Vapes enjoyed a fuckton of marketing from people proudly proclaiming “There is no proof that these new things cause cancer!” Followed by a decade of company funded “Nuh-uh!” ambiguous refutations and lobbying campaigns to kill any kind of contrary studies.

Like, I get the impulse to say “No duh”. But I doubt you’re listening to a congo line of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson ad men telling you that vaping is the safest, bestest, most liberating way to consume your drug of choice.

Just admit, like all people who smoke cigarettes do, that it’s bad for you

I still know people who insist smoking isn’t bad for you. Typically with some kind of “Actually, oranges and swimming pools kill more people than cigarettes do, so it’s no big deal” rejoinder. It’s genuinely maddening.

The cancerous chemical company said this one wasn’t proven to cause cancer. Who was I supposed to believe?

Besides, without cancerous smoke packets, I’d still be using cancerous smoke sticks. Are you saying I should still be using the sticks? You freak. Those things cause cancer!

Greater Israel is fully predicated on the US backstopping its existence, both politically and militarily.

Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and now I guess Syria all align with Israel due to an enormous American boot on their collective necks. As soon as that weight is seen to lift up, you’re going to get a full blown Congolese War between the various tin pot dictators and aristocratic despots.

Israelis simply don’t have the manpower to control more territory. Their plans to settle the West Bank and Gaza are heavily predicated on damned near every Jew left on earth moving into their domain. And even then - so many of the Israel Jews hate one another, hate their Christian neighbors, hate their Arab co-conspirators, and hate their European financiers. This isn’t sustainable in any material way. Not without the world’s largest economy propping them up.

Going to enjoy reading this article every week for the next 20 years.

the fall of multiple fictional empires

Appropriate, since we’re talking about Isn’trael.

You’re describing Revelations Jesus. And by the time he finally shows up, all the killing’s been done by the Fake Jesus that’s tricked legions of people into damnation.

This is also the only Gnostic text that made it into the canonical texts. If you get into the actual Gnostic beliefs about Jesus, you’re on a rollercoast ride of spiritualist philosophy bordering on the Sci-Fi. Alternate dimensions, shared souls, astral projection, just all sorts of weird goofy shit that the Council of Nicea cut from the program.

Revelations is, at its heart, a story of how Rome and its pagans will all eventually get what’s coming to them. That the Christians-Who-Are-Doing-It-Wrong will get what’s coming to them. That the Jews will get what’s coming to them. It is a story wildly out of line with the prior books, but one that resonated strongly with the post-Constantine neo-Christian order.

You want to start a genocide?

We’ve been sponsoring or engaged in genocide in the Middle East since the Nakba of '48. Trump’s just doing it badly.

Retribution for what?

Fighting back.

Not immediately kowtowing to the wounded narcissist?

Practically since Reagan, it has been crazy to see how many times the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has done exactly that. The Ayatollah worked with Rumsfeld. He worked with Bush. He worked with Obama. He worked with Trump the first time. He worked with Biden. It’s amazing how many times Iranian leadership could be bought off with the promise of sanctions relief or was willing to turn the other check in the face of a political assassination or a stuxnet computer virus or a frigate seizure.

Whipped dogs rolled over less frequently than the Iranian government, until we straight up started putting bullets into the heads of their senior leadership. Now the only people left to run the country are the real, actual, not-fucking-around revolutionary diehards.

👏 Rules 👏 Based 👏 International 👏 Order 👏

I mean, that’s not wild on it’s face. You can explain shifting morality with respect to changing material conditions and social relationships.

I might argue that the Old Testament God was intended to offer leverage to the intelligencia (priest class) over the military/aristocracy (kings and their courtiers).

Meanwhile, the New Testament was fundamentally describing a God of Slaves, preaching equinimity and grace in the next life for the hardships of the modern day.

And then, when the slave class overthrew and supplanted the Pagan aristocracy, suddenly the Old Testament was back in fashion again.

It makes sense historically

No no no. That was the Old Testament which doesn’t count anymore.

The New Testament is the one that we care about (except we’ve we don’t)

An allegation

Everything the Trump cult does is to cut off our balls.

You know, there are ways of undermining US socio-economic hegemony without killing millions of people.

I’ll never get the BlueMAGA head who looks at American GOP-lead fascism and insists that the real victims of it are Americans.

This, while we’ve got multiple genocides occurring on our watch.

Absolutely sickening.

If Trump is the cause of America’s destruction, perhaps its deserved. He’s not an agent of Putin, he’s an agent of Karma

Glad to hear it. Was playing that game just last night.

Lots of fun, but it’s still very rough around the edges with the interface, the visuals, and the single player campaign.

Jesus christ how long until they just fire up the gas chambers and skip this song and dance of a trial

We past that point ages ago. This is a purely procedural motion to legitimize the de facto summary executions and extrajudicial murders already happening in the field.

IDF thugs have been bombing emergency vehicles, demolishing every source of potable water or edible food, and wounding children in order to lure adults out of hiding with their cries for help going back… straight to the Nakba of 1948 if we’re being honest. But it really took off in 2018, during the first peaceful March of Return. Then it accelerated enormously after Oct 7th.

Anyone Israelis have captured since then has been brutalized solely for military intelligence and propaganda. Executing them is a matter of course. There’s a case of a one-year-old being tortured in order to extract information from his father, for instance. Palestinians who leave Israeli custody have often been so maimed and abused that they die within a few days or weeks of release. This is deliberate. Their executions would have been a formality at best.

America: “We’re going to destroy Iran once and for all”

Creates Iranian Singapore

You don’t even need to go back 81 years. The post-war Germans were also horrifyingly antisemitic for decades. It wasn’t until the late stages of the Cold War that the German Christian Democrats felt the need to clean up their own rotten reputation and rebrand as zealously pro-Zionist. Curiously enough, this was just about the same time anti-Muslim bigotry was coming into vogue, and anti-semitism accusations could be leveraged to denounce Middle Eastern government leaders sitting on large oil reserves.