Lurker > Funkdamental

WaffIeElite posted...

Besides, if she was stupid enough to have kids with someone who took off, she doesn't make very good decisions.

Throwing this question out to other users in this topic: Anyone here with parents who are either divorced or separated, and think that proves their mother is a stupid bitch with poor judgement?
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Jtrunks posted...

Never a woman with kids. The kids are a reminder of her mistakes. PERMANENT mistakes.

Sounds like your mum made a permanent mistake.
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Returning_CEmen posted...

The US is an oppressive regime if you think about it. Can't start picking and choosing what is good and what is bad around the world.

While it's good not to harbour illusions (Angelina Jolie might direct movies with the help of oppressive governments, but arms companies actually sell them the lethal tools of oppression -- yet no one's making topics about it), the whole "we're all as bad as each other" argument sounds more like an excuse for being too lazy or too afraid to make moral choices.
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I strongly dislike Islam because, in common with other irrational belief systems that seek to control people with myths, fairy tales and superstitions ultimately backed by the threat of heavenly (or earthly) punishment for dissenters, it's an ideology that fits into the liberal, secular-humanistic society that I believe in about as well as a square peg in a round hole.

But that doesn't mean you can't separate the human rights and civil liberties of the holders of a belief from criticism of the belief itself. (No ideology is, or should be, immune from criticism.) There's no contradiction between being willing to criticize Islam as a flawed ideology and being willing to defend Muslims from injustice or violence -- any more than there's a contradiction between pointing out that Scientology is a fraud and insisting that Scientologists are nevertheless entitled to constitutional rights.
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I've been in a relationship with a 32 year old woman who had a 10 year old daughter. We just started getting a little serious when suddenly her ex-partner (the girl's father) turned up out of the blue, and it's tough to compete when a little girl wants her daddy back in her life. I won't lie -- that stung. I'd still rather be with a real woman than an 18 year old kid, though.
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Darkman124 posted...

Funkdamental posted...

been married

odd word choice.

Less so if you've had more than one marriage.
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I've been married to a woman who survived child sexual abuse, so it's not a hypothetical question for me. When we started to become serious I discovered what had happened to her earlier in her life, and no, it didn't stop me loving her.
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Mandasnake posted...

Funkdamental posted...

An annual growth rate of 2% means that GDP per capita doubles over 35 years. It's gradual, but it's not stagnation.

jesus dude, that's absolutely nothing and you know it.

You thought that an average annual GDP growth rate of 4.4% was a "pretty shitty" achievement. I've pointed out that it's a higher average annual growth rate than the USA experienced between either 2014-17 (to take a short-term view) or 1947-2017 (to take a longer-term view). And that's on a continent which, in your judgement, is "fucked".

African economies are extremely unlikely ever to rank among the world's power performers, and African states' burgeoning middle classes are nevertheless likely to remain small for a very long time to come -- despite the fact that the region yields around 30% of the planet’s mineral wealth from beneath its soils and seabeds. But there are clearly stories coming out of the continent other than just about starving babies, civil wars and blood diamonds: stories that most people don't bother to read about.

Sustainable in the long run -- or even the short run? Who knows? But for sure, it's not as insignificant as you insist on trying to make out. You sound like you're arguing for its own sake. Just let it go now.
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Mandasnake posted...

And those are pretty shitty growth rates.

It's 8 times higher than average GDP growth in the UK (0.54%) and nearly twice as high as average GDP growth in the USA (2.3%) between July 2014 and the second quarter of 2017. (If you want to take a longer view, average GDP growth rate in the USA between 1947 and 2017 was 3.22%.)

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

Oh they are inching themselves out of poverty?

An annual growth rate of 2% means that GDP per capita doubles over 35 years. It's gradual, but it's not stagnation.

And the world economy is fragile as shit nowadays.

African economies weathered the financial crisis of 2008 better than the IMF predicted -- it expected a fall in African GDP growth rates in 2010 thanks to the dip in world market prices, but against the odds growth was sustained through the crisis. African economies are still vulnerable to external shocks, but at least they're more robust than they were when the oil crisis of 1973-74 derailed what had been steady growth in Africa since independence.

They are not going to pull themselves out of poverty for a LONG time.

Nevertheless, they're still moving in the right direction.
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Mandasnake posted...

Which doesn't mean much when you remember....The population growth percentage...

Which averaged 2.59% between 2010 and 2015 for the whole of Africa, according to the UN's Department of Social and Economic Affairs, Population Division:

https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DVD/Files/1_Indicators%20(Standard)/EXCEL_FILES/1_Population/WPP2017_POP_F02_POPULATION_GROWTH_RATE.xlsx

Growth in GDP is still managing to outstrip population growth. What makes that economic growth fragile is not African women producing more babies, but Africa's continuing vulnerability to external economic shocks.
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Mandasnake posted...

yeah, its fucked dude.

There is no such thing as an African economy. There are African economies -- and they have sharply divergent patterns and rates of growth. Excluding oil exporters and North African countries, the rest of Africa posted accelerating growth at an average annual rate of 4.4% from 2010 to 2015, compared to 4.1% from 2000 to 2010. Africa as a whole is projected by the IMF to be the world's second-fastest-growing economy by 2020. It has a young population, and will soon have the fastest urbanization rate in the world. By 2034, the region is expected to have a larger workforce than either China or India -- and so far, job creation is outpacing growth in the labour force.

Spending by consumers and businesses today totals $4 trillion. Household consumption is expected to grow at 3.8% a year to 2025 to reach $2.1 trillion, while business spending is expected to grow from $2.6 trillion in 2015 to $3.5 trillion by 2025.

The September 2016 report by McKinsey & Company, Lions on the Move II: Realizing the Potential of Africa's Economies, paints quite a different picture from a "fucked continent". Economic performance on a country-by-country basis may be patchy, but there's no need for doomsday predictions for Africa.

http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/middle-east-and-africa/lions-on-the-move-realizing-the-potential-of-africas-economies
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Mandasnake posted...

Funkdamental posted...

Some countries will obviously be affected far worse than others. For Burundi, already creaking and groaning under the strains of population pressure, crisis point is going to be reached within maybe the next couple of decades. For countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other hand, the story is a tragic one of policy failure that has left a huge potential of natural resources untapped. (The DRC has immense energy potential in terms of hydropower -- if fully developed, the Inga Dam complex would be the biggest generator of electricity in the world -- and its wealth of arable land could make it the larder of Africa.)

Population 80 million
GDP per capita....

387

yeah its not gonna happen.

Not without considerable foreign investment. And the Inga Dam project does have foreign investors. The problem is the policy environment -- although there have been important administrative reforms under Kabila since 2011, the momentum's been lost now he's putting more effort into securing himself a third term as president (despite the political conflicts it's causing) and putting all other priorities on the back burner.
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No. I have no memory of his existence.
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I read books and fat chicks are my hobby, so in that sense maybe there's a tenuous connection.
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Mandasnake posted...

And with climate change and an exploding population, there is reason to believe things will get worse, not better for Africa.

Some countries will obviously be affected far worse than others. For Burundi, already creaking and groaning under the strains of population pressure, crisis point is going to be reached within maybe the next couple of decades. For countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other hand, the story is a tragic one of policy failure that has left a huge potential of natural resources untapped. (The DRC has immense energy potential in terms of hydropower -- if fully developed, the Inga Dam complex would be the biggest generator of electricity in the world -- and its wealth of arable land could make it the larder of Africa.)
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Solar_Crimson posted...

Many European nations drew borders around so that tribes that didn't like each other were forced to interact and this caused conflict.

That argument can be over-emphasized.

Look, nearly every modern state -- whether in Africa, Europe, Asia, or the Americas -- has “artificial” borders. Their boundary posts have been arbitrarily fixed either by the see-sawing fortunes of war, or by the stroke of a pen in some distant (often foreign) capital. Dozens of modern states are patchwork quilts of different regional, ethno-cultural or religious identities, thanks to history's loose ends. Untidy patterns of human migration and settlement make nonsense of the idea that 100% "pure", cookie-cutter nation-states can be carved out by neat lines. But so what? Half the world isn't made up of imploding failed states because of it -- and to be fair, neither is Africa.

Blaming all of Africa's ills on dotted lines drawn by Europeans doesn't explain how countries like Tanzania have managed to make them work remarkably well for decades. It doesn't explain why two tribes, the Krahn and the Gio, kicked the shit out of each other on the Liberia side of the Cavalla River during the civil war in 1989-96 yet at the same time coexisted peacefully together on the Côte d’Ivoire side. It doesn't explain why one of the worst genocides of the 20th century happened in a country (Rwanda) whose borders were drawn by mwami (king) Kigeli Rwabugiri in the 19th century, not by Europeans.

Not only do Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda share the same language and the same religion, but the two groups intermarried and lived side by side in mixed neighbourhoods long before the Germans turned up in 1897. So Hutu and Tutsi lives were already tightly interwoven in their own web of power relationships by the time Europeans arrived on the scene.

It should be pointed out too, that "tribal" identities can be fluid and complex things. In pre-colonial Rwandan society, Hutu who climbed the social ladder could be icyihuture -- de-hutuized, or tutsified. And sometimes these identities are of very recent construction. The Nandi-speaking peoples of Kenya transformed themselves into the Kalenjin -- an imagined community that includes the Pokot, Tugen, Keiyo, Marakwet, Nandi, Kispigis and the Terik -- only in the 1950s; the Mijikenda identity was invented in the 1930s. It’s worth bearing in mind when you hear someone talking loosely about “age-old tribal hatreds”.

Yes, border disputes can cause tensions and frictions (there were over 100 diplomatic squabbles between African states in the first decade of independence), but inter-state wars to re-draw maps in Africa have been remarkably rare since 1960, and so have tribal separatist insurgencies. It's not borders as much as policies (especially ones that involve the redistribution of land) that sharpen divisions within states.
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Conner4REAL posted...

Help me understand why desert has such value?

It's wrong to imagine that Israel is a "desert state". There's the Negev Desert in the south, yes, and the reason why in the second week of November 1947 Chaim Weizmann asked Truman to twist the UN's arm to make sure the Negev was included in the land awarded to Israel under the partition plan was because Weizmann recognized the importance of Akaba for access to the Indian Ocean. The idea that the Negev was some kind of booby prize, a dry bone tossed to the Jewish state like an insult, is a complete misconception.
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So the only thing about the oblast that's "Jewish" is its name?
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darkphoenix181 posted...

I thought Chris Evans is Captain America

ofc he make more than CNN anchors

That's a different Chris Evans. A very different Chris Evans.
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The fact that Chris Evans was paid more than £20k, let alone £2.2m, last year is one of the biggest scandals.
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The US Armed Forces, active and reserve, currently represent roughly 0.6% of the total US population. So I'd say your real worries are a long way off yet. So long, in fact, that I reckon you will be building robot armies by then. How do you keep your competitive edge sharp? Technological innovation. It's going to matter more than raw manpower in the end.
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Dyinglegacy posted...

UncleBourbon33 posted...

I still don't get why they chose the rainbow.

Probably for diversity. I'm just guessing.

I would think that would have been better suited for interracial relationships, but what do I know?

How many other visual metaphors for diversity can you think of?
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Judgmenl posted...

Anything that promotes authoritarian liberalism

You mean illiberalism.
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I've been an activist in several causes for social justice, but that was back in the days when we campaigned on issues such as the murder of human rights or labour activists by government death squads, the sale of arms or torture equipment to repressive regimes, or the triangle of government corruption, corporate malfeasance and poverty in the Third World. I didn't get into debates over comic book superheroes.
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Can't do it any more -- ex-alcoholic.
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There's a difference between allowing a bias to influence how you interpret events, and claiming that anyone who fails to lick the shit out of your leader's ass and say it tastes like chocolate is by definition a liar who must be exposed, smeared and destroyed.
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Peterass posted...

Germany after WW1 was in extreme poverty, weak, and on the brink of collapse.

The only really painful years for Germany were 1921-23. Germany's economy recovered strongly after the hyperinflation of 1923 (the twelve-month growth rate after the Weimar Republic rebounded from its first serious recession over the winter of 1926–27 was higher than anything achieved under Hitler's Third Reich), and it was the Depression that later brought an end to what were called the Weimar economy's "gold-plated" years.

He made Germany powerful again and allowed the German people bounce back from harsh sanctions placed by the allies of WW1

Germany stopped making reparations repayments in 1931, well before Hitler came to power. By that time, she'd paid only around 21.5 billion marks -- while over the same period, she received 27 billion gold marks in net capital inflows, mainly from private investors. This, I'd point out, was less than half the cost that destruction during the war had inflicted on France; and a good deal of that destruction was down to Germany's spiteful 'scorched earth' policies in occupied France in 1917 and 1918.

In fact it could be argued that Germany actually paid between only 8 billion and 13 billion marks (i.e., 4-7% of total national income) over the lifetime of reparations, because after 1923 she used US loans to finance the payments -- and Germany defaulted on her US loans in the early 1930s, owing Uncle Sam the equivalent of roughly 8.4 billion marks in 1932.

The German economy under Hitler may look like it enjoyed a strong upturn when seen against the very low baseline of the Depression years of 1929–32, but it's a trick of the light. Nazi economic policy was definitely not a miracle formula. Most working-class German families under Hitler in the 1930s still existed on a very modest standard of living. In 1938, German families actually ate less wheat bread, meat and meat products, bacon, milk, eggs, fish, vegetables, sugar, and beer than they had in 1927. The only things they were eating more of – after five years of Nazi government – were rye bread, cheese and potatoes. (Source: The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–38 by Richard J. Overy, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1996.)

Meanwhile, German GDP per capita in the 1930s remained lower than that of the USA, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, France, Denmark or Belgium. (Source: The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, Penguin, 2006.)

Even by 1937, the economy was only just above the level reached some twenty-five years before, and from 1936 onward all the indices of growth began to slow down. The short-term recovery might have been achieved with remarkable speed, but the long-term prospects for growth were much more muted. Hitler was no miracle worker.
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Armed resistance against federal authority by moose who are prepared to fight to keep their limbs.
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Dijon mustard.
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I've already done that. Unfortunately I've found my machine can't go forward in time.
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A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, about his experiences in the Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1965-66.
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In this day and age, how is this even an issue?
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Yep. Hitler's war machine was parked on the beaches on the opposite side of the English Channel, and his bombers were pouring high explosives down onto our cities practically every night for around five months straight. I couldn't have stood the shame if I didn't do my bit.

...

And then by a cruel twist of fate, I get posted to Burma to fight the Japanese: a theatre that, for Britain, had nothing to do with national survival and everything to do with imperial possession.
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MJ_Max posted...

emblem boy posted...

How much did the average soldier know about the concentration camps anyway?

True I don't think anyone knew much until the very end.

Plenty of newspapers wrote about the Nazi concentration camps, even before the war. In 1933-34 they were seen as a kind of tough boot camp; by 1938 (especially after the wave of arrests in the wake of Kristallnacht) they gained a reputation in the Western democracies for brutality. But their real horror wasn't known until they were liberated in 1945.
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SmokeMassTree posted...

Boobs
Boobs1
Boobs2

My previous passwords at job #2

Wanna guess what my current one is?

Have you changed it to Blobs?
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Try to entice it out of your cat by lighting a candle.
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Password renewal at my work is always an epic clash between man and computer, as you try more and more desperate attempts to dream up something that it's happy with. I've been trying 18-character passwords including combinations of at least five numbers and five symbols, and it still tells me "Nope, not good enough".
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I can't stand the stink of marijuana smoke, but my wife has relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and if during her next relapse she's in as much pain as she has been in the past, I'll have no qualms about buying some marijuana for her to try. (She doesn't react well to carbamazepine, which seems to be the painkiller of choice for doctors to prescribe for MS pain.)
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Seems like you can't make up your mind whether no one works under socialism, or everyone is a slave under socialism.
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By "human history", do you mean "for American youth"?
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The Devil's advocate in me is tempted to ask: whatever happened to all the "hate speech should still be free speech" arguments?

More seriously, I applaud the fact that the station's been suspended and that Ofcom is planning to revoke its license.
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Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

Half those idiots attending world probably be the first to call out islamophbia tho.

Many of those posting here who think "no men" events are unjustified because they unfairly stigmatize all men as potential sexual predators (even if some are) probably think "no Muslim" events would be justified because all Muslim men should rightly be treated as potential sexual predators (because some are). And yet they'll have the nerve to bang on about "liberal double standards".
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Ultima Dragon posted...

Hell, why not just walk around naked all the time? Fuck clothes.

Hee hee. No one knows that underneath my clothes, I'm actually walking around stark naked.
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Tempted to tell the Roman guards they'd got the wrong Jesus.
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Iwin2013 posted...

Absolutely. Then make sure, you have a great support system in place. I'm talking about Family.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a stable family that they can rely on. Least of all a family with a capital F.
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I would say anyone who imagines that there's some incompatibility between being black and being socially conservative in matters of personal morality has some, well, confused preconceptions about race, politics and religion.
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I dunno, maybe they just think there's a distinction between private property (I say whether or not you're free to come into my house) and public space (generally free to most people), or something.
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No one should feel compelled to tick every box on a checklist to self-identify as a "liberal" or a "conservative".
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I like to think of myself as a guy with a fairly liberal outlook who tries not to be unnecessarily judgemental, but these people who've voted for dogs are clearly just plain wrong and should not be permitted to express any kind of opinion because their powers of judgement are so dangerously flawed. Retract and apologise for your statements immediately.
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