To clarify, I meant SE Asia as the region, and I was mentally comparing against Africa or the rest of Asia. It’s not the West, but Thailand and Singapore have legal gay marriage now.

Yes, it’s possible he was even more trash than usual.

By the standards of whatever Siberian village, the compensation and various bonuses (including after they die) these guys pull is insane. That how they’re convincing people to sign up for a war that’s both unpopular and nearly guaranteed to kill you. They could try massive conscription, but they’d need loyal people to enforce it or a guarantee it wouldn’t lead to regime change, and they have neither.

The Russian government is basically drawing down all the funds and infrastructure in the country to sponsor this war, and at some point here they’ll run out. I think I have 11 months left on my prediction of by when.

Do I dare ask about which part?

There’s pretty clearly 2 pyrotechnic events here. if you’re viewing it on a good enough screen.

Given camera movement, I suppose the “plane” could just be a cloud of smoke as well, that’s true. Like, maybe it started a rocket stage? Aren’t Shaheds slow and dumb, though? I don’t know why it’d need that.

Ah neat! So it’s a drone firing a drone to intercept a drone.

Edit: No, that’s a Russian craft.

Just allowing it. Previously, Ukraine was one of the countries that required citizens to surrender all other citizenships, or at least didn’t recognise them.

Kind of annoying they don’t say in the article.

So is that a plane at the beginning?

Has any place in the world ever been actively “flooded” with migrants of a vastly different culture in recent history?

Any place that borders a very culturally different country that has a massive crisis. They usually get banned from working and shoved in refugee camps, though.

But anyway,

Why are humans like this?

Probably stuff that happened in prehistory, some quirk of evolution. It’s definitely not rational.

He didn’t drop dead immediately either. Poor guy, should have stayed home.

The really successful religions and eventually empires just happened to be homophobic, so anyone conservative globally is likely to be homophobic.

It’s actually a pretty LGBT friendly region anyway, it’s legal in most of Indonesia, even, but they border Malaysia where gay stuff gets hard prison time.

Edit: As in, SE Asia is a relatively gay-friendly region, for whatever reason. It’s not because social conservatism is out of style.

Indonesia itself is meh. Better than Malaysia, worse than Thailand. And the Muslim part will cane you for it, per the article.

Arabia hasn’t been closely involved for a long time. Actually, I don’t know if it ever was or the someone like the Mughals were an intermediary, off the top of my head. It’s far away from the Middle East.

Religious conservatives gonna religious conservative. If you go back to ancient history sometimes they were fine with homosexuality, or even expected some amount, but that died out along the way. Because of the European empires, but only because they were more successful, so I wouldn’t blame Europe either.

Maybe it’s like the smoky tomatoes you can buy in cans?

Ah yes, pretending intransigence isn’t happening to stop different intransigence. Definitely a sustainable strategy, and definitely not part of why Hamas doesn’t trust US negotiators in the first place. /s

The short term plans have been shit like this. The long term “plan” has been slogans and platitudes. Repeat for decades and unsurprisingly it escalates to genocide. This has been the shame of the West in my lifetime.

Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.

He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.

Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.

This seems no more or less likely than before.