Harrison [He/Him]

In the west there are laws about public indecency which legislate what people may wear outside and these rules demand women wear shirts but do not demand the same of men.

In some western countries, there are ones that do not make a distinction

The law covers that also. All visible religious garments are forbidden.

“The law in it’s great magnanimity prohibits poor and rich alike from sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.”.

A law can be applied equally to everyone and still target a specific group of people.

There will of course be different sources of information, but that does not mean that they will present a fair and balanced spread of ideas. The capitalist class will push their own interests. A single owner is not required for that to occur

Under capitalism, the capitalist class controls the media, and can use their wealth to control the political class.

A democracy can only make choices so far as it’s voters are informed, and when a group controls most sources of information, it can control the democracy as a whole.

Well, you’ve got to get rid of it some way, and while charity might systematically be a problem there are plenty that do genuine good.

If you have any decency, get rid of most of it, preferably to charities or political causes.

That sort of wealth in the hands of a single person is obscene, and spending it on luxury when there are people starving and homeless in the world is the height of immorality.

Foolish if the goal is to hold on to more money than you could ever need in ten lifetimes to pursue the goal of accumulating more from the work of others.

No, it’s more like doctor or engineer where it’s a protected profession that’s criminal to imitate.

We can, through collective effort, precipitate change away from or reverse negative change, and the first step to that is complaining about it.

Sort of, the local communists, probably without soviet knowledge or support, overthrew the local military dictator. They started unpopular reforms like gender equality and social ownership, people got very unhappy about that, the situation devolved into a civil war and the Soviets decided to intervene to support the Afghan communists.

Not quite a straight invasion like Ukraine and probably more justified than the US intervention.

In fairness, outside of three decades or so in the 20th century, Germany has been one of the nicest places in the world to live in for at least the past 200.

A full military occupation followed by several years of constructing a new government like what was done in Germany or Japan might have had a chance at working. Our efforts were always half-hearted. There were never enough boots on the ground to properly police the population and there was no political will to try.

The Soviets had their go at nationbuilding. Their puppet state survived eight years after they withdrew as well, which is a fair bit longer than the ten days we managed.

Becoming a terrorist is a rational decision in the face of such injustice.

The measured pool is chess players, not random people they picked off the street.

Yes, but mainly that’s because NATOs ammo production was very limited. The factories are all designed to be scaled up massively in times of need, but pre-2022, NATO was barely producing enough to maintain stockpiles.

NATO doctrine relies heavily on airpower for any large military conflict. The NATO ground armies might be relatively small, but their combined air forces are qualitatively superior in every metric and at minimum three times larger than any potential opponent. 10k people can hold off 500k when they have a giant arsenal of precision guided weapons and complete control of the air.

The Palestinians have the stated goal of murdering the Israeli people as well as ending the Israeli state

Which excuses attempted genocide?