~ Blood of the Shaman

@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard Hello! How are you?

~ The Lost Shadow

~ American Wrestler: The Wizard

~ Not everything is star-worthy...

@M.A.R. no, just plain spanking. With a fish. :P

@Pandya thanks, I'm fine, and today there's already cease fire.

~ Who needs sleep here?

@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard Ok. Where?

@KennyBOT Everyone who are living.

@KennyBOT Bot doesn't need it.

~ A few more hours and this room will be frozen ...

@Pandya Israel

@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard jordan (?)

~ Where is everybody!?!

@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard I got vaccinated too! (only first shot tho)

@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard You mean missile fire? from Gaza? I'm not quite clear on that whole situation. Are both sides firing missiles? Is Gaza an independent country? Who's the bad guy? And most importantly: are you safe??

@Ginger Palestine is the equivalent of your native American tribe trying to hold back their extinction for a few years against the colonizers.

With that perspective in mind, Netanyahu is a corrupt POS that prefers to commit genocide to stay in power. He makes some noise and gets some Palestinians and Israelis killed so people keep voting for his alt-right fascist party out of fear.

I dunno how much I should delve into my opinion in all this, because Sha and Mith are from Israel and pretty cool people, if a bit dorky.

@M.A.R. Who's that?

@Ginger Israeli PM from the Likud party

@M.A.R. Are you in Israel too?

@Ginger No, I'm Iranian actually

Oh. huh. Is Iran also in a state of conflict? I don't know.

No, Iran is pretty stable.

Piss poor, but stable.

Well, Who's sending missiles? I know by the news that Gaza has lost far more people Palestinians than Israel has lost Israelis, but apparently Gaza tried to missile the capital of Israel among other important places. Not sure what is really going on there.

@M.A.R. Interesting to think you're all the way in Iran, and I'm in America!

@M.A.R. nvm. respecting what you said before, I'm going to look it up instead.

@Ginger well, didn't want to get into this much, but one side is the aggressor, the other is an oppressed people trying to fight back. There are extremists ("terrorists" if you prefer) from the Palestinian side that think there should be no Israel. Almost always Israel has reignited the dormant conflict that goes on there; this time, it was Hamas that started shooting overpowered firecrackers at the Israeli capital.

Because they are that, putting them in the same basket as high-tech American or Israeli military missiles distorts the picture.

Nonetheless, there are injured and killed Israeli civilians, and Netanyahu gets a kick out of this, because he gets to escalate the conflict and drive even more Palestinians out of their homes by force.

@M.A.R. Yeah. I remember "Hamas". What, or who, is this? The news mentions these things as if everyone is supposed to know it all already.

@Ginger well, some background first: You usually get three types of militia in oppressed or colonized third world countries: Either an armed gang of thugs that terrorize people and kill them, without much of an affiliation; these are usually rampant in war-riddled African countries. Then you have an armed civilian militia that tries to fight back against the oppressors, and finally, the armed civilian militia that bows and becomes the colonizing masters' dogs.

In South African Apartheid, it wasn't the whites that policed and beat up and killed blacks, the loyal guard dogs were all black. And sometimes the second type of militia, the resistance, is eventually defeated and turns into a loyal gang serving the oppressors.

Palestine has constantly, since 1950s, had groups and leaders that started out as part of a patriotic resistance force, but quickly defected to become Israel's watchdogs over people.

These people's idea of winning nations over was you get a secret meeting with Kissinger or someone like that, and boom, everything solves itself.

They never tried to appeal to an international audience. They just couldn't grasp the concept of international solidarity.

right.

The result was that Palestinian armed groups have always been effortlessly labeled as terrorists, while some have betrayed their own people, and some haven't.

Hamas is in the process of becoming the watchdog type; for them, Palestinians come second, and the most important thing is getting back at Israel.

@M.A.R. I see.

So the situation is ripe for dishonest journalists to portray the situation as "Israel vs. the terrorists", somehow shoving everything else to the background

But the devil is in the details, and what's really going on and having a really big human impact is Palestinians have always been literally forced out of their homes.

And obviously killed when they don't comply and throw as much as a stone towards an Israeli tank.

Meanwhile, many in the Israeli military are unabashedly racist.

So it's essentially an Apartheid state. The Palestinian people are absolutely without hope. Arabic countries have abandoned them, everyone else that pretends to fight on their side just considers their cause a facet of their own agenda, to pretend to be moral

So the situation is Hamas and Hezbollah love to boast about how much damage they do to Israel, and Likud also loves it when they do, because then they can play the victim.

But the whole scene is absurd. On the one hand you have an oppressed people without any real form of government, and on another one of the most militarily advanced countries in the world with hundreds or thousands of undocumented nuclear warheads.

@M.A.R. Right. Reading through articles, Israel forced Palestinians out of their homes to prevent the Palestinians from making the Jewish population a minority and making Israel Palestinian. And then they blocked them from returning home.

@Ginger That's reminiscent of the American Republican rhetoric of immigrant hate 'because immigrants make white people into a minority'.

Right, yes.

P.S.:

Israel has built walls inside Palestine to keep Palestinians out of their territories.

@M.A.R. For real, if that isn't an exaggeration, that's shocking. A normal American would think "We're fine. We have GOMs to intercept ICBMs before they hit us!" ...But no. We only ever tested them 7 times, 2 of which had failed. And we also only have 80 GOMs in total. 40 in Alaska, 40 in Colorado. Lastly, the experiments were controlled. the USAF already knew the test ICBMs were coming, plus the ICBMs were intercepted in space, which was preferable. preferable doesn't exist in a real war.

Wait, I don't think Israel poses any threat to the US.

Why would it bite the hand that feeds it?

@M.A.R. Huh?

I know what that means, but I don't get what you meant by that.

@Ginger AFAIK the number one country in the world where US aids go is Israel.

And yet US law explicitly states that they cannot give aids to a nation that does not sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. (Which Israel hasn't)

And Israel has not complied with any request from IAEA for a visit

@M.A.R. IKR? Also a lot of aids went to Ukraine. Trump really tried to dig his nose into the Israel-Gaza Conflict, took unconstitutional action, and got Impeached for it. At least Biden is the President now (Not sure who you support, but I'm a Democrat)

I don't support either, but one of them does not fancy himself the second coming of Hitler.

@M.A.R. Yeah... The U.S. is the richest country in Government (the country who's Government has the most money), at trillions of USD, And the U.S. also spends the most money on its Military than any other country-- at just over 1 Trillion. And yet, how come they aren't making more GOMs? GOMs are the most advanced ICBM protection out there, and they're the only line of defense against ICBMs, and yet they stopped testing them, stopped researching on ways to improve them.

And the government felt "comfortable" with only 80 GOMs in 2 locations.

Because who would oppose the US and not get obliterated?

Shouldn't they have a solid, trustable GOM first, and then a whole bunch of them, before we start making railguns? (The U.S. is making all sorts of weird stuff)

The military spending goes into making all those weird stuff. How else to woo people into not asking for more welfare programs and social spending?

F22s are way more important than affordable insulin, after all

@M.A.R. It doesn't matter if they get obliterated. If they hit is with at least one ICBM, that damage still stays. If the country is as violent as North Korea, they might as well send some ICBMs knowing that they'll get hit hard for it. (Just imagine... North Korea sends an ICBM at, say, Denver (I don't live there) and wipes the whole city off the face of the Earth... Then the U.S. will just drop the Castle Bravo Hydrogen bomb on North Korea... Not a good outcome for North Korea, huh.)

Yes, which is why they're not doing it

@M.A.R. Not exactly. Why do you think they're making a whole bunch of ICBMs right now? They signed the no-nukes thing in exchange for some light-water reactors from the U.S. to help with their energy crisis. We later found out that they just built some secret ICBM facilities and lied to us. We found out, and they began stopping International UN checking

(these checks check to see if they're complying with the treaty or not, by going to the facilities and making sure they aren't making anything.)

Couple months later, they quit the no-nukes program, and resumed making ICBMs in their other facilities. So, they lied to us.

Well, why are they trying so hard to make 'em?

Suspicious, right? Those countries are very suspicious. And with India, it is very suspicious that they are building so, so many biochemical weaponry facilities. I mean, it is in the name. Biochemical weaponry. That is the scary stuff like nerve poison and stuff that kills us instantly without notice. I mainly don't want another world war, because I don't want to get drafted.

@M.A.R. Mith, you mean Mithical?

I hope they stay safe from both the Virus and the missile violence.

@Ginger Same reason Americans have all the nukes.

I mean, don't get me wrong, sometimes an idiot does something unpredictable, which is exactly that, unpredictable. And everything spirals out of control. And that the countries have the means to harm humanity as much when that happens is a big no-no.

But when that hasn't happened, it's really a bit hypocritical to say the other side has no right to weapons.

@M.A.R. Not quite. U.S. has never been the kind of country that'd be Axis or something. We have our Nukes to eliminate a serious threat. By threat, I mean if someone attacks us with an ICBM, we drop a Hydrogen bomb on them so they won't do it again. (or rather, they won't be able to do it again) Whereas North Korea has their ICBMs for suspiciously different reasons. See, they're the kind of country that would use them to attack a country like an Axis country would. The attacker.

And the US has vetoed enough of UN resolutions, and has a much worse human rights record.

@Ginger Yeah, not so fanatical about it, but the US would absolutely drop the bomb anyway.

I think you may be oblivious to what the US has really done to the world in the past century.

So if you want NK disarmed, it's not right for someone like Trump to have the ability to push a button and obliterate a hundred thousand human lives either.

@M.A.R. Wdym? I'm very aware of the bad things they've done. But the U.S. isn't the kind of country to drop it North Korea when they haven't done anything. If North Korea literally points their ICBMs at us, to the point where all they have to do is press a button, of course we drop a bomb on them.

@Ginger What had Cambodia done when Kissinger bombed them?

Nothing, I think.

@M.A.R. Sure, but we aren't making our own ICBMs, want proof? Because we'd need to test them. Testing an ICBM can be recorded by any other country, the blast is huge.

@M.A.R. Kissinger?

@Ginger Maybe because the US already owns enough to destroy the entire Earth a couple of times over.

This emotion, this fear, this is exactly what pentagon planners bank in on the next time the US does something to NK to make the people's lives there even more miserable.

@M.A.R. Possibly true. I'm very open to the fact that the U.S. has an enormous arsenal of nuclear weaponry. It's just that I know we'd never abuse them, whereas NK definitely could.

@Ginger The US is literally the only country that has ever used nukes.

@M.A.R. Very true

I get it, the US hides behind a false pretense of civility

That it's not like the other empires, that it's benevolent.

Yet when it does do harm it efficiently covers it under the rug.

So if you will, the US government is not fanatical, the boss of the world doesn't need to be fanatical. Just a calculated villain that's far more dangerous than some dictator.

@M.A.R. But we dropped those for reasonable reasons. The U.S. wanted Japan to stop. So we dropped those bombs. We didn't want to kill the people we killed with the bombs, it was just the only way. See, I don't say "We didn't want to kill people" lightly, and it is difficult to admit that Japan was the bad guy and they sort-of deserved those bombs. It is difficult for me to say so because I'm half Japanese and so of course I don't like the deaths those bombs caused.

But really, if those bombs weren't dropped, there would have been far more deaths in the long-run.

@Ginger Japan was already on the brink of collapse. The outcome of the war was pretty obvious. Fire bombings had already killed a significant portion of the Japanese population. I'm not convinced about this hard-decision superhero-esque narrative.

And dropping it twice?

@M.A.R. Very, very true. Twice wasn't necessary, but clearly everyone was heated up in the war. We mainly wanted to shock them into stopping, but 2 may have been unecessary.

I will take the Occam's razor and say some general was drunk on victory and it cost several hundred thousand lives.

But maybe we did 2 to show them we can make more.

@M.A.R. Sure, maybe so, but that was actually the president's idea.

The US secretly forgave major Nazi generals and the Japanese doctors that worked in Unit 731.

I'm not arguing with you, I'm... semi-agreeing with what you're saying.

So it was not a moral obligation either.

Winners don't have to be moral.

@Ginger Thing is, obviously you and I have heard these excuses several times. I think they're mundane and just not true.

They didn't know concentration camps existed until they discovered them in Germany. The US didn't join in the war because of some moral obligation either.

Think about it @M.A.R. The U.S. dropped those bombs for reasons that can be understood, and I know you understand there was legit reasoning in them. I also agree that the U.S. may have overdone it by afar. But if NK dropped a Nuke, do you think it would be for reasons of equivalent responsibility as was the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs?

That they ended up being the lesser lunatics and maybe even the good guys was accidental.

@Ginger Yes, in their mind they would be retaliating the bombings of the Korean war.

@M.A.R. Not quite. That is far from the truth, but I see the point there. They dropped over 1 Billion lbs of bombs during the war.

If why the US did it suffices as "reason", the North Koreans are even more valid in their "reason".

@Ginger Who?

The bombings are a pretty shady area. Both the allies and the Axis bombed civilians.

Close to the end of the war the B52 planes would bomb houses and fighter planes would shoot people that ran outside.

@M.A.R. The U.S. They literally said that the practice of raining Bombs down onto innocent people with enormous planes was "Peace through deterrence." I literally didn't understand that at all at first. Why civilians? The civilians have done literally nothing wrong. Why not on the Military camps? The ones who're actually at fault? There's a reason.

If you drop them on military camps, they'll regroup and get you back. Drop it on their civilians and they realize that if this goes on much longer, they'll have no more civilians that they're fighting for.

That's no reason in my book. Just that there are no inhibitions in a war, and we need to understand that. Not for the American side either. America would absolutely bomb the heck out of NK, maybe even strike first.

"Peace through deterrence" actually masks the fact that we're creating "Peace through Fear"

So I agree with you.

And there would be plenty of "reasons".

@M.A.R. True, but not out of hate, nor out of racism. Instead, it'd be out of fear that they'll hit us.

So glad I convinced you of that. The world should just do away with nuclear bombs, but politicians seem to only care when something happens that is so gruesome speaking against it will get them votes.

@Ginger The people would be just as dead.

So you can picture a scenario when the US strikes first. And the US is in no place to say what country should or should not have certain weapons.

@M.A.R. I absolutely, 110% agree with you on that one. Very glad that someone else understands this. We should just drop the big nuclear bombs all together. I'd rather see regular bombs than nukes. Nukes will kill people, then it'll slowly, painfully kill people by giving them radiation diseases like ugly patches of hair loss and other freaky things, and then it leaves the area of impact unlivable for hundreds of years due to nasty radiation.

Lol

*Drop, by I meant end.

Lmao that totally came out wrong.

@M.A.R. There's always a wrong-doer in wars. Technically, NK would be the initial Wrong-doer because they didn't have to be so aggressive about their ICBMs, testing them by firing them into the seas right next to Japan, poisoning hundreds of thousands of seafood, crippling Japan's biggest industry (seafood), and lying and hiding the fact that they're making more ICBMs.

But the U.S. would also be at fault, too.

So, both would be in the wrong.

US has been the initial wrong-doer for a long time.

@M.A.R. Right. I don't think that it is fair that civilians have to die because of the issues the government causes. The fact that governments get caught up, then disagree, then get into a war... and then those countries force their citizens to draft in to fight for them, that is, in a sense, making the civilians slaves of their country.

Maybe if it didn't wipe out one fifth of the North Korean population, anti-US nationalistic rhetoric wouldn't have worked so well.

@M.A.R. True

@Ginger hearted (?)

Lol

@M.A.R. Very true. Looking at the stupid Manifest Destiny thing that lead to the Mexican-American war, it is all so dumb, and definitely the U.S.'s fault. I'll admit that I'm actually grateful for the land that war got the U.S., but still, it was wrong. It benefits us, but clearly it wasn't right. Human greed caused it.

Wait... let me test something...

@M.A.R. type something random, @ me with it, but don't make it a reply to anything. Like, don't reply to a message. Just type "@Ginger test" or something?

@Ginger bread

@M.A.R. Wheat

@Ginger olive (?)

See?

See what?

Something happened with @FOX9000 The bot responds to something that I replied, but I replied to something someone else said.

If you're part of the game FOX will always respond to one-word replies

@M.A.R. wheat

@M.A.R. I'm not part of the game tho, that is the problem.

Well I dunno how to check that

It isn't responding to a normal @. It only responds to a reply, but it's quite strange that it responds to my reply to you, not it. Strange.

If you've >>joingame at one point you will always be unless you leave

How does that happen?

*How do I leave, I mean.

@Ginger well it's not an unexpected behavior for me, I've seen it often

@Ginger forgot

@M.A.R. recollect (?)

>>quit

@Ginger Command not found. Did you mean: quitgame?

@FOX9000 shut

@M.A.R. cw (?)

lol

>>help

@Ginger I'm FOX 9000, ProgramFOX's chatbot. You can find the source code on GitHub. You can get a list of all commands by running >>listcommands, or you can run >>help command to learn more about a specific command.

>>listcommands

>>quitgame

@Ginger You left the Word Association Game. Run >>joingame to join again.

Let's see now...

@M.A.R. Wheat

...

Huh. Problem solved.

~ Man in the Shadow