Suicidal thoughts in response to this news is really concerning. From what I understand, you aren’t being personally affected by this news. Go take care of yourself. Touch grass or do whatever you need to do.

I think it will help to have a broader perspective. The US spends over $1 trillion each year on violence. When the bombs stop, then profits drop, and this is not acceptable to the capitalist class. When we stopped spending $60bln in Afghanistan, we instantly started spending $60bln in Ukraine. Now Ukraine is winding down, we will spend it on Venezuela. After that, Panama? Greenland? Cuba? Mexico? This cycle will continue until the military industrial complex is dismantled. That is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes.

You are on the ethically correct side, and that matters. I find inspiration in the many generations of people who fought against slavery in the US. So many people, so many generations fought to end slavery, and most did not live to see the successful end. We must continue to fight, even if we do not see success in our lifetimes, we lay the groundwork for future generation’s success. We owe it to them.

And if you do choose to end yourself, I respect your bodily autonomy, but please make sure you are of sound mind when you make that very serious decision. And consider following in the holy footsteps of Saint Luigi of Baltimore.

How do you know they will not comply with an order to land? No country has tried, despite their obligation to do so under the Rome Statute.

Right, you don’t “just shoot down” planes. You order them to land, as they are in violation of your sovereign airspace, and in violation of international law.

Russian planes violating European airspace are not shot down, they are ordered to land and they comply. Planes violating “US airspace” in Iraq and Afghanistan were not shot down, because they complied when ordered to land.

And maybe I’m being pedantic, but a leader overseeing an ongoing genocide is an immediate threat of the highest order.

Yes.

Scramble jets, have air traffic control instruct them to land, and if they do not follow instructions then shoot to kill.

This is literally how all restricted airspace works.

As a leftist I can assure you, yes the left is significantly weaker, and there is a deep imbalance.

The left, specifically in America, has suffered gravely over the past century. The Red Scare era made it functionally illegal to be a leftist. Many leftists were fired, some were killed, and leftist thought was purged from our education system.

The following Cold War era pumped our populace full of anti-socialist propaganda. The majority of people over 50 believe socialism is just as bad as fascism, and that socialists are the enemy.

The American left has yet to recover from these deep wounds.

Adam “I can’t stand people who criticize Israel” Sandler

This is not a long term solution. I feel your frustration with the genocidal entity that is Israel, but forcing any ethnic group to be second class citizens is immoral and shortsighted.

Jews were oppressed, now they are oppressors, and you want them to be oppressed again? That’s a horrific cycle of war and injustice with no end in sight.

Peace, human rights and dignity for all is the only stable long term solution.

Death, death to the IDF.

This procedure is called a positive exchange of controls. Under normal circumstances it is a three step process:

Pilot 1: "You have the controls" Pilot 2: "I have the controls" Pilot 1: "You have the controls"

This process removes ambiguity, ensuring that both pilots are situationally aware.

According to the voice recording (VFR data), we can hear Brett James say “Jesus, take the wheel”.

The VFR does not register a response from Jesus. Some have speculated that he was distracted, others say it may be a technical malfunction. Many others are speculating that he actually never existed.

Unfortunately Brett James does not follow positive exchange of controls procedure, he never confirms that Jesus has the controls, and this is a fatal mistake.

I don’t feel strongly about Coldplay, but I think their style is “whatever Radiohead was doing two years ago, but watered down for the masses”.

Nothing wrong with that, but it does evoke a hipster vs. normie conflict.

The bottom line is that there is no profitable way to use this gas. You can capture it, pipe it out, then refine it, but you will lose money. You can burn it onsite to generate electricity, but your investment in generators and maintenance will never pay off.

The only way to get oil and gas companies to do the right thing is by government regulation.

Source: my father worked for a startup trying to develop this type of technology in the bakken oilfield. The startup had strong initial investment, but it failed after only a few years.

I think the hottest genre is still “survival/craft”, but there are so many similar looking games, you gotta stand out somehow. Two of the best ways to stand out are combining genres, and having an interesting artsyle.

I would start with the basics of Stardew Valley, people love farming, resources management, upgrading tools and buildings, wooing villagers. But what is lacking in Stardew? I think the battle system and world exploration.

Instead of stardew’s generic 2d Zelda-style battles, I would suggest a card battle system like Slay the Spire. At night players can delve into the card battling cave, looking for new cards, new seeds, farm equipment, etc, always trying to delve deeper for better loot. During the day they work the farm, earning money, crafting new cards and foods that can buff their card battles.

For world exploration, it would depend on your style choices and budget. If you stick with 2d pixel graphics I could see a Zelda style map filled with puzzles and unlocks. If you go bigger with a 3d engine I could see a sprawling Bethesda style map.

As for artsyle, you definitely want to avoid being a Stardew clone. Go a bit darker, both in color and theme, while still creating a game that is suitable for children.

Yes I agree.

If you use context instead of cherry picking a half-sentence then maybe you would understand that is part of the broader point I am trying to get across to a western, chauvinism-brained audience.

Since you are still completely missing the basics, let’s do a little history lesson then.

The bombing of Afghanistan started in retaliation to 9/11. After initial bombing of Al-Quaeda training camps and Taliban headquarters, we asked the Afghan government to hand over Bin Laden. They said “yes we will hand him over if you agree to stop bombing”. George W’s famous response was " we don’t negotiate with terrorists". The bombing continued, and Bin Laden fled to Pakistan to survive for years.

The propagandistic idea that we were there to nation build and create a liberal democracy only entered the picture a year into the brutal bombing campaign because the US populace was turning against the war.

Then, we propped up a classic puppet government that was always destined to fail when we left. Elements of a puppet government include:

• installing a leader from a minority faction
• allowing them to violently repress members of the majority faction
• brutal violence inflicted upon dissenters
• development of natural resources for the desires of the imposing nation, a lack of sustainable development for the local people
• creating a system with very little input from local leaders, and never giving them a reason to participate or have skin in the game

The Afghan army had many huge problems. There is a plethora of news stories from 2008-2021 showing how the army is poorly trained, unmotivated, and largely drug addicted. Military leaders have been saying the entire time that this army would not stand on its own.

The Afghan army did have one strong motivation though: money. It was a mercenary army. But when the US withdrew in 2021 we stole the majority of the funds from the Afghan Central Bank (over $7bln dollars was taken by the Biden administration). Not only did this immoral act of theft cripple the Afghan economy, it destroyed their ability to pay the mercenary army.

No one who was actually paying attention expected the unpaid mercenary army to defend the puppet government once we left. Maybe, if the money kept flowing, they could have held up for a few months, but the stolen Central Bank funds ensured that was impossible.

I’m not saying “we don’t care”. Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best. But the military and civilian systems created by the US were never built for the benefit of the Afghan people. Your positive spin on this war is naive and ahistorical.

So your thesis is that the 1950s war was inconsequential, and then you lay the entire blame on the Kim regime and their policies?

My dude, how do you think the Kim regime became a dictatorship?

Before the 1950s war, Kim was a weak puppet leader propped up by the Soviet Union. By the end of the war, the Kim regime had dictatorial power, which persists to this day.

I did not close my eyes when America turned it’s back on the thousands of Afghans who helped the American regime during the war. The people who helped America were left resourceless and with giant targets on their back. We betrayed them.

I did not close my eyes when the flimsy and deeply flawed education system America propped up instantly failed the moment we left.

The abandonment of Afghan allies and the destruction of girl’s education in Afghanistan are just two more data points showing the deep failures of the American model of foreign intervention.

We did not spend truckloads of money trying to get a functioning system in place. A lasting functioning system was never the goal. I urge you to read into our military’s functions and objectives in Afghanistan, because you are deeply misinformed. Anyone who suggests our goals were “democracy and human rights” is obviously infected with US propaganda.

You have obviously misunderstood me.

I was comparing the United States actions in the Korean War(1950s) to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The mass civilian bombing campaigns, complete destruction of civilian infrastructure, manmade famine, widespread preventable disease, and imposed economic isolation are very similar between the two cases.

I am not comparing current-day North Korea to current-day Gaza, and I agree with you that would not be a good analogy.

Kinda shocking to me how anyone can present such a whitewashed take on the Afghanistan War in 2025. It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.

We shortsightedly allied with brutal local warlords, and the failure at local politics blew up in our faces. We bombed 100s of villages, losing the hearts and minds of the people. We sent innocent people to be tortured in Pakistani black sites, creating a fanatical resistance willing to martyr themselves. We forcefully changed the main agricultural output from wheat to opium poppy, leading to widespread drug abuse and addiction. I could go on and on…

I’m not sure if there is a military intervention model that works, but American-style military intervention with mass civilian deaths and warcrimes from beginning to end is a proven failure.

I think the answer is simple: end the sanctions.

McDonalds and Starbucks can take down the Kim regime much more effectively than B-2 bombers and Hellfire missiles.

America already tried to save the North Koreans once. It was called the “Korean War”.

We bombed them back to the stone age, then permanently isolated them from most of the world. Despite having good reasons for the start of the war, America treated NK like Israel currently treats Gaza.

Even if North Koreans tried to forget that America bombed every hospital, every water purification plant, all the electricity production, etc; the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.

If we actually wanted to help those people, the first step would be removal of economic sanctions. There is no clean way to remove dictatorship, but the “Arab Spring” model is much more effective and humane than the “Afghanistan War” model.

I appreciate your skepticism, but if that’s your burden of proof, then I’m unsure how you would ever form a political opinion. Its conjecture and propaganda all the way down, mate.

The most scientific approach one can take is look at all the evidence, form hypothesis and alternate hypothesis, and determine the likelihood of each.

I do not trust Trump, and I certainly do not believe he cares about Palestinians. But the only hypothesis that seems to fit the facts is “Trump envoy applied pressure, Bibi capitulated”. But if anyone has an alternate theory I would be interested to hear it.