I don’t even know what Mastodon looks like and I don’t know who the guy is, but I’m just assuming he’s lying because it sounds like the usual “crazy pronoun libs” dog whistle.

The Egyptians have Ramses

Uh? Ramesses was human - all 11 of them were. Egypt has the likes of Ra, Osiris, Anubis and so on, who I don’t think are particularly tyranical in their stories.

For China, the actual mythology stuff is a lot of creation myth, but they do have a few stories about a divine emperor crushing an army of demons, and it turns out a lot of that is actually about conquering less developed, more nomadic cultures to unify China (Japan pretty much did the same, creation myth then crushing foreign demons that are actually literally foreigners not under their rule). And then there’s the whole mandate of Heaven that they used to justify dynasties rising and falling, mixing up history into myth, that began when a government that started well ended up being seen as tyranical after a few centuries (the Shang, ending with Zhou and Daji).

Older, more primordial mythologies just start at world creation myth, and then talk about humans figuring out how to settle the land, and how the universe works. Mesopotamian cultures mostly focus on defeating the forces of nature, which does involve standing up to violent gods or monsters, but that comes from trying to build up a civilization that can survive disasters, and is actually not tied to tyranical human rulers. Any civilization needs to start with things like water control, that’s why everyone from China to Greece also have that. Sumerians specifically have cities that go to war with each other because “the chief god of their city told them to”, which is obviously manipulation to secure resources, but isn’t particularly tyranical against their own people. And then the Bronze Age Collapse happens, after which the myth of Ishbi and Erra shows a war god who gets petty and kills everyone because people didn’t pay attention to him. So again, the stories of tyranical gods come from people trying to survive and explain destruction events, from nature or from outside forces. When the Assyrians go around killing everyone, Sennacherib destroys Babylon out of anger and frustration - he tries to write a story about the god of Babylon ordering him to do that, and another story of his own god putting the same god of Babylon on trial for some crime, but that doesn’t stick and Sennacherib gets murdered.

At some point it’s not easy to distinguish mythology and simply literature. For China specifically, Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods talk a lot about the bureaucracy and hierarchy of the Heavens, the oppression of gods and demons - but they’re 16th century novels, are they really mythology? Those stories clearly became popular because people felt oppressed by tyrants, so the myths about tyranical gods can of course be a reaction to the people experiencing tyranical rule. Sun Wukong’s story famously starts because the various systems of the Heavens can’t contain him (and mankind), only Buddha can - but then that’s still a 16 c. novel that showed up long after the creation of Buddhist “mythology”, its spiritual structure and divine figures.

So there’s multiple reasons for stories to pop up about gods becoming tyrants, either because the people get upset at actual tyrant kings, or because one country tries to justify the destruction of another country. But there’s a distinction to be made about stories written as piece of literature and when they become actual civilization building myths that is a fundamental part of its culture. The older a civilization develops and gets centralized, the more opportunities you get for anyone to write more stories that become myth a few hundred years later. If that civilization has ups and downs, the stories about gods are more likely to reflect that. (I think Egypt got out of that because it actually collapsed 3 times, and kept starting over with new gods doing the same things, none of the unified kingdoms lasted more that 500 years)

the people of Europe showing that unlike their governments, they do not tolerate genocidal apartheid supporters

I don’t know the details for each country, but as a Western European, it seems to me that apart from Germany, European governments are generally trying to distance themselves from Israel more and more, so there’s that. I can’t tell what each country does in details and in facts, but it’s the impression I’m getting. I know France has taken a couple punishing actions like banning them from an important military sales show and calling for a ban on weapon sales. Anyone knows if other countries have done similar things or the opposite?

Exactly, they announced earlier this year that they were working on reviving a bunch of licences, including Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and hinting at a longer list. We don’t know yet eactly how many titles that includes, and which of them will get remakes, remasters, or brand new games, but it was hinting brand new. Early dev footage was leaked at some point for Crazy Taxi and Shinobi.

It was always over 11k total, but the first time it came to public news in a big article was about a specific shipment of 2 or 3K one or two weeks ago for the first arrivals. Those early articles were already mentioning both numbers without being very clear. In the following week, reports from Ukraine and the Pentagon kept coming public about the total force actually making it to Ukrainian land.

Shadow of Mordor/war scratch the same itsch as assassin’s creed

??? It’s the first time I’m hearing Shadow of Mordor allows you to run around famous places in ultra popular historical periods.

The US interpretation of free speech is not what the world considers free speech.

You’re misreading it (unless you’re against gay marriage I suppose) - the article tries to break it down, but it’s still a mess.

The plaintiffs are the pro same-sex couples that complained that the state is wrong to refuse same-sex marriage. They appealed to get a better ruling than what they got at first. The second ruling is still not everything they wanted, but it’s still much better than before the complain.

Hebrew used a generic word for fruit, all languages translated that word as their version of apple which was generic at the time, and then much later, all languages changed the meaning of their word for apple, it’s not specific to French. The use of apple for one specific fruit is fairly recent - more recent than the King James Bible, even.

I don’t know what the word in Hebrew is and if it also changed its meaning since then, though.

No one blames New York on the Avengers, or even on Thor. It only gets serious with Sokovia, which is entirely Tony’s fault going off the rails in secret. It’s also introduced slowly and early, with a woman blaming Tony for her son’s death in Avengers I think (before the Iron Man thing), which starts him early on facing his guilt and responsibility, leading to his fuck-up.

Pourquoi pas les deux

I don’t know the other countries. I don’t mean it happens everywhere every day, but a big storm can throw a few trees on the lines to the South and bench all trains on those lines for half a day easily. Anyway I also meant it’s not terror, just irritation. Which is usual for French people. No one was harmed, people are just sour they can’t go on vacation.

If you think a bunch of trains running late for a day causes terror, you don’t know the French rail system.

A bomb that could destroy Earth’s core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!

Does France do graduated brackets like the US?

Is there any place that does taxes without brackets, just flat “pass this number and suddenly lose half of everything”? Does that even exist outside the imagination of Americans who have never understood or looked at taxes? Brackets should be the definition of income taxes, is it not? It’s not an economic tariff applied regardless the volume of merchandise passing a frontier.

The link quotes him calling the Kiev regime a putsch, but that was back in 2014, and that was in fact a revolution. It’s not about Zelensky, but he does give all the current talking points (neonazis in Kiev, NATO provocations, Russia can’t have NATO at their doorstep…). BTW no one did anything about Russia stealing Crimea, either, everyone was still trying to justify not doing anything.

That was 10 years ago and he has been (very) slowly toning it down: when making the left alliance a few weeks ago, he finally relented on allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine because the rest of the left made him, there’s still hope he’ll give up the anti-NATO talk… eventually. If he makes it to the government, when someone asks him about Russia bombing children’s hospitals, at some point he’ll have nowhere to run because he doesn’t actually support that. He shouts and curses quite violently at journalists who help out the far right, but on serious subjects in serious interviews, he actually has to be reasonable (and he is). On the last presidential elections, when he showed up to the round 1 left parties debates, he was all proper and serious and making his points properly and sensibly - and then he lost on round 1 and the next day in the street, he screamed his head off at the first journalist who put a microphone in his face.

Oh, and over this side of the world, no one claims Russia is socialist. But leftists do get mad at the EU and NATO for crushing the farmer class and playing the capitalist hand, that’s what that is about.

President is elected, assembly is elected, president picks a prime minister among the majority party in the assembly (hopefully the same as his own, since the assembly gets to confirm the pick), prime minister picks a government (picks the ministers in their own party) with the president’s blessings. In case the majority party is opposite the president, the president doesn’t get much of a choice, as we know the majority party will only accept ministers on their side.

When the assembly is reelected, the prime minister typically offers their resignation regardless of the results (we are here), and the president can accept it or refuse it (we expect Macron to refuse, or at least delay it until the end of the Olympics, which makes the most sense, but Attal will almost certainly be gone after the Olympics). Then a new government is formed. A prime minister usually gets a couple governments under their belt until the president gets a new prime minister. Attal got shafted by the early dissolution since he was only here for a few months.

Everyone getting the same chance means 50/50 hiring because believe it or not, women do want to work in all fieds; the current 70/30 soon goes down to 50/50 from there. And yes, men do want to work in healthcare and child care and education, surprise. Why do you need to make sure they can’t? Because that is in fact the same process that happens, one side is actively shunned from some jobs and the other side gets shunned all the same, even though there are people on both sides who do want to work in both types of jobs. The reality that you pretend doesn’t exist is that there are 10 women who want to be an engineer at the beginning of their education and they get stomped down to 1 until she gets passed over for some 10 men who at first wanted to work in healthcare but were bullied into engineering. This 1 woman to 10 men scenario is your own creation.

It takes actual work of being unfair to maintain the imbalance you benefit from. Man you don’t even understand the math of your own argument, maybe the women who get hired over you actually are more skilled.

It should be 7 men 3 women, on average

No, it should not. That’s just ridiculous. You don’t fix unequality by maintaining it just because that’s what you’re always known. You want to keep the privileges you have now while denying improving the situation of others, because you think losing your unfair advantage over others becomes unfair to you, that’s nonsense.

Hiring 50/50 is not discriminating against you just because you were at 70 before. You don’t get to decide that half the female population of the planet shouldn’t be allowed to work - because that’s what your 70/30 is, if the 70 is most of the male population (let’s imagine a >90% employment rate), then the 30 is around half of the female population, you’re saying the other half will never be allowed to work. You’re assuming they can keep being SAHM or whatever else.

The thing is that the 70% of workers being men shouldn’t mean there are less men if it becomes 50%. Men aren’t losing their jobs. It means there are more workers, including the same number of men, and more women. This isn’t supposed to be a zero sum game when population grows.

Oops, sorry for the confusion.

But now you’ve also influxed a tonne of women into that workforce, meaning now you’ll need to hire disproportionately more men next generation.

Even though we reached equal representation? You want to reinject more of one side to recreate the imbalance we were getting away from a minute ago? The only gap is between generations, when the old people retire, at first that’ll be a lot of men since they’re the only ones that were there, but it shouldn’t be that hard to map that out to maintain equality through the change. Plus, hiring seniors is a thing, so hiring older women and not all young women can immediately balance that retirement sausage fest faster, removing the gender imbalance per generation. You’re supposed to hire at all levels, entry level only is just more corporate speak. And that’s not just about women or minorities, that’s already a subject for people who can’t get a job because companies want both experience and entry level pay, this isn’t new, it already hits everyone, including poor white men. Fixing this helps everyone.

Also, I mentioned it before, but I’m not talking about a single company on a single job position. As long as everyone plays the game, and not everyone has the same amount of people on the same generation and retiring at the same time, it shouldn’t be that hard to smooth out the curb to the middle, and then stay there. All HR departments in the world should know how to plan that, they’re built around their love of Excel sheets.

Hiring 50/50 is of course part of it, yes, it’s not like the whole world is really doing 100% women only everywhere, you know that’s just not reality. If one company is doing “men need not apply”, you know there are other companies that aren’t. Of course that depends on the job, because places that say “this job is only good for women” (like, you know, low-level healthcare), or the other way around (mechanics? That’s only for men!), has been an issue long before people started complaining about diversity hire, they just didn’t like to mention it because they liked it. Hiring exclusively women was fine when it was for low level jobs that men obviously don’t want to do - except there’s plenty of men who do want to work in healthcare or childcare or education, and they can’t.

Encouraging young men and women to branch out more is of course a good idea, but we’ve seen for decades that women who want to try STEM and the likes often ended up chased away by men who say “it’s no place for women” (students, senior employees, teachers) and because the culture is already plagued by sexism and racism and exclusion and actual threats. Starting at the bottom and doing nothing else doesn’t actually work, we’ve tried that and it failed hard and we’ve all gone surprised pikachu face about it. The fact is that young women do want to try STEM, until they get assaulted and victimized, just like there are young men who do want to try traditionally female jobs, until they get mocked and harassed for not being manly enough. These people already exist, we’re already telling them to try it out - only to destroy them within a couple years. We do have to include the middle and the top right from the start, it has to happen everywhere, and people who fight back have to be forced to accept it - we have to clean up the “locker room” culture and the “traditional gender role” culture to protect the people that want to join these places.