I was just saying your islamopobia was showing.

Thank you for proving my point for me. You wielded it like the duplicitous cudgel it was designed to be - to protect the religion instead of any person.

Except that the person is intentionally misdirecting the entire convo in order to invalidate an entire highly problematic edifice of issues.

I did no such thing.

Orly?

My Muslim neighbor seems pretty chill. I doubt he partakes in honor killings, sexual slavery, and/or apostate killings in his free time.

There are extremists in almost any facet of humankind, especially so when religion gets involved. It’s best not to paint everyone with the same brush.

There it is, the “not all Muslims” defence. Totally misdirects away from how “Islamophobia” is wielded to protect all manner of religious-based evil, by throwing up a “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy to force the convo onto the people instead of the religion.

I never focused on the people or even a single person, my argument was entirely the flip side - how a tool that is meant to protect people is instead shielding an entire religion.

If a religion needs protections of any kind from criticisms, censure, or challenges, then it has no right to exist in the first place. And that is what makes “Islamophobia” so unremittingly evil - it protects the religion from anything that can diminish it. It goes out of it’s way to conflate the religion with the people, thereby muddying the waters and making both the exact same thing; usurping what is meant only for the people to include the religion as well.

They were never a thing in Europe.

Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.

the person you’re replying to isn’t entirely wrong either.

Except that the person is intentionally misdirecting the entire convo in order to invalidate an entire highly problematic edifice of issues. “Not all Muslims” is the misdirection, because I am not talking about individuals or even people in general.

I am talking about how an entire concept - “Islamophobia” - is wielded in a maliciously dishonest manner to protect the evils of the religion, specifically and primarily, instead of only the people.

It’s best not to paint everyone with the same brush.

And there is that intellectual dishonesty and malicious misdirection that makes up so much of “Islamophobia” accusations.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism suppresses all criticism of the state of Israel.

It seems that Jews and Muslims learn from each other. The widely-used definition of “Islamophobia” does much the same to insulate Islam, the religion, from criticism as well, allowing all sorts of horrific things - from honour killings over sexual slavery to apostate killings - in the name of “protecting Islamic values”.

D) America has ALWAYS had a Canada-invasion plan percolating as a contingency. They update it every half a decade or so to bring it inline with the latest intelligence.

The most recent plans are designed with climate change in mind, in order to secure resources like the grain fields and oil fields of the prairies. Much like the Nazi “Lebensraum” plans for Poland.

Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.

Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.

I would consider the latter to be depraved indifference, but the former to be maliciously genocidal.

Of the two, the former is much, much worse than the latter. And with everything being a spectrum of some kind, the former is much further along the path to being evil than the latter.

With that said, there is no single person pushing all the buttons in Israel; as such, I am sure there are people in the Israeli command structure that represent the former much more than the latter, and vice versa.

But if there is one characterization I feel is wholly appropriate: on Oct 6, Israel looked at the evil of Hamas and said, “hold my beer and watch this.” And boy, did they ever deliver.

$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

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The Parasite Class. That’s what happened. These are people for whom any amount of wealth will never be enough. So they extract it out of the working class by cramming down wages, making all aspects of life precarious, and raising prices.

We all suffer and the 0.1% accumulare more wealth than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.

North Korea calls itself socialist

They also call themselves democratic.

Are they? Would you call their system democratic? No?

Why one and not the other?

It’s not laziness.

Most people are too resource poor, too time poor, and too exhausted from being violently forced to be profitable to someone else, to have the headspace to do what you suggest.

You can indeed spend every waking moment optimizing your life, but then you would be just one person among tens of thousands who could be successful doing that. 99.999% of people would utterly burn out trying to achieve the same. They don’t have the underlying intergenerational wealth that would give them the ability to do so, or don’t have the free time to do so, or have too high of a cognitive load just putting one foot in front of the other to do so. Vanishingly few people are “just too lazy” to do so, and of those who are, they are the ones who can monetarily afford to be lazy.

It’s why poverty is fiendishly expensive, and why it is almost impossible to escape poverty

OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.

In a fair and equitable world, communities like this would not exist, because these people would not have that wealth.

All extreme wealth has been stolen from the working class. That’s the only way it can be obtained.

I make a meaty spaghetti sauce with various spices, but I cook the ground beef in the pan at a low simmer for about 2hrs before I even add the tomato sauce, in order for those spices to penetrate the meat.

I call it a nuclear time bomb because it tastes totally normal - very delicious, even - but about 10-15 minutes in, you are reaching for a hand towel to wipe away the sweat which is quite literally dripping off of you. And you have felt NONE of the hot spices on your tongue.

A much quicker dish involves Cæsar dressing, which I add copious amounts of garlic powder to (4-5 tablespoons), then prevent the dressing from solidifying by adding lemon juice, then wrapping up with freshly ground garlic. As in, a paste, *not chopped or minced._ For a salad using a single head of Romaine, the paste alone uses 15-30 garlic cloves depending on size. And this is on top of the garlic powder. Tastes amazing, but it can get garlicky enough to be barely edible. Think the same kind of burn when chewing down on a fresh raw clove. I sometimes get an “addictive overwhelming thirst” for this garlicky dish that has me gorging on it almost exclusively for an entire week.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.