Unfortunately, the German bureaucratic clusterfuck does tend to hamstring good intention with stupid regulations carried out to the pedantic letter. It’s a bit of a lottery at times whether you’ll find yourself dealing with a human or with a relentless rule fetishist, and the more complex a process is, the more people it involves and the greater the chance someone will obstruct.
I’d hope things have improved and I hope they’ll improve further. Shame that it’s too late for you.
Ich spreche nicht für alle, aber ein “dummer einsprachiger Amerikaner” der nach Europa abhaut verliert (meiner Meinung nach) zumindest das erste Attribut und mit dem zweiten kann ich ganz gut leben.
I don’t speak for everyone, but a “dumb monolingual American” that to Europe runs off loses (in my opinion) at least the first attribute and with the second I can quite well live.
The awkward word order of the translation is intentional to more closely mirror the German word order. I promise you, I can also good English speak ;-)
India? You mean the “+05:30” timezone? I’d rather not deal with that :30 tbh. I like having my timezone arithmetics quite simple, just adding and subtracting hours. A half hour offset is worse to me than having to switch which offsets to use when. (Still better than Australia Central Western with its +08:45, but that’s a low bar to clear.)
yes, of course, you don’t want to cause an international incident by pointing fingers until you’re really sure. They need to publish the fact that it’s even considered a possibility for political purposes, but they can’t assert with confidence for diplomatic ones.
You might get sued, but you might also go viral
Probably along the lines of “I approve of what he’s doing, and I find the way he’s doing it very smart.”
I want Russian civilians to suffer a bit because they need to fucking get the hint and do something it they want to survive
Morale Bombing has never, ever, ever worked. It has been tried: Nazi Germany bombed the UK, the UK and US bombed Germany, the US leaned on it during the cold war in Korea and Vietnam, Russia did it to Ukraine. By and large the results have been the same: Civilians hate being bombed. They’ll hate you for bombing them. They’ll rally against you.
Bombing can influence the leadership decisions, if it damages target of value to the high and powerful, but the historical record on bombing civilians to make them oppose the war isn’t just bad, is terribly one-sided. And it makes sense: If Russia were to bomb your hometown, would that make you want to surrender or fight back?
(And in case anyone thinks that Japan was defeated just by the nukes, nothing is ever that simple in war and Japan was on the back foot already. What the nukes achieved was that the political leadership, already distressed by the way the war was going, saw the sheer and unprecedented destructive power and opted to surrender. The civilians’ will had little to do with it.)
Imperialism doesn’t imply stupidity.
A state’s sovereignty is contingent on others recognising and respecting it. If Putin claims Ukraine isn’t a sovereign state, that’s not a mistake so much as his opinion – a dangerous opinion, make no mistake, because he uses it to justify his actions to his own people and is putting a lot of effort into trying to convince everyone else to accept his opinion. If we do, Ukraine effectively loses its sovereignty, because that is itself a product of other states’ opinions.
I hate war, I hate profiteering off human misery and I hate that the only way to deterr others from attacking you is to be ready for war yourself because humans still can’t get over the drive to dominate and exploit.
But that despicable reality of the Security Dilemma means we need to spend money on defense. We cannot yet trust other humans enough that disarmament is viable. I consider myself a pacifist, but I am not so naive to think violence can be checked by words along. The feather may be stronger than the sword, but only if it lives long enough to write.
I hate that so much production has to be wasted on means of destruction. I hope we never have to use them.
Technically, I’m not new, just recently moved instance, but maybe mine delights you anyway? Assuming it’s still there, idk how long it lasts.
Eurydike I was a boss bitch. Not only was she unusually prominent in politics for a queen, she also engaged in foreign policy on her own, successfully negotiationg with a foreign general to have him protect her late husband’s throne against a pretender, apparently without any participation from her son-in-law, who served as regent at the time.
The youngest of her sons, Phillip II, would go on to reform the military and secure hegemony over Greece, laying the groundwork for the invasion of Persia that he never got to carry out. After his assassination, that invasion was instead performed by his son, Alexander III, later dubbed “The Great” for this feat.
It should be noted that, with Alexander being on campaign for basically all of his reign and generally not too interested in domestic rulership, his mother Olympias of Epirus was the de facto ruler of Macedonia. Behind the successful general are two powerful women that first protected his father’s throne, then took care of the actual ruling so that he would be free to hunt glory.