I guess? The alternatives to capsaicin (mustard, garlic, horseradish, etc) are all pretty overwhelming flavors, so if you want things even moderately pungent they’re the only thing you’re going to be tasting in a dish. I personally loathe the taste of most hot peppers (but love spicy food) so the trend of "spicy everything" is getting pretty tiresome.

That the name of their unofficial national dish is in Persian/Hindi also suggets something, but I’m sure I don’t know what…

Americans are borderline obsessed with hotsauces and spicy food, though. IME, the pushback about english mustard is usually the same as with vegemite - its too easy to use way too much, and thus obliterate the flavours of the rest of the dish. (Plus it doesn’t pair super well with a lot of regional menus). In many restaurants (diners) there’s always at least tobasco sauce next to the salt and cracked black pepper, and nowadays most have a selection of hot sauces on the table to choose from.

Most american stereotypes I understand or even represent (fat white guy with too many guns here) but I’ve never understood the “american food is bland” thing - I can’t think of a region of the US internally known for bland food. Even the Hot Dish parts of the country strive for bold flavors. Why the hell do you think we’re all so fat, if not because we have so much good food to tempt us into excess?

Deep Fried Beer is a pretty good one, too. Not very tasty, though…

So just spitballing here, but which is more likely - nobody is doing anything at all to try and stop this, or that you’ve bought into a largely manufactured perspective given to you by the (spectacularly) captured international news media system?

(There’s been protests, many of them getting quite violent, every single day of this bullshit in the US. Just so you know.)

People are working damned hard to put it out - why on earth do you think they aren’t?

I think that’s been covered elsewhere.

So, why are you an atheist?

Not being churlish I’m genuinely a little unclear - what’s your thesis here? I don’t think it’s news that a secular organization can be involved with vile systems, but that appears to be the crux (sorry) of what you’re trying to say. I think we may be arguing past one another.

Quatari Kafala is directly derived from Shiara. It’s even alluded to in the article you linked. I know it’s leaning into the stereotype and honestly I’m usually a whole lot less rude than this, but my dude that was a truly terrible example to go with.

(Edit: Sorry to be clear, yes, that’s absolutely correct - I’m aware of no ethnic cleansing, government or otherwise, that’s been divorced from religion. Nor do I know of any broad slavery schemes that don’t use religion as a justification for their actions. I really really want you to check me on this because it’ll be damned educational, and to be totally fair I’m not actually certain that there’s never been a secular slave trade. Just fairly confident.)

In a world where religion never developed, nothing would have changed? Then it rather clearly carries that it’s sole use has been to introduce some exploitable divisions in our non-hypothetical universe. I’m sorry, I think you’re actually making my case for me at this point.

(I’m not confusing boo, and don’t presume to tell me what I mean.)

But it isnt.

I hate to get all schoolyard here, but yes it is. I’ll happily grant that the root cause behind nearly every suffering is that humans can be convinced to be awful tribalistic little shits to each other at the drop of a hat, but there’s no honest way to get away from the reality that religion has been and continues to be the #1 hat to drop when you’re looking to appeal to humanity’s basic capacity for cruelty. Look, I can easily demonstrate the point - find me an ethnic cleansing where religion wasn’t a primary motivation/justification. I’ll wait.

And please feel free to take my view to the extreme! But it falls just a little bit flat when you do, since I don’t have to take religion to an extreme to find examples of it being used to justify all kinds of horrible things. Do I think that an abstract concept (like a system of belief) is in itself good or evil? No. Nuns don’t kill people, people kill people. But I do think it’s a tool which has, time and time again, demonstrated that it brings nothing to society which cannot be gained elsewhere, yet introduces an incredibly easily exploited and basely irrational system wherever it gets it’s toe in the door. It’s an outdated concept that needs to be left in the dust of history, there only to serve as a cautionary tale for those that come after (though I admit that as a species, we’re godawful about actually paying attention to those…)

1. It’s holographic.

2. A reasonable rebuttal might be that all those other things have never been co-opted to instigate, for example, an ethnic cleansing.

Anime builds communities - some of the largest gatherings in the world are anime conventions, people build shrines to the characters, some even go so far as to claim marriage to the characters most dear to them - and yet anime has never been the justification for genocide, the rationalization for slavery or the claimed source from which all morality is derived. And yet despite all that, I’m 100% certain you’ll agree someone holding an unshakable conviction in ‘My Hero Academia’ as a literal accounting of historical events should be precluded from any position of authority. On the grounds that they’re too divorced from reality to make sound decisions.

This is what the religious masses look like to the sane outsiders. You claim many good things that religion provides, but you fail to acknowledge that those things can exist completely independently of a system responsible for more death, suffering and cruelty than any other humanity has developed. At best that’s just plain ignorant, at worst it’s intentional deception.

… we don’t have air pollution?

I see no way this could possibly go wrong.

(Full disclosure that this response is transcribed from my retired civil engineer father, who is the primary source of any information I have on this subject)

Obviously most of the true Khrushchevkas are pretty old, but they were solidly constructed. Not huge, but the layout is pretty reasonable (square plan with living room / kitchen / bath / bed), you can look floor plans up online to get a better idea. The major points where they win over the modern hell that is a 5-over-1 are sound isolation (yeah famously they had no sound proofing, but it’s still a great deal better than what you find in any US stick n’ brick), access (you could pretty easily move a couch up the stairwell), fixtures (this one is both my own subjective opinion and not uniform across all designs, but the ones I have seen were quite nice - decently modern gas appliances (water heater and stove) and branch control radiators (I think this is the wrong term, apologies, I am very tired) as well as in-ceiling lighting fixtures instead of switched outlets - none of the apartments around [where I live in the US] have lighting fixtures outside of the kitchenette and bathroom), and just space (They were, despite being tiny, quite a bit bigger than the rooms I live in now)

Having seen the interiors, Khrushchevkas are way nicer than any 5-over-1 I’ve been in in the US. By a comical degree, really.

Lmao no he won’t be wtf is this.