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remember back in the first 2016 Republican primary debate the moderators just straight up loving forgot John Kasich existed, so they introduced every other candidate in sequence, they all walked out onto the stage one at a time, and then they ended the introductions and just started the debate, with one podium empty and Kasich standing around awkwardly just off stage Chris Christie had to be like 'what about Kasich? you forgot Kasich' two or three times before they finally gave him a belated introduction
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Dec 4, 2019 03:04
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MikeCrotch posted:When the US and EU declared some loving lib the president of Venezuela and then quietly dropped the whole thing when it became clear he was a complete failure lol remember how he came to an air force base expecting the military to defect en masse and let him in but instead they locked the gates so he just stood around on a highway interchange for like three hours and then left also remember how he had a representative give soldiers at a nearby garrison a letter asking them to defect for the good of the country and they took the letter and lit it on fire
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Dec 5, 2019 00:25
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'have a nice day' lmao https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1124805303202189317
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Dec 5, 2019 00:43
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just remembered that a past General Secretary-Treasurer of the IWW (who has long since been expelled) once used his position of authority in the union to order literal thousands of copies of his own book about the history of the IWW from himself, paying himself for them, ostensibly so they could be sold by the Literature Department, and then nobody bought them because it's not a particularly good book and so they've just been sitting in the office at General Headquarters ever since they're everywhere, boxes and boxes of them, in closets, in offices, in the conference room, stacked against the walls, in corners, there's copies of the book being used to prop up wobbly table legs, there's huge stacks of them being used as monitor stands for the computers they've been there since 2006
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Dec 5, 2019 01:17
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the funniest part is that this is really not far off from reality, in which the actual judge presiding over their case called them 'low-type Italians' and 'wops'
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Aug 24, 2021 18:10
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the funniest part of this was all the staffers having to come in and help them up afterwards because they're too decrepit to stand up on their own
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Sep 11, 2021 07:37
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Paul Ryan proposed a plan to privatize Social Security in 2005 and it was so poorly thought out that it would have led to the US federal government directly owning all publicly traded stock in the US eventually, effectively nationalizing most of the economy his plan was that, instead of your Social Security contributions being held by the government, it would instead be held in private investment accounts opened by, and managed by, the government. the Social Security Administration's primary function would be to use the money it received to invest in stocks and bonds, putting all money paid into Social Security directly into the stock market. any time someone retired, Social Security would then use revenue from the government's investments to purchase them an annuity that would fund their retirement. this would include all the money they currently hold in their asset reserves, which in 2021 is almost three trillion US dollars, enough that if this plan were implemented now the Social Security Administration could directly, immediately buy about 25% of all the stocks in the DJIA. it would make the US government the largest investor in the country, and it would inevitably snowball bigger and bigger until it forced all private investors out and the stock market was reduced entirely to the US government exchanging Social Security money for ownership shares in businesses. it would not be a question of if the government would gain a controlling stake in a major corporation, but when, and 'when' was probably 'within a few years'. the George Bush White House called the plan stupid and irresponsible and he withdrew it in shame
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Nov 24, 2021 22:31
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there's a city in Florida where you can only vote in local elections if you own land, and a supermajority of the land is owned by entities owned by the Walt Disney Company, so Disney effectively appoints the entire municipal government this is also how Walt wanted to organize the government in his Experimental City of Tomorrow, with the twist that in EPCOT all the land would have been owned by Disney and they would just not bother having elections
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Nov 25, 2021 01:16
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rescue workers clearing the debris and recovering bodies in the ruins of the WTC in the wake of the 9/11 attacks found the crushed remains of a fire engine whose cab was stuffed full of neatly folded designer jeans, stolen from a shop in the WTC basement while the tower was on fire, by firefighters, who spent their last moments looting the Gap while the towers fell on their heads
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Dec 10, 2021 07:00
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the best part about the wackos freaking out about The Number of the Beast is that they usually consider themselves biblical literalists, except for that specific part which they instead think is a vague metaphor warning about bar codes or driver’s licenses or basically any person or organization whose name can in any way be related to the number 6, no matter how tenuously
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Dec 15, 2021 02:36
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the President hid in a bunker under the White House while his constituents nearly battered down the fences and soldiers beat up and shot them for several days at one point he was supposed to deliver an address to the nation and the live feed was half an hour of an empty podium, with smoke and flecks of ash drifting across the screen and screams, sirens, and explosions audible in the background. Fox News cut the audio on theirs. eventually he came out and babbled for about six minutes about nothing much. after the address a heavily armed riot squad cleared enough of the street outside for him to be taken to a church nearby that didn’t want him there and hadn’t been informed he was coming, where a visibly annoyed President posed with a bible in front of the church. when asked by the press if it was his Bible, he responded ‘it’s a bible’. he then returned to his bunker.
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Dec 29, 2021 17:11
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one of the most important Soviet moles in British intelligence, who managed to get promoted to the head of all the UK’s anticommunist operations and spent years sabotaging them, spent the whole time telling everyone that he was a Soviet spy and should probably be arrested his colleagues thought it was a very funny joke
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Jan 1, 2022 01:24
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30.5 Days posted:Didn't he like get caught and then they brought him back at some point yeah he was actually exonerated the first time he got caught lol after being exonerated he promptly went right back to doing the things they had quite accurately accused him of Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 08:07 on Jan 2, 2022 |
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Jan 2, 2022 08:02
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Tesseraction posted:Do you mean the Tulsa rally leading to this hands down incredible picture? so I live near Tulsa and that entire rally was hilarious in hindsight People were seriously scared in the lead-up to it, everyone was absolutely positive there was going to be violence. basically every business in downtown Tulsa was not just closed, but boarded up, and regional gas station chain QuikTrip went one step further and barricaded their parking lots. Absolutely no one local was looking forward to the rally, even local Trump supporters were calling it irresponsible. as the time got closer and closer the Trumpers descended. The thing that really got me was that they were all from out of town - Tulsa is a pretty red city so you’d think there would be some locals, but no, what we got was a bunch of out-of-towners descending on the city and setting up illegal encampments on the streets around the convention center. Rather than clear out these encampments, like they had just done with homeless encampments for miles around, the police guarded them and blocked off the streets they were on. The Trumpers got into a bunch of fights with locals and absolutely trashed downtown, leaving piles of garbage, discarded camping equipment, and human waste everywhere. It’s still so bizarre to me because even the most disorganized homeless encampment usually has a specific area where people use the bathroom, I had never seen people just drop trou and poo poo right outside their tents until that rally. Following the rally attendees, in numbers equal or greater than them, were pop-up store entrepreneurs who set up stands in every available space, selling them poo poo. Punisher skull merch, thin blue line merch, MAGA merch, think of a right-wing slogan or symbol and there were at least two or three pop-up stores trying to sell it on a hat, flag, T-shirt, or coffee mug. There were so many of them it made the rally look way bigger than it actually was. So about that. The day of the rally came and people were tense. The local cops had been reinforced by the US Marshals and the military, there were huge fences erected around the arena, troops everywhere, thousands of counterprotesters. It started, and it wasn’t even half full. Hardly anyone attended the drat thing. They resorted to packing people in on the front rows to make the crowd look larger. It ended up being way shorter than intended, and when it did end the few attendees exited the arena and...left. There was no confrontation with counterprotesters, no march, no afterparty, they piled into their trucks and RVs and charter buses and loving ran away. Thousands of locals had assembled to try to stop them from trashing our city and they were so scared that they didn’t even try to confront them in an organized way. They just left. At one point a few friends and I, who had been distributing water to people, were heading back to our staging area to resupply, get snacks, and rest. We were masked but not in bloc or anything like that, just dressed in regular clothes, and I remember the mood being really chill, talking, laughing. Ahead of us on the sidewalk were a couple older ladies in MAGA apparel, and at one point they turned around and looked at us, screamed ‘OH MY GOD THEY’RE RIGHT OVER THERE!’, and ran away down an alley. I guess they thought we were antifas? It’s still one of the strangest things I’ve ever had happen to me. Anyway, when they left, the crowd was still there and everyone still had a bunch of energy, so it ended up turning into a spontaneous block party, which was pretty nice. It had more attendees than the rally and somehow still managed to leave less trash on the streets. Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 17:18 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 17:09
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Peyote Panda posted:I remember feeling uncertain when Transmetropolitan was originally published that definitively exposing a politician's venality and corruption would actually be the decapitation strike that the story suggested, but hoped I was being overly cynical. Now the last few years have made it clear time and time again that it was embarassingly naive to think that sort of thing will even move the needle. I haven't read Transmetropolitan in years, but I also remember that being the comic where the first big arc was the police deliberately instigating a riot so they could kill a bunch of homeless people, and the protagonist stopping it by liveblogging it and everyone watching being so horrified at what the police were doing that the city government made the police stop and leave, which is in hindsight also incredibly naive. From real-life experience we now know that you can have a dozen people livestreaming a police riot and at most you'll get the police to voluntarily agree to temporarily use less tear gas, unless they deem it necessary (they always deem it necessary).
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Jan 13, 2022 20:34
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Antonymous posted:remember in 1945 that most of the korean communists lived in the south and the US suddenly pulled out of negotiations with USSR (who had just pulled their troops from korea) and decided that the US Army Dictatorship Of Korea (USAMGIK) would do an election where their guy no one liked ran uncontested and won and then killed the communists in the south who protested his winning the election and then started incursions into the much stronger North and then the US and their lackies killed 15% of people in north korea on top of killing most left wingers in the south and by all definitions it was a genocide also some of the refugees fleeing the genocide ended up in Japan, where tens of thousands of their descendants remain stateless people with no political rights to this day
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Feb 10, 2022 04:17
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the Officer Down Memorial Page used to include an entry memorializing Edward Gorsuch. Gorsuch was a Maryland plantation owner who organized a posse of slave-hunters to track down four slaves who had escaped from his plantation, and illegally chased them all the way to Pennsylvania (which was a free state). When he finally found them, he confronted them with his slavecatching band, only to be met by about 100 armed black people and white abolitionists, who offered him the opportunity to just walk away. He instead attempted to physically grab one of his escaped slaves and drag the man away, while being held at gunpoint, which ended in him getting clubbed in the head and then shot a few dozen times, along with most of his posse. all of the men charged in relation to his death got off scot-free and the slaves went on to live the rest of their lives as free people in Canada. the page's comments were almost all officers honoring him for his sacrifice and thanking him for his service. it was quietly deleted sometime in 2020, but is still on the Wayback Machine. the escaped slave who beat Gorsuch over the head and then riddled him with bullets died peacefully on his farm in Canada in 1891, surrounded by his friends and family, which is not funny but is nice Mister Bates has issued a correction as of 23:35 on Feb 10, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 23:25
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over the course of the Afghan war, a cottage industry of bombing scavengers developed, guys who would go to places where the US had done a strike and collect all the debris and unexploded ordnance to resell, mostly to the Taliban this became so lucrative that you'd have guys 'tipping off' the US about fake 'Taliban positions' in the middle of nowhere, entirely so the US would drop a bomb there for them to come steal the remnants of
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Feb 19, 2022 21:27
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the Gunpowder Plot plotters made basically no attempt to cover up what they were doing at all, mostly used their real names when conspiring (or really obvious fake ones; Guy Fawkes was using the alias John Johnson), and, after the plot failed, got most of themselves killed when they fled to the forest to start a guerrilla war and decided to try to dry their damp gunpowder by spreading it in a big circle on the ground around their campfire also Guy Fawkes fell down and died while walking to the gallows and the executioner had to sheepishly hang his already dead body
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Aug 7, 2022 20:06
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a bunch of guys in British intelligence agency MI5 and the British military seriously considered a military coup against moderate social-democrat prime minister Harold Wilson for being too left-wing their plan was to oust him and replace him with Louis Mountbatten, a big ol' pedophile who had been under investigation for possibly trafficking young boys for over twenty years by that point; this was seen by MI5 as being less objectionable than slightly increasing the health care budget
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Aug 22, 2022 05:08
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the US neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Workers Party imploded because one of the founders caught another loving his wife, particularly notable because guy B was married to guy A’s daughter specifically he caught them by spying on them through the bedroom window, but got caught because the box he was standing on broke and he fell down with a loud crash, which led to a fistfight in the front yard the guys who call everyone cucks as an insult fell apart because of literal cuckoldry
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Aug 25, 2022 01:23
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Bust Rodd posted:when we impeached a hugely popular and successful president for lying about hooking up with his secretary for secretly doing something that most previous presidents just did openly without really even bothering to hide it, up to and including Lyndon Johnson straight-up whipping his dick out in front of foreign dignitaries or the press on a regular basis
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Aug 27, 2022 18:08
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Recently dead idiot Gorbachev repeatedly tried to get back into politics by working with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and was apparently genuinely hurt and upset that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with him
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Aug 31, 2022 04:03
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one of the fire engines crushed under the 9/11 rubble was full of neatly-stacked pairs of jeans the fire crew had been in the process of looting from the Gap when the towers came down
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Sep 7, 2022 02:00
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VFWs around the US still have custom Jane Fonda urinal cakes and Jane Fonda stickers in the toilets so you can piss on Jane for her terrible betrayal of the Brave Troops and their noble campaign of colonialist genocide
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Sep 8, 2022 01:27
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War and Pieces posted:Some rx marine with a feel good story begging for donations to airlift dozens of stray dogs out of Kabul whose actual real name was 'Pen Farthing'
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Sep 8, 2022 05:07
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on a related note, the media and much of the GOP establishment spending years treating Jeb Bush as the heir-presumptive to the Republican nomination in 2016 only for his campaign to be such an embarrassing failure that there was no chance of him even getting a consolation-prize cabinet seat
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Sep 12, 2022 07:22
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MD2020 posted:The "cool" in the link above reminded me off all the prewritten articles to celebrate the coronation of Hillary and her family after the 2016 that still went to print after Trump's victory. it looks like she’s wearing a mask of her own face lmao
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Sep 15, 2022 00:52
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Zerg Mans posted:There was a stretch around that time where anarchists just decided to start killing every head of state they could find. They killed the empress of Austria and I think two different Italian PMs? propaganda of the deed objectively did not work and was a failure as a political strategy but it did get a bunch of rich people and horrible inbred nobles killed so it had at least one redeeming quality
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Sep 23, 2022 19:00
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FreeRangeHexagon posted:Right wing twitter is mad about George Floyd again because of a new Candace Owens movie or something, and I'm just remembering how much of an effort all the liberal BLM people made to be as peaceful and civil as possible and how it doesn't matter because the right think they burned down entire cities anyway. So they got all the bad PR of doing citywide riots, but without the actual harm to capital that would have caused. remember how Minneapolis city council supposedly agreed to put forth a ballot proposal to disband their police department, and everyone was celebrating it as a huge victory but then it turned out the city council's plan for disbanding the police department was to then immediately replace it with an organization with the same purview, budget, facilities, and equipment, and then rehire all the same people to staff it, which is to say they were actually just renaming the police department and then in the end even that hilariously meaningless token gesture was drowned in a multi-million-dollar right-wing advertising blitz and easily defeated at the ballot box and that advertising was so effective that a bunch of those people are still 100% convinced that, not only was Minneapolis seriously considering disbanding their police force, but that it did actually happen and the city is just run by gangs now
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Oct 13, 2022 20:00
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all of the major news outlets collectively deciding they were never going to mention the name Bernie Sanders ever again partway through the 2020 Dem primary, up to and including removing his bar from state polling results and lumping it in with 'Other', even when he was in the lead
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Oct 26, 2022 21:10
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while on the subject of Sanders, the following misspellings of his name received multiple write-in votes in Texas in 2020: BENARD SANDERS BERINE SANDERS BERNIE SAUNDERS BARRY SANDERS BERNALD SANDERS BURNIE SANDERS Also multiple write-ins for 'COLON POWELL'
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Oct 26, 2022 22:51
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when Disney first tried to open Euro Disneyland in France the commuter train crews did a wildcat strike and shut the trains down rather than drive anyone to the park, a bunch of the staff no-showed, and someone blew up one of the power substations supplying the park with a bomb, with the final opening day guest numbers missing Disney’s projections by over 95%. there were more staff than guests in the park on opening day. also a bunch of their standard rules and restrictions for ‘cast members’, in particular the hair/piercing/tattoo restrictions they had, were illegal workplace discrimination under French law, and they tried running a campaign to get French voters to repeal those protections by saying they might choose not to build the (wildly unpopular) park if France didn’t cut back on worker’s rights a bit
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Nov 3, 2022 03:43
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 here is that same graph except as a set of silicone buttplugs
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Nov 7, 2022 22:22
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4186587/2012_Republican_primary_polling.0.png)
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cohsae posted:The boaters for Trump almost drowning each other in a lake because they were all hooning around like complete morons. one of the organizers of that event planning to take a boat flotilla across the loving ocean to Cuba during the abortive 'protests' last year, for unclear reasons, and the US Coast Guard having to come out and tell people not to do that because they would probably die
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Nov 8, 2022 21:10
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Zerg Mans posted:the Venezuelan invasion gravy seals hogtied with one of them having peed and the pee ran down hill to his face these guys weren't even getting paid because Guaido reneged on the deal and the check never cleared also the operation was allegedly planned in the reserved birthday party room at a Buffalo Wild Wings
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Nov 19, 2022 02:45
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Ron Paul was infamous on the Hill for double-billing all of his expenses - whenever he went on a speaking engagement or a campaign trip or a luncheon or really anything at all he could reasonably expense, he would bill it to both his Congressional expense account and also to one or more of various Ron Paul aligned libertarian orgs, so he'd spend 50 bucks on a dinner or something and make 100-200 back I don't think anyone has ever done a full accounting of dollar amounts but it is likely he directly ripped off his own diehard supporters to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars
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Nov 23, 2022 15:30
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a group of hardcore Ron Paul fans bought ronpaul.com and spent a shitload of time, money, and effort putting together a website, associated political organization, and a mailing list with several hundred thousand people on it, fundraised a big pile of money for him, and then Ron Paul decided he wanted that domain name so he immediately stabbed them in the back and sued them into oblivion the funniest part is that he started by filing a complaint with the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization asking them to confiscate the website for him, which his supporters viewed as the ultimate betrayal because he was working with the evil ZOG-run UN
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Nov 23, 2022 15:44
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Ron Paul repeatedly introducing legislation that would authorize the US government to issue Letters of Marque, an extremely archaic document that was a legal sanction for a private individual to commit piracy or banditry in the name of a government. they were really common during the Golden Age of Piracy and most of the famous pirates you can think of had one from one country or another, but there hasn't been one issued by anyone in like 200 years Paul wanted to use them to 'fight terrorism'
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Nov 23, 2022 23:42
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the US government spent billions of dollars in the 1980s developing space weapons because the president was a senile old man who had seen Star Wars and liked it, with almost all of them being promptly cancelled by George HW Bush, his own hand-picked successor. they included a concept for a laser gun powered by a nuclear warhead and a bugfuck-insane plan to launch over 300 orbiting space stations covered in weapons. the one that they went with, as the least stupid and outlandish of the various designs they wasted money on, was 'Brilliant Pebbles', a plan to launch ten thousand tiny missiles into orbit and have them just hang out up there forever, to be activated if the Soviets ever launched ICBMs. in addition to violating pretty much every space treaty and filling LEO with debris, the plan's projected cost was about 55 billion US dollars by the time it was finally cancelled (inflation-adjusted, about 110 billion dollars), plus ongoing costs for replacing the missiles as they reached end-of-life, for something that we now know would have never been used. it managed to survive through the Bush era only to finally get shitcanned by the Clinton administration. also, even if it had been deployed, and even if nuclear war had broken out, we are now pretty sure it wouldn't have even worked
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Nov 27, 2022 16:05
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