Tuuktuuk

Same here!

I guess that line is there. Either in the middle or as a part of the edge?

…and Iraq, true.

Though, at least Finland sent the absolute minimum to both of those shitstorms, and that only after being blackmailed by USA. But zero conscripts were sent to either one. Especially the shit about Iraq is something I am really angry about.

USA is only waging wars of aggression. It would be horrible forcing people to that shit, IMO.

In Finland or Germany it’s very different because our armies exist strictly for self defence. When the US military should see military action, is decided in D.C.

But when the Finnish military should see military is decided in Moscow.

If your wars are something you fan decide about, it would be extremely immoral having compulsory military service.

In countries that cannot decide when to not have a war, it’s immoral to not have compulsory military service, as that would mean only the poorest having to bear the brunt of the war.

Well, the purpose is to be denied by the foreign country. Or, to be accepted by it, depending on your perspective.

Typically your own country doesn’t (shouldn’t) care of shit about your passport, because according to the declaration of human rights, you are allowed to come and go to/from your country as you please. But other countries don’t have to give you that privilege.

(I do think they should have to, though!)

I think it does. At least I kept hearing “als ich mein Zivi gemacht hab” when I lived there. Most people elect to serve in the form of civil service instead, but civil service is a type of military service (as weird as that sounds).

But maybe it’s very easy avoiding the whole thing altogether? I don’t know all that precisely, really. My “military service” was done in the form of civil service in a children daycare centre by the time I moved to Germany. And I’ve never been a German citizen anyhow.

That’s a rather standard thing in any country with compulsory military service. Typically you get that done with right when you’re 18-year-old and then you’re free to travel.

In Finland it’s handled so that you cannot get a passport before you either finish your military service or have turned 30. That meant that when I wanted to travel with my brother outside the EU before they were 30, we were limited to countries such as Albania and Georgia that allow entry with just an ID card. (And also, had we wanted to destroy the climate by flying, we would have needed to fly the flight out from the Schengen area from some other country than Finland!)

You get to choose which country you serve your military service in.

After that, you are affected by the laws regarding military service that that country has. But not of the other one.

Imagine if this picture was taken in Ukraine. The church would have been bombed, because in the opinion of the Russia, churches are always a military target. Just like blocks of flats are.

If all MAGAts and people like the guy mentioned in the article were indeed to go to that place halfway between US and UK, I would be delighted! ❤️

The article says (even though, weirdly, between the lines) that the man had been spewing out anti-immigrant rhetoric and told that the flags are there to show that foreign-born people are not welcome on his island.

It’s not surprising that flags put by a person saying “I am putting these up as a form of showing the middle finger” are interpreted as being a form of showing the middle finger. Or in other words, causing alarm and distress.

I really wish someone could make a racing game akin to NFS II. The track design is incredible because they were able to completely skip all realism. Nothing ever since has achieved quite the same. Okay, Mario Kart and similar come kind of close, but what I really liked about NFS II was the combination of kind of serious cars, and absolutely exaggerated scenery.

It is, in some places and to some extent.

Until year 2009, the Berlin transportation’s rules said “Disturbing use of alcohol is prohibited in public transportation.” …meaning that non-diaturbing use was allowed. The new rule dropped the word “Disturbing”, meaning that the procedure is now no longer allowed.

But, the last time I was in Berlin, a few years ago, I was relieved to see that the tradition still lives on. I bet there are cities where it’s still outright allowed to this day! But even where it isn’t, it’s still being done.

Plus, people do drink their Feierabendbier in parks and benches. And often simply first thing after coming home. But Feierabendbier, the concept of drinking a bottle of beer ASAP after the end of your working day, is still alive and kicking indeed!

Feierabendbier!

That’s what happens en-masse in Germany in the early havening.

Everyone goes to a corner shop to buy a bottle of cold beer, enters the metro train, opens the beer bottle and drinks it in the metro on the way home.

There are a bunch of jokes in this game that I absolutely am not okay with.

Yeah, the whole point of the game is the main character being a horrible asshole.

But then, the game for example makes jokes about a black woman ending up a slave. She ends up as a slave not because the main character is being thoughtless. Yes, his actions affect the result, but it’s a pure coincidence he could not have reasonably predicted. The joke boils down to “look, we dare to be this inappropriate.”

Some of similar jokes could maybe read as commentary on horrible bigots who really do behave towards other people in the way the protagonist of this game does, because technically the bad things happen to those people because of the protagonist’s behaviour. But when the same things sometimes happen to them kind of “just like that”, it puts the rest of the jokes in a very different context: The developers of the game actually are making fun of the fact that black people were used as slaves or that women often experience sexual violence.

And then there’s also the transsexual who turns out to be the worst stereotype of a transsexual that a MAGA person ever could imagine. And, and, and.

Some of the jokes are kind of more neutral: At one point the protagonist needs to feed some ten-ish children to a monster, camouflaging them as hot dogs and covering them in ketchup and mustard. And then the children do indeed get eaten and the game progresses. I mean, okay, it’s super inappropriate in a way, but it’s not perpetuating hate speech. But a surprisingly large share of the jokes are punching at various minorities.

I’ve never seen as much bigotry in a game as I saw in the Deponia trilogy when I played through it.

Did she know back then what was coming?

It’s impossible that she would somehow not have known what was coming.