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Messages - Pezevenk

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1
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 13, 2025, 10:48:27 PM »

Probably because I don't just settle for a quick five minute article that oversimplifies things.


That's literally what you are doing right now, with this post. Why don't you ask the actual Norwegian in this thread?

Quote
Sweden is a capitalist state with hefty social welfare programs. A socialist state, by contrast, is often built to put welfare (rather than sustainability) first. They pay for these welfare programs.[\quote]

If you define "socialist state" (which I didn't say Sweden is) as "not sustainable", it's not particularly surprising to find they are not sustainable.

By the way, you insist now that Sweden or Norway aren't socialist, because even if they have a big welfare state, they have no minimum wage and relatively low corporate taxes or whatever. But every time anyone in America calls for a big welfare state, you lose your shit and call it socialism. So make up your mind!
Also the reason some countries in Europe have no minimum wage is because they have strong labor unions which effectively set these minimum wages, and they protect these unions. The US doesn't, because labor unions are evil gormunism, and worked hard to dismantle them.

Quote
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2018/07/08/sorry-bernie-bros-but-nordic-countries-are-not-socialist/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/how-sweden-left-socialism-behind/ar-AA1yWSTj
https://reason.com/2019/01/02/sweden-isnt-socialist/
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-problem-using-sweden-as-an-example-of-a-socialist-model-that-works-sweden-aint-socialist/
https://www.cato.org/blog/debunking-myth-swedish-socialism-again

Where do I get such ideas?!? Maybe, because I do follow-up?

Follow up? You literally just searched "Sweden not socialist" in Google and copy pasted some links to propaganda.

2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 11, 2025, 02:32:00 AM »
He's not entirely wrong.

Sometimes big businesses will lobby for regulations to squash competition.

But given his lack of understanding on taxes and constantly changing story of small business ownership, plus my own second hand experience... I'm not sure he knows what he's doing enough to have a valid opinion on the subject.

I know they do, I agree this sometimes happens, but it's not the cause of income disparity in the US or anywhere else. If you just indiscriminately removed regulations, you would just get more disparity, not less.

3
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 11, 2025, 02:29:48 AM »
By the way, I took two minutes to look at what the "economic freedom" index entails. It has a bunch of indices which have to do with "judicial effectiveness" and "government integrity" which have nothing to do with what people typically interpret as "economic freedom" or how "capitalist" a country is, and predictably, Nordic countries rank very high on these metrics. Then of course they (comparatively) tank on metrics of "tax burden" and "government spending", which is predictable, because they're among the only actually relevant and more or less objective metrics they use. This doesn't hurt their position though, because there's a whole host of other hard to interpret and/or irrelevant metrics they use, such as "business freedom" (ok, how is that defined exactly?) or "property rights" (again, how do you measure property rights? The property rights of whom are we talking about and under what circumstances?), or "fiscal health" (completely irrelevant metric, only there to filter out poorly performing countries from the top). My personal favorite however was "labor freedom", because I have no idea what it is in practice supposed to mean, and because the US, famously anti-labor and union busting, somehow ranks #2 in the world for labor freedom! Again, no idea what happened there, but it should tell you everything you need to know about this index.

Don't pay attention to what random think tanks tell you, research the actual policy and history.

4
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 11, 2025, 02:05:42 AM »
Pez acts as if Norway is a valid benchmark when it comes to the US.

Norway - largely homogeneous

US - Not even close to homogeneous.



lackless confuses race war with class war.

keep fighting at the bottom!
you'll figure out how to dig up eventually.








Was it Sweden or Norway that was held up as a socialist model? Anyway, that model turned out to be wrong (I think the reason you mention Norway is that Sweden turned to a libertarian free market after socialism tanked the economy.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/27/nordic-countries-not-socialist-denmark-norway-sweden-centrist/

Also the US doesn't have "unfettered capitalism." You want to know the real reason for the income divide? Goddamn regulations! Big businesses set up big lobbies, who campaign for regulation. These regulations don't affect those businesses, as they are either too big to affect, or grandfathered in under the older laws. How do I know this? I've tried to run a small business. And I've found that advertising is really hard to do. I don't understand modern advertising, and living in a small town, I can't see how it would work. So when I see tax after tax, and regulation after regulation, and can't afford to get anyone to help me, my business doesn't grow. Even with no expenses except transport, ultimately I failed. Rule after rule. If I wanted to fix computers I would need a license (I checked, it would run $500 or some nonsense) so I instead only dealt with teaching people, mainly older people, to use the computer. I'd instead get screwy calls about part replacement (no, I can't fix the glass on your computer). These regulations trap small businesses in red tape. They have to operate by either getting licenses that gouge a significant chunk of their paycheck and then income taxes that consider them employees and employers, or operate under the radar by trying avoid these taxes and fees, which screws with the amount of business they get. If I make over a certain amount in gross income, I have to pay quarterly taxes (I don't want to pay quarterly taxes!) so to avoid those, I don't work too often.
The reason there is a gulf between rich and poor is precisely because the poor are prevented from effectively working for themselves. Either work for someone else and get scraps from their earnings, or work for yourself, and deal with a legal minefield of small business ownership.

Where do you get all these things? Both Norway and Sweden (and Denmark, Iceland, Finland...) have traditionally followed a more or less "social democratic" model. They're not remotely "libertarian", and never have been. There have been neoliberal reforms in ALL of Europe in recent years, which includes them (notice how income inequality also trended upward there around the 80s-90s?), because this was a global trend and everyone had to jump in on the bullshit new order. The dissolution of the USSR also had to do with it. But even after the reforms, none of these countries are remotely "libertarian". That's nonsense some US think tanks created to peddle to Americans specifically, because no one with any proximity to these countries would buy that their massive welfare state, consumer protection and pro-union legislation is in any way "libertarian".

This nonsense about regulation also serves to completely obscure the fact that these "small business owners" are also responsible for the inequality, and also routinely underpay and exploit workers (and before you say "but I am not", or "but my uncle is a small business owner and he is not", I don't care about you or your uncle specifically). Or are you saying that if all regulations were taken away, everybody would just create their own business and not have to be employed by anyone?

5
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 10, 2025, 07:50:22 AM »
Pez acts as if Norway is a valid benchmark when it comes to the US.

Norway - largely homogeneous

US - Not even close to homogeneous.

I have no idea why everyone uses this ridiculous "homogeneous" argument. You can't just say "but US not homogeneous" and leave it at that, as if that explains something. Explain your point.

Btw, the only reason I brought up Norway is because clearly comparatively lenient penalties on murder have not caused high murder rates. It's not the only example. In fact, most countries have more "lenient" penalties than the US for murder (most countries don't have or don't practice capital punishment), and again, most countries have lower murder rates than the US. If you think it's because Norway is "homogeneous" and the US isn't, then there you go, that's another, much more important factor than severity of penalties. Which is my whole point, there is basically no relation between the severity of punishment for murder and murder rates. Absolutely no murderer pauses to think "hmm, am I gonna do 25 or 50 years, or am I going to be executed if I get caught?" before commiting murder. They either just do it without thinking of consequences, or they bet on never getting caught. Never has any crime been prevented because the criminal thought "I would do it if the penalty was 30 years, but it's 35 so I'm not risking it".

Isn't Canada comparable? Canada has no death penalty, the murder rate there is less than half that of the US.



6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 10, 2025, 12:48:21 AM »
I brought up Norway because they don't even have life sentences. The gulf countries have much lower murder rates than Norway. Maybe Islam is good after all? Lol

Edit: Zimbabwe also has a lower murder rate than Norway, go figure.

7
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 07, 2025, 03:43:13 PM »
For instance, Afghanistan had about 4.0 in 2021.

Yeah, I'm sure that is totally accurate.

Probably is very close to accurate, it comes from UN research, and it's actually a really high murder rate, and it's simar to other countries in the region. It's just that the Americas have absurdly high murder rates, and I'm guessing it's probably related to the drug trade. Nothing to do with the harshness of penalties though. In fact, if most drug related prohibitions were simply dropped, most of this would probably stop.

8
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 4chan / reddit party van.
« on: February 07, 2025, 03:29:17 PM »
It's not that I don't think they do that. But I would think they would use VPNs when they do that.
It could be scraping not just astroturfing.  Still...

Anyway, glad D1 has got me up to date with this 2013 story.

Oh come on, at least it's not the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or something like that again.

9
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: February 07, 2025, 09:31:51 AM »
All of what BB says is wrong as usual.
If you look at the archeology and the study of genetic drift, there are no “races”, just a mix of clusters of shifting gene pools blending and merging through invasion, colonization, slavery, and nomadism. The borders of these counties have constantly shifted over the centuries and are largely arbitrary.

The Iranians, from the same root as Aryans, incidentally, is an obsolete grouping that covers the people from India (the term comes from the Hindu Vedas) to the middle East.

I suspect he’s just dog whistling from a position of Christian exceptionalism, filtered through a US isolationist perspective and a poor education.

BB was under the impression Afghanistan turned Muslim because of the Taliban, and that the Taliban "invaded" Afghanistan. It's not such a weird impression to have if all you know about the situation is the fragments of the official US narrative that you picked up by listening to ignorant nationalists. What happened then is that it was pointed out that this is not at all the case, which sent BB googling for something to confirm their silly viewpoint. The Pashtun thing was just BB inventing some ridiculous story to justify the ridiculous story already in BB's mind. The Nuristanis=only true Afghans was yet another ridiculous story invented for the same purpose. That's really the extent of it, it's no deeper than that. I'm just here for the next ridiculous story to justify all the previous ones.

10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: February 07, 2025, 02:03:53 AM »

2. Increase the penalty for rape or murder.

What is this obsession with increasing the penalty for some crime as a solution to decrease crime rates? Here is a statistic. Norway has a maximum prison sentence of 21 years, meaning that you can't stay longer than that in prison (unless in very rare circumstances where it can be extended, because you are a mass killer or something like that), and there is no death sentence. In the US, murderers typically get life in prison or death sentence. So we can certainly say that the US has harsher penalties for murder than Norway (and I'm not sure how you're going to make death sentence harsher).

Norway has about 0.75 homicides per 100,000 people, while the US has about 5.8, which is higher than many war-torn and impoverished countries. For instance, Afghanistan had about 4.0 in 2021.

Would you say the harsher penalties for murder in the US compared to Norway helped at all to decrease murder rates? And how would you go about making penalties harsher, when there's already a death sentence in many places? Why do people still think that just because you make penalties harsher, people are going to stop commiting crimes?


11
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 4chan / reddit party van.
« on: February 07, 2025, 01:15:16 AM »
Greek police once arrested an "anarchist" for terrorist activities who was really an agent of the National Intelligence Agency. It is funny.

12
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: February 07, 2025, 01:05:58 AM »
Quote
Are you trolling? Taliban (and Pashtuns in general, who are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, although not all Taliban are Pashtun) ARE native Afghanis. And almost every other ethnic group within Afghanistan is also Muslim.

Do me a favor and stop parroting idiotic ideas.

Pashtuns
Quote from: wikipedia
Iranic ethnic group native to Afghanistan and Pakistan

Pashtuns, also known as Pakhtuns, or Pathans, are a nomadic, pastoral, eastern Iranic ethnic group primarily residing in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Look, look, it says they are native to there! It must be... sorry, this is why we have critical thinking.

They are an ethnic group from Iran. They are nomads from another country who move around between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am European-American, for my ancestors came from European and settled in America. Linguistically they are Iranian. I imagine if you did a genetic test, you'd find the same. Have they been native Afghanistan residents? Not hardly. They don't identify with true Afghani culture. They exported Islam from Iran.
Back to me being Eruopean-American. I am culturally American. I don't try to speak some native language, I don't try to make over the country I reside. These people are in every way Iranian.
And no, it doesn't matter how much time their people have stayed there. The people of Afghanistan are largely Iranian, but their classical religions were Zoroastrian, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Not Islam. Moreover, it highly probable that the ACTUAL Afghanis are the Nuristani, who are Animists.

Afghanistan has been Islamic for centuries, genius. If they had recently exported Islam from Iran, they would have been Shia, not Sunni. How the fuck are the Iranian when they absolutely don't live in Iran and never have lived in (modern day) Iran?

Iranic people are those who speak some Iranian language. Americans are not English. Australians are not English. Canadians are not English. The Irish are not English. But they all speak English. I counted 18 anglophone countries that are NOT England. You say you are American. But according to your logic, you are just "English in every way", are currently invading the US, and you are very much making over the US and exporting Christianity, because you are replacing native American, non-christian culture. There is no difference between you and the Pashtun, except the Pasthun have actually been there for wayyyy longer, and they didn't colonize the place, they organically moved there before the US existed, before modern Iran existed, and before Islam existed.

Do you know why Iran is now called Iran instead of Persia? Because Persians are only one of numerous Iranic ethnic groups (very distinct from Pashtun, Pashtun are eastern Iranic while Persians are western Iranic, they separated long ago) that live within Iran, and "Iran" is viewed as more inclusive a name than Persia. Iranic people do not come from Iran. They come from a much larger region that spans many different countries, including Afghanistan. They are also not all the same, there is many different ethnic groups, just like Slavic people come from many different countries, Germanic people don't all come from Germany, and anglos are not all from England.

Actually, Iranic people didn't even originate from modern Iran. Here's what the wiki page on Iranic people says:

Quote
The Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separate branch of the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia around the mid-2nd millennium BC.

They came from central Asia, which includes Afghanistan. So, plot twist, it's the other way around, they migrated from Afghanistan to Iran.

Now about your Nuristanis. Congrats, you found the one ethnic group that is maybe not entirely Muslim! Except they kind of are, for about a century or so, even though they were forced into it. So yeah, it's true, some parts of Afghanistan followed other religions until a few centuries ago. Except there are some huge problems with your theory:

1) Nuristanis are about 2% of the population of Afghanistan. They're a tiny tiny group.

2) They're also Muslim now. Actually I found that there were big fights between Taliban and ISIS in Nuristan some years ago because ISIS was recruiting Nuristanis (ISIS and the Taliban are enemies, I'm just saying because you probably think they are the same thing given all the weird shit you've said so far)

3) Nuristanis are ALSO Iranic. Yep.

Quote
The people of Afghanistan are largely Iranian, but their classical religions were Zoroastrian, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Not Islam.[\quote]

By the same token, the historical religion of Europeans is various forms of paganism, so christian Europeans are not actual Europeans. The only actual Europeans are the tiny fringe larpers who profess to be pagans. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Most of Afghanistan converted to Islam BEFORE the Baltic states and most of Poland. Go tell the polish, one of the most hardcore christian countries in Europe, that they are actually confused, or fake Polish, because their historical religion is paganism and not Christianity LMAO

13
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 4chan / reddit party van.
« on: February 05, 2025, 11:42:11 PM »
It's not that I don't think they do that. But I would think they would use VPNs when they do that.

14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: February 05, 2025, 10:34:11 PM »
No, what you just said was.

Some idiot said Taliban were the native Afghanis.

I looked it up. They're not. They are an invading culture imposing moral laws on a struggling country. I country with actually a history of invasion.

You say it's stupid rather than spend the mental energy to realize, "Holy crap, that's right!"

You somehow think this is native to Afghani way of life, you're greatly deceived. This isn't indigenous culture, it's a foreign empire trying to take over. The distance from Kabul, Afghanistan to Mecca is 2700 miles. Under no natural circumstances would Afghanistan share the religious or political ideas of Saudi Arabia. This is imported religion and imported culture.

Are you trolling? Taliban (and Pashtuns in general, who are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, although not all Taliban are Pashtun) ARE native Afghanis. And almost every other ethnic group within Afghanistan is also Muslim.

The distance of Texas to Jerusalem is far greater, how come there are Christians in Texas? Wait, bad example, they did invade native Americans... Ok, better example, Norway. Why are there christians in Norway? Are they a foreign empire taking over? Are Christians in Texas and Norway not really Texans and Norwegians because Christianity comes from Palestine, which is far away?

Which foreign empire is taking over? Because you said Iran before (since you saw that Pashtuns are an Iranic ethnic group, which is a different thing from them being Iranian, just like there's Turkic people in Afghanistan, without it meaning they are from Turkey) but the Taliban are Sunni, while Iran is officially Shia. They're different creeds. In fact, the Taliban persecute Shias such as the Hazara ethnic group, who are predominantly Shia (and they are also Iranic!).

Ok, let's try to find these "native" Afghans. Clearly they can't be Iranic, and they can't be Muslim. Are Turkic people allowed? Let's say they are allowed, as long as they are not Muslim. Well, the non-Muslim part kinda excludes most of them, Wikipedia says 89.7% are Sunni and 10% Shia, which leaves a 0.3% of real, native Afghans.

Wikipedia says that of that 0.3%, some people are adherents of Bahai faith, but that religion was founded in the 19th century in another country, while Afghanistan has been Muslim for centuries. Let's try the next group. There are a few Sikhs and Hindus. Both these religions are from India, and Sikhs are fairly recent, so I don't know if they count. There are also some Zoroastrians, but this is an Iranian religion, and an unknown small number of christians. Something tells me that you believe christians count as native wherever they are, so I guess we did it! We found the real native Afghans! They are the 20 christians that live somewhere in Afghanistan! Except they probably belong to some Iranic or Turkic ethnic group (maybe even Pashtuns!) so that's tough luck. I guess there are no real Afghans after all!

Clearly you have it all worked out, so who are the real, non-Muslim, non-Iranic, native Afghans? Because I couldn't find them.

15
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: February 04, 2025, 06:23:15 AM »
Bullshit.

Muslim playbook:
1. Interbreed with a minority population (Ainu, Phillistines, Pakistani, etc)
2. Separate from the population.
3. Outpopulate the natives.
4.Take over.

The Taliban, as wikipedia is quick to tell you, are a Pashtun nationalist group (mixed with some Deobandi ideas).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban
Okay, so who are the Pashtuns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtuns
Quote
Pashtuns (/ˈpʌʃˌtʊn/, /ˈpɑːʃˌtʊn/, /ˈpæʃˌtuːn/; Pashto: پښتانه, romanized: Pəx̌tānə́), also known as Pakhtuns, or Pathans, are a nomadic, pastoral, eastern Iranic ethnic group primarily residing in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan.

They are nomads from Iran, there to impose Iranian Islam on Afghanistan.

This is the stupidest thing I've read possibly all year.

16
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: January 30, 2025, 11:45:52 PM »

Bullshit. If I was handed this deal that Biden was, here's what would have done.
1. Pledged to protect Afghanistan if they were ever attacked again.
2. Build modern facilities for a modern state (banks, schools, hospitals, etc)
3. Leave in a calm fashion, bringing any Afghanistanis who want to leave their shithole and who have helped the military fix their country in the past.
4. Leave the country with a sense that America will move in again, if any hostile action is attempted
5. If Taliban does try to move in again, work with native Afghanistanis to drive it out.

Instead, what Biden did was out of a different playbook.
1. Blame America first.
2. Destabilize countries so they are dependent on UN aid (Guess who drafted this playbook).
3. Open the borders so assholes from Afghanistan and every other shithole head to America for aid. Smuggle in some terrorists too, so they fuck with our country also.

1. That would violate the deal. That Trump made.

2. How would Biden do that within his first few months of the presidency? The US had been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, it sounds like something that could have been done earlier. For instance by Trump, who was president for 4 years.

3. The fashion in which the US left would make no difference whatsoever. The Americans left in a haste because the Afghanistan government was already collapsing before they did.

4 and 5. So almost 20 years wasn't enough for you? Isn't that one of the reasons Trump made this deal in the first place? Are you saying that maybe he shouldn't have made the deal, and the US should have permanently stayed in Afghanistan?

This has nothing to do with Biden or Trump, and everything to do with the whole Afghanistan debacle being a horrible idea to begin with, spanning decades.

17
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 100% Tariffs - Trump
« on: January 30, 2025, 12:31:48 AM »
Dude, what are you talking about. Biden literally just followed the deal. The outcome was never going to be any different at all, because the situation was a shit show from the get go. Clearly nobody in Afghanistan gave a shit about the corrupt puppet government the US installed, and it collapsed immediately. This had nothing to do with either Trump or Biden. It was years in the making.

18
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: January 30, 2025, 12:23:09 AM »
 Trump will also maximize freedom of speech by deporting foreign students who participated in pro-Palestine rallies.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/01/29/trump-threatens-to-deport-international-students-who-participated-in-pro-palestinian-protests/

Go America! Go Trump! Go free speech!

19
Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Your thoughts on Elon musk?
« on: January 27, 2025, 03:11:13 AM »
Some day people will figure out why all these Musk types, massively benefitting from immigration, express anti-immigrant viewpoints. They don't want immigration to stop completely, and it will not stop completely. They don't even want illegal immigration to stop, if anything they prefer it. Do drug dealers want drugs to become legal? Hell no, it would destroy their profits.

The idea is to make immigrants a scape goat for all their problems. The more marginalized the immigrants are, the more easily they can be exploited. Undocumented immigrants are the easiest to exploit of course.

I've seen it so many times here in Greece as well. You go to a lot of the rural regions, and everyone hates immigrants and votes for anti-immigrant platforms. It's odd at first, since they don't even have that many immigrants compared to the cities. Then you realize that all these ex-farmers are now farm owners: they don't work the land, they have immigrants working for them. They might complain that non-immigrants don't come to work for them, but the reality is that nobody would want to go work for the money they give to Bangladeshis, or put up with the conditions they have them work under. A lot of the "farmers" know that, and know how much they actually need immigration, but they vote and speak against it anyways, because they want to weaken the bargaining position of their immigrant workers. They also use anti-immigrant rhetoric to torpedo attempts to organize workers in places which employ both natives and migrants.

Musk couldn't make all of this any more transparent. Of course, you can't really ship in undocumented engineers, they have more options, hence the need for H1B visas. But they will still put up with so much more than non-immigrants.

20
Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Your thoughts on Elon musk?
« on: January 27, 2025, 02:40:40 AM »
Musk not doing a lot to beat the Nazi salute allegations by talking in AfD rallies.

Not that he wants to really.

Before anyone starts saying "nyeeeh everyone you disagree with is a Nazi", I don't really believe he is a Nazi, ideologically. I don't believe he really believes all that much. He just does whatever he thinks suits his interests best, plus he is obviously in the midst of a power trip right now. Then again, that's not all that different from what Nazis did...

21
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: January 18, 2025, 07:09:58 AM »
So, when does the madness start? When does the bewigged pumpkin briefly reign alongside the waxy faced ketamine junky before they trip over their egos and fall out, and what will that mean for Greenland and the Panama Canal?

Will more of your military break under the strain and attack their own or is the whole country on the brink of a misinformation implosion fueled by Chinese tiktok algorithms and X sacking of its overseers?

Is the overmedication and intoxication of your populace to opioids and the ever increasing waistlines due to corn-syrup addiction an attempt to make you slower and easier to hit by drones piloted by Ritalin dosed teens thinking they are playing FPV Kamikaze drone on Steam, or is it just to sell the drugs and make you less likely to be whisked away by the fossil fueled induced climate change winds?

Well Trump is one step away from making open threats of invasion to allied countries. That's certainly a new one.

22
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: December 29, 2024, 01:16:08 AM »
It's kinda funny how Vivek and Musk sided with the hardcore nationalist anti immigrant crowd only to turn around and tell them that Americans are actually super dumb and incompetent and they actually really need foreigners to come in.

23
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: December 29, 2024, 01:13:40 AM »
I think they probably are hoping Trump will think they're doing something so he'll not impose tariffs. Mexico does not think the drug smuggling problem is their problem. Which makes no sense to me, because they have their own drug addiction problems. It's not all being smuggled into the US! Not to mention the violence that goes along with it. They have thousands and thousands of murders related to the drug trade.

I think the US and Mexico should work together to get this under control. Not be enemies. I love Mexico.

Jimmy I think it is drug addiction fueling homelessness, not the other way around. People with everything, stable homes, decent money, they lose it all. I was close to people who lost everything to their pain pill addiction. They were middle class suburban moms! They had the best chance of not going to jail, because they could afford rehab, some of them ended up in jail anyway. Opioids are powerfully addictive. Fentanyl has turned it up to eleven. Our NGOs all promote "harm reduction" which means giving addicts clean needles, but no help. You can't stop fentanyl cold turkey, you could die. I wish I could remember which country had a successful program, I swear I think it was Portugal. I don't see the US ever doing the right thing, anyway. You have to have compassion for these people, and we have two extremes, which are enabling the addiction or locking the addicts up with no treatment.

I do agree with you lorddave, we should have a free drug rehab programs. It's the only way. Most people who are strung out on drugs do not have insurance, and the money they scrape up is used to buy the next high.

Yes, Portugal does have a successful policy toward drugs, because they started treating drug use as a public health issue and not a criminal issue, although there is more they could have done. They mostly decriminalized use of any drug, but kept trafficking criminalized. The result was that a large percentage of drug users sought medical help, HIV transmission from drug use fell by 90%, and overdose deaths also decreased greatly. HOWEVER, drug use actually increased a little bit, although that might have been because people were more likely to admit they used drugs. So it doesn't exactly solve the demand issue, although drugs did become a whole lot cheaper after these laws (which hurts the dealers).

24
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: War
« on: November 30, 2024, 12:54:49 PM »
What?

Some Al Qaeda/ISIS offshoot took over Aleppo, because everyone in the area is busy with Israel. Now that this is happening, they will be a lot less busy with Israel, which is awfully convenient.

25
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: War
« on: November 21, 2024, 08:39:13 AM »
Of course it won't do shit but at least they did it.

26
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: War (in the middle east)
« on: November 21, 2024, 08:32:21 AM »
They did it!

https://www.reuters.com/world/icc-issues-arrest-warrants-israels-netanyahu-gallant-hamas-leader-2024-11-21/

Which obviously won't do anything because Netanyahu will never be arrested. Well, who knows. Maybe when he's 90 years old things will be different.

27
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: November 21, 2024, 08:16:54 AM »
Interesting defence of RFK

And yeah, you guys need to ban pharmaceutical adverts, like the rest of the world.  That's one of the most jarring things when you visit America and stick the TV on - the continuous stream of adverts for prescription (or should be prescription) drugs.

"Yeah ok he is the exact opposite of what a health minister should be in about 50 different ways but these are not normal times so let's just focus on the 5 ways in which he is good" is a weird defense... Why does this guy think he's likely to part ways with the bad stuff, but not the good stuff?

28
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Why do you support donald trump
« on: November 20, 2024, 02:17:28 AM »
Dr Oz is such a weirdo.

Not a weirdo, a greedy asshole. At some point in his career he clearly figured out the best way to make the most money with the least effort. Being a surgeon can make you a lot of money. But you can make more money with less effort if you figure out how to market the fact you were a surgeon to sell snake oil.

29
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: War (in the middle east)
« on: November 17, 2024, 11:55:46 PM »
Nah I think I'll trust the Mormons on this one.

30
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: War (in the middle east)
« on: November 16, 2024, 02:02:09 PM »
Is that a no? Can't tell.

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