The last two months have been a goddamn rollercoaster.

It almost makes me wonder if we really are in a sim and someone is just pressing buttons to fuck with us and see what we do.

I lived in Korea for a while and the biggest difference is how our cities are set up from the get go.

Korean cities are dense. NY dense. Buildings generally go up instead of out. Shops on the base floors, but also a lot of commercial buildings with 5+ levels of shops.

You generally don’t have to walk more than a mile in any direction to get anything you need at any hour of the day, even in smaller satellite cities. There’s usually at least a corner shop or two within a few hundred feet of your apartment entrance.

Subways are generally within a 10~15 minute walk. That connects you to anywhere in the greater Seoul area. Cabs are plentiful, you can hail one down on any major street in minutes if not seconds if you’re in a hurry. The cities are designed around walking. Wide sidewalks, overpasses everywhere, and the density makes it so anywhere you go feels a bit like walking in an outdoor shopping mall would in the US. You can’t walk more than a quarter mile without hitting another cluster of shops.

The area I lived in probably had a 100+ shops in a 2 mile(?) radius and it was a smaller city in the outskirts of Seoul called Buchun. Everything from smaller corner stores to chain restaurants & Korean versions of multi-story Walmart/Costco etc. I’m guesstimating a bit, but I never walked longer than 30 minutes to get to anything I needed.

Sure, you can drive, but walking works just fine. No one NEEDS a car if you live in a city in Korea.

The high speed rails just complements all this infrastructure to connect the cities. We don’t have any of the other stuff necessary to really make this work the same way. That last mile is the killer. If you need to drive to the rail, ride it, get off and find another car to your final destination, most folks would just opt to drive the whole way. Especially if you also factor in the return trip, or the need any degree of flexibility.

In the US, high speed rail would almost function like a plane. In Asia, it’s more like… one part of a comprehensive public transportation system.

I live in Austin in one of the expensive areas considered to be ‘walkable’, but the closest bagel shop from my house is still a 10 minute walk away. If I want to get to the breakfast place I like, it’s 20 minutes from my front door. Only thing I pass in between those two are a bunch of tattoos shops and I think a yoga studio, and some architect firm. Oh, I guess we have a few food trucks now too. They’re usually closed in the mornings when I walk anywhere.

The rest of it is just houses. If I wanted to get to the downtown rail station, it’s a 30 minute walk and I have to walk under the highway and get accosted by homeless folks on occasion. (Most of them are cool, there’s a few that are not).

Oh, and there’s no shade anywhere and it’s Texas. Five months out of the year we hit 90~100+ degrees and you’d need a change of clothes by the time you get anywhere you’re going.

American cities are just not designed for it. We have everything spaced too far apart.

Yeah, but they got rid of those, didn’t they? Elon is going full throttle in the OTHER direction. I mean, clearly one is worse than the other. I’m sure from a money perspective, it didn’t make sense to shut down /The_Donald. Elon would LOVE to have that crowd.

I mean I agree, I didn’t like what they were getting up to, that’s why I’m here, but as bad as Twitter? Comon. Have you heard Elon lately?

I don’t feel like retyping my last comment, so just click my name and read my most recent one.

Gore’s whole thing since he lost the election was global warming. Carter had solar panels installed in the white house that Reagan took down. Gore spent the last 24 years trying warn people about global warming. You got another hot take there, hoss?

When you’re done telling yourself how good of a person you are for taking a stand on an issue we created because we didn’t want Jews in our country either after WWII, may I remind you that the last time the US had a Republican president and a terrorist attack, we murdered 4.5 million people.

That’s still ongoing. ISIS exists because of OUR actions.

Which still doesn’t hold a candle to the countless people who will be dying in the coming decades in the least developed parts of the world thanks to us completely abandoning our responsibility to mitigate global warming, as a country that produces a quarter of all global pollution/waste, 5x the global average per capita.

A truly astounding number, taking into account that we are a country that doesn’t even produce much of anything anymore. At least China makes shit.

We pollute for FUN.

A situation that could very well have been avoided if another 1000 people bothered to show up to vote for Gore in Florida instead of sticking to their ‘principles’.

But I’m glad you got to get your figurative rocks off taking a stand. It’s not you and your ilk playing brinkmanship in this election could very well result in the US diving off a cliff into full on climate change denial that will kill billions in the coming decades.

Who cares, right? The important thing is, you’re fighting for a cause. It matters, by extension, YOU matter.

Real happy for you.

Fair, but if the excuse is that you can’t get the information elsewhere, that’s just not true. I’d rather give reddit the page views and clicks over Facebook or Twitter.

At least over there, Nazi content actually earns you a ban.

I mean, I’ve never had a twitter account but I’ve heard it plenty. Just peek over at /r/conservative once a week or so.

I finally got around to deleting Facebook this year too when I found out they’ll cross post your Instagram stuff to Facebook if you don’t click a box somewhere.

I get a lot more stuff done without the doomscrolling.

Don’t change the subject, man.

What would we do? You know the answer.

Netanyahu is Israel’s Donald Trump. Hamas knew exactly what would happen and did it anyway. Just like you know exactly what would happen if the above scenario happened in America.

You just don’t want to say it. Because that would make you a hypocrite. Because accepting your first position, that we need to leave Israel high and dry, applying the same moral standards to us, you might as well be saying, “Death to America.”

If you don’t wanna go that far, guess what. You’ve got double standards. And that is a moral conundrum only WE have. Most other countries that have a terrorist attack don’t invade sovereign nations and murder millions of people.

When France had their huge terrorist attack, their PM went on stage and said, “This will not change us.” They still accept more Muslim refugees than we ever will.

If anyone doesn’t get to talk shit, it’s us. Especially, ESPECIALLY regarding anything in the middle east, because we engineered the whole thing for our benefit. Abandoning 20 million Jews we propped up specifically to draw aggro for us is cowardly. Denying the reality of what we did because you want to pretend you’re really a ‘good’ person is laughable.

You live in a house with potable water that comes out of the tap. You have any idea how insane that sounds to most of the world? Just wasting drinking water like that?

All the things you take for granted was built on the blood of others. You live in America, get off your high horse. The name of the game is harm mitigation. You want to cosplay a goody-two-shoes? That’s nice. Tell it to the 4.5 million people that died because we couldn’t be bothered to make sure Florida got another thousand Gore votes. If you’re an American, you’re ruining things for everyone else, just by existing.

The US has 1/20th of the global population and produces 1/4 of global emissions and waste. 5x the global average. Know those billions that are going to die in places like Africa as global warming accelerates in the coming decades?

That’s us.

So, if you wanna know why I think your phariasaic platitudes are gag inducingly vile, it’s because your vapid single-issue hot take is ACTUALLY harmful to humanity as a whole. Republicans should never be in power. And no, you wanting to play brinkmanship with democracy itself at stake isn’t funny to anyone actually paying attention.

Your lifestyle is only possible because of the absolutely heinous shit we visited upon others. You want them to pack up and leave? First find them a place to go.

Better yet, campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn’t immediately accept an offer to come live in America?

Sure, we’d have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We’ll get bombed, people will die, and we’ll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we’d actually deserve it. And they’d acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living there.

Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It won’t, but at least you will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It’s called assassinations and coup attempts)

9/11 was just my imagination I guess.

Wait… no it wasn’t. We killed some 940,000 directly and our wars resulted in a cumulative loss of some 4.5 million people.

What… Americans didn’t know we were mucking about in the middle east for decades?

You think we wouldn’t do that now, if we lost ten times as many people?

…With Donald Trump as president?

I didn’t ask you if you were a conscientious objector. Unless your name is Donald Trump that means diddly squat. I asked what America would do in that situation if you weren’t lying to yourself.

And when that day comes to pass, do we deserve the death sentence you want to inflict on Israelis? Cause… we already showed what we’d do in those circumstances.

Do you think we’d react differently today? That’s a super straight forward question.

If anyone anywhere, regardless of the horrific shit we visited upon them attacked a US territory and killed 20,000 people and took another 4,000 hostage, and we had a Donald Trump in office at the time, what would we do?

This isn’t one of those, “Rules for thee, but not for me” kind of situations, is it? Because I’m not doing this to deflect things from Israel, I’m saying WE did it, so at bare minimum we have an obligation to protect the lives of the 20 million people we placed in a death-trap of our making.

You say that and yet, we have protests about Israel/Palestine and not a peep about reparations for Native Americans. We killed 99.9% of their population. It’s easy to pay lip service after the fact, it’s done.

Guess it’s easier to pretend you care when you don’t have settlements being raided and entire families being scalped. And you killed so many of them that there aren’t enough of them left to complain about their treatment. We know what we did do when that was the reality though.

I ask again, what would we do if a tribe went rogue and started doing that now?

Do you think we’ve grown over the past 200 years? Think we’d react differently today?

Be honest.

And that’s why you completely sidestepped my assertion that we’d never do what you’re asking of Israel right now?

I can’t tell if you just aren’t bothering to read what I wrote or if you are just looking for the closest tangentially related thing to copy-paste.

I just said expecting them to return land when we’re keeping Texas and California is a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Yes, Israel removed Palestinian settlements. At our behest. We told them that land was now theirs. And the countries surrounding Israel telegraphed invasion plans for days before the six day war.

Revisionism aside, are you still trying to lay this at the feet of the Israelis instead of ours? We did that. It’s cowardly to try to pretend otherwise.

Make your own arguments instead of copy pasting things. It’s lazy, and you haven’t addressed any of my arguments.

If you care enough about the issue to have a discussion about it, at least use your own words and arguments that show you at least thought about the issues at hand.

I laid out my argument for why we can’t unilaterally cut support to Israel clearly and repeatedly. Least you can do is attempt the same if you want to convince anyone.

I know I wrote a lot and I wouldn’t expect you to read it all, but I addressed this as well, using the US-Mexico war as an example.

We haven’t given back Texas and California yet. If you invade a country and they take your territory, you can ask for a do-over, but it’s probably not going to happen.

As I’ve noted, WE created this whole mess. And we shouldn’t expect others to comply to standards we would never accept ourselves.

If you want to take it a step further, I posited a hypothetical situation where Mexico invaded and killed 20,000 Americans and took another 4000 hostage.

And what our response would likely be. If you aren’t lying to yourself, you know exactly what we would do, especially if we have someone like Donald Trump at the helm when it happens.

And we committed genocide against the Native Americans and put the few that were left in barren strips of land no one wanted to fend for themselves.

Fine, let’s give them back everything first. Then demand others do the same. To this day we impose more rules on the Native Americans than Israel does to Palestine.

We should pray that Israel doesn’t do to Palestine what we did to the Native Americans because there would be about 500 of them left, and they’d be stuffed into a piece of land the size of a Walmart parking lot.

And yet… despite the absolutely horrific shit we inflicted on the Native Americans… if your local tribe started kidnapping Americans and beheading them do you think anyone will care why?

You don’t see the irony in this?

I’m not saying the Palestinians aren’t justified in trying to take back their lands. I’m saying the Israelis are there because WE carved out that piece of land and told them they could go there. I’m saying WE decided to destabilize the entire region and sowed division so we could steal their oil afterwards. And WE directed the resulting (entirely justified) resentment towards Israel, using them as a convenient scapegoat to take the target off of our own backs.

We do not have the moral high ground here, and pearl clutching about the Israelis being racist towards people who are trying to kill them (because of us) and trying to say we should cut off all military aid and leave them to die is a morally abhorrent position to take for someone who lived their whole life steeped in the wealth that we extracted from their blood.

Because if that’s your solution for Israel, applying that same standard to us would mean we’d have to collectively commit mass suicide first. We’ve done a lot worse for a lot less.

Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones. Our house isn’t even glass. It’s made out of single sheets of phyllo dough.

And the scary thing is, we weren’t even the worst of the lot. Look at what world dominating empires have done historically and most of them were so, so much worse than us. Hell, look what China and Russia is doing NOW. As horrible as we were/are, just about everyone else who attained this level of power has done worse.

There is no way to atone for everything we did. But even if you wanted to start, letting 20 million people die in a death-trap we created because it’s no longer convenient for us to maintain it is certainly not the way to start things.

We put them there to draw aggro for all the messed up things we do in the region so we can steal their oil.

They’ve been doing that for 60 years. Every rocket, every terrorist attack they took in that timeframe should have been ours to take. We engineered the whole thing.

We got all the benefit, while they took all the losses. You want to blame them for being racist to the people trying to kill them every day? When we, as Americans are pretty much the entire reason it’s happening?

Have you seen pictures of Iran in the 70s?

We did this. All of it. We don’t get to wash our hands and pretend this isn’t all on us.

What did Mexico do to us? Guatamala? We overthrow governments for fruit companies on this side of the pond. The idea of US taking the moral high ground on a situation we created is insane.

If you actually want the moral high ground, know what we should be doing? Campaign to bring the 2 million Palestinians HERE. You think people living in Gaza right now wouldn’t immediately accept an offer to come live in America? And they’d acclimate to secular society a lot faster here than they ever would living in Gaza which has been blown to bits already.

Sure, we’d have all the problems that we were so eager to inflict on the Israelis. We’ll get bombed, people will die, and we’ll probably finally get our share of the terrorist attacks Israel and Europe have been dealing with for decades. But unlike them, we’d actually deserve it. Last I checked, OPEC isn’t selling oil in Euros.

Let Israel have the whole thing, and lets see if that changes a damn thing. It’s the LEAST we could do after using them as cannon fodder for the past 60 years. And these performative leftists will actually learn WHY Jordan and Egypt refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. (Hint: It’s called assassinations and coup attempts)

Clearly, because reading my comments it isn’t immediately obvious what my political inclinations are.