they can get them for free from iran too ...

oh, no. it's money that hasn't any inherent value. art can have value. copyright is all about protecting money extraction from it.

i said exactly the opposite (re profit). are you being disingenuous?

ok, yes, you may be being disingenuous.

copyright has nothing to do with creation. it's just about money and rents. you can infringe any copyright you like and be as creative as you wish with it as long you do it underground, or privately, or anonymously. nobody will give a damn, and it is still creation in its purest form. however, try to make money with it or claim ownership and the sharks will be all over you. see? art, money, entirely different matters.

copyright is just property law that distorts the concept of property and exploits "art" to protect rents, mostly those of big companies. and a convenient instrument for censorship.

some precision. far more people compared to what? the 120 in the knesset? ofc there are israelis for peace who oppose genocide and apartheid, and some very notoriously, and that's a tiny ray of hope, but it seems to me they're a very tiny minority. that's one reason they're powerless (in israel at least, for the time being). but polls and media suggest that the vast majority of israelis is actually ok with violence and ethnic cleansing, not to mention the brutal treatment of any palestinian (specially children because they could become eventually "terrorists", etc) as an accepted tool. israeli society is sick, and this goes a long way back. there is indeed huge dislike of netanyahu but mainly for other reasons.

again, you might be overestimating here. trump has likely lost quite a bit of support but i guess the coming midterms will tell how much. but the point i really wanted to make is that this issue didn't start neither with trump nor with netanyahu. evil villiains are convenient for simplistic narratives but don't tell the real story. the reality is that apartheid and ethnic cleansing have been going on for decades, spanning across multiple administrations and governments both in israel and with the endrosment and collaboration of many countries (mostly western but not only). that's because israel is actually a long running western colonial and geopolitical project. israel is today a spoiled society, but it is a western creation.

yes and no. while it was obvious that such an attack would trigger a brutal retaliation i can't make any claim as to what the strategy of hamas really was. we don't even know where the decision came from exactly as there are some indicators that iy could have been a dirty operation orchestrated from within israel itself (or abroad). i'm not saying it was, just that we don't really know. then one can speculate what the consequences would have been of hamas not doing anything at a point in the struggle where the abraham accords would have reconfigured (or solidified) the political relationships in the area (and world opinion) definitely burying the palestinian cause into oblivion.

what i do know for certain is that beyond giving israel an excuse it has succeded in dropping the masks and the whole world recognizing that this is, in fact, a genocide. it has been a seemingly fatal blow to israel's image and it is collapsing the whole propaganda machine that has been operating for decades and seemed invincible. this is a huge strategic victory for hamas and palestine. was it worth over a million innocent dead and counting? i don't know, i just can't judge that. maybe one day we conclude that, wether intended or not, opening pandora's box was precisely what in the end saved the palestinian population from extinction.

you mean the illegaly occupied territories? that's their land.

https://www.un.org/unispal/doc...

the perception that the present is all what there will ever be with just a different veneer is a normal human thing, but if you pay attention you should be able to track how things fundamentally change. maybe you're too distracetd by clichés and feeling scandalized by bizarre sounding thoughts, because they've been changing quite dramatically for a while. india is becoming a new powerhouse, and japan is going broke.

i would rather not live in a country vassal to the us, squeezed and commandeered into geopolitical conflict by the us in its own desperate empire saving rage (that's what "friends" are for, right?), with a debt 2.5 times their gdp, with an acute demographic crisis, a currency in precarious equilibrium and stagnating production numbers. and i actually like japan very much, but thanks but no thanks, they're rushing head on into a very rough ride. india? not really. you would be fine there.

mind, i'm in europe and we're going down too. if you noticed a pattern it's because there is a pattern. the collective west is reaching then end of its privileged dominion. it's crumbling already and you'll be going to hear a lot about india going forward, and the "global south" in general.

i read that as enough of a threat. putin is an old school statesman, a lawyer by training and a diplomat. explicit threats, inflamed speeches, insults, death wishes, and inflammatory tweets interspersed with ALL CAPS are common political communication today but are not his style at all. russian officials in general are quite serious, formal and contained. medvedev is the outlier.

oh, really? well, then i guess after more than a year the plant is surely again in full operation, right? these guys are ex-soviets after all, they repair energy plants, railway stations or bridges in days or weeks. how long would it take them to repair a roof?

yeah, that was embarrasing. tbf, that general's briefing had been publicly broadcasted, and he did report kupiansk was captured. and it was true that they had captured it, meaning driven out the ukranians, but it wasn't secured. ukranians just retreated to the forest southweast (in a rare instance in which they emulated tactics often used by the russians, good for them), then came back together with fresh assault forces from the north.

good pr stunt, quite their style, but it apparently has already fizzled out, the beachead resisted and russians will have to capture kupiansk a third time. they're already on it.

by the way, zelensky's video is fake or much older than purported, in it the sign at the south entry of kupiansk appears mostly intact, while it had been battered considerably much earlier as can be seen in other earlier videos.

i think it is a quite rational response to irrational leaders instigating war and escalation.

they aren't. these are either misses, deflections or debris. they can be misses, or they can also be valid military targets they have intel on.

you know, hitting civilians is a terrorist tactic. russians don't need that, since they have superiority. why would they do that? the ukranians (or brits, who knows) however have used these tactics, flying drones into apartments in moscow (and filming it, and posting it) or blowing up bridges over passing passenger trains, because they have a reason (as illconceived as it is): they are losing, and don't have many other options.

btw if you are worried about bombing civilians check out ukraine's bombing campaign over donetsk in 2017 ...

he actually hasn't for a while. he seems confident to have other options for now. he might threaten with that in the future according to circumstances.

por qué no los dos? they surely would use satellites if available, but they can work without (the context was someone proposing to take satellites out to cripple that capability). i would assume precision would take a hit, but i would rather not find out.

equivalent isn't meant in mathematical sense. the kinetic force and thermal energy seems to be enough to be devastating. mach 10 is already 1/3 of escape velocity, and apparently already makes for a nice crater volatilizing a huge chunk below. also, you can launch unlimited numbers of them without any worry about radiation. it means that it can cause the same destruction as a small nuke without being a doomsday weapon.

i'm always sceptical, but at least he speaks rationally and is consistent over time, unlike most western leaders ...

among other reasons, but in fact they are (surgical). there are actually very few (direct) civilian casualties recorded in this war compared to any other modern wars, and that's considering casualties on both sides. civilian casualties are usually colateral damage from debris, deflected projectiles or anti air ordinance, or isolated incidents.

the thing with "meat assaults" might have been true at the start of the war, with wagner, but is mostly a western meme. the frontline is huge and assaults are hard, specially with drones, so they progress methodically and slowly. assaults are usually carried out by very small groups of troops supported by drones, artillery and air support, clearing trenches and buildings one by one, cutting off supply routes, creating operational encirclement or drawing defenses into hotspots to then penetrate elsewhere. avoiding own troops (of which most are volunteers) and civilian casualties is a priority. re donbas and novorossiya this is specially true because they consider them their own population, and they get out of their way to protect them while they advance. they collect ukranian troops corpses too and keep them in refrigerated trucks, thousands of them, to hand them over to kiev, which is often reluctant to take them in because that's not good for morale and it means paying compensations to families. only this summer they started blowing up factories involved in military supply, only this autum they started targeting the energy and communications infrastructure in general, and particularly recently in odesa, and this has been either to drive populations away from hot zones or as a form of escalation. they could have done all that from day one, and be done with it. they are actually holding back. and putin in particular often takes flak from russians considering they should be more expeditive.

the worst episodes of civilian casualties in this conflict, by far, actually happened before the 2022 invasion, as ukranian nationalists indiscriminately bombed ukranian separatist civilians in donbas, which they considered traitors and "legally" terrorists, particularly in donetsk. the next was the ukranian incursion into kursk where numerous warcrimes against civilians are recorded. then you have bucha which was attributed to the russians and is the only instance that hit western headlines, very insistently so, but i'm still sceptical about it. and ofc isolated incidents. war is war. there are quite a few videos on telegram of ukranian drone operators blowing up fleeing civilians. the ultranationalist ukranians deeply hate russians and what they consider ukranian traitors. the opposite is not really true, russians don't hate ukranians, only azovites and such. e.g. those who survived kursk or so, they know who they are and if these fall into their hands they may indeed get special treatment, which is one reason why they don't tend to surrender.

it's been a pleasure to educate you. you may return to your daily chow now.

correction: not spiderweb, that was this year. it was in retaliation of atacms and storm shadows shot into russia.

not these. you are talking about kinzhal and zircon, these can't maneuver at hypersonic speeds. oreshnik can, and have been used only once, in 2024, as retaliation for operation spiderweb and show off. they destroyed a soviet era factory compound in dnipro. with dummy warheads. the relevant people surely took notice.