Even if that is true, is that supposed to mean something to me?
That whole area used to be ethnically diverse for millennia.
If these are the standards, then OK, they passed the minimum.
That's no argument against the ethnic cleansing going on for decades.
Palestinians were robbed from their houses, house by house, street by street.
Anytime there was some form of protest against that, it was used to swat them down and steal more of their land. Later the strategy with walls was introduced. Put a wall around them with armed guards at the entrance. Starve them out so they have to leave. Kick out the remaining ones and take the area. Next area. This is how Israel stole most of the land. Any protest was just met with overwhelming violence. In the meantime, Palestinians were just murdered for fun. When you control the law, you can kill with impunity. The numbers are a bit lower, but the level of evil is on par with the holocaust. And you disgust me for supporting it.

By that logic, we cannot call the holocaust a genocide either.
I was not there in Germany, to understand their reasons. Were you?

Funny how your definitions of ownership change when it serves your country.
Remember how we talked about survivors on an uninhabited island? You said that one of them would own a crate of supplies if they found it. Now it's OK to literally murder people in a country that owns the natural resources?

You actually proved my point. I completely agree with you about the average Confederate soldier. Most of them didn't own slaves; in fact, the institution of slavery economically harmed poor Southern whites. They were manipulated by a wealthy elite, who absolutely DID fight to maintain slavery.
Just like modern terrorists who are brainwashed by their leaders and have very little left to live for, those Confederate soldiers had nothing to gain and everything to lose. They were easily turned into pawns. They bravely fought and died, for what they believed was right. It just happened to be an atrocious lie.

My question to you is: if you can clearly see how poverty, trauma, and manipulation drove those soldiers to fight, why can't you apply that exact same human psychology to people today? And more importantly, you need to realize that you don't make these people less extreme by inflicting even more suffering upon them. Escalating the misery only feeds the cycle.

I don't care about the education of Ben Shapiro, because he is a grifter.
He talks that fast, so people don't have time to recognize all the lies.
Only use an argument from authority with people who are credible and honest.

• Against Full Citizenship Rights: Voting rights mask institutional exclusion. While Arab citizens hold passports and vote, they face systemic discrimination in housing and zoning. The Admissions Committees Law legally permits hundreds of community towns to reject Arab applicants based on "social suitability," enforcing de facto segregation.

• Against the Claim of Coexistence: Coexistence is fractured by structural inequality. Daily interaction exists, but it takes place within a system of deep economic disparity. Nearly 39% of Arab families live below the poverty line [Israel Democracy Institute] due to decades of underfunded municipal infrastructure, segregated school systems, and restricted land allocations for Arab towns.

• Against the Apartheid Critique: Sovereign borders are a legal fiction in human rights analysis. Restricting the debate to Israel proper ignores the reality that one single authority—the Israeli government—maintains ultimate military, economic, and bureaucratic control over the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, managing a fragmented but singular hierarchy of ethnic dominance.

• Against the Dismissal of Media Controversy: Constitutional law explicitly codifies inequality. Shapiro's dismissal of critics ignores the 2018 Nation-State Law. This constitutional Basic Law explicitly declares that national self-determination is "unique to the Jewish people" and downgrades the Arabic language, proving that inequality is not a media myth, but a constitutional reality.

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You didn't want your politicians' phone toll records subpoenaed, signed by federal judges and the DOJ, when they were suspected to be involved in the ONLY insurrection in your history, but you would RAID a representatives HOUSE for an alleged issue
with her citizenship, while she was CLEARLY a refugee at age 12?

Ilhan Omar came to your country at the age of 12. Around 1991, age 8 her family fled Somalia's civil war and she spent approximately four years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
Omar came to the US as a child refugee through the refugee-resettlement process.
You would hold her accountable if the papers were not perfect back then?
You two are just racist as fuck!

I don't dignify your accusations with a reply.
When I claim something, you want evidence.
If you claim something, bring your evidence.

I donated 100 points to you. Go ahead.

The only one I heard was about 72 GRAPES.

The argument originates from a controversial 2000 book, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, , written by a German scholar of ancient languages using the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. Early Quranic Arabic was heavily influenced by Syriac-Aramaic (the dominant language of the Middle East at the time).
The word Houri: In the Quran, the companions in paradise are called Houri. In traditional Arabic, this is interpreted as dark-eyed, pure maidens. However, Luxenberg pointed out that in Aramaic, hur means "white" and was often used idiomatically to mean "white grapes" or "raisins".
Luxenberg argued that "white grapes" make more sense because other verses describe paradise as a lush garden filled with flowing water, shade, and abundant vineyards. Furthermore, ancient Syrian Christian hymns described heaven using the exact imagery of being served crystal-clear grapes.
While it is an intriguing theory, the vast majority of secular Western historians and Islamic scholars view it as highly unlikely due to the rest of the text. The Quran and early commentaries don't just use the word Houri; they explicitly describe these companions using distinctly human, feminine terms. For example, the text describes them as having "modest gazes," "beautiful eyes," being of "equal age," and being untouched by man or jinn. White raisins cannot have modest gazes or eyes.
The number 72 is never actually mentioned in the Quran. The number 72 comes from later sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (Hadiths). If the original Quranic word just meant "grapes", it is highly implausible that generations of native Arabic speakers, living immediately after the Quran was written, somehow collectively forgot their own language and invented a hyper-specific narrative about 72 wives.

Personally, I agree with Jeff Dunham's puppet Walter: "Seventy-two virgins?
Why not 72 slutty broads who know what the hell they're doing?"

"a viable solution to replace what is being tried"?
I don't think the US at any time tried anything close to peace making,
if you keep killing hundreds of thousands of people to get to the oil
under their feet and topple their more democratic moderate governments,
because they don't want you to have their oil for cheap.
This monster is your creation, and the world is suffering for it.

People who are doing well are not easily convinced to sacrifice their lives
over a fairytale. However, if you murder their family and friends, and make them
live in poverty, they are much more acceptable of sacrificing their lives to kill
the people who did that to them.

Sure, if you think "research" means anything from a quick Google search or watching YouTube videos to reading opinion pieces.

In your case "Research shows clearly" is simply as a rhetorical tool to make emotional, politically charged social media opinions sound authoritative.
Actual academic and geopolitical research contradicts or complicates the text's claims in three ways:

• Movement Restrictions: Research and official data show Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza do not have free access to Israel. They are subject to a strict military permit system, checkpoints, and blockades. Only Arab individuals who hold actual Israeli citizenship can move freely within the country.

• Human Shields: International organizations (like the UN) have documented that militant groups place military infrastructure near civilian areas. However, the text's specific phrasing ("guinea pigs", "virgin goats") is inflammatory rhetoric, not scientific findings.

• Socio-Economic Status: It is true that many Arab-Israeli citizens become successful surgeons, lawyers, and leaders. However, socio-economic research notes that these communities still face systemic inequalities, lower municipal funding, and higher poverty rates compared to Jewish-Israeli demographics.

I have not seen that many comments agreeing with you.
Most of them certainly have similar opinions, but I don't think
that anyone really likes you much.

WATCH FULL: Jon Ossoff, Mike Collins in Georgia US Senate debate
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Ossoff ripped him a new one. And Collins just looks weak too.
Dude, what are you writing? What are you looking for in your papers?

You have not reached the lowest level of your depravity yet.
You can do better.

No arguments here

You always need to rely on debunked lies and personal attacks. Yawn!

Every single claim about cheating was struck down by the courts.

If you're referring to the video of two Georgia election workers supposedly pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, that claim was investigated and debunked. The containers were standard ballot-storage boxes, and the full surveillance footage showed normal ballot processing. In June 2023, Georgia's State Election Board closed the investigation, finding no evidence of fraud and ruling the allegations against Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss unsubstantiated.

Meanwhile, there is a massive pile of evidence that Trump was cheating.
It includes thousands of pages of documents, recorded conversations, and testimony from more than 1,000 interviews conducted by the January 6 Committee.
Witnesses included Trump's own attorney general, senior Justice Department officials, campaign staff, and Republican election officials. Evidence includes Trump's recorded call asking Georgia's secretary of state to find enough votes to reverse his defeat,
as well as efforts to organize alternate slates of electors in states Biden won.
Trump just managed to obstruct the law long enough to get elected again.

I firmly oppose and condemn Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the IRGC, and radical Islam. However, decades of short-sighted American military intervention and destruction have proven that you cannot shoot an ideology out of existence; they have only served as a breeding ground that feeds and strengthens these extremist movements.
Using this woman’s sign as a token to justify the obliteration of Gaza or the displacement of its people is a bad-faith distortion of her message. She is protesting for peace and human liberation, not condoning the murder of civilians by foreign bombs. To pretend her stance validates the total destruction of these populations completely reverses her intent and fuels the exact cycle of violence she is standing against.
Using her image to justify that kind of violence is the exact opposite of the empathy,
that you claim to base your morality on. She DOESN'T agree with YOU.

The Iranian regime's brutality is real. It still doesn't justify bombing a country
back to the Stone Age. Condemning a regime's crimes is not the same as
wanting its people bombed. And starting with a girls' school? WTF!

Everything else in your post is personal abuse and unsupported accusations
about my beliefs. You have one legitimate point about Iran, but you haven't made
a case against me.

You keep trying to expose my character. All you're doing is showing everyone yours.

Verdict: The quote is falsely attributed to Clint Eastwood, and several of its political and economic claims are misleading or false. The wording was traced to Fred Doucette, a Republican New Hampshire state representative, who wrote a very similar statement in a September 2019 letter to the Eagle-Tribune. There is no credible evidence that Eastwood wrote or said the viral passage.

“The multi-billionaire who kicked every Democrat's butt.”
In the US, it's almost impossible to stop being a billionaire, once you are born one. The whole law and economic ecosystem is designed to favor wealthy people. Still, Trump managed to go bankrupt 6 times, almost destroying his father's legacy.
Trump didn't beat Biden. He lost, and then lost 60 court-cases fighting it. He is a sore loser.

“Buried 16 career Republican politicians.”
OK, true, Republican voters like stupid, rude, conmen.

“Continues to make fools out of once-reputable news organizations.”
That is what all wannabe dictators do. The free press is their enemy.

“The guy who won the presidency.”
I know. And now most people who voted for him regret it.

“The guy with the supermodel wife.”
If you are rich, you can have a trophy wife. Do they look happy together to you?

“His words alone put a massive slowdown on illegal border crossings.”
No, his words were lying about it. Then he didn't really deliver the wall he promised. Even now, while spending billions on ICE, the results themselves are still not impressive. The brutality is impressive though. That is surely to discourage people crossing your borders. Who wants to end up in a horrible prison, designed to make it as uncomfortable as possible?

"His mere presence made the stock market smash its previous records.”
No, that was his intent to give massive tax-cuts for the wealthy. Transferring money from the people and the state towards the wealthy is indeed a short-term stimulus for the stock market. That causes a 'boom'. However, then comes the 'bust', when it doesn't help the average American pay for the things they need to live, and they stop buying the luxury items from big companies. The only companies who hold up the stock market now are the high-tech companies that are trying to replace workers with AI. Good for business, but it sucks for people. They have data centers in their backyards, exploding electricity bills, loose their jobs or see their wages crumble.
By the way, the index looks a lot higher than the actual value, because the actions of Trump is making the dollar drop in value.

“He created 1 million jobs in his first seven months.”
Numerically true, attribution misleading. Approximately 1.189 million net jobs were added between Trump's inauguration and the September 2017 employment report. But job growth was already occurring for years before he took office. The same seven-month period had added more jobs in each of the preceding four years. The number describes employment growth during his presidency, not jobs demonstrably created by him personally.

“Are you sure you back a party that enables the decimation of every core principle of Christianity?”
Christian traditions differ on how they prioritize abortion, poverty, immigration, war, racial justice, and other issues.
Trump is violating Christian values consistently:
- Treatment of immigrants, refugees and vulnerable people
Christian teaching: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Matthew 25:35. Do I even have to explain it? Welcoming the stranger is the opposite of everything he stands for.
- Truthfulness, humility and pride
Christian teaching: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” — Matthew 23:12.
He lies constantly, he is a braggadocios lunatic and he takes pride in other people's accomplishments.
- Sexual conduct and respect for women
Christian teaching: “Treat younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.” — 1 Timothy 5:2. Trump treats women like a piece of meat that you can do with as you want.
- Mercy, forgiveness and treatment of political opponents
Christian teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” — Matthew 5:44. Trump is a vindictive bastard who attacks anyone who doesn't suck up to him.
- Justice, mercy and equal treatment under the law
Christian teaching: “What does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8. He had his cronies in the Supreme Court give him almost absolute immunity, and he appointed loyalist goons as the DOJ and the head of the FBI.
- Care for children and family integrity
Christian teaching: Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14). The Bible also repeatedly calls for protection of the vulnerable and care for families. We are talking about the **** protector and chief.
- “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” Trump does the exact opposite. Recently, he was doubting if he would be going to heaven. He definitely isn't.

“A party that voted 100% against the abolition of slavery.”
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. It passed the House on January 31, 1865, by 119 votes to 56. Republicans were the principal political force behind abolition, while many Democrats—particularly those aligned with the South—opposed it. However, Democrats were not a uniform bloc across all abolition-related votes: Democratic and Unionist senators had helped pass the amendment in the Senate in 1864.
The claim also ignores the subsequent transformation of the parties. The historical Democratic and Republican coalitions of the 1860s were not the same as today's parties. Their regional bases and positions on civil rights changed substantially over the following century.

“Are you sure you really take a politician like Maxine Waters seriously?”
No, but that doesn't excuse the parade of nutjobs, fraudsters and grifters in the Republican party. If you are too stupid or too shady to be a politician, you just become a Republican. There is no lower bar then the Republican party.

“Someone who has a 40-year career as a public servant living in a $4.5 million mansion.”
A person's home value by itself does not establish corruption or wrongdoing. Waters has had a long public-service career, beginning in California's state legislature in the 1970s and continuing in Congress from 1991. Those are well-paying jobs. A member of Congress earned $158,100 a year in 2004. Her husband Sidney Williams was working as a municipal-bond consultant and had other business interests. They could easily afford a home worth $2.05 million at that time.
Meanwhile, Trump is the most corrupt president in history. He used the presidency while refusing to separate himself from his business interests, repeatedly blurred public office with private profit, and presided over a documented pattern of conflicts of interest. Watchdogs counted more than 3,700 potential conflicts during his first term. A jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation; a New York court found his company’s financial statements fraudulent. The defining issue isn’t just scandal, it’s the repeated use of power, money and public trust as if they were his personal property. Reuters documented how foreign investors poured money into Trump-family cryptocurrency ventures while Trump held office, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns. A Senate investigation examined whether Trump’s $TRUMP coin and related ventures offered wealthy buyers a route to presidential access. Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao after Binance had business links to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture. Trump has turned the presidency into a web of personal business interests, wealthy backers and opportunities for people seeking political favour. The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, has openly funded election scams for Trump, and then he became co-president, being allowed to go through the governments finances unlawfully, while congress wasn't allowed to check what he was doing. That is unprecedented corruption.

Japan helped approximately 6,000 Jewish refugees escape.
Denmark helped about 7,200 Jews escape.
France sheltered 3,000–5,000 refugees from the holocaust.
Both Belgium and the Netherlands helped and hid thousands of Jews.
Switzerland admitted close to 30,000 Jewish refugees.
Spain admitted almost 30,000 Jewish refugees and Portugal allowed many of them to transit to the Americas.
From mid-1942 until September 1943, Italian forces protected Jews in parts of southern France and other occupied areas. The USHMM estimates that at least 25,000 Jews fled to the Italian-controlled area of southern France. Italian authorities resisted German demands to hand them over.
And roughly 200,000 Jewish people from prewar Poland survived the Holocaust by finding refuge inside the Soviet Union. That means that the Soviet Union is probably the nation where the largest number of Jews survived by escaping Nazi-controlled territory.
That doesn't mean that their war-crimes against the Ukrainian people should be excused.

Projection of the highest order; this is how right-wingers were under Biden.
Crying about the price of eggs and gas, which are now much higher.

"..I don't want to date anymore.." Women don't want to data MAGA-men anymore.
That is true; right-wing men are encouraged to lie about their politics, because most women avoid them like the plague. See how long you can keep it up.

I didn't promise not to talk to you publicly. You are here on the marketplace of ideas, and I'm not letting you spout your nonsense unchallenged. Go somewhere else,
if you need a safe space, snowflake.

When we talked privately, I was open, honest, decent, and direct with you, while you were patronizing and rude, when you didn't like an argument that you could not refute. You constantly attack the person instead of the argument. I only address your behavior when you cross every line of decency. You even leaked our private chat,
thinking it would hurt me. It didn’t; I am the exact same person in private
as I am in public. You only showed everyone here who truly lacks character.

Maybe he didn't, but holding him to a eleven-year-old comment lacks empathy.
Did someone ask him if he thinks that this is just self-defense?

South Park Apology to the White House
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I agree with that nice man, but for very different reasons than you might think.

Do you think that taxes on labor are more fair?
You own your body, you provide your time and your energy,
and then someone says "30% of what you just made is mine!".

The government needs money. Where do you want it to come from?
Do you believe in the principle of "Those with the broadest shoulders
should bear the heaviest burden"?

At least he has some property. Why do people who own NOTHING still pay taxes for the ONLY thing they have? As soon as their taxed labor allows them to own a roof over their head, a thing they need to survive, they pay property taxes. The property tax in the US
is about 1%. You pay that, even if your mortgage is higher than the value of your home.

Elon Musk own companies and property valued around 1 TRILLION dollars.
He pays roughly $930,000 annually in property taxes. His companies usually secure
100% property tax exemptions and there is no wealth tax. That means that Elon Musk pays ~0.00009% annually over his ownership. He also doesn't pay taxes over his labor, because he is paid in stock options. He only pays taxes when he sells them, which he almost never does, because he lives of personal loans, using his Tesla and SpaceX
stock holdings as collateral.

So, some people pay 1% over property that the bank owns and other people pay
almost nothing for property that they fully own and makes them money.
Now you know that, do you think differently about what that nice man was saying?

Is it a good alternative for workers making a living wage from it?
When the robots replace all the workers, it just means that ONLY
the wealthy owners make money from giving people obesity,
diabetes and heart disease.

Well, maybe some programmers and maintenance people will have a job.
Those are better jobs, so that's an improvement, but where will all the numbties find a job?
Look around and see how dumb the average person is, then realize
that 50% of them is dumber than that. How are they going to learn
to program AI and maintain robots (if they don't maintain themselves)?

Will the people who cannot manage in the robot economy be the pets
of Elon Musk, or put to work in government funded sheltered workshops,
do they get Universal Basic Income (UBI), or will they just starve?

"all of them are just screaming and hating on Trump"
They are protesting what he does and says on a daily basis,
because no president has ever been as corrupt, evil and bad for the US.

While your president is pushing through his madness ILLEGALLY,
you want Democrats to make their own stand and say what they want LEGALLY,
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

He said (something like) that in 2015.

They were NOT making a nuke, until Trump ripped up the JCPOA.
I predict with 95% certainty, that you will never have a better deal than that, and that Trump will be forced to take a loss, and explain it as a win, maybe even without any deal. Why would the leaders of Iran trust the US to ever keep a deal? Do you still think that the international inspectors come back for Trump?

It will leave you with an Iran with more extreme leadership than the ones who were killed, a people who will never trust the US again to help them resist it and who are now further away from becoming a modern society, because their economy is in shambles. They will need to be kept under even stricter control by their government, to crush their discontent. Iran will arm themselves even heavier at all costs, and they will put all efforts in their nuclear program in upmost secrecy, because that's the only thing that will keep them safe. When they have lots of them they will present that to the world, and ridicule the US.

If that ballroom comes to pass, it surely will have his name on it.
And it will probably be kept there by all presidents after him.
Just not for the reason that Trump imagines.

Most poorly educated lower working class people don't make careers.
There are too many of those 'entry-level jobs' in your country to fill them with just high school kids.
That means that there will be by design many people stuck in jobs that do NOT pay a living wage. Then you have a choice of supporting them with food-aid programs, which means that you are supporting the profits of all those fast food companies with tax-payer dollars, OR you have a huge chuck of your community grow old without any progress in life. They will live in slums, eat garbage, never have kids or have kids grow up on the streets becoming addicts and gangsters, and then die young from poverty related illnesses. Is that Making America Great Again?

If the American people do indeed pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and make it to managers, engineers, accountants, lawyers, dentists, economists, architects, etc, by working 100 hrs/week in their fast-food jobs, to pay for their education, then who will do those jobs that pay shit wages? That will make the owners of McDonald's very sad and they will pay your politicians to open the borders and let in lots of 'dirty' immigrants to do their shit jobs.

No, it's possible to to both think that the terrorist attack on Israeli citizens was horrible
AND reject Israel for committing a horrible genocide.

The actions of Israel do not get rid of the threat, it motivated millions of Muslims all around the world to hate them even more. Jewish people are suffering from more antisemitism because of this. Not everyone can make a mental separation between Jewish people
and Israel's genocide. You should understand that, because you cannot make a mental separation between individual Muslims and Islamic terrorists.

Why are you talking about 'control'? What Trump is cutting is affecting the quality of schools a lot. You think that education already sucks, so why are you OK with more cuts? It requires investments to make education better. Every dollar invested in education creates a 300%-700% return on investment in the future. That's why wealthy people send their kids to expensive private schools.

Elite private schools in the United States that cater to wealthy families lean heavily into rigorous, secular logical reasoning, advanced sciences, biology, economics, and elite academics. They strictly do not teach creationism as science and do not leave out evolution or other religion-challenging topics.
That's because religion is intended to keep the working folks obedient.
The wealthy want their children to USE IT, NOT BELIEVE IT.

As you know, there is more than 1 child in a class, so you cannot have schools listen to the loudest parents who are demanding that the kids are educated the way THEY see it. That's why you need standards, and that is not sick.

You DON'T think that parents should be able to decide everything for THEIR children, because you want the government to meddle in their choices related to trans-gender kids.

Children should have a broad basis, that gives them choices. That should not be limited to where they live and certainly not what the loud-mouth parents of other children make their teachers do. If you don't allow some standards from the government, you have one school teach ONLY creation, the bible, the 10 commandments, and skip everything related to biology, geology, and other science, other schools who only teach gender studies, veganology or whatever the fuck, and only a few moderate schools who actually provide your country with children who are capable of surviving the harsh reality of your extremely individualistic capitalist society. Both extremes are useless to your wealthy, so I would think that you would support some standards for how kids are educated.

That's on the bottom end of the rental homes, it's not a new thing and it's everywhere.
I don't understand why you keep defending all those wealthy people,
who would gladly let you starve, if it makes them a little bit more profit.
You disrespect everyone who is like you, and worship people who step on you.
Even Kim Jong-un doesn't have people who worship him, like you worship them.
Americans are all working like slaves, and most struggle to make ends meet.
That's not their fault, that's because they are exploited by the wealthy.
It's because someone is getting wealthy, from any move they make.
And what do you get back for it? That their houses are all owned by the wealthy too.

Your ideology puts us back into serfdom, after the working class, that you belong to, has suffered, fought, bled and died, to be allowed some freedom and dignity.

Did you know that the wealth inequality in the US is now more extreme than during the Gilded Age? When will you think that the wealthy own to much and the rest too little?
EVER?

"Jack Smith Testimony Continued" (parody, but accurate)
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I know what you’ve said and how you’ve behaved.
That speaks volumes about you.

He didn't really answer the accusations; he dismissed them as lies, attacked the people making them, invoked existential threats, and presented Israel as the perpetual victim, while avoiding the substance
of the legal and humanitarian allegations.

I care about what someone thinks of me, when I respect them
and value their opinion.

“I love the poorly educated.” — Trump, 2016.
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He ordered the federal government to facilitate closing the Department of Education.
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His FY2026 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending by 23% and continued the process of shutting down the Education Department.
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His administration proposed cutting NIH funding by roughly 40%, about $18 billion, and NSF funding by 57%.
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More than 7,800 federally funded research grants were terminated or frozen
under his administration in 2025.
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He called the press “the enemy of the people”.
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His administration has explicitly targeted scientific research it considers ideologically objectionable, including climate and social-science research.
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Yes, we can safely conclude that Trump wants to make Americans dumber.

He can make you pay more taxes, if you are dumb enough to not understand
that tariffs are taxes.

Which is completely irrelevant to the point that phart made.
But you accuse me of always bringing up THAT discussion.

The UN Commission of Inquiry made that determination on its own evidentiary assessment: in September 2025 it concluded that Israel had committed four of the underlying genocidal acts and that Israeli authorities possessed the requisite intent
to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal international court for disputes between states. Under the Genocide Convention, it can determine whether a state
is responsible for genocide.

This is the exact legal framework that was created in response to the Holocaust,
with the explicit purpose of preventing another genocide.

The legal order born from ‘never again’ is being defended as universal,
until it reaches Israel. Then the rules suddenly become illegitimate,
the court becomes illegitimate, and the principle itself becomes negotiable.

The shoe is on the other foot now, and suddenly the rules are the problem.

Good idea!

"Killing billionaires is actually moral."
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(this means that it's a joke)

If you have nothing to add on the current subject, why are you yapping?

Do you understand the scale between exploitation and NO profit?
Can you only see the world in black and white?

Landlords in the US are killing it. Private equity is sucking up property.
They maximize the rent to just below that no one can afford it any longer.
That way, they are maximizing profit, but hurting people who need a home.
It's the exact same 'Price Optimum Formula' that I explained in the McDonald's discussion. I just didn't add rent prices there, because it's not much related to wages.

"what other purpose does a investor buy houses and apartments if there is no profit?"
Why do you need them to? Let people buy their own houses and apartments.
Oh, they are to poor? Yes, I know, because this system makes housing too expensive.
When you have people compete with investors, the people lose.

She had unusually thin veins and they couldn’t get the needle in on the first attempt. Now the poison is in her soft tissue, slowly killing her.

They fucked up. That’s the reason she survived. Just shooting her brains out would have been less cruel than what they’ve done to her. But that would LOOK brutal.
It would destroy the sanitized image that allows this practice to continue.

And that, to me, is part of the problem. Some Americans need the people who commit horrific acts to be monsters, because it is easier to condemn monsters than to confront the failures of the society that produced them. Others couldn’t accept the brutality of state killing, so they made the killing look less brutal instead.

That’s how you end up with this: not a society becoming more humane, but a society finding cleaner ways to present its brutality. The United States keeps refusing to confront the uglier parts of human nature and its own failures, and instead keeps finding ways to sanitize them. At some point, a nation that considers itself civilized
has to grow beyond that.

Why do you think that paying all those people NOT a living wage,
is a better option than either or all three other options?
The entire goal of working is to be able to afford to live. Right?

Executing someone after making them wait for thirty years is cruel.
A government ought to hold a higher moral standard than the criminals it punishes.

Mamdani is literally price fixing the rent, so that's not possible.

This is a false equivalence.

The 1960 population paper was a mathematical extrapolation from a limited historical dataset, produced by three researchers. Its famous “doomsday” date was CONDITIONAL: IF population CONTINUED to grow as it had grown, the equation would reach a mathematical singularity in 2026.

That condition did NOT come to pass. So NEITHER did the prediction.
There is NO scientific failure here.

Climate projections work on exactly this principle. They are conditional projections
based on different emissions scenarios. If humanity continues emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, the projected warming and associated impacts are much greater.
If emissions are cut rapidly, warming is substantially lower.

The uncertainty is therefore not “scientists don't know whether CO₂ warms the planet”. That physics is extremely well established. The major uncertainty is how much greenhouse gas HUMANITY will put into the atmosphere, and therefore which
emissions pathway we will actually follow.

SCIENTISTS CAN NOT PREDICT THE LEVEL OF HUMAN STUPIDITY.

And the physical basis is completely different from the 1960 population extrapolation.
The population prediction depended on a historical pattern of human behaviour continuing indefinitely. The greenhouse effect is a physical mechanism: CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation, and increasing CO₂ reduces the rate at which Earth loses heat to space.
That isn't inferred from a historical trend, it is directly measurable physics.

So using this paper as evidence that “science can't be trusted” gets the paper backwards. It is a conditional projection whose condition failed, not a failed prediction of an inevitable event.

If you want to challenge climate science, the relevant question is whether its physical mechanism, observations and quantitative projections stand up to scrutiny. A 66-year-old population extrapolation doesn't answer that question.

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The commonly used IPCC/CMIP6 scenarios (SSPs) are:
- SSP1-1.9 — Very low emissions. Rapid transition to sustainability; warming kept around 1.5°C.
- SSP1-2.6 — Low emissions. Strong climate action; warming around 1.8°C.
- SSP2-4.5 — Intermediate emissions. Current policies/trends broadly continue; warming around 2.7°C.
- SSP3-7.0 — High emissions. Fragmented world, weak international cooperation and limited climate action; warming around 3.6°C.
- SSP5-8.5 — Very high emissions. Fossil-fuel-intensive development with little climate action; warming around 4.4°C.

These are NOT five competing predictions of what will happen.
They are five CONDITIONAL scenarios: IF emissions follow pathway X,
THEN the climate response is approximately Y.

In short; IF humanity DOES X, then the climate DOES Y

IF HUMANITY DOES THE STUPID, THEN THE CLIMATE DOES THE CATASTROPHIC

Just like in the 1960 population paper, which just stated; IF!!! humanity keeps breeding
like we do now (1960), then we have “doomsday” in 2026. We didn't, so IT didn't happen.

Yes, I'm telling you that they still make lots of profit in my country.
Those breakfasts cost almost nothing to make. There is like a 75% markup on that. The labor on it is also almost nothing. The secret behind the profit from low-priced meal deals lies in the drinks. Coffee and soft drinks have the highest profit margins in the entire hospitality industry. Coffee has a profit margin that can reach as high as 2,900%.

Companies often uses a cheap breakfast item at an extremely low price as a loss leader. Even if they make barely any profit on that specific article, it is profitable because customers rarely order just that one item; they almost always add a drink, a hash brown, or an extra snack.

It was my girlfriend's birthday, and she received a code from the garden center to pick up a free plant. It’s a lure, really, because once you’re there, you end up having a bite to eat in their restaurant (for $25), buying a few plant pots, some potting soil, some Christmas items, a couple of bags of chips, and so on, and suddenly you’ve spent $150. That’s how they make a profit off a free plant.

All Dutch supermarkets sell bananas at a loss, because they are a traffic-builder:
- Bananas are a price-sensitive product. Customers know roughly what they should cost, so a low banana price makes a supermarket seem cheap.
- They attract customers. Once people come in for cheap bananas, they often buy other products with higher profit margins.
- Bananas are used for price competition. Supermarkets may deliberately accept a small loss to compete with rivals and strengthen their overall price image.
- The loss is compensated elsewhere. The supermarket makes money on products with much higher margins, so losing a few cents per kilo on bananas can be worthwhile.
In short: the supermarket isn't trying to make money on every banana;
it's using cheap bananas to make money on the customer's entire shopping basket.

Don't you know these things? In my country, we have several consumer affairs programmes, who investigate things like this and advice the customer. I watch all of those, and that's how I know how all these commerce tricks.

OUT OF THEIR PROFITS!!! Isn't that clear?
McDonald's STILL makes profit in my country, and not a little bit either.
So do hair salons, food delivery services, supermarkets, drugstores, internet providers, insurance companies, movie theaters, gym chains, the train, airlines, private educational courses, etc. They all exist in my country, pay better wages, offer better services, and are either more affordable or have similar prices.

We just don't transfer as much money from the average citizen to the wealthy
like you do in the US.

You are assuming corporations use "cost-plus" pricing (blindly adding a fixed profit markup on top of their expenses). They don't. They use value-based pricing, centered entirely on finding the price optimum.

• The Price Optimum Formula: A corporation continuously tests the market to find the exact intersection where Price × Sales Volume yields the absolute maximum total profit. They always charge the maximum price the local market can tolerate before demand collapses.

• The Demand Ceiling Capping Prices: If a company raises prices beyond this optimum just because their internal costs (like wages or rent) went up, they ruin their own demand. A higher price that causes a massive drop in customers results in lower total revenue. Therefore, prices are structurally capped by consumer purchasing power and local competition, not driven upward by a company's internal bills.

• Costs Impact Profit, Not Price: Internal expenses, whether they are wages, taxes, or real estate, dictate the profit margin, not the price tag. When operational costs rise, a company has a choice: accept a slightly lower profit margin to maintain their sales volume, or raise prices and risk destroying demand.

I would not call this 'basic economics', but it all aligns perfectly with standard neoclassical microeconomic theory. It is fully backed by academic economics because it directly operationalizes the foundational principle that firms are profit maximizers operating under demand constraints.

The Ultimate Proof (Recent US Price Cuts): Look at McDonald's recent behavior in the US. After aggressively raising prices for years, they were forced to introduce value menus and slash prices. They didn't do this out of goodwill, and they certainly didn't do it because their labor or supply costs suddenly dropped. They did it because consumers, strained by economic uncertainty, stopped buying. Demand collapsed, forcing McDonald's to lower their prices back down to find the new market optimum.

Public narrative heavily distorts economics into a moral tale of companies just covering their bills. In reality, economic theory demonstrates that corporations are just cold, optimization algorithms. They charge the absolute maximum the market will bear. They will ONLY lower prices if they can make more profit from it, by increasing demand.

Trump has fundamentally re-engineered the mechanics of the presidency. He created lots of new precedents, for the next Democratic president to use at their discretion.
That's on you; whatever power you give your ally, you eventually yield to your opponent:

• Bypassing Congress on Budgets: Using national emergencies to redirect defunded or unapproved tax money toward pet projects. (Democrats could do this to bypass Congress and unilaterally fund massive Green New Deal or climate programs).

• Bypassing the Constitution via Executive Order: Challenging established legal rights by decree—like attempting to end birthright citizenship. (Democrats could do this to circumvent Congress and the Constitution by using an executive order to unilaterally implement sweeping national gun control mandates or bans on specific firearms).

• Denying Hearings/Bond for Detainees (The ICE Policy): Using broad executive power to enforce mandatory detention and deny bond hearings to people caught inside the country. (Democrats could use this precedent to indefinitely detain corporate polluters, white-collar financial criminals, or political extremists without allowing them to request bail or a bond hearing while their cases are investigated).

• Subverting the Non-Political Civil Service (Schedule F): Reclassifying thousands of independent federal workers as political employees so they can be fired instantly. (Democrats could use this to systematically purge conservative judges, defense officials, or agents from the deep state and replace them with loyal progressives).

• Bypassing Senate Confirmations: Keeping temporary, unconfirmed "acting officials" in charge of major cabinet departments indefinitely. (Democrats could use this to install radical cabinet members who would never survive a Senate confirmation vote).

• Seizing Control of Independent Agencies: Subjecting legally independent regulators (like the FCC, SEC, or FTC) to direct White House commands. (Democrats could use this to force the SEC or Federal Reserve to penalize banks that invest in fossil fuels).

• Broad Presidential Criminal Immunity: Utilizing the Supreme Court's ruling that a president has absolute immunity for "official acts" committed while in office. (Democrats could use this to execute controversial or legally borderline policies without the president ever fearing criminal prosecution after leaving office).

Trump has done all these things. He didn't achieve a lot with it, other than to keep himself out of prison, but don't cry when Democrats will use them effectively. Your side pulled that rabbit out of the hat, and Democrats can now use that rabbit too.