Azuth0667 posted:

Looks like my dad has been suckered by the propaganda . I like how bad the analogy of GPA redistribution = social programs is.

cheerfullydrab posted:

It was the first thought in a lot of people's minds. Also there was this:

And this:

Loving Life Partner posted:

So wait, people like actually just dismiss Snopes if you reply to a chain bullshit thing with it? drat.

What about Politifact? It's a good, well sourced resource as well.

Mo_Steel posted:

I think you meant to say the best part is the non-Euclidean bench that guy is sitting on.



(Click for big.)

e: Here's the massive .tif file for that: http://cl.ly/1q2o3z0X0y3Q0a0x2T3I

yaoi prophet posted:

madlobster posted:

A woman from La Mesa, California, went to Tijuana, Mexico, to do some shopping. As any visitor to this border town knows, the streets near the shopping areas are populated with stray dogs. The woman took pity on one little stray and offered it a few bites of her lunch, after which it followed her around for the rest of the afternoon.

When it came time to return home, the woman had become so attached to her little friend that she couldn't bear to leave him behind. Knowing that it was illegal to bring a dog across the international border, she hid him among some packages on the seat of her car and managed to pass through the border checkpoint without incident. After arriving home, she gave the dog a bath, brushed his fur, then retired for the night with her newfound pet curled up at the foot of her bed.

When she awoke the next morning, the woman noticed that there was an oozing mucus around the dog's eyes and a slight foaming at the mouth. Afraid that the dog might be sick, she rushed him to a nearby veterinarian and returned home to await word on her pet's condition.

The call soon came. "I have just one question," said the vet. "Where did you get this dog?"

The woman didn't want to get into trouble, so she told the vet that she had found the dog running loose in the street near her home in La Mesa.

But the vet didn't buy it. "You did not find this dog in La Mesa. Where did you get the dog?"

The woman nervously admitted having brought the dog across the border from Tijuana. "But tell me, doctor," she said. "What is wrong with my dog?"

His reply was brief and to the point. "First of all, it's not a dog — it's a democrat. And second, it's President Obama."

quote:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

llama_arse posted:

Just had the following dose of homophobia and Islamophobia come across my news feed, with the brief comment "love this guy."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlhxadPHt4s

The guy who posted it is a pretty typical libertarian (agnostic, free market obsessed, legalize drugs/prostitution, etc.), which is annoying but not enough to make me defriend him. Then he goes and posts this rant from someone who sounds like a senior member of the EDL and I don't know what to think.

EnsGDT posted:

A kid I know on Facebook. I thought I had him ignored on my newsfeed but I guess not!

Class Warfare Against the Rich!

Those poor rich, they never catch any of the breaks.

quote:

Obama: The Most Arrogant Man in the World

Sarion posted:

Except (big surprise here) abortions. Each State must have at least 1 plan in their Exchange that does NOT cover abortion, for people who object to the idea of their money being spent on abortions (because they think that once you give away your money, its still really yours). Unfortunately, the reverse is not true; there is no requirement that every State Exchange offers at least 1 plan which covers abortion. So if Mississippi wants to make it so that 100% of the Private Insurance Plans offered through their Exchange (does not impact Employer insurance plans), deny abortion coverage, they can. But this is a double whammy of STATES RITES and ABORTION BAD, so I doubt it will upset conservatives too much.

Loving Life Partner posted:

This one is going around heavy right now (because what person doesn't love Morgan Freeman?)



If you get it, make sure to click and look at all the insulated WASPs cheering on what a fantastic idea Mr. Freeman has come up with.

Just stop talking about it and it'll go away, poof!

Also some weird griping about reparations.

Yeah, just an ugly little thing.

Coelacanthian posted:

Jesus tapdancing Christ. I posted something the other day regarding the new parts of the Affordable Care act that just came into effect yesterday, mostly so my female friends are aware that, you know, "free" birth control! Then this supreme deuche posts this right under it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5FNDRgPOLs Link to a lovely video

And also this nifty quote: ‎"The difference between you and a common thief is that the thief has the honesty to commit the crime himself, while you whine to the government to do your stealing for you."

I wanna burn this shitheel so badly. I made it through about one minute of that video and I just... it's so drat self-righteous and lovely, I'm having a hard time putting it into words.

Imperialist Dog posted:

By Chinese politics, this is actually a left-wing Facebook issue (left-wing is equivalent to anything regarding China and Communist issues) but by our standards it's right-wing hawkishness. Basically Chinese people are going nuts again over a few specks of rock in the ocean. The last time this happened the school I work at had primary 5 students speak at the morning flag-raising ceremony about "Japan has violated sacred Chinese territory! Japan get out of our islands!" ... when we have Japanese children attending our school. Since I wanted to be ready in case it happens again, I did some research on the issue and the following argument ensued. I'm green, my sensible Chinese friend is blue and red is a Chinese ex-coworker who is now a school vice-principal. Red also knows that my uni major was Asian history and I can speak/read Japanese and Chinese. Through reading of this forum, I hope I argued correctly. If anyone wants to skim over the wall of text and point out where I could have argued better I would be grateful, though.

Bruce Leroy posted:

The states' rights aspect of the Civil War doesn't really hold water if you look at the events directly preceding the Civil War. The South not only didn't mind that the fugitive slave laws and Dred Scott decision eviscerated the states' rights of the North not to have slavery in their state boundaries, the South actually pushed for these things, with the end goal of de facto expanding slavery to free states through federal fiat. Even more interesting is how loving pissed off the South got when several state governments of the North explicitly came out in defiance of fugitive slave laws and said they were nullifying SCOTUS' Dred Scott decision forcing them to comply with the fugitive slave laws.

The rank hypocrisy by the South during this period preceding Lincoln's election shows just how flimsy the states' rights justification and historical apologism is. The South didn't give two shits about states' rights other than their own and were perfectly willing to use federal power to force other states to abide by their will until it looked like that federal power could be used against them. So, the Civil War was pretty much like that popular website "The only moral abortion is my abortion." The South gave no fucks about states' rights until it came to their turn to exercise them.

As for the Lincoln stuff, he actually was completely against slavery, it's just that there were two main philosophies in the Republican Party, (1) end slavery ASAP with a constitutional amendment vs. (2) end slavery over time by letting new territories become free states and letting the powerful northern free states influence them to outlaw slavery. Lincoln was of the latter school of thought but once the Civil War broke out, he kind of sidelined that idea in favor of his single-minded desire to reunite the nation, which is where that famous letter that you posted comes in.

As for abolition wrecking the South's economy, that's true but the South only had itself to blame. It chose to focus entirely on slave-based agriculture because it made them quite rich and they had a stranglehold on the global cotton market, hence "King Cotton." They were even planning on using this to coerce France and Britain into helping them in the Civil War, but that ended up not working (for various reasons). The South had previously gotten pissed off because they wanted higher prices for the raw materials they sold to the North and didn't like paying lots of money for finished goods made in northern factories, but again, this was their fault for not building many factories of their own to compete. At least the American revolutionaries were restricted by British law into becoming dependent on British products made with American raw materials, but the South did it to themselves. This actually became one of the South's main weaknesses in the Civil War as they didn't have the industrial infrastructure to manufacture the war materials that the North could.

To digress from Civil War chat, anyone get any good emails, comments, etc. about Paul Ryan apparently being a big Rage Against the Machine fan and Tom Morello releasing a blistering editorial against him? Most that I've seen so far are pretty tepid and generally revolve around Morello somehow being a hypocrite because he got rich playing guitar in RATM. Apparently, you're only allowed to criticize Paul Ryan, capitalism, American foreign policy, corporatism, etcif you're middle class.

Guilty Spork posted:

I'm sure no one's surprised that when I did a quick Google search just now about it one of the first results was from PolitiFact, and they gave it a Pants on Fire rating.

Of course, if PolitiFact's evaluations are any indication, it's pretty much safe to assume that chain e-mails are false.

SonicBoom posted:

The thing is, IIRC some turbofan blades and other aircraft components ARE designed with help from evolutionary algorithms that undergo a sort of natural selection. So, when he claims that he wouldn't want to be on a plane designed by evolutionary principles(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxX11c1cSWU&t=85s) it's likely that he has if he's flown on a recently designed plane. (Of course his bullshit 'throw all the pieces on the runway and they self-assemble' doesn't happen)

fake edit: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.0743.pdf ; it doesn't say if any engine manufacturers have used it, but it's quite possible.

Augster posted:

From facebook:



sigh

Bombadilillo posted:

Ever watch the daily show where they show 50 pundits saying the same phrase? It's not a meme or anything. They literally have taking points.

VideoTapir posted:

Does China count?

XyloJW posted:

It's North Korea alright. As noted above, Holy Roman Empire takes the cake for nisnomer.

quote:

Any time that a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush’s tax policies, Republicans shout, "class warfare!"

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.

Thomase posted:

Deficit and debt are too high!

Whoooooooa! Not my taxes!

Absurd Alhazred posted:

So it would be nice if you stopped constantly feigning amazement that the solutions here are different. I'm sorry a late-industrialized half-third-world country isn't as nice and fluffy as a rich old-school postcolonial Northern European state.

Anyway, "content". A facebook friend posts this blood splatter specimen

I pointed out that the issue of population density is related to how dense it is within the besieged territory (Paris isn't under siege, etc), we'll see how that goes.

ultimateforce posted:

Arm all teachers with hammers I guess?

Wang_Tang posted:

I can't vouch for the guy's deep, personal views. But according to what I've read, he did renounce his earlier, racist agenda. But in the end, that still does not excuse one from what they did.

But trying to tie his own lovely beliefs to the party which held polar opposite beliefs is just retarded.

Lee Atwater, Reagan and Bush 41 strategist, 1981 posted:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "friend of the family, friend of the family, friend of the family." By 1968 you can't say "friend of the family" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "friend of the family, friend of the family."

Trent Lott (R-MS), then-Senate Majority Leader, 2002 posted:

When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.

quote:

In my Facebook feed the other morning, I saw someone sharing one of these notions that seems like basic common sense, until you start thinking about it and realize that common sense is often more common than sense. The claim was that you can put the fiscal cliff—the federal budget, really—in better perspective by taking eight zeroes off the end of a series of numbers and thinking of it as a family budget. Now, families and governments actually aren't a good comparison, as economists (and common sense, if that's your speed) would tell you. But since a lot of people find this basic idea a powerful comparison, let's think about what if the United States was a big extended family living under one roof with one budget.

What happened in this Facebook share once those zeroes were gone?

quote:

Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Budget cuts so far: $38.50

First off, this set of numbers tips its hand by only talk about cutting budgets, not increasing income for this fictional family. Which is interesting, because one of the big problems the America-family has is that a bunch of rich relatives are living in the house not doing their fair share to cover expenses. We've got an uncle who's down in the kitchen all the time telling the rest of us to eat nothing but beans and rice because we can't afford fresh vegetables and meat, and telling us to turn down the heat in the house if we're having trouble covering the power bill. And no, he's not going to share his giant steak because it's his and he bought it with his own money. But meanwhile, we're paying the electric bill for that space heater he's always running in his room, because he's not gonna be cold even if the rest of us are. And we're paying the gas bill for cooking that steak he didn't share. So a big part of that spending problem we allegedly have is that some people aren't acting like we're a family where everyone contributes to the income side.
Another part of why our family budget is hurting is that the factory in town that a couple family members made a good living working at for years or even decades closed down. Now sister's still unemployed and the best job dad could find was working at Staples for $9 an hour. And since when the factory closed, he lost his pension, he may never able to retire. As a matter of fact, it was friends of rich space heater uncle who closed the factory, and we're pretty sure he made some money in the deal himself. Doesn't stop him lecturing us about why we're struggling, though.

Next, a bunch of the debt we took on last year was investing in our future. One of the kids is college age and we thought it was worth taking on some student loans to invest in her future. We feel sure when she graduates, she'll do her best to contribute to the family budget. We think in the long run she'll be able to contribute more to the family's bottom line with a college degree than if she just started working at Walmart right now, but, well, right now that investment is debt on our balance sheet. But that's what families do—they invest for the future and try to ensure that the kids have the brightest possible future.

We also took out a small-business loan to expand a little furniture-making business one of the brothers started out of the garage. With better equipment and a small advertising budget, we're hopeful he'll be able to grow the business and provide jobs for a couple other family members who've only been able to get part-time work.

We've also been having a family debate about whether to put a little more money into the house, actually. See, there was a big storm and a tree fell through the roof. Most of the bedrooms are fine, but two of them are really badly damaged. Some of us think all the members of the family deserve to have mold-free walls and roofs without gaping holes, but others aren't so sure and think maybe the people in those rooms ought to be on their own to recover from a tree coming through their roofs and crushing their stuff. We're hoping to win this one by reminding everyone that the people in those rooms have good jobs and pay more than their share of the bills most of the time. If they get too sick to work or have to take time off work to figure out how to fix things, the whole family will be financially weaker for it. We'll see how that one goes, but I sure think the whole house and the whole family will be weaker if we don't try to shore up after a disaster.

So, yeah, it's been a tough year what with the storm and all the rich relatives living in our house, running up the bills, but only contributing like 13 percent of their money to the family budget while a lot of us with much less money are contributing more like 30 percent. We're trying to invest for the future, though, and fighting to get those rich relatives to contribute a little more to the family budget. We'll see how things go with that, but meanwhile, it's not helpful to just strip the numbers down without any context for why we took in so little, or why we spent what we did.

Radish posted:

Yeah the way to write it would be along the lines of "I love you even though libdems took away Cupid's bow" or something.


Also I agree Image Macro, cops shouldn't have weapons like that.

zeroprime posted:

I liked the White House Correspondents Dinner intro from 2011 for pro trolling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mzJhvC-8E

Radical Griff posted:

People always get really solemn about the Nazi's, "never again," they say. Based on my interactions, a majority of people would openly embrace Fascism as long as it was groups they dislike suffering; poor blacks (because they're lazy and sell drugs), pedophiles (because they deserved to be used in Mengele-esque science experiments), people on welfare, muslims, etc.

It's been said the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Conservatives trust people to take care of themselves, and Liberals assume we need a strong government to keep order and peace. I used to be offended by that, but the more I look at America, the more I think that's true. I have seen the people, they are panicky, fear-driven, angry, and quick to lynch any group they feel is threatening their imaginary bubble. I would argue the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is the naivety of thinking large groups of people are inherently motivated by good.

quote:

The death of Princess Diana sparked much controversy and the original reaction of the public was that she was murdered. After a media campaign that called the event an accident and blamed the paparazzi, the public was divided on the issue. Examining the evidence makes this issue a lot clearer. The film "Unlawful Killing" examines the evidence that was largely concealed from the public for years. This movie can still be found on torrent. The evidence presented in the film includes:


Diana left a note saying that she was suspecting there is a plot to murder her in a car accident. This note was hidden for years after the murder.


Evidence used during the inquest was doctored, including blood samples, autopsy results, etc. For example, only a bottle of champagne was found at the driver's apartment when the police searched it, so the police searched it again and found a lot of alcohol. The blood samples of the drivers had numbers that are physically impossible.


Witnesses saw a bright flash in the tunnel at the time of the incident. A former MI6 agent revealed that MI6 had a plan to assassinate a Serbian leader by blinding the driver in a tunnel with a bright flash.


The ambulance ride took an incredibly long time to get to the hospital.


The media distorted the verdict of the inquest. The inquest found that Diana was murdered and other road vehicles were responsible for the murder, not paparazzi.


A white Fiat Uno was seen by witnesses at the scene of Diana's death and left paint on Diana's car. James Andanson owned a Fiat Uno and lied about his whereabouts on the night of the murder. James Andanson's body was found in his burnt out white Fiat Uno. It was locked and the body had no keys on it. The fireman that found his body said that he saw two bullet holes in the back of his skull. The police declared that it was a suicide. How did he shoot himself twice in the back of the head and then set the car on fire, before he died?


People say that the royals are a harmless relic of the past. Instead of just enjoying their lavish lives that are paid for by the taxpayers, they are using their wealth and influence to murder people they don't like. Sure, they don't murder people with their own hands, but that doesn't make them any less guilty. Diana's murderers must be brought to justice. The actual assassins might be hard to find now that much of the evidence has been covered up and/or destroyed, but the people that ordered the hit can be located easily. These bloody aristocrats are living in luxury. Princess Diana tried to use her position to help people and she was murdered. Good always defeats evil and one day justice will be served.

Plom Bar posted:

I think that one's about trans* rights.