings, using their own civilians as a shield. That’s a warcrime it itself. So it’s going to be messy as hell.

The US sent the USS Gerald Ford into the Mediterranean as a deterrent. If any country starts to try to 3rd party the conflict, oh shit oh fuck WW1 vibes. That’s how tender this situation is.

And with 1 other active conflict in the world, this is shaky ground.

On the bright side, this means that Republicans may have to stop playing hardball with Ukraine, in order to not appear hypocritical.

Most support Ukrainian support, and most Western countries need Israel as a foothold in the middle east.

Well to be quite fair, it’s better to judge a country by it’s progress and current state of affairs than by its past actions. Because if we judged every country by their actions in the past, not many countries would have clean hands.

From 2016-2021, I was ready to move away. I was quite disillusioned by everything. What changed? Soccer 💀. Soccer made me comically nationalist for our national teams.

Honestly being in that environment of being able to be innocently prideful of my home without thinking about the past helped put things in perspective.

I’m now prideful to be American, and proud that my home heavily invests in NATO. I’m an adult now, and I’ve been working to push for some more improvements in things like infrastructure. I don’t cringe at 4th of July celebrations anymore, and I feel great that I’m making an impact.

You probably won’t see me putting a flag outside my home, but I have a lovely high quality flag.

Our national park system is the best in the world, our ecosystem, nature, and geography are spectacular and diverse. And NASA is phenomenal.

Don’t allow yourself to wallow in this cynical disillusionment. It’s not good for your mental health to focus on the terrible parts of America without having the ability to change those parts.