Tuuktuuk

It’s both.

Nestlé is Nestlé. It regularly gets caught of similar things. Now it put a little too much of some ingredient that contains a toxin.

Nestlé has been under boycott since at least from 1980’s for convincing mothers to use formula instead of breastfeeding, even in places where the formula will be mixed in very dirty water. When the pediatrician recommends something, you do as recommended.

Since 1980’s at least, newborns have been dying painful deaths through diarrhea because of Nestlé wanting profits. And the last time I checked, around 2010, it was still doing that. Nothing has changed.

It’s a company intentionally killing newborns for profit.

So: this is a sign that safeguards are working. They are, once again, forcing Nestlé to reduce the amount of toxins in its baby food. That’s a good thing.

It’s been years since I played through these games, and I have forgotten much, but “has to dance for money” is not the whole story.

It’s more like “has to dance for money, has to always give all income to another person and is physically not able to leave before having saved up a large sum of money to pay the debt”, or something along those lines. And the reasons were out of her control, but very crucially, also out of the control of the protagonist.

I find it refreshing to get to play the bad guy in a game. He’s doing things I absolutely would never do, and it is me who has to click the button to command him to do those atrocities. It’s good because you should know your enemy, and this gives me a perspective that let’s me peek into the thinking of an absolute fucking asshole. Also, if you ever find any similarities between what you’d do and what the protagonist does, you know that’s something you need to process in yourself.

But… There are so many spots where the horrible things happen to the people in the game for reasons not in control of the protagonist. So, you should probably re-read previous paragraph, adding a lot of “would” words in there. Because when it’s not about the protagonist being evil, it’s about the developers being mean. You’re not role-playing an asshole, you’re playing a game that is an asshole towards various minorities.

Of course: I did play the game in German. Others are saying many of the jokes get missed if you play it in English. Maybe the game is kind of milder if played in English, then? Maybe it’s left more ambiguous whether the people in the game will really live a miserable life for the rest of their days?

I think I’ll copypaste my comment from the Linux Gaming comm to here as well… So, here goes:

There are a bunch of jokes in this game that I absolutely am not okay with.

Yeah, the whole point of the game is the main character being a horrible asshole.

But then, the game for example makes jokes about a black woman ending up a slave. She ends up as a slave not because the main character is being thoughtless. Yes, his actions affect the result, but it’s a pure coincidence he could not have reasonably predicted. The joke boils down to “look, we dare to be this inappropriate.”

Some of similar jokes could maybe read as commentary on horrible bigots who really do behave towards other people in the way the protagonist of this game does, because technically the bad things happen to those people because of the protagonist’s behaviour. But when the same things sometimes happen to them kind of “just like that”, it puts the rest of the jokes in a very different context: The developers of the game actually are making fun of the fact that black people used to slaves or that women often experience sexual violence.

And then there’s also the transsexual who turns out to be the worst stereotype of a transsexual that a MAGA person ever could imagine. And, and, and.

Some of the jokes are kind of more neutral: At one point the protagonist needs to feed some ten-ish children to a monster, camouflaging them as hot dogs and covering them in ketchup and mustard. And then the children do indeed get eaten and the game progresses. I mean, okay, it’s super inappropriate in a way, but it’s not perpetuating hate speech. But a surprisingly large share of the jokes are punching at various minorities.

I’ve never seen as much bigotry in a game as I saw in the Deponia trilogy when I played through it.

There are a bunch of jokes in this game that I absolutely am not okay with.

Yeah, the whole point of the game is the main character being a horrible asshole.

But then, the game for example makes jokes about a black woman ending up a slave. She ends up as a slave not because the main character is being thoughtless. Yes, his actions affect the result, but it’s a pure coincidence he could not have reasonably predicted. The joke boils down to “look, we dare to be this inappropriate.”

Some of similar jokes could maybe read as commentary on horrible bigots who really do behave towards other people in the way the protagonist of this game does, because technically the bad things happen to those people because of the protagonist’s behaviour. But when the same things sometimes happen to them kind of “just like that”, it puts the rest of the jokes in a very different context: The developers of the game actually are making fun of the fact that black people were used as slaves or that women often experience sexual violence.

And then there’s also the transsexual who turns out to be the worst stereotype of a transsexual that a MAGA person ever could imagine. And, and, and.

Some of the jokes are kind of more neutral: At one point the protagonist needs to feed some ten-ish children to a monster, camouflaging them as hot dogs and covering them in ketchup and mustard. And then the children do indeed get eaten and the game progresses. I mean, okay, it’s super inappropriate in a way, but it’s not perpetuating hate speech. But a surprisingly large share of the jokes are punching at various minorities.

I’ve never seen as much bigotry in a game as I saw in the Deponia trilogy when I played through it.

Beside other things mentioned, by adding the hat on the Israeli guy, it’s also trying to make it look like Jewish people in general are siding with Israel’s atrocious behaviour. Many are, but those who have relatives who were in German concentration camps are of course strongly opposed to genocides, including the one committed by Israel.

The meme is trying to create anti-jewish sentiments, and that’s not okay.

Ah, so there will be shaheds attacking targets in Ukraine? Do I guess correctly that Iran will be helped by its friend, the Russia, to launch said drones? Must be a schocking new experience for Ukrainians.

Or, more likely, misunderstood. Yes.

I upvote when the argument is good or I want to give a little more visibility for the argument expressed in the comment. And if it’s a joke, to show that I enjoyed the joke.

I downvote if an argument is in bad faith or not thought of thoroughly at all.

The one that the Russia started, and the other one the Russia started.

NATO was America. Trump has changed that. Especially when he threatened to start a war against NATO, he ended up inadvertedly restructuring the whole philosophy behind what NATO is.

They do not see themselves as Swedes. Beside that, I do not understand what you are trying to say with your comment, and cannot react to it in a very meaningful manner.

You referred to a statistic where people’s everyday language is incorrectly conflated with their nationality and then used that statistic to claim that the eastern half of Ukraine was identifying as Russians. That statistic was erroneous precisely for the reason you are bringing up: Being of a certain descent and speaking a language are not always connected. And also, being of a certain descent does not mean that you identify as being a part of the culture you are descent of.

Both.

That’s also probably why I haven’t bought products such as Coca Cola and Pepsi since the Iraq war began? :)

And me advocating for further integration of EU and wanting the EU parliament to have much more power over EU decisions than it currently has?

I find the concept of “malpracticing a law” very interesting.
What, specifically, was malpractice here? Except that it was against the will of Putin, and you are on Putin’s side? Your anti-EU sentiment seems to be strong.

Otherwise the russians would start with much smaller and weaker countries

You mean, like Georgia? Or Moldova? Yes, you are right. That’s also what they did. And the Russia did not mean to begin a war with Ukraine. Putin had spent several billions into bribing Ukrainian officials. He had found a large amount of Ukrainians who were willing to inform him about the sentiments in Ukraine, and they unanimously told that Ukrainians either want to become part of the Russia or will be completely okay with that.

Putin had not recognized that since 2014, most Ukrainians were strongly against the Russia. And he had not understood that almost none of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine identified as Russian. Because most Russian-speakers for example in Estonia or Moldova do identify as Russians. (In Estonia this has lately somewhat changed, BTW. Possibly in Moldova as well, but I don’t know that much about what’s going on over there right now!)
The only people willing to give any information to him were those from a very small minority of Ukrainians that were indeed pro-Russian. I used to like the L’viv–Mariupol train because it was the only night train that arrived to Vinnytsia, where I lived, at a sensible time. Other trains arrived around 4 in the night, this one around 8. Much nicer that way! And there I did have conversations with people from Mariupol city, and I could find people who were indeed pro-Russian. But those were not many at all!
When Putin gave the order for the full-scale invasion, he knew that Ukrainians will not fight. He knew that almost all of the Ukrainian military leadership had been succesfully bribed. Because that’s what all of his aides told him. That’s what the most trusted people around him were telling him. He did not try invading a strong country. He started a military march into a large but extremely weak country that he knew would immediatelly fold.

But he was wrong, because he had built an extremely biased group of sources, and he had promoted exceptionally corrupt people into the Russian leadership. Almost none of those billions meant for bribery of Ukrainian military was actually used for bribery. It went almost exclusively into buying cool yachts for the people responsible for delivering the bribes.

Yanukovich was e legitimate President who was took down in a coup

That coup was the parliament of Ukraine voting to remove him from the post of the president of Ukraine. It was done according to the laws of Ukraine. It was breaking the laws of the Russia, and Putin is annoyed about that. Just like he is annoyed that there not being elections in Ukraine right not is breaking the laws of the Russia.

I would not call an impeachment done according to the laws of the country a “coup”. And I feel that you are either uninformed or intentionally lying when you’re calling it a coup.

almost the entire eastern half of Ukraine is ethnically russian, a fact that people tend to forget or ignore in this narative

Dude, 40 % of Ukrainians spoke Russian as their main everyday language in early 2022. In the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, that was 70 %. More than two thirds of the people in Kyiv did all of their everyday things almost exclusively in Russian. When they paid the bus driver, they talked in Russian. When they bought milk in those over-the-counter shops that are still prevalent in Ukraine, they asked for it in Russian. And the bus driver and the shopkeep answered them in Russian. And when I lived in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016, practically all of my friends spoke Russian as their main everyday language. That had to do with me knowing Russian reasonably well back then and only knowing the basics of Ukrainian.
Any Russian-speaking Ukrainians I explicitly asked about their mother tongue always gave the same answer to me: “Ukrainian and Russian”. I almost never heard them utter anything at all in Ukrainian – they lived their life completely in Russian. But still, they would answer “Ukrainian” in a poll. And not even one of them identified as Russian. They identified as Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Or, more specifically (and a bit funnily, to my eye), as “Ukrainian-and-Russian-speaking Ukrainians”.

I am also married to a woman born in the city of Donetsk. Who used to speak exclusively in Russian until September of 2022. And even though she is from the most Russian-speaking city in all of Ukraine, and therefore along the most unambigously Russian-speaking Ukrainians, she has never seen herself as Russian. So, no. Eastern half of Ukraine was not Russian. It was Russian-speaking. And the capital was overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. And still not Ukrainian.

Also, most of the people in the Maidan demonstrations spoke Russian as their main everyday language and spoke Russian with their parents and children and spouses at home. Your claim that it was a demonstration against Russian-speakers in Ukraine is based on a forgetting or ignoring of this narative.

Also…

I am sure that you are very important and that people want to hear you opinion

This sounded very sarcastic. Keep in mind that I started expressing my opinion because of you saying the following:

I am eager to hear your opinion about it.

If you think I am unimportant and my opinion is not of any interest to you, please refrain from saying “I am eager to hear your opinion”

I don’t think it was possible guessing in 2008 or 2014 that the Russia would attack Ukraine in such a moronic way as it did. Of course the Russia has gotten weakened by this, and I believe the main reason Scholz and Biden were trying to minimize the military support to Ukraine was that they wanted the Russia to bleed.

But keep in mind: That is the motivation for decreasing Ukraine’s support. The Russia started the war by itself. It would have been in the interests of the Russia to end it right in summer 2022 by withdrawing back behind its own borders. Maybe even just withdrawing back to where the front lines were in January 2022 could have sufficed back then, as people didn’t yet understand how much the Russia wants to completely subjugate Ukraine. It was not understood that this is a war of genocide. But especially Scholz made sure that the Russia would stay in the game. I’ve been wondering why he did that, and I only have such unclear theories about that that it makes no sense to write them – they are likely to be incorrect. But still: We can still see that Putin believes an enemy can be made to give up by scaring it. Europeans are otherwise friendly but if they get scared, they start fighting back. Putin’s junta thinks the other way around: They are friendly if they must, but if they can, they will be aggressive. Putin cannot understand why Ukrainians don’t give up when the Russia shows that it’s willing to torture and murder Ukrainian civilians, because under those same circumstances, Putin would give up. If Scholz had allowed right in, say, May 2022, Ukraine to shoot down the bridge between Ukraine and the Russia using the Taurus missiles, that would have been the end of the war. And the Russia would not have bled.

There is nothing more despicable than those central Europeans that have been advocating against helping Ukraine because they have wanted the Russia to bleed. And then there have been a large bunch of useful idiots who have done the bidding of the Russia-bleeders “in the name of peace”, without understanding what their shouting is actually bringing us to… I’m not thinking very friendly thoughts about those useful idiots, either.

I am eager to hear your opinion about it.

So have many other people before. To be honest, it is extremely tiresome having this same conversation again and again, month after month.

But good, let’s go for it again then? Yes, USA definitely had an interest in who would be in the leadership of Ukraine after Janukovych is gone. So did for example Finland. When there were elections in USA in the end of 2024, there were people in the embassy of my own home country, Finland, in Washington DC having conversations about who they would prefer to see as the next president of USA. And various people working in the embassy of Finland in DC did call Helsinki and did have conversations very similar to what you linked there. That’s one of the main reasons what embassies exist for, in the first place. They observe what is going on in the country they are based in, report about it back to their own countries’ capitals, and also try to influence the outcomes of various events that can affect their own countries’ interests. Also the embassy of Finland in USA does this. I am sure they said something along the lines of “Harris is our woman, it is important that she wins the election!” If there was anything the embassy of Finland could do about it, I am sure they did try nudge the US towards having Harris as its president.

This becomes even clearer if you listen to this phone call in the audio format. If you listen to the original conversation while keeping in mind that it’s the embassy of USA doing its job reporting to its capital about what is going on and how it affects US interests, you see it’s a call that is basically business as usual for an embassy. Yes, trying to influence what is going on.

From my previous experience of having had this same conversation with various people during the past 12 years of this war, next you are likely to say that this phone call proves that during this phone call USA created the conflict that began in 2008 when the Russia for example changed the Russian grammar, demanding that the conjugation of the word “Ukraina” in Russian language should use the forms used for regions of the Russia and not the forms used when talking about independent countries. In 2008 the Russia started preparing for invading Ukraine, and somehow this phone call in 2014 proves to you that USA created the Maidan demonstrations that began with Ukrainian berkut troops beating up unarmed teenagers in the demonstration and their relatives, many of whom were veterans of Soviet-Afghan war, came in their defence, armed. This would mean you implying that USA had a time machine they could use in 2014 to influence what the Russia does in 2008.

How did the Russia taking over Crimea and Donbas weaken USA’s old cold war enemy?
And what did USA do to convince the Russia it should invade Crimea?

The US wanted the war between Ukraine and Russia

US wanted the Russia to take over Crimea and Donbas? What for?

the US used ukraine as a lever to demand more money from other members

The money spent to NATO defence does not go to NATO. It goes to Czechia. It means Czechia buying tanks, howitzers, drones and ammunition for Czech stockpiles. I don’t think Trump really understood this when demanding we ramp up our defence spending here in EU, but that’s not money for NATO. It’s a demand that we use more money for our OWN defence. Furthermore, the demand is that 3% should be for direct military use, further 2% should be for any use that is usable also by the military: For example any railway connections that would be useful in the time of a war count as defence spending for those extra 2%.
Czechia or Finland building new railway routes brings zero money for Trump.
In other words: Trump “used Ukraine” as a lever to demand other members spend more money for their own militaries.