Most of the guys I know who are really into warmachines as cool machines like to say that they aren't interested in the weird nationalism, but when you point out that nonwhite countries have found ways to incapacitate the western wunderwaffen, they somehow begin sounding like Cecil Rhodes and talk about needing to pacify the restless natives, or how the West needs to stop being such (slur) and just "teach them a lesson".

Denmark is currently having a culture war moment with a Square within the city, which by popular demand was to be named "Palestine Square". Obviously the useless city government was against it for a while, with members of the county council going out and arguing that names for places in the city shouldn't be used to make political statements.

Describing yourself as "a successful restaurateur" when you have 18 McDonald's franchises is just

The Kalmar Union sort of was, even if it never did much other than massacre some Swedish nobles. The massacre was for stupid reasons rather than based ones, and it led to the disintegration of the union.

Okay serious question, what the fuck is up with the names of things in Dune? Landsraad looks suspiciously like a Danish word for a house of parliament (though I think ours was specifically called Landsting rather than Landsraad) and the bad guys are apparently named Harkonen, which is also the name of every 4th guy in Finland, so like, was that writer on some weird mission against Scandinavia?

Didn't Utah literally try to form an independent government when the Mormons were getting pogrom'ed from every other state. Only the problem was, that forming a state in a desert takes time and people, and the Utah territory was annexed by the US before the mormons even got enough people there to form more than 2 towns.

They shouldn't have to be public role models though. A teacher shouldn't be held to a different moral standard from any other adult. What the teacher does in their time off is their own business.

Erdogan is a living fucking embodiment of that scene. I still don't know what the fuck he believes in aside from petty corruption. He seems like he picking fights with his neighbours while also complaining about everything that results from him picking said fight. Like, so many of his decisions are just baffling to me and seemingly make no fucking sense.

Literally dying the same way that Putin joked about Prigozhin dying. Surely this should be the final evidence for Ukrainians and Russians being the exact same people only separated by a fake border.

Morocco never quite forgave the rest of North Africa for their support of republicanism, which is also why the previous king Hassan II allegedly spied on the Arab Republics for Israel during the 6 day war. It's honestly hard to overstate just how much the moroccan royal family sucks ass and they are only saved by the fact that the other Arab monarchies are somehow even worse.

If the US decided to rid the world of the Petro-dollar, wouldn't that undermine the ability to export debt and inflation to the rest of the world? Or at the very least, happily speed up the dedollarization that the Yanks are so afraid of. Sure it would massively hurt the petro-states in the Gulf, but presumably they could theoretically weather it if they got given international assistance in the transition periods.

I think it's pretty clear that a whole lot of the current situation is due to miscalculations from both sides of this conflict, in as much as you can call Ukraine a side. I don't really know or understand what caused Russia to act the way it did, but I think it's pretty clear from the actions of their ministry of finance and the central bank, that they did not intend for this to be a broader reckoning with neoliberalism, and the central bank is in fact fighting tooth and nail to protect the neoliberal ideologues in charge of it. I kind of agree with you that Russia probably thought the easternmost parts of Ukraine would greet them as liberators, or at least expected some kind of cooperation from them, which has simply not materialised.

However I have 0 fucking idea why the fuck Ukraine is continuing to fight a war that they are 1) never going to win outright, and also 2) is rapidly depleting the male population, which is going to hamper whatever remains of Ukraine when it inevitably have to rebuild, when a ceasefire is signed. Not to mention all the privatization and destruction of labour power is going to ensure that any gains post-war by Ukraine are going to be hoarded by the ruling class and rather than being used to rebuild infrastructure, is probably going to be used in real estate speculation in Toronto, Vancouver, New York and Los Angeles.