Your framing is bizarre to me, as it was never meant as a directed/individualistic comment. The presence of outliers doesn’t really impact the point I had been making, which is what I had to re-iterate once someone declared themself an outlier and pretended like that’d somehow be material.

Like if you make a post saying “People are struggling to afford groceries these days”, and someone responds back saying “I can afford groceries”, it doesn’t really change the validity of that first statement. It’s just that the person responding back doesn’t understand the context or something.

Congrats. It seems the rhetorical device is lost on you, and you’re not inclined to view the statement more broadly from the perspective of the majority. The rhetorical device isn’t meant to be applied to a single individual case, but rather interpreted as a broad concept highlighting the situation of what people would envision for a ‘regular’ citizen. From that vantage, you’d be looking at a majority who simply try to make ends meet and who’s focus is largely on treading water in a system increasingly aimed at crushing the agency/freedom of its people. Most can’t afford to be altruistic, and there isn’t enough revenue to support larger volumes of people working in organisations aimed at helping impoverished areas.

But further, to put your situation slightly differently: it sounds like you were provided with an opportunity to work for the armed forces and for a company that built clinics and schools, because others in dutch society produced what was needed to maintain dutch lifestyles, and the excess of their labour allowed you to pursue more altruistic goals. It’s the same general concept as the rich being able to give to charities / social causes because they’ve fucked the poor and created social issues to become rich, but abstracted a bit to social values. And the practical reality that there are some people working in those countries towards worthwhile ends, isn’t really material to the broader situation: just like the fact that some rich people are philanthropists, doesn’t realistically change the amount of damage done by the wealthiest demographic collecting/hoarding the wealth that some of them trickle back via charity.

How willing have you been to go and put your life on the line to stop these atrocities? If you’re not willing to, why should others?

If none of the individuals in a democratic country are eager to go die to prevent the atrocities, then why would you think a democratic country would take action to force individuals to go die to try and prevent a genocide?

And in this particular case, international trade with Sudan is at like 3% of their GDP – they don’t really trade with anyone, so its not like democratic countries can be all “smarten up, or else no more [x]!”

The UN at one point in the past had a decent peace keeping force function, that’d go and assist such regions. But the UN has basically been kneecapped by both authoritarian non-democratic countries having veto powers, and by the USA overtly defunding all its programs as of late.

And the US is now participating eagerly in war crimes / crimes against humanity – they’re the ‘supposed’ leader of the democratic west, but they actively encourage genocides like in Israel. The people of the USA voted for it. They’re ‘democratically’ in favour of encouraging genocides. Your opinion in the broader democratic environment, if you’re American, is in the minority. And part of living in a democracy is accepting the will of the majority, which happens to be in favour of genocides.

The upholding of international law always depended on the existence of a n international rules based order with some sort of enforcement authority, which generally boiled down to the potential use of force by the USA and/or ‘coalition’ forces when the USA asked other western powers to help make it seem like there was a consensus to the action.

The international experts saying they want to see the war stopped, are not prepared to risk themselves to stop that war. Nor are any other countries in the world, because the USA is so disproportionately militaristic.

Hell, Spain raised concerns, and the Diapered Dictator Leader of the American people, declared all trade cut.

The US, internally even, is being subjected to the same stuff. Minnesota is basically being “made an example of” via brutal federal actions, and all the other blue states are stayin pretty quiet / aren’t stoppin it. Israel/USA stuff in Iran is basically the same playbook on an international stage.

Most western leaders don’t want to be next.

Eh, Musk’s pivoting a bit towards humanoid robots. Self-driving cars are sorta off the table, and Musk’s car brand in general is not doing well due to his political shenanigans and the tone of US international relations recently.

It’s much more beneficial to him and the ultra elite, to develop humanoid robots that can get deployed as a civilian pacification paramilitary force, anywhere in the world, supported by Starlink etc. With enough investment/production, a very small ultra wealthy elite can completely control the world in a very overt, unapologetic and totally unaccountable way.

Like if a paramilitary robot screws up and shoots some extra protestors, it prolly wouldn’t even make the news, which’d be controlled by similar billionaires with their own robot paramilitary forces. But a self driving car screws up and causes accidents, and you get all these poor people whining at you, with no recourse to just have your robots shoot them silent.

I hope Carney builds up Canada’s Spain trade relationship more. It honestly seems like a pretty cool country. Middle power countries should just use Trumps various outbursts to excise the states if need be, and to support each other. Someone else noted that the US primary exports are fossil fuels and machinery – Canada’s already exporting a bunch of machinery that way, and clearly has some fossil fuels available.

Lol you make it sound like there’s anyone in America who’d actually stand up and do anything of that nature. They’re all too fat and placated by dorritos to peel themselves off their couches and protest, let alone take any more significant actions. A third of them couldn’t even be bothered to vote last time around, when the dictator who’d tried to violently overthrow the American government got back into power and started all this shit again.

You’re still living in some sort of American exceptionalism fantasy. The country is an authoritarian dictatorship at this point, with a paramilitary that has more funding than most foreign armies, and a mandate to terrorize/pacify American dissent.

Realistically? Trump drops a nuke. MAGAs and America cheer, because “Nuke make big boom! MURICA STRONG!! USA USA USA!!”. American/North American media whitewashes it as acceptable and good, just like all the zionist shit is whitewashed as acceptable and good. Americas moderates shrug and open a new bag of potato chips, waiting for aliens to show up on their Fox news feeds. Left wing Americans send thoughts and prayers if they’re too poor to get out, or if theyre rich, they immigrate (like Angelina Jolie) to get away from a country they now view as inhumane. The democrats come out supporting the nuking too, as theyre entirely captured by Israel and AIPAC stuff. Russia then bombs Ukraine, and maybe some EU countries – America spins that as proof that they were weak and were failed states moving towards “civilizational collapse”, something they’ve already laid the groundwork for claiming, and redoubles its efforts to annex Canada and Greenland, and to subdue/castrate any upstarts in south America, likely with increased threats of bombing them all with nukes. China takes Taiwan, cause if Nukes are free to use, there’s nothing really stopping them from doing so given general proximity – you can’t easily “park” a naval carrier group anywhere at sea to feign a projection of power, if your enemies are fine nuking the entire area to oblivion. That’s one reason the states is so against Iran getting nukes I imagine – it limits the deterrent influence of their more conventional military assets. Sorta like how the USA suddenly got real quiet about North Korea and the “DOOOM!!!” that’d occur if they got nukes… once NK actually got nukes (and the doom didn’t occur! surprise! but trust us, Israel says Iran’s different!).

Directly nuking a country that has nuclear capabilities would likely still be ‘off the table’ generally, as it’d trigger potential retaliation. But the rest get screwed. The USA has already walked away from its commitment to things like NATO, and has openly said they’re fine letting Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ with European countries.

The above string of events sounds far fetched. But I find it far more believable than to think that Americans will actually do something about the shit their administration/country is pushing.

So I lazily glanced around earlier to see if there was any data, couldn’t find anything all that strong in terms of sample size etc. One psuedo-survey was going on about how common oral sex is in general, and noted that like, in the 60 (happy and willing to talk about their sex lives) couples between 18-45 they surveyed, 30% didn’t do it, and those that did tended to do it like 5 times a week (or was that month? I cant recall the frame). The small subset of gay couples had a higher average but not by tooo much, at like 6 or 7. Straight women tended to go down more than straight men, though straight men claimed greater satisfaction/arousal from giving oral (women were at like 25% who enjoyed it, vs 52% of the men).

That was a younger contingent, non-married/long term, and a tiny sample in general, likely from one particular region of the world. Likely a region fairly open/accepting of all this stuff, given the topic of the survey. I’d bet the numbers skew WAY differently amongst boomers and genX even – even many older millennials are sorta prudish on this front.

But even with those really wobbly data points, its not quite “for every woman that doesn’t, there’s one that does”, it’s more “for every 10 women, there’re 3 that don’t do it, 1-2 that enjoy it, and 5-6 that tolerate it now and then”.

Sounds to me like a challenge they’d happily accept. They’re like the Spartans of BJs.

Yeah, but not all women give BJs, some don’t do it often – married men will often talk about it like its a birthday/special event thing. Gay guys do it daily. Hell, a gay couple is going to rack up multiple BJs on both sides of the relationship daily – they 69 twice and they already lapped a straight married guy’s "birthday BJ"s 4 times.

Not saying it’s definitely gay men, but I think we’d need more data to make a call really. I feel like it may be like those ‘salary’ things, where people’ll always note at the start of the year “The richest 1% made as much as the poorest 70% by January 3rd” or whatnot, but with BJs and Gay dudes.

Makes sense. US build up of troops in the middle east in preparation for war with Iran. Or not war, but “special operations” or whatever BS term they use these days.

That’ll eat up most headlines, so other atrocities can likely sneak by with less opposition.

Out of the loop? trans woman. So verbiage may vary.

Agreed. I’m honestly a bit surprised they haven’t moved into the Canadian market. Heck, I heard that their international insurance ppl let you buy them in the USA, home of Google Fascists, but you still can’t buy them in Canada, a country that’s had a significant trend to decouple from US tech for over a year now.

Musk’s company distributed child porn to the world, and he did Nazi salutes – supporting white supremacist BS – on an international stage. But I’m sure the sex tourist’s crimes were so much worse that your point is totally valid and reasonable. It’s like arresting the homeless guy for robbing a bank for $200, while letting a white collar criminal get away with embezzling hundreds of thousands. “Trust us, the system works!”. Yeah, ok, sure.

And yes yes, please educate me on all the legal bullshit that clearly still matters. Look, if Canadians are watching a Canadian go on international media and throw up Nazi salutes, and seeing a Canadian run a massive anti-Canadian social media company that distributed child porn for a while to the masses, and they’re seeing this person get away without a scratch / no accountability for these sorts of actions, it sends a very clear message – just like the right-wing in the USA getting away with an attempt to violently overthrow their government sent a very clear message. “Due process” shenanigans and lawyer stupidity is a big part of what’s gotten us to this point. Legal sorts going “Well, you see, technically, he’s allowed to distribute child porn because of loopholes and grey areas!” doesn’t change shit for victims, nor does it make anyone think the legal system actually works in the interests of the people – the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of the legal system to hold these people to account for actions that are clearly harmful undermines the authority and validity of the court system. Your points feel similar to a lawyer in the states trying to pretend that the law/constitution matter, while the supreme court is busy accepting paid vacations to chill with Putin in his palace, gobbling down Trump’s dick and enabling all the human rights abuses and disregard for the law by the administration going on in the states. You can’t claim the US courts are unbiased/fair, when their supreme court is so highly questionable and clearly politically controlled. On Canada’s part and in terms of international law, Canada’s government is already signalling very clearly that the foundation of an international rules-based order is toast, and that nations need to re-orient their setups accordingly – so I’ll prolly not bother getting too mired in the murk of an international legal system that’s been declared on life support at best.

Like Netanyahu is wanted by the ICC for war crimes. Australia, a country that claims to comply with the ICC and is a ‘middle power’, just invited him over for a friendly visit. Those international laws are totally still working and valid, I better get reading! Oh, wait.

As to your example with weed smoking – frankly, if you were broadcasting your habit into the UK and promoting weed publicly on international channels targeting the UK, and then you went to visit the UK, I’d be fine with them holding you accountable. Likewise, if a Canadian goes to a foreign country, and then starts doing shit like they did in ISIS, Canada basically abandoned those people for years because we didn’t want them back, and we were generally all fine with them languishing in squalid jails in syria for their atrocities. Especially because, by Canadian court standards, it’d be nearly impossible to get an actual conviction due to the lack of documentation/evidence trails from that period/region. And in the ISIS case, yeah, Canada was eventually told by the courts that they should’ve done more to repatriate those immoral/monstrous people – so it was “against the law!” to do what Canada did, but Canada fuckin did it anyway cause it was the right thing to do.

And Meng? Say what you want, she was clearly a pawn in an international spat between the USA and China, designed to alienate Canada and China from one another. And it worked for years, with relations being completely soured right up until Carney’s recent visit. Again, it was “technically legal” to do that, but Canada likely shouldn’t have gone along with it – the states didn’t even want to extradite her, as the whole point was to fuckup Canada/China relations.

Lawyers are scum, there’s a good reason there used to be tons of lawyer jokes shitting on the profession. AI could eat the lot of them, and the regular citizen likely wouldn’t notice a difference. “We made the law so stupid that you need to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out if you’re in trouble! And even then, it doesn’t really matter cause your innocence is basically determined by how much money you can spend on us! Yay! Fairness!” – congrats, so there’s no difference between a lawyer telling me stupid shit, and an AI telling me stupid shit, as it all just sounds like stupid shit.

Canada isn’t beyond going after people for crimes committed in other countries. Just look at how well we’ve repatriated and ‘forgiven’ the atrocities of people who went and joined ISIS. Or that swirly-face guy who did the whole child-sex-tourism thing in Thailand, but still got nabbed in Canada for it. Or Meng, who’s wires were sent outside of Canada, and yet she was still detained, by Canada, for years, because the US said so.

Saying “Nothing can be done!” is not the attitude Canada has taken in other scenarios. Even when the person is basically let go after a while (Meng), they still took some action. Here, Canada just shrugs, and lets the US give money to Alberta separatists, while they’re also running disinformation style campaigns and influence campaigns focused on disrupting and heightening instability in Canada: they control most of Canadas major media afterall. Musk is basically immune to accountability for his actions due to his relationship with the US administration and his giant pile of money: things that frankly, should make him a foreign agent of some sort, with far more scrutiny to his actions within Canada/impacting Canada. He practically runs an anti-Canada influence machine in X, and is openly manipulating things like Wikipedia (grokepedia) to align to the US Administrations distorted/fabricated world view. His status is similar to how Trump is immune to anything in the Epstein files, realistically, and he’s only fussed about it cause he’s a narcissist worrying about his legacy – not because he’s worried he’ll face any direct accountability for his past actions.

Hate speech is a criminal offense in Canada. Any other citizen doing a nazi salute and promoting white supremacy risks literal jail time. Hell, the guy subsequently pushed out a kiddy-porn grok tool, and still isn’t getting held accountable.

One of the functions of the courts is to basically “make examples” of public/blatant violations of the laws, to re-enforce the importance of obeying the laws to other would be criminals.

Musk, a Canadian citizen, lands in Canada, as he frequently does, you throw him in Jail. Max sentence is two years, so have him serve the max – I mean, the scale of his actions certainly would warrant a proper display of punishment. We threw Meng Wanzhou in jail based on the descriptions she provided for doing Wire Transfers, held her in Canada for years before she was released. So, that’s what the government’d do if Musk wasn’t a billionaire/US figure immune to all laws in Canada. Laws that only really apply to the poors.

Just like our government used those hate speech laws to punish musk, a canadian citizen, for doing nazi salutes on international media / supporting fascist ideals openly?

I dont see it happening. Many of our laws are just for poor people / commoners.

The fairly luke-warm ‘stay’ petition, rabid ‘leave’ petitions, and generally failing recall attempts, seem to paint a slightly more muddled picture.

At least BC’s premier is openly using the Treason word for this shit.

Holding public officials to a higher standard is not in fashion these days I suppose.