I thought it was because they were all dying and fertilizing the soil with their corpses.

That’s hilarious.

Anyone know? Super curious.

These things take time

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VOA takes money from US taxpayers, not the Trump administration. Criticizing Trump is about as pro-American as that news organization can get.

Ah yes, Bernie Sanders, diehard Joe Biden fan famously indifferent to the plight of common folk. /s

Your critical self-reflection is the rarest characteristic of wisdom in these dark times. You actually care about the truth.

In the early 20th century, about 50 years before Norway discovered oil, they were already per capita among the richest countries in Europe. This was because of their culture of land and resource sharing.

The art direction and the combat mechanics. But I can’t be sure.

Got ’em

I’ve never met an actual Christian in America. They’re all fake as fuck, and there’s nothing about abortion in the Bible. It’s one of the easiest moral questions, one that ethicists don’t even bother to debate anymore: no, we shouldn’t force women and children to give birth to rape babies. wtf.

Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.

Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.

Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.

Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.

All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.

This is such a fantastic summary of the theory of money. Holy shit.

Well, yes, but Americans support Zionism, and genocide is something the current president has explicitly endorsed.

Religion is a monstrous evil.

Currently, Palestinians.

The US is also hellbent on exterminating dolphins and every other living creature until we can achieve a Mad Max apocalypse.

The US with Christian Nationalists at the helm.

What a bizarre comment.

I think that there are a lot of good reasons not to use the word “retard”. And there aren’t many good reasons to use it. I know of plenty of alternatives.

I totally agree when it comes to any public discourse.

But how often do people use the word cretin?

Most people have no clue what that word means or how it originated. I certainly don’t use “cretin,” since I have no use for disparaging someone as diseased and crippled. Maybe that’s your point, that properly understanding the genesis of some term can undermine your desire to use it? And you’re right. Cretinism, the disease, makes me really sad, as does the fact that assholes chose to turn it into a pejorative. So maybe that has something to do with my unwillingness to ever use the word.

In my mind, “retard” was more of a vague diagnosis of mental slowness, so it makes it less real as an actual medical condition. Like when you say “retard” I think “Republican.” Those are the people who need diagnosing. Still, I’m less willing to use the r-word than alternatives like “idiot” whose meaning is totally divorced in my imagination from any origin story.

After all, once you use a word (a bunch of sounds) to mean something long enough, it eventually makes no difference what the word used to mean. That said, I can see your point. The cretin example is a good one. Very persuasive.