With regard to Reagan I'm assuming you're referring to his 2nd wife? Did she have a reputation as a thot?
By 1950s standards yes. Which by today’s standards would make her practically a Catholic saint.
And with regard to Melania, are we automatically assuming that she was a thot by virtue of being a fashion model, or is there more to know about her career that I'm not aware of?
She did pose naked for magazines a couple of times.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
Republicans also hardened up a lot about morals after they publicly beheaded Nixon for jaywalking, and then twenty years later the Democrats closed ranks and lawyered up to get their guy out of rape and cartel money laundering charges.
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
Norman_Rockwell_Freedom_Of_Speech.jpg
For some reason this reminds me of @coffee_enjoyer
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
The ID by some random McDonald’s worker who had only ever seen one blurry security camera frame of his face also seemed really fishy.
ABigGuy4U
22d ago
The limits of protest conduct are:
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Protest for causes the establishment likes (unlimited violence allowed)
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Don’t protest for causes the establishment dislikes (seriously, don’t even bother leaving the house)
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
It's extremely unlikely the Troubles could have become a more traditional uprising because most of the people who cared were placated enough by the freeing of the Republic (nee Irish Free State)
Also Northern Ireland was always going to be an uphill battle because around half the population are Scottish Protestants and not actually Irish. The fighting was incredibly difficult for the UK in the few areas that were actually 90 plus percent Irish (South Armagh).
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
I think a second American civil war would most closely resemble the Mexican Revolution, where you have a central government of questionable legitimacy, multiple entire states that have risen up against that central government, regions within otherwise loyalst states that are in rebellion against both their state and the central government, and numerous paralimitaries and militant groups operating within that framework that don’t have ties to any particular geographic area.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
That deal would work out very well for President Al-Sisi, at least for the 45 minutes he had before his own people hung him from a bridge. He already has very low popularity in Egypt and is seen as cuck to American-Israeli interests. That would put him over the edge. Which is why he was resisting the idea of taking Gaza’s refugees so hard. He’s not trying to be an obstinate jerk, he has to for his survival.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
What I’m taking away from this is that Trump got more young people than any other Republican candidate of the last thirty years. The only one that ties him was the guy cruising on rally-around-the-flag effect two years after Pearl Harbor II: Pearl Harder
The problem with thinking "faction A has four times the population, five times the soldiers, six times the industrial capacity, etc," is that is assumes that all those assets stay loyal to faction A.
Yes, people forget that half the Syrian rebels started the war as Bashar al-Assad’s own troops.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
I think all those Kamala ads hammering that “your vote is private! Your abusive MAGA husband will never find out!” may have backfired by reminding women that they could be militantly anti-Trump on social media and around their friends, but still pull the lever for him in the voting booth.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
My hypothesis is that I thought everything would be fairly smooth sailing from here on out, and I’m starting to have paranoid jags that it might not.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
I’m not saying the Zizians would cause a civil war. I’m saying it’s some evidence that the crazies are starting to move.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
@FiveHourMarathon The tax exemption also makes many churches incredibly cowardly, as they have to refrain from doing or preaching anything that could harm the precious tax exemption.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Untouched by you, I mean. Thin men and thick women pay themselves sinecures from the ill-gotten treasure. Worse, these janitors conspire to turn it against the state.
I’m not sure I agree with this reasoning. If these people receive payment, then definitionally, they cannot be janitors.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
I know posters who use objectively compelling and comprehensive evidence, and they’re all cowards.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Russia was humiliated when it was unable to to help its Slavic allies against the Turks, and Germany looked weak by providing only lukewarm support to Austria and preventing them from moving against Serbia.
ABigGuy4U
26d ago
It would also become a federal constitutional issue. The Constitution requires that the states each have a republican form of government. While that is pretty loosely enforced as to form, it would be hard to argue that Maine is if it became a one-party state and 45 percent of the people’s elected legislators were barred from voting.
ABigGuy4U
26d ago
People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot
Ironically one of the loopier members of the BLM movement, Shaun King, was the only one who actually took a principled stand and said he thought the Babbit killing was a bad shoot and an act of police brutality.
I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it
I have been meaning to write an effort post on this. The reason is that the modern woke worldview is already 9/10s of the way to being an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It holds that a certain ethnic group (white people) is responsible for all the problems in both America and the world. The way this ethnic group did that is by displaying racist high in-group preference, conspiring that all high ranking positions in society are controlled by that ethnic group. That way they can control the flow of wealth in the entire world away from those who need it, and to themselves and themselves alone. The ethnic group has also enforced this racial dictatorship by developing a years long stranglehold of not just politics, but of media and culture as well. All you need to do to turn that into something out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is drop in a single triple parenthesis so that instead of white people it’s (((white people))). This is not helped by the fact that Jews are often high achieving and end up in many high positions of power and cultural authority in the society that the woke despise so much. Karl Marx said that antisemitism is Communist class warfare for morons, and surprise surprise, when you try to Communize a bunch of college morons, you are going to turn a lot of them into antisemites.
I think there are some other factors too, but this is the main one.
A couple of reasons why you don’t see that many soldiers in political office anymore:
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With a couple of exceptions like Grant and Eisenhower, most soldier-politicians are not career military. Most of them joined because of a big war, did 3-5 years in the military, and then got out and and started climbing the political ladder. You don’t really have that kind of soldier any more. Most people who join the military are either working class and trying to get some civilian job market skills and education for free, or they really want to be in the military. The first type likely isn’t going to have any bourgeoise-class political ambitions anyway and the second is just going to stay in the military for life because they like it. The especially elite units are often made up of the second type.
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The really elite units like the SEALs, green berets and snipers tend to select for a certain personality type, they even run psych evaluations to get that personality type. And to put it bluntly, that personality type is “lightly on the sociopathy spectrum”. You need that if you want a guy who can kill 50-200 people over the course of their career without having a mental breakdown, and who can fight in the pretty calm and detached method of modern warfare and isn’t just a Viking berserker. I want to be clear, these guys are (mostly) not bad people or serial killer types, and most of them have very peaceful and mostly pro-social lives outside of the military. The problem is that type of person often comes off as weird, and often comes off as a jerk. If you want a good example, look at how many people (even conservative pro-military types) were kind of disturbed by Chris Kyle’s autobiography. This guy never did anything bad outside of combat and had a stellar service record, but it sounds like it was written by a working-class Patrick Bateman. As much as we joke about politicians being psychopaths, that is not a personality type that really gels well with politics.
@2rafa @Tree You think that way because you’re both boomers. The reason people used to like the town bicycle is because they would occasionally get a turn to ride the town bicycle. That’s where the term comes from! When the town bicycle gets seized from the public commons and only the mayor and the five richest businessman in town get to ride it anymore, it just becomes yet another symbolic way you’re getting ground into the dirt. You have to open Instagram and see the mayor in his stupid little top-hat doing donuts in the town square on the bicycle that you never get ride going ding-ding-ding on the bell and you grit your teeth in hatred and tab over to BicycleHub dot com to look at even more bicycles that you’ll never, ever get to ride. Forget actually owning a bicycle, they’re much too expensive. You’ll just have to walk.
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