Remember these are people who know what it’s like to go through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

South Africa today is largely governed by the people who fought and won against apartheid, so it’s understandable that they feel a level of solidarity with the people of Palestine.

(in this context I’m choosing to gloss over the real and present issues with the ANC, because they are not relevant to Israel’s genocide)

Probably to continue getting ‘Gulf Region’-rich off the back of the oil it found in an area that is internationally recognised as their territory.

Even Venezuela recognised it as part of Guyana’s EEZ until very recently.

After Maduro mismanaged one of the most resource rich countries into basically a failed state, he’s now trying to cling to power the tried and true way: stoking a pointless war with its neighbour.

Best case he’s trying to rally support for a 2025 election, or use the threat of as an excuse to say the election. Worst case he’s gonna do a Putin and actually start a war. Not a bad time for it either, whilst the world is already distracted with Ukraine and and Gaza.

Here’s a decent video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7fTSirNDs

You’re flat out wrong when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church - I don’t know enough about Islam to say whether you’re right about that.

In church doctrine, Matthew 16:18 and 16:19, and again in Matthew 18:18, give ultimate authority to St Peter (the first Pope) and all the Popes that followed him.

Essentially the Pope can decide whatever, and it just is. Tomorrow the Pope could decide that gay marriage and abortion are a-okay, and they would be a-okay as far as heaven is concerned.

He might get lynched and the next Pope reverses it, but that mechanism for change exists, and has been used many times in the past - one notable recent one was when the Pope decided dogs go to heaven, so now dogs go to heaven.

Source: ex-Christian who was very involved within the Church institution.

You’re assuming that they’re honest about their reasons, which is not the case.

The main message of the film (besides being a 2h ad for Mattel) is gender equality and female empowerment.

This threatens these people more than homosexuality, but I imagine even for them saying “we don’t want our women to even imagine a world where they’re not subservient to men” would be a tough sell.

Far fewer people are willing to stand up to defend the LGBT community so they’re a convenient scapegoat (‘conservatives’ will always find a group small enough to target in order to push their unpopular policies, it just works).

Having followed SpaceX for a very long time, I think that Elon kinda figured early on how to get engineers excited for a lofty goal and give them sufficient room to fail and innovate, whilst squeezing every drop of work out of them.

So he was a good hype man for things he broadly understood and he was willing to put loads of money into making it successful.

But following a long tradition of people who are actually excellent in a narrow field, he convinced himself that he can translate this into imposing weird and frankly really stupid philosophy onto the world. The Bloombergs and the Carsons of the world have already failed at this, happily it looks like he will too. Not that he’ll learn anything from it, just hope he goes away and stops trying.