With my ADHD just cutting on sugar seems to be the best diet change in my life period. I mean, of course there’s sugar in lots of things, but at least not putting it into tea and not eating Snickers improves everything.

and one of the first things Zalensky did was crack down on that.

Rather replace Russia-dependent corruption with more generalized corruption.

for freedom and democracy. Supposedly what the alliance exists for.

What? It’s been founded by a bunch of colonial nations (not ex-colonial at that point) still from time to time fighting colonial wars with war crimes and such. It has Turkey of all genocidal bastards as an important member.

The only reason for its existence was accumulating power. Well, as with all alliances.

Of course, kinda motivated by USSR redesigning its ground forces for capturing large parts of the world after they’ve been nuked. I’m not joking, that’s the reason ex-Soviet militaries so terribly suck at actually fighting - they are sort of a different mechanism, more like huge mobile garrisons to deploy in wastelands. Their analog of western ground forces was, say, VDV in Russia ; which is why despite nominally having the narrow function of paradropped assault troops, they’ve been used for every kind of thing important.

But corruption is present in all countries, including the NATO members, so that’d be a bit hypocritical,

Yes, and also weird.

I don’t think the decision was ever on the table.

Yes, when after 2 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead they meet and sign something about “discussing help to Ukraine” in case fighting gets more intensive by not clear which criterion - it means Ukraine is not becoming a member.

About “irreversible path” - they’ve said such things about Georgia too. Ivanishvili’s party is not good, but there’s been plenty of time before they started acting like now.

I genuinely wanted to be like “but we like you.” I don’t think that would have gone down very well though.

Maybe you should have, I’m almost certain somebody did it later in another conversation. Better from a friend and so on.

The reason why I never wanted a gun in my house is because of looking at the statistics of who is by far the most likely to get shot by that gun. [Either me or my spouse.]

Ah. Same here. Though I can’t get a legal one here anyway, because Russian laws make no difference between ADHD, ASD and schizophrenia for the purpose of getting a permit.

I misunderstood that “anti-gun personally”, cause not wanting a gun in your own house doesn’t mean being anti-gun. One thing is about whether the choice is on your side or on the government’s, the other is what would you choose.

Some people choose the pleasure of ridiculing their opponents over being a little bit more certain that they won’t regret later when shit hits the fan.

Correction - you should believe them that such will happen when nobody else but them has knives and they are certain they won’t get a scratch while it’s happening. Until then they’ll be very afraid.

The dangerous part is that the fact that they are cowards may over time become more notable than the fact that they really want this.

I mean, when somebody says a threat of such kind in a situation which doesn’t yet warrant it, it’s clear they are cowards.

Make no mistake - that bloodshed they want to be done by police, national guard and such. Not their own supporters. Cause no person who says such things first wants to be shot back at.

I hope you do realize that this means you’ve been wrong all the time. Because the main political argument for gun ownership is such events exactly.

Wtf are you talking about, there are dozens of them, its literally a huge network of cables.

There are places connected by only one or two and there are issues with load in case a lucky combination of those gets sabotaged etc.

I’m not sure of that really working, hasn’t been tested after all. Shootouts on the streets don’t lead to everyone getting shot. So, say, US warns “everybody big” that they are nuking someplace, but don’t want to nuke anyone else. If “everybody big” are kinda fine with it, they won’t launch nukes in response. That means there’s a place nuked and no MAD.

That’s more of a joking tone, if it happens, it happens anyway.

The idea of the US dropping all support for Ukraine is pretty damn scary to me.

Only it seems that support for Ukraine is slowly drying out anyway. So whether electing Biden will help that is questionable.

One can’t blame them for not trusting anything signed by Russia, though. But maybe they should have conceded on some of the occupied territories, when Russia wasn’t demanding anything they didn’t hold, which is as close to “begging for peace” as you can expect from an adversary 3 times stronger.

Dunno, I think no matter what the outcome of that election, for Ukraine it’d be best to sign some treaty by September. Same for Armenia, only unless somebody forces Aliyev, it may not get such an opportunity.

He didn’t change policies on many other things too.

I’m not sure it makes sense to talk of them as of separate figures. The US state policy, internal and foreign, under both is eerily similar and continuous, with Trump it looked like “dumpster fire of the day”, with Biden (and Obama before Trump) it looked like “another careful calculated decision”, but they are all in the same general direction.

Biden cleaned up Trump’s mess and avoided a complete imminent global financial collapse.

Was it really Biden, though? Global economy is self-organizing and kinda reliable, like the Internet (by design, not by its real topology and those big underwater cables with no backup connecting whole continents).

Well, you’re in the US, so it’s not your problem if they decide to nuke someone outside it or, say, greenlight an invasion. While I have some of my family and myself in a place theoretically attractive to nukes, and half of my other family in a country likely to be invaded. Fortunately the rest is distributed between USA and a country which, despite all the cries, is in no significant danger.

offtopic: Other than Trump and MAGAts using it, such capitalization could look interesting. As something, indeed, characteristically American. And it might make texts more legible sometimes (I’m not joking), a bit like with Bionic Reader.

If your point is that he somehow would “fit in” were he not homeschooled or in any case at all, being autistic, that’s exactly the kind of ignorant bullshit making me wary of mandatory public education, because the system is often defined by people of such opinions.

Homeschooling is technically the opposite of fascist approach. As in “state being in charge” vs “parents being in charge”.

That said, some parents are just too dumb to allow them full control over their child’s education. Just in my case it was their “try harder” attitude about school, while something like homeschooling would work much better.

Imagine an autistic adult who never dropped the imitation and missed on most good things in life, trying to impose the same onto their autistic child who at least understands that imitation takes too much energy and isn’t worth shit (and is seen right through by NT people anyway), thinking that their fake smiles, stupid loud nonsense talk and even fake hobbies (as in those they know nothing about, but talk a lot in public) don’t look that, and also being scared shitless of the very idea of going to a therapist (“I’m/you’re NORMAL”, this is common in ex-USSR though), and, finally, actively sabotaging any idea to isolate their stupidity and ignorance to them. That would be my dad.

Other than personal examples, there are good and bad parents and there are good and bad schools and there are good and bad education systems.

Parents generally don’t groom their children to become cannon fodder, some education systems do ; parents generally don’t want their children to be fooled by politicians, and education systems are directly influenced by those politicians ; parents generally care for their own children to have some successes, while for Prussian-style school systems it’s normal that some are just discarded, if the majority becomes good drones.

If between two variants in a decision there’s a huge difference in incomes for someone, that someone will find a way to make the deciding party interested in that difference.

Which is why good guys should introduce good things slowly and carefully, the way bad guys introduce bad things (unless they are too powerful to care).