Agreed

How do you reverse a chemical castration if it’s later revealed the person was wrongfully convicted?

You stop the regimen of drugs and the primary effect ceases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration

I’m not arguing for the policy, I think violating someones bodily authority is inherently evil and should not be on the table even as a result of a criminal conviction.

But I think our objections should follow the science, we should object to the harm caused to the (falsely)convicted while on the drugs rather than the permencance of the sentence.

The difference is that chemical castration is typically a course of drugs that alter the body’s hormone production while it’s being taken to reduce sexual desire/function, when the subject stops taking the drugs the body returns to its natural hormone balance.

Physical mutilation is a one off, permenant, irreversible operation.

The problem is that the term chemical castration is wildly misleading in its attempt to describe the process.

The only series I would consider installing ubisofts launcher for.

The trailer looks really good, it seems like they have made modifiers for island beauty localised rather than island wide which makes sense, now we can benefit from building sperate residential and industrial districts.

Land based combat I think is also new, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, but the lack did always seem like a glaring omission in 1800.

Hopefully they have done away with the influence system or at-least heavily modified it, it felt so bad in 1800 having to pick between ships, island defenses and buildings that allowed you to actually use all the cool items you found.

Way to disengage with every point made and assume I am a warmonger.

I did almost include a paragraph on the morality of the bombing of Pyongyang, but after some thought I realise it wasn’t even a decade after ww2 and area bombing cities was part of how America and its allies won that conflict.

Would you say bombing Germany was necessary or justified to stop facism in Europe? Was the bombing of Japan necessary or justified to end Japanese subjugation of Asia?

I’m not sure I have a consistent position on this, it feels like the bombing of Korea was excessive but the bombing of Germany was necessary, but I can’t find a good justification for that split.

Either way I’m not particularly interested in defending the US’s conduct, but the original commenter presenting the invading country as being innocent and laying all the blame for the war at the feet of the US is gross.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that NK has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Huh, surprised they got banned since that seems to be broadly true esp in context of your second point, maybe it was a different comment that got them nuked

Damn, their whole account is gone, what did they say?

The standard penalty for starting a war is being in a state of war, during which your opponents will try to kill you. Until the war is over your opponents will keep trying to kill you.

Its worth noting that armestice wasn’t reached until Stalin died and the new soviet leaders weren’t interested in prolonging the war, which suggests that the belligerents in the conflict were happy to continue it as Koreans continued to die in order to support their territorial and idiological designs.

In my opinion the US shouldn’t have crossed the 38th parallel north, doing so brought china into the war and ended the possibility of a quick end to the war and fewer deaths, but that sin pales in comparison to starting the invasion in the first place.

The real tragedy is the same as it ever is in wars, innocent civilians and young soldiers die in droves because someone in power wanted more land, more subjects, more resources more power and made the decision to take it at the cost of these lives.

And let’s not pretend that if the ROK and the US didn’t fight there wouldn’t have been massacres of civilians, purges of intellectuals and “political dissidents” and forced migration.

The community we are in is somewhat appropriate when you are advocating that “war is bad” so people shouldn’t fight back when they are invaded because people die or powerful nations shouldn’t militarily support victims of invasions because that “prolongs the war” during which yes; people die. I see enough of that from the various anti-ukraine/pro-russia shills, it’s nice to see that logic gets applied to other cases where a country with red in it’s flag tries to annex its neighbour too.

America and the USSR agreed to partition Korea along the 38th parallel after liberating it from imperial Japanese rule.

Subsequent to that the Chinese communists agreed to arm and back north Korea in return for Korean support during China’s civil war.

Later on North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea I feel like this is a very important point you somehow completely failed to mention. They then captured most of the Korean peninsula down to Busan.

At this point the US (technically the UN but most forces were US) reinforced the ROK troops reclaimed the lost territory and invaded the north capturing Pyongyang.

At this point China reinforced the north Koreans and recaptured Pyongyang the fighting then stalemated around the 38th parallel after years of fighting an armistice was agreed and the current borders were agreed.

Your protratal of the US deciding on a whim to butcher the poor north Koreans then impose a separation on them would be laughable in how poorly it conveys events if you weren’t seeking to mis-atribute the cause of a war that killed 3 million people

Just to add to your (excellent) comment; in the UK you can be prescribed medical marijuana but it has to be done by a consultant level doctor and a multi disciplinary trial. The most important disqualifying factor is any history of psychosis, if they see that on your medical records they will not write you a prescription.

So I would a assume there is some published medical literature they are following which states cannabis exacerbates the symptoms of psychosis.

That’s fair, as far as I know it’s a screenshot form the redient doctors conference.

I went digging for more information after your (very fair) comment, I didn’t find it in the agenda https://www.bma.org.uk/media/g2ofmswk/resident-doctors-conference-2025-motions-for-voting.pdf

But I have found an explanation for that and a somewhat dubious confirmation via this thread on Reddit, https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorsUK/comments/1k97tti/british_medical_association_conference_calls/mpc84s8/ wherin a doctor states that it was an emergency motion and they voted in favour. (Side node; a lot of people in that thread are unhappy about the BMA acting beyond the role of a trade union)

On the one hand it’s a random Reddit thread, on the other hand, a lot of people who are likely to have first had knowledge aren’t actively disputing the presence of success of the motion and there are anecdotal confirmations of both.

I will admit I probably jumped the gun here, I was just happy to finally see some trans positive sentiment from a UK institution.

I got nitro for similar reasons but would up cancelling when discord sent ads to a friend of mine with my screen name on it, “why not join your friend _____ with nitro” or something.

Absolutely not, don’t use my name to shill to people I respect.

Israel’s war crimes do not excuse Hamas’ terrorist attacks, nor do Hamas’ terror attacks excuse Israel’s war crimes.

Intentionally escalating the conflict and suppressing rival organisations then turning around and saying “we are the only counterbalance to Israel, you must deal with us” is also kinda gross.

That said, it’s weird that they want the UK involved given the history of the conflict and the relatively paltry (and apparently declining?) level of arms exports.

I think the EU also designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Germany is a big arms exporter so I would have expected them to focus on getting that designation repealed.

Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished

Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.

But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.

The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.

Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?

To play devil’s advocate;

The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.

The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.

Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.

The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.

E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.

The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.

The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.

“Big government” means thinking the government is bigger and more expensive than it needs to be.

When all the government needs to do is keep me happy then any program which I understand benefits me is vital and any which doesn’t is “big government”

The Hamas and IDF aligned telegram channels have both been remarkably consistent about cheering when about our munitions landing in their territory and decrying the reverse.

The threat of international condemnation and the less hawkish members of the Israeli government and electorate.

Predictably the rate at which civilians in Gaza are bombed by Israel went up not down after Hamas’ acts of terrorism the other week.

Even if you believe that the Israeli government is ontologically evil; serving them up causus belli to bomb and potentially invade Palestinian lands does not constitute “preventing Palestinians from being exterminated”, rather it actively helps them hastens the process