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  1. #1936
    Ol' Doogie, Circa 2005 GindyPosts's Avatar
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    Oh, for ****'s sake. The moon is making your kid autistic?!

  2. #1937
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by PwrdOn View Post
    There are plenty of legitimate reasons to despise China and its growing influence on the world, but none of the people that vocally hate them actually care about any of that stuff. Fundamentally, people are just especially triggered by China trying to dick over Western countries in the same way that the West has been dicking over the rest of the world for so long, being on the other side of that equation is not really a comfortable or familiar position.

    As far as the Uighurs go, I don't think that any amount of well-meaning concern shown by the international community is going to do anything to help their plight, if anything the more sympathy they garner the more that the Chinese government will double down on the repressive policies. Just look at what happened to the Tibetans, they were quite the cause celebre for a while but the support stopped well short of actually doing anything to help them, and by this point China has basically beaten the Tibetans completely into submission, to the point where their international supporters basically just gave up and moved on to something else. China is banking that they can repeat the same trick with the Uighurs, except that this time they are dealing with an ethnic group that doesn't have any of the inherent charms of the rustic and peace loving Tibetans, or a charismatic leader like the Dalai Lama, so they are confident they can get away with a lot more.
    Sure. I am not saying 'don't criticize China'. I am saying that anti-Chinese demagougery serves a useful purpose in our politics to many, which usually does not criticize China for things like, say, its treatment of Uighurs.

  3. #1938
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    Quote Originally Posted by JDogindy View Post
    The Chinese government is well aware that the international perception (particularly Western) of Islam is that everyone who is a Muslim must be a terrorist or violently opposed to progressive ideas, so it's okay to be mean to them 'cuz they're bad people. It's not going to be talked about for those obvious reasons; Tibet had that appeal to the average layperson due to the allure of the Dalai Lama as well as the mystique of the region itself, while you couldn't get the average man or woman to identify Xinijang on a map.

    The absurd part is that... Islamic countries themselves are okay with this abuse, since A) it's not their people being oppressed, and B) China helps feed their coffers.
    The crackdown in Xinjiang is based on race, not religion, since ethnically Chinese Muslims aren't being targeted at all and Uighurs, like most of their cousins from the 'Stan countries, practice a pretty loose form of Islam that would be unrecognizable to most Middle Easterners. And while I'm sure Middle Easterners do care about what's going on there, it's sort of counterproductive for them to speak up, since showing solidarity with Uighurs only confirms the Chinese government's suspicions that foreign countries are conspiring to break off that chunk of territory, which was the rationale for the repression in the first place.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    Sure. I am not saying 'don't criticize China'. I am saying that anti-Chinese demagougery serves a useful purpose in our politics to many, which usually does not criticize China for things like, say, its treatment of Uighurs.
    Anti-Chinese demagoguery also suits the interests of the Chinese government perfectly, the idea of a bunch of evil foreigners trying to take China down a peg out of spite is exactly the image they want to present to the people to whip up the nationalistic frenzy that they need to tide them through the oncoming economic transition.
    Last edited by PwrdOn; 05-26-2019 at 07:49 AM.

  4. #1939
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Not Hiring: Georgia Mayor Allegedly Says Her City Isn’t Ready For Black Employees

    For Black Employees
    Michael H. Cottman, BlackAmericaWeb.com Michael H. Cottman, BlackAmericaWeb.com

    If you’re Black and applying for a job in the mostly all-white town of Hoschton, Georgia, you may want to reconsider: The Mayor doesn’t want you.

    According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mayor Theresa Kenerly told a member of the City Council she yanked the resume of Keith Henry from a group of four finalists “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this.”

    Not ready for a Black executive in 2019?

    Henry was a talented, qualified and competent candidate for the city administrator job in the small town of Hoschton, population 1,700, about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. But 55 years after former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act in 1964, Kenerly either doesn’t think her town is ready for an African-American administrator – or Kenerly isn’t ready to forge a professional working relationship with a Black man who would wield a significant amount of power around the tiny township.
    “I can’t say I said it or not said it,” she told reporters according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

    She later issued this statement:

    “I do not recall making the statement attributed to me regarding any applicant for the City Administrator position, and I deny that I made any statement that suggest (sic) prejudice,” she said.

    Another case of selective memory?

    Here’s what we know: Henry said he was interviewed by Kenerly over the phone. He told a reporter that he realizes racism in America is prevalent but he didn’t feel Kenerly was particularly racist.
    Kenerly’s alleged comments were made in a closed-door meeting of the City Council where a City Council member overheard Kenerly whisper her remarks. But then, another council member, Hope Weeks, threw Kenerly under the bus.

    “She proceeded to tell me that the candidate was real good, but he was Black and we don’t have a big black population and she just didn’t think Hoschton was ready for that,” Weeks wrote in her account, according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

    Weeks told Councilwoman Susan Powers about Kenerly’s comments, and both women told City Attorney Thomas Mitchell.

    “Both of us were just appalled, so we thought we had to do something to stop it,” Powers said.
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  5. #1940
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    What's going on India should terrify everyone.



    The rise of this sort of fascism in India is /deeply/ worrisome.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...XIGE4K0n4gDOyE
    The right sure does have a lot of extremists that are supposedly devout theists. Doesn't matter if they are Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever, they love to terrorize/kill for their religion .

  6. #1941
    Horrific Experiment JCAll's Avatar
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    Okay, wait, so...vaccines are bad but drinking laundry detergent is okay?
    I can't, I don't, I can't. I just wish the world would stop disappointing me.

  7. #1942
    Horrific Experiment JCAll's Avatar
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    I'm not sure if people are just really bad at being racist, or if they think being this open about it will win votes.

  8. #1943
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Andrew Sullivan writes about what HBO's Chernobyl reveals about totalitarianism and socialism.

    HBO’s Chernobyl doesn’t exactly entice at first blush. It’s a grisly three-hour story of the worst nuclear accident in history. It doesn’t have a happy ending or a happy beginning — it starts off with the main character dutifully recording all he remembers of the incident on a series of audiotapes, before hanging himself, as the KGB waits outside. Then we shift back two years in time for the story to begin. But it is masterfully wrought, vividly filmed, and beautifully acted. I really had no idea what happens to the human body after being exposed even for an hour or so to so much lethal radiation — at one point, we’re told that it’s the equivalent of enduring 4 million simultaneous X-rays. But then you see it — first as a kind of bad sunburn, and then the slow and agonizing decay of the body into a terrifying burning-alive corpse, followed by a small and deceptive reprieve before a screaming, medieval tormented death out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. No morphine, we are told, can quell the pain.

    It’s a classic fight against time, and as a disaster flick, it has many fateful moments. But what makes it fascinating is its depiction of how a communist state reacts to such a catastrophe. There is zero institutional concern for human life, because individuals only really count as threats to the system, rather than ends in themselves. In a mandatorily atheist communist world, there are merely bodies, not souls, usefulness, not dignity. And without anything like a free press, the inhabitants of the nearby city know nothing for days except that there has been a fire and explosion at the plant.

    So they stay put, hoping for the best, wondering why their sons and husbands and fathers are taking so long to end their work shifts — so much collateral damage to prevent mass panic or any inkling of the reality seeping out into more general public awareness. It’s only when Scandinavian monitors detect radiation in the atmosphere and identify it as Soviet in origin does Moscow concede that anything is awry. By then hundreds of thousands have had their lives potentially shortened, because the Big Lie comes before everything else. They lie about everything, everything.

    You begin to see how anti-human this system was. Even as the Soviet Union was fast losing any internal legitimacy, vast swathes of ordinary human existence could be sacrificed with a wave of the hand to avoid admission of elite or ideological failure. It’s sickening. And this is Gorbachev treating humans like so much dirt — not Lenin or Stalin.

    There are, of course, flickers of humanity, feats of ordinary heroism, and extreme courage. You watch as a hardened top Soviet official is sent to the site in complete denial, intent on maintaining party discipline and control, and over the following weeks he begins slowly to crumble inside. Not of radiation (although he had probably cut his lifespan to another five years at most); but out of a realization of how foul, incompetent, and monstrous the entire system was. One critical moment comes late in the series when he is asked a question by one of the miners about to sacrifice his life to prevent an even greater catastrophe than the original explosion. And for the first time, he tells the truth. And for the first time, the miner believes him.

    Then there’s the color palette: an endless series of grays and blacks. And the architecture: brutal, concrete, inhuman, vast, ugly, functional. Communism and socialism share this key feature: the lack of color, of variety, of personality, of initiative, and personal pride. But the main undercurrent is fear — fear of the authorities, fear of the KGB, fear of making a mistake, fear of any kind of candor. Everyone is followed and spied upon, including those tasked with following and spying.

    Socialism is not communism. Far from it. It can be democratic, fear can be absent, individual freedom profoundly attenuated but still there. But neither is it social democracy: a capitalist system with a solid welfare state that takes care of its people. Socialism is currently fashionable among the young, who understandably have come to see late capitalism as a failure in improving their lives. But I wish these millennials and Gen-Zers could have some understanding of what living in a socialist society is like. The texture and mood of Chernobyl gives an exaggerated but real sense of it.

    I grew up in socialist Britain, before Thatcher, coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s. The state did indeed control most of the means of production: huge industries owned directly by government, and effectively run by union bosses. The government owned and ran all but a sliver of the entire education and health-care systems, steel and coal production and the auto industry and the trains and water and on and on. Governments came and went, but all-powerful unions really ran the place. And unions, by their very nature, are collective entities, deploying collective punishment in their ongoing struggle to secure as many resources as they could for their members at the expense of consumers and taxpayers.
    He also covers PC excesses of the New York department of education evident in training material on white supremacy.

    If I were to put a time capsule in the ground to alert future generations what it was like to live in 2019, I think I’d include two simple documents: a video and transcript of one of Donald J. Trump’s deranged and unnerving rallies, and a chart used by the New York City schools system to train all its administrators, principals, and supervisors. The chart’s title is “White Supremacy Culture” and you can take a look at it here.

    Back in the day (about five years ago, actually), if you thought of “white supremacy culture” you might have imagined, say, depictions of brutal slavery, crackpot theories of a master race, photographs of burning crosses on lawns, terrifying images of lynchings, or “whites only” signs, or a video of the Charlottesville neo-fascists. You know what I mean. And I think I’d be glad that public schools were educating employees about America’s original sin.

    But that, of course, is not what “white supremacy” has come to mean among woke elites in 2019. And the chart, which is taken from a tome called Dismantling Racism: A Resource Book for Social Change Groups, explains what the term now means. Namely: “being results oriented and diminishing an otherwise-sound process which does not produce measurable results”; “seeing things in terms of good or bad, right or wrong, black or white”; “individualism”; “worship of the written word”; an overemphasis on “politeness”; “perfectionism”; “focusing only on the bottom line.” Now, if I were to give this material every benefit of the doubt, I’d note it’s perfectly reasonable to attempt to mitigate some kinds of obsessive conduct, excessive self-criticism, or distorted perspective among kids. We all know that perfectionism can lead to misery (tell me about it), that short-term thinking can be counterproductive, or that students need to have interpersonal skills as well as mastery of the written material. I’ve no doubt principals and administrators get this. But why on earth is this connected in some way to resisting “whiteness”?

    But what this document clearly does is much more than that. It seems to me that it finds some essential features of success in America (or anywhere else, for that matter) as somehow racially problematic. And so a major school system is effectively telling principals and administrators not to expect the very best of their mainly minority students, not to reward individual effort, or mastery of written English, to instruct students that there are no binary choices between right or wrong, and to banish from their minds any notion of objective truth. The problem with objectivity, it seems, is that it “can lead to the belief that there is an ultimate truth, and that alternative viewpoints or emotions are bad. It’s even inherent in ‘the belief that there is an objective truth.’” This is not just bad education, it’s an assault on the very principles that buttress Western civilization.

    Worse than this, the ideology equates excellence in objective tests with not just whiteness (whatever that is) but white supremacy. And it does this in a school district with enormous racial diversity. It’s hard not to infer that it is an official endorsement — by the schools chancellor no less — of the damaging canard that studying hard in school, doing your homework, and striving for excellence is “acting white.” And this is despite the fact that the ethnic group that is succeeding the most by traditional standards of excellence in New York City’s schools are Asian-Americans. (They comprise 74 percent of students at Stuyvesant High School, because Stuyvesant doesn’t admit students on any other metric than test scores.) Funny, isn’t it, how “white supremacy culture” ends up empowering nonwhites. I’m not sure real white supremacists would be down with that.

    I’m often told that the social-justice left’s assault on individuality, meritocracy, and achievement is a figment of my imagination, or only true in isolated pockets of super-woke academia. But here is one of the largest school systems in the country imposing this ideology on its most important employees, mandating lessons in “whiteness,” allegedly firing women solely because they are white, and indoctrinating an entire generation into associating the virtues of objective truth, academic excellence, and reason with the worst kind of bigotry. If you want to know why liberal democracy is in peril in America, mandatory indoctrination in critical race and gender theory is a factor not to be underrated.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  9. #1944
    Ultimate Member Malvolio's Avatar
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    This is child abuse. Protective Services should remove these children from their homes and place them in foster care, and the parents should be arrested.

  10. #1945
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    Texas state Rep. Jeff Leach (R) said Tuesday that lawmakers had an obligation to ensure Chick-fil-A was able to have stores in every airport across the country.

    His comments come one day after the Republican-controlled Texas state Senate revived a bill that would prevent local governments from impeding Chick-fil-A and other companies based on their religious beliefs, moral convictions, and anti-LGBTQ views.

    “People love Chick-fil-A. You can’t argue with Chick-fil-A’s food and I don’t think you should be able to argue with the organizations that Chick-fil-A chooses to support either,” Leach said, speaking with Fox & Friends.
    ... oh WBE-eeeeeee..

    https://thinkprogress.org/texas-lawm...-3477dd646b53/

  11. #1946
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Jesus H. Christ. That is beyond abominable. Yeah, it damn sure IS child abuse in EVERY sense of the term.
    Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!

  12. #1947
    Ultimate Member Robotman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    Andrew Sullivan writes about what HBO's Chernobyl reveals about totalitarianism and socialism.



    He also covers PC excesses of the New York department of education evident in training material on white supremacy.
    Conservatives always make this giant leap between liberalism/Democratic Socialism and Totalitarianism/Communism. It’s the all or nothing view point we see so often. No left learning politician has ever called for the end of capitalism. Things like wanting a livable wage and equal rights for women, minorities, LGBT, etc does not equate to a dictatorship.

    History has shown that Communism doesn’t work. The last stage of Communism before the supposed utopian society is totalitarianism and you can never get past that stage. But not wanting laissez faire capitalism doesn’t mean we hate the concept of capitalism. We need the free market but we’d also like workers rights to go along with that. “Running the country like a business” is incredibly stupid because the only reason companies give their employees any rights or benefits is because the government makes them.

    But on a side note the Chernobyl series does look fascinating.

  13. #1948
    Invincible Member Kirby101's Avatar
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    Margaret Thatcher was an abomination.
    There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!

  14. #1949
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Author Naomi Wolf was called out on an epic mistake in her latest book.

    Author Naomi Wolf has a new book coming out titled "Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love". It's about the emergence of homosexuality as a concept and its criminalization in 19th-century England.
    ...the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold—first in England and spreading quickly to America—and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men.

    Before 1857 it wasn’t “homosexuality” that was a crime, but simply the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable.
    In a BBC interview with Wolf, her host, historian Matthew Sweet, points out two serious problems with her work. First, she assumes "sodomy" refers to homosexuality, but a key example she uses was a child abuser and it often refers to other sexual offenses.

    Secondly, she assumes the 19th-century legal term "death recorded" (for example) means the convict was executed, when in fact it means the opposite: the sentence of death being merely recorded rather than carried out, because the prisoner was pardoned and freed. A term she thought signaled draconian punishment turns out to demonstrate leniency.
    The fact-check is painful.

    https://twitter.com/thymetikon/statu...503425/video/1

    Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy center, raises interesting questions on medical ethics while describing the French attitude towards homeopathic medicine. Is it worth spending government funding on placebos if it makes the patients happier?

    This is your regular reminder that France’s national health insurance scheme currently pays for homeopathy "medications.

    It is astonishingly cynical but also perhaps a net positive for public health. France has historically had a big problem with overconsumption of meds, especially antibiotics. Consumers simply demand a prescription for a headache or a tummy ache. Prescribing a placebo "works."

    Of course, though, you have to wonder, in a Republic supposedly based on the rule of law, about what essentially amounts to a big lie orchestrated by the government, involving health, science and taxpayer money. (You might even say a "conspiracy.")

    To be clear: the government’s independent health agencies don’t make stuff up about homeopathy. But it is a lie by omission. It is taken for granted by ordinary people that national insurance will pay only for "legitimate" treatments.

    Doctors willingly participate in the conspiracy because it’s easier to prescribe a patient a placebo for a tummy ache than explain that they should just tough it out.

    Homeopathy is enormously popular in France. When Macron’s health minister, a professor of medicine, said on TV that homeopathy isn’t a legitimate treatment, the uproar was massive, with the press very much "teaching the controversy."

    Here’s a professor of pharmacology, awkwardly acknowledging that homeopathy critics "are not wrong" but fretting that if homeopathy is no longer subsidized patients will overuse actual meds w negative impact on public health or turn to dangerous quackery.

    One of the things that foreigners don’t usually realize about France is that the country is positively enamored with pseudo-science.

    France recently banned the retail sale of glyphosate, a popular weed killer, based on the conspiracy theory that it causes cancer. (The fact that all studies show the opposite just shows the power of the agribusiness lobby, Very Serious Politicians explained on TV.)

    It should be no surprise that when it comes to pseudo-environmentalist craziness France is in the big leagues. Greens in the European Parliament say privately that the French Greens are wackjobs. Greens!

    In French psychology, psychoanalysis, which ranks somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scientific credibility scale, still dominates the field, with often disastrous public health consequences, as in the barbaric treatment of autism:

    (A documentary denouncing this was banned after a libel suit. POTUS would love our libel laws.)
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  15. #1950
    Invincible Member Kirby101's Avatar
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    Homeopathy is pure bunk. but our health insurance also pays for some questionable therapies. Still France.....

    As for glyphosate. Yes a recent study said that, other recent studies have said it is cancer causing, and the WHO has said it is. I don't think we have something definitive here art all.
    This action by France is nowhere on par with what they did with Homeopathy.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/01/healt...afe/index.html
    There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!

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