rahmad

Where is the line?

We interact with hundreds if not thousands of chemicals in every ordinary act of life. This is not just unavoidable, it's normal and natural, and has been going on for centuries if not millenia.

Are you proposing we stop cooking food (which results in chemical alterations of the underlying food). What about soap?

You have a point, but you've oversimplified it and taken it to an extreme where it's no longer a sound or balanced idea.

Look...

Not a remake, but there's a sequel on the way... I'm not super hopeful but maybe I'll be surprised? Flashback did get a remaster and release on (at least) Switch, but i found the controls unintuitive and dissatisfying. It was a bummer.

Technically true, but it needs to be non militarized, can't purchase the missile mounts (or the missiles etc.). My point stands.

But this already isn't true. Even if I could afford it, I can't buy an F16, anthrax or a nuclear warhead. So, isn't this just about where the line is being drawn? The line itself both already exists and doesn't seem to be contested.

To be fair, I was like: that's clever! They are asking for the missing piece to bridge the neural gap and make the signal flow... it totally works!

Blackbeard's Ghost. Watchable on Disney+ right now. Family friendly, great performances and some epic physical comedy from Peter Ustinov (voice of Prince John in Disney's Robin Hood).

I will also accept "I am rubber, you are glue" as a possible answer.

Anything related to hamsters and/or the smell of elderberries.

If you think 'a bit of my statue broke' is even a rounding error compared to their legacy in the Congo, I suggest you go look into it and let me know once you've done the research if you think I'm wrong. I'm open to hearing your counter-argument, but from my view the two do not compare.

I disagree. The rich got richer, there's no doubt about that, but (using England as an example), a massive amount of infrastructure was built and paid for through colonial income in part of not whole. Roads, trains, factories, ships, universities. Much of the money that went into long lasting projects like that depended on the continual income from the colonies.

That infrastructure benefits the entire country, even though the poor are still poor. They are poor with trains to take them places and roads to drive on. They are poor with universities to create new medicines to treat them. That benefit is meaningful, it is pervasive, and it didn't just materialize spontaneously -- another group of people somewhere do not have something today as a result of that transfer of resources.

I agree that Germany's hand was forced because they lost the war, but as a counter-example, the Japanese also lost the war, and they have done very little to acknowledge any of the negative actions they committed during WWII -- so losing the war wasn't the only variable here. Turkey lost, but continue to deny their role in the Armenian genocide. Both those nations have made a choice where others have not.

I agree with you that this is not how things have been forever. It probably does go back to the Holocaust. That's not a reason to not do things. We are constantly changing things about human societal structure. Why not include an understanding of how destructive colonialism was and how it impacts the economic and cultural variances between nations today?

Much of how Germany handles their role in WWII in terms of public consciousness was not placed upon them by the Allies. Initially Germany tried to distance itself from responsibility by blaming what happened only on the Nazi party and not on those who were not party members or high ranking party members.

It took time for them to start to instill in their culture the idea that they had to grapple with the Holocaust meaningfully, not because any of them were at fault, but because they still had a responsibility to know and prevent. It's not perfect, and like I said before, nothing is, but it's more than doing nothing.

That culture of ownership, in my mind, is far better than reparations. The resources are gone. You can't (or perhaps, shouldn't) unbuild a railway system. But to ignore the past and pretend nothing happened and that (mostly) European nations have no long lasting responsibility for the state of much of the developing world is, in my opinion, totally wrong.

To your point, do you think the average teenager in England understands how the policies of their leadership caused the Potato Famine? More importantly, do you think it's a good thing that they should never have to learn that and recognize that England has something today because Ireland does not?

Returning to Belgium, statues of Leopold were still present and commemorated until they were attacked by fringe activists fairly recently. That's a signal to me that they don't know their history. I'm sure if they did, it wouldn't be a group of radicals trying to bring attention to this subject, it would be a more widely and normally accepted conversation with their past selves.

Not sure where I suggested destroying the statue would even the karmic scales, I just said I didn't feel bad for them (due to their current karmic bank balance). Those are two totally different things.