The US is normally the country that bombs the middle east but in Aleppo it was almost exclusively Russia and the Assad regime that did the bombings. Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent Turkey) were the ones who sponsored ISIS. The US for once actually sponsored the relatively good guys in the conflict by backing the AANES (“Rojava”).

This is not to say that the US had any moral reasons to choose the AANES. It was strictly geopolitics but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

InkScape.

I don’t fully know why but vector graphics just work for me in a way that pixel graphics don’t. I love fiddling with vectors.

Socialism is when the workers directly own their workplaces. While there are strains of socialism that view government ownership of businesses as an indirect form of worker ownership, they only view it as socialism if the government also abolishes the profit motive from those businesses.

Corporate welfare is a form of state/planned capitalism. Private ownership, profits and internal organizing; with the state being the main (or only) customer and also the party that takes on all the risks.

Capitalism is when there is a capitalist class that owns the means of production in order to extract surplus value, and a working class that uses the means of production in order to create value.

The truest capitalism would be a society where one individual owned everything and everyone else had to work under that individual.

Capitalism does not care - and never has cared - about people’s ability to buy stuff. That’s why market crisises happen. It’s the result of capitalists taking more than the workers can afford to lose.

There have been times when the capitalist class has cooperated with the demands and needs of the working class. That’s called a mixed economy, and as the name suggests, it’s a compromise between capitalism and socialism and therefore far from “true” capitalism.

The “minimum support threshold” for Germany’s MMP voting system is 1% of the voters. Without even taking things like gerrymandering and strategic voting into account, the threshold for a first-past-the-post system like in the U.S. is often well over 40% of the voters. An absurd difference.

Sure, MMP is not perfect. No system is. But it’s extremely much better than FPTP.

That is not a proportional system of representation.

No system that creates a large amount of election “losers” can ever be fully democratic. If you vote for the second most popular party, or the third most popular, et cetera, you should still be given representation.

I was thinking TurboQueef but that works too.

Normally I get angry at these pathological liars but this lie is so absurdly stupid that it’s actually funny.

Imagine someone driving their van to a parking lot near the white house and then going “Welp, better strap on my suicide nuke that will obliterate the entire city. I see no other way of doing this.”