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I met mother at a work thing. She seemed nice.
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Jan 26, 2019 21:32
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:I met mother at a work thing. She seemed nice. Except for the whole refusing to work with people who are different thing?
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Jan 26, 2019 21:53
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:I met mother at a work thing. She seemed nice. Yup. Polite. Has a nice dog. Married to a horseman. Wears matching track suits with her husband. Hrm.
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Jan 26, 2019 22:29
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How worried should we be about the Pompeo/Trump has designating Elliot Abrams to handle the situation in Venezuela??
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Jan 26, 2019 22:31
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Spree murder / shooting in Louisiana makes 3 instances of 5 victims or more in a loving week iirc. Just a regular January in the world superpower
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Jan 26, 2019 22:36
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Guacamayo posted:How worried should we be about the Pompeo/Trump has designating Elliot Abrams to handle the situation in Venezuela?? Iran Contra af. At least he has the relevant experience  I'm no fan of Maduro and it's a good thing that we, along with most of Latin America, have recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Boots on the ground is obviously a terrible idea of course that will make everything a million times worse.
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Jan 26, 2019 22:42
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Cat Army 
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So it’s gonna happen then because trump?
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Jan 26, 2019 22:49
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The Iron Rose posted:I'm no fan of Maduro and it's a good thing that we, along with most of Latin America, have recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Boots on the ground is obviously a terrible idea of course that will make everything a million times worse. One directly leads to the other, ya gently caress Also we shouldn't be fuckin' around with "recognizing" some rando that "declared" himself President since the Venezuelan elections were certified as good (and I seem to remember there being some sort of hubbub over someone fuckin' with our elections which makes this all hippocritical as gently caress)
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Jan 27, 2019 00:07
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Can someone give me or point me to a quick rundown of Venezuela’s situation. All I can find is snark. All I know is they are oil rich and have crony communism as opposed to the standard Latin American crony capitalism. And some bus driver was the leader but now that’s disputed. And that’s all probably wrong.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:11
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That Works posted:https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna963056 gently caress the church
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Jan 27, 2019 00:24
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The Iron Rose posted:Iran Contra af. At least he has the relevant experience lmao
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Jan 27, 2019 00:25
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Back in the 80s they ripped up or tore down everything that wasn't making or processing oil and replaced it with oil because high oil prices money, leaving them with all their eggs in one basket and when the spice stopped flowing it pretty much kicked off everything since then which someone else can summarize because I don't know more than that. Big oil money can paint over lots of problems but when you run out of paint and have literally no other options other than coasting off high oil prices, hoo nelly if that ride ever comes to a stop.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:29
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Milo and POTUS posted:gently caress the church The Catholic church has been a morally bankrupt institution for the last 1000 years and anybody expects better now lol.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:32
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am i the only gip catholic
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Jan 27, 2019 00:33
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I was raised catholic but shed the title around 14 y/o.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:36
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Richard Bong posted:Can someone give me or point me to a quick rundown of Venezuela’s situation. All I can find is snark. All I know is they are oil rich and have crony communism as opposed to the standard Latin American crony capitalism. And some bus driver was the leader but now that’s disputed. And that’s all probably wrong. Crash course? Hugo Chavez was the former leader of Venezuela. He used oil money to shore up social programs and basically fund his social projects. 2010-ish, oil market goes batshit and crude kisses $110 a barrel. Chavez and the Venezuelans are rich as gently caress. This means cronyism, dummy jobs, cash being spread around, and any budget shortfalls are made up by oil revenues, since the oil industry is largely state controlled. Everyone is happy, so long as the money keeps pouring in. 2013, Chavez has a stroke and dies. He didn't really have a secession of power lined up like Castro, so things are kinda fubar for while. Maduro steps up from being Chavez's #2 to being the new president, and as chaotic as things are at the top, nobody cares because oil money keeps coming in. September 2014, maybe 18 months after Chavez died, the oil market becomes glutted from North Dakotan and Texan frack oil and prices nosedive. What was once $110 a barrel is now worth maybe half that. The Saudis can withstand the shock because their cash reserves can hold out from drat near anything, but the Venezuelans have been sinking their money into cronies and make work projects for the poor, not to mentions straight up embezzlement from the powers that be. Chavez and his supporters were betting that oil prices were never going down, and when they did, they were sitting on a pile of oil that was worth maybe a quarter of what they needed it to be. People lose jobs, food lines become a sign of the times, people start loving off to Brazil and Columbia, whatever. Venezuela takes a hit, but nothing more substantial then what we went through back in '78-80. Two years later, as Maduro consolidates his power, takes over the remains of the oil industry and other state-owned entities, things begin to look up. Prices are still low, but at least they've been stable, and Maduro double downs his bet on oil, and cranks up production to make up for the lost revenue in 2014 and 2015. Then the bottom falls out from the oil market, and a barrel of WTI Crude drops to $29 by Valentines Day 2016. THIS is where things go from 'recession' bad to 'The Road Warrior' bad. Stores empty out, the bolivar becomes virtually worthless, food lines become food riots. Cops openly shake down druggies and gangbangers for protection money, and the Venezuelan Chiefs of Staff are named as heads of a major coke smuggling ring. So, yeah. Oil prices are heading back up, but Venezuela can't benefit from it because they took out a second mortgage on their infrastructure back in 2016 and there's nothing left to profit from. BigDave fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 00:37
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CRUSTY MINGE posted:I was raised catholic but shed the title around 14 y/o. Same but 19.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:37
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CRUSTY MINGE posted:I was raised catholic but shed the title around 14 y/o.  Got called into the principals office once because they wanted us to do a bunch of community service before Confirmation, and I told the religion teacher that I wouldn't do it because it sounded a lot like child slavery to me.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:40
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CRUSTY MINGE posted:I was raised catholic but shed the title around 14 y/o. Same but 9. It still affects my life an irritating amount.
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Jan 27, 2019 00:44
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I went to church with a catholic friend of mine a few times growing up and slept through it every time. Goddamn Catholics are boring.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:02
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BigDave posted:Crash course? And to add to this, we are supporting an attempted coup and appear to be the backing/funding for a lot of the anti-maduro grassroots.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:08
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BigDave posted:Crash course? Ah ok thanks. Everyone keeps referencing a whooole lot of stuff and I felt a bit lost.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:11
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Chuck Boone does a great job as an Venezuellan expat explaining it all: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3738387 The most recent bad things is that Maduro essentially told their congress equivalent, the National Assembly, to gently caress off and made a "Constituent Assembly" that was full of his people and stripped all the power from the rest of the legislature. Pretty much everything valuable was sold off to fund the pockets of him and his. Then late last year they go through another round of elections that Maduro clearly rigged (even though it was deemed legitimate) and under some peoples interpretation of the law the president is either the president of the now toothless national assembly or the guy who ran against Maduro in the most recent election.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:16
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Mr. Nice! posted:And to add to this, we are supporting an attempted coup and appear to be the backing/funding for a lot of the anti-maduro grassroots. And this is because Maduro sees himself as Chavez's disciple who can do no wrong. Even though he thought that printing more money would solve the crisis. So we have in effect a political newbie who read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and took it as the gospel according to socialism.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:21
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I too was raised Catholic. I opted out around uh...10? 12? Was never really involved in anything church related and I went to public school.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:30
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Maduro is lovely. Literally anything we do or support will be shittier. The only winning move is not to play.!
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Jan 27, 2019 01:30
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Anyone living under a regime lovely enough that anyone would argue we should overthrow it is a refugee, so the opening move should be to open immigration and naturalization to them.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:39
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colachute posted:I went to church with a catholic friend of mine a few times growing up and slept through it every time. Goddamn Catholics are boring. Yeah that's the right way to do it. Never go to a catholic wedding, especially if it's in latin. It will take a year off your life. I had the added pleasure of coming from teetotaler german catholics. If there was a family drunk down that line, I never met him. I also did private school through sixth grade. After my mother received an annulment from the Joliet diocese, I dropped any fucks I was carrying over catholicism. Guess that just leaves me and my brother a couple of godless bastard mistakes erased in the records of the catholic church. gently caress catholicism.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:41
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Chavez built a personality cult around an unsustainable system. As soon as oil prices tanked it started coming apart. He was poo poo.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:50
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I left Catholicism as a teenager but I keep wandering back occasionally until inevitably the church does something insanely gross, or I realize most Americans still in the church are basically culture war evangelicals with some minor literacy then I'm out again. I feel a lot of pride in the church at weird times which really leaves me feeling disappointed whenever say, everyone doubles down on some school kids running around DC harassing people as just "boys being boys." With the ever increasing chud-ification of US Catholicism I feel like it's a matter of time before Catholic charities, one of the things I'm still proud of, are entirely dropped in favor of going all in for right wing culture war stuff. I feel like they already went halfway there during the gay marriage fight when there was talk of shutting down adoption services rather than be forced to adopt to gay couples.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:52
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I was raised catholic too but american catholics freak me out.
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Jan 27, 2019 01:54
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Catholic until I joined the military. I was an altar boy as well, but never got my butt touched by a priest. Maybe it's because I was an altar boy on a military base and the priest was military..... Although that doesn't make sense because I would assume military+priest would equate to super sexual predator..
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Jan 27, 2019 02:34
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You're just ugly. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
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Jan 27, 2019 02:37
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Nice and hot piss posted:Catholic until I joined the military. I was an altar boy as well, but never got my butt touched by a priest. Maybe it's because I was an altar boy on a military base and the priest was military..... Yeah that sounds like the Predator/Alien hybrid or whatever
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Jan 27, 2019 02:38
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ded posted:You're just ugly. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
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Jan 27, 2019 02:45
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sharknado slashfic posted:Yeah that sounds like the Predator/Alien hybrid or whatever
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Jan 27, 2019 02:56
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sharknado slashfic posted:Yeah that sounds like the Predator/Alien hybrid or whatever
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Jan 27, 2019 03:21
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Roman Catholic here. I’ve only had my first communion and stopped caring about church right afterwords, mainly because my brothers didn’t have to do the bs. I also gave the argument why should I have to go to a specific building to pray, give money, or say thanks? The only time I go into one now is weddings or funerals. My parents still do the no meat on Friday’s during Lent, Good Friday, and Christmas Eve.
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Jan 27, 2019 03:40
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Closest I ever got to Catholicism was watching The Boondock Saints as a kid and wanting one of those sweet rosarys e] Growing up in NZ, I don't think I knew a single religious person who wasn't in my grandparents generation. Any Christians around were pretty much looked at as harmless weirdos. Then I met a bunch of Samoan Kiwis and they are fuckin crazy about Catholicism. Radical 90s Wizard fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 04:11
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BigDave posted:Crash course? Important addendum: While fluctuation in international oil prices have hurt the country, the far bigger problem has been price controls and a lack of investment in the state-run oil company, PDVSA. The price controls effectively prevent business from doing... well, business for a wide amount of goods, as the prices are set so low that selling basic poo poo like milk legally is done at a massive loss. This is a major reason for both scarcity and hyperinflation, and has persisted under the PSUV's government as the party loyalists in charge of state-owned industries can effectively get away with making the bare minimum to sell legally while making a massive killing selling products on the black market. With the PDVSA, since Chavez took power the company has been dying a slow and painful death. Oil is an industry that requires a ton of capital investment and expertise, and they've lost both under the governments of Chavez and Maduro. Even during the 2000s, when oil was at an all-time high, Venezuela's oil output actually decreased because the company didn't have enough money to drill new wells, and billions of dollars have been siphoned from the company to line the pocketbooks of the PSUV's elite. Mr. Nice! posted:And to add to this, we are supporting an attempted coup and appear to be the backing/funding for a lot of the anti-maduro grassroots. ehhh, sort of. So the gist of the current situation is that back in 2018, Maduro called for a new election for a six year term. And to ensure he would win, the state election organization (The CNE) took steps to completely remove the opposition* as a threat—a bunch of candidates were either prevented from running or flat-out arrested, entire political parties were barred from participating in the election, and the apparatus of the state did everything in its power to promote Maduro over the opposition. As a result, the opposition openly refused to participate in the election, and Maduro 'won' the least attended election in Venezuelan history. A number of countries, including a wide arrangement of fellow South American states, refused to recognize the election as legitimate as a result. (Which, of course, is understandable—imagine the 2020 election, for instance, if the only people allowed to run against Trump were Jeb Bush and Joe Lieberman.) Flash forward to January, and Maduro takes office for his second six-year term as President. Not long afterwards, however, Juan Guaidó, head of the National Assembly (The state legislature that Maduro effectively invalidated after the opposition won big in 2015) declared that because Maduro's election had been fraudulent, the office of the President was technically vacant, and following the Constitution he was now effectively the interim President. It's a "It's legal if you squint" argument, but it was enough for a wide number of countries to recognize him as President, including most of the rest of the hemisphere. Now, news has come out over the past few days that Guaidó coordinated to a degree with other countries, including the US and many other South American countries. However, the 'coup; such as it is, is by no means armed, and seems to basically be hinging on international political and economic pressure forcing Maduro to call for new elections. Whether this will actually happen is debatable, as Maduro still has control of the military (for now) and is a stupid stubborn idiot. As Trump is also a stupid stubborn idiot, this will likely lead to disaster of some kind... but, speaking personally, I can understand why Guaidó and the opposition have decided to take this route, as there's virtually no other route anyone can see towards ending the crisis peacefully, as the PSUV has made themselves far too powerful and entrenched to be removed through normal democratic means. *It's very much worth noting that the opposition is actually a collective of basically every other political party in Venezuela. Their makeup includes parties with a fairly wide array of beliefs (Their second and third largest component parties, for instance, are both recognized by Socialist International), but their primary objective is to remove the PSUV from power and end the self-imposed crisis they have plunged the nation into. e: Also I describe myself as 'ostensibly Catholic' 
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Jan 27, 2019 04:12
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