HorthyMiklosKatonaja
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User ID: 540
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2d ago
East Germany had something like this. Because of its unique situation with continued flight to the West, many factories and other businesses were constantly begging for employees.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1d ago
It was for quite a range of occupations IIRC.
I know they did bring in some Cubans and even Vietnamese, but that may have been for propaganda value and "proletarian internationalism" points. Don't think they ever had Poles or Romanians.
Screenwriters and especially studio execs are dimwits who know bugger-all about science, but have absorbed the notion (from watching Captain Planet and Ferngully as kids) that science is Bad and destroys the environment.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
I think it's this one:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
Also the origin of the "fifty Stalins" line!
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
I'm guessing he read about the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves to protest Ngo Dinh Diem's regime and, maybe was depressed/suicidal already and decided that as long as he was putting an end to himself he might as well do it in a way that makes some kind of impact.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
Oddly enough, Moreno's arrest record lists her as white non-Hispanic.
Though not transgender, could she be trans-ethnic?
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
close friend and colleague of Martin Luther
Someone should have asked him for his longevity secrets.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
What is a "cut" in this context? Do the Outlaws all have a certain haircut?
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
Hell, I've got ants in my kitchen and I've seen a few silverfish in the bathtub. No biggie.
I visited Seattle in July 2011; there were a few bums, but it was still a livable city then.
This is 3rd and Pine in 2011:
The main public library building had just opened; it was sparkling clean and still had the new smell. I don't want to think about what it must be like now.
And I visited Portland in September 2008, walked back to my hotel at 2 a.m., wasn't hassled. Back then Portland's homeless all seemed to be the "crusty" type: white guys with dreadlocks, who usually have dogs.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
"The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers"
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite.
That ingrained assumption completely blew my suspension of disbelief in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium.
Sure, medical care doesn't actually cost anything!! It's just the fault of the nasty bad evil rich capitalists who are selfishly refusing to treat every little twinge and hangnail of ten billion people!!
I felt dirty after having watched that.
Here in the Washington DC area, everyone's taken it for granted for decades: carjackers, robbers and other violent criminals (except the occasional domestic murderer), and professional thieves/shoplifters, are never white.
Edit: And of course, you'll never find anybody drawing attention to that fact in public, as that would be "hate speech"; the metro area is 99% blue tribe.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
Not since 1965 or so in DC itself. School desegregation in 1954 caused the trickle of white flight to turn into a torrent, making for the "Chocolate City/Vanilla Suburbs" that obtained until:
1973 in Prince Georges County, when school busing was introduced to achieve racial balance and created an even greater surge of white flight there, and
The early eighties in the rest of suburbia, when the first wave of Central American immigrants started pouring into the affordable garden apartment complexes, displacing the whites from there and pretty soon taking all the fast food, landscaping and physical labor jobs. Nowadays, on the buses and at the bus stops in Fairfax County, you will not hear one word of English (even the drivers are all foreigners now! (And most of the taxi drivers are African immigrants and Afghanis.)), nearly all small shops are owned and staffed by immigrants, and Fairfax County schools are maybe 35% white, down from ~80% in my high-school years forty years ago. Less than that in Montgomery County and in the low single digit percentages in DC and Prince Georges.
Pretty much all the whites here are white-collar PMC types, and the white working class has decamped to remote trailer parks many miles from the nearest public transit.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
A common Nazi trope was condemning the Jews' "trickery" and "evil cunning" in cheating/inveigling money from "honest but simple" German workers and farmers.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
3mo ago
If it's hot, dry weather you want, you can't do better than Phoenix or Tucson (if you like mild winters), or Salt Lake City, Boise or Denver (if you like snow and cold winters).
All of these places' housing prices have spiked in the last few years and all have homeless problems in the downtown areas, but tell me a US city that doesn't.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
Shinola is an odd name for a watch company; before the stores opened I only knew it from the saying "doesn't know shit from Shinola" which refers to a brand of shoe polish that was discontinued around 1960.
I've never driven, or owned, a car.
I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.
The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.
All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.
Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).
Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.
In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.
If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.
Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
In stores and malls, I haven't heard any religious Christmas music since sometime in the 1990s. It's just one billion repetitions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Chestnuts Rosting on an Open Fire", and various pop abominations.
My two local malls (Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria) and the stores in them, in fact, have really been skimping on Christmas decorations in the past few years. In the 1980s, the whole place used to get transformed: tinsel and colored lights everywhere, decorated trees in every shop window. Seeing this used to be one of the things I most looked forward to about the Christmas season.
Nowadays, there are just a few anemic strings of white lights hanging from the ceiling (colored lights seem to be permanently out of fashion for some reason) and almost no stores have any decorations put up at all!
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the area now has a sizable Muslim population (when I go there now, maybe a quarter to a third of the women are wearing headscarves or hijab) who'd rather not see a Christian holiday celebrated, although I doubt anyone would admit publically that that's the reason.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
Professional shoplifting gangs are active in DC and Northern Virginia and some of those are male.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
Back in the old days, when often no candidate had a clear mandate going into the convention, and it was there that the deals were hammered out - things were just more interesting back then. Every election cycle, it seems to me, the D and R candidates are decided earlier and earlier, and the national conventions became pointless coronations by 1988.
Now the nominees are set in stone even before the election year and all we get to look forward to is month after month of attack ads and partisan news leaks. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up on the morning of November 5.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
John Varley, if anyone's old enough to remember him, put quick and easy sex changes in his Eight Worlds universe in the early seventies.
IIRC one of the main reasons the French granted the West African states independence was that they had full representation in the legislature, and their population was increasing so rapidly that the ethnic French deputies would be outnumbered/outvoted by the African deputies very soon.
Tail wagging the dog so to speak.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Rootless cosmopolitans, even!
Or clone DNA from extinct animals. I'm kind of curious on whether Hallucigenia tastes like shrimp.
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