Years ago, I have read that Mongolian street children in the capital, Ulan Bataar, would intentionally steal to get arrested so that they would have a warm place to stay during the cold nights in Mongolia.

America has now stooped this low.

Well, all living beings came from a common primordial ancestor, so it makes sense that some features are shared.

I do think there is psyops to wedge the progressives and liberals. However, this benefits the blue MAGA nonetheless. The blue MAGA kept going on about the “lesser evil” and “perfect is the enemy of good” phrases. It occured to me that it is a thought terminating response from criticising the Democratic Party from actually being active to go further left in order to finally quash the far-right. Moreover, those phrases are also usually conservative phrases to convince people to accept the status quo. This make the Democratic party conservative. And the problem with conservatives is they would rather side with fascists, than to rein the ills of capitalism to keep the monied interests happy. The right and conservative parties in 1934 Germany elected to give Hitler absolute power while the left opposed it. Ninety years later in the US, which party allowed the GOP bill to gut welfare programmes? It is the Democrats with Chuck Schumer. Progressives have the last laugh over liberals/blue MAGA being wrong on “vote blue, no matter who” nonsense (although fascists indeed would like the left to have the last laugh before sending us to concentration camps). The Democrats would vote with MAGA regardless of whether or not they have the majority anyway!

I love Pocket! However, as what most people mentioned, there are too many articles to keep up. I have years worth of backlog.

TIL Pocket is owned by Mozilla. I thought they are partners.

I am not saying hate speech hasn’t had any role at all on what happened to Native Americans, but to my knowledge there wasn’t a deliberate and systemic call to eradicate Native Americans unlike with the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. A lot of native people and colonisers have initially gotten along, but many colonial conflicts happened because of neither misunderstanding or some trumped up cassus belli orchestrated by local colonial officials, which the central government may not know due to poor communications over long distances at the time. Even the Spanish crown have gotten appalled after learning what Christopher Columbus did to indigenous population in Hispaniola, which took a long time for Spain to find out because of long distance.

Again, I am not trying to say hate speech hasn’t had any role whatsoever on the genocide on Native Americans, but it is more complicated than that. Western colonisers still saw indigenous people as humans, but lesser if that makes sense. That’s why even for the Western Allies, the systemic hate speech and call to rid the Jews had been a step too far, even though they themselves own colonies.

Action comes from speech though.

There are plenty of things that are restricted from frivolous communication and nobody thinks twice about it. Yet when it comes to hate speech, it’s suddenly difficult.

Homophobia used to be accepted because society accepted it, but not anymore, at least in the West. The Holocaust happened because Germans at the time accepted it.

Ultimately, I think what is acceptable speech is down to morality, which many could argue whether morality is subjective or objective. And I don’t have time to argue for either because I am not a philosopher.

This is also the rationale to people defending Nazis because “it’s just their opinions”.

I find that it is mostly Americans who do this sort of thing because of exaltation of free speech. I don’t wish it would happen to the US, but it is primarily because they haven’t had much experience with inciting hatred that led to genocide. Other parts of the world have had this experience so they have restrictions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love free speech as much as the next guy, but as seeing how unbridled speech led to genocide in many cases, I used to be absolutist and now I am on the fence. I think free speech is something that will be perpetually debated. I was told the social contract could define what is acceptable speech and what isn’t; but society at times is not a great arbiter of many things.

I know guys who straddle the line, and I give the benefit of the doubt because they are simply confused and don’t know better. And then there is the Andrew Tate gang.

I don’t know where you reside, but can’t you write on the back of the envelope containing the letter with “return to sender”? In my country, this is what we do to notify the sender that the addressee no longer lives in the premise.

But people don’t experience attraction before puberty, right? How do they know what groups of people they’ll grow up to be attracted to?

Well, we all have crushes when we were kids, don’t you agree?

Edit: sorry if I sound like I am trying to put words into your mouth. What I mean is that some people already figure out what their sexuality is and whom they feel attracted to at early age. To whom you feel crush to at early age is an indicator.

Because Bernie knew the system is rigged against him and thus allowed neoliberals like Biden to have their way. Now that the DNC lost pathetically to an orange man, and the DNC leadership is enabling fascism, I don’t hear “vote blue no matter who” nonsense anymore. And Bernie and AOC have the last laugh and “told you so” moment to the DNC. Their tours are gathering record number crowds since Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Plenty of kids already know if they are gay or not. In my home country, I have had classmates in elementary school who are openly gay. Some cultures find it awkward to talk about it to children, whereas in some, tolerance and acceptance to lgbt is part of culture. I probably don’t need to mention about the concept and existence of third genders since the ancient times.

Now that I think about it, is she happy? Is she traumatised? Is she regretting? Is she laughing at the absurdity of it all?

The best kind of acting is where the face puts all kinds of emotions into one expression, making it too ambiguous to tell what the character really feels.

Depending where you are, there are tax benefits to legally married couples.

If cost is an issue, you can have cheap wedding. But I think the concern is more cultural in which there is an implicit expectation to have a grandiose wedding, like in a church and have a huge gathering and party with dozens if not hundreds of attendees.

You will realise that many people are too egotistic to back down.

You are quite right. There is a tribe in East Africa which makes a hole on their lower lip and place a huge disk into it. It is theorised that the practice started to prevent lockjaw disease that may have been prevalent in the area eons ago. I am not sure how this prevents lockjaw but maybe for them it works.

The only good thing that came out of the Trump tariff is the volatility index going up!

I heard that Americans prefer Irish beef.