RexFavilla

I'd rather be stuck in the forest with a bear than Pete or Vivek. The bear would give me a nice quick death, saving me from dying slowly, excruciatingly of boredom and cringe were I stuck with the alternative.

Literally the two worst people in the country lmao

Alone I stand in the autumn cold

On the tip of Manhattan

The Hudson flowing southward;

I see a thousand towers crimsoned through

By their lit windows deep-dyed,

And a hundred barges vying

Over murky green waters.

Seagulls cleave the air,

Fish glide in the limpid deep;

Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.

Brooding over this immensity,

I ask, on this boundless land

Who rules over man's destiny?

Chairman Trump

So, the message to China and Russia is this is our hemisphere, and we will do what we want militarily in our hemisphere, you stay in your hemispheres.

This isn't a new message; the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary have been around a lot longer than Trump.

Pretty sure his father largely built and owned apartment buildings, not single-family homes, and Trump himself invested in luxury real estate development in Manhattan and later country clubs/casinos. I do think the casino business is deplorable and have criticized Trump for that, but there isn't anything inherently wrong with building homes/apartments, as that increases the amount of housing available and lowers prices. Some of his father's properties are housing co-ops, where tenants each own a 'share' in the overall building and can vote for a board to manage the building, so it's even done very democratically.

They weren't institutional investors with billions of dollars buying up existing single family homes on the market and turning them into rental properties, thus driving the cost of housing sky-high for everyone else. That's a relatively new problem in America; it started after 2008 when a large amount of distressed properties emerged on the market due to widespread foreclosures. It was fueled by low interest rates and then given a shock infusion during COVID.

I wish he would just confiscate and redistribute all the houses, but Maga Maoism must take one step at a time into the bright future. Orange Sun in the Sky! Still a good move by The Donald, to balance out my recent criticism.

The problem with this is that there have been multiple attempts to break up large monopolies and establish small private holdings in LatAm. They were suppressed violently, brutally, overwhelmingly by us or by governments associated with us. One was led by the bishop whom we assassinated, who sought to avoid a communist revolution while alleviating the suffering of the peasants and establishing smaller family farms from the large, foreign fruit-company-owned holdings. So, while the Spanish may have established dysfunctional extraction economies centuries ago, those systems tend to succumb to entropy once a centralizing authority is gone - Roman latifundia gave way to decentralized feudalism and eventually to small landholders and a culture of robust property rights like you see in Switzerland. We replaced Spain and have intentionally kept many of those countries in a retarded, quasi-feudalist/slave economy state so that US-based corporations can extract wealth more easily.

Far as I can tell Iraq is stable enough, now its minus a terrible dictator.

If we made a mistake it was staying there so long to try nation building

Iraq was a shitshow. We overthrew a strong secular leader who backed the Sunni minority over completely fabricated claims about WMDs and a fictitious alliance with al Qaeda. Any past crimes he had committed were done at our behest or with our knowledge and tacit approval. De-Baathification resulted in an enormous power vacuum in a Shia-majority country, while we as occupiers were aligned with regional Sunni governments. This led to years of sectarian war, the eventual victory of the Shia forces, and the waxing of Iran's regional influence. This in turn pissed off Israel, as it strengthened the Shia crescent and allowed for a highway of supplies to run through that crescent from Iran to Hezbollah and Hamas. They yanked on the golden collars they have affixed to every congressman's neck, and before you knew it our CIA was clandestinely supporting al Qaeda cells in the Levant, helping to form ISIS, which toppled the democratically elected government or Iraq and started to rampage through the whole region. Elements of these terrorist groups were then tacitly supported by Israel and factions of the US government to destabilize the secular regime of Syria as well, plunging that country into bloody, chaotic civil war. Now that the dust has settled, you have a literal former al Qaeda commander in charge of Syria, with Salafist militias running rampant, butchering and looting religious minorities left and right including Christians.

What about the rest of usa interventions? The usa has a long history of gettin itself involved in other countries and I dont see dire results. In south America in particular the usa has for decades toppled corrupt leaders or in any case leaders hostile to the usa. We usually install pro American interests leaders who also cozy up to corporate America. Is that so bad?

Why do you think Maduro and Chavez were in charge of Venezuela? People hate us there for a reason. Our interventions in Latin America have involved militant groups running into impoverished villages, murdering every person there, slitting their throats, and pulling their tongue through the gash in an ugly mockery of a mouth, leaving the bodies arranged like that for the survivors to find once they returned from the fields. We did this because the peasants who worked the land wanted to transition to small, privately owned family farms instead of giant plantations run by American fruit corporations which treated the laborers like slaves. These same groups, trained in America and funded by us, assassinated a Catholic bishop in church.

In Chile, our appointed dictator ran a prison where female inmates were subjected to rape, forced impregnation, and then forced abortion. Starving rats were put into women's vaginas and men's rectums until they started to claw at them and try to eat their way out. Some documented case involved putting a starving rat in a cage and affixing it to a victim's face, until the rat started to tear at and eat their eyes and flesh. In many countries, our intelligence agencies supported and worked with brutally violent drug traffickers because they funded their black budget through cocaine smuggling. I mean don't you think it's weird that an entire continent hates us? Do you think it's just random? We've behaved in an absolutely horrible way in that part of the world - the closest analog I can think of is Imperial Japan, and their cruelty and barbarity ended up destroying their empire when they couldn't hold their newly conquered territories due to intense hatred from the people they wanted to rule over.

Venezuela leader was corrupt and giving our adversaries lots of oil and to some extent they promoted terrorism cells and drugs and corruption. Do we really want the country with the world's leading supply of oil to be run so shoddy and corrupt and anti our interests ?

Sure, it's against our interests for him to be in power. And I hope that this time we will engage in earnest long-term nation building and build an actual ally in the region. But I'm a cynical guy, and our model in the region has been to let our corporations loot the country, basically enslave the population and give them no ability to own land or start their own private enterprise, and then to accuse them of communist sympathies when they protest and brutalize them horribly whenever they attempt to push back even the slightest bit.

Can't he do this to Cuba? The Bahamas? I'd like to get some nice beaches out of the ordeal. Let's keep with the Caribbean theme and steer clear of the Arctic. Swaying palms, sugarcane, and cigars are more my speed.

Innocent as doves, wise as serpents. Charity is more than just giving something away, you should care if what you give is good for the person in the long run. Giving poison to a depressed person who asks for it isn't charity. Giving drugs to a destitute addict isn't charity. Giving money to a destitute addict who will spend it to slowly kill himself with drugs also isn't charity. It's evil, just a way to balm one's own ego with zero real care for what happens to the person once they're out of sight. Similarly, giving money to someone who is a known unrepentant thief/murdere/child molestor isn't noble either, you are just contributing to their own criminal lifestyle as well as to the victimization of their next targets. Charity isn't just giving something away, it's loving one's neighbor as oneself, not as an inanimate object of our pity and a target for self-aggrandizing generosity. Sometimes being a good neighbor means tough love, and sometimes simply giving something can be contrary to the spirit of charity.

Jews are a mixed bag. Some of them are great people, some make you understand why God put an end to the whole '800 year old Jews' thing in the Old Testament pretty quickly.

LOL, they saw you as a mark because you would give them stuff for free. If I ran around in the city giving stuff away I'd suddenly have a bunch of homeless 'friends' as well. Once I stopped giving out free stuff I'm sure our 'friend' status would evaporate and half of them would cus me out and move on to a juicier target.

There was a huge demand in China as well (70% of the country was addicted) but once the government decided to actually do something about it the problem was solved in a handful of years. Our government doesn't want to actually do anything about it, that's why it targeted users for punitive actions while dealers often walked away with a slap on the wrist.

Probably has to do with the CIA running a good chunk of its black budget off of narcotics and cocaine trafficking. I don't think it's a coincidence that we finally called it quits in Afghanistan as soon as dirt cheap, lab-produced fentanyl made poppies an uneconomic source of narcotics.

Even in the Middle Ages, casualty numbers for entire campaigns weren't that high. Agincourt, considered a collosal and abnormal bloodbath for the Frogs, had French casualty rates of 25-40% (including injuries, not all deaths). Movies dramatize battles and show the losing side as a big pile of corpses and a few straggling survivors but that's not how it worked historically. Most people came home from a battle, with 10% being a 'normal' casualty rate for entire campaigns. If war was as brutal as movies portrayed it, every king who led a foreign misadventure would return with no forces to keep order and an imploding peasant population.

And if the issue is replacing fathers as caregivers, polygamy makes that problem worse, not better, because each dead man leaves behind multiple widows. This is why in polygamous societies it's usually practiced by the upper echelons of society - they usually have much better survival rates in battle due to armor and ransoms.

Germany isn't a sovereign country anymore. It was literally raped by the USSR, then turned into a proxy battleground during the Cold War, then absorbed under the Nato security umbrella. Being an American vassal means not even being able to utter a peep after we bombed the gas pipeline that they were relying on, sending their manufacturing economy into a death spiral. You saw the same thing with Japan and the Plaza Accord decades earlier. That's what it means to have a suzerain. Vae victis. They brought this upon themselves by not fighting to the death against foreign control.

I mean if someone wants to live in a world where rape is legalized they can just move to India. It isn't very nice.

Your claim was that they were people just like any other and that dislike of them was due entirely to situations outside their control and not specific to their particular ethnic group. Were that the case, exposure to said group would result in a decrease of animosity and prejudice, not an increase.

And when disapproval in a given region does crest, there is public support for physically removing these populations, with nationwide expulsion taking place in France in the 2010s. People were by and large happy with the results. Most Germans didn't know about the death camps, they were essentially happy with the same results that contemporary expulsion policies produce, while being unaware that their government was doing more than 'relocating' them.

Wrong again.

And would you look at that, the positive countries strongly correlate to low exposure to the people in question. Tale as old as time.

Now, what you said here makes sense, but conclusion doesnt follow from it, because again, your conclusion was that men dont need to be protected, which doesnt follow from statement that men are necessary to protect women and children. If men are necessary for protection of women and children, then not protecting men from harm is a logical contradiction when goal is protection of women and children, goal achieved indirectly by men being safe from harm.

So if men didnt need to be protected (thus, harm done to them wouldnt be prevented), it would result in men being harmed, which would harm women and children indirectly who depend on man to be safe in order to protect them.

Protection isn't some magical whispy thing floating around in the ether that can be conjured by wishing and hoping for it. The world is a hostile, unforgiving place. Protection is created by someone, somewhere, confronting that harsh reality - they come into contact with that reality and shield someone else from it, and it costs them to do so. A world where everyone is protected and nobody pays a cost for it is an absurd pipe dream. Men in society are the people who pay that particular cost. Women typically weave and navigate the social frameworks that develops within that wall of protection, and pay their own costs while confronting their own dangers.

Now, you seem to say men specifically dont need protection or nurturing. Now can you explain why male children benefit from protection, and men do not?

Because men are the ones who have to protect and nurture the children and their mother. The world at large certainly isn't going to do it. That nurturing environment is a temporary luxury, a bubble that the father carved out of a harsh reality and the mother maintained, a safe enclave which allowed their children to develop into adults who can one day not only survive outside of it but to carve their own protective bubbles for their own children. So every male child must transition into some semblance of that role, or become a failed incel who is repellant to any woman with an ounce of sense. Women have their own, parallel evolution to move through that usually involves navigating social situations deftly.

No, my son will be protected (necessary condition for survival of offspring) and he will also be nurtured (necessary for maximal brain development).

Children need that. Men do not. If your son isn't weened off of that sort of treatment in adolescence he will be slapped in the face by reality and end up a genetic dead end, in all likelihood.

I understand you see men as animals who are supposed to just kill each other so winner is made stronger, because you read it in Hitler's books (yes, I know you read Hitler's books), however, I have better plans for humanity which are based on unity and logic.

I'm not sure which 'Hitler books' you're talking about - Mein Kampf isn't exactly a parenting guide or anthropological dissection of gender roles. And Hitler wasn't exactly a profligate man of letters. But I'm sure you have limited experience with any shade of literacy.

Men marry and have two or more children young, then go to war in their late 20s-30s, with state support for war widows. It's not rocket science.

This works only in non Christian societies.

For Christian societies it will be Hellboundedness for any engaging in this... I dont know why but God ruled it so. 1 man for 1 woman or we go to Hell. No option 3. Clearly stated by none other than Lord Yeshua himself.

You misinterpreted this as support for polygamy. The fact of the matter is that a man just needs to stay married to a young woman for a decade to have more than enough children to maintain a population. Another decade to raise most of them to a point where they are contributing to society. Outside of that window, or even within it, he is seen as more expendable than the wife who is entrusted with his progeny, and the care and respect given to widows is reflective of the fact that widows were historically much more common than widowers.

If you would joke about male victims of rape, you are not a Christian.

Puritanism n. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy

Even if I buy the first part, we're talking about rape and not murder, so what does it have to do with whether or not the victims are "disposable"? I don't think the problem people have with rape is that it stops people from furthering society, it's that it's done without consent and can be traumatic.

Also I disagree with the first part. Men don't have wombs, but they are much less disposable as far as labor is concerned. And furthering society only matters is we care about what happens to people in society, so no one is really disposable.

The discussion wasnt about the legality or morality of rape, but about why the rape of women is treated as a more grave matter in most societies. I obviously don't think rape should be considered legal or moral, but gravity with which it is treated is informed by cultural norms.

Those norms are in turn ultimately informed by childbearing. The question was not whether someone was disposable but whether they were expendable. A hard laborer is expended for production. A soldier is expended for offense or defense. It goes without saying that disposing of a healthy man for no good reason is foolish, but expending him for some greater purpose is not. This why historically men were employed in dangerous labor or deployed as soldiers while women were not, aside from the obvious strength differential.

That difference in perceived societal value is what informs the perceived disposability of men, why they are viewed more often as tools or weapons rather than something to be nurtured and protected. This is just the way of the world. It is in the nature of a man to take the slings and arrows of the world without relying on the sympathy of others.

Actually, in order for reproduction to happen, there must be both man and woman. Woman alone cannot reproduce.

You just need one man for each woman of childbearing age. They're produced at a much higher rate than that.

the correct term is map. "Pedophile" is considered offensive to say to a person.

It might be a bit much to call those at liberty to be offended by it 'people'

Would you joke about average woman being raped?

Those jokes are rarely good - men are disposable, whereas women are responsible for the furtherance of any society. So male rape has always been taken less seriously than female rape, because it has no ramifications as far as children or motherhood are concerned. Whether it's 'nice' or not, men who fall that far are seen as 'responsible' for allowing themselves to be victimized.

And when it comes to prison rape, most people think that sentences are a joke and that prison murder/abuse/rape are a way to 'balance the scales' and give certain people their 'just deserts'. Pedophiles in particular are sought out to be brutalized and that's where the largest discrepancy between what a person deserves and what the 'justice system' actually metes out lies - most people think they should be executed, so when an inmate tortures one to death it's almost seen as a heroic act.

Half for oil, half for Israel. If US consumers actually see savings at the gas pump I'm fine with it. It would be refreshing for our escapades throughout the world to actually benefit the people of this country for once. But the pessimistic side of me says that oil companies will pocket the savings as extra profit. Here's to hoping that Donny is worried enough about this approval numbers to twist their arms a bit, but I'm not holding my breath considering the psychotic bubble he's ensconced himself in.

I think that most Europeans nowadays think he was right about the gypsies at least. If he had stopped there they'd still be building statues of him.

For the vast, vast majority of people, being self-interested is all the justification they need

Then they're no better than King George.

People seldom reach the heights of political power through virtue. The devil is the prince of this world. The only metric to compare one ruler to another is competence. King George was lacking in that department, to put it lightly.

So if they weren't anticipating a full scale war that affected all the colonies, how could they expect to occupy prominent positions? It only had positive effects for them because of the war.

Yeah but there were advantages to living in the colonies despite lack of representation, and most colonists were fine with the arrangement minus some small grievances. Taxation was not unique in being without representation, a big complaint was on internal vs external taxation which Britain actually acquiesced to to some extent. Most of the colonists preferred to work their grievances out without war until the Intolerable Acts. Note that Canada got its independence without war.

If that was true that just makes the Intolerable Acts even more of a blunder. The message sent by the Tea Party (and there were other incidents - I recall a ship in Rhode Island?) was that there were interested, influential, and competent parties in the colonies willing to draw the line on this issue and risk any backlash that might come. Reticence on the part of the wider citizenry meant that a measured response and more concessions from England could have successfully tamped down the embers of revolution. Instead, the Brits poured gasoline on the fire and burnt their own eyebrows off. The people organizing these events also would have benefitted from British capitulation. The only thing they wouldn't benefit from would be surgical British retaliation which didn't enrage enough of the colonists to risk all-out revolt. I imagine they correctly assumed that the Empire was incapable of carrying that out due to a mix of incompetence and arrogance.

I mean I'd joke about any man being raped if the punchline was good. Don't really get the meme.