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Absent

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Yeah, this is just as funny as Andrew Tate converting to Islam for the same reasons. In his eyes, Islam is apparently willing to shoot all the woke people and this is why we should convert too
"Woke" being defined as "people too tolerant towards Muslims", if I remember well.
 

Trunkage

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"Where the men are men and the sheep are nervous."
1. I have always seen this joke more about men sexing sheep
2. Clearly the answer was dragons
3. Sheep are always nervous
4. I have also taken this joke as describing toxic masculinity before that term was even made up. To be fair, 'men will be men' does the same thing and I despise when people use it as a defense for bad behavior
 
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Absent

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I just feel profoundly sad for every each wagner member that is not dead. It distresses me.

I've seldom felt so little humanity for/from humans. Humanity isn't a trait inherent to a person, it's a relationship between entities. Dehumanizing is a two-ways action. Or more. You dehumanize others (by making your trade to kill them), you dehumanize yourself (by making your trade to kill people)... and you dehumanize the witnesses (who witness your dehumanizing, and cease to see you as human, and dehumanize themselves). I see wagner members as objects to break, more than people. It feels... terribly cold and void.

I just wish none of them was alive. I'm happy to live far from war. It wouldn't have a very good effect on me (besides killing me).

(Also, "my" country is founded on that. For centuries, "we" have been wagner. I'm the direct product of that assholery.)
 
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Thaluikhain

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(Also, "my" country is founded on that. For centuries, "we" have been wagner. I'm the direct product of that assholery.)
You'd be hard pressed to find countries that weren't like that, in some way. Well, excepting newly formed countries that used to be other countries that did those wrongdoings, but you know what I mean.

(Not meant as a defence or minimisation, just a depressing truism)
 

PsychedelicDiamond

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I just feel profoundly sad for every each wagner member that is not dead. It distresses me.

I've seldom felt so little humanity for/from humans. Humanity isn't a trait inherent to a person, it's a relationship between entities. Dehumanizing is a two-ways action. Or more. You dehumanize others (by making your trade to kill them), you dehumanize yourself (by making your trade to kill people)... and you dehumanize the witnesses (who witness your dehumanizing, and cease to see you as human, and dehumanize themselves). I see wagner members as objects to break, more than people. It feels... terribly cold and void.

I just wish none of them was alive. I'm happy to live far from war. It wouldn't have a very good effect on me (besides killing me).

(Also, "my" country is founded on that. For centuries, "we" have been wagner. I'm the direct product of that assholery.)
I think every modern democratic country should cultivate a healthy degree of hatred towards fascists. The fact that we've been raised to effectively treat it as just another opinion that we need to tolerate, even if we find it disagreeable, has done great damage to our values.
 

Thaluikhain

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Just Ireland. Personal pet peeve of mine. But we're just "Ireland". And definitely not "southern Ireland".
Should have gone with "Greater Ireland" or something, given the different sizes. And Northern Ireland could have been North-Eastern Ireland.
 

Gordon_4

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I just feel profoundly sad for every each wagner member that is not dead. It distresses me.

I've seldom felt so little humanity for/from humans. Humanity isn't a trait inherent to a person, it's a relationship between entities. Dehumanizing is a two-ways action. Or more. You dehumanize others (by making your trade to kill them), you dehumanize yourself (by making your trade to kill people)... and you dehumanize the witnesses (who witness your dehumanizing, and cease to see you as human, and dehumanize themselves). I see wagner members as objects to break, more than people. It feels... terribly cold and void.

I just wish none of them was alive. I'm happy to live far from war. It wouldn't have a very good effect on me (besides killing me).

(Also, "my" country is founded on that. For centuries, "we" have been wagner. I'm the direct product of that assholery.)
I’d trust a fifteenth century Swiss Mercenary before I trusted a member of the Wagner Group. Those old boys just want me dead for sordid coin (usually), but Wagner would string me up because they’d believe I deserve to die. Like I could not bribe a member of Wagner with enough money to make them go away if I was on the shit list.
 

Terminal Blue

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Chekov in Star Trek (though sometimes it's future stuff that deosn't really exist and nobody disagrees so that thing might be from that area) is the only example that comes to mind, I must admit.
It was a recurring joke in Star Trek. It comes up in the Undiscovered Country, for example, where the Klingon ambassador explains that "you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon".

It's based on a real trend for Soviet and Nazi propaganda to exaggerate their own scientific or cultural achievements, although the latter was a bit more shameless about it due to the racial theory angle. German propaganda did make a particular effort to claim that Shakespeare was of pure Germanic blood and that his plays exhibited Nordic values, for example.

(Also, "my" country is founded on that. For centuries, "we" have been wagner. I'm the direct product of that assholery.)
As someone who has studied that general renaissance/early modern time period a bit, I think it's interesting because it's one of the first points in history that we tend to read retrospectively. We tend to see people from that era as essentially similar to us, as having the same basic moral compass, ideology and values but just being kind of bad at upholding them.

But it actually makes much more sense to read them prospectively. Chronologically, culturally and psychologically they're far closer to medieval people than to modern people like you or me. They lived in a world that was quite fundamentally different. Basic assumptions about reality that we wouldn't even think to question were just absolutely alien to them.

Back then, states didn't have standing armies. If you wanted to fight a war your options were to levy a bunch of peasant farmers (whose families would be left destitute or starve if they died or were kept away from agricultural labor for too long) or to hire mercenaries. Pre-modern armies in general were terrible, terrible things. They would devastate any land they travelled through through, because without organized logistics looting or "foraging" was an important part of the way armies supplied themselves. There's no real concept of atrocities or war crimes, it's just war. That's how war is. The only restraining force on the absolute barbarism was religion, and after the reformation that broke down too.
 
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Thaluikhain

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It was a recurring joke in Star Trek. It comes up in the Undiscovered Country, for example, where the Klingon ambassador explains that "you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon".
Well, yes, but that's the only example off the top of my head when I can think of someone not Chekhov doing it.


It's based on a real trend for Soviet and Nazi propaganda to exaggerate their own scientific or cultural achievements, although the latter was a bit more shameless about it due to the racial theory angle. German propaganda did make a particular effort to claim that Shakespeare was of pure Germanic blood and that his plays exhibited Nordic values, for example.
Ah, ok, I knew they did that sort of thing, but it never clicked that Star Trek was referencing that.
 

tstorm823

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Dehumanizing is a two-ways action.
This is close to something profound. I know it's not quite right, because how you used it in the sense of "your actions made me not see you as a human" is pretty conceptually similar to "my wife makes me beat her", but if we go with "when you dehumanize others you also dehumanize yourself", I think you're onto something.
 

Absent

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This is close to something profound. I know it's not quite right, because how you used it in the sense of "your actions made me not see you as a human" is pretty conceptually similar to "my wife makes me beat her", but if we go with "when you dehumanize others you also dehumanize yourself", I think you're onto something.
Yeah. Don't you have some gay rights or transgender humanity to deny instead of giving me your opinion on dehumanisation?
 

tstorm823

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Yeah. Don't you have some gay rights or transgender humanity to deny instead of giving me your opinion on dehumanisation?
I deny no person's humanity. People categorizing themselves in detrimental ways does not make them any less human.
 

Dalisclock

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So this is a thing now. Russia, are you okay over there?


The first of these weirdo MT-LBs started showing up in Ukraine last month. On or before Feb. 3, Ukrainian forces in Vuhledar captured from hapless Russian brigades a 13-ton, two-crew MT-LB sporting a 2M-7 gunboat turret.


The 2M-7 is an over-under pair of 14.5-millimeter machine guns behind a steel shield. It entered service with Soviet forces in 1945.


In early March, photos circulated online depicting MT-LBs with 2M-3 naval turrets welded to their roofs. The 2M-3 is two 25-millimeter auto-cannons, one atop the other in an enclosed casing. The 2M-3 made its debut in 1953.

 
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