Go have a beer (or some haldol) and re-read what I just said very slowly, then re-read what the OP said (which I quoted), then re-read what Trump said, bearing in mind that I'm not for Trump.
Did Trump "brag" that he did something like that? No, no he didn't. My only point here is about how dumb it is to say that Trump said something that he clearly did not fucking say.
This is about people lying when they summarize Trump's words. I don't say he did or did not sexually assault anyone but if you say "here's proof! He just bragged about committing sexual assault!" and I click on the link and I see him bragging that women let him touch their pussies... I know you are a liar. And/or suffering from some form of aggressive delusional disorder or perhaps some mild to moderate hallucinations.
Raving about some terrible thing that happened to some other woman, in a situation completely unlike what Trump described, is irrelevant to this very specific issue about his words and only makes fence-sitters (and there *are* fence-sitters still out there, many of them people who voted for Obama or Kerry) think that the anti-Trump brigade is completely full of shit.
Meanwhile, Trump is bragging about how he has sexually assaulted multiple women
Except he didn't. He said they "let him" do it. Stop infantilizing women. Let means some form of consent was given.
Trump is a posturing macho jackass, and this incident makes me think even less of him (as if that were possible), and I want to see him lose this election... but this is not the time to be pushing your microaggression, mind-reading , SWJ-ish definition of rape nonsense. Trump implied that these women all wanted to have sex with him and that they let him do stuff. I think Trump was lying when he said that. If there are believable accusers (and I don't say these women are or aren't believable; I haven't had time to look into it. Some of them allegedly have ties to the Clintons), I might even go so far as to say that this makes Trump look more likely to be the kind of person to commit sexual assault.
But he did not admit or brag about sexually assaulting anyone. Anyone who Googles can see that you are lying, and that Trump was clearly implying that all of these women wanted to have sex with him. You shouldn't need to lie to destroy Trump at this stage in the game; you really, really shouldn't.
"My girlfriend let me touch her pussy" does not imply that I sexually assaulted my girlfriend. You people seem to be confused due to the pluralization...or just the fact that Trump is an ass and the whole thing has an pathetically strained macho haze over it.
The consent here was not specified. It could be in any number of things. Generally speaking, these things takes the form of a hand that rests on a thigh or belly for a while and then, if the body language shows this is welcome, slowly moving closer, giving her plenty of time to react. Generally speaking, written paperwork is not involved.
The implication was that all women 'want it' from him. That's the BRAGGING bit, right? When macho jackasses like Trump want to brag, the theme is that women want to have sex with them, not that they have to force themselves on women.
You have a thousand ways to thoroughly tear Trump to shreds for the benefit of the people who are still on the edge in this election. And I really wish you people would do that, but the biggest controversies that the left fixates are invariably the flimsiest. Pushing everything through a SJW filter and assuming that everyone else in the country is going to make the same "most men are rapists" assumption as you... is not a good gambit to be making at this stage in the game.
So what does "they let you do it" mean in your vocabulary? I'm using standard American English, where "let" means consent was given, implied or otherwise.
I don't talk like this. My friends don't talk like this. It obviously sounds like some exaggerated macho crap, but the impression he is conveying (truthfully or not, and I'm guessing "not") is that all women submit to his advances. That's what "let you do it" means. He didn't say some deeply disturbing thing about how they fight at first or something--he basically was saying he was some kind of stud god whom any woman would gladly submit to sexual contact with.
The worst thing the left can possibly do is lie to try to make Trump look bad. You don't NEED to lie, god damn it! But you are. And people who are on the fence can easily tell that you are lying--it's just a Google away.
And immediately he said that, he said "they let you do it." Let means consent. Why lie about this? Why exaggerate? You're hurting your own cause.
Yes, the phrasing is crass and tediously macho. No I've never talked like this in my life. But let's just do a little experiment here with some singular masculine pronouns:
"He let me borrow his car."
"He let me kiss him."
" He let me do it--I could do anything I wanted. I could grab him by the dick."
Does ANY of this sound plausibly non-consensual to you? It sounds obviously exaggerated to me, like a guy claiming all women were attracted to and submissive to him. None of that sounds like sexual assault. If he made a comment about them like "not wanting it at first but then they stop fighting", now THAT would sound like sexual assault... but he explicitly said they let him.
You have fifteen million legitimate ways to tear Trump to pieces but every single one of them that you people fixate on, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, is based on some truly demented logic bordering on lies. Yes, by all means, let's fucking turn this into a SJW three ring circus where all sex is rape without forms filled out in triplicate, talking in this lame "alpha" way implies a lack of consent. Let's make sure that we scream the loudest about issues like this so that every single person on the fence in this election can look into it and see it's bullshit.
The man is a liar and a moron and a goon. You really shouldn't need to make up more shit to torpedo him.
Just last night I mentioned in the "No One Wants to Buy Twitter" thread that I probably conflate "Islamist" and "conservative Muslim" pretty frequently. The line between the two is pretty fluid, but it's a distinction I shouldn't gloss over as much as I end up doing (largely out of laziness.)
And here, I'll do it right now: substitute "rarely" for never. Never was obviously a rhetorical exaggeration on my part.
You see? It's easy. And I apply the same principle to talking about the errors and wrongdoings of America. Admit it, correct it where it's possible/reasonable to and then move on. You should try it sometime.
Heh, you think I'm a pretentious name-dropper like Brian? Well, I enjoy talking about these people and I've a half hour to kill so... why not:
Paine for unparalleled courage and vision and tenacity in refusing to deviate from what was right. He was the only person you could rightly call the godfather of the Enlightment; he didn't formulate its precepts, but he had the courage and the eloquence to bring them to the masses. He was much more courageous than that other, much more successful and well-known man who shared his first name and much of his world view; however, in the end his hatred for the establishment in England probably went too far, and although he was ill-used by many people, he probably should not have harped on and wallowed in personal offense for quite so long.
Vonnegut for understanding the human condition, particularly in his underrated Mother Night and Sirens of Titan in addition to his magnum opus, Cat's Cradle. I find it baffling that so many say that Slaughterhouse Five is his magnum opus; it's top self Vonnegut, sure, but it's a bit self-indulgent (eh... understandably so) and not nearly as profound as people make it out to be.
His political views and advocacy were stunted, particularly in the later years of his life. It seems clear enough that scar tissue prevented him from digging any deeper, and given the man's life that's really quite understandable... but still, he was far too glib when talking about issues like Iraq. I wish he could have gone back and re-written Player Piano when he was older. Give it an injection of that fully matured Vonnegut irony, and it would instantly become one of the best science fiction novels of all time.
Luz, I know mainly from his Vice interview and the cover of the survivor issue. That's all I need to know. Probably we disagree on a variety of economic issues, but it's clear the man is a warrior and a humanist of the highest caliber. I'm sure the "die on my feet rather than live on my knees" Charb and others deserve to go on this list as well, but this was all off the cuff, and unfortunately I do not speak French.
Christopher for being one of the greatest orators who has ever lived (though only a good writer, not great.) His combined articulation and insight like no one else and it's astonishing how he could do this even with off the cuff responses. He was wrong on a number of things, particularly Iraq and also (interestingly enough) when he argued about WWII, but he was usually wrong in interesting and useful ways.
Sam for being a paragon of reason and intellectual honesty. Nonetheless, he has been very sloppy with a number of his arguments, a couple of which I have dissected at length in his official forum (under this handle.) Compared to the rest of humanity, his sloppiness is minimal but he is capable of doing much better. In recent years he is also shrinking from the fight... understandable, but lamentable. And he's allowed a rabid SJW (a term I don't use lightly) to literally take over his forum.
Mark Twain for being insightful, self-critical, humane, rightfully disdainful of the peddlers of nonsense and, as if he were a more prudent version of Paine, being able to see far ahead of his era. In the words of Vonnegut, he's an American saint. Off the top of my head, I can't remember what I disagree with him on but I'm sure there are plenty of things.
Orwell for being, like Paine and Christopher, able and willing to stay true to his ideals and sharply criticize the Revolution, even though he did think a revolution was called for. And also for using his self-disgust to better himself. I'm sure I'm critical of something he's advocated as well, but I'm shamefully under-read here (particularly his nonfiction.)
Joanna for possessing one of the greatest minds, visions and attitudes in industry. She has the uncanny ability to be right so often, in such an a
And as I said elsewhere, you can substitute "paid lower taxes" if you don't like my more flowery comparison of military and healthcare expenditure. Or it could have meant a greater spending on infrastructure. The point is, cold war military expenditures re: protecting Europe did not enrich us (except to the extent that we actually contained Russia, and to the extent that a contained Russia enriched us... well, it's certainly much less than the enrichment Denmark enjoyed, and I tend to believe that lower taxes, more social spending and/or more infrastructure spending would have been a better use of that money.)
Obvious off-topic troll is obvious. Your writing patterns give you away. You're no desire to engage in real debate and I've no more desire to respond to you except to warn others to not bother responding. Go register for an account if you want to have a real debate with accountability.
even when confronted by criticism, you can dismiss it easily
Only because you say very, very stupid things. Your "criticism" was entirely based on a very bad parsing of my very short, very clear post asking that, OTHER THAN PROTECTION FROM RUSSIA, what value did we get out of Greenland?
If I say something stupid, I never hesitate to own up.
I didn't say percentage of GDP; I said health care subsidy, i.e. taxes used to subsidize the healthcare costs of individuals.
Our spending more of our GDP on healthcare is an direct result of the government not being involved in dealing with the costs of healthcare (this is often characterized as us having a more pro-free market healthcare system but this is absurd--our government still regulates the hell out of medicine, thus ensuring that prices are kept artificially high. In our current setup, primary care physicians and pharmacists are basically parasites that wouldn't exist in a truly free market... but that's a rant for another day.)
I bet half the people who said "C" actually meant C++. There's really no reason to use C...
Meh. Objective-C is a strict superset of C, not an "almost exact" superset. (You could cut and paste any snippet of C code into an Objective-C program and be guaranteed that it will function properly.) Furthermore, its message passing style objects (similar to Ruby's or Smalltalk's implemention of objects) are more powerful than C++'s objects in that they can parse or ignore the "message" (arguments) as they please.
It's a bit of a pity that Objective-C development is largely dominated by Apple (the result of Steve Jobs bringing his enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP with him when he rejoined), but it's entirely possible to write Objective-C applications for other platforms.
C++'s advantages largely emanate from its popularity--it's popular because it's popular, i.e. there are a bunch of self-sustaining advantages that come with popularity. In the hands of an expert, it's certainly not a bad language and when used correctly it can be considerably more powerful than C while remaining just as fast but taken as a whole, disregarding the advantages its momentum has given it... it's not a great language, and it never was.
I could go even further and argue that the noun-centric syntax favored by many OO languages (including many that use Smalltalk-style OO) is obnoxious and unnecessarily cumbersome, but that's a rant for another day.
Oh please, do explain this. The concept of an echo chamber is you hear back similar words and ideas, confirming your biases and reassuring you that you're not alone.
That said, if you want to tell me whose words and ideas you identify as the ones you wish to associate with, feel free, I'll know who to avoid.
Thomas Paine, Kurt Vonnegut, Rénald Luzier, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Samuel Clemens, Eric Blair, Joanna Rutkowska, Lao-tzu, H.L. Mencken, Anne Frank.
There's a reason why many people mention revenue before profit. Actual profit/loss from year to year often isn't a good indicator of a company's potential, particularly an expanding company or a company with mostly static (as opposed to marginal) costs.
Twitter must have one of the lowest marginal costs of all time. It's text, for chrissake. No massive bandwidth, no constant barrage of DMCA complaints, no hiring people to sit around and watch flagged videos to decide on bans. They just push around 140 character messages all day long. If Twitter can't monetize that, they are doing something horrendously wrong.
It's almost certain that they're trying to innovate, invest, push partnerships, acquire and run other stuff like Vine, and all of these extravagances stuff exceeds their ad and market research revenue... or maybe they just have a bunch of useless cogs who aren't doing much of anything. Regardless of the reasons, any purchaser could surely storm in and trim it down and make it profitable almost overnight.
A likely explanation is the purchasers don't like the implicit valuation they're seeing. Since Twitter is a public company, the directors/executives can't set an arbitrary price. If Wall Street says it's worth $X based on some hype or optimism that just won't go away, but $X is way too high to justify based on revenue (not profit), then there's not much anyone can do. The free market works in mysterious ways.
There's also the fact that Twitter's content policies are getting them embroiled in some drama and that's something the purchaser may not want to deal with. It's not inherent in a technical sense to what Twitter is doing--they could easily pass the buck to their users with WOT blocklists and never actually delete or censor any legal tweet ever again, but most prospective purchasers don't want to consider this... the corporate world is too used to the idea of a curated walled garden being the best or only way to run things. Cyberbullying and 'hate speech' are still hot buzzwords, and corporations that promote actual free speech (as opposed to simply saying that they do) are few and far between.
So... Twitter is coming with baggage. You could try to reform the baggage, but most prospective buyers aren't willing to simply ditch it. I'm unsure precisely how big of a deal this is (I don't quite think Anita Sarkeesian has single handedly destroyed the company's value, as some people have implied), but I'm convinced it's probably playing a factor here. Prospective buyers want Twitter for the synergy. They see the drama, and they see the potential for that synergy to backfire and damage their other brand...
Given that all I can find in the way of comments of it seems to be self-aggrandizement from atheists wishing to present themselves as the victims
We were the victims. The men I claim as my brothers were killed in Bangladesh.
while turning a blind eye yourself to such problems as tragic deaths in factories in Bangladesh
Are you the same AC? Or are all ACs like this? I'm beginning to see why most people just ignore you people.
Strawman, liar, hijacking without apology, expecting me to provide citations for some lazy asshole who won't even bother making a slashdot account... yeah, I think I'm done with this.
Well, substitute "paid less taxes" if you must. Either way, America would have been more enriched. Our military expenditures (particularly post-1940s, after most of the really nifty stuff had been invented) cannot be viewed as anything other than a huge net negative drain on the economy.
And like I said, I'm not sure intentions matter all that much here. This is about the welfare of Denmark--costs and benefits. We didn't do what we did to the detriment of Denmark, yes? Did they spend less on defense than they would have otherwise, or more? (This somewhat depends on whether or not you'd believe they would have given up... I tend to believe that Europeans would've played for time as long as they could by increasing their defense, spending far more than what they spent knowing that America was at their back. But, this is admittedly mostly just a gut feeling.)
Name three people who share my general outlook. Go on.
Yours? I could easily find thousands with less than a day of searching.
And you still haven't owned up for your gibberish about me claiming that Greenland was worthless. I still don't even know if you understand the purpose of this conversation; seems more likely you just like throwing out your $0.02 on the cold war, regardless of its relevance.
I see, so your position is that all Muslims are extremists.
Islamist is not a synonym for Muslim, nor is "jihadi" an acceptable synonym for Islamist (as some people try to claim) because most Islamists are able to operate in the open by simply prefacing their comments with a nominal rejection of violence (often espousing terribly bad justifications for doing so.)
I do sometimes use the word "Islamist" a bit too loosely insofar as I often am actually referring to "Islamists and conservative Muslims", but the line between those two groups is quite fluid and this has nothing to do with your complaint, which is based entirely on ignorance.
This is the second time this week someone has misundestood this term. I want to think that it's not a common enough word, but I suspect it's more likely that there are tons of people out there who have no idea that the Muslim world isn't divided between jihadists and moderates. Hundreds of millions of Muslims (but not all Muslims, of course) are fighting for the right to create theocratic hellholes...hellholes that go far beyond what the vast majority of Evangelical Christians are advocating; it's just that they have enough sense to occasionally preface their rhetoric with a few words of condemnation for ISIS or whatever.
If you are in fact ignorant of the Islamist movement that has tendrils around the globe, you may want to refrain on commenting on anything pertaining to controversies surrounding Islam until you've had time to read up on it. I mean to say that in the friendliest possible tone of voice.
Which Christians or right wingers are being censored on Twitter? And before you trot out Milo, who was banned for posting racist garbage to a black woman's Twitter feed, keep in mind he wasn't censored for being a Christian or a right winger, he was banned for being an asshole.
I don't really buy that was their only reason; it might not have even been their primary reason. He was de-verified by Twitter prior to this. He was also temp-banned by Twitter immediately after the Pulse shooting due to a result of a sustained flagging campaign by Muslims. (This isn't some conspiracy theory; they were open about trying to get him taken off of Twitter.)
I don't have another good Twitter example offhand, since I have mostly avoided Twitter like the plague. (Although I have in the past translated some of the comments on Arabic Twitter and they definitely seemed like the sort of thing that would be deleted if said by a Christian on English Twitter.)
Youtube's censorship is what's most troubling me at the moment, particularly of Atheism-is-Unstoppable's video a few months back. (Disclaimer: I'm not a huge fan of either him or Milo, but both men are correct and even compelling on certain specific issues.) They are apparently not allowing anyone to say that they "hate" Muslims, even if they candy coat the shit out of it with " no, not all Muslims are terrorists, I don't hate Muslims on the street to anywhere near the same extent I hate ISIS, I just hate that people are spreading vile nonsense." This, in combination with their almost sickening official video response to the Pulse nightclub, has me very pessimistic the direction they are headed in.
The tiny bit of optimist in me says that maybe if it keeps getting worse, we'll finally see a good pro-free speech platform arise that Joe Sixpack would be willing to use.
He doesn't even know what he's arguing for, and either of you actually think I was arguing that Greenland was strategically worthless to us then I recommend you look into adult literacy classes at your local community college.
I implicitly and explicitly acknowledged that worth. The AC here has been shadow-boxing phantoms, refusing to go back and re-read anything to see what he misunderstood. My thesis is that Denmark shared in that worth, and that it obviously got more out of the NATO arrangement than it paid in.
Are you ready for the coupe de gras? Fine fine, let's do this already:
You asked what the US had to gain "other than" what Denmark was interested in too.
You neglected the "(protection from Russia)" bit. I think that might have made your replies just the tiniest bit wrong-headed. The more you argue that Greenland was vital for us, the more you are arguing my position for me, whilst apparently thinking you are destroying it.
The US policy of the time was to stop communism at any cost with any means necessary
1. There are small hints that you're vaguely aware of my thesis here, but you're still meandering way off point. The high crimes and grand schemes and neoimperialism of America are ENTIRELY irrelevant to this conversation except as they pertain to the enrichment of or detriment of Denmark and her former colony, Greenland.
2. Ask the status quo in Denmark and the rest of Western Europe what their policy was vs. communism. Pretty sure they were a trifle concerned--rightly or wrongly; it doesn't matter. My point stands either way. Being smaller countries, they might have been in less of a position to do anything decisive about it but to pretend that this was only America's fight is just dumb. The elites (along with much of the lower classes) in every single Western European country were fairly goddamn worried, and then fairly goddamn relieved that they didn't have to spend a fortune on militaries when it became clear that NATO was almost exclusively about allowing us to defend them and yes, that does necessitate them giving us land for bases, but that land didn't generate wealth for us except to the extent that we might prosper whenever Russians were contained... BUT THIS WAS A PROSPERITY THAT THE ELITES DENMARK MOST SURELY SHARED IN. I would tend to argue that it's a prosperity the common man tended to share in as well, but you don't even have to concede that point for my primary point here to stand.
That is not saying that the Cold War was conducive, on the whole, to prosperity; I am merely saying that the Cold War sans NATO seems rather unlikely to have led to greater prosperity for Denmark.
3. As the events of the last few years have shown, communism was a bit of a red herring. The real issue was and is Russian imperialism. The McCarthy shit was genuine and genuinely hysterical (and, need I say, very bad for the country), but whether they knew it or not they were locked in an very real battle of wills against an adversary that desired global domination as least as much as we did, and demonstrated a propensity for using much more ruthless tactics than we (for all our evils) tended to use.
From an international geopolitical perspective, Russia without communism turned out to be pretty similar to Russia with communism except their fifth column powers aren't nearly as robust. And if you feel like lecturing me on how Russia's actions in Ukraine are entirely justified for demographic reasons and/or because of our interference in the EU vs. Russian internal political struggle that went on in the years leading up to it... why don't you give it a miss instead. I'm only thinking about your self-esteem here. Baby steps, and all that.
Do you really think basically every European NATO country would have been F-104 and F-16, and soon unfortunate F-35 users, if it hadn't been for the American influence via NATO?
I think that if NATO didn't exist, the chance that European countries would've spent and would be spending LESS on their defense is virtually zero. The welfare states of Europe are built, in part, on a foundation of American paternal protection (and yes, with that comes paternalistic condescension and geopolitical games). Peek before that, and there's the Marshall Plan money. Peek a little before that, and there's America saving the whole damn thing from Germany.
I don't have a problem with admitting any of this any more than
I'll debate anyone on anything for hours, but I've no interest in pandering to a coward who likes to play psychologist. Do you actually encounter any/many people who are eager to sit here and argue about your half-baked psychological analyses instead of debating the subject at hand? It's off-topic and boring and you aren't very good at it.
Wishful thinking carried to the extreme. If DRM markedly decreased sales it would have been abandoned long ago; instead, I've watched gamers routinely snub GOG copies of a game in favor of Steam copies to the point GOG had to create their own Steamlike client just to placate them. Cloud DRM implies a Big Brother awareness of what you're doing at all time; this awareness has been leveraged, as an afterthought, to offer to features that people will excessively fawn over.
Economics 101 should be that people are morons. Particularly when they pretend to be experts in fields they clearly know nothing about, but also in their capacity as consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
Go have a beer (or some haldol) and re-read what I just said very slowly, then re-read what the OP said (which I quoted), then re-read what Trump said, bearing in mind that I'm not for Trump.
Did Trump "brag" that he did something like that? No, no he didn't. My only point here is about how dumb it is to say that Trump said something that he clearly did not fucking say.
This is about people lying when they summarize Trump's words. I don't say he did or did not sexually assault anyone but if you say "here's proof! He just bragged about committing sexual assault!" and I click on the link and I see him bragging that women let him touch their pussies... I know you are a liar. And/or suffering from some form of aggressive delusional disorder or perhaps some mild to moderate hallucinations.
Raving about some terrible thing that happened to some other woman, in a situation completely unlike what Trump described, is irrelevant to this very specific issue about his words and only makes fence-sitters (and there *are* fence-sitters still out there, many of them people who voted for Obama or Kerry) think that the anti-Trump brigade is completely full of shit.
Meanwhile, Trump is bragging about how he has sexually assaulted multiple women
Except he didn't. He said they "let him" do it. Stop infantilizing women. Let means some form of consent was given.
Trump is a posturing macho jackass, and this incident makes me think even less of him (as if that were possible), and I want to see him lose this election... but this is not the time to be pushing your microaggression, mind-reading , SWJ-ish definition of rape nonsense. Trump implied that these women all wanted to have sex with him and that they let him do stuff. I think Trump was lying when he said that. If there are believable accusers (and I don't say these women are or aren't believable; I haven't had time to look into it. Some of them allegedly have ties to the Clintons), I might even go so far as to say that this makes Trump look more likely to be the kind of person to commit sexual assault.
But he did not admit or brag about sexually assaulting anyone. Anyone who Googles can see that you are lying, and that Trump was clearly implying that all of these women wanted to have sex with him. You shouldn't need to lie to destroy Trump at this stage in the game; you really, really shouldn't.
"My girlfriend let me touch her pussy" does not imply that I sexually assaulted my girlfriend. You people seem to be confused due to the pluralization...or just the fact that Trump is an ass and the whole thing has an pathetically strained macho haze over it.
The consent here was not specified. It could be in any number of things. Generally speaking, these things takes the form of a hand that rests on a thigh or belly for a while and then, if the body language shows this is welcome, slowly moving closer, giving her plenty of time to react. Generally speaking, written paperwork is not involved.
The implication was that all women 'want it' from him. That's the BRAGGING bit, right? When macho jackasses like Trump want to brag, the theme is that women want to have sex with them, not that they have to force themselves on women.
You have a thousand ways to thoroughly tear Trump to shreds for the benefit of the people who are still on the edge in this election. And I really wish you people would do that, but the biggest controversies that the left fixates are invariably the flimsiest. Pushing everything through a SJW filter and assuming that everyone else in the country is going to make the same "most men are rapists" assumption as you... is not a good gambit to be making at this stage in the game.
So what does "they let you do it" mean in your vocabulary? I'm using standard American English, where "let" means consent was given, implied or otherwise.
I don't talk like this. My friends don't talk like this. It obviously sounds like some exaggerated macho crap, but the impression he is conveying (truthfully or not, and I'm guessing "not") is that all women submit to his advances. That's what "let you do it" means. He didn't say some deeply disturbing thing about how they fight at first or something--he basically was saying he was some kind of stud god whom any woman would gladly submit to sexual contact with.
The worst thing the left can possibly do is lie to try to make Trump look bad. You don't NEED to lie, god damn it! But you are. And people who are on the fence can easily tell that you are lying--it's just a Google away.
immediately before that*
And immediately he said that, he said "they let you do it." Let means consent. Why lie about this? Why exaggerate? You're hurting your own cause.
Yes, the phrasing is crass and tediously macho. No I've never talked like this in my life. But let's just do a little experiment here with some singular masculine pronouns:
"He let me borrow his car."
"He let me kiss him."
" He let me do it--I could do anything I wanted. I could grab him by the dick."
Does ANY of this sound plausibly non-consensual to you? It sounds obviously exaggerated to me, like a guy claiming all women were attracted to and submissive to him. None of that sounds like sexual assault. If he made a comment about them like "not wanting it at first but then they stop fighting", now THAT would sound like sexual assault... but he explicitly said they let him.
You have fifteen million legitimate ways to tear Trump to pieces but every single one of them that you people fixate on, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, is based on some truly demented logic bordering on lies. Yes, by all means, let's fucking turn this into a SJW three ring circus where all sex is rape without forms filled out in triplicate, talking in this lame "alpha" way implies a lack of consent. Let's make sure that we scream the loudest about issues like this so that every single person on the fence in this election can look into it and see it's bullshit.
The man is a liar and a moron and a goon. You really shouldn't need to make up more shit to torpedo him.
Just last night I mentioned in the "No One Wants to Buy Twitter" thread that I probably conflate "Islamist" and "conservative Muslim" pretty frequently. The line between the two is pretty fluid, but it's a distinction I shouldn't gloss over as much as I end up doing (largely out of laziness.)
And here, I'll do it right now: substitute "rarely" for never. Never was obviously a rhetorical exaggeration on my part.
You see? It's easy. And I apply the same principle to talking about the errors and wrongdoings of America. Admit it, correct it where it's possible/reasonable to and then move on. You should try it sometime.
Or those whose words you really do admire.
Heh, you think I'm a pretentious name-dropper like Brian? Well, I enjoy talking about these people and I've a half hour to kill so... why not:
Paine for unparalleled courage and vision and tenacity in refusing to deviate from what was right. He was the only person you could rightly call the godfather of the Enlightment; he didn't formulate its precepts, but he had the courage and the eloquence to bring them to the masses. He was much more courageous than that other, much more successful and well-known man who shared his first name and much of his world view; however, in the end his hatred for the establishment in England probably went too far, and although he was ill-used by many people, he probably should not have harped on and wallowed in personal offense for quite so long.
Vonnegut for understanding the human condition, particularly in his underrated Mother Night and Sirens of Titan in addition to his magnum opus, Cat's Cradle. I find it baffling that so many say that Slaughterhouse Five is his magnum opus; it's top self Vonnegut, sure, but it's a bit self-indulgent (eh... understandably so) and not nearly as profound as people make it out to be.
His political views and advocacy were stunted, particularly in the later years of his life. It seems clear enough that scar tissue prevented him from digging any deeper, and given the man's life that's really quite understandable... but still, he was far too glib when talking about issues like Iraq. I wish he could have gone back and re-written Player Piano when he was older. Give it an injection of that fully matured Vonnegut irony, and it would instantly become one of the best science fiction novels of all time.
Luz, I know mainly from his Vice interview and the cover of the survivor issue. That's all I need to know. Probably we disagree on a variety of economic issues, but it's clear the man is a warrior and a humanist of the highest caliber. I'm sure the "die on my feet rather than live on my knees" Charb and others deserve to go on this list as well, but this was all off the cuff, and unfortunately I do not speak French.
Christopher for being one of the greatest orators who has ever lived (though only a good writer, not great.) His combined articulation and insight like no one else and it's astonishing how he could do this even with off the cuff responses. He was wrong on a number of things, particularly Iraq and also (interestingly enough) when he argued about WWII, but he was usually wrong in interesting and useful ways.
Sam for being a paragon of reason and intellectual honesty. Nonetheless, he has been very sloppy with a number of his arguments, a couple of which I have dissected at length in his official forum (under this handle.) Compared to the rest of humanity, his sloppiness is minimal but he is capable of doing much better. In recent years he is also shrinking from the fight... understandable, but lamentable. And he's allowed a rabid SJW (a term I don't use lightly) to literally take over his forum.
Mark Twain for being insightful, self-critical, humane, rightfully disdainful of the peddlers of nonsense and, as if he were a more prudent version of Paine, being able to see far ahead of his era. In the words of Vonnegut, he's an American saint. Off the top of my head, I can't remember what I disagree with him on but I'm sure there are plenty of things.
Orwell for being, like Paine and Christopher, able and willing to stay true to his ideals and sharply criticize the Revolution, even though he did think a revolution was called for. And also for using his self-disgust to better himself. I'm sure I'm critical of something he's advocated as well, but I'm shamefully under-read here (particularly his nonfiction.)
Joanna for possessing one of the greatest minds, visions and attitudes in industry. She has the uncanny ability to be right so often, in such an a
And as I said elsewhere, you can substitute "paid lower taxes" if you don't like my more flowery comparison of military and healthcare expenditure. Or it could have meant a greater spending on infrastructure. The point is, cold war military expenditures re: protecting Europe did not enrich us (except to the extent that we actually contained Russia, and to the extent that a contained Russia enriched us... well, it's certainly much less than the enrichment Denmark enjoyed, and I tend to believe that lower taxes, more social spending and/or more infrastructure spending would have been a better use of that money.)
The weird part is 90% of your positions are correct, but it's obvious you've put very little thought into your justifications for them.
I can only assume you run in some smart circles and some sense has rubbed off on you, but not any actual critical thinking ability.
Obvious off-topic troll is obvious. Your writing patterns give you away. You're no desire to engage in real debate and I've no more desire to respond to you except to warn others to not bother responding. Go register for an account if you want to have a real debate with accountability.
even when confronted by criticism, you can dismiss it easily
Only because you say very, very stupid things. Your "criticism" was entirely based on a very bad parsing of my very short, very clear post asking that, OTHER THAN PROTECTION FROM RUSSIA, what value did we get out of Greenland?
If I say something stupid, I never hesitate to own up.
The industrialized world has repaid the USA with interest, for the Marshall plan, NATO, UN, and their world police activities.
I'd like to see the accounting on that. Granted, a lot of these things are pretty hard to judge since most transactions aren't zero sum.
I didn't say percentage of GDP; I said health care subsidy, i.e. taxes used to subsidize the healthcare costs of individuals.
Our spending more of our GDP on healthcare is an direct result of the government not being involved in dealing with the costs of healthcare (this is often characterized as us having a more pro-free market healthcare system but this is absurd--our government still regulates the hell out of medicine, thus ensuring that prices are kept artificially high. In our current setup, primary care physicians and pharmacists are basically parasites that wouldn't exist in a truly free market... but that's a rant for another day.)
I bet half the people who said "C" actually meant C++. There's really no reason to use C...
Meh. Objective-C is a strict superset of C, not an "almost exact" superset. (You could cut and paste any snippet of C code into an Objective-C program and be guaranteed that it will function properly.) Furthermore, its message passing style objects (similar to Ruby's or Smalltalk's implemention of objects) are more powerful than C++'s objects in that they can parse or ignore the "message" (arguments) as they please.
It's a bit of a pity that Objective-C development is largely dominated by Apple (the result of Steve Jobs bringing his enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP with him when he rejoined), but it's entirely possible to write Objective-C applications for other platforms.
C++'s advantages largely emanate from its popularity--it's popular because it's popular, i.e. there are a bunch of self-sustaining advantages that come with popularity. In the hands of an expert, it's certainly not a bad language and when used correctly it can be considerably more powerful than C while remaining just as fast but taken as a whole, disregarding the advantages its momentum has given it... it's not a great language, and it never was.
I could go even further and argue that the noun-centric syntax favored by many OO languages (including many that use Smalltalk-style OO) is obnoxious and unnecessarily cumbersome, but that's a rant for another day.
Oh, you can be alone in your echo chamber
Oh please, do explain this. The concept of an echo chamber is you hear back similar words and ideas, confirming your biases and reassuring you that you're not alone.
That said, if you want to tell me whose words and ideas you identify as the ones you wish to associate with, feel free, I'll know who to avoid.
Thomas Paine, Kurt Vonnegut, Rénald Luzier, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Samuel Clemens, Eric Blair, Joanna Rutkowska, Lao-tzu, H.L. Mencken, Anne Frank.
There's a reason why many people mention revenue before profit. Actual profit/loss from year to year often isn't a good indicator of a company's potential, particularly an expanding company or a company with mostly static (as opposed to marginal) costs.
Twitter must have one of the lowest marginal costs of all time. It's text, for chrissake. No massive bandwidth, no constant barrage of DMCA complaints, no hiring people to sit around and watch flagged videos to decide on bans. They just push around 140 character messages all day long. If Twitter can't monetize that, they are doing something horrendously wrong.
It's almost certain that they're trying to innovate, invest, push partnerships, acquire and run other stuff like Vine, and all of these extravagances stuff exceeds their ad and market research revenue... or maybe they just have a bunch of useless cogs who aren't doing much of anything. Regardless of the reasons, any purchaser could surely storm in and trim it down and make it profitable almost overnight.
A likely explanation is the purchasers don't like the implicit valuation they're seeing. Since Twitter is a public company, the directors/executives can't set an arbitrary price. If Wall Street says it's worth $X based on some hype or optimism that just won't go away, but $X is way too high to justify based on revenue (not profit), then there's not much anyone can do. The free market works in mysterious ways.
There's also the fact that Twitter's content policies are getting them embroiled in some drama and that's something the purchaser may not want to deal with. It's not inherent in a technical sense to what Twitter is doing--they could easily pass the buck to their users with WOT blocklists and never actually delete or censor any legal tweet ever again, but most prospective purchasers don't want to consider this... the corporate world is too used to the idea of a curated walled garden being the best or only way to run things. Cyberbullying and 'hate speech' are still hot buzzwords, and corporations that promote actual free speech (as opposed to simply saying that they do) are few and far between.
So... Twitter is coming with baggage. You could try to reform the baggage, but most prospective buyers aren't willing to simply ditch it. I'm unsure precisely how big of a deal this is (I don't quite think Anita Sarkeesian has single handedly destroyed the company's value, as some people have implied), but I'm convinced it's probably playing a factor here. Prospective buyers want Twitter for the synergy. They see the drama, and they see the potential for that synergy to backfire and damage their other brand...
Given that all I can find in the way of comments of it seems to be self-aggrandizement from atheists wishing to present themselves as the victims
We were the victims. The men I claim as my brothers were killed in Bangladesh.
while turning a blind eye yourself to such problems as tragic deaths in factories in Bangladesh
Are you the same AC? Or are all ACs like this? I'm beginning to see why most people just ignore you people.
Strawman, liar, hijacking without apology, expecting me to provide citations for some lazy asshole who won't even bother making a slashdot account... yeah, I think I'm done with this.
Well, substitute "paid less taxes" if you must. Either way, America would have been more enriched. Our military expenditures (particularly post-1940s, after most of the really nifty stuff had been invented) cannot be viewed as anything other than a huge net negative drain on the economy.
And like I said, I'm not sure intentions matter all that much here. This is about the welfare of Denmark--costs and benefits. We didn't do what we did to the detriment of Denmark, yes? Did they spend less on defense than they would have otherwise, or more? (This somewhat depends on whether or not you'd believe they would have given up... I tend to believe that Europeans would've played for time as long as they could by increasing their defense, spending far more than what they spent knowing that America was at their back. But, this is admittedly mostly just a gut feeling.)
Name three people who share my general outlook. Go on.
Yours? I could easily find thousands with less than a day of searching.
And you still haven't owned up for your gibberish about me claiming that Greenland was worthless. I still don't even know if you understand the purpose of this conversation; seems more likely you just like throwing out your $0.02 on the cold war, regardless of its relevance.
I see, so your position is that all Muslims are extremists.
Islamist is not a synonym for Muslim, nor is "jihadi" an acceptable synonym for Islamist (as some people try to claim) because most Islamists are able to operate in the open by simply prefacing their comments with a nominal rejection of violence (often espousing terribly bad justifications for doing so.)
I do sometimes use the word "Islamist" a bit too loosely insofar as I often am actually referring to "Islamists and conservative Muslims", but the line between those two groups is quite fluid and this has nothing to do with your complaint, which is based entirely on ignorance.
This is the second time this week someone has misundestood this term. I want to think that it's not a common enough word, but I suspect it's more likely that there are tons of people out there who have no idea that the Muslim world isn't divided between jihadists and moderates. Hundreds of millions of Muslims (but not all Muslims, of course) are fighting for the right to create theocratic hellholes...hellholes that go far beyond what the vast majority of Evangelical Christians are advocating; it's just that they have enough sense to occasionally preface their rhetoric with a few words of condemnation for ISIS or whatever.
If you are in fact ignorant of the Islamist movement that has tendrils around the globe, you may want to refrain on commenting on anything pertaining to controversies surrounding Islam until you've had time to read up on it. I mean to say that in the friendliest possible tone of voice.
Which Christians or right wingers are being censored on Twitter? And before you trot out Milo, who was banned for posting racist garbage to a black woman's Twitter feed, keep in mind he wasn't censored for being a Christian or a right winger, he was banned for being an asshole.
I don't really buy that was their only reason; it might not have even been their primary reason. He was de-verified by Twitter prior to this. He was also temp-banned by Twitter immediately after the Pulse shooting due to a result of a sustained flagging campaign by Muslims. (This isn't some conspiracy theory; they were open about trying to get him taken off of Twitter.)
I don't have another good Twitter example offhand, since I have mostly avoided Twitter like the plague. (Although I have in the past translated some of the comments on Arabic Twitter and they definitely seemed like the sort of thing that would be deleted if said by a Christian on English Twitter.)
Youtube's censorship is what's most troubling me at the moment, particularly of Atheism-is-Unstoppable's video a few months back. (Disclaimer: I'm not a huge fan of either him or Milo, but both men are correct and even compelling on certain specific issues.) They are apparently not allowing anyone to say that they "hate" Muslims, even if they candy coat the shit out of it with " no, not all Muslims are terrorists, I don't hate Muslims on the street to anywhere near the same extent I hate ISIS, I just hate that people are spreading vile nonsense." This, in combination with their almost sickening official video response to the Pulse nightclub, has me very pessimistic the direction they are headed in.
The tiny bit of optimist in me says that maybe if it keeps getting worse, we'll finally see a good pro-free speech platform arise that Joe Sixpack would be willing to use.
He doesn't even know what he's arguing for, and either of you actually think I was arguing that Greenland was strategically worthless to us then I recommend you look into adult literacy classes at your local community college.
I implicitly and explicitly acknowledged that worth. The AC here has been shadow-boxing phantoms, refusing to go back and re-read anything to see what he misunderstood. My thesis is that Denmark shared in that worth, and that it obviously got more out of the NATO arrangement than it paid in.
You asked what the US had to gain "other than" what Denmark was interested in too.
You neglected the "(protection from Russia)" bit. I think that might have made your replies just the tiniest bit wrong-headed. The more you argue that Greenland was vital for us, the more you are arguing my position for me, whilst apparently thinking you are destroying it.
The US policy of the time was to stop communism at any cost with any means necessary
1. There are small hints that you're vaguely aware of my thesis here, but you're still meandering way off point. The high crimes and grand schemes and neoimperialism of America are ENTIRELY irrelevant to this conversation except as they pertain to the enrichment of or detriment of Denmark and her former colony, Greenland.
2. Ask the status quo in Denmark and the rest of Western Europe what their policy was vs. communism. Pretty sure they were a trifle concerned--rightly or wrongly; it doesn't matter. My point stands either way. Being smaller countries, they might have been in less of a position to do anything decisive about it but to pretend that this was only America's fight is just dumb. The elites (along with much of the lower classes) in every single Western European country were fairly goddamn worried, and then fairly goddamn relieved that they didn't have to spend a fortune on militaries when it became clear that NATO was almost exclusively about allowing us to defend them and yes, that does necessitate them giving us land for bases, but that land didn't generate wealth for us except to the extent that we might prosper whenever Russians were contained... BUT THIS WAS A PROSPERITY THAT THE ELITES DENMARK MOST SURELY SHARED IN. I would tend to argue that it's a prosperity the common man tended to share in as well, but you don't even have to concede that point for my primary point here to stand.
That is not saying that the Cold War was conducive, on the whole, to prosperity; I am merely saying that the Cold War sans NATO seems rather unlikely to have led to greater prosperity for Denmark.
3. As the events of the last few years have shown, communism was a bit of a red herring. The real issue was and is Russian imperialism. The McCarthy shit was genuine and genuinely hysterical (and, need I say, very bad for the country), but whether they knew it or not they were locked in an very real battle of wills against an adversary that desired global domination as least as much as we did, and demonstrated a propensity for using much more ruthless tactics than we (for all our evils) tended to use.
From an international geopolitical perspective, Russia without communism turned out to be pretty similar to Russia with communism except their fifth column powers aren't nearly as robust. And if you feel like lecturing me on how Russia's actions in Ukraine are entirely justified for demographic reasons and/or because of our interference in the EU vs. Russian internal political struggle that went on in the years leading up to it... why don't you give it a miss instead. I'm only thinking about your self-esteem here. Baby steps, and all that.
Do you really think basically every European NATO country would have been F-104 and F-16, and soon unfortunate F-35 users, if it hadn't been for the American influence via NATO?
I think that if NATO didn't exist, the chance that European countries would've spent and would be spending LESS on their defense is virtually zero. The welfare states of Europe are built, in part, on a foundation of American paternal protection (and yes, with that comes paternalistic condescension and geopolitical games). Peek before that, and there's the Marshall Plan money. Peek a little before that, and there's America saving the whole damn thing from Germany.
I don't have a problem with admitting any of this any more than
I'll debate anyone on anything for hours, but I've no interest in pandering to a coward who likes to play psychologist. Do you actually encounter any/many people who are eager to sit here and argue about your half-baked psychological analyses instead of debating the subject at hand? It's off-topic and boring and you aren't very good at it.
Wishful thinking carried to the extreme. If DRM markedly decreased sales it would have been abandoned long ago; instead, I've watched gamers routinely snub GOG copies of a game in favor of Steam copies to the point GOG had to create their own Steamlike client just to placate them. Cloud DRM implies a Big Brother awareness of what you're doing at all time; this awareness has been leveraged, as an afterthought, to offer to features that people will excessively fawn over.
Economics 101 should be that people are morons. Particularly when they pretend to be experts in fields they clearly know nothing about, but also in their capacity as consumers.