This is no longer a conversation I want to have here, a place I consider a respite from the bullshit of the world. You seem to want to continue stoking the fire but I’m afraid you’ll have to do it without me.
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I just responded to your post, but it seems there are certain preferences here that I was unaware about going in. If I allow the western, racist AF narrative with barely a murmur, that’s ok, but if I contest imbedded propaganda and genocide justification, that’s somehow…beyond the pale.
And it makes me think how much most of us, myself included, are siloed into our white, western, Global North ways of thinking. The Russo-Ukraine war, as I have found with friends and on various forums, isn’t complicated. Sure, some people are tankies and pro-Russian, but generally everybody else can see there’s an aggressor and a victim, and not only the facts but the history will bear that out.
But in Gaza? For Muslims? For people who don’t dress like us, speak our language, who resent the west (I wonder fucking why), who are discernably “other”? There the sympathy ends. How dare they resist? How dare they change their perennially awful circumstances? They get what’s coming to them. After all, there was no context for the October 7th attacks, none whatsoever.
“Natus, you’re so passionate about this” My dude, it’s genocide. I should certainly hope so. Why aren’t you?
Passion is good. Empathy is good. But if you want to advance the laudable view that we ought not trivialize suffering, you’re fucking it up badly here. Caring about the suffering of Palestinians but not Israelis is no more laudable than the reverse. I value your voice here and don’t want to lose it even temporarily, but I also value other people’s, and you can probably already tell that you’re costing us those. Attempts to get on the right side by hardening one’s heart against the concerns of oppressors invites manipulation of one’s perception of oppression and turns justice into a PR auction, one which anti-Semitic white supremacists are currently delightedly manipulating. More importantly, showing that you care about some people’s suffering and not others harms our Stately Play community, which is the only community you’re directly affecting with your posts. That sort of thinking is a warning to anyone at risk of being othered, and when you specifically address it to another member of our community, that’s completely unacceptable.
I explain all this because I haven’t had to before now, and I want you to have an opportunity to learn. But, from a certain perspective, it looks like you got aggressive with another poster here because he’s Jewish, and the only reason that’s not an instaban is that there are lots of other perspectives, this whole topic is horrifically messy with clear moral imperatives seemingly conflicting right and left, and you’ve shown you’re trying to consider many perspectives and have a long history of community-building here.
So, think about how your posts look from the viewpoint of someone threatened by anti-Semitism at home, who knows that the neo-Nazis in their country are using this (yes, horrific, disproportionate, apparently illegal and genocidal) war as a recruiting tool to get people unwittingly helping them around the world. And remember that damage isn’t collateral if it’s the only damage you do.
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This is gold.
Can you imagine the regret?
I for one am thankful for Brexit, it worked out great for me.
At the time I was working for the London Stock Exchange Group and because of Brexit, the merge with Deutsche Börse did not go through and for complicated reasons, that impacted me and I found myself out of work.
Which is how I ended up at Akamai and then Okta, which were career changing roles for me that might not have happened…if not for Brexit! 
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Kudos for the on-topic post 
i was starting to feel possessive about this thread which I started to work through my personal Brexit psychodrama in front of a bunch of mostly anonymous strategy gamers on the internet, largely thanks to alcohol to be honest, now I look back. It‘s been a weird few years.
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The whole brexit thing has been strange - following the brexit decision I shelved plans to apply for a UK passport. I could get one using ancestry application - my sister has one - since my Mum and grandparents on both sides were born in England.
I wanted it mostly on the off chance I could get to work in the EU or UK - most companies in my field will have a head office over there somewhere.
Once the brexit kicked in, I stopped it. If I need work rights in the UK it should be pretty simple, and the rest of EU? Well, that can be my companies problem.
Other than that, my family in “the north” are happy with brexit, so shrugs not sure it impacted their lives much but it did help their sense of identity.
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Probably the one scandal that perhaps epitomises British society today, in which literally hundreds of people were convicted of financial crimes because post office software was shit, and no-one is going to be punished for it. This has been going on now since the 90s, and prosecutions continued until 2015.
https://youtu.be/2M48j58Twjw?si=h14PEM2Olz7Qk8EJ - watching the people responsible give evidence and just have their memory fail is the purest bullshit. Watching them avoid responsibility is insane. Nobody appears to have known what was going on, but they knew enough to say no-one else was having problems, and that if money was missing, they were going to be prosecuted for theft.
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Anyone have any insight here? I thought the EU wasn’t allowed to have subsidies?
The other interesting part - how is the budget illegal? Would love to see that happen in the US!
I thought the EU wasn’t allowed to have subsidies?
Where did you get that idea from.
All I know is I landed here in Paris a few hours ago, and Uber drivers were blocking all of the roads in and out of the airport in protest of regulations favoring Taxi drivers. My Uber driver assured me he would not join the protest until after he got me to my office. 
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I thought that was one of the guiding principles of the EU and part of the reason for brexit - you could subsidise as you see fit.
Farming subsidies are so interesting to me, every country does it to a certain extent - free trade deals in Australia always seems to get caught up on details around tariffs/subsidies/portectionism. For some reason I thought the EU had equalised it somehow…. I must be miles off!
Broadly, the German constitution strongly limits the extent to which the budget can involve deficit spending - this is the so -called schwarze Null, the black zero, or the principle that the budget should be basically balanced.
In the pandemic, the coalition used emergency funding which overrode the black zero but this being Germany, managed not to spend all of it, and ended up with a €60bn surplus. The government diverted the surplus into the KTF, the climate and transformation fund, which as it sounds is (was) intended to support the transition to low-carbon technologies.
The argument was that this was against the constitution because it provided an unjustifiable end run around the schwarze Null - a future government could use an emergency to justify going into a larger-than-necessary deficit, and then divert the excess into the budget. The Bundesverfassungsgericht, the constitutional court, agreed and pulled the plug on the scheme, spectacularly screwing up the federal budget for the year.
Obviously this is much duller than the US version of shutting down the government every year in a spate of willy-waving, or the UK version of shamefacedly going deeper into debt while pretending not to.
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Thanks for the extra explanation!
I also heard on the news radio that they were withdrawing fuel subsidies for farmers as the cause of the protest
If it is like australia, the government puts huge tax markups on fuel to pay for externalities (roads etx). The logic is for those that use fuel that doesn’t use roads, they don’t out the tax - mining and farming for example.
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Yep. Mrs StC is about to head home from the office and there are a lot of blocked roads full of tractors around where she works. Google maps does not look good. Interesting times…
You sir, have made my day.
What an amazing change. Why not also put “not for North Korea, Russia or Yemen” on it as well?
The Pentagon response in the last paragraph is nice.
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