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Forums Terrorist posted:This is overkill as gently caress but unlike some posters I'm not going to categorically decry the use of violence in achieving one's political ends. For me it's less universally decrying political use of violence and more that, as ways of discrediting and combating fascism and its underlying failings, vigilante attacks against those neither in positions of power nor already actively engaged in violence is about as counterproductive as you can get without blaming the Jews. Pictured, nine kings attending the funeral of Edward VII: 
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Apr 12, 2013 18:26
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:55 |
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Humboldt squid posted:I like that money has colors now. If it's going to rule our lives it should at least be nice to look at. It became so much better once I saw this: 
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Apr 26, 2013 02:12
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Loving Life Partner posted:Uhhh, what's the deal with the "support radical feminism and multiculturalism until your sons can't find wives and keep a family" bit? It's important to remember that sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a colossal rear end in a top hat. Otherwise you end up like the people claiming that a CIA/Al-Qaeda alliance was conspiring to destroy the last best hope of anti-imperialism. 
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May 2, 2013 03:22
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Enjoy posted:I heard that the centralisation and stability of the Church are what allowed Europe to claw back again after the decentralisation and destabilisation of the collapse of the Roman empire. Starting with the Scholasticism movement in the monasteries. When I vacationed in Ireland once a point made for their perspective was "Dark Ages? What Dark Ages? That was when our scholarly traditions were first developing." Since that was where a lot of scholars displaced by the fall of the Western Roman Empire ended up taking up shop.  Pictured, Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest and physicist. He was the first to propose the expansion of the universe and Hubble's constant, as well as the Big Bang. At the time, astronomers tended to prefer the steady state theory, and in fact some made issue of his religion biasing him, characterizing it as an attempt to make the universe's origins better adhere to Genesis.
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May 19, 2013 22:27
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LimburgLimbo posted:As hosed up as it may seem, this is the way these laws tend to be written, and it (debatably, of course) makes sense. Firearms are deadly weapons, not negotiation tools, and the idea is that if you have to discharge one, it should be because you had no other reasonable choice. If you have the time to fire a warning shot, it means that you had the time to move, or warn off an assailant. This is why most states require a basic training course, including a briefing on laws like these, in order to get a concealed weapons permit. I totally get you that warning shots basically have no place in sane self-defense and can easily never be justifiable even in a legal system where justifiable homicide is not difficult to prove, but thirty years for them is hosed up full stop. 
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Jul 14, 2013 06:38
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Zeroisanumber posted:I love the look on that kid's face, "Mom! Why the hell did we stop in the middle of this hot-rear end grassy scrubland? Why aren't we going further west to California like every other sane settler in the loving country? Can't we at least drag ourselves to someplace where we're not threatened by locusts and grassfires every goddamn spring?" Locusts are an interesting topic, as currently North America is the only inhabited continent without a majorly damaging locust species. This wasn't always the case, and in fact in the 19th century the Rocky Mountain locust devastated crops in swarms which were reportedly some of the largest in the world. A famous one, Albert's Swarm, was estimated at 198,000 square miles and comprised of trillions of insects.  I suspect they were smaller than this. After the 1870s they rapidly diminished, and by 1902 they were extinct. What happened? Some have theorized that they were just the swarming phase of a normal grasshopper and circumstances just haven't been right to trigger swarming behavior in a century, but there's much stronger evidence for them being a separate species that lived in more isolated valleys between swarms, and settlers plowing over their nesting grounds turned up and destroyed enough of their eggs to put them on an irreversible decline. So the lack of a major locust species in North America seems to not be deliberate intent by humans to eliminate a pest, but simply doing it by dumb luck.
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Aug 23, 2013 21:08
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Edit: wrong thread. Since I was out west recently and just amazed at how much government land you can drive through:  Admittedly, a lot of it really does seem pretty barren. Killer robot fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 18:32
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Laminator posted:There's a kid on the pediatric inpatient service I'm on currently who has been using this stuff, or some variant of it. The synthetic cannabinoids can bind to the same receptors as naturally-occurring cannabinoids in weed, but with a much, much higher receptor affinity. It can precipitate episodes of psychosis, especially in individuals who are genetically susceptible, but I don't know if that would manifest as suicidial thoughts. The bigger issue is that it can cause acute renal damage, so you can have a young teenage kid getting kidney failure from the fake weed he bought at the gas station. This is much of why "end the drug war" daydream is not just legalizing or decriminalizing weed or drugs in general, but specifically looking through each general "category" of drug and legalizing some of the less harmful examples. I figure if you can legally get one of the less unsafe opioids, one of the reasonably safe uppers, etc, even if they're not the absolutely most potent it'll make the leap to getting "better stuff" less appealing than if you're getting them all from the same guy down the street while watching out for cops. 
Killer robot fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Sep 29, 2013 |
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Sep 29, 2013 03:11
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I'm American, and while I didn't think "gypsies" themselves were mythical, how I heard it used as a kid was basically synonymous with "carnies" or "migrants." So while I knew it associated with bands of (implied dishonest) travelers and outsiders, the word always suggested an itinerant lifestyle independent of ethnicity. If gypsy kidnappings, fortunetellers, and curses came up in stories it was just general "weird and mysterious strangers" stuff rather than being racist against any sort of real group, so far as I knew. I only learned that once I was in my teens as part of some Holocaust education. Pictured: a floodgate supervisor on what is now the Volga–Baltic Waterway, c. 1909, taken by a then experimental color process. 
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Oct 21, 2013 09:48
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Zeroisanumber posted:Although I saw and was disgusted by the retarded Twitter brigade that came out after Fukushima, I've never personally met anyone who still harbors ill will towards Japan for Pearl Harbor. I'm sure that those people exist, but not in large numbers and they're not something that I hear about on a year-to-year basis. I've known some who did at least into when I was a kid, but mostly just people who had literally fought them in the Pacific: otherwise even old people always seemed to get even more than with Germans that however terrible Imperial Japan might have been the current Japan is a much different place. Mostly though, it's as said a living memory of a rare foreign attack on US soil. 
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Dec 8, 2013 06:25
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Capt. Morgan posted:
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Dec 18, 2013 22:04
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Now that you mention it...   And when will the hatred end?
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Jan 28, 2014 02:21
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I was just thinking that.  The San Xavier Mission, on the San Xavier reservation near Tucson. Was 2006 when I visited it, and still under some restoration. In that part of the country, surviving 18th century construction is unusually ancient.  It was Christmas when I was visiting. The simple little seasonal decorations made a great reminder that it was an active community church and not just a sterile historic site. 
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Apr 30, 2014 23:42
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Centripetal Horse posted:It's not just below, it's way below. I happened to look this up two nights ago, and ran the numbers through inflation calculators. The minimum wage in 1968 was about $10.60 in today's dollars, and that's using an optimistic conversion. You can get much more damning results depending on which index you use. It's a little more complicated than that, since in 1968 there were multiple minimum wages for different industries, and I think even all together they covered fewer jobs than current law. Only the highest one, $1.60, was that high by today's standards, and the lowest, $1.15, was much more in line with current minimum wages. This isn't disputing that current minimum wage is too low, since overall worker productivity and business profitability has grown so much since then while wages have remained low, and more people on minimum wage are supporting families than most people like to think. It's just that the $10.60 figure isn't a simple comparison. 
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May 9, 2014 00:20
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Accretionist posted:Seriously, though, I'd like to think I'm just misreading that; what are they on about? Tell me I'm wrong. You're not. Cultural appropriation may be a real thing, but on the internet it's never about things like literal sacred symbols being used as kitsch, it's always about dumb kids unironically raging about race-mixing and calling it social justice. Also spotted today, the latest version of the political compass quiz! I didn't bite, but I gather this one tends to steer moderate people toward anarcho-socialism. 
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May 15, 2014 00:11
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Unlearning posted:No time for MRA or any of that, but can't this literally be applied to things like race ('most terrorists are Muslims' etc.) and still hold? And doesn't that tell us there's something wrong with it? I don't think you have to be an MRA to find it unsettling when well-meaning activism (satire aside) co-opts language and argument structure traditionally used by bigots, especially when a lot of time has been invested in demonstrating to people how the bigots are wrong for their language and argument structure apart from the actual social implications of their speech. In other news, I'm glad to see the US isn't alone in stuff like politicians awkwardly throwing first pitches at baseball games, though I don't know enough about this guy to know if his awkwardness is "harmless old man" or "demonstrates that he is heartless and evil." 
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May 31, 2014 00:26
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syscall girl posted:Political like David Dees? Because the second half is just a joke about crackpots. Guess what was capped with 100 whole ounces of the wonder metal?   Mind, by the time they finished it, the price had tumbled to that of silver.
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Jul 17, 2014 05:43
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Let's take a break from organized sexual assault and enjoy something nice and wholesome: Killer Robots.  
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Sep 6, 2014 05:34
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There are even more valid ways to make pizza than there are to make chili, and disqualifying something from being either because it's not your precise favorite variation is dumb. That said, I want to try this one out of horrified fascination rather than genuine interest: 
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Sep 8, 2014 02:06
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Hubis posted:The "you can't be racist against white people" construction is a convenient fiction that is essentially true since, while a white person can certainly experience prejudice on an individual, personal level, the degree to which they might hypothetically experience it, the circumstances under which it occurs and the amount of societal power possessed by those who might execute said prejudice are orders of magnitude from the "actual" racism experienced by marginalized minorities so as to effectively be non-existent. For all intents and purposes, white people don't experience "Racism" by any useful definition of the term. "Redneck" is still leveled specifically against rural, poor, uneducated whites, very often by richer, more educated, urban whites who consider themselves liberal and tolerant but still want someone they can safely hate. I didn't see it as a slur once either, but one of the biggest things to change my mind is how when it's challenged the whole racist excuse bingo card comes up, including "they use it too" and "I don't mean all of them, just the bad ones." It's not as high up as "gypsy" in Europe in terms of hateful terms used with genuine venom specifically by people who consider themselves active opponents of bigotry and intolerance, but at the same time it's the only slur I've seen self-described liberal/leftist types not only happily use about people more disadvantaged than themselves, but complain doesn't hurt the targeted group enough when you say it. It's too bad: as you say there's a genuine difference between societal discrimination and individual bigotry, but no one ever brings it up except as a leadin for "and that's why my hating these dirty subhumans as a category is the right thing to do!" 
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Sep 25, 2014 01:33
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Stultus Maximus posted:Saltwater goes in. Water evaporates. Salt remains. Repeat enough times and you have a lake that cannot support any kind of life and, when the water level is low, salty dust storms blow over all nearby farmland, contaminating the soil there too. In other words, imagine this  being reduced to a barren desert.
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Mar 4, 2015 02:24
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Slipknot Hoagie posted:I guess when you look at something you don't like, you pick out the bad parts of it, like if I hate feminism, I might ask, "how come all these feminist bitches are all fat dykes?" Probably some of the feminists are really really attractive, but in my brain no. Now that's just silly. Everyone knows that psychology only explains how other people think. In my brain there's nothing but logic and truth. 
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Apr 2, 2015 21:01
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Humans Need Not Apply Something that's been happening at a steady pace for 200 years is going to continue happening, you say? 
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Apr 9, 2015 18:28
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Apr 25, 2015 07:15
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VagueRant posted:This seems like a horribly designed image/text. Maybe I'm stupid, but I had to read it a couple of times. Does it matter? If you're against expanding the number of legal activities people can be restricted from without due process, you're with the terrorists anyway. 
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Apr 26, 2015 00:51
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VagueRant posted:Serious question - is there any reason for you Americans NOT to vote for Bernie Sanders? It's not going to turn out he endorsed genocide in the '90s or anything, right? If you think he might be ineffective enough compared to Hillary that he'd get less actual left-wing policy done than her, it's a valid reason not to vote for him even if you like his views better. Other than that? It's a primary, go for it. Voting against moderates in primaries is much of how hard conservatives took over the Republican party, and there's little reason it can't work on the left for Democrats: there's very little real downside if you're not a moderate, it has a real possibility of switching the overall discourse of the party toward your side, and it's got nothing in common with voting for a third party spoiler in a general election. Volmarias posted:Well we all learned our lesson and decided to eschew third parties, except for the extreme right wing which has made significant gains through the Tea Party. Case in point: they did it without splitting the Republican vote by doing it entirely within the Republican party. If a Tea Party candidate makes it to the general election, it's because of winning a Republican primary. If they lose the primary, the tea partiers shrug and vote for the RINO like it never happened. 
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May 5, 2015 04:04
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Unormal posted:
Of course he was. 
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May 11, 2015 07:02
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Bip Roberts posted:It might have had to do with filming in 3d? Yes, they couldn't do forced perspective because of the 3D. They often used all the other tricks they did in LOTR though, including greenscreen work and CG soldiers padding out big battle scenes. They still made huge set stuff with lots of real actors though, and a lot of times when they didn't it's since they tried practical first and weren't satisfied. 
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May 31, 2015 17:04
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Thing is, even if you're against guns, American gun control is hosed up. Don't talk about "tightening up the current laws" because the current laws are based one part off leftover Jim Crow laws, one part off half-assed Hollywood ideas of how crime works, and one part laws written by people who don't know anything about the subject other than that they find it vaguely scary. All of these have been the case since as long as Hollywood at least has been a thing. We have strong federal restrictions on safety and anti-nuisance devices which are outright required in some countries with overall stricter laws. We used to have sweeping federal restrictions on cosmetic features: if you're in a blue enough area you probably still have them on the state level. Gun talk generally ignores how crime actually works either in surface statistics or root causes, so we argue primarily over whether "those people" should be armed or whether we need to particularly restrict what looks like a movie villain would use it, and the only thing everyone in the mainstream agrees is that the bodyguards to the wealthy sure drat need to be armed. Sometimes you get a slip of honesty where someone admits even if a particular proposal will be laughably ineffective or counterproductive, it's still good because it serves incrementalism. If that approach all sounds like some sort of reactionary conservative bullshit that's because it is just that. It's not even the only 20th century reactionary position still widely embraced by the Democratic mainstream. It might be the only one of those that's also been dropped like a hot rock by most conservatives though, even if for reasons of tribalism rather than enlightenment. Which is the other thing: millions and millions who personally like and use guns will take that position more firmly than the more abstract ideas of taxes or who gets welfare money or whatever, simply because it hits them in their daily lives. It drives them to the polls and to activist meetings. It keeps them political. And if the only people promising to protect their interests are also pulling them into other conservative causes, soon enough they''re pulled into them too, even if they never used to care enough to bother. It's been a huge turnout issue for the right for years, and only because it's been so thoroughly cargo culted into the Democratic party line that no one questions it any more. It's all likely to fade: active proponents of gun control on the right mostly died off with Reagan's generation, and those on the left are following suit. Younger Democrats don't trend more anti-gun even if they''re less white, less rural, and more liberal than the last generation; where they do support it they're mostly passively waving along proposals from the old guard since they aren't personally affected. Gun violence, like all other violence, is trending down, often in the face of loosening restrictions. And the courts have more or less started to solidify the bounds of gun control. It's probably premature to say that it's all over but the screaming of self-identified liberals still desperate to focus their limited political capital on things even more difficult and less effective than addressing inequality and injustice, and the insufferable gloating of right-wingers who know it's their stopped clock moment. But it's close. 
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Jun 8, 2015 05:07
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Here's the thing. Focusing on other things than guns, especially guns filtered through how they are used in movies and video games as most gun control specifics are, isn't an unrelated issue. All the data suggests that violence correlates weakly, at best, with gun availability controlled for basically anything else. It correlates really strongly with poverty, inequality, the drug war, and all the other social issues that conveniently are really in keeping with liberal values to fight. As I covered before, the pushback is also less personal from the rank and file of white conservatives who grumble about taxes and poors but actually turn up in person (with some of those poors), when you convince them their guns are on the line. The real elephant in the room is the 300 million guns that are already in the US and need either door to door searches a time machine to seriously dent. If you have non-infinite political capital and the specific goal of reducing violence, or even gun violence specifically, you're better off focusing all of it on the root causes and none on the feel-good reactionary side of sticking it to those rednecks. But reducing violence isn't more the goal for gun control advocates than "saving children" is for the anti-abortion activists whose tactics they co-opted, and this is why ongoing efforts aren't even in line with reducing gun violence specifically, but with sleeping better knowing that "at least my neighbors aren't those kind of people.". Like all other social conservatism, just this time it's tuned specifically to comfortably urban/suburban people who never dealt with guns and think Chekhov's Law applies to real life like it does in movies. 
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Jun 9, 2015 17:20
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:55 |
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bollig posted:
It's true, gun suicide is twice as common as gun homicide. Even more when you strip out self-defense or law enforcement shootings. Naturally, the effect of gun availability in the US is reflected in their enormous suicide rates relative to other countries with strict gun laws.  This is when a lot of anti-gun folks mysteriously suddenly remember confounding factors exist. But only for suicide, honest.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:34
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