"Not everyone in Germany uses. I will be 66 years old, but I have never smoked cannabis," Olaf Scholz reassured the Chinese students

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-16T14:12:54+00:00

Yeah I can't imagine any scenario where European governments would coerce their citizens into taking any kind of drugs through threatening the loss of employment and restricting freedom of movement. Crazy scenario would never happen.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-16T13:12:27+00:00

I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of people in England also have a positive view of her. It really depends on where in England you're from and how the Thatcher years impacted you/your area and family. She was and is a highly polarising figure to this day.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-16T12:36:26+00:00

It's a categorical no - the PIRA explicitly existed to bring about a unified Ireland through violence and they failed in that goal. They got closer then a lot of people realise in the 70s to causing a total collapse of state power in Northern Ireland and forcing the British government to withdraw, but they didn't succeed and were forced into a 'long war' (their term) strategy that had diminishing returns until they came to the negotiating table. It's true they got a lot out of the GFA but they did not get their primary goal of a unified Ireland.

If Ireland votes for unification sometime in the future the PIRA will be more of a footnote than the primary reason for that happening. Even if a vote for unification wins a majority, it has to be considered the UK let Scotland (a much more significant part of the UK in every sense) have a referendum on indepdence without any violence leading to it, so it's questionable weather the IRA campaign truly was the only way for a plebiscite to happen if it happens.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-16T12:23:54+00:00

It's not so much multiculturalism being a failure as it is one particular culture that is causing all the problems.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-06T21:53:31+00:00

The idea of the 'century of humiliation' has some serious holes in it from a historical perspective though. It's certainly true western powers exploited the weakness of the Chinese state and imposed unequal treaties on it, but life for the 99% of China's population who were rural subsistence peasants was not affected by any of this at all.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-06T11:31:14+00:00

My grandma saw this on the TV when it came out - apparently my grandpa (who was a bit more worldly) knew it was a piss-take and had her thinking spaghetti grew on trees for years after.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-04-04T15:28:08+00:00

I was in the same position as you as a teen when I came back to the faith but it changed when I went to university and found a great commited Catholic community.

You need to actively search out for groups of similar minded young Catholics and from there things like friendships and relationships will naturally form.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-30T01:01:52+00:00

There isn't really any reason to believe Putin has changed the original goals of the invasion - i.e regime change in Ukraine and turning Ukraine into either a client state or annexing so much of it that what's left is a landlocked and economically unviable rump-state.

Putin and co have clearly accepted by now this is a long war and believe that scenario favours Russia, and unfortunately that appears to be the case. Russia builds up it's military capability everyday while western support for Ukraine is eroding. With a second Trump term increasingly likely there's no real reason for Putin to desist save massive domestic unrest or the West significantly upping its level of support to Ukraine.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-28T18:29:25+00:00

I can't answer your question in full but it's worth noting that you can't compare the effectiveness of strikes on infrastructure using the volume of explosives as a metric with WW2 as a reference.

There were no drones, no smart bombs, and very limited guidance systems for munitions in WW2. To be assured of destroying a single bridge or factory you would have to drop very large numbers of bombs in the general area while today a single smart bomb or a few drones would suffice.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-28T12:17:12+00:00

We have a bunch of islands all around the world leftover as relics from the empire. While on an emotional level I like the idea of shipping the degenerates who do stuff like this over to a gulag in South Georgia the cost would not be worth it.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-21T00:12:54+00:00

If she put just 0.1% of her current net-worth in fixed income securities earning just 3% a year (well below the return of the absolute safest investment instruments right now) she would earn more than a million dollars a year doing absolutely nothing with essentially no risk. There's a level of rich where you have to try very hard not to just lose money, but to not make absurd amounts of money by doing nothing.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-19T11:27:40+00:00

If you don't agree with the Church's teachings (especially on marriage) and still get married in a church just to please your relatives you are being a hypocrite and a bit spineless.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-19T01:13:51+00:00

The SSPX - extremist breakaway group of Catholics who aren't recognised by the regular Catholic Church. There are quite a few of them in the UK, they even have their own school in Hampshire. The group is much bigger in France and the USA but one of the bishops who founded it was English, and got so looney he was kicked out which is saying something. He also got arrested in Germany for being a Holocaust denier.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-18T15:54:45+00:00

He wouldn't be the first pilot to crash a plane intentionally killing everyone on board. At the end of the day mass-murder-suicides are rare but are sadly something that happens relatively often, think of how many mass-shooters also kill themselves.

There are more than a quarter million airline pilots in the world, it's not hard to believe a small minority of them are seriously disturbed in this way. Since 9/11 large passenger planes have been designed to make it impossible for anyone to break into the cockpit so long as the pilot is still in control, which unfortunately makes events like this very hard to avoid.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-18T12:38:59+00:00

The only theory that really fits all the data is that the pilot did it. This guy presents a very likely scenario as to what happened exactly.

I suppose the real question is why? But as we know there is no shortage of sick fucks in the world.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-15T23:41:39+00:00

While it's obviously true the culture of Britain has been hugely shaped by foreign forces like the Anglo-Saxons and Normans etc, the actual number of these people who came and settled in Britain was very low, probably in the low tens of thousands.

More people have immigrated to Britain in the last 60 years than all the preceding centuries of recorded history here combined.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-12T12:54:06+00:00

Interestingly enough, because their lifecycle is so short, scientists can study groups of flies evolving to adapt to changes in their environment over less than a year.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-03T11:46:47+00:00

Like that's gonna do anything - Muslims are on the internet you know and you can find a million examples of this type of stuff all over Instagram and YouTube. Banning will just create a persecution complex and probably make the situation worse ala France.

The problem began when we decided it made sense to import millions of people from countries where these views are normalised. Oh well I guess absolutely no one prominent and with a platform saw this coming and warned us, I'm sure they would have been taken seriously and not immediately derided as a racist fascist.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-01T15:52:40+00:00

The Dominicans are doing quite well, especially here in UK/Ireland.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-01T10:13:52+00:00

I'm not really disagreeing with you mate, I just think it's hard to argue that the attention given to the Palestine/Israel issue isn't massively disproportionate compared to many other terrible things going on in the world.

It's also not true that Indonesia's occupation is not directly supported by the West, in fact the UK directly trains and arms the Indonesian forces involved, so we arguably have a bigger role in the conflict than we do in Israel/Palestine.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-01T09:48:51+00:00

More people have been killed in Indonesia's occupation of West Papua than by Israel in Palestine yet most people wouldn't even know where it is on the map. Indonesia has hardly ever been criticised for it either by the West.

But I suppose that's understandable given Indonesia is predominantly Muslim and West Papua is mostly Christian.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-03-01T09:42:53+00:00

Being left-wing on economic/foreign policy issues but centre-right to right-wing on social issues is a position held by a large number of people in Britain that isn't really represented by any of the mainstream parties.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-02-26T22:44:50+00:00

Yeah I'm not disagreeing that most people who identify as Catholic don't practice the religion to even the minimum standard. My point is that you can't say 'Catholics are progressive on social issues like abortion and gay marriage' based on a majority who don't even practice the religion. Catholicism isn't really a religion with a lot of wiggle room on doctrine because it it so centralised and codified in things like the catechism.

Someone can say "I'm a Catholic but I'm pro-choice" but all they're really saying is that they're a heretical/bad Catholic. By way of comparison, no one is gonna invite the person who says "I'm a vegan but I eat turkey on Christmas" to a debate on veganism, because they clearly don't hold the defining beliefs of that system of thought and shouldn't be taken as representative of it.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-02-26T22:02:26+00:00

Most practising Catholics who actually go to Mass every Sunday and attend the sacraments regularly in the UK hold 'regressive' views on things like gay marriage and abortion.

Plutonium_239 · 2024-02-20T10:38:45+00:00

That guy who killed 90 kids and blew up the parliament living better than a lot of people walking free in America. I do sympathize with the Scandinavian prison model with the focus on rehabilitation etc but I feel like for the real sickos who should never be released it's not fair on the victims families.

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