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REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:43 PM
SECOND
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: He cuts and pastes all of his info from Google. He's too stupid and/or inept to even push back at you on that one even though he could have. If he was 70 years old in 2023 AND got the maximum benefits AND waited until he was 70 to retire, it would be $4555. He's not and he doesn't and he didn't, but notice how he went back to ignoring us when he thought he was made an ass of again. This is all moot for 2 reasons anyhow... 1. We've already debunked Second's Social Security fantasy a few months back and either he's forgotten that happened or he thinks we did. 2. I'll be just fine with my $816 per month social security the second I'm old enough to take it and I'm just as impressed with any rich people getting $4555 per month in retirement as I am anybody making 6 or 7 figures at their jobs right now. Which is to say not at all.
Saturday, March 4, 2023 10:24 PM
6IXSTRINGJACK
Saturday, March 4, 2023 10:25 PM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:05 AM
SIGNYM
I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: He cuts and pastes all of his info from Google. He's too stupid and/or inept to even push back at you on that one even though he could have. If he was 70 years old in 2023 AND got the maximum benefits AND waited until he was 70 to retire, it would be $4555. He's not and he doesn't and he didn't, but notice how he went back to ignoring us when he thought he was made an ass of again. This is all moot for 2 reasons anyhow... 1. We've already debunked Second's Social Security fantasy a few months back and either he's forgotten that happened or he thinks we did. 2. I'll be just fine with my $816 per month social security the second I'm old enough to take it and I'm just as impressed with any rich people getting $4555 per month in retirement as I am anybody making 6 or 7 figures at their jobs right now. Which is to say not at all. SECOND: 6ix proved he has only gotten to be a bigger asshole as he gets older. ...The worst example is 6ix stealing from his dead grandmother.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 7:26 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 7:40 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 7:43 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: blah, blah, blah goes 6ix for hundreds of words. I'm a fuckin' hero right now. And get my grandma's name out of your fucking mouth, worm.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 8:36 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 9:22 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 9:29 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 9:39 AM
THG
Quote:Originally posted by second: Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin by Andrew S. Weiss When I was thirteen years old, Ronald Reagan became president. All his tough talk about the Soviet Union being the Evil Empire sounded like dangerous fearmongering. And to a rebellious teenager eager to escape Southern California, it was hard to think of anything more exotic than the U.S.S.R. So on my first day of college in 1986, I threw myself into studying Russian language and literature as well as a now-extinct academic discipline known as Sovietology. The U.S.S.R.’s final leader, a fatally flawed man named Mikhail Gorbachev, had become an international darling for trying to reform the Communist system. What he didn’t appreciate was that brutality, dysfunction, and lies were actually the glue that kept the country together. By the time I arrived at Vladimir Putin’s alma mater in Leningrad as an exchange student in 1989, the mighty U.S.S.R. was starting to fall apart. I started working at the Pentagon in summer 1991, on the eve of a failed coup by Soviet hard-liners. Just months later, the Soviet Union disappeared, and America’s relationship with Russia was transformed. The Pentagon was hungry for expertise on the twelve brand-new countries that had replaced the U.S.S.R., and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. At one point, the U.S. secretary of defense made a spur-of-the-moment decision to call his Russian counterpart, just to say hello, using a new secure telephone line. No one had made proper preparations, so I was hustled into his office at the last minute to be the translator. By the time I was thirty. I was going in and out of the Oval Office helping the president and his top advisers deal with their Russian counterparts. Overconfident American officials kept saying the same thing to our new Russian friends: We were going to be partners, not adversaries. Yet Russia’s leaders quickly found that it had been a lot more fun being America’s enemy than our friend. With their country flat on its back, they resented being told to follow our lead. When the Russians did try to push back, they quickly realized how unequal our two countries’ partnership actually was and that they were antagonizing the very people in the West who were paying billions of dollars to keep Russia from collapsing. The West’s hopes for Russia to make a successful transition to democracy and free markets turned out to be very unrealistic. Still, if you’d told me back then that a former mid-level KGB officer named Vladimir Putin, then forty-six years old, would be plucked from the back rooms of the Kremlin to run the country, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet there I was with President Bill Clinton on the August morning in 1999 when the Russians secretly informed him that Putin was going to be the country’s next president. Even then, no one on Clinton’s team could have imagined that Putin would eventually dominate Russia like a modern-day czar, let alone become one of the world’s most feared leaders. Western experts like me would make plenty more mistakes in the decades that followed. Even today, it’s not always easy to understand what drives Putin. A lot of what we think we know about him is the product of pop psychology and misreadings of Russia’s thousand-year-long history. Peeling all of that back is made harder by Putin's toughguy theatrics (prancing around bare-chested on horseback, acting like a villain from a James Bond movie, etc.), which have helped him seem more clever—and capable—than he actually is. As the political scientist Thomas Rid once wisely observed, “The Kremlin’s rulers are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all.” Putin’s resentment and grievances toward the West have never been far from the surface. Time and again, he’s acted like a post-Soviet version of Oscar the Grouch, lecturing U.S. presidents and accusing them of hypocrisy, double standards, and attempts to humiliate Russia. At various points over the years, his finger-wagging has been occasionally punctuated by flashes of pragmatism and cooperation. But on the whole, his behavior has grown more belligerent over time. Launching an undeclared war against neighboring Ukraine in 2014 would prove to be the most fateful decision of Putin's presidency. His obsession with Ukraine was not new; it had long been out in the open. But until that point, few people realized how far Putin was prepared to go to prevent Ukraine from being, in his phrasing, absorbed by the West, or how much his efforts would disrupt the global status quo. To counteract Russia’s post-2014 international isolation and to disrupt a U.S.-led pressure campaign, the Kremlin built bridges to far-right and populist Western politicians like Donald Trump. As a presidential candidate, Trump repaid the favor by showering Putin with compliments, including, astonishingly, about his brutal actions in Ukraine. The Kremlin interfered so blatantly on Trump’s behalf in 2016 that Putin even cracked jokes about it before election day. During Trump’s presidency, Putin seemed to be having the time of his life. He was playing a crummy hand exceptionally well and enjoying something that he’d always craved: the world’s undivided attention. As time went on, Putin’s behavior got more and more brazen, bolstered by his own emotionalism and an undisguised belief in the West's deep, irreversible decline. It was this same sense of self-confidence and opportunism that led Putin to launch a full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s unjustified invasion of a neighboring country was of course unprecedented—and it triggered an equally unprecedented outpouring of anger from democracies around the world. The fact that the whims of one man had caused this calamity was lost on no one. But conspicuously missing from the resulting conversation about Putin was much awareness that the West's problems with Russia go far beyond its leader’s uncompromising, hard-edged tactics. To date, there has been far too little discussion of the intense grievances that have piled up on both sides—not to mention the growing risks that these conflicts could potentially spin out of control. If we’re going to deal effectively with Putin, we need to do better. We need to understand his motivations, along with the heavy burden of history that helped shape them. We need to see the parts of a man who is in many ways ordinary, even if the problems he has created are often extraordinary. And that’s why I wrote this book. More at https://bit.ly/3ETFkUv (google books review) The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Sunday, March 5, 2023 9:59 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Why don't we talk about your President* and his party and how they're driving Americans off a cliff? This is rhetorical, of course. You talk about Russia all day long now because there is nothing good to say about the Democratic Party in 2023.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 10:33 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 11:09 AM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 11:34 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Why don't we talk about your President* and his party and how they're driving Americans off a cliff? This is rhetorical, of course. You talk about Russia all day long now because there is nothing good to say about the Democratic Party in 2023.6ix, none of the things you think are important are actually important. Nothing. You are a zero, 6ix, same as every other whiny little prick who votes for Trump and complains about how hard their life is. Life is easy in America if you are not defective, mentally ill, or an addict, but Trumptards are overburdened with flaws in their character. And thus life is hard for Trumptards. For example, you're an addict, 6ix, a drunken fool for a decade. It is absolutely unsurprising how you ended up at the bottom of American society. But the Trumptards like you, who are angry poor white trash, want to rule America. You can't even run your own lives worth a goddamn.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 1:29 PM
Quote: The U.S.S.R.’s United States' final leader, a fatally flawed man named Mikhail Gorbachev TO BE DECIDED, didn’t appreciate ... that brutality, dysfunction, and lies were actually the glue that kept the country together.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 2:39 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Wow, you have really gotten under SECOND'S skin, SIX. He spends an inordinate number of lies on you. Just like he spends an inordinate number of falsehoods on Putin, Russia and Trump. I'm impressed!
Sunday, March 5, 2023 2:42 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: We're not even pacified by prosperity, since the American standard of living has been falling for over 30 years Meanwhile both the Russian and Chinese standard of living has eusen- dramatically in the past 20 years. Can Americans say the same? America is a broken concept. It can be mended, but not be people like SECOND (who hates Americans) and THUGR (who can't admit that anything is wrong).
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:00 PM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:13 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Oh that's that whole "per capita" lie, SECOND. You and I both know that for MOST people (yanno, the Americathat you hate, and that should hate you) livung standards have been declared ning even as SOME people have gotten inordinately rich. You, yourself, have posted about it many times. Keep in lying, SECOND. You're just ruining your reputation even more, if that was possible.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:16 PM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:33 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: EVERYBODY is poorer than they were, except commodities sellers and financiers, SECOND. Just look at the number of homeless people in liberal bastions like California and New York state. Fuck you, troll. And fuck Ukraine.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:52 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: EVERYBODY is poorer than they were, except commodities sellers and financiers, SECOND. Just look at the number of homeless people in liberal bastions like California and New York state. Fuck you, troll. And fuck Ukraine. Tough luck for homeless people who can't afford $2,500 per month rent in so-called "liberal bastions". It turns out that "liberals" are just about as selfish/uncharitable as Trumptards. Perhaps the poor should live where the rent is less than $2,500? The poor drunken addicts and fools can't stay where they are because most middle-class Americans won't rent out a room and shared bath for $500/month in their house to the homeless. The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Sunday, March 5, 2023 4:09 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Quoted for Posterity. Every once in a while Second gets it right. True Charity is a rare thing. Especially when granted to strangers. Most Trumptards that give it are buying their way to Heaven. Most Liberals that do it are virtue signalling for Twitter points. When the rich do it, it's for PR and tax brakes. Why don't you do something nice for people in your life, Second? You'll feel better about yourself and won't have to spend all day virtue signalling to 7 people on a dead forum. In the mean time, are you about to put a room up for rent for the homeless in your 4 story mansion since it bothers you so much?
Sunday, March 5, 2023 4:39 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: EVERYBODY is poorer than they were, except commodities sellers and financiers, SECOND. Just look at the number of homeless people in liberal bastions like California and New York state. Fuck you, troll. And fuck Ukraine. SECOND: Tough luck for homeless people who can't afford $2,500 per month rent in so-called "liberal bastions". It turns out that "liberals" are just about as selfish/uncharitable as Trumptards.
Quote: Perhaps the poor should live where the rent is less than $2,500?
Quote: The poor drunken addicts and fools can't stay where they are because most middle-class Americans won't rent out a room and shared bath for $500/month in their house to the homeless.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 4:54 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Oh BTW I noticed you want to post about ANYTHING BUT Ukraine.
Quote:Navalny, as Ukrainians and liberal Russians remember well, vehemently supported the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and even used derogatory, dehumanising terms to refer to the Georgian people. Several years later, he would apologise for the terms he used, but never for his support of the Russian war on Georgia. Navalny was nominally against the Russian aggression in Ukraine, but his “anti-war” position was underpinned by economic, rather than moral, considerations: “Russia can ill afford waging the war”. That position expectedly did not entail any empathy towards the Ukrainian people – something that was also reflected in his use of ethnic slurs against them. He saw the Russian people as victims of injustice under Putin’s regime, not the Ukrainians. In his view, no wrong had been committed against Ukraine that was worth righting.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 5:27 PM
Sunday, March 5, 2023 9:13 PM
Monday, March 6, 2023 3:52 AM
Monday, March 6, 2023 6:55 AM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: What is the test? Because your post seems to be all about Russia and Trump. You really cant help yourself, can you? heh heh heh
Monday, March 6, 2023 6:57 AM
Monday, March 6, 2023 7:13 AM
Monday, March 6, 2023 10:05 AM
Monday, March 6, 2023 12:05 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: What is the test? Because your post seems to be all about Russia and Trump. You really cant help yourself, can you? heh heh heh It is an analogy to testing if Signym could turn on the lights in a bathroom at night. 1) Signym needs to find the light switch. It has a little LED to illuminate where it is. Remember, this is at night. 2) Signym needs to understand the switch. It is a push-button dimmer rather than an up/down toggle switch. 3) Signym could not find the switch. I can hear Signym knocking over things in the dark bathroom. 4) Signym smeared EVERYTHING in the bathroom. Signym never did find the toilet in the dark. Instead, Signym pooped on the floor. Signym, here are your test results: You are stupid and/or you like to poop on the floor. It must be a Russian thing about you. Thankfully, I don't have to clean up the mess you have made out of life. Signym, you'll have to live and die in eternal darkness, as will the Russians, unless they leave Putin's Russia. The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Monday, March 6, 2023 12:30 PM
Monday, March 6, 2023 12:44 PM
Quote:Originally posted by THG: Nihilism, it's your word SECOND and it accurately describes an aspect of comrade Signym and Jacks attitudes, beliefs. Well done... T
Monday, March 6, 2023 12:46 PM
Quote:nihilism ni'?-liz??m, ne'- noun *The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. *Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs. *Political belief or action that advocates or commits violence or terrorism without discernible constructive goals.
Monday, March 6, 2023 1:07 PM
Quote: ZH Geopolitical Week Ahead: Bracing For Bakhmut Loss, Pentagon Declares City 'Not Important'
Monday, March 6, 2023 2:18 PM
Monday, March 6, 2023 3:38 PM
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Quote: nihilism ni'?-liz??m, ne'- noun *The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. *Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs. *Political belief or action that advocates or commits violence or terrorism without discernible constructive goals. I think the word you're looking for, THUGR, is nationalism. I see myself as a realist, focused on AMERICA'S long term national interests. I don't see us needing to be "global cop" or "global hegemon" or "bringing freedom to the globe" or global anything. Let's just be a nation among nations and make America the best it can be, and then we can be a positive example for others to aspire to. Instead of overthrowing or invading nations willy-nilly and supporting corrupt regimes everywhere.
Quote: nihilism ni'?-liz??m, ne'- noun *The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. *Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs. *Political belief or action that advocates or commits violence or terrorism without discernible constructive goals.
Monday, March 6, 2023 4:36 PM
Quote:Summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.
Quote:The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
Quote:The Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy’s 2018 book on Chernobyl reconstructs the sequence of events and assigns blame. In effect, Plokhy argues, it was the Soviet system that created Chernobyl and made the explosion inevitable. Glimmers of this understanding appear in the HBO series, too. In the final episode, Legasov, testifying as a witness, tells a Soviet court that the disaster happened because the tips of the control rods were made of graphite, which sped up the reaction, when the control rod was supposed to slow it down. When asked, by the prosecutor, why the reactor was designed this way, Legasov cites the same reason that other safety precautions are ignored and other corners are cut: “It’s cheaper.” He seems to be damning the whole system. More often, however, we are given to believe that the three men who were put on trial—and especially one of them, a particularly unattractive villain by the name of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)—are to blame. We see him strong-arming younger, better men into actions that will ultimately lead to catastrophe. All because, it seems, he wants a promotion. In fact, it wasn’t the carrot of a single promotion, or even several promotions, and it wasn’t one nasty and abusive boss. It was the system, made up primarily of pliant men and women, that cut its own corners, ignored its own precautions, and ultimately blew up its own nuclear reactor for no good reason except that this was how things were done. The viewer is invited to fantasize that, if not for Dyatlov, the better men would have done the right thing and the fatal flaw in the reactor, and the system itself, might have remained latent. This is a lie. It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster. In the same way, it’s harder to see dozens of scientists looking for clues when you can just create a single fantasy character who will have all the good disaster-fighting traits. This is the great-men (and one woman) narrative of history, where it’s a few steps, a few decisions, made by a few men that matter, rather than the mess that humans make and from which they suffer.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 2:46 AM
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 8:24 AM
Quote:Originally posted by THG: Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Quote: nihilism ni'?-liz??m, ne'- noun *The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. *Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs. *Political belief or action that advocates or commits violence or terrorism without discernible constructive goals. I think the word you're looking for, THUGR, is nationalism. I see myself as a realist, focused on AMERICA'S long term national interests. I don't see us needing to be "global cop" or "global hegemon" or "bringing freedom to the globe" or global anything. Let's just be a nation among nations and make America the best it can be, and then we can be a positive example for others to aspire to. Instead of overthrowing or invading nations willy-nilly and supporting corrupt regimes everywhere.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 8:25 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Zelensky pledges to ‘find the murderers’ of Ukrainian soldier executed in grisly video “Today, a video has emerged of the occupiers brutally killing a warrior who bravely said to their faces: ‘Glory to Ukraine!'” Zelensky said in his address. “I want us all to respond to his words together, in unity: ‘Glory to the Hero! Glory to the Heroes! Glory to Ukraine!’ And we will find the murderers.” “Ukraine will not forget the feat of each and everyone whose lives gave freedom to Ukraine forever,” he added. “Eternal memory and honor to all those who gave lives for freedom for our people!” he said. “Eternal memory and honor to all Ukrainian heroes of different times who dreamed and fought for freedom for Ukraine! Ukraine will emerge victorious!”
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:24 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Fake news. Fake soldier. Also, 5 minute hate.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:42 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Fake news. Fake soldier. Also, 5 minute hate.6ix, your verbal nonsense would work with other Trumptards, but people who aren't failures like you would fire you or kick you out of their lives. In that way, they reinforce the judgment that you are a failure.
Quote:Obviously, 6ix is not comprehending what is a failure. Similarly, Trump insists he will end the Russia/Ukraine War in one day. He promised the same with the war between North Korea and South Korea. Trump was lying then. Trump is lying now. Trump is a bigger failure than his Trumptards: Trump makes the implausible claim that he'd end the Ukraine war in a day
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 11:26 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Trump would end the war in a single day. In fact, it never would have even begun if he were in office now. Nobody can take your opinion of what is and is not a failure seriously because your "leader" and his party have been failing the American people for over 2 years now and you fail to recognize it.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 2:20 PM
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:40 PM
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 8:46 AM
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