To quote the greate Mahatma Gandhi: “Yes”

There are way too many of the “old ways” still around in Germany, from a surveillance culture and a very propagandistic Press activelly indoctrinating people to them continuing to support an ethno-Fascist state committing a Genocide with weapons very overtly because of their race and German courts convicting people for “anti-semitism” when they say the “from the Land to the Sea” saying (which is about Israel, not the Jewish Religion) but not doing the same for actual overt racist statements and behaviors against other ethnic groups.

The rise of the AfD has happened in a field well plowed by mainstream German politicians with the idea that people’s worth depends on race, with some races being deemed good (ubermenschen) and others bad (untermensched) - they might not use the same words anymore, but they certainly share that same view of Mankind.

The apparatus of the State and even the Justice System in Germany is riddled with the very same ideas about people - the racist idea that people’s value is determined by their race and some races are better than others - that served as the foundation of Nazism.

It’s really very simple:

• When it’s for the benefit of the Owner class (in this specific case mainly Publishers) it’s ownership hence people are told they’re buying games (only to discover after paying that it’s not so) and piracy is described and even in some countries treated as Theft.
• When it’s for the benefit of citizens in general it’s intellectual property and it’s not really owned by them when they buy it (only licensed, often in such a way that they can lose access to what they were told they were buying) and if they do happen to created intellectual property themselves it can easily be taken away from the by the Owner class who “curiously” even in those countries which treat Piracy the same as Theft won’t be criminally held responsible for it.

It’s the good old “one rule for thee another for me” so popular with authoritarians, especially Fascists (which probably explains why Germany is one of a few countries in Europe that criminalizes piracy, but de facto only treats it as such when it’s the little people doing it).

I suspected so, but in this day and age who knows…

Between the possibilities that people extracting the dirtiest most ecologically-damaging to extract oil there is from Alberta’s Tar Sands are doing it for:

• The Lesbians
• Their own pockets (and screw everybody else)

There is one infinitely more likely to be the actual reason than the other and it ain’t the first one.

Kind reminds me of an equally facile argument that was making the rounds excusing the Israeli Genocide because of “how Palestinians treated Homosexuals”, as if Israel was murdering tens of thousands of little children (more broadly, an estimated almost 200k people, quite independently of their sexual orientation) because of how much they cared about Palestinian Homosexuals.

This shit is to Equality what Greenwashing is to Environmentalism.

Something as simple as having a decent size fridge with a freezer or not is the difference between being able to buy larger quantities of food cheaper per Kg, buying cheaper frozen ingredients or preparing extra food and freezing some for later and not being able to do so hence spending more money on food.

Also there are several other kinds of things were having the money to buy them in larger quantities yields a lot of savings versus having to buy them in smaller quantities with what little money one has available.

Just like beyond a certain point wealth is self-sustainable and it’s almost impossible to fall down from there unless one is a moron (and even then, one has to be extraordinarilly so and also unlucky), below a certain point poverty is self-sustainable because one doesn’t have the money needed to be able to access cheaper options to fullfil basic needs.

Even at higher wealth levels there are all sorts of feedback cycles that stop people from climbing the ladded or which push them down unless they’re high enough in it: for example, healthcare costs in countries without Universal Healthcare or the tuition of Higher Education (a gatekeeper for many opportunities) in countries without decent free or cheap Public Higher Education.

The System is rigged.

Here, have a “Be My Bitch” coupon, free of charge.

“a sad story”

Yeah, yeah, but notice how no trash thief attacked him on his way to the dumpster thanks to him having a gun on his person!

/s

Yeah, but if I’m not mistaken dogs can read human feeling.

If that goes all the way to empathy (which a lot of dog owners would say it does), people around him being unhappy is probably not good for the dog.

(Mind you, the reason I personally like dogs is because it definitelly works the other way around, and making a dog happy - and hence getting a pleasanty feeling from it through empathy - is usually pretty easy)

Fake News!

There’s way too much fat in that meat patty for it to be Dexter’s.

With Ryanair you have to pay extra for the air stewardess not to spit on your face or insult you on the way in.

(I might be exaggerating)

(But not by much)

Dutch people pay so much tax because dutch companies pay so little tax, so pretty much the entire burden of paying the costs of the State comes from the wallets of individuals (whilst companies too are owned by individuals, those rich enough have many ways of avoiding paying tax on that and a lot of the biggest owners of the companies making profits in The Netherlands - whilst paying little tax on said profits - aren’t even resident in The Netherlands).

In countries were the tax take is more evenly balanced between people and businesses, people pay less taxes for more services (The Netherlands doesn’t even have a National Health Service, only a mixed Health Insurance system).

I lived in The Netherlands over a decade ago and already back then the country already had Northern European levels of taxation with nowhere near the levels of Public Services that countries with similar individual taxation - such as the Scandinavians - had and I doubt a decade of right-wing neoliberals in government has made things any better.

Because being adult in age isn’t at all the same thing as being adult in maturity plus often people derive different benefits in different kinds of relationships so they want to keep both going (for example, somebody in his or her 40s happilly married with kids and yet getting excitement and sexual pleasure with a younger lover).

Also there are often huge social and financial implications to breaking up certain types of relationships or under certain conditions, but people might still be irresistibly drawn to something else, so they play a game to both sides not wanting the costs nor willing to run the risk of losing one to get the other.

It’s a mix of selfishness, immaturity, cowardice and people changing over time and discovering that the stable relationship they’re in doesn’t fit them (either anymore or they get to a point were they figure out it never trully did)

Judging by the actual toffs I’ve known sufficiently well, they get taught during their time in Public School as teenagers to separate presentation from their true thinking and desires, i.e. their true identities.

They’ll do what they think they can spin as the right thing whilst being seen, but outside that, all bets are of (it really boils down to the kind of person behind the mask).

I think expecting to change their identities through forcing them to wear certain masks is like expecting that repainting the façades of a Potemkin Village will magically make the real buildings appear behind them.

The regular folk who aren’t celebrities get minor honors, not knighthoods, and it gets covered to death in the Press how some fireman or nurse got “an honor” and yet they’re never made “Sir” something of “Dame” something-else - the Press always spins it as a great thing and never mentions it’s only the smallest of honors that they’re getting.

If you go see the actual list of Knighthoods and Damehoods (and don’t get me started on Lordships), it’s mainly the moneyed, upper middle class - the kind of people who are in the BBC’s Board, Theatre Directors, heads of banks, owners of large companies and so on - and people in senior positions in the State aparatus.

Call me weird, but I think somebody who risked live and limb to save children from a fire deserves a knighthood much more than somebody who is a CEO of a bank or owner of a supermarket chain.

How much is Trump’s Racism the real thing?!

I mean, he definitelly plays that tune to entice a certain type of person to support him, but I’ve always had the idea that he was an equal opportunity asshole, or if you will a “race” of one, a person for whom there no “us” just “me”

I think he’s terrified of losing to somebody who is not from the same social circle as he is and might very well not got easy on him (like Biden did), quite independently of gender or race.

It’s a lot harder to notice the additional incoherence due to aging on people who constantly say things uncorrelated with objective truth (what’s - and I kid you not - scientifically called “bullshitting”) - when they’re young they’ll say whatever independently of truthfulness because they’re trying to manipulate others, whilst when they’re older they’ll say whatever independently of truthfulness because they’re mentally lost - the output is similar but the reason is different, so it’s harder to tell from the outside how much is their bullshit the product of an aged mind.

As I said, celebrities (famous sports people, actors, comedians) get knighted, probably because giving such awards to people “beloved by the Public” makes the Honors System seem honorable, even though such recipients are a tiny proportion of the whole - this very much dovetails with my point about how putting image management above almost all else is a well entrenched cultural characteristic of the English upper classes: by very publicly giving knighthoods and damehoods to celebrities they’re maximizing the projection of a “good image” for the Honors System whilst minimizing the number of members of the “lower” classes who get it.

You will notice that in every year’s honors list there’s only one or two knighthoods and damehoods for “celebrities” right next to a much larger number of people getting similar awards whose only “honor” is being upper class and/or faithful servants of the State (and by State I don’t mean Society as a whole, I mean the centuries old power structures of Britain).

I would say your view of it reflects their great success in using the technique of honoring people “beloved by the Public” to shape the Public’s perception of the Honors System as rewarding merit, all the while the hard numbers show such recipients are but a tiny fraction of the total.

Beyond that you’ll also see upper middle class people who have been faithful servants of the Establishment get knighthoods (quite common in the Justice System and probably why Sir Keir Starmer got his knighthood), which makes sense as a form of incentivising such people to be faithfull servants of the British Establishment - people within the machinery of the State who express a want for change don’t end up in the Honors List.

Working Class people who were actual heroes risking their own lives for other people only ever get minor honors.