You were the polite one and I was the rude one. No need for you to apologize.

Appreciate the discussion. Hopefully the world we leave is a better place than when we were born into it.

My tone was a bit over the top and I generalized regarding instances. For that I will apologize.

The USA is an "easy target" because it's incredibly active in the world stage. Very few nations have the resources available to it to do what the USA is capable of doing. With that said this is the classic man in the arena argument -- the USA is most certainly in the arena and there are good and bad things that come with it. I believe your argument to be reductionist at best -- USA bad because XYZ. There's a whole hell of a lot more to it than that. So you've mentioned Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. What about long, successful alliances between USA with Jordan, Egypt, Israel (hot button I know), and Saudi Arabia.

The struggle in the region today is very much Iran and Saudi Arabia throwing their weight around and many groups of people are caught in the middle. USA included. Israel was on a path to discuss normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and suddenly that is not a thing anymore. Hrm. Convenient. Wonder why?

Things are not as simple as you make it out to be. It takes two to tango.

The tried and true bot everything bad because USA ... do you argue that things would be fundamentally better or worse today if the USA had never been involved? Half these commie ML troll bots on the internet keep spitting out the same old crap. Profit bad. Bad. Bad. They ignore the fact that a woman got shot for wearing a head scarf. You going to blame that on the USA? Get out of here with that crap.

The art of debate and discussion today is watered down to, "...but but that other thing is evil too!"

Can't talk about Uyghurs genocide because European settlers killed natives 500 years ago. IBM and Musk can both be bad. Same as time changes things and people.

Stop distracting from Musk's wrongdoings. What happened 90 years ago was 90 years ago. We can't change that. What we can do is influence change today. Thanks to IBM for not allowing their money to fuel Musk's machines.

This feels like one of those "I'm so stoned" and TIL posts. Speaking of...

!The concept of sex in movies already reached its peak with Porky’s, and any attempts to improve on that are just embarrassing.!<

Never change Onion. 😄

I'm very saddened to hear about the death of this young woman. I'm also sad to hear about deaths of many, many Palestinians. I do not think it's coincidence that Hamas decides to launch a major offensive in the midst of talks with between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations between the two after many years of relative peace. We can't have peace in the Middle East because it doesn't serve the ends to the major regional powers.

Both sides in this conflict are used as pawns for the political ends of others. Innocent people are those that get caught in the midst of it all. Hamas didn't do this without a green light so as much vitriol being spilled in this thread we have to take a step back. These fights have been brewing and going on for generations. If you take the short term view much of the strife we see today is the fallout from WWII and that is used as leverage by other nefarious parties.

It's not the Israeli people's fault they do not have a home. It's not the Palestinian people's fault they do not have a home.

Some of the comments in this thread are sickening, hateful, narrow, and short-sighted.

..if your average man has better abs. The fuck did I just read. Can't we just just appreciate someone being fit.

Can always rely on there being at least one person ... "but the USA did XYZ." Doesn't change what happened in 1989.

I was on tilt because I took the bait. And then I got confused because I'm like this doesn't make sense gas is safe. And then I'm wondering why isn't a pair of lungs on display not flagged as not safe for work. Then I looked at the forum and then I got even more confused because I'm stoned. And then I realize that's a walnut and it's time for a snack. A roasted one even. Boom roasted. What up. Peace out.

I swear I tried. I got ten screenshots/links in and then killed myself. I'm posting from the grave. Long live Lemmy. Infinite Twitter screenshot support was my dying wish for the fedi-verse. Bless you.

The entire discussion around " small town" is bs

I'm from a small town of 4,000 people in Northeast Texas and ...in the late 90s...

Had to finish high school out of church because a kid literally burned down the school. He got expelled and on his way out the door he said I'm going to burn this m*********** to the ground and he did.

Person I went to school with got strung out on meth and decided to murder three gas station attendants.

So yeah the entire thing is stupid. As if protest and crime are new concepts due to a new world order brought about by liberalism.

These are serious issues no doubt but when I see all the memes about this song in particular all I can think about, " The sky is falling Chicken Little" or "if these kids could read they'd be angry" or "it's funny until it happens to me"