Religion really isn’t about knowledge and Science really isn’t about personal moral and motivation, which is probably why (from what I’ve observed from the handful of Christian Scientists I’ve known), it only ever works well when they’re kept apart and neither is used in the domain of the other - it’s perfectly possible to want to “discover the wonders of God’s creation” and “be a good, moral person” at the same time as practicing Science as long as one does not believe that the words of the Bible are literal and actual “knowledge” in the Scientific sense.

“Studying” in madrasahs is literally just the rote memorization of a version of the Koran in a language that students don’t even speak and don’t get me started on just how Christian belief was so thickly weaved into medieval university teachings that being against the Aristotelian earth-centric view of the Universe was cause to be burned at the stake (the medieval times aren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing and during the time of Medival Universities Europe actually went back a lot on technology and scientific knowledge)

Having studied Physics at university level in a country which still back them had quite a bit of religiosity, I have come across a handful of people who were both true believer Christians and Physicists and the only way to manage it was basically to keep them apart except for the single point of contact which was “by discovering the wonders of the World, I’m discovering the wonders of God’s creation” which is not a logic link in any way form or shape, just an attempt at getting two very different perspectives to be side by side, never really touching.

Religion simply does not inform Science in any way form or shape (and vice-versa), not in terms of logic, not in terms of information or knowledge and not in terms of methods - at best some people manage to have personal motivations to practice Science include Religious motivations, but any actually “knowledge” they have from Religion does not feed through into their Science because it doesn’t obey even the most basic criteria to work (for starters, it’s just “belief” rather than actual measurable or at least detectable effects that could not be explained in any other way than divine intervention).

Religion is absolutely fine when it’s about how people feel, but it ain’t fine when it tries to intervene into the domain of Science: back in the Medieval times the most advance civilization was Arab and mainly Muslim (such as the Moors, who invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula) - they were the true inheritors of the knowledge of Ancient Greece and Rome - but at some point in the 15th century within Islam the idea that all that Man needed to know was contained in the Koran spread, hence why Madrasahs are “schools” were people rote learn the Koran and why those nations have been going back Scientifically and Technologically ever since.

They’ve been regularly bombed using American and British bombs for a decade or so, via Saudi Arabian planes, so the big difference is that this time around the Americans haven’t used a middlemen which you really can’t tell from below.

This probably explains the father’s reaction.

We leave our little donkeys to graze on the fields and grow up to become big donkeys.

We certainly don’t stick them with knives and forks!

They’re starting to reek of fear…

If you’re going to protest, cast a blank vote, if you abstain you’re just going to end up mixed with the “too lazy to vote” crowd.

Also, having maned voting booths in my own country a couple of times (I expect it’s not all that different in the US) writting stuff in the your ballot paper will just make a vote invalid and nobody will record or even care about you wrote there - maybe 2 or 3 people will see your words there while counting votes, but that’s it.

“yOu ShoULd hAve vOTeD FOr OuR BabY kiLLeR tO SToP ThE otHeR BabY kiLLeR!”

I use MullvadVPN and I almost always encounter this issue.

It probably depends on which server(s) you’re using.

Good luck getting the Trumpettes to understand that…

It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.

In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.

(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)

I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.

I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.

I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.

I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.

I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.

This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.

They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.

The 180€ Mini PC I have as torrenting server, NAS and TV Box (and it’s overkill for just that) says otherwise.

$300 will buy you a lot of Desktop PC nowadays if all you want is to browse the web and read emails (in fact that approx. $200 mini-PC of mine is more than enough if you’re running Linux on it as I do and if you add a simple monitor, keyboard and mouse you’re about $40 shy of $300).

A $300 PC is only shit if you’re trying to run things like AAA games on it or use Windows 11.

There used to be a point back in the day when you did need a good PC for things like document edition or watching videos, but now we’re well past the point where you needed anything more than the most basic PC for everyday stuff.

Those specific propaganda elements are widespread in the West and widelly repeated in the mass media even outside the US, so it’s useful to deconstruct all that for others when I am in a position to do so since that deconstruction of it will also alter their perception of other instances they saw which at the time they did not really spotted for what it really is.

Hopefully the pointing out the mechanisms used here to construct a highly biased image will even make the readers of the deconstructions of it such as mine be more resilient to other instances of the same techniques being used.

Further, how can we be sure that this poster is a propagandist sock-puppet and not just a normal person who got deceived by the modern (that relies on framing, qualifying and implying) style of propaganda and hence repeated it?

I think that all in all, it’s better to have these things and then just deconstructing them for all to see, than silencing them. Also on principle I’m very wary of Censorship.

I went to all the trouble of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy and propaganda not for “these people” but for everybody else.

EDIT: Wow, the previous poster totally changed their post that pretty much just outright repeated the traditional points of Zionist Propaganda on this as seen in most of the the Western Media (I should’ve kept a screenshot) into a response to my own post which just outright repeats traditional points of Zionist Propaganda (at least he’s consistent) but without the slick framing.

(Interesting technique to avoid that others are notified of a response and come back to counter it).

My original benefit of the doubt (that maybe he’s not a sock-puppet) seems to have been incorrect. My bad.

–

My original post below:

That shit starts by straight out quoting Zionist propaganda.

First the double standard:

Either they’re both Terrorist organisations for “attacking and murdering civilians” or one is a Resistance Movement and the other a Nation State. Claiming that the murdering of civilians to terrify the rest into complying with one’s political and economical goals is only Terrorism if some do it but not if others do it is absolutely taking a side and doing it quite extremely since “Terrorist” is a heavily loaded word.

Second:

The ever repeated Zionist propaganda that being against Israel is being against Jews hence it’s antisemitism. Is Hamas anti-semite (I.e. against Jews for being Jews) or is it against an occupier oppressor nation that takes their land and murders their children and is controlled by a subset of Jews? So far all indications are that it’s mainly the latter.

Also the double standard raises its face once again here as the Israelis aren’t being said to be anti-Islamic, which is funny give that even the Israeli press is extremely racist nowadays - curious that the alleged Racism of one side just had to be mentioned but not of the other side.

Third point:

That Israel responded as if there had been nothing else before. This is pure Zionist framing of this stage of a long ongoing conflict between a colonialist occupier and the native resistance. Israel started this shit, way back when the Zionist colonialists started stealing the land of Palestinians and expelling them or murdering the (the first peak of it being the Nakba).

If Israel was given the exact same treatment as Hamas in that text, it would have been described as “the Terrorist anti-Islamic colonialist invader”

Now, I’d like to think you’re just naively repeating the Zionist framing and propaganda that they so carefully spread in the West, in which case you might want to actually think about what you read before repeating it, as you’re parroting outright propaganda.

There are countries (such as the UK) were one of the main pathways for Tax Evasion for very rich people is to make a Charity or Foundation (in the UK case, you register it on one of the Channel Islands tax havens) to which one gifts the entirety of one’s income (the way it works for tax evasion in the UK is that the entire tax on the money given to said Charity or Foundation is sent to them by the UK State) and then that Charity or Foundation pays for all your living expenses.

Even better, such a scheme also works for evading Inheritance Tax - you just have to change who the controlling board member of said “Charity” or “Foundation” is and now the control of all that money is in the hands of the descendant(s), tax free even if the amount is high enough that inheritance tax would be due (so, for very rich people).

But that’s not even the most special part. The most special part is when some people who uses such tax evasion schemes boast very publicly that “I give all my money to Charity”, since most of the public aren’t aware of this scheme.