Very important.

For Germans there is

https://kein-taeter-werden.de/

I’m sure there are other similar services in other countries.

Just to be clear: Dutch people agree that rapists of 12 year old girls (such as the convicted child rapist van de Velde, who raped a 12 year old girl) should be punished and not go on to represent their country at the Olympics. There may however be old farts and creeps in positions of power that try to make excuses for convicted child rapist Van de Velde who believe a technicality over an unprovable state of mind matter when it comes to the damage caused by having a convicted child rapist represent your country both to the victim of convicted child rapist Van de Velde and to the reputation of the Netherlands.

TLDR: Convicted child rapist Van de Velde should be kicked off his team and the Member of the committee that thought it was relevant whether he is paedophile or not should resign. Both are a disgrace to the country and should not be used as representatives.

Membership fee? For shaving?

No. He is bad and he should feel bad. He was sad because his evil plans didn’t work out the way he had hoped. He is alone because he abuses the people around him because he considers himself a superior being for whom others are just play things.

His backstory of abuse goes a way to explain why he is the way he is, but it does not excuse it.

Yes. But the state still has to prove that what you did was a) a Nazi thing and b) that you either knew or should have known it was so.

So if you show the Hitler salute, you’ll be arrested and fined. If you give a speech in which you suggest that immigrants need to learn “the liberating power of work” (referencing the Motto of Auschwitz “Arbeit macht Frei” “Work makes Free”) that is totally fine.

“We totally would have saved the climate if you had only paid us enough.” Bitch, please.

The trillions the oil industry has earned over the years were not enough?
You had enough money, you had the knowledge of the problem and what you could do to fix it and you had enough time to change your strategy from lieing and denying.

The only thing you didn’t have was the will to give up a single cent to help clean up the damage you have done.

Imagine what could have been done with half of the 52 trillion the oil and gas industry earned in the last 50 years (that’s without coal, even). Imagine how far we could have developed renewable energy sources. What we could have achieved with carbon capture. What could be done today if the fossil industries propaganda hadn’t turned climate change into a question of political opinions.

Fuck that guy. He and his ilk created this mess and they got fat of it. He doesn’t get to shift blame.

Yes.

“credible reports” (but low confidence) of some employees of UNRWA participating in the attack. No evidence at all that UNRWA had partnered with Hamas or supported the attacks.

What that means is “somebody said that some people that work for UNRWA also participated in the attacks but we have found no proof either way.”

Being a democracy has nothing to do with committing war crimes.

They both approximate perfect representation close enough. If the difference between one government or the other comes down to variations that are basically explained by the weather being good or bad on voting day, you can’t really claim that the government isn’t representative.

Just because it didn’t represent YOUR opinion, it doesn’t make it less representative. A truly representative government will make decisions that align with 10% of the population 10% of the time. So if 10% of the population want to bomb Canada a perfectly representative government will make it happen every 40 years or so.

Don’t actually tear down church buildings though.

Many of them are beautiful and even if the morals of the Organisation(s) that built them are, to put it mildly, “outdated”, it is still a huge part of our cultural history.

Use the spaces to open “sexual health centers” (like Planned Parenthood on steroids), libraries, and in like 1 or 2 per continent you could create memorial centers to keep alive the memories of the suffering created by organized, doctrinal religion.

Moving past a phase of our cultural development has to include remembering that phase. The church buildings turned to useful purpose will be powerful monuments.

As a Berliner, it doesn’t match my memory either. I don’t have historical data other than my own shitty memory, but I remember vaguely getting upset at Döner prices during the Pandemic being above 3,50€ (so in 2020).

It gets better. He resold one of the paintings in question for a profit of 320 million$. He is suing because his speculative profit wasn’t big enough.

This article seems bad.

The only sources cited are RAC (Retailers Against Crime) and their employees. If there really had been a major bust against organised crime as they claim, wouldn’t there be confirmation by the Scottish police (who RAC is cited as claiming they cooperated with and made these arrests?).

So why is not a single government or police source being cited? Did they just copy a press release from RAC?

Actually, no.

The science is quite precise, if largely theoretical. Neither the article nor the study it is based on are doomerism. If you’d read it you would have found the following paragraph:

Their results showed that we’re not necessarily headed for certain climate doom. We might follow quite a regular and predictable trajectory, the endpoint of which is a climate stabilization at a higher average temperature point than what we have now.

Basically they are saying “this new method (which is a very macroscale perspective) does not predict a stabilization at preindustrial climate given the amount of change the system already has experienced. Also if we really want to we can probably kick earth into a runaway greenhouse system”.

They do not claim that we are already at that point nor that we will inevitably cross it. Only that it is possible for us to do it.

Also: Hello Officer. No I wear these zebra stripes on my clothing and the googly eyes on the back of my hat for religious reasons, not to confuse your drone swarm. What do you mean I’m under arrest?

You don’t. The only thing you need their permission for is to work with them (by putting something in their stores). I feel it’s reasonable to give them that power.

I love “yeet cap rn”.