Alhazred posted:

MageMage posted:

What site are you getting the English translation from?

Jay Rust posted:

A little late (my fault) but here:

DACK FAYDEN posted:

I had a conversation about this before the election and we conclusively settled on "never better than now, even if now sucks"

turns out I can pinpoint it now, it was the day before the election

Alhazred posted:

I'm doing them myself.

Zesty posted:

America was never great.

The Groper posted:

America was great up until the late 1400's or so

Duke Igthorn posted:

One thing lost in the obvious "He fired someone for bias so that means he's bias???" answers is that bias doesn't change fact. The political affiliation of the Watergate security guard that discovered the break in doesn't change the facts of the break in. So, basically, all of these people are saying "Well OF COURSE they are going to find something incriminating: the people looking for something incriminating hate the person they're investigating" which...I mean...wut?

ratbert90 posted:

I love that the FBI narrative has gone from "There's no collusion -> It's a big nothing burger -> the FBI is bias ->fake evidence!"

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

2

Alkydere posted:

Wait, wait, wait....a reasonable/sane comic with a sober expanded opinion from loving Bok?

Cloud posted:

Yesterday's The i paper:

Rupert Murdoch reshapes media empire with $66bn Disney deal

RuanGacho posted:

This just made me realize that the Mouse is now going to own The Simpsons?

Flipperwaldt posted:

The word is "biased", he's biased, the FBI is biased, jfc.

Panty Saluter posted:

Good, maybe they'll finally euthanize them

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

1

the_steve posted:

Don't get too excited.
It's only because Moore lost, now they all have an excuse to backtrack and pretend they never supported him.

Had he won, they'd all be crowing about how that somehow magically proves he isn't a pedophile.

Duke Igthorn posted:

...wut?

RuanGacho posted:

This just made me realize that the Mouse is now going to own The Simpsons?

Fulchrum posted:

I still can't find any confirmation either way on this. It keeps ranging from people saying all Fox tv stations were excluded, to just Fox News, Fox Business and Fox Sports.

Sandpuppy posted:

4

Xander77 posted:

Oh goddamit.

Edit - Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Dustin Hoffman? G-g-goddamnit! GODDAMNIT! Dustin Hoffman, GODDAMNIIIIT!

Jerry Cotton posted:

The first time I remember an actor (can't remember who it was at all) publicly complain about Dustin Hoffman's horrible sexual advances on set was some time in the late 80s or early 90s. I guess it just wasn't considered a big deal back then. Don't know what this one is about though.

fool_of_sound posted:

BoK was against Moore the entire time. BoK is a giant turd but he does have at least one scruple. He sometimes has a decent opinion on other topics too. Every since Stantis’ brain shattered BoK is probably the most reasonable right wing cartoonist we post.

Rincewinds posted:

Yea, I constantly feel like things are going to Hell, but at the same time I know that objectively there have probably never been a better time, especially socially and politically, and while climate change is a ticking bomb, things are getting better for the majority of people, especially in the developing world. Then again, that's probably the point, the jobs disappearing in the west are helping the developing world, but making us feel like we are in decline because things are on a whole evening out while we blame foreigners instead of billionaires who are constantly moving jobs even out of developing countries to keep wages down. Not to mention that while sweat shops are far from ideal, they are often better than jobs available and they provide income that exceed what people earn normally in those places, increasing the standard of living and the focus should be on improving the conditions rather than closing them down (I sound more like a capitalist the older I get than the socialist I imagine myself to be). And at the end of the day, news about horror and poverty sells more than the stories about development and success, though at the same time, there need be a focus on the problems for there to be pressure of improving society.

Still, I am probably never going to stop worrying about a world controlled by mega corporations and police states, if not just struggling to survive in a collapsing world. No loving way I am becoming a prepper, I would just kill myself after running out of toilet paper anyhow.

Herblock posted:

6. Bang, You're Dead

Many people think of our national sport as baseball — a game involving fair play, team play and individual prowess. This is a misconception. The great American sport is Bang-you're-dead.

It is played at an early age by children, sometimes using the thumb and forefinger, sometimes using toy weapons, and sometimes using real pistols and rifles loaded with real ammunition. The latter are often used accidentally and often used intentionally by Americans of all ages and of all physical and mental conditions. This is a sport in which any number can play, and do — running up a per-capita toll of maimed and killed that far surpasses the other countries of the world.

Compared to this sport, bullfighting, which is often looked upon as cruel and as indicating a morbid fascination with death, is a mild and harmless pastime. In the United States, it is Death in the Afternoon, Death in the Morning, Death at Night, Death Every Hour of Every Day of the Year, Death by Accident, Death by Murder, Death in Anger, Death in Fun — all with that great American sporting device, the gun. Nowhere else in the world is it used so widely or is it so easily available for participation by so many.

The reference to this slaughter as a national "sport" is not overdrawn. In the gun lobby's continuous campaign to put as many guns as possible into the hands of as many people as possible, it is constantly argued that the lobby is acting on behalf of "sportsmen." And all the money the gun-lobby organizations take in is pour le sport. The National Rifle Association, the lobby which is the chief front for gun peddlers, has an income of more than five million dollars a year, and this unregistered lobby pays no taxes. About a quarter of its five-million-a-year take comes from advertisements for guns in its magazine. The very title of this "Rifle Association" is misleading, since it engages in advertising and peddling not only rifles but a wide variety of handguns.

The NRA has other sources of income besides the gun peddlers. It has a large membership list of people who regard themselves as sportsmen, or red-blooded Americans, who receive its publications. The NRA gives these paying member-subscribers a steady barrage of anti-gun control propaganda so false and misleading that it might not be believed by anyone who received it in a free handout. In turn the members who are thus propagandized lay down their own barrage — on notice from the NRA to fire — on Congressmen.

Of course, NRA members have received other benefits, too. The United States Government has provided special sales on ammunition and firearms to the NRA and contributed men, money and weapons toward NRA-sponsored marksmanship meets, apparently on the theory that this somehow contributed to the national defense in a way that training in the U.S. armed forces does not.

This situation was dramatized when four hundred Detroit policemen joined the NRA as a group to obtain surplus carbines, available to them only through membership in that organization.

The U.S. Department of Defense, which had been subsidizing this private lobby with low-cost ammunition, firearms and other contributions, finally let its right mind know what its trigger fingers were doing and began curtailing its support of an organization dedicated to gunning down any government control of firearms. However, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has never seen fit to tax this well-heeled lobby, apparently preferring to think of it as a social-welfare organization. In time, perhaps the President and the heads of various government departments might get together for a chat about the U.S. Government's relationship to the NRA.

Many of the people who complain most loudly about crime have been curiously uninterested in the control of guns which play a direct part in our nation's record-breaking number of murders, robberies and other crimes.

Many of those who place on their cars bumper stickers that say "SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE" seem unmoved by the fact that from 1960 to 1966, more than 320 policemen in the United States were murdered by gunfire. And most of those police were gunned down in states with the most lax gun-regulation laws.

Those who want to support their local police might also consider that police agencies at all levels have long sought effective gun controls.

When Americans begin to be concerned about prospects of "long hot summers," the NRA's special contribution to the nation's tensions, fears and disorders was the suggestion that citizens "stabilize" their communities by arming themselves with guns and doing practice shooting. And the guns were all there in the NRA magazine's advertisements.

President Johnson called the write-in-for-your-gun business by its correct name when he referred to it as "mail-order murder."

He pointed out that 750,000 Americans were killed by firearms in the U.S. from the turn of the century to 1968 — "far more than have died at the hands of our enemies in all the wars we have fought."

He might also have pointed out that the death toll in modern predominately urban America is far greater than it ever was in actual frontier days — or even in the accelerated gun-slinging versions of "the Old West" that appear on television programs.

For those who like to think about how our country leads the world, there are interesting statistics in the President's message on guns:

quote:

Each year, in this country, guns are involved in more than 6,500 murders. This compares with 30 in England, 99 in Canada, 68 in West Germany and 37 in Japan. Forty-four thousand aggravated assaults are committed with guns in America each year. Fifty thousand robberies are committed with guns in America each year...

One can only wonder why a China which now fears "American imperialism" should bother to develop missiles, when its invention of gunpowder long ago might have been all that was necessary to insure that Americans would do themselves in.

In May 1968 the U.S. Senate, after prodding by President Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, voted to control mail-order sales of handguns, as part of an omnibus crime-control bill. But it rejected Edward M. Kennedy's proposal to control mail-order sales of other guns as well.

In 1965, the Senate had not been moved to action by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who testified as a former Attorney General. He told his fellow Senators that in the previous year alone 9,300 persons had been killed by guns and that the great majority of those deaths would not have occurred if firearms had not been readily available. Senator Kennedy denounced the distorted facts put out by the National Rifle Association and said, on May 20, 1965, "For too long we have dealt with these deadly weapons as if they were harmless toys."

Just a little over three years later, Robert F. Kennedy was felled with a bullet in his brain — a bullet fired from a deadly weapon that might almost have been a toy. Like the shot that had killed his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and the one that had killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this shot was heard round the world.

It was even heard in the United States Congress. What was heard even plainer was the voices of constituents — Americans who for years had shown themselves in national polls to be from 70 to 85 per cent in favor of strict gun controls, but who were not organized to shoot letters at Congressmen as were the trained letter writers of the National Rifle Association.

Under the volume of letters from outraged Americans, some of the most stalwart friends of the gun lobby and many of the Congressmen who had cowered before letters from NRA members were moved, temporarily at least, to take some account of the will of the people and their need for protection. President Johnson, who had called for a ban on mail-order sales of guns and some controls on over-the-counter purchases, now asked Congress for licensing and registration of all firearms in the United States.

The gun-lobby tactic at this point was to fight a delaying action, putting off effective legislation till the "hysteria" died down. "Hysteria," "haste" and "panic" were the words used in 1968 by gun lobbyists and politicians who had never found a good time to approve adequate gun controls in all the years such measures had been proposed.

Among Congressional delaying tactics was the good old leave-it-to-the-states device, which saw some kind of virtue in leaving to the states something which many states had no interest in doing ever, and in which they had long handicapped other states that did try to stem the flow of firearms.

Another ploy was that the President's new registration proposal was too tough. Tough on whom, besides the advocates of unrestricted killing in the United States?

There were delays and setbacks in Senate and House committees, to give time for the letters brought forth by the assassination of Senator Kennedy to "die down." Meanwhile thousands of Americans continued to "die down" from gun fatalities all over the country, as the gun lobby regrouped and stepped up its fire on Congress to put off really effective gun controls.

To my mind, this is one of the most important issues in the nation. It involves more loss of American life than Vietnam, and is an issue far less debatable. The national interest here is all on one side, on the side of life versus death.

We often hear that our political system involves a preference for ballots instead of bullets. We can use those ballots to bring to an end the steady stream of bullets which cut down Americans in the United States every day.

I am in favor of voting against Congressmen and Senators who will not vote for strict gun controls. The prime fault is not essentially with the gun peddlers' lobby, shameful and malevolent as that lobby is. It is with the Senators and Representatives who have it in their power to curb crime and killings committed with firearms — and who will not act.

Voters should put their Senators and Representatives on notice that they regard effective gun control as the life-and-death matter it is.

Ballots instead of bullets is exactly right. The levers on voting machines work quite as well as the triggers on the guns that brought down President Kennedy and Dr. King and Senator Kennedy. With the pull of a lever, the voter can say to a member of Congress, "Bang, you're dead politically."

Compared to the maiming and killing of millions of Americans, the careers of Congressmen who are callous to this carnage are of little consequence.

Voters can take part in a real and important version of the scene familiar to movie watchers as the Showdown.

Herblock posted:

In August 1966 a 24-year-old man killed his wife and mother and then shot more than 40 people from the tower of the University of Texas, killing 13 more. Governor Connally, who had said in 1963 that the assassination of President Kennedy could have occurred in any American city, now expressed doubt about the value of proposed federal gun-control legislation. Texas is one of the states with the weakest gun laws and highest gun homicide rates in the U.S.

Tibalt posted:

You hope Disney is going to kill an intellectual property?

Look forward to a Simpson movie every two years, my dude.

Spoderman posted:

Christ, these Herblock cartoons are so depressing. The NRA hasn't has to change its playbook at all.

Spoderman posted:

Christ, these Herblock cartoons are so depressing. The NRA hasn't had to change its playbook at all.

The Groper posted:

America was great up until the late 1400's or so