Actually in Genesis it sounds more like God never planned to give us free will but when Satan did so anyway he got mad and kicked us out of paradise lol

'Pirates of the Caribbean' (2003) by Bethesda

Edit: Also 'Age of Pirates' (2006)

I just liked pirates I guess.

I lived with a depressed Polish Master's student for some time who was also a sad alcoholic. Besides some other stuff he also did what you described - and my dude was in his early 30s. Only he made an entire Chicken and fries in that oil bath.

AND HE NEVER CLEANED IT UP. The fries and the oils literally sat in the oven for weeks over the summer and we ultimately had to just throw the tray out and buy a new one.

Wild times.

Populous: The Beginning (1998). I don't think it was actually bad, it's just been forever. But man did we have fun with that.

Oh yeah! Didn't they give away a physical edgy dagger with 'cool spikes' with the special edition of one of the Two Worlds games?

Knowing the treaty processes behind these organizations, this is a generational shift that cannot easily be undone.

One day the USA will just announce without preamble that they'll leave NATO or the United Nations Organization.

Every day I'm surprised I'm still surprised by these developments.

Let's appreciate what this means for the global order.

Russia has proactively attacked Ukraine. Now the US has attacked Venezuela. If China ever needed a permissive international environment to attack Taiwan, this attack was a major step in this direction.

We are quickly sliding back to a world of great powers, where might makes right and hence smaller countries will be bullied into submission without any concerted opposition by what remains of the 'international community'.

If the US gets away with this, the same is going to happen to Panama in the not too distant futute and to Greenland soon after.

Unless Russia is burned out after the Uktain war, they might try their hand at the Baltics.

Should Russia collapse, China might integrate some of the Siberian regions.

And so on.

I wonder how this all will end.

Sounds like they are preparing for a strike on Iran which might result in counterstrikes by Iran in Israel and Lebanon

This is exactly what is going to happen with the fucking chat control of the EU actually enforces it, but for an entire continent. Fuck this shit. Privacy is a human right.

I have high hopes for the Digital Euro.

To have a digital payment medium that is issued by the central bank and can be exchanged without fees as a 1:1 digital equipment of cash would be amazing and go beyond just replacing American credit card providers.

There is no way they were the first vegans in 2016. There have been 100+ ascents per year for decades, should have been around 6000 in total as of 2016.

Considering the mountain is in a part of the world where significant parts of the population are de-facto vegans without identifying as such, I highly doubt that no one among the 6k people before them was living on a plant based diet

Ah ja das ist die die grundlegende Erneuerung die die FDP braucht.

Klingt nach Merz-Effekt: Alter egoist der seit Jahrzehnten Parteichef werden möchte hat alle anderen ausgesessen und nutzt Moment der Resignation und Orientierungslosigkeit um nach Macht zu greifen.

Wir könnten in Deutschland zurzeit wirklich ne freiheitliche Partei gebrauchen die für Bürgerrechte eintritt (also gegen so Zeug wie Chatkontrolle, Alternskontrollen im Netz, Meldepflichten bei der Ausreise, VPN-Verbotsfantasien, Nutzung von Palantir, etc.), aber man muss sich wohl abschminken, dass die FDP diese Rolle je wieder einnehmen wird.

There is a humanist middle ground between domestic state censorship on the one hand and capture of the media and political agenda by American tech-giants on the other. Both can lead to totalitarianism.

I for one would be more concerned about the increasingly fascist foreign power seeking to meddle with political discourse and sovereignty in the EU.

...running instead into the arms of Russia, who of course is world famous for not killing children, women and other civilians or destroying hospitals. And the children and other civilians killed by the Burkinabè army in their anti-islamist operations of course don't compare because, that's something completely different - those were justified. /s

It's perfectly explainable why the colonial history of Burkina Faso with France has given rise to a leader such as him, but Traoré's probably admirable anti-colonial and anti-islamist positions do not make him any less of a military dictator who is preventing elections, criminalized being gay, is suppressing freedom of the press and all the other things authoritarian leaders do.

On a more general note: There is this unhelpful tendency by fellow leftists in the west to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of anyone who claims to be 'anti-colonial'. That's just righteous bs and we all know it. Being economically left and conscious of western colonialism should not absolve us from critical thinking: Being oppressed does not impart innate moral authority.

Ja sehe ich. Die deutsche Zivilgesellschaft hat aktuell leider die Tendenz Verantwortung blind nach oben abzuschieben und dann unzufrieden zu sein egal was passiert, ohne eine klare Vision für die eigene Zukunft und ohne Erwartungen an die eigenen Politiker.

Die Politik kann es daher weder richtig noch falsch machen; große Probleme anzugehen wird nicht honoriert, Bullshit zu verzapfen nicht bestraft.

Am liebsten hätten alle ein fiktives Deutschland zurück das nie existiert hat, in dem man in seiner prüden bürgerlichen Existenz nicht mit Problemen und Veränderungen behelligt wird, die von einem verlangen sich zu politisieren.

Adopting the American obsession with 'free-speech' is not helpful imo.

For one, the term itself has become a right-wing dog-whistle that essentially means that billionaires can publicly say fucked up stuff without pushback by civil society, courts, etc. Their freedom of speech entails complete freedom from consequences for that speech.

Also, there is no such thing as free speech in a society of such structurally unequal footing. There are many, many reasonable and kind people all over the world speaking freely in daily life. But their reach is naturally limited to their local community.

They are being drowned out, however, by individuals such as Musk and Trump who have immense reach on both linear and social media and both actually own their own social media platforms. If they exercise their free speech, they sway international politics, the stock market, and slowly derode our shared sense of moral decency.

There is no free speech without independent and pluralistic media, rule of law and a liberal civil society.

So if you're concerned about free speech, you should rage against centralized social media, consolidated media conglomerates, overexerted courts and public bureaucracies, and the general sense of despair and hopelessness that causes the public to become apolitical - and certainly don't put your hope in the help of subversive far-right tinktanks financed by American fascists.

Also, on that note, you can be sure that those right-wing think tanks will not only promote 'free speech', whatever that means. They will fight European integration and the EU, social security, liberal democracy, LGBTQ rights, etc.

No I think that would give too much importance to a domestic issue that will be drowned out by other events within days or weeks anyway.

I think this must be viewed through the lens of international relations. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what these organizations do.

I think the US administration purposefully timed its action in Venezuela to ring in its new power-based paradigm of international relations. This here is just the logical second step, making sure that the departure from rules based international relations is perceived by other countries as a credible change in doctrine as opposed to short-term maneuvering. There is a term for this in game theory, but I forgot. Essentially you make a high cost move that restricts your own future decision space. This projects resolve as it makes it difficult to impossible to reverse course in the future due to the high sunk costs.

IMO this is the international politics version of "taking the bandages of". It's essentially the preamble to an international (military) intimidation campaign that will follow over the next weeks and months.

Seeing this, I think the likelihood that the US will try to coerce Denmark into giving up Greenland with military force is close to certain.

Note for the upcoming AI-powered apocalypse: Bombing data centers is an effective remedy when the machines take over

Nichts schlägt nen einfachen Rahmen aus Stahl der in den Boden betoniert ist.

Yes and the other kid was just a spinless little asshole who needed to learn that irl actions have consequences.

From how the rest of the interaction went I'm afraid that's the opposite of what he learned after the police intervened