RexFavilla

Do you think mayer pete is a bad nominee given hes gay? Even if hes a good candidate otherwise

His main electoral problem isn't that he fucks dudes, it's that he's a theater kid who looks and sounds like a rat.

The first gay president will probably be a deranged conservative looksmaxer/bodybuilder who tans his asshole on the Whitehouse lawn.

I think she has a decent chance. To quote conservative luminary Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty:

'Yeah, he love this fat ass

Yeah, this one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club

I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?

Fuck those skinny bitches, fuck those skinny bitches in the club

I wanna see all the big fat-ass bitches in the motherfuckin' club

Fuck you if you skinny, bitches, what? Kyuh

Rrr, yeah

I got a big fat ass.'

I know this one, wasn't this penned by a famous romance novelist with a checkered sexual past?

I actually cared about a website community that didnt give a shit about me for over a decade.

I wasted huge proportions of time on ensuring its iteration stayed active while mocked, hated and laughed at.

Then I dedicated to a religion that tokd me to forgive them and keep trying my best regardless to love them.

Then I realised only very recently how cringe my entire life has been and that Christianity is a masochistic religion.

"I posted cringe on internet forums for years. Instead of maturing as a person, learning to laugh at myself, and going 'wow, haha, that sure was cringe' years later I am still seething and blaming God over people calling me cringe."

My brother and I collected Pokémon cards as kids. We would go over to my uncle's house who was in WW2 (War in the Pacific) for family parties and to walk in the woods and play with his turkeys. At one party we were looking at my cards and my brother showed my uncle his holographic Charizard and tried to explain the whole concept to him. When he mentioned he had spent $100 on it my uncle just looked at his friend in horrified disbelief and exclaimed 'we beat the Japs at Guadalcanal and now they've got our kids paying a hundred bucks for a piece of cardboard with a lizard drawn on it.' Never really got into any 'collectible' craze after that lol.

It's not a question of knowing everything, but of knowing as far from nothing as possible.

So it's a sliding scale and you become more authoritative over time. I disagree with the extreme you started with, which was "meet this maximally high bar before you can speak authoritatively at all.

Carvalho was complaining about nobody in the public square who was debating these topics in a democracy reaching this bar, which is a problem.

As an example, they have learned that Chardonnay is oaky, rich and heavy. This is a pedagogical lie. Many of Chardonnays are not - depending on slope exposure, latitude, altitude, climate, and élevage, the style can be rapier-thin, fresh, and highly acidic or dense, stony and closed in its youth, and many iterations in between.

So the problem wasn't not studying for years, it was being taught something technically false. I don't think you need multiple years to get a thorough understanding of wine. Like...you just corrected that misconception in a sentence.

Anyone with familiarity with wine (or really almost any topic that interfaces with the 'real world') quickly figures out that the more you learn about it the more you realize you don't know. That understanding is a fractal thing, you can just keep diving deeper, and there will always be a specialist in an aspect of the subject who will have a deeper grasp of that niche than you do. I corrected one common misconception among beginners. There are dozens of huge glaring ones I could list that a beginner student learns, only to be corrected on them and gain a more nuanced understanding further down the road. If I tried to explain them all, I would literally be typing out the curriculum for an intermediate wine class.

When it comes time for the trial to interface with reality, with the material world, a good lawyer does not do that. He brings in an expert to testify, because he recognizes the very fact that I pointed out - that sparring over the surface-level interpretations of very complex subject matter is not illuminating to anyone, and that to bring good information into the courtroom you need an interpreter of sorts who had put a lot of time and energy into discovering as much about the field in question as possible.

Well, in a debate, both sides will be citing sources from experts. I think you could learn as much from a few decent debates as a jury could learn from a trial.

The whole question that Carvalho was facing is that there are no experts in the public square to cite on the issue. That the collapse of rigorous formal education into doctrinaire camps meant that even self-styled experts were frauds who lacked the necessary familiarity with the source material to be cited reputably.

Even when I was a moderate leftist I realised how utterly moronic Communism is.

Yes, thinking you've understood the world fully at a glance and are just the person to fix it is a common outlook among teenagers. Thankfully we soon outgrow such things, hopefully.

This country is quickly becoming Brazil. Trump is a textbook caudillo (which is why MAGA is not WASP at all but that's another story), gig economy/hustle culture instead of careerism, machoism. Northwest European culture has never been at an all-time low like it is now.

Brazil I feel is a template for what much of the West or even at this rate parts of the Middle East and Asia will become. At first a slave state in which slavery collapsed. Then, the resulting disjointedness and lack of social cohesion drove the country to just atrophy over time into a big dysfunctional lump.

It's probably more helpful to study the actual policies of communist countries.

And sure, at greater length than "they starved people to death and persecuted Christians", surveying a fairly broad range of regimes as opposed to just the worst ones like the Khmer Rouge or the USSR at its absolute worst moments. But my point is, if you have lofty Marxist theories that something like two dozen dedicated Marxist states with zero internal opposition never attempted to put into practice, there's little use describing Marxism as being the sum of said theorizing. Political religions, like theological ones, are the sum of what their followers make of such. You could just as well try to boil down "Protestantism" in its entirety to the tracts and manifestos of Calvin and Zwingli, or the confessions produced by 16th and 17th century state churches, as opposed to the lived religion of a billion worshipers around the world today, who are members of diverse denominations and who by and large have never read such.

This is what de Carvalho said though. He explicitly included Bukovsky and Solzhenitsyn in his reading list. He included Voegelin, whom I've read and who looks at communism through a critical lens. He also recommended reading 'good books on the history of communist regimes written from a non-apologetic point of view.' His point was that you had to understand the theory, the application, and the results to fully understand the phenomenon of communism, but that virtually no one on the right or the left had done this. They were just arguing with one another in the sense that fencers fight one another - by rehearsing rote arguments and counterarguments which had become divorced from realities, from the principles that actually informed what they were essentially miming.

You are why Trump says he “loves the poorly educated”, you just don’t know what you are talking about, and that is why the Republicans have invented this campaign issue for gullible people like you who readily believe lies and conspiracy theories because it's easier than trying to comprehend the real issues. The article you searched out is from 2022, gender reassignment surgery and other gender-affirming medical care (such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy) have been illegal for minors in Florida since they passed Senate Bill 254 in 2023. Even with a Google search to justify your bigotry, you came up with nothing. Try again.

Nice moving of the goalposts. Yes, it's illegal. So is murder. So is theft. So is fraud. They all still happen. And politicians successfully campaign all the time on stopping them from happening. Because, surprise, making things illegal does not make them stop happening. Resources have to be allocated to enforcement. Knowing how often illegal things happen, to whom, and where is also a logistical challenge for governments.

If you had read the article I posted, instead of going down your beep-boop decision tree of 'Trump Bad' talking points, you might have noticed this line:

'A recent article in The New York Times indicated Dr. Gallagher provides "top surgeries," or a procedure in which a child's breasts are removed, to multiple trans youth around the age of 15 every month, despite it being a clear violation of state health department guidelines where she practices.'

While all such care for minors was outlawed in 2023, even in 2022 performing such surgeries on children that young was not permitted by the state health department and yet it was still happening. And it likely was not showing up in officially reported statistics, as when you repeatedly break state health guidelines you tend to find a way to not report that. Hence why the article is a perfect counter to your dumb claim that this 'isn't an issue' simply because a law was passed and the official numbers show that everything is fine. Murder has been outlawed since Hammurabi, and it's still an issue.

WTF are you talking about? Roe v Wade stood for 50 years, it protected a woman’s 14th Amendment's right to privacy, giving a pregnant person the liberty to choose to terminate a pregnancy, the Democrats didn’t have anything to “milk”. It’s the Republicans who milked it by making it a source of outrage for their suckers for those 50 years. The Boogieman kills babies, BOO!

Codifying Roe v. Wade. As in making it law. Are you really so fantastically illiterate when it comes to political history and general current events that you don't know that this has been an important policy debate for years now? Roe was always seen as legally unstable and vulnerable to being overturned (RBG famously said of it that "doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable"), so abortion rights activists have sought to have it pushed through Congress and passed officially into law multiple times. The WHPA was first introduced in 2013. These attempts have always conveniently failed, often by very slim margins. This is a persistent pattern with Democratic promises, leading activists on the left to cynically wonder the status quo is being kept in place by both sides of the political aisle to avoid confronting the growing contradictions between the influence of K-street and the policies which the public want implemented. Whether politicians intentionally tread water on policy to avoid having to choose between their financial sponsors and their constituents, always finding a convenient scapegoat to explain why they were 'just one vote short!' every time.

Because it's better to invent an issue "you can fundraise and campaign on"

I'm from Georgia, the home of Marjorie Taylor Green, do you know what statement resulted in the biggest fundraiser for her was? It was her claim that the California wildfires were caused by Jewish Space Lasers, when you clowns heard that, you took out the checkbook LOL.

You guys just make it too fucking easy to be sleazy, damn that conscience.

Keep arguing with this imaginary yokel friend that you've dreamed up. I'm sure debating is much easier when every argument is with the same strawman that lives in your head - less stress, less strain to just endlessly regurgitate the same canned lines every time.

This campaign issue is simply “made up”, it is not an issue anywhere, nationally, the number of preteen gender reassignment surgeries is zero as it is for under the age of 15, and for 16-17-year-olds, the rate of occurrence is 2 per 100,000 transgender people. That’s almost nothing, and almost all of those are corrective surgeries, not elective surgeries.

The claim that it doesn't happen is flat-out untrue. One Florida surgeon brags about performing double mastectomies on girls as young as 13, claiming to do an average of one surgery on a 15-year-old a month. And who knows how many are quietly doing it if you can openly brag about it in a Republican state?

https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/miami-surgeon-performs-top-surgery-for-15-year-old-transgender-kids-report-says

In the end its a two way street. The Republicans use these wedge topics because they are 80/20 topics that the Democrats are ideologically captured on and are stuck taking the 20% stance.

The Democrats could take both these issues off the table tomorrow by passing national legislation that would throw such surgeons in jail and formalizing nationwide bans on transgender athletes in sports. They could even extract concessions to do so. They won't, because they are captured by an ideologically rabid segment of their base.

Conversely, Republicans have little incentive to actually fix the issue, as it's an effective way to posture and drum up support that doesn't aggravate their donors by hitting their bottom line like actual reform would. In this way its like a mirror image of abortion, where the Republicans are captured by an out-of-step portion of their base and too extreme on the issue and the Democrats milked the issue politically for years without actually doing anything to address it, despite ample opportunities to codify Roe v. Wade. Why solve an issue when you can fundraise and campaign on it?

Sure but I can make authoritative statements about something without knowing everything about it. A few statistics about wealth or something in communist countries would be enough to speak authoritatively about whatever those statistics are measuring. Also if there's something pretty much every expert agrees on from either side, then you can say that pretty authoritatively.

I'm not sure if according to Olavo we can reliably know about anything. Yet humanity still makes progress on complex topics. Maybe the bar for authoritative is just extremely high, but then it's probably too high to be useful.

It's not a question of knowing everything, but of knowing as far from nothing as possible. Take one of my hobbies for example. Wine. When you teach anything that interfaces with the infinitely complex real world, you need to engage in what is known as a pedagogical lie. The human brain needs to learn things from the outside in, memorizing broad categories and then refining them to specialize your knowledge of a topic.

In the beginning stages of this process, the knowledge you gain can cause you to make inaccurate conclusions with more confidence than if you were completely uninformed and approaching the topic with the proper level of epistemic humility. In wine circles, the people at this level are the dreaded wine snobs.

As an example, they have learned that Chardonnay is oaky, rich and heavy. This is a pedagogical lie. Many of Chardonnays are not - depending on slope exposure, latitude, altitude, climate, and élevage, the style can be rapier-thin, fresh, and highly acidic or dense, stony and closed in its youth, and many iterations in between. If I'm talking to somebody who knows nothing about wine yet has expressed a liking for racy, bright wine and ask them to try a Chablis, for instance, they have no preconceptions guiding them and will say 'okay, sure', then 'oh, wow, I really like that!'.

I've done the same to a wine snob, they will ask what grape it is, I say 'Chardonnay' and, faced with a false conception of what Chardonnay is, they will say 'oh, never mind, I don't like Chardonnay'. If they gained the surface-level understanding of wine a while ago and have developed a self-conception of being a 'wine person' around this, they will even be vehemently dismissive and refuse to consider the fact that they were wrong and might like this Chardonnay.

They know more than the complete neophyte, yet they are more wrong with more confidence - this is the meaning of Pope's paradox about knowledge. Skimming the surface is often more dangerous than never dipping a toe in when you're dealing with the real world - you develop incorrect, overly broad generalizations because you've only been exposed to that first level understanding, which is rife with pedagogical lies. You don't understand how much you don't know.

The same example holds for something like communism. Just as wine is as complex as the cultural legacies, geological landscapes, climate patterns, and biological evolution which has defined it, communism is an ideology which has gone through so many permutations and iterations in different cultures, places, and geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions that delving deeper into the subject quickly reveals the severe limitations of surface-level understanding that can be imparted in a brief lecture or debate.

And yet paying lawyers to argue is the most reliable system anyone has come up with to judge guilt vs. innocence.

Now for your example about lawyers. Lawyers are not interfacing with the real world. They are interfacing with a legal system, which is a human construct. They are arguing, for or against, the innocence or guilt of a party under law due to the nature of their actions. When it comes time for the trial to interface with reality, with the material world, a good lawyer does not do that. He brings in an expert to testify, because he recognizes the very fact that I pointed out - that sparring over the surface-level interpretations of very complex subject matter is not illuminating to anyone, and that to bring good information into the courtroom you need an interpreter of sorts who had put a lot of time and energy into discovering as much about the field in question as possible.

When it comes time to draft laws, the same thing happens - there is a recognition that there is a divorce between reality and the laws we make to govern how we interact with it, and that consultation is often necessary to conform the law to nature. And it is not the lawyer who determines the guilt or innocence, it is a jury, an uninformed jury. In a sense, the process of justice involves a fully uninformed jury watching superficially informed jurists argue while consulting deeply informed experts when the facts of the case touch on complex topics which are beyond the ken of anyone else in the room.

I disagree with this premise. Watching a few modern debates on communism with decent debaters on both sides should be decent enough to get a broad overview of the relevant facts. Or reading a few credible secondary and tertiary sources.

Disagree heavily with this premise. Communism is a movement spanning multiple countries and generations, which has existed in countless iterations. Whether they are decent debaters are not is irrelevant. The limitations of their knowledge will necessarily transfer to the person extracting information from viewing the debate. The idea that such a phenomenon can be boiled down to a few relevant facts reveals a great deal of hubris. And anyone who gathers their opinions from such a debate and is convinced of one side and then reads any seriously Marxist work (or debates someone who has actually read one) will immediately notice the huge chasm between the weak understanding of the debaters and the seriousness of the actual foundation work. It's Pope's adage in action:

'A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.'

If both debaters are informed to the level which Olavo de Carvalho would prefer, the debate would be almost unintelligible to the common observer, as debates at a higher level of expertise necessarily need to rely on a denser presentation of ideas which the uninitiated won't have the context to parse. If they aren't, they are neither engaging with the extensive and complicated historical record, nor are they engaging with the foundational philosophy. They are like actors reciting lines, engaging with canned arguments that they've heard from someone else. The people watching would be judging them on form, there's a fundamental emptiness to the exercise. I think this mentality is a contributing factor to the absolute banality and idiocy of modern discourse. Everyone argues like a defense attorney, deploying arguments like moves in choreographed dance, engaging in intellectual dressage. It's completely isolated from the messiness of reality and the immense amount of work that must be put in to really understand complicated phenomena.

Recently ran into this excerpt on Brazilian politics by conservative Brazilian thinker Olavo de Carvalho:

"For someone to speak authoritatively about the communist movement, they must first have studied the following things:

The classics of Marxism: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong.

The most important Marxist philosophers: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Althusser.

Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski.

Some good history and sociology books about the revolutionary movement in general, such as Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington, The Pursuit of the Millenium, by Norman Cohn, The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin.

Good books on the history of communist regimes written from a non-apologetic point of view.

Books by the most famous critics of Marxism, like Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Raymond Aron, Roger Scruton, Nicolai Berdiaev and so many others.

Books about the communist strategy and tactics on their rise to power, about the underground activities of the movement in the West and chiefly about the "active measures" (disinformation, agents of influence), like those by Anatolyi Golitsyn, Christopher Andrew, John Earl Haynes, Ladislaw Bittman, Diana West.

The largest number possible of testimonies by former communist agents and militants who recall their experience in service of the movement or communist governments, such as Arthur Koestler, Ian Valtin, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz.

High-value testimonies about human condition in socialist societies, like those by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vladimir Bukovski, Nadiejda Mandelstam, Alexander Soljenítsin, Richard Wurmbrand.

This is a reading program that can be accomplished in four or five years by a good student. I do not know, either in the Brazilian right or left, anyone, absolutely anyone, who has accomplished it.

There are so many people in this country wanting to give their opinion on the matter, almost always with an air of wisdom, and nobody, or practically nobody, willing to make the necessary effort to give any substance to their words.

No honest leftist will do it without forever renouncing their beliefs. No rightist, without acknowledging that they were presumptuous, a fool, and in many cases, a useful idiot – sometimes even more useful and more idiotic than the leftist masses.

The left thrives on exploiting ignorance, both its own and that of others. Wherever it exerts hegemony, the prevailing commandment is never to read the works of adversaries and critics, but to spread distorted and caricatured versions of their ideas and biographies, so that militant youth can hate them under the illusion of knowing them. Universities that profess to offer courses in Marxism excel at this point, bordering on pure and simple mind control.

The right wing, well, the right wing cultivates its own forms of self-deception, which I've already discussed at length in this very newspaper. Perhaps I'll return to the subject in another article."

This rings very true for me in America as well. The amount of young right-wing people I've talked to who are incredibly animated about the evils of Marxism and go into a borderline witchhunt mentality for 'commie ideas' have zero literacy about communism, neither it's central tenets, any detailed understanding of its history, or of its more recent evolution. His criticism of the left - that it only understands opposing ideas in caricature, is 100% true of the American right. It's also true of the left here - I think it might be even worse, because the number of young leftists I've met who are even capable of discussing actually Marxism or Marxist economics is vanishingly small, and they all believe in a cartoonish strawman of the opposition's beliefs.

I don't pretend to have worked my way through this exhaustive list, nowhere near it, but I have checked a few of those boxes. The fact that I've met vanishingly few people who have checked as many, people who self-identify as virulently pro- or anti-communism and have much more intense, extreme feelings about the matter than I do, is shocking and sad. Politics on both sides of the aisle has devolved into mere pantomime. Just a posture, just a slogan, just a brand, with little or no understanding of the underlying principles. Marxism has become a zombie movement, transforming into ever more absurd permutations of itself, divorced from the questions of material production and the grand arcs of history and utterly preoccupied with mundane cultural and psychological affairs. Counter communism has just evolved into a similar counter-posture, a circus. Trump has stepped into the ring and is eminently suited to be ringleader, but he didn't build the big top.

It's just striking is all, how our chattering classes, talking heads, and political leaders on both sides are utterly bereft of erudition, even real-life expertise, or any connection to reality. Politics is like a funhouse hall of mirrors, with no substance and no point. People are filled with vitriol and can't even articulate why. It's almost like politics doesn't even exist anymore; it's become a kind of guerilla marketing campaign or MLM scam where cynical players manipulate the masses so they can push crypto scams or beg for superchats.

The Lipstadt trial? That was a defamation trial instigated by Irving himself which he lost. We're talking about the criminal conviction in Austria if we're talking about censorship of holocaust denial, a case that Lipstadt herself vehemently disagreed with. I think it was foolish of Irving to bring a defamation case on the grounds that he did, and that the trial itself was illuminating as it forced both sides to get down to brass tacks on the issue at hand. But before that trial Irving was mostly attacked through sneers and underhanded smears and by people who were lazy and complacent.

It's an excellent example of the fact that griping about 'platforming' and 'exposure' of 'cranks' is often just poorly disguised fear of having one's ideas contested - a fear primarily felt by incompetents in high places. Far from bringing light to the issue in question, it often allows the person who is being suppressed to take on the mantle of the underdog and bloody the noses of people who aren't on their level enough and to therefore seem more credible over time. If someone's ideas are wrong, exposing and contesting them in the public square is always the best answer.

Believing this depends on trusting the sources saying it's true. Most people aren't going to go around interviewing all Holocaust survivors. The issue isn't the primary sources and evidence, it's the secondary sources claiming the evidence exists and is so abundant. I trust those sources, but only because people are allowed to challenge them and they can withstand scrutiny.

This is an enormous problem that I've wrestled a lot with, and I think it will become a major issue of our era. Richard Feynman wrote a lot on this when he was alive, how science is such a delicate thing, how it requires intense self-criticism and rigorous intellectual honesty, and how easily it can lapse into what he called 'cargo cult science.'

The idea was that during the war on the Pacific and the island-hopping campaign, we often built temporary airstrips on remote islands whose inhabitants had incredibly limited exposure to advanced technology at this point. The soldiers would give them gifts and generally awe them with modern technology. Once they left, the natives desperately wanted them to come back, and this was where the 'cargo cult' was born. Remembering the landing strips and control towers on which the planes would land, the natives aped these facilities in an incredibly superficial way, building fake control towers, headsets out of dried plant material, built a fake runway. But the planes never came, because they didn't understand and were missing the vital things that were actually bringing the planes.

Feynman compared this to several fields of 'science' - psychology, reflexology - which had kept all the trappings of science but had lost the experimental rigor, discipline, and honesty which are the core of science that actually produced reliable results. He pointed out an exceptionally well-done psychology study on running rats in mazes which explored all the ways in which rats could 'cheat' in the maze through echoes from the floor, smells, lighting, etc. and also devised ways to control all those variables. He then talked about how subsequent maze-running experiments completely ignored these critical elements of experimental design because the study wasn't splashy enough to catch attention and continued to run the experiments in the same, flawed way that they always had, leading to unreliable results.

There's a certain type of person, very common in modern America, who 'trusts the experts' without even trying to slightly understand for themselves what the experts are saying, what claims they are making, and how they arrived at their conclusions with any sort of critical angle. The proliferation of this mindset has basically allowed a lot of sciences and other intellectual disciplines to rot from the inside out. The people who aren't in the 'trust the experts' camp notice this decline and lose faith in the experts, as their faith was based on the process and not the position occupied by the person carrying it out. This is the point at which a lot of censorship arises I think - it's an attempt to stop this bleed, shore up faith in institutions, and punish people who point out that the headsets are suddenly all made out of coconut shells and rattan. It only further destroys faith in institutions, until you get to that dismal, Soviet-level disillusionment which Solzhenitsyn so aptly summed up in his famous passage:

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”

David Irving was so popular because he dug into archives and found new sources while mainstream historians often sat on their haunches and just lazily repeated the prevailing narratives about the war. If he was so wrong, the proper response to his claims was to roll up their sleeves as well and start digging to counter his narrative of that period in history. I feel like the attempt to shut him up just poured gas on that particular fire, both hardening Irving's own ideological bent while making the doctrinaire historians appear weak and incompetent in the eyes of critically-minded members of the public.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Zoloft. Happy pills. Depressed rich women start taking them, they tend to kill your libido, and then they think they have some new identity called 'asexual' when they stop being horny. They get super attached to it and convince themselves that 'non-horny people' were some horribly oppressed identity group historically. When their grandma or mom asks them when they are going to have kids or meet someone, instead of being a minor annoyance this is now LITERAL ERASURE OF ACE PEOPLE. They are no longer privileged, rich white women, they are now proud, oppressed members of the LBGTBQIA+ alliance. Any character in mythology or fiction who doesn't fuck everything that moves is immediately glommed onto and claimed as 'ace representation'.

Dumb rich bitches who have had their libidos fried by SSRIs think that 'she's just like me fr fr'

It's irrelevant to the primary concern - if oil prices go too high, entire economies will start to unravel. Oil factors into all elements of an economy, especially one as centralized as ours, where cheap transport has allowed regional specialization to a staggering degree. The transit of feed, crops, and products has been baked in. And that's just externally - so much of our economy now relies on supply chains that circle the globe. Trump had years to dismantle that model and build up some more regional autarky within the American economy before triggering a potential oil crisis and failed to do so. Add in huge investments in AI, an industry which is very power hungry, and this has the potential to disrupt the American economy and is one of the few ways the Republicans could screw up the mandate they were given badly enough to hand the country back to the Democrats.

Those who wish aid and comfort to the enemies of USA were very sad that Oil peaked at 120 and then dropped to around 90.

Most of those price increases are to keep China from buying American oil since they can't get the cheap Iranian or Venezuelan oil anymore.

That's what happens when the IEA open the strategic reserves and release 400 million barrels while publicly declaring the war over. What prices will continue to do if the conflict drags on is another matter entirely. You're also going to need to replace any barrels you release. It's dumb to try to project a long-term trend due to a blip clearly driven by transitory events.

Trump paid 88.5 million to E.Jean Carroll for raping and defaming her.

Damn, 88 mil? I should have accused The Donald of turning out this bussy in the FAO Schwarz bathroom in '05. I wouldn't have had to plagiarize my story either. Could have at least squeezed enough for a beach house out of his legal team.

the other title, however, is sayyid.

Yes, Iran's Supreme Leader,

Ali Khamenei, is considered a sayyid—a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He is widely believed to be the 38th-generation descendant, tracing his lineage through the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and Imam Hussain. As a member of the Ahl al-Bayt (family of the Prophet), he is entitled to wear a black turban. 

But Donald Trump is also a sayyid.

So is the King of England iirc. Much of the Spanish royalty was, due to some intermarriage with the family of the Cordoban Emir, who was himself a member of the Umayyad dynasty in exile and a descendant of the Marwanid ruling house, which in turn descended from the Rashidun Caliph Uthman who married Muhammad's daughter.

The problem is it's not men vs. women, it's incels vs. chads and the women who all throw themselves at them. The chads, who are the most competent/dangerous men, have no problem with hypergamy, it just means that they're drowning in pussy. This is why so many societies in the past ended with harems and eunuchs. The warrior class/nobles just horded all the women, cut the incels' dicks and balls off, and made them babysit the women. It never ends with a big men vs. women battle, the men winning, and then the 6' 4" Chad warlord sharing the women equally with the scabby weirdo who cleaned his jockstrap on the campaign trail. That weirdo is getting neutered pronto, especially if he starts eyeing the women.

I personally think the moment he won was that bizarre interview when they all asked them where they wanted to travel next and all of the other candidates glazed Israel and gushed about taking a trip there, but Mamdani said he'd stay right in New York City (this is like the standard answer all of my boomer relatives would give - 'why go overseas when you have so much to see in America!') Then they basically started interrogating him, saying, aghast, 'you wouldn't go to Israel!?' Bitch the question wasn't even about Israel, how loony is it to expect any American politician to say 'Israel' when asked where they want to travel to?

The homeless issue simply needs to be solved. I don't care how, it's completely out of control.

It's almost like Biden WANTED Kamala to lose the election, why would he do that?

Most of the info that came out after the election does hint at this. He appears to be incredibly salty about being unceremoniously sidelined and then being blamed for Kamala, probably the worst presidential candidate of my lifetime, predictably falling flat on her face and losing to Trump. There was no love lost between the two.

Also, it could be argued that Kamala and Biden both lost support because of the fence-straddling when it comes to Israel. Because, let's get real, that's the real reason the files were being covered up and are now heavily redacted by both administrations. Epstein was constantly hanging out with Ehud Barak, Ghislaine's father was a prominent Mossad operative who was given a state funeral in Israel. Biden tried to still support Israel while lightly slapping their wrist over the naked genocide being carried out in Gaza. This intensely pissed of his base for obvious reasons, while also pissing off the Israeli-aligned money. As Charlie Kirk can (well, could) tell you, they have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to criticism and pushback. Money wins elections, and hundreds of millions poured into Trump's pockets from donors like Adelson.

Remember to celebrate Communism and thank it for its help defeating Nazism next time you bring this topic up.

I mean it's a historical fact.

Whenever a MAGA supporter (definitely not you) says about 'America beat the Nazis wooo' make sure to remind them to shut up and thank Communism.

I don't ever recall claiming that America beat the Nazis one on one lol, or even that they did the lion's share of the lifting.

Years ago I came across some source online that did the math. They assessed the scale of the Allied bombing campaign on German industrial centers and quantified the impact this had on the German war machine, and concluded that the Soviets would not have won without said bombing campaign. The Western allies, in short, were a more vital player than the Soviets in deciding the outcome of the war.

This is a very blinkered and, frankly, dumb way to analyze something complex as war, and is a perfect example of bending the numbers to fit one's conclusion. If the Soviets hadn't been fighting the Germans, we have every reason to believe that the Allied campaigns would not have gone off nearly as smoothly as they had. There's simply no way to 'crunch the numbers' to account for a counterfactual like that. If the bulk of your opponent's army is off carrying out a grueling occupation far from your theater of battle, of course that makes it easier to hit their critical infrastructure. This is why two front wars often end badly for the people involved in them. To flatly quantify this is dishonest.

But putting that aside, the Soviets helped build the German war machine which they subsequently took credit for defeating. It's questionable whether Hitler would've gambled on Poland or anything after Czechoslovakia if not for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and without those conquests the manpower and economic output that was Hitler's to command would've been much smaller.

To add injury to insult, up until Operation Barbarossa the Soviets were actually paying tribute to Germany in the form of large amounts of raw materials; it's been said that the Germans waited for the last inbound shipment to arrive from Russia before they started their invasion.

I mean if we take your argument here at face value it makes the Soviets even more critical, not less, as there would have been the possibility of them continuing to support Germany. So that makes their switching sides more decisive, not less. However, the argument itself doesn't hold water because it was always a temporary alliance to buy time on both sides - Stalin always intended to stab Hitler in the back, Hitler just beat him to the punch.

But if, for the sake of argument, they did, then so what?

They fought to replace one mass murdering ideology with another. For this reason I would go so far as to say that those members of Europe's anti-Nazi resistance who were communists weren't heroes. Only those who fought to replace Nazism with something that wasn't a different variety of totalitarianism were.

Neither Chinese nor Russian soldiers were fighting to spread an ideology. Both were fighting to defend their homes from foreign invaders. That's always heroic in my book. Half of the Chinese forces weren't even communist - the Kuomintang fought alongside the communists against the Japanese.

My point wasnt whether either empire was admirable anyway. It was to express disgust that someone would rise to such a position in the EU and seem shocked that Russia and China believe this, and view it as some novel propaganda angle based in historical fiction. That is flat-out retarded. Both countries have made that conflict a central pillar of national pride for decades, since before this woman was born. She would have had to have been born under a rock to not know that, let alone to say it on a public stage while doubting the historical literacy of the general public.

Incoming EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas recently made the following statement:

"Russia was addressing China like we 'fought the second world war, we won the second world war and we defeated Nazis,' and I was like, 'ok, that is something new'".

Kallas then proceeded to lament the lack of historical literacy in modern times and opined that "if you know history, then it raises a lot of question marks in your head"

This, of course, proved her complete historical illiteracy, as China and the Soviet Union suffered staggeringly high losses fighting both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in WWII, with both countries being subjected to catastrophic invasions and occupations by enemy forces. The Chinese in particular single-handedly pinned down and attrited the Japanese army for years before Pearl Harbor.

I've never had much respect for the EU, but I've always thought that mind-numbingly retarded foreign policy was a post-Cold War American specialty. When did our vassals pick up this most unadmirable trait from us?

Fun joke:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!"

He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?"

He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region."

I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

It's not necessarily political reasons; it's just recognizing when you are being manipulated and doing something to prevent that. A person who is perfectly rational and principled is also perfectly predictable, and another person with bad intentions will easily be able to control them to achieve evil ends. This is what I think the deeper meaning is behind the biblical injunction to be a wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. It's not enough to just be moral and good, you also have to understand how evil people think and take advantage of otherwise noble impulses to pursue nefarious ends - so that you can recognize them and counter such machinations. In this case, being principled means allowing one group to profit from sowing discord and causing violence. That's not noble at all in my view, it's rigid and unreasonable.