Which is really big because most of Europe has a housing crisis going on and home ownership rates are in the toilet.

Ah, yes, an ad by checks notes BBC.

Holy anti-Chinese cope.

PS: Nothing you said actually backs up your argument.

Ha…lal bro?

I mean it’s either that or tax the rich, and you can guess which option the rich prefer.

Never change, Germany.

This has been going in for ages.

Yes, because America has America has had strategic interests (read: reasons to do imperialism) in the Middle East for ages.

The lobby and Moussad are powerful.

Yes, because they’re allowed to be powerful. There’s a reason no other country gets to manipulate American domestic politics this openly, not even longtime American allies in NATO. If money and a good intelligence agency were all you needed to control the strongest military power in the world everybody would be doing it. The fact of the matter American elites need a reliable thug in the region to do their dirty work for them and Israel does that job well enough that American elites feel the need to protect it from popular backlash. Compare how mainstream media talked/talks about Trump getting bribes from the Gulf States to how Israel’s antics get reported on and you’ll see what I mean; if Israel wasn’t valuable to the people running the show they’d have tossed it overboard a long time ago.

Not to defend Lenin (he sucks for other reasons, including the secret police bit), but to be fair:

But saying he betrayed the revolution implied he had any part in it in the first place.

It was the Bolsheviks that overthrew the provisional government, and they had been agitating for more Soviet power before that. They were absolutely an important part of the revolution.

and won the 1917 constitutional assembly vote.

The split of the SRs, had it (edit: fully) taken place before voting rolls were announced, would’ve almost certainly given the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition a majority.

betrayed the revolution, starting the Russian Civil War.

The idea that anything resembling socialism was going to happen without civil war is a fantasy. The people who would become the Whites obviously weren’t trying to restore democracy, and democracy wouldn’t have stopped them. I mean hell the Whites’ Volunteer Army predates the overthrow of the assembly. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that reactionaries don’t actually care about democracy. The only way to avoid civil war would’ve been to let the reactionaries win before it started.

To reiterate, fuck Lenin for turning post-revolutionary Russia into a one-party police state, but some of these charges don’t make sense.

Gotta love it when evil assholes sabotage themselves.

Are you… are you surprised that heads of state lie?

Thinking that Israel controls America is like thinking the knife controls the serial killer because he spends money on sharpening it.

TIL that you can do that.

To be fair, it could be sold as Tex-Mex. I don’t know if it would work, but theoretically it could.

I don’t know how cheap Mexico is relative to America, but given cost of living differences I doubt they’ll be selling $20 burritos.

the israeli population is also a victim of the zionists.

The imperial boomerang works in mysterious ways, but still, “victims” is a strong word. They by and large back the choices of their political leaders.

The influence of St Thomas Aquinas, Pope John and the Malleus Malificarum is not imo a ‘nothing burger’ in the world of the state killing women in the western tradition.

I don’t know about Thomas Aquinas*, but Pope John only said that witchcraft could and should be tried by the Church. Therefore, the damage he caused could be estimated by how many “witches” the Church killed, and the answer to that is “not many.” Like I said, the vast majority of witch trials were done by secular courts, and Church (inquisition) courts were much more likely to hand innocent verdicts or lenient sentences. The Malleus Malificarum was definitely a problem (though certainly not the problem; the period where most executions happened started more than 70 years after it got published), but the Church never endorsed it or otherwise used it to my knowledge.

*I gave up and looked him up, see below but that’s absolutely a nothing burger.

I’d be wary of history via wikipedia but if you are doing that Italy, where Aquinas was from, might be worth a peek for the 1300’s to 1500 or so period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Italy

I did, and… the same pattern holds?

The Inquisition did not consider witchcraft a priority compared to heresy, particularly after the introduction of the Counter-Reformation. It maintained the policy that the Witches’ Sabbath was an illusion caused by Satan rather than real, and did not accept a charge of witchcraft based solely on the testimony of an already charged person.[4] As in the case of heresy, people who were condemned guilty of witchcraft by the Inquisition, and repented, were not executed the first time they were condemned, only if they relapsed and repeated the crime, which also contrasted with the secular courts.

Most witch trials in Italy were conducted by local secular courts and not by the Inquisition.

Again, the Church had little to no role in any of this.

1300-1517 we have hundreds of women being killed as witches with the RCC from Aquinas to 1620 throwing petrol on the fire.

Adding to what I said above, this is all in Italy. We have data points elsewhere: Spain and Portugal, both under strong Catholic control, saw very few witch trials during this or any other period specifically because local inquisitions were the ones running the trials.

While it’s tempting to just ignore the machine that started burning women alive using idiotic theology to prop it up for hundreds of years and instead focus upon when it went hysterically viral I think it’s worth remembering who laid the groundwork.

Even if we accept the (very inconsequential) positions taken by select Catholic leaders as “the groundwork,” I don’t think people should be judged for the actions of people who claim to agree with them. Both Aquinas’s work and John’s papal bull would need to be quite a bit more misogynistic and murderous before we can assign either man blame for this. I mean hell neither of them even mention women in their relevant statements. By this logic we could blame Adam Smith for the Irish Famine.

deleted by creator

Yes, but paying to support open source software is a decent compromise.

Netanyahu wanted (and wants) to stay out of prison, but also (thanks to America and its European allies) Israel has faced a grand total of zero consequences for trying to do regime change in Iran. What should they (Netanyahu obviously couldn’t have done this alone) known better?

By the early 1600s the RCC was already getting bored of the women burning machine they’d spent centuries building and polishing almost ex nihilo before the new world had even really properly considered burning women as a hobby.

Burning women was never a thing the RCC did with any regularity. Witches were tried as heretics, which in almost all cases were simply told to repent. Petronilla de Meath is unusual specifically because she wasn’t given that option, along with all the bullshit Richard Ledrede did. There’s no sense in relitigating a single trial from 700 years ago, but this was clearly not the result the RCC court system was supposed to produce, as evidenced by how it almost never produced it in other cases. In modern terms we’d call this a mistrial, and I’m pretty sure I could name similarly egregious ones from modern America (the keyword would be “black defendant”) with equally lethal consequences.

Saint Petronilla de Meath was burned in 1324 as this clusterfuck was revving up.

If it was really “revving up,” it’d have taken less than 100 years before the absolute shitshow of witch trials got started.

and cranked it up with bulls that helped embed hardcore misogynistic heresiology

Can you give an example of this? As far as I can find online the papal bull in question just says Church authorities could and should try witches for heresy. It’s a complete nothingburger, since the Church itself would hardly punish any claimed witches in its entire history. They didn’t get bored of burning women because this is simply not something they ever did regularly.

When the Malleus Maleficarum dropped in the late 1400’s long before the Protestant schism, things went feral and infected all that stems from it.

This is when the witch panic starts, but to quote Wikipedia:

Witch trials were still uncommon in the 15th century when the concept of diabolical witchcraft began to emerge.

More Wikipedia:

The period of the European witch trials with the most active phase and the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630.[42][5] This period saw more than 40,000 deaths.

Keep in mind that the estimated number of “witches” executed was between 40 and 60 thousan, so we’re looking at the vast majority of killings. And yes, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were both in full swing by then.

So the upshot of all this is: The Catholic Church was mever a primary engine of prosecuting witches, which is why places where they were still in control of the justice system were also the safest from witch executions.