Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
Shit!!! I must apologise everybody! I fu**ed up! I was gonna quote Inky's reply on where she quotes Oz answering him about the history of Hungary, I was gonna replay on the Sweden being accused on letting phedophiles have their way in the propaganda over there and in the stress of doing this before getting to my day job I mistakely clicked edit instead of quote and mistakely altered her reply. I'm SO, SO sorry😲😲😲

Lol. I ramble on too much anyway. It's a common tactic by the way: Pick the one group no one wants to get associated with and say anyone who doesn't agree with your draconian laws reducing masses' privacy or taking away people's rights is their supporter / one of ‘em. You know the situation is fucked when even medical scientists can’t research a subject properly because the term got so twisted out of its meaning that it's weaponized on a daily basis.

p.s.: “ where she quotes Oz answering him”. Looks like even I manage to confuse people now and then. :D

InkyMoondrop wrote:
Lol. I ramble on too much anyway. It's a common tactic by the way: Pick the one group no one wants to get associated with and say anyone who doesn't agree with your draconian laws reducing masses' privacy or taking away people's rights is their supporter / one of ‘em. You know the situation is fucked when even medical scientists can’t research a subject properly because the term got so twisted out of its meaning that it's weaponized on a daily basis.

p.s.: “ where she quotes Oz answering him”. Looks like even I manage to confuse people now and then. :D

Oh, I get the concept for sure. What I was going to respond with back there was simply that this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. Hell, I'm pretty sure I've heard similar typical far-right propaganda prompts here in my own country, like how the goverment is gonna make sex change on newborn children who are idntified as transgender at birth mandatory or some stuff like that.

Like - crazy, out-of-touch-with-reality propaganda aside - I can agree that its debatable wether a person in a very, very young age, childhood or early teens, should be allowed to undergo a sex change at their own whim regardless of what their parents or legal guardian has to say about it, because it could turn out to be a temporary phase (hell, I underwent a phase once in my mid-twenties where I was an open transvestite for like a year or so), just so that it is a mature choice they are ready to live with and won't regret down the line (This is a topic that comes up between my little brother and my parents quite often when we have get-togethers at my parents house out in the country, by the way, and my brother also thinks that our democracy should be replaced with the old monarchy which neither me or my parents agree with him for a second).

The same way that its debatable in what age one is mature enough to drink alcohol or have sex or apply for a driver license and so on. Though I could very well be ignorant on the subject. See, now I'm ranting too^^

Oh, I get the concept for sure. What I was going to respond with back there was simply that this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. Hell, I'm pretty sure I've heard similar typical far-right propaganda prompts here in my own country, like how the goverment is gonna make sex change on newborn children who are idntified as transgender at birth mandatory or some stuff like that.

Like - crazy, out-of-touch-with-reality propaganda aside - I can agree that its debatable wether a person in a very, very young age, childhood or early teens, should be allowed to undergo a sex change at their own whim regardless of what their parents or legal guardian has to say about it, because it could turn out to be a temporary phase (hell, I underwent a phase once in my mid-twenties where I was an open transvestite for like a year or so), just so that it is a mature choice they are ready to live with and won't regret down the line (This is a topic that comes up between my little brother and my parents quite often when we have get-togethers at my parents house out in the country, by the way, and my brother also thinks that our democracy should be replaced with the old monarchy which neither me or my parents agree with him for a second).

The same way that its debatable in what age one is mature enough to drink alcohol or have sex or apply for a driver license and so on. Though I could very well be ignorant on the subject. See, now I'm ranting too^^

That's a subject I myself will tackle in IN, the distress coming from living in a body that you feel should be significantly altered to reflect you more accurately. And it's a sensitive subject that causes wild debates when it comes to minors, I don't even think there's a clear answer to that. But I think parents, people, society, etc in general are yet to find a thousand more ways to help someone feel valued and seen for who they are, removing the emphasys from the body itself that could go a long way in easing that distress on a grand scale because how people perceive you, me, anyone else on physical characteristics should not be enough to make us feel like we either alter the body or our lives will be utter mysery. I can imagine many would feel their entire self-worth depends on getting a tattoo if having or not having a tattoo would determine how they're treated and looked upon by everybody else. Luckily for most, that's not the case. We all want to feel good about ourselves… if we want kids that young not to be desparate to go under the knife I think it's our collective responsibility to make them feel it'll be an option eventually, not the turning point of being valid or invalid as themselves.

Might I add: I don't see desire for gender-affirming surgery as the same as eating disorders or some more socially accepted surgeries like cosmetic, etc. But I think they sometimes if not most of the time root from the same problem: the extreme distress people experience because the emotionally fulfilling image of an ideal self is not accessible / maintainable to them by conventional means. And by pretending that condition exists in a vacuum we don't really improve on general health that much.

Interesting to get a non-American perspective on things like gender reassignment procedures.
What I love about this site is that we have such an active international community and that we don't look at things in false black and white terms.

The current US obsession with “conservative Vs Liberal” strikes such a false note. The typical “liberal” side is a vast mix of centre right with some few left wing people and very, very few far left. Really you'd be safer calling the majority of them conservative.
The “conservative” side is again a mixture of centre right people with some far right people, but mainly they seem to be dominated by people who lack much political knowledge at all and are just along for the popularism.

So rather than “conservative Vs Liberal” the truer characterisation would be *“popularist vs conservative”.
Actually that really strikes a true chord!

*In that the “popularists” = the “right wing” and the “conservatives” = the “left wing”.

I went into a pretty deep depression yesterday morning. My mom is living on social security and Medicare, things that are blatantly on the chopping block, I’m a trans person living in a deep red state, my roommate is queer too, this election was literally do or die for all of us.

Today I made a plan, today I decided to survive, to stop being scared. I have friends in a state much safer than mine where my roommate lived before, the job market is better there, cost of living is higher but I can be closer to people like me and actually be myself. I’m not gonna let some rotting orange and his death cult ruin my life. I survived the fucker once, I can do it again. I know he’s gonna fuck the world but if that’s what it takes to wake people up, get people fighting back? Idk maybe there’s still hope then. Either way my priority is getting to safety and getting ready for what comes.

Nothing I hate more than the politization of medical procedures. Just go with the science. Science is self correcting. No matter what the fear mongers may tell you the whole point of science is proving the establishment wrong. You prove that HIV doesn't cause AIDS you get a Nobel prize not kicked out of any establishment. You come up with a surefire way to coordinate gender identity with genetics and biological expression of sex and it'll be akin to working out the theory of everything in physics.

It's your body, no politician should have the power to make Healthcare decisions for you (unless it is a matter of public safety. You don't have the body freedom to endanger others with diseases because of your science denialism) That pregnancy going to kill the mother? Well what does the legislation say? She's about to die – yeah but the law says we can't save her because of this legal definition of this schedule and we have to get a court order or ship her across state lines. Too late. She's dead. Well at least the fetus wasn't aborted. Yeah, it died with the mother.

People have no idea the kind of things health care professionals have to take a patient through before sexual reassignment surgery is performed. This isn't, well I feel like this today, let's get an operation. It's years of treatment. Be nice if people actually bothered to read up on the science and talk to Healthcare professionals as opposed to letting some political pundit form their opinion.

If it's a question of my health, it should be my decision with the advice of Healthcare professionals not lawyers, judges and legislators.

So yeah. If you have been convicted of 34 felonies, 27 counts of rape, groping, and kissing without consent; if you once called for the death penalty of 5 minority kids who were falsely accused of rape; went on television and asked China to dig up dirt on your political opponent, made billions off of foreclosed homes, interfered with the election process of a foreign country and placed your own puppet leader (Zalinsky); and let's not forget inciting a riot that led to 100 injuries and 4 deaths in the capital building, in the countries capital city…

You can be President!

A non-American friend and I were having a discussion the other day, but I think it would be interesting to share this particular thought of mine here as well, since it seems like the majority of this community is non-American as well.

One of the worst things about American politics is the campaigning, because almost every politician who runs in any position, from President all the way down to local state levels (Mayor, Sheriff, Governor, Congressman, et al.) never explain to you why you should vote for them in their campaigns, but rather, why you shouldn't vote for their opponent(s). In a nutshell, all American political campaigns are pretty much smear campaigns. “Harry Butz is a cotton-headed ninnymuggins. What he and his staff don't want the American people to see is that he once broke into somebody's house, killed his wife, and ate his children. We don't need a murderer and a baby-eater like him running for this position, which is why you need to vote for me. I'm Aloysius Zimmerflotz, and I approve this message.”

Because of this, it falls on us to do our own homework and research on these candidates - and you can just bet your brass that almost nobody does . . . because if they did, people would have see that Joe Biden was not this saving grace for America that a lot of people on the left made him out to be. Seriously, when we had way more Democratic candidates to choose from in 2020, I did my homework on each of them, and Joe Biden was not the ideal choice. He may have been on the ticket as a Democrat, but he was no liberal, progressive, or even leftist; he was far more right-leaning than any of the other candidates: he supported our current for-profit healthcare system, which none of the others did; he supported Big Pharma that allows them to continually jack up the prices for people's prescription medicines, which none of the others did; and as you can see, Biden's done nothing about inflation, which Trump started last time when he imposed his tariffs that started driving up prices for groceries and such even before COVID happened. That's one of the reasons why we still have a lot of the problems started by Trump in America to this day, because Biden's done almost nothing to clean up those messes. If anything, Michael Bloomberg should've been our Democratic nominee. Nobody liked him simply because he was wealthy, so they just saw him as a blue version of Trump, when in fact, unlike Trump, Bloomberg has actually been very charitable with his wealth, and where Trump will never admit to any of his policies not working (and just blame Democrats instead), Bloomberg does admit to whenever a policy of his doesn't work (like the Stop and Search policy he implemented when he was Mayor of New York City) and even works to rectify it - nothing that Trump would ever do. Plus, Bloomberg had the kind of aggression a Democrat would've needed when it comes to debating a big blowhard like Trump, unlike stuttering softee Biden.

So yeah, either way, American politics sucks ass. American politics sucks balls. American politics sucks ass balls.

It's true that all propaganda is insultingly stupid, but I would also note the simple fact that in the USA, right-leaning propaganda reaches far more viewers than left-leaning propaganda does. And the right has worked for decades specifically to bring that about.

In my opinion, those who control the propaganda control the state. Revolting as that reality is, it has been true for a long time.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
It's true that all propaganda is insultingly stupid, but I would also note the simple fact that in the USA, right-leaning propaganda reaches far more viewers than left-leaning propaganda does. And the right has worked for decades specifically to bring that about.

My argument here would be it's because the right clearly isolates themselves in their own little rose-colored bubbles where reality doesn't filter in. Notice how whenever somebody is asked to cite their sources, a leftie will link a variety of different sources, many of which are reputatable, and may even have been fact-checked by other souces like Snopes . . . but a rightie will always, without fail, cite blatantly biased sources like Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, and/or Newsmax - sources that are never fact-checked, and are straight-up propaganda. I would say this is because lefties want the facts, whereas righties want what they want to hear.

The night of the election I stumbled onto a wiki article about the Kent State Shootings and was reading some of the Nixon quotes sprinkled around in it. I said to my friend ‘exactly how BIG of a time loop are we stuck in…?’

Stuff like, ‘a secret plan to end the war’ if elected….

There are no time loops. There is merely taking lessons from the past and applying them to the present.

Sadly it is far easier to take the lesson of what to do as opposed to what NOT to do.

As far as echoes from the past we saw ones from US elections going back to 1800, lots from Andrew Jackson (one of Trump's model for populist presidential leadership), the Know Nothings of the mid 19th century (who eventually became the original GOP) as well as America First movement (the MSG rally was just like the ones in the 1930s by the German-American Bund and the America Firsters). We got scary deja vu all over the place here without bringing in Nazi Germany or even Tricky Dicky.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
A non-American friend and I were having a discussion the other day, but I think it would be interesting to share this particular thought of mine here as well, since it seems like the majority of this community is non-American as well.

…

Haven't counted how many here are American and how many aren't, but we're pretty international indeed.

Anyway, if you want another non-American perspective, allow me to add the following.
Like probably most people in my vicinity, I don't think it's not that much about the campaigning, because that has long been degenerating into pretty much the same kind of mudslinging over here.
Us Germans usually don't get about American campaigning that the focus is much more on the candidates as persons and how they come across (although how that famous smug grin of Trump's can make anyone not want to punch him is a bit beyond me). We don't vote for a chancellor, although these candidates are fixed before the elections and make the bulk of public appearances, but for parties.
And there's another thing many of us have a hard time of getting our head around. If you directly compare the political spectrum of both countries, according to party lines, you'll get something like this:

Democrats = CDU/CSU (“conservative” which however in the US would translate as liberal with just a slight touch of occasional conservatism), FDP (liberal, economy-focused), SPD (social democrats in the same tradition as the British Labour Party), Grüne (Greens: left-wing, ecologist), some of the more moderate members of Die Linke (generally very left-wing, successor to the GDR's communist party but largely ignoring that part of their history)

Republicans = AfD (right-wing populist party, Russia-friendly, under observation by the domestic intelligence service because of quite a few members pushing their right-wing tendencies way too far), some parts of the CSU (conservative, only active in Bavaria in place of the CDU with whom they form a parliamentary group on a national level; it's all a bit complicated)

Basically, 80-90% of seats in our parliament would be taken by Democrats (I'm trying to account for variations within our parties in this estimate) and to most here this still means an alarmingly high number of seats taken by the right, while the differences between the parties are considered so large by each of them that they almost always make forming a governing coalition a nerve-wracking, fickle procedure with a result nobody is really happy with. That our current coalition has just announced an early election, having fallen apart due to its inner struggles that just paralysed everything, is actually a relief to many, of all political colours.
The really interesting thing to consider here is that the Democrats somehow seem to manage to keep almost as many different political leanings together, nonetheless, when they're sworn enemies here. Quite a fascinating feat, really.

Now, I don't want to suggest for a moment Americans are generally more right-leaning - that wouldn't just be a gross oversimplification but also plain wrong - but that could only mean that party lines play less of a role in elections, and that the actual political spectrum is kind of misrepresented in one of our countries or, more likely, both. Of course, they'll never be quite comparable, because our “conservative” is very different from what Americans would call “conservative”. You couldn't even say that one is necessarily more right-leaning than the other, because they focus on very different things.
People tend to ignore all that when making comparisons, though, which may lead to misunderstandings.

Incidentally, talking about isolating oneself in little rose-coloured filter bubbles quite disconnected from reality, I sometimes get the impression that that's pretty evenly spread across about the entire party spectrum over here, although the closer you look at both of its ends the worse it arguably gets.

Last but not least, what confuses us here is the “winner takes all” approach and the electoral college. Why this is still kept up is probably the one question e.g. my students in English classes ask me most. But then, from what I gather, many Americans seem to wonder about that, too.

Hehehe, the Duck is a veritable history book in a manner of speaking. Check this one out, which has just popped up in Quail's random: GEORGE BUSH, SON OF DRACULA A real gem!

Ah, those were the days - everyone had just this president to worry about, blissfully unaware of who the world would have to deal with a mere eight years later… 😉

I wonder what Quail's Random will spew out in years to come.
Perhaps TRUMPed, which I'm sure y'all remember? It's still here. Bet even rawdale would have wished for it not to be half as timeless as it now has become, kind of. 😔

On a side note: I haven't realised before that these two, erm, protagonists are just three weeks apart, age-wise, Trump actually being the older.

You know back when I was a young kid I was obsessed with politics and big business. My dad had a high profile white collar job in the city and I'd hear about political news and business new on the radio and wanted to understand it all!
I'd read the Financial review for business news and political articles in the newspapers. I loved political comedy. Yes Minister was my FAVE show on TV.

This all seemed very intelligent to me and the antithesis of what I hated and despised (sport), so I craved to understand it all.

I found international relations fascinating! Economic news was mysterious and I needed to comprehend it…



When I finally understood all about politics and business though I was SO disappointed T_T
None of it is smart or sophisticated at any level. It's as basic as anything else and really no different at all from the sports world- except the people who're into it aren't meat-heads and they dress better.

Political satire and comedy which I once worshipped as the apex of cleverness (especially Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minster) I saw as crude and childish :(

Trump and his adherents put that more openly on show than people usually do, but it's always been that way, no matter how far in the past you look.

-An insight into Ozoneocean XD

it bugs me when regular people deep-dive about cartoonists in australia its majorly political cartooning. its nice that it exists but it just never felt all that creative to me.

When I was a young kid I had politics thrust in my face. All in the Family was big and my grandmother was complaining about the live coverage of the Watergate hearings interrupting her afternoon soap operas.

I was homeschooled during most of my high school years (partly because, as you have seen, public schools in America are no longer a safe place for kids), and I can confirm that homeschool curriculum is a lot more faith-based than public school curriculum is. Anyway, you have to earn credits and such in homeschool just as you do in public school, including enrolling in some kind of elective, so one year, much to my chagrin, I was thrust into a political elective . . . they claimed it was a non-partisan club, but they clearly had a very right-leaning bias.

At one point in this elective, we put together a school play, in which I played an extra. The play was a take on IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, the story was about a pastor who felt like trying to continue his ministry in a world where nobody listens to him anymore was a lost cause, and was considering stopping altogether. After he falls asleep, he is visited by his guardian angel who shows him what the world will be like if he and other religious leaders like him were to stop doing their part in spreading the Gospel to the world. It painted a picture of a dystopian society that was controled with an iron fist by freelance abortionists and legalized homosexuals (keep in mind, this was the mid-2000s, when LGBTQ+ marriage was still illegal), while Christians basically had to live their lives like the Jews in Europe did during the Holocaust: in hiding to avoid being detained and interned. I played one such Christian in a scene in which we all secretly congregated in a safehouse for worship, since public worshipping had been made illegal, only for our safehouse to be raided, and all of us rounded up and detained.

The irony is . . . this is exactly the sort of dystopian society the religious right (and the right in general) is going to force all of us into, except instead of them who are going to be forced into hiding, it's going to be everyone else who isn't white, straight, cis-gendered, wealthy, and/or evangelical; already they're proposing adding a denaturalization process to their deportation plan so that they can go ahead and deport legal/naturalized immigrants as well. This is why I'm more afraid for other people than I am for myself.

That play you describe was a movie in the 1980s. In part it is based on a seminal work that started the whole militia movement and remains a huge influence throughout the Christian right: The Turner Diaries. This is conspiracy theory, white supremacy stuff. If you dig deep into Trump movement you will uncover neo Nazis and White Christian Identity movement. To say they want to implement the world of the Handmaid's Tale is not hyperbole. The book was based on their agendas going back into the 1980s. That's where all of this comes from. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are finally vindicated.

Of course this did not happen in 2016 so everything will be just fine. Trump's choice for Chief of Staff who was also one if main people behind his election is actually an old GOP person going way back so Trump may actually shift to the middle and abandon a lot of the more vicious rhetoric as campaign hyperbole. One can hope.

And Florida has added a few hundred more books to the list of ones banned from schools.

I bought a Trump action figure so he will be showing up in some future comic. I already have a G.W. Bush.

bravo1102 wrote:
If you dig deep into Trump movement you will uncover neo Nazis and White Christian Identity movement.

One doesn't have to dig deep at all; Trump has been non-so-secretly accepting endorsement from various different White Supremacy groups, from the KKK to the Aryan Brotherhood, to the Proud Boys - David Duke himself has been openly praising Trump ever since he got into Office the first time.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
If you dig deep into Trump movement you will uncover neo Nazis and White Christian Identity movement.

One doesn't have to dig deep at all; Trump has been non-so-secretly accepting endorsement from various different White Supremacy groups, from the KKK to the Aryan Brotherhood, to the Proud Boys - David Duke himself has been openly praising Trump ever since he got into Office the first time.

Sadly you do. These connections are not widely known outside of certain areas. In your part of the country it may be common knowledge but not in the Northeast or Midwest. You live in Texas. Things are totally different there from any state north of the Mason Dixon line.

Trouble with populists like Trump is, you'll never quite know what he's up to - just that he's going to do whatever he thinks its takes. If that means crawling up to the KKK or Putin or so-called “pro-lifers”, he'll do it.

bravo1102 wrote:
You live in Texas.

Tennessee actually, but okay, fair enough.

PaulEberhardt wrote:
If that means crawling up to the KKK or Putin or so-called “pro-lifers”, he'll do it.

I see where he's already been in direct contact with Putin immediately after his victory . . . and quite extensively too. Not so surprising, considering what butt buddies they are. I just fear for Ukraine at this point; we all know Trump's just gonna hand them over to Putin on a silver platter, and pretty soon, Trump will sell all of us out to Russia.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
You live in Texas.

Tennessee actually, but okay, fair enough.

Oh, the state that would be last on all “worst” lists if it wasn't for Alabama. My battle buddy in Army basic training was from Tennessee. He had committed statutory rape and the judge said he'd drop the charges if he enlisted. So he did. Probably went on to be governor. Lol
Even fellow southerners picked on the guy for being from Tennessee.
Only place worse was my home state: New Jersey. Got slammed for that constantly.

Living in the city, where life is far more purple, it really isn't that bad, but once you get out into the rural areas, yeah, it gets regressively redder and redder.

But when it comes to politics, yeah, we're crazy. Marsha Blackburn doesn't do anything for everyday Tennesseans; she just likes to suck Trump's dick for more power. Likewise, Bill Lee has been a very neglectful governor - hell, if you may recall, by Christmas 2020, our state became the world's new COVID epicenter . . . wanna know why? Because Lee wouldn't implement any mandates for wearing masks, vaccinations, or sheltering in place . . . by May of that year, he was far more concerned about sending people back to work and reopening businesses, because he was afraid staying at and/or working from home would make people not want to work anymore, and we couldn't have that. He too is a Trump dick sucker. More recently, the state also tried to drop age requirements from marriage licenses, basically making it legal for creepy old perverts to marry little girls who aren't even old enough to consent (yet, somehow, it's liberals who are all pedo creeps).

In other news, I did see where the House blocked the bill that would've allowed Trump to basically seek revenge against and lock up his political opponents for disagreeing with him, so there's that . . . unfortunately, I do see where they are, indeed, going to let him purge our military and replace all of our generals with loyalists, and likewise, the only ones who can serve in any branch of the military are those who will be loyal to him. This is exactly how Stalin formed his military, and how the USSR came to be int he first place.

More recently, the state also tried to drop age requirements from marriage licenses, basically making it legal for creepy old perverts to marry little girls who aren't even old enough to consent (yet, somehow, it's liberals who are all pedo creeps).

Our government's newest idea is using actual child sexual abuse material to screen for pedos in some lines of work. Yes. You've read that right. They're looking for ways to make it legally possible for some department to not just own that shit but to expose people to it in the name of “catching pedo creeps” and “protecting children”. Material of the most traumatic experiences these victims had, utilized to hunt for and stigmatize individuals who might be in great need of therapy in order to abstain from harm and the last thing they need as child sexual abuse material getting shoved in their face.

I know people would be glad to build gas chambers for as long as it's for those, okay? But I'm not going to pretend that individuals with a serious mental illness, who might or might not abuse kids somewhere down the line are morally more reprehensible than lawmakers who DO make it possible for grown-ass adults to marry children and DO reduce children and their worst traumas to mere tools for some deranged witch hunt that'll only produce ultimately more victims on the long run. When will we stop measuring the harm caused to children in lust and start measuring it in ignorance? Ignorance of one's own health? Of boundaries. Of bodily integrity. Of basic human rights? Of developmental needs? Of medical science? Of educational needs? It's so fucking simple, but no. Because than we'd have to take responsibility. Let's just say the problem is lust and those with it, that'll solve everything. Except we give anyone a free fucking pass to do just about anything as long as they stand against the lust problem in principle.

I'm sorry… it's just this fucking insanity gets me riled up. That shit shouldn't be illegal to parade around because “some might enjoy it”, it should be illegal because it's a horrendous memorabilia that capitalizes on the exploitation, abuse and suffering of the most vulnerable. It's like saying watching celebrity leaks is okay if you don't fap to them. No, it's not, it reinforces the insane notion that others' right to privacy ends where your browser begins. I can't possibly understand how people still believe these fuckers ever cared about the well-being of children.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
In other news, I did see where the House blocked the bill that would've allowed Trump to basically seek revenge against and lock up his political opponents for disagreeing with him, so there's that . . . unfortunately, I do see where they are, indeed, going to let him purge our military and replace all of our generals with loyalists, and likewise, the only ones who can serve in any branch of the military are those who will be loyal to him. This is exactly how Stalin formed his military, and how the USSR came to be int he first place.

That new post he seems to have specifically designed for that Musk-rat of his reminds me a bit more of post-USSR Russia, but as that kind of thing has always worked pretty much the same way at a lot of times in a lot of places, that Tesla may be on the wrong track.

bravo1102 wrote:

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Tennessee actually, but okay, fair enough.

Oh, the state that would be last on all “worst” lists if it wasn't for Alabama.

Ohhhh, Poor Hyena Hell lives in Tennessee. Now I understand why she always complained about it.

All I know about that place is from cowboy films XD

InkyMoondrop wrote:
Our government's newest idea is using actual child sexual abuse material to screen for pedos in some lines of work.

People who are obsessed by things and claim they hate them often transform to become obsessed by them and love them.
That's why I am always VERY wary of people that go on and on about paedophiles or sex trafficking because they're either coving for their own obsession or they WILL become obsessed.

The character Saruman in The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example of that transformation. When I read it as a child I couldn't really grasp how that could happen to a character but as an adult you see it often. :(

There's that Nietzsche quote that sums it all up.

“He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”