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Should troll Fancy Pelosi be allowed to stay? This poll is closed. |
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Yinlock posted:There are no "good ones". IK Hat: Okay guys, we have a wonderful Police thread for ACAB stuff, outside of the context of the testimony being given about 1/6 and how they deserved it, this ain't the place for it. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3926317
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Jul 27, 2021 23:12
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Edit: I'll leave it then.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:15
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zoux posted:The idea of spiritual warfare is very real among evangelicals. Like they don't see Satan as a metaphor (or as a translation of "adversary") they believe that Satan and his invisible demons are constantly tempting and corrupting people to sin, these demons have names and personalities. They believe that one must engage in offensive action against these demons through, well, militant prayer that invokes a lot of violent imagery against these demons - almost like spells of binding - and that an insufficiently pious person, or even one who engages in one of the world's many temptations is open to literal demon possession. A lot of talk about the armor of god Today I learned where one of my favorite Venture Brothers bits came from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_QGEmoFhDk Angry_Ed posted:Also the original translation isn't even belt of truth And that they used the more accurate translation lmfao
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Jul 27, 2021 23:24
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Epic High Five posted:Today I learned where one of my favorite Venture Brothers bits came from There’s an intermediate step in the evolution of that bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cdqXCMaGg
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Jul 27, 2021 23:32
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:There’s an intermediate step in the evolution of that bit: lmfao, I should've suspected I guess with how much that show loves to lampoon that sort of thing
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Jul 27, 2021 23:35
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Angry_Ed posted:Also the original translation isn't even belt of truth Truth is stored in the balls.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:37
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Randalor posted:Truth is stored in the balls. But what happens when they're tazed? 
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Jul 27, 2021 23:52
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Flopsy posted:But what happens when they're tazed? The truth retreats to the heart, unfortunately displacing the blood in the process
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Jul 27, 2021 23:54
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Epic High Five posted:The truth retreats to the heart, unfortunately displacing the blood in the process Ah yes, "Systemic Truth Shock". Terrible way to go. Kinda like going Septic.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:59
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:New Jersey finally did it. As someone from New Jersey, I'm really gonna miss saying cheesequake. It's an amazing word and it needs to be everywhere possible. That said, it's a good replacement, but better than cheesequake? This is going to be a question up there with "Taylor ham or pork roll?" debate
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Jul 28, 2021 00:46
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The debacle in Afghanistan, which will unravel into chaos with lightning speed over the next few weeks and ensure the return of the Taliban to power, is one more signpost of the end of the American empire. The two decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 troops deployed to subdue Afghanistan, the high-tech gadgets, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs and the Global Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air commandos, black sites, torture, electronic surveillance, satellites, attack aircraft, mercenary armies, infusions of millions of dollars to buy off and bribe the local elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never exhibited the will to fight, failed to defeat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that funded itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest countries on earth. Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed. The human tragedy — at least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan and 37 million have been displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria according to The Watson Institute at Brown University — is reduced to a neglected footnote. Nearly all the roughly 70 empires during the last four thousand years, including the Greek, Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires, collapsed in the same orgy of military folly. The Roman Republic, at its height, only lasted two centuries. We are set to disintegrate in roughly the same time. This is why, at the start of World War I in Germany, Karl Liebknecht called the German military, which imprisoned and later assassinated him, “the enemy from within.” Mark Twain, who was a fierce opponent of the efforts to plant the seeds of empire in Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, wrote an imagined history of America in the twentieth-century where its “lust for conquest” had destroyed “the Great Republic…[because] trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake.” Twain knew that foreign occupations, designed to enrich the ruling elites, use occupied populations as laboratory rats to perfect techniques of control that soon migrate back to the homeland. It was the brutal colonial policing practices in the Philippines, which included a vast spy network along with routine beatings, torture, and executions, which became the model for centralized domestic policing and intelligence gathering in the United States. Israeli’s arms, surveillance and drone industries test their products on the Palestinians. It is one of the dark ironies that it was the American empire, led by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, which spawned the mess in Afghanistan. Brzezinski oversaw a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation to arm, train and equip the Taliban to fight the Soviets. This clandestine effort sidelined the secular, democratic opposition and assured the ascendancy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with the spread of its radical Islam into Soviet Central Asia, once Soviet forces withdrew. The American empire would, years later, find itself desperately trying to destroy its own creation. In April 2017, in a classic example of this kind of absurd blowback, the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” — the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal — on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan that the CIA had invested millions in building and fortifying. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not an existential threat to the United States. They were not politically significant. They did not disrupt the balance of global power. They were not an act of war. They were acts of nihilistic terror. The only way to fight terrorists is to isolate them within their own societies. I was in the Middle East for The New York Times after the attacks. Most of the Muslim world was appalled and revolted at the crimes against humanity that had been carried out in the name of Islam. If we had the courage to be vulnerable, to grasp that this was an intelligence war, not a conventional war, we would be far safer and secure today. These wars in the shadows, as the Israelis illustrated when they tracked down the assassins of their athletes in the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, take months, even years of work. But the attacks gave the ruling elites, lusting for control of the Middle East, especially Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks, the excuse to carry out the greatest strategic blunder in American history — the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war, including then Senator Joe Biden, knew little about the countries being invaded, did not grasp the limits of industrial and technocratic war or the inevitable blowback that would see the United States reviled throughout the Muslim world. They believed they could implant client regimes by force throughout the region, use the oil revenues in Iraq, since the war in Afghanistan would be over in a matter of weeks, to cover the cost of reconstruction and magically restore American global hegemony. It did the opposite. Invading Iraq and Afghanistan, dropping iron fragmentation bombs on villages and towns, kidnapping, torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people, using drones to sow terror from the skies, resurrected the discredited radical jihadists and was a potent recruiting tool in the fight against U.S. and NATO forces. We were the best thing that ever happened to the Taliban and al Qaeda. There was little objection within the power structures to these invasions. The congressional vote was 518 to one in favor of empowering President George W. Bush to launch a war, Rep. Barbara Lee being the lone dissenter. Those of us who spoke out against the idiocy of the looming bloodlust were slandered, denied media platforms, and cast into the wilderness, where most of us remain. Those who sold us the war kept their megaphones, a reward for their service to empire and the military-industrial complex. It did not matter how cynical or foolish they were. Historians call the self-defeating military adventurism of late empires “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain attacked Egypt in 1956 in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and was humiliated when it had to withdraw its forces, bolstering the status of Arab nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. “While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred McCoy writes “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.” The death blow to the American empire will, as McCoy writes, be the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This loss will plunge the United States into a crippling, and prolonged depression. It will force a massive contraction of the global military footprint. The ugly, squalid face of empire, with the loss of the dollar as the reserve currency, will become familiar at home. The bleak economic landscape, with its decay and hopelessness, will accelerate an array of violent and self-destructive pathologies including mass shootings, hate crimes, opioid and heroin overdoses, morbid obesity, suicides, gambling, and alcoholism. The state will increasingly dispense with the fiction of the rule of law to rely exclusively on militarized police, essentially internal armies of occupation, and the prisons and jails, which already hold 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States represents less than 5 percent of global population. Our demise will probably come more swiftly than we imagine. When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, empires become “brittle.” An economy heavily dependent on massive government subsidies to produce primarily weapons and munitions, as well as fund military adventurism, will go into a tailspin with a heavily depreciated dollar, falling to perhaps a third of its former value. Prices will dramatically rise because of the steep increase in the cost of imports. Wages in real terms will decline. The devaluation of Treasury bonds will make paying for our massive deficits onerous, perhaps impossible. The unemployment level will climb to depression era levels. Social assistance programs, because of a contracting budget, will be sharply curtailed or eliminated. This dystopian world will fuel the rage and hyper nationalism that put Donald Trump in the White House. It will spawn an authoritarian state to keep order and, I expect, a Christianized fascism. The tools of control on the outer reaches of empire, already part of our existence, will become ubiquitous. The wholesale surveillance, the abolition of basic civil liberties, militarized police authorized to use indiscriminate lethal force, the use of drones and satellites to keep us monitored and fearful, along with the censorship of the press and social media, familiar to Iraqis or Afghans, will define America. We are not the first empire to suffer this fate. It is a familiar ending. Imperialism and militarism are poisons that eradicate the separation of powers, designed to prevent tyranny, and extinguish democracy. If those who orchestrated these crimes are not held accountable, and this means organizing sustained mass resistance, we will pay the price, and we may pay it soon, for their hubris and greed. hth (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) IK: This appears to be quotations from this article: https://scheerpost.com/2021/07/26/hedges-the-collective-suicide-machine/ Somebody fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 01:03
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MLSM posted:The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not an existential threat to the United States. They were not politically significant. Are you sure about this one? Looking back, it seems they were pretty politically significant.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:17
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Sir, this is a Hard Rock Cafe.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:27
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How are u posted:
they were made politically significant as a pretext to war which.....is the point of the article.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:28
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How are u posted:
They were no more significant than the WtC attack in 1993. 9/11 was literally a crime. It should have been handled the same way as it was in 1993
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Jul 28, 2021 01:32
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PainterofCrap posted:They were no more significant than the WtC attack in 1993. 9/11 was literally a crime. It should have been handled the same way as it was in 1993 I'd say there was a very significant difference in the scale and consequences of 9/11, compared to 1993. Are you genuinely saying you can't tell the difference? You truly cannot fathom how the American public would discern a difference? e: I am curious how old you were when 9/11 happened. 9/11 and the months that followed were quite a wild time, and so if you were young enough to not really notice I could slightly better understand how you could end up here. How are u fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 01:47
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PainterofCrap posted:They were no more significant than the WtC attack in 1993. 9/11 was literally a crime. It should have been handled the same way as it was in 1993 yeah man it was just a crime, in which more Americans died than Pearl Harbor
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Jul 28, 2021 01:52
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Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on 1/6 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1420147017242746885?s=20 Maybe he WILL get to be a part of the hearings, after all! Meanwhile, DOJ has addressed Mo Brooks claims that his presence at 1/6 was in official capacity https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1420186778393321474?s=20 CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 01:52
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It's a little hyperbolic, but there's some gems hidden in there. The dollar's status as a reserve currency lets the US get away with a lot of financial stuff, and if the current system were to collapse it's likely we'd see a deeper dive to the right, instead of the trade unions and agrarian communes establishing a worker's utopia.
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Jul 28, 2021 01:59
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CommieGIR posted:Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on 1/6 I really hope Liz Cheney bring some of her family's patented vindictiveness to bear on Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy over this. I really do.
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Jul 28, 2021 02:07
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CommieGIR posted:Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on 1/6 Lmao Jordan could of told him to stand down: He didn't Jordan knew about the coup the whole time
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Jul 28, 2021 02:16
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PainterofCrap posted:They were no more significant than the WtC attack in 1993. 9/11 was literally a crime. It should have been handled the same way as it was in 1993 In hindsight, hindsight being from about 2002 to now, the actions taken in response to 9/11 were terribad. But 9/11 was definitely more than a crime, and since the people directly responsible all died as part of the act it's not like a court case was going to fix anything in response. It needed an international response, but the US was not politically capable of doing any sort of constructive response to such acts then or now.
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Jul 28, 2021 02:21
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Meh, Avshalom did it better with the Overwatch fart fetish post
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Jul 28, 2021 02:24
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TulliusCicero posted:Why the gently caress does a wierd Christian Hobby Store Company want a bunch of Middle Eastern artifacts anyway? I've said for a while that the position of V:tM lore is that young-earth creationist fundamentalist christianity is right.
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Jul 28, 2021 02:29
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OctaMurk posted:yeah man it was just a crime, in which more Americans died than Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor was an act of war because of who committed it (a state actor) and why (as part of a plan of imperial conflict with another power), not because of how many people died. Fort Sumter killed zero people but it was an act of war, not a crime. Dylan Roof killed more people than died at Fort Sumter, but that was a crime and not an act of war. Orthanc6 posted:In hindsight, hindsight being from about 2002 to now, the actions taken in response to 9/11 were terribad. But 9/11 was definitely more than a crime, and since the people directly responsible all died as part of the act it's not like a court case was going to fix anything in response. It needed an international response, but the US was not politically capable of doing any sort of constructive response to such acts then or now. Plenty of people involved committed crimes and didn't die in the attacks, for example everyone who planned it. The US could have worked with the Taliban government to capture Osama Bin Laden since they didn't want him in their country anymore, but we rebuffed that offer and welp. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 02:37
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CommieGIR posted:Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on 1/6 Is it a tad bit hosed at how relieved I am Garland didn't go full  ?
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Jul 28, 2021 02:42
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VitalSigns posted:Plenty of people involved committed crimes and didn't die in the attacks, for example everyone who planned it. The US could have worked with the Taliban government to capture Osama Bin Laden since they didn't want him in their country anymore, but we rebuffed that offer and welp.  I'm not an expert on this and don't want to start a big derail, but can you please summarize this along with sources? From what I can remember, along with refreshing my memory looking it up, the Taliban leader did not want to give up bin Laden and gave him shelter: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/29/opinions/bergen-mullah-omar/ quote:Ten days after 9/11, the Voice of America radio service interviewed Mullah Omar, asking him: "So you won't give Osama bin Laden up?" Omar replied, "No. We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims, that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened."
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Jul 28, 2021 02:47
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Kalit posted:
They refused to hand him directly to the US, but offered to hand him over to a mutually agreed upon third country for a fair trial This was all very public at the time, although for obvious reasons it didn't get much play in the US media Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over quote:Sun 14 Oct 2001 17.19 EDT
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Jul 28, 2021 02:51
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VitalSigns posted:They refused to hand him directly to the US, but offered to hand him over to a mutually agreed upon third country for a fair trial Ahhh right, now I'm remembering. I forgot there was differing messages from different people within the Taliban and I was just thinking of what Mullah Omar was stating. Thank you for this summary/source.
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Jul 28, 2021 02:57
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Kalit posted:Ahhh right, now I'm remembering. I forgot there was differing messages from different people within the Taliban and I was just thinking of what Mullah Omar was stating. Thank you for this summary/source. Yeah like ymmv on how possible an agreement was and whether the Taliban could have even followed through given that they didn't know where he was and he could've been on his way to Pakistan already, but considering that invading the country made all those problems worse and saddled us with decades of miserable grinding war that bankrupted the country, killed countless civilians, and began the process of turning a sympathetic world against us....
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Jul 28, 2021 03:21
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Jake Ellzey has defeated Trump-hugger Susan Wright in the Republican primary for the TX-06 special election. Evidence that aligning with Trump may not be the best idea for Republicans going forward.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:24
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Deteriorata posted:Jake Ellzey has defeated Trump-hugger Susan Wright in the Republican primary for the TX-06 special election. Well that's going to get the Politicos talking for the next couple of days. Interesting.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:29
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Agents are GO! posted:I've said for a while that the position of V:tM lore is that young-earth creationist fundamentalist christianity is right. now there's some spicy political revelation i am entirely down for dissecting
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Jul 28, 2021 03:37
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah like ymmv on how possible an agreement was and whether the Taliban could have even followed through given that they didn't know where he was and he could've been on his way to Pakistan already, but considering that invading the country made all those problems worse and saddled us with decades of miserable grinding war that bankrupted the country, killed countless civilians, and began the process of turning a sympathetic world against us.... Bin Laden was allegedly at the battle of Tora Bora, which was another 1-2 months later. So, he hadn't flown the country yet. But, the Taliban also had no way to actually apprehend him even if they wanted to unless they were going to launch a war on Al-Qaeda to try and capture Tora Bora.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:41
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Agents are GO! posted:I've said for a while that the position of V:tM lore is that young-earth creationist fundamentalist christianity is right. Staluigi posted:now there's some spicy political revelation i am entirely down for dissecting on the one hand, this seems like exactly the sort of thing i should encourage to be taken to a dedicated thread on the other hand, it should perhaps be exposed to the largest audience possible here is my compromise: make the effort thread and i will pin it
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Jul 28, 2021 03:42
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Deteriorata posted:Jake Ellzey has defeated Trump-hugger Susan Wright in the Republican primary for the TX-06 special election. Is this a case where only 2 Republicans made it through a primary so normally Democratic voters had to vote for the more moderate choice?
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Jul 28, 2021 03:49
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Normy posted:Is this a case where only 2 Republicans made it through a primary so normally Democratic voters had to vote for the more moderate choice? Yeah, I misunderstood it. They had a jungle primary back in May and no Democrats survived. This was the final runoff vote, so Ellzey takes the seat. I thought about correcting the post but was too lazy. So now I get to put in more effort on a followup post.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:53
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the effortpost must be made now! there is no other conclusion. yall can't leave us hanging. i need a reputable list of sociopolitical morality rankings of the clans and to what degree the vampires construct oligarchic channels that imperil civilization through global warming, and which houses might oppose
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Jul 28, 2021 03:54
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GreyjoyBastard posted:on the one hand, this seems like exactly the sort of thing i should encourage to be taken to a dedicated thread Theres really not a lot to it, like the chapter one VtM rulebook lore is that Cain was the first vampire, the mark of Cain is vampirism, Noah's flood was to wipe out the vampire/human city founded by the vampires created by Cain, but the oldest and most powerful vampires survived and are called Antediluvians. It's not subtext, it's text. They even have the Left Behind "rapture" theme going on, theres a persistent fear that the Antediluvians are going to wake up and destroy all the current vampires. I don't have access to my books right now, or I'd do the thread. Staluigi posted:the effortpost must be made now! there is no other conclusion. yall can't leave us hanging. i need a reputable list of sociopolitical morality rankings of the clans and to what degree the vampires construct oligarchic channels that imperil civilization through global warming, and which houses might oppose The first Blade movie ripped heavily from VtM. Agents are GO! fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 03:55
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too be honest i would perfer if a donnist won regressive primaries and then lost the general supa hard so we can at least skip the 1st step of "not pro Donnie enough / a RINO". like they would still do that, but its skipping the first step of a inf. sum of steps in the No True Regressive process.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:55
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