The Old Hack

Well yes but they have been doing that for decades now without actually bringing the US close to socialism so it isn't really comparable.

I feel very tired. Trans visibility day always falls on March 31. Easter happened to fall on March 31. Certain Republican douchevolcanoes decided to pretend to be angered by this and demanded an apology from trans people in a blatant attempt to stir up outrage among their voters. This is offensive in so many ways. Just to mention a few: 1) They are demanding that trans people apologize for existing. They know perfectly well we won't and plan to use our refusal to further outrage their befuddled and frightened voters. 2) Their pretense that it is somehow the responsibility of trans people that a holiday that falls on a different day EVERY YEAR happens to coincide with an unrelated holiday this year. 3) Their use of a holiday meant to honour a man who preached tolerance and acceptance as a tool to further promote hatred and intolerance. 4) Their assumption that their voters are so blisteringly dim-witted so as not to know how calendars work. 5) The possibility that a number of them actually are that dim offends me personally. Sigh.

Currently their stance seems to be that anyone who is not an outright authoritarian fascist is lurching uncontrollably to the left.

To be fair to the shooting from the hip thing, perhaps the shooter though they might as well because the sight was so awful.

Thank you!

We could be immortal, immortal just not for long, for long...

"Project X" sounds kinda like something Elon Musk would come up with so yeah. How about something less impenetrable like "Fire At Will"? (I never did get why so many people seem to hate poor Will.)

Well, from a certain point of view it is. For example, traditionally when you negotiate with Nazis you do it with, say, thirty-ought-sixes fired from an M1. (You are allowed to upgrade to more modern negotiation methods today, of course.) By the time they are finally tired of that you can move on to negotiate their surrender with words. (Give up or we go back to previous methods.) I loved the 'Edwardian' joke in the comments. Possibly because I am like that myself. I have a friend named Elizabeth whom I once cited as the ideal source with whom to consult about Elizabethan English.

So Russia just withdrew its Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol. Think about that for a moment. A much smaller nation with no navy of its own just forced Russia to move its navy back to a safer port in Russia proper. What an amazing feat. https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-withdraws-black-sea-fleet-vessels-from-crimea-base-after-ukrainian-attacks-51d6d4f5

Oh yeah, like Brock Turner. Oh wait, he was a solid American Christian white boy of a good family. My bad, no reason to mention HIM. I mean if we started to consider people like him worthy of note they might never be able to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Obviously, but it also depends at least a little on the hosts treating their guests properly. I daresay stuffing them into ghettos, treating them like trash and not giving them decent schooling might be factors that could aggravate teenagers and make them more likely to act out even to the point of serious crimes. Once while I was riding a bus I witnessed an immigrant innocently approach two Danish girls who told him off. He then left them alone. They, on the other hand, spent the next ten minutes swearing at him, cursing him and insulting him. I tried to soothe him down but finally he had had enough and attacked them. I and another passenger tried to intervene but at that point he broke off and threw a beer bottle at them and fled. I know exactly what the headlines would have read if the tabloids had gotten hold of that one. "DRUNKEN <slur> ATTACKS DANISH GIRLS WITHOUT PROVOCATION." As an aside, I told the driver of the bus to call the police (this was pre cell phone days) but he was himself an immigrant and he was afraid to call the cops. I told him that I would take responsibility for the situation and speak to the cops and then he finally called them. That whole experience spoke volumes of what a minefield immigrants have to navigate here in happy little Denmark. Yeah, you need to show good manners when you are a guest, but it really makes it a lot easier to behave nicely if your host doesn't treat you like trash. With all due respect to laws and customs, I am a lot less motivated to follow them if in doing so I am likely to become a Darwinian example. Oh, that was never in question as far as I am concerned. All I was saying was that if they had had their way my family would shortly after had been en route to a fun little holiday camp and I myself would never have been born. Which was my whole point. Meh, I am unworried. The people doing that are in no risk of being out of work. Still lots of genocidal fascists running around murdering queers Jews illegal immigrants whatever flavour of people they have been told not to like. Once WW2 is finally left so far behind that it is no longer practical to track down its offenders, there will be plenty of new material to work on.

"War is a failure of politics." -- Some American Guy

"All warfare is based on deception, so that tracks." -- Some Chinese Guy, Misquoted

Discussion moved here from military thread: My apologies. I allowed anger to goad me into sarcasm and lack of clarity. Two strikes against me; I will try to avoid a third. I am sorry. I was talking about Denmark in early October, 1943. My family was in hiding, having only a few hours before learned that the Nazis were moving en masse to arrest all Danish Jews and move them to internment camps in Germany or eastern Europe. My grandfather was at the time quite ill and unable to reliably make major decisions and my grandmother decided that the family had to flee to Sweden. After barely dodging Nazi patrols on the eastern coast of Zealand they managed to cross the Sound in a leaky rowboat that almost sank before making it. And here, unfortunately, we arrive at the crux of the matter. My grandmother had no way of knowing whether the Swedes would actually welcome her family or not. She was caught in the refugee's dilemma: flee from horrible danger to an uncertain future. No, it would be the decisions of Swedish politicians and officials whether her family would be welcomed as deserving refugees or arrested and rejected as 'illegal immigrants.' As already mentioned there was a sizable faction in Sweden that wanted to refuse Jews admittance to the country whether for reasons financial or out of fear of offending the Nazis. My grandmother could have done everything right and still faced expulsion on arrival. The difference between a refugee and an illegal immigrant is out of the hands of the people fleeing. They cannot be certain of their welcome or absence thereof. The only surety they have is that their home is no longer safe or even survivable in some cases. They then leave everything they know behind bringing only what they can carry. They go elsewhere in the hopes that they will find better in the end. That these hopes are all too often dashed is hardly anything to blame them for. Using such language as 'illegal immigrants' and them being 'rewarded' for a 'crime' they had no idea they could even be committing is loaded language, and to be frank, it made me lose my temper. It is common propaganda to dehumanize these people as 'being too lazy to work' and also somehow 'coming here to steal our jobs' (I am not sure how these two work together. The logic escapes me, I fear.) Especially since what distinguishes the 'illegal immigrant' from the refugee is an all too often purely arbitrary distinction applied by politicians based on whether they come from 'shithole countries' or are Jewish or of the wrong skin colour/religion. I feel that naming someone 'an illegal immigrant' and then punish them for having this definition applied to them might not be very just.

Following up on this in politics thread.

The same thing occurred to me. Thank you for pointing this out.