ABigGuy4U
6d ago
I think it’s true. The types of training designed to increase aesthetic mass are quite different than those for pure strength, like powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting. That said I think a person who seriously lifts for aesthetics is still going to be a lot stronger than they would have been if they didn’t train at all.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.
Neither was his pre-MCU career.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Well the Arab world maintains its own massive charity-lobbying-propaganda industrial complex that works to keep that alive, but I think the historical outline I have is the reason that sympathy is around to exploit.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
You’re the one equating women to children, I’m just pointing out the second-order consequences if that’s true.
- WWII mortally wounds the British and French Empires, meaning their holdings all over the world are now up for grabs.
- World War Two was (among many other things) an extremely violent six year long PowerPoint presentation about how controlling major oil fields is really really important.
- For this reason both the US and USSR are very interested in getting friendly proxy nations in the Middle East.
- For various cultural and political reasons, the US ends up backing the new state of Israel and the old British and French backed Arab monarchies. The USSR ends up backing the rising tide of Arab socialist movements. This was not set in stone, and there are plausible alternate scenarios that end up with the USSR backing Israel. It just didn’t shake out that way.
- Now that everyone has chosen their fighters, a forty year war of proxy battles ensues to control the Middle East. For the USSR, that includes eventually knocking out Israel.
- The USSR and various Arab states begin arming and training nascent Palestinian paramilitary groups as part of this strategy. Most of these groups like the PLO are pretty secular and vaguely Marxist even while they pursue goals that are basically ethnic nationalist with religious characteristics. If you want a western example for reference, look at the Provisional IRA.
- If you are an American Soviet fifth columnist (read: “University Professor”) the hip thing to do is to ardently support these Soviet-backed paramilitary groups and denounce Israel.
- The Soviet Union and the Islamic world suffer a messy break up over Afghanistan, immediately followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the Soviet backing to keep them nominally on the socialist track, the Palestinian militant groups increasingly drift in an Islamic and nationalist direction.
- University professors are mentally stuck in 1968 and they don’t receive the memo about anything that happened in paragraph 8.
- In the 2000s, George Bush’s adventures in the Middle East reawaken and inflame the dormant Islamist sympathies of the University professor set. This passes it on to a new generation and sets it in stone as a foundational left wing tenet.
- Fast forward to modern times and now leftists endlessly simp for various Islamic militant groups even though it really doesn’t make sense anymore given that these groups are all reactionary religious organizations with a heavy overtone of ethnic nationalism and ethnic supremacy.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!
If we regularly expected children to be helicopter pilots, doctors and heads of state, then yes I think them acting like regular children would be a big problem.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
In Northern Ireland during the Troubles (a period of civil war waged by clandestine paramilitaries roughly along religious sectarian lines), neighborhoods in the major cities would have large political murals on buildings and walls that marked the area as either Protestant or Catholic. This is a region where walking into the wrong neighborhood could get you shot.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
I’ll admit, I’ve seen political signage and iconography on both sides that’s starting to get disturbingly close to the murals in Belfast that demarcate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
I think one factor everyone is forgetting is that it didn’t actually cost much to be pro-Israel for the last 20 years. It didn’t cost much to be pro-Palastine either. Go to AIPAC conference once a year “blah blah unbreakable commitment to the continued existence of the state of Israel blah blah” pass Go, collect 2 million dollars in PAC money. Or alternatively, “blah blah illegal apartheid regime, boycotts and sanctions” all the college students clap, your leftist card is now good for another three years even though 80 percent of your votes are solely for the benefit of Raytheon. There had only been minimal violence since the end of the Second Intifada, and it looked like things would only get better in the future.
Now, supporting one or the other carries significant costs, and someone is going to hate you whomever you pick. Each choice is also going to permanently associate you with it’s own set of gory videos showing various unsympathetic behaviors by your guys. Politicians have spent the last two years trying to figure out the new reality and how to best exploit it for votes and campaign contributions. In conclusion, blah blah rational argument, blah blah updating my Bayesian priors blah blah Aella HBD whatever give me updoots.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Old pagan religions had different virtue ethics systems so it can often be easy to miss how devout these civilizations were despite all the drinking killing and whoring. Also people forget that the cynical libertine city slicker/salt of the earth rural farmer divide has existed forever, and a small strata of the urban upper class isn’t going to accurately represent the beliefs of society as a whole.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
You can see a similar paradox in the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union. The coup plotters wanted to overthrow Gorbachev to instate a more hard-line interpretation of Marxist-Leninism than what Gorbachev had in mind. So that would make them left-wing revolutionaries right? But at the same time, the reason the coup plotters wanted to do that is because hardline Marxist-Leninism was the old, established order and they were old established figures that had a large stake in the old order. So in a lot of ways Gorbachev is the young left-liberal reformer and the coup plotters that want more Marxism are the reactionary conservatives.
Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness
Old age and actually having status to lose has made them cowardly. The new school principal character South Park introduced in 2015 was basically a meta-textual admission that they just can’t do the same kind of jokes that they did in the 90s for fear of getting cancelled. Even with their criticism of Trump, they spent 10 years walking on eggshells and are only being really vicious in their parody now that much of the controversy over Trump has died down and he has safely solidified into a semi-establishment figure.
ABigGuy4U
21d ago
Typically when a soldier uses a garrote, the victim is pushed forward with a knee to the back, while the garrote is pulled backwards with force. This crushes the trachea to the point the airway cannot reopen, and possibly even breaks the neck. It is a useful technique for quietly and quickly removing pickets, and if you want to see a demonstration there are World War II era training films that show the technique. This is consistent with the postmortem analysis that found physical effects that differed from those you would see with a suspension hanging, and were more consistent with a violent strangulation.
This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.
Unfortunately I have been warned by our moderation staff to avoid this topic, so I cannot post my full 14 page long screed in which I accuse @Southkraut of being a traitor to all of humankind. Nor can I delve into the incredible commitment to cultural subversion it takes to cast that actress in a science fiction universe in which the defining feature of the world building is that there are NO AYYS.
Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
This is just my head cannon (I think), but I always interpreted his terrible heart condition as just him having a normal human heart and not a eugenically selected überheart.
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
To be fair, this is nothing new. Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan and J.Paul Getty weren’t particularly nice people either. And the old extractive industries had the same weird semi-sovereignty where one minute you’re overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and the next Mexico is nationalizing your oil wells.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
Unlike the movies, real life garrotes function by instantly crushing the windpipe, the killer doesn’t need to sit there for three and a half minutes choking the guy out. And controlling a resisting victim is pretty easy when you have three or four people.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
And the Secret Speech was pretty hard for many to swallow. Remember, it’s called the secret speech because it only went out to party members. A lot of these people had turned in friends and colleagues on the assurances that this was for a good cause.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Those are a lot of good questions. Unfortunately we don’t know the answers to them because the guards all fell asleep and the investigators forgot to ask. :^)
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Hell if I know! That’s the type of thing that is usually done in secret.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Trump is scared even if he’s not on the list, because a full accounting of the truth would have people seriously calling for revolutionary tribunals and guilotines. And not just the types that are always calling for that.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Yes, his brother had very serious alcoholism and died early as a result.
The right has begun to sour on Capitalism for a few reasons. The current iteration of the “free market” has so much government intervention that it’s basically corporate socialism already, making calls to preserve the free market ring hollow. Libertarians burned too much of their conservative cachet and are now fringe group without much pull. Also the right realized that “all that is solid melts into air” includes religion, nation states, ethnic groups and families.
More options
Context Copy link