Lurker > Firewerx

Well... It depends on what those beliefs are. If the creator turns out to be a truly toxic lump of shit, I wouldn't like knowing I've given them a penny in royalties (if it can be, y'know, avoided).
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texty bastard

rexcrk posted...

Im planning on starting school next year, just something I can go for two years for, but by the time Im done, Ill be 33. And then who knows how long until I actually get the kind of job I want / need.

In another couple of years you'll be 33 anyway, and you'll still have the basic problem of trying at that age to get the kind of job you want/need. So you might as well get some extra education tucked under your belt. The longer you leave it, the harder things will be.
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texty bastard

There's always the green alternative: a really tall hedge.
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texty bastard

"God, I need a drink."
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texty bastard

Never trust a man who uses a naval rank fraudulently.
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texty bastard

SterlingM posted...

Go ahead and mock him, he (like the rest of us true christians) will have the last laugh

Only because you'll be the very last ones to get the joke.
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texty bastard

Doesn't really sound worth dying for.
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texty bastard

captpackrat posted...

Most health food stores will carry it, or at least a tincture of myrrh if they don't have the resin.

Nasty tasting stuff. Smells sickly sweet but is horridly bitter.

Clearly the Wise Men did some last minute shopping on Christmas Eve and that was all there was left.
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texty bastard

PokemonExpert44 posted...

I have researched a lot of the time in my free time, and no one has shown that we evolved from something

What kind of proof would you consider persuasive that we evolved from something?
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texty bastard

The Great Muta 22 posted...

Fair for everyone involved. Fair for the scumbag who got his ass whooped and fair for the people to take their charges.

What's the big deal?

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texty bastard

Sunhawk posted...

I can't believe people had to wait roughly 10 years, after ordering their Trabant. I don't think it was worth it.

I've had experiences like that with eBay.
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texty bastard

Maybe you just bring out the worst in people.
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texty bastard

I don't think I've even seen most women 18-35 yet.
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texty bastard

streamofthesky posted...

In general, if someone seems to be criticizing Israel excessively compared to other countries for similar actions, holding Israel to a higher standard than its neighbors, or so on, it's likely based on anti-Semitism by the person, whether consciously or unconsciously.

There's a certain amount of backlash though, because Israel has always liked to project an image of itself as adhering to higher moral standards than its neighbours. The higher the standards that you claim for yourself, the further and harder your tumble from grace when you fall short of them. If you tell the world that you're an oasis of liberal democracy whose actions are always measured by restraint and fairness, expect people to shine a searchlight on your hypocrisy and judge you harshly for it if you shamelessly betray those principles.
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texty bastard

Depends if you believe that criticizing the policies of successive Israeli governments, condemning some of the actions of the Israeli military, and objecting to the expansion of Israeli settlements in disputed territory is the same thing as opposing the existence of a State of Israel in any shape or form.
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texty bastard

One myth is that whenever the Allied western democracies occupied Axis territory, they immediately overturned the regimes they found in place there and flung open the gates of the prisons and concentration camps to liberate the inmates. Not in North Africa, they didn't.

After Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of North Africa) in November 1942, the US left the Vichy French administration there intact because of the ceasefire deal that Robert Murphy (Eisenhower's adviser on political affairs) struck with Admiral Franois Darlan. It meant strict non-interference by Americans in local affairs. So GIs in Algiers stood by, watched and did nothing as Vichy policemen rounded up the Resistance fighters who, on the eve of the Allied landings, had risked their own lives to save American ones. Many of the 377 fighters were later dragged off to punishment camps in the Sahara.

Meanwhile in Morocco there were there were fascist pogroms in Casablanca (just moments after the first parade of American troops had passed by the city's Jewish quarter) and in Rabat and Sale, and new anti-Jewish measures were put in place in Meknes and Fez by the US-endorsed regime. Jews and other detainees were still rotting in slave camps in the Sahara as late as August 1943, ten months after the Allied "liberation", because the American troops who garrisoned the country didn't lift a finger to free them. Instead, it was up to de Gaulle's French National Liberation Committee to finally free Vichy detainees shortly after it took control.
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texty bastard

Zikten posted...

That Hitler only killed Jews

They exterminated other groups too like Gypsies, gays, and the disabled

Gay people were not targets for physical extermination as part of Nazi policy, even though many died in the concentration camps and they were sometimes used as human guinea pigs for medical experiments (particularly ones that attempted a "cure" for homosexuality).

What the Nazis did was to tighten up Paragraph 175 of the Reichs 1871 Penal Code, which was enforced more stringently by the police and the courts after 1933; but putting gay men in prison for being gay was hardly a Nazi (or even German) innovation. The 1933 Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and Measures for Protection and Recovery gave courts the power to order the compulsory castration of gay men who were convicted of homosexual acts in public or with boys under 14, and the 1935 Amendment to the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases allowed the castration of gay men who (theoretically) consented to the procedure.
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texty bastard

Sunhawk posted...

Here's a question: why does so much talk about WW2 and the Axis Powers, focus on The Nazis and the Japanese? The Italians barely seem to be mentioned at all. Where they considered that unimportant, by both sides at the time? Although, nobody likes a flipflopper, I suppose.

Back when I was a hell of a lot more invested in the history of WWII, if I had what you might call a "specialist subject" in it, it was the wartime role of Romania: military, political, economic, and genocidal. I don't have any personal connections to Romania, but then you don't need German connections to be interested in Hitler's Germany either
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texty bastard

WizardofHoth posted...

I really miss Netscape. It was faster and easier to browse websites than Explorer

Wasn't that back when AltaVista was the search engine of choice for porn?
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texty bastard

I think it means you have to turn 90 degrees so you're no longer facing your oven directly.
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texty bastard

Does stealing a stapler from your office count?
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texty bastard

eggcorn posted...

Firewerx posted...

It's a case of misplaced sarcasm.

I would say it's a case of not reading and chomping at the bit to shit post in a vain attempt to feel superior.

I would say you're right.
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texty bastard

If you were to go into a bookstore (and yep, people still do) and browse the shelves and spines on European history, you'd form the impression that German history was only twelve years long: 1933-45. I don't know if book retailers' obsession with the Nazi era is because they believe that swastikas sell books, but fuck me, I'm sick to death of it.

And I'm saying that as someone who, in his teens, voraciously consumed anything he could read about that era. The Axis forces fascinated me. Seeing the war through German eyes was a bit like watching the original Star Trek with the Klingons as the good guys: something coolly subversive. (And it was, back then -- when for most Brit schoolkids brought up on a diet of comic book patriotism, the war was all about GIs and Desert Rats battling a faceless foe: squareheaded and jackbooted hordes whose only speech was "Donner und Blitzen!" and "Gott in Himmel!" as Captain Hurricane clobbered them with a torn-off tank cannon. When you finally read about WWII from the German perspective it felt like you were breaking a taboo, and breaking taboos is always exciting.)

The important thing, Sunhawk, is not to become so close to your subject that your sense of perspective starts to erode and you find yourself always leaning towards your subject's side. I'm not saying you're letting that happen -- I'm just cautioning you against letting it happen.
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texty bastard

eggcorn posted...

averagejoel posted...

Foppe posted...

And with N-word, I mean the lighter version, the one that Martin Luther King, Jr. used in his "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963. The worse version was never used until gangster rap became popular.

I didn't know they had gangster rap in the southern US in the 1800s! I guess you learn something new every day!!!!

Are you ok?

Foppe was talking about the use of the n-word in Sweden, averagejoel clearly thought he was talking about the use of the word in general. It's a case of misplaced sarcasm.
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texty bastard

If you're British, French, Belgian, German, or Portuguese, the history of the Atlantic slave trade and/or of European colonialism in Africa are part of your own country's history, and you're very likely to be fully aware of the meaning behind the term.
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texty bastard

deupd_u posted...

Everyone I don't understand is a Nazi, topic #982750934

You don't have to be a Nazi to be a Nazi apologist, just as you don't have to be an Islamic fundamentalist to give ISIS too easy a ride. Being a cranky contrarian probably helps, though.
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texty bastard

Dash_Harber posted...

And again, Germany had a right to be angry

I'm not so sure most Germans were that angry. It's hard to make a strong case that public resentment over Versailles was the main reason why people voted Nazi. Far right parties, who constantly used the Treaty as a big club with which to beat their opponents over the head, found it harder and harder to sustain electoral momentum in Germany after the Ruhr occupation came to an end. (German heads of business, by the way, criticized the Ruhr occupation on the grounds that it violated the Treaty of Versailles.) As I've said, for the first ten years after the Treaty was signed Germany's biggest party remained the centre-left Social Democratic Party.

The far right's difficulty in using Versailles to mobilize public opinion is starkly illustrated by the degree of voter apathy over the 1929 referendum on whether Germany should pass a law to formally renounce the Treaty and ban the collection of reparations. Fewer than 15% of German voters even bothered to turn out for the referendum. Again, despite the conventional wisdom in today's school classrooms that Versailles stoked the German public so badly they rushed to vote Nazi out of spite, it seems to demonstrate instead a remarkable apathy about the Treaty as a specific issue.
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texty bastard

MakoReizei posted...

Sounds interesting. There's another Russian film set in WWII called "Come and See" that I want to watch, and it's apparently super disturbing

Well, the final sequence is brutal.
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texty bastard

It doesn't take an epic struggle to beat IV: The Voyage Home or V: The Final Frontier.
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texty bastard

Proto_Spark posted...

Germany lost WWI and got completely screwed over (Germany didn't have a "Roaring Twenties" just a really long depression

Nope. 1925-28 are known as the "gold-plated" years of the Weimar economy, which recovered from the recession of winter 1926-27 with a twelve-month growth rate higher than any achieved during the Third Reich.

But even during the most painful years of the early 1920s -- hyper-inflation and the Ruhr Crisis -- Hitler's party never managed to win more than 6.5% of the votes in federal elections. Worse, the Party's share of the vote actually fell from 6.5% in May 1924 to 3% in December that year, and then crashed to a feeble 2.6% in May 1928. The most popular party in Germany for ten years after the end of WW1 remained the centre-left SPD. In other words, even when memories of defeat and Versailles were freshest and most bitter, the German public didn't rush to vote Nazi out of spite.

Yet suddenly in September 1930, after a decade spent as nothing more than a fringe party and almost disappearing from the political scene by the end of the 1920s, the Nazi vote shoots up to 19%. I think only a fool would see no connection between the impact of Brning's deeply unpopular deflationary policies and the surge of support for Hitler's party. Heaping all the blame for the Nazi victory on Versailles is as over-simplistic an explanation as claiming that Germans fell over themselves to vote big-time for Jew-hatred. It was clearly a more complex phenomenon.
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texty bastard

Excessive modesty. Really, it's the only fault I have.
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texty bastard

McSame_as_Bush posted...

The UN is as powerful as the nations that fund it want it to be (not very). Blaming the UN itself is silly. They do what they can with the resources they are allocated.

Exactly. The speed and strength of UN commitment in any situation around the world depends entirely upon the response from the governments of its member states. The Secretariat can condemn, plead, and press for action all it likes; but if member states aren't willing to stump up the cash to fund an operation or commit the troops to give it muscle, then the Secretariat has to water down its words because member states won't back them up. That's why "the UN doesn't seem to be doing anything about it." Before slagging off the UN because you can't see any action, first ask what your own country has offered to do because believe it or not, that's how the system actually works.
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texty bastard

There were a number of options available to the Clinton administration, relatively low-cost attempts that it could have made to at least disrupt the organization of the massacres.

Clinton could have severed diplomatic relations with Rwanda. This would have helped clear the legal hurdles to a proposal developed by Alison des Forges (a senior consultant for Human Rights Watch and a widely recognized expert on Rwanda) to jam the radio broadcasts of Radio Television Libre Milles Colines, or RTLM. This Hutu Power hate radio station facilitated the killings by broadcasting where specific Tutsis were hiding, living, and trying to escape to, and then ordering their deaths on air. Although des Forges appealed to the NSC, the State Department and the Pentagon, the requests were ultimately turned down. The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Walt Slocombe, was unhappy that the overflights needed to jam the broadcasts would cost around $8,500 per flight hour, and because the assets would have to be peeled from Haiti he expected resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Even more knotty were the legal wrangles over Rwandan sovereignty, which would have been infringed by the jamming. The State Department could have cut through the Gordian knot by severing diplomatic relations with Rwanda, and this it did not do. The Clinton administration made no attempt to encourage the UN to restrict the representation of the genocidal government in UN agencies, organizations and institutions; Rwandan ministers were still free to travel to and from the US, and the Rwandan diplomatic mission in Washington remained open. It wasn't until July 15 that Clinton finally gave the order to freeze Rwandan assets and close the embassy in the US -- eleven days after the end of the genocide.

Clinton could have backed efforts to launch a second, reinforced UNAMIR mission earlier. Lt.-Gen. Romo Dallaire, the force commander of the token UNAMIR presence left behind after the initial evacuation, pleaded to the UN that with reinforcement of just 5,000 well-equipped troops he could protect the lives of thousands of people; Dallaire had managed to work small miracles with around 500 men. By May 11, the Interagency Working Group (IWG) was discussing developments that put the prospect of a new UN "coalition of the willing" on the table: troop offers by Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Canada and Namibia. But the momentum died down five days later because, as Slocombe explained in a secret memo to the Secretary for Defense and Deputy Secretary for Defense, the IWG and the Peacekeeping Core Group were opposed to the US providing a C-130 to fly missions into Kigali in support of a proposed 5,500-man UN peacekeeping force.

Even if it refused to lift a finger to help, the Clinton administration could at least have raised its voice against the genocide. But as I've said above, it refused to even call it a genocide. This had nothing to do with any American failure to grasp the scale of what was happening in Rwanda, either. A secret May 1 discussion paper for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East/Africa Region, Molly Williamson, advised her to be careful on the issue of discussing language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the Genocide Convention. The underlying rationale behind this was the risk that the genocide finding could commit the USG [United States Government] to actually do something.

Neither Clinton nor National Security Adviser Tony Lake called a single senior-level meeting during the 100 days of the genocide to discuss the violence and the possibility of a response by the United States. There was simply no interest from the President, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State or senior officials to do anything about it.
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texty bastard

Impavid54 posted...

Honestly, this movie is proof that the United Nations is useless garbage that talks big game but does nothing in the end. It is also evidence that American intervention is a positive thing.

- Only, it was the American government that wanted UNAMIR run on a shoestring. Originally the US wanted a token UN force of no more than 500 peacekeepers in Rwanda. The Secretariat had to keep the ceiling on UNAMIR I's strength down to 2,548 troops instead of the 5,500 recommended as the "ideal" size, in order to get the mission proposal past US objections in the Security Council.

- It was the American government that voted (along with the other members of the Security Council, admittedly) on April 21, 1994 to evacuate almost all UNAMIR troops from Rwanda and leave behind only a token force of 270 men. It voted to do this in the midst of the genocide.

- It was the American goverment that refused to acknowledge that was happening in Rwanda was a genocide. It wasn't until June 10, when most of the killing was over, that Secretary of State Warren Christopher finally used the word "genocide". Even UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had called it a "genocide" on May 4 in a Nightline broadcast, while the US government denied it.

- It was the American government that objected to the use of the word "genocide" during the Security Council debate on April 29, and insisted that the draft text of SC Resolution 918 be watered down by deleting the offending word. It wanted to wriggle out of the obligation to act as implied in Article I of the Genocide Convention of 1948.
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texty bastard

EbonTitanium posted...

Why do people confuse kinks with fetishes?

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texty bastard

Middle hope posted...

Stock up on gas and oil products

And food and water.
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texty bastard

It fell out of fashion in the second half of the decade.
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texty bastard

Iran-Iraq War -- eight years (1980-88), half a million dead: not large scale.
Second Congo War -- nine countries, over five million dead: not large scale.

And so on.
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texty bastard

Decline, but not because of her weight. I've dated and doinked girls heavier than 200 and they've been awesome.
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texty bastard

Does he mean the Second Reich (1871-1918)? I'm confused about what "a long time ago" means exactly.
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texty bastard

So what you meant by an "actual war" was: one in which large numbers of Americans are killed in America, and until then it won't feel "actual" to Americans.
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texty bastard

_Rinku_ posted...

Firewerx posted...

Pitlord_Special posted...

Imagine how youd feel if you were the guy outside the burning building and some doofus comes out hauling his pit bull over his shoulder and says sorry man, I wanted to save your baby girl but never could I leave Mr.Bojangles there to die

If anyone comes out of the burning building and tells me he left my dog in there to save the kid that he's hauling over his shoulder, I'm making him go right back in there.

Internet Tough Guy

I just think the guy could have tried harder. Probably found the kid and thought, "That'll do." That's just laziness.
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texty bastard

They could have brought Roger Moore back into the role if he hadn't died last year. He was only 89.
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texty bastard

Pitlord_Special posted...

Imagine how youd feel if you were the guy outside the burning building and some doofus comes out hauling his pit bull over his shoulder and says sorry man, I wanted to save your baby girl but never could I leave Mr.Bojangles there to die

If anyone comes out of the burning building and tells me he left my dog in there to save the kid that he's hauling over his shoulder, I'm making him go right back in there.
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texty bastard

Chr0noid posted...

And not "Iraq War" levels either. I'm talking, an actual war.

It probably felt like an "actual war" to the roughly hundred thousand people who died as a result. Just like the Second Congo War probably really did feel like the planet's deadliest conflict since WWII to the 860,000 people (at an absolute minimum) who died by 2008.
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texty bastard

The dog. And I don't even like dogs.
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texty bastard

wwinterj25 posted...

Yes. Only I can see her though.

Unlock the basement door and let her out occasionally.
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texty bastard

If I was a boy getting into Girl Scouts, I'd probably be OK with that.
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texty bastard

Always. I'm determined to get my money's worth out of these things.
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texty bastard

If you're a paramedic and you've just loaded her onto a gurney after she's been cut free from a car wreck, it'd probably seem a tad pushy.
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texty bastard