If it can be said to ‘belong’ to anyone, it would be Turkiye. They decide who gets in/out and who doesn’t.

Beyond that, there are plenty of animal products that vegans refuse to eat even though taking them doest harm the animal or cost its life. Eggs, dairy or butter, etc.

You should do some research on what industrial scale dairy and egg farms are like. It’s not much better, and in some cases worse.

Common practices include:

• Throwing live freshly born male chicks into blenders

• Chickens being confined, thousands at a time, in small dark spaces where they spend all their lives. Often dying to wounds from fighting each other due to being kept in such unnaturally close proximity

• Due to a variety of tactics to maximize eggs per chicken, they often deplete their calcium, meaning they break their bones when attempting to stand

• Dairy cows often spend most of their ‘useful’ lives (4-5 years) in concrete boxes barely larger than their own bodies, head pointed to food, and grates behind where waste can flow

• The calves taken from dairy cows (necessary for them to begin lactation) end up in the same meat industry if male

• Dairy cows, once out of their prime, end up in the same meat industry

Relevant XKCD

It’s a high score for some of them. It’s not that they want any tangible benefit, they just want the most so they can say they’re the richest person.

They must be sociopathic in order to do this. They just don’t understand other people suffering in the same way the majority of us do (more of an abstract concept).

The hyperrich who don’t fall into these categories don’t stay wealthy for long. If someone lucks into this situation somehow, they’ll either get swindled, start using their wealth for causes they care about, or stop growing their wealth because they have enough. There are quite a few examples of benevolent millionaires: once you get to the billions, there’s none. Attrition removes all benevolence on the climb.

You’re 100% correct. I should have written “Taxation is only done by the individual member states”, quite right.

Taxation is done by the individual member states… for now.

Due to the creation of EU debt first for COVID, then for Ukraine the EU is going to need some way of paying it back sooner or later. Expect to see some Europeans lose their shit over the next decade at the inevitable federalization this will cause. Excellent news for federalists though.

Thank God they got this done before Bulgaria’s new PM assumed power.

Governmental messaging platforms. This video is about government workers.

Every time they do this, it gives cover to real antisemites to launder their hate. Attacks on Jews worldwide are going up in large part due to exactly this kind of insane hyperbolic rhetoric making the word antisemite lose all meaning, and therefore more difficult to combat.

It’s relative. It’s not exactly a reasonable, balanced position, but it’s more reasonable than the alternative which is clear and unambiguous war crimes, and possibly meets the criteria for genocide.

We knew what Trump’s policy was on the campaign trail:

On Iran, Project 2025 advocates a markedly more confrontational stance, denigrating diplomacy and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in favor of barely veiled advocacy for regime change.

She’d likely be another Biden: not directly assisting Israel in aggression, but too cowardly to call them out in any meaningful way.

Again, there’s a difference between complicity via silence, and complicity via an active bombing campaign. Neither is good by any stretch of the imagination, but the latter is clearly worse than the former.

There’s a difference between known liar Trump, who contradicts himself from one sentence to the next, and Kamala, who is a bog-standard politician. This is just a hypothetical of course, but I think it’d be incredibly likely that Kamala would have continued economically suppressing Iran via sanctions, maybe some half-hearted attempts at another nuclear deal, but would have had advisors presenting what military aggression would mean for the region (including the economic damage of them blocking the strait) to prevent her from pushing this far. She’d likely be another Biden: not directly assisting Israel in aggression, but too cowardly to call them out in any meaningful way.

Anyone with a functioning brain could see Trump was talking out of his ass on this topic, especially when project 2025 explicitly talks about waging a regime change war on Iran and assisting Israel in bombing Iran.

I’m no fan of Kamala, but vague gesturing towards stopping nuclear armament (it even says in that picture “diplomatic solution still preferable”) is different from a full mask-off declaration that they’re going to commit warcrimes.

I violently disagree with your whole worldview and wish to engage you in rigorous debate over a topic neither of us has any ability to actually change in real life.

Here is the rebuttal and deconstruction of everything that you believe:

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