I'm sorry to hear this. Hope you come home to an unblemished home!

Go to work, then panick that all the shops are closed and all I brought to eat is dry crackers...

Only a Clinton shill who doesn't know those emails contain all the dirt the DNC had collected on the Trump campaign would say that.

A New York court ruled this publication, which btw showed the DNC had rigged the primaries / stolen the primaries from Bernie, and pushed media to always talk about Trump in the mistaken Clinton would easily win against him, was First Amendment protected by the highest order.

Yea, I see what you mean, and if you don't know German you'll likely not notice the 'not now' option in the pop-up that lets you keep reading. Kind of annoying but I promise the page is technically not paywalled.

Are you having trouble with republik.ch? It doesn't have a paywall to my knowledge! But if you prefer, you can head on archive.org without any popups: https://web.archive.org/web/20240910100941/https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange

Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Anyone can and does edit it. Heck, I know I have.

If you'll please just read this interview with someone who has looked into the case in Sweden in great detail.

Unfortunately I'll be at work at the time but I will be watching it soon after, I'm sure! It feels like a profound moment for humanity, that he can speak freely again. Many people are going to be watching live and hang on his every word. The pressure must be enormous. I'm very interested what he has to say.

Do you believe every rumour started by cops?

Yea. It exists and is a terrible idea. Like it's a creepy ideology that rears its head in too many places.

Selective breeding of humans is not and never was a good idea. It comes with forced sterilisation, marriage bans, stigmatisation of characteristics contributing to naturally occuring diversity, supremacist thinking and fascist pseudo-scientific tendencies.

Oh yes definitely The Little Prince is a must-read.

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren is one of my childhood favourites. Originally Swedish but has been translated into English.

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt another childhood fav., it has been translated from Dutch. Actually, anything by Dragt I loved, but not sure which have translations or not.

In terms of adult fiction, I was hooked on Stig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (he only wrote the first 3 though).

Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut; I recommend the one I've read of his: Slaughterhouse 5.

The Circle still gives me pause more than 5 years later. It's by Dave Eggers.

Switzerland is not an EU country...

Lol, what? Australia is a US lackee more than anywhere else. And the CIA was definitely involved in the Whitlam sacking.

same.

and here I thought it was a parody...

15yo me gets an angry phone call from the dad where I'd scored a weekly long-term babysitting gig after the first or second night: don't think for a second that you're coming back! (I'm paraphrasing here).

I give a one-word reply and he hangs up.

All I did was leave after getting paid without saying bye while they were checking on the kids. (They were asleep). Because I didn't want to be coerced to get a ride like last time.

Took me years to realise they were in the wrong.

I am angry at the politicians in the US etc for their continued support of the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

I'm also angry at the Israeli head of state and political machine, who controls the IDF. When I say 'the IDF' I mean of course the military arm of the state of Israel. The Likud charta explicitly states the aim of one Israel 'from the sea to the river' - oh, the irony!

What Hamas has done on Oct 7, even if all stories are to be believed, pales in comparison to what Israel has done to innocent Palestinians - schools, universities, hospitals, aid workers, journalists, etc -before and since. And it was clearly provoked by years of being occupied in an open-air prison. So I'm sorry if I'm not interested in the 'we're only defending our own' shtick.

A two-state solution is only possible if Israel withdraws, stops occupying Palestine and allows it to exercise full sovereignty of its borders, governancet, and defence.

Look it's hard to say if it saved lives in the overall ww2 tally, but surrender to save lives was the rationale of the Generals eg in The Netherlands. They looked at what the Luftwaffe had done to Rotterdam, looked at what weapons they had themselves, considered the prospect of what was going to happen to Utrecht next, and decided that further resistance was futile. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_in_World_War_II#German_occupation

Funny story, I was mistaken for an Israeli patriot today, just because of my accent and what I was wearing. I was reassured, if you like, that the world is not going to ostracise Israel and Israel will keep existing. That was the gist of it anyhow. Of course I have no doubt israel will keep existing, what with all the support of the world's hegemons. What worries me is that Israel will keep existing in its current form: a fascist, genocidal ethnostate. Describing the only armed resistance against occupation permitted by Israel to take hold, as an 'army', creates a false sense of equivalence between Hamas's militants and the IDF with all its powerful tech. To describe what's been going on in Gaza for the past 10 months as a war between two armies simply defending their own people is, well stunning, when faced with all the evidence of the IDF's targeted mass killings of Palestinian civilian lives, as well as their callous disregard for Israeli lives (eg Hannibal directive).