Lurker > Firewerx

ElatedVenusaur posted...

Still, it must be said the Germans are handling things pretty well, particularly compared to other nations with dark pasts.

That's quite true. But I believe it's only because Germany's total defeat represented perhaps the most catastrophic failure of any leader or ideology in the 20th century.

I think it's significant that when the Ottoman Empire laid down its arms in 1918 and Constantinople was placed under military occupation by the British, for several months afterward Turkish newspapers and parliamentarians openly acknowledged the enormity of what had happened to the Armenians, condemned the genocide, and demanded full investigations and swift trials. But when Turkish nationalist resistance hardened and the nationalists eventually won the ensuing war, the wind blew from a very different direction -- and the new Republic built a wall of silence and denial around the Armenian genocide that has stood to this very day. It's often the losers, not the winners, who learn the real lessons; and the nationalists could rightly claim to have won.

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America's going to be living with Trump's legacy for some years to come. Even if Trump steps down and leaves the stage for good, the ugly disease of Trumpism will infect the body politic like gangrene.

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ArvTheGreat posted...

alcoholics never admit they have a problem

"Never" is untrue, otherwise I'd never be able to describe myself as an ex-alcoholic. But there's a lot of denial, and it's stubborn. Not entirely surprising. When you live in a culture where there's a recreational drug that's not only legal but socially acceptable -- in fact almost obligatory, since everyone's encouraged to use it, heavily and often -- it's difficult to know exactly when you crossed over the line, when socially normal behaviour overlapped with addiction.

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CW_McGraw posted...

Germany was soundly defeated, worse than it ever had been in WWI, and their leader killed himself like a coward after seeing the depths of his failures.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if the July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler had been successful. Would the western Allies have stood united -- or might separate peace deals have been negotiated, deals that ended up sparing Germany from western occupation?

And if Germany manages to survive the war without the punishing devastation that rubbed Germans' noses hard in the harsh lessons of total defeat... Does the aftermath leave behind smouldering embers of Nazi ideology that could burst into flame again a few years later, with Hitler revered as a martyr by more and more Germans who insist that Nazism "never really failed"?

I guess what I'm saying is that maybe we should be thankful the 1944 plot failed.

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The Allies' denazification programme was a colossal exercise in bureaucratic red tape more than anything else. Ordinary Germans learned to make jokes about the lengthy questionnaires (131 questions over six pages) they were required to fill in, detailing their activities before and during the war, because they realised it was practically impossible for under-resourced, harassed Allied officials to check the veracity of what had been written on 13 million forms.

I'd guess that many Germans found the most compelling argument against Nazism was the disastrous consequences for their ruined, divided, occupied country of having followed it.

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Crepes posted...

And UR was not seen in this topic again.

He's right enough that economic crises are a witches' cauldron for political extremism, but I think it's too deterministic to heap all the blame for the rise of the Nazis on purely economic factors. Germany was hardly the only country that suffered from high unemployment and poverty between 1929-32 -- it was a global depression, after all -- but it wasn't the first time that Germany had been down that rocky road after WW1, and not every country that suffered during the depression caved in to left- or right-wing dictatorship.

So there must have been something else, something in Germany's political culture and history, to explain why after 1929 the Nazis suddenly went from being a fringe party about to disappear down the drain, to being a significant force. Versailles isn't a good enough explanation, because during the German referendum of 1929 -- held to decide whether Germany should formally renounce the Treaty and refuse to stop paying reparations (which Germany stopped paying in 1932 anyway) -- fewer than 15% of German voters even bothered to turn out for it.

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Banning Trump from Twitter actually hit him where it hurts: in his ego. I don't think that clown has a single genuine shred of remorse or shame for what happened in the Capitol -- only disappointment that his gambit failed, and fury that he's been now denied the use of Twitter as a platform to incite further attempts. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if his next phase of attack was to drop heavy hints that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if Biden didn't live to see the end of his inauguration ceremony.

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If you're looking for consistency -- for people (well, Twitter users at least) to be held accountable to the same standard no matter who, what or where they are -- then it's going to be a struggle. Americans will care (rightly) when the man who's supposed to be their president incites a mob to attack and undermine the fundamental institutions of democracy in their own country, and those words actually have violent, in fact lethal consequences. They're going to care a whole lot less when someone in another country says something bad about a third country.

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UnfairRepresent posted...

The Nazis only took off because post war Germany was shit. Hitler and WW2 gave everyone work and a purpose.

Despite communist uprisings, the Allied occupation of the Ruhr and Rheinland, hyperinflation, and the first few painful years of the Weimar economy when Germany actually made genuine attempts to pay reparations, the most popular party in Germany from 1920 to 1929 remained the centre-left SPD. Meanwhile, the Nazis' share of the vote in federal elections had been in decline since 1924 and sank to a feeble 2.6% in May 1928.

So either it wasn't just the length of the lines for soup kitchens that brought the Nazis to power, or the Weimar economy wasn't actually in such terrible shape for most of its life. (The Republic's rebound from the recession of winter 1926-27 saw a twelve-month growth rate higher than any achieved during the Third Reich.)

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treewojima posted...

Ha

Ha ha

Bahahahahahahaha

Oh man, that's so funny it made me forget all about the pain of using the piece of shit they give me at work

At work, our computers would probably run better if we picked them up and smashed them repeatedly against a rock than they do after there's been an "upgrade".

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Even the landscape of the Western Front must have had a surreal, nightmarish quality. Brown fields honeycombed with waterlogged shell craters. Vast swamps of liquid clay. Skeletal remnants of forests. Whole towns pulverized into stalagmites of masonry rubble. Colossal thickets of barbed wire, 475 miles long. Crumbling trenches that resemble open sewers of sludge. Fogbanks of toxic gas. Tons of rotting meat, thickly blanketed with blowflies.

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TopKEKIeon posted...

Yes, and I am very fortunate they do, well, when they find mine sexy. But I don't profess to think like a woman.

What I'm saying is that as a straight guy who loves the female body, sometimes it might seem downright incomprehensible that all women aren't lesbians, or that not all men are straight. I mean, what could there be about the male body that would make someone actually prefer it? And yet ... it seems plenty of people do. As you say: it's very fortunate for guys.

Most straight guys probably don't want to see any pics of just naked guys when they're searching for porn. Not so much because they find the naked male body totally disgusting maybe, but because in that particular context they find it a definite turn-off and they'd really just rather not see it. So it's understandable why gay guys on a porn quest might give a firm thumbs down to images of the naked female body.

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TopKEKIeon posted...

Seriously. As a straight guy, I do not understand gay people.

Straight women must have some reason for finding the male body sexier, yeah?

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

WW2 had everything WW1 had basically

And short of nukes, WW1 had pretty much everything WW2 had -- even behind the lines. Genocide, for example. Massacres and summary executions of civilians. Murder and mistreatment of POWs. Strategic terror-bombing of cities. Police-state repression in occupied territories. Ruthless asset-stripping. Destruction of cultural treasures. Spiteful scorched-earth policies. Deportation and forcible relocation of populations. The overworking and starvation of civilians and POWs as slave labourers. Incarceration and brutalization of minority nationalities in concentration camps.

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The US Army suffered more combat deaths in France in 1918 -- more than half of them in just the last seven weeks of the war -- than throughout the whole of the Pacific campaign in WW2. During 47 days of intense combat in the Meuse-Argonne forest, for example, twice as many American soldiers were killed than died on Okinawa.

In fact the average US daily combat death rate in France in WW1 (132.2 per day) was 77% of the US rate in all theatres combined in WW2.

By comparison with Vietnam, the US suffered 12% more combat deaths in France in 1917-18 than in the entire Southeast Asian theatre between 1965-73; total US military deaths were more than twice as high. As a proportion of total in-theatre personnel, 40% more Americans died in France than in Vietnam, and the average daily combat death rate for US soldiers was eight and a half times higher.

And I still might have preferred fighting amid the muddy moonscapes of the Western Front to fighting in the jungles, malarial swamps and bush of Africa during WW1 (yes, there was jungle warfare in WW1) -- where most soldiers were soon reduced to diseased skeletons, half-naked in tattered rags.

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Smarkil posted...

yeah ive only broken two vases with my penis in my life

And I suspect that "I only had my penis out because those children were being menaced by a lion" may not be the best thing you could say in court.

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Tell her that the violence at Antifa protests is routinely started by disguised Trump supporters.

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CyricZ posted...

Odd topic to make during a pandemic.

If they're literally everywhere, they could even be hiding behind your couch right now. It makes sense to be prepared.

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RetsuZaiZen posted...

I'm getting another cart.

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Being bored is more tiring than being busy.

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Forgive wisely rather than easily.

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Veggeta X posted...

I love my mom

At least that's some consolation.

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This risks giving small boys entirely unrealistic expectations of what manhood will be like for them.

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YoukaiSlayer posted...

Now MRIs are the fucking annoying scans. They take a long time, are SUPER loud even through the earplugs and they shake you the whole time and it takes at least like 30 minutes, usually much longer.

They always made me think, "So this must be what it's like to be clothes in a washing machine..."

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Give them some credit: it's three whole syllables long.

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Former alcoholic. Alcohol isn't a problem so long as I don't drink it.

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I dunno, if you skip to the end to see what happens the plot still doesn't seem to make much sense. I think the writers just kind of ran out of ideas and didn't really know how to wrap up the saga.

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Obviously in an ideal world, facts and falsehoods would have exactly the same weight and be accorded equal validity.

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creativerealms posted...

He's not going to flee the country. He's going to have his own victory rally during the inauguration.

By now, would it really surprise anyone if he hinted heavily that someone should try to kill Biden during the inauguration?

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Fat chicks can be smokin' red-hawt sexxxy.

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JoeRodonExprien posted...

Not really, more that the minutiae of foreign regions isnt really relevant to anyone who doesnt live there.

Ignorance sure as fuck didn't stop a lot of people in this topic from kidding themselves they knew "how Brits talk".

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Bio1590 posted...

But Prestwick Airport has been told to expect the arrival of a US military Boeing 757 aircraft previously used by Mr Trump on 19 January, according to the Sunday Post.

We could try shooting it down.

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If they can prove intent, then he should be treated as harshly as he would be if he intentionally destroyed IV bloodpacks in the middle of a nationwide blood shortage.

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

easy, why would the soviet union call bull **** on the moon landings

Not quite sure whether you're edging into "playing stupid games of goofy and perverse contrarianism" territory or "have the educational attainment of a small cabbage" territory with this. Could it be both?

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nothanks1 posted...

I figured anything up until blackreach or whatever it is when you get the first shout word was early spolers

but like, okay see that makes sense they can see the soul
How come they assuemd you absorbed it and not 'shit the dragon is just now that bosmer piece of trash let's kill it'

Because they believed in the folk tales of their Nord upbringing.

But there's only so far that logic will get you in sword-and-sorcery fantasy. It's pointless asking why characters aren't more skeptical about superstitions, or demanding to know how magic works, or insisting that it's scientifically implausible to have gigantic insects.

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My main gripe is that the models for the character builds have so many bizarre choices, there's only a few that don't leave you looking like a hideously disfigured car crash victim. This is especially true of the freaky mouth types...!

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

20 people, 30 people, whatever, I'm just trying to explain to you that just because 1000 people are involved in a project doesn't mean all of them know what is going on. You don't need the janitors, scientists, and engineers to know about the agenda. The only people that matter are the directors and astronauts.

Here's the thing. The Apollo program and the Moon landings took place during the depths of the Cold War, in an era of constantly predicted nuclear destruction from the skies. The USSR would have kept a beady eye on every man-made object that the Americans launched into the stratosphere, and tracked its every move. If the Apollo rockets had been going anywhere other than where NASA had told the public they were going, then the Soviets would certainly have known it very quickly. There's no way the hoax could have remained unexposed.

Yet throughout the life of the Apollo program, the Soviets did not make a single accusation that the lunar missions, the landings, were a hoax. Why did they signally fail to seize the opportunity to humiliate Nixon in his hour of victory, by exposing him as either a liar or an ignorant dupe of his own agencies? Was it because they felt it was just too ungentlemanly to make him look like a laughing stock?

There is no explanation you can offer for Soviet complicity in the "hoax" that doesn't demand a ridiculous suspension of disbelief. If it's a choice between accepting the Moon landings as an established historical fact or of turning the known world upside down and back to front out of some goofy, perverse contrarianism, I know which alternative is far more plausible and which one requires a hell of a lot more gullibility.

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

then this contradicts human behavior because 99% of the New World should be uninhabited then because Desoto the explorer didn't find gold mines in Texas for example. Only Mexico City and the Rockie mountains would be colonized with this logic. The fact that there's unclaimed land is enough to gather interest.

I think that first of all, the perceived cost-benefit ratio of exploring and colonizing outer space is somewhat different to that of colonizing an unmapped continent on the far side of the ocean. A colony in the New World at least stood a chance of becoming self-sustaining within a few months after setting sail. Secondly, royal sponsors of colonial missions rarely had to weigh the political costs of spending other people's money on their pet projects.

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

Wouldn't a space colony or something be lucrative though?

But nobody wants to get his hands dirty doing the massively expensive spadework that promises to yield no economic (equals political) rewards until long after he's left office. It's all about short term gains; politicians don't want to put in work if it means only their successors will benefit from it.

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

Plus, we were fighting a losing war in Vietnam and a cold war at the time, so don't give me no damn excuse about no money.

The Space Race was another arena of the Cold War. But since abandoning Vietnam, successive administrations have calculated -- rightly or wrongly -- that there simply aren't enough votes to be won by spending immense amounts of taxpayers' money on serious, manned space exploration just for the sake of science. Most politicians are fixated purely on their own personal careers and don't give a shit about the nation, the planet, or the future beyond the next election.

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Yeah, I'm going with no.

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If your entire profession consists of pretending to be something or someone you're not...

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Surely it depends on what, if anything, you happen to know about each other before you go on the date. You might have met at a rally, for instance.

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teepan95 posted...

As one fan wrote, "Come on, Lin. I'm on your side, but now you're just sounding insane."

Think it's time to start questioning just why you're on his side, pal.

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Turning down opportunities isn't the act of someone who claims they're unfairly rejected at every turn. There's still a difference between "I can't" and "I won't" -- except maybe in cases of "I won't try because I know I can't succeed".

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darcandkharg31 posted...

Holy geez.

Indeed. Luckily my wife had a tube of EMLA cream (a topical anaesthetic), so I borrowed it and took with me into a hospital bathroom before the procedure; I smeared the head of my cock with it until it was totally numb. Just as well.

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Our big project should be striving to make Earth more habitable by humans.

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Generally, no. The notable exception was when I had a local anaesthetic injected into the meat of my cock head in preparation for a biopsy. I made very, very sure not to look when they did that one.

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Nowhere near it.

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MrMelodramatic posted...

This is incorrect

Also, taking upskirt shots doesn't count as legitimate field research.

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