Bananasaurus Rex posted:

This just caused stocks to shoot straight up
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1126139704108302336?s=19

Rex-Goliath posted:

lol zero hedge

Bulgakov posted:

sean spicer's nightmare

Helsing posted:

I think the brain trust over at The Economist might have finally come across a sufficiently compelling explanation for global inequality...

quote:

HUMANS can digest lactose, the main carbohydrate in milk, only with the help of an enzyme called lactase. But two-thirds of people stop producing it after they have been weaned. The lucky third—those with “lactase persistence”—continue to produce it into adulthood. A recent paper* argues that this genetic quirk helps explain why some countries are rich and others poor.

Justin Cook of the University of California, Merced, uses data on historical migration flows to estimate the ethnic composition of 108 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe in 1500. He then estimates what proportion of the population would have been able to digest milk, using data on the lactose tolerance of different ethnic groups (which he assumes has not changed much over the centuries). Pre-colonial countries in western Europe tended to have the highest rates of lactase persistence, Mr Cook estimates. Some 96% of Swedes had it, for instance. The lowest levels were in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia.

Mercrom posted:

i guess milk being a white supremacist symbol wasnt made up

Concerned Citizen posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/NBChristinaGinn/status/1120258845710983173

quote:

Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire. Despite being the daughter of the Mad King and the last rightful Targaryen heir to the Iron Throne (until this week), Dany didn’t grow up in the lavish palace walls of the Red Keep. She was born during the chaos of her father’s overthrow, in the last great civil war between the rich and powerful family houses. Dany grew up in exile, wandering the so-called Free Cities of the East — many of which weren’t free at all but propped up by slave markets to serve their masters. When we meet Dany in season one, she’s a teenager sold off by her abusive elder brother to beefcake warlord Khal Drogo in order to further his political ambitions. Dany might be a princess by birth, but she wasn’t dealt an easy hand.

Dany believes fiercely in her right to rule, but she despises what ruling means in the world she’s grown up in. She doesn’t want to be a slave owner or a dictator — and she definitely doesn’t want to become her murderous father. She tells Ser Jorah: “Slavery is real. I can end it. I will end it. And I will end those behind it.” Before sailing across the sea to Westeros, she frees the enslaved people of Meereen and creates an army that fights because they want to, not because they have to. (Also, she has dragons.)

Calibanibal posted:

i think she identifies w/ daenerys because they both have extremely rare bloodlines

Peanut President posted:

Nichael posted:

The Making of the Legend of the Galactivate Heroes Post: An Oral History

Nichael: The idea for my Legend of the Galactivate Heroes post came to me some time before I actually made the post. I was absentmindedly reading the Succ Zone, and noticed their derail had shifted from Game of Thrones discussion to someone bringing up how Legend of the Galactic Heroes was a fitting analogue for our current political climate. It then occurred to me, what if I replaced the "Galactic" in Legend of the Galactic Heroes with "Galactivate". Galactivate, of course, being an iconic in-joke in C-SPAM, and a much beloved cultural touchstone of the Trump Thread.

Immediately I knew that replacing "Galactic" with "Galactivate" was a potentially dynamic shifting post. The "LOGH" acronym would still work, "Galactic" kind of sounds like "Galactivate", and it even works in context. You can be a "Galactivate Hero", and I knew for drat sure C-SPAM posters would appreciate the idea of there being "legends" of said heroes. It was a post that should be made. It was a post that had to be made.

Narrator: But then tragedy struck. Nichael would not be able to make his Legend of Galactivate Heroes post when he wanted to...

Nichael: Unfortunately, life as it often does, got in the way. Though the idea for the post came to me in the mid-evening, I became occupied by various chores and obligations that prevented me from making the post, and in a moment of forethought, I knew I had to make a reminder for myself to make the post when I had more time. Therefore, I opened a blank tab in Chrome, and typed "logh" in the search bar, so as to remind myself later to make the post. Initially I thought I'd be delayed by an hour or so, but then I watched three episodes of Deep Space 9, and forgot that I had intended to make the Legend of the Galactivate Heroes post in the first place...

Narrator: Then as if some divine force intervened...

Nichael: I was finishing up watching Deep Space 9, by this point having completely forgotten to make the post. It was then that I went to look up who played O'Brien's cellmate in the episode Hard Time, when I noticed the blank tab with the letters "logh" in the search bar. I was ecstatic. I knew now was the perfect time to make my Legend of the Galactivate Heroes post, and so I opened the Trump Thread, clicked "Reply", and posted the following:


My work was done at last. I had made the Legend of the Galactivate Heroes post, and with that I knew I would cement my legacy as someone who combined the idea of Galactivate with a 1980s anime.

Narrator: The Legend of the Galactivate Heroes post would go on to become one of C-SPAM's most well regarded posts, with over one quote of it in the pages soon after it was posted. Nichael would spend the rest of the evening looking at C-SPAM and then going to sleep. It was a job well done... worthy of a true Galactivate Hero.

smarxist posted:

linking my own tweet for a proper video embed w/ sound

https://twitter.com/smarxist_/status/1130197686366461959

Aino Minako posted:

Epic High Five posted:

almost as ironic as China bringing in a shitload of opiates into our country to destabilize it

DONT THREAD ON ME posted:

yet another stunning example of chinese ip theft

Woof Blitzer posted:

Ip Theft Man

theblackw0lf posted:

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein she said that health care and education are places that are not suited for the market.

So while she does believe in markets, she also believes that things that are a human right, like health care, shouldn’t be susceptible to the market and shouldn’t be a commodity.

Willa Rogers posted:

I can't find her healthcare platform on her issues page. Can you point me to it?

papa horny michael posted:

https://facts.elizabethwarren.com/elizabeth-does-not-take-risperdal/

alsothere posted:

https://twitter.com/eloise_97/status/1144075939388809222?s=19

really queer Christmas posted:

*in high pitch voice* why do you keep calling me

*voice shifts to deep pitch* delaney

Zhulik posted:

no poo poo dude. those are the good poll telling gods own sterling truth, and not baseless garbage reinforcing the sewer proclamations of rpgmaker townspeople who failed upward into having a unique sprite

Al! posted:

stomp my flag

ILL STOMP yOUR rear end!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

twoday posted:

Finally I can post poo poo like this with the firm knowledge that it won't be the craziest thing in the thread. Anyway, none of this is really crazy, it's all well-sourced. But if you want to hop down into the warp-tunnel and skip ahead to Epstein Brain Level 99, read this:

~~~

The Cow on Pedo Island: A Detailed History



~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. THE CANAANITES
2. THE PHOENICIANS
3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE
4. THE OLD GODS
5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE
6. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN?
7. MOLOCH
8. EPSTEIN
9. POSTSCRIPT

~~~

1. THE CANAANITES



So the Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, or the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, the Jordan River valley). It was not a specific term but a catch-all term, and not one that is really used today. Many of the groups living in this area in ancient times were Semitic peoples, and as time went on they branched off into various groups. The two which you might have heard of are the Jews and the Phoenicians (and also Carthaginians).


I will refer to these groups as the Phoenicians.

2. THE PHOENICIANS

The Phoenicians are, I think, one of the most fascinating of the Ancient Mediterranean cultures, and one of the least understood. They did a lot of cool stuff. They invented the alphabet, from which just about all other alphabets are derived (even Sanskrit!).They were the finest seafarers in the world in their day, and circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC (something which was recently replicated in a replica Phoenician ship), they invented the olive and set up a vast trade network to sell the oil and thus "lit up the world" by providing one of the first convenient cheap fuels for oil lamps.It's even been speculated that they discovered America more than a 1000 years before the Vikings

They were originally based in the area of Lebanon, and eventually founded Carthage in Tunisia, one of the coolest ancient cities:



The old Phoenician cities in the Levant were eventually conquered, but Carthage flourished in the western Mediterranean as the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. Then the Romans appeared on the scene, and started fighting with everybody. For a long time, the Cartheginians and the Romans were the main two powers in the Western Med and ended up bitter enemies engaged in existential warfare. The Carthaginian Hannibal (whose name contains "Ba'al," remember this) came close to conquering Italy, but didn't. Then Rome conquered Carthage.

3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE

I mentioned that we know little about the Phoenicians (and the Carthaginians). There are three reasons for this:

1) They were very secretive. They were super rich, and made this money through having a monopoly on trade goods and trade goods. For instance, to make bronze you need copper and tin, so both were pretty important. Copper is all over the place, but there are very few places in the world where you can mine tin.



While the waters of the Med are pretty calm, the waters in the Atlantic were really dangerous in those times. There were tides, currents, and trade winds which nobody understood. Except the Phoenicians. They were the only Mediterranean civ to go really go beyond Gibraltar. They traded with the Celts of Spain, France, and England, and developed a monopoly on tin, which they sourced from Druids in Cornwall. They went to incredible lengths to maintain their secrets. For instance, once a Roman ship tried to secretly follow some Carthaginian ships beyond Carthage to see where they were going. The Carthaginian captain steered them into a dangerous area filled with rough seas and sharp rocks, causing the Roman ship to sink, as well as his own small fleet. Almost everyone died, but the captain made it back to Carthage. Not only was he reimbursed for the loss of his ships, he was also lauded as a hero and handsomely rewarded, because he maintained the secret that kept their whole empire running. They also lied to everyone in the Mediterranean, telling them that the Atlantic was not navigable and full of sea monsters, so that nobody would even try to go there.

2) They were considered the bad guys by the primary predecessors of Western Civilization. The Romans hated them, and so did Jews (I'll explain why in a second). They were the Other and the Enemy, and they were spoken of almost exclusively in the worst of terms. Almost everything written about them was black propaganda, and not really reliable historical information.

3) Their culture was systematically exterminated. During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the Romans grew to despise the Carthaginians. Carthago delende est! or "Carthage must be destroyed!," as you may remember Cato saying in the Roman Senate. He would end every speech he gave this way, no matter what the topic of the speech was. It became ingrained in the Roman psyche that Carthage must be utterly wiped off the face of the earth if they were ever defeated. When the Romans finally invaded Carthage they killed 500,000 people, burned the city down and then went through the ashes tearing apart the rubble so that no building was left standing, and then they went out into the fields and literally salted the earth so that no crops could grow. 50,000 were enslaved and dispersed throughout the Empire. And though they brought writing to much of the world, most all of their own writing was systematically destroyed except for a small handful of books which the Romans copied, such a treatise on olive growing, a text which became the basis of an entire sector of the Roman economy. It was rumored that some Carthaginian leadership escaped to a secret island somewhere, but no evidence of this has been found.

So we have almost nothing left of their culture except some ruins and a book about olives.

4. THE OLD GODS

Their were two reasons everyone hated them - their wealth, and their religion.

The Isrealites were descended from Semitic people in the Levant, and so their ancestors worshiped the same ancient Semitic pantheon of gods and goddesses that was worshiped by the Phoenicians. However, if you are a keen reader of the Bible, you might have noticed that they became monotheistic at some point. At this point the worship of the Old Gods and their likenesses became forbidden.


This is from the ten commandments, as given to Moses by God himself on Mt. Sinai. He was up there alone for a while. My suspicion is he was there for quite some time, probably fasting and getting into some intense trance state. I suspect this because he was gone long enough that when he came back, some of the Isrealites had reverted back to the old Religion and set up a statue of a golden calf and were worshiping it.



Moses didn't like this; neither did God.


So from then on, the Israelites really didn't like the worship of cow statues. In the Bible it became kind of a symbol of the old polytheistic religion of the Levant which was specifically forbidden by God in the ten commandments, and comes up elsewhere in later books.

And even though this old Canaanite religion became symbolic of everything that was wrong and backwards, the Jews and the Canaanites (a.k.a. Phoenicians) weren't enemies because of this. A Phoenician King even helped sponsor Solomon when he was constructing of the first temple in Jerusalem, as they were allies at the time.

The Romans were the ones who really hated the Phoenicians, and the thing that really irked them was another aspect of their religion that developed, and you guessed it, it was...

5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE




Seems bad! However,


It seems that at some point the ancient Canaanites did practice child sacrifice, and then began substituting the children with animals and other offerings. Remember the story of Abraham? The one that is the basis of the Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam, the basis of most of all religious worship on the planet Earth? Well the story of Abraham is about him deciding to kill his child because God told him to, and then being told not to once God told him that he was just kidding and just wanted to see how far he would go. Just a prank, bro!

Abraham lived, according to the Bible, before the Jews were captured by the Egyptians. That is, he was an ancient Canaanite, and this story would have been known to the Jews and other Canaanites long before, and therefore was probably integrated into the Phoenician religion as well, which developed later. The Phoenician tophets have plenty of animals that were used as ritual substitutes for children, and this would seem to indicate that this was also acceptable. This is also what the Jews did in the first Temple period, sacrificing animals instead of kids (see: Leviticus), which would make their animal sacrifice seem like an act of mercy. "Yeah there's blood everywhere, just be happy I didn't do it to your family." Which is a good point, and will keep people allied with the people who sacrifice animals, and keep them in fear of the other bad people out there who might actually sacrifice children. In a way, it's just a giant protection racket that makes everyone follow the faith. "Do what we say, because the alternative is that something horrible will happen to your family.

The evidence of child sacrifice was the conclusion drawn by the first archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1970's, and the reason he thought this was the case was because it is something that is often repeated in Roman tirades about how evil the Carthaginians were, and explaining why Rome should go to war with Carthage. So, it's not the most reliable and objective source. And once something is written in history books by someone who made a major discovery, it takes a Herculean effort from later scholars to overturn it, because by then it's already canon.

Now, this leaves us with two possible interpretations of the Tophet of Carthage:

1) The Phoenicians practiced ritual child sacrifice all the time, they couldn't get enough of it. They were an entire massive culture of just straight up evil motherfuckers murdering children left and right, killing children and harnessing that dark child murder energy as the source of their power, and what keeps their empire going, and what keeps them wealthy and in control of the international economy. That's a bit difficult for me to believe, but not impossible; ancient times were pretty crazy.

This interpretation was pretty much what the Roman Senators were saying all the time as they were banging the drums of war. It's how they got everyone in Rome to despise Carthage, and agree that it must be destroyed. By promoting these ideas and this sentiment they were able to justifiably invade and conquer and obliterate their main political and economic opponent and use the spoils of war to double the size of their Empire. So I'm remiss to trust the Romans on this.

But the thing is we know almost jack poo poo about Phoenician religion because the Romans systematically obliterated them and all traces of their culture that they could get their hands on. And also they became the basis of all of Western Civilization so this bias is fundamentally ingrained in our culture.

2) The alternative interpretation of the Tophet which other archaeologists support is that the Tophet represents a necropolis, and was where the Carthaginians respectfully cremated and kept their dead kids in urns. Keep in mind that at this point in history infants and children had a really high rate of mortality from disease, complications at childbirth, etc. If the kids who died of natural causes aren't in the tophet, then nobody really knows where they are.

In this interpretation, the Romans were actually the bloodthirsty ones. While trying to drum up support for war and expand their empire, they came up with a smear campaign against the Carthaginians based upon their religion. The Roman religion (which they just straight up stole from the Greeks, and changed the names) was also polytheistic, but with very different roots than that of the Carthaginians, and the Senators took advantage of this. At the time of the Punic Wars the Romans mostly buried their dead, and the Carthaginians practiced cremation. They could have also heard of the story of Abraham and twisted it to say, "Look! Their God encourages Child Sacrifice! You can't let them be in charge of anything!" And this story is still the basis of our knowledge of Carthaginian religion because the Romans did an excellent cover-up of whatever the truth was. They built up sentiment and mistrust against the mysterious Middle-Eastern religion of the Carthaginians and then used this as a reason to perpetuate a genocide of a Semitic people for economic gain and the expansion of Empire.

6. WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? HOW THE gently caress IS THIS RELATED TO EPSTEIN, LIKE, AT ALL??

Understanding this history, as well as the way this historical narrative developed and was presented is absolutely essential to understanding everything that has happened since then, because this the story of how the Romans ended up in charge of the Mediterranean, which gave them the resources to build up the Roman Empire and take control of Europe. The destruction of Carthage enabled the rise of the Rome, which in turn determined the fate of Europe, and thus all of Western Civilization for the last two thousand years. Understanding this story is essential if you want to understand the DNA of Western culture. I'll get to Epstein in a minute, I'm at the crux of the argument right now though, so pay attention.

Now, to get to the cow, and move a bit further forward along the timeline of history:

Christianity grew out of Judaism, and incorporated into it all the stories from the Hebrew bible, including the stories of Abraham as well of that of the Golden Calf. The Romans adopted Christianity and spread it through Europe. The empire eventually collapsed, but their ideas did not. While all the books written by the people who invented the alphabet are lost, those of the Romans survived, being carefully copied and studied and repeated for thousands of years, with all the later societies of western Europe being based upon them. The idea that there are still people out there from the Levant who were practicing "The Old Ways" (which included child sacrifice) was politically expedient for Rome during the Punic Wars, but it espoused with such intensity that it never really went away. That idea is still floating around in our society today and continues to shape the trajectory of western Civilization. It warped and changed a bit over time, but the core of it remains. First of all, since the genocide of the Phoenicians was largely written off as a success, and that religion extinguished, the animosity of the original Roman anti-Carthaginian antisemitism was carried over to the other Semites which were encountered in western Europe - The Jews. One way to look at the history of antisemitism in Europe is that it is the story of the descendants of the Romans hating the descendants of the Canaanites. It's a loving ancient conflict which was fought throughout the middle ages, and the 20th century, and continues to be fought by some today.

This has manifested in various ways at various times, but one essential and constantly recurring theme has been human (often child) sacrifice and the worship of a false god (often symbolized as a bull). Somewhat ironically, these ideas are essential to Judiasm as well, but historically they have been used by the Christians of Europe to persecute the Jews.

First, there was the idea of blood libel. Jews were viewed as suspect, practicing an old religion which most people associated with human sacrifice, etc. A well-known example of this would be Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice when Shylock the Jewish Merchant demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt. But often whenever there was a murder in medieval Europe would blame the local Jews for this and a bunch of them would be executed. This is how the Jews ended up being banned from England in the 13th century. Wherever they fled to these rumors would follow them, and the local xenophobes and preachers were often quick to recite the verses in the bible about Abraham and Leviticus, and accuse the Jews of murdering children. Eventually this idea became so widespread that it became the common understanding of people that one (secret) part of the Jewish religion was that they had to murder one Christian baby every year if they wanted to appease their allegedly bloodthirsty Jewish God and be allowed to return to Jerusalem. This imagined payment of Christian child blood to the Jew God is known as blood libel. These stories, in one variation or another, became widespread throughout Europe, the same way everyone reading this knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood. So the Jews were met with the same accusations wherever they went, and stories of Jews eating children were widely believed through the early 20th century. This narrative was exploited by all the local Christians (whose most holy city was what? Oh yeah, Rome), and the Jews were exploited as a scapegoat by the local authorities for economic and political gain (ironically, the concept of the scapegoat also comes from the Hebrew bible. For examples of this, one can think of the Spanish Inquisition or the pogroms in the Russian Empire. These beliefs began fading away first in Western Europe in places like the Dutch Republic, where Jews became an integral part of society, and later in Eastern Europe, paralleling the timeline of the spread of Christianity across Europe but with a delay of about a thousand years. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in 1919 in Russia, and said that the Jews secretly run the world and eat children, which was later recycled by the Nazis. However, even god drat Hitler realized it's hard to make people believe in the 20th century believe that Jews literally sacrifice children, so he slightly modified the idea a bit to describe the Jews as a parasitic minority eating away at the health of the German people. And they bought it.

7. MOLOCH



Besides Christianity in medieval Europe, there were also lots of esoteric religious beliefs based on a mix of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, kabbalah and other Jewish texts, and a bunch of poo poo that people just made up. Think of alchemy, or Rosecrucianism, or Freemasonry. There are a bunch of others. These people dug up a bunch of ancient ideas and reworked them and adjusted them to fit their whims. This is how Moloch emerged as a theme in conspiracy culture. Let's see what wikipedia entry has to say on the matter.


Ok, so Moloch is based on anti-Canaanite stuff from the bible, including the Golden Calf. But it also fits very well with the European bias against Semites, and also is just a loving perfect thing to talk about if you are a good Christian who hates the Jews, because not only does it explain why you think the Jews are backwards and terrible, but you can also refer to the Christian bible for proof of all your claims. Read the wiki article about Moloch if you want to dive into a two thousand year old cesspit of circular arguments about why the Phoenicians actually did sacrifice children. But anyway, the idea of Moloch helped perpetuate the idea of child sacrifice throughout the ages, and still comes up today when people are really pissed off at someone and want to depict them as the worst scum of the earth. This is why people were freaking out about the cow on Epstein's island. It proves he's a Molochian, doesn't it? He had a cow statue, that's the key to all of this!

This is what people actually literally still believe, by the way:

https://twitter.com/ottovonschirekt/status/1158658206387691521?s=20

https://twitter.com/FightRasche/status/1155853574196355170?s=20

I don't believe this myself, because I have an alternative theory to explain the cow that I will get to in a second, but first I will round out every other part of this story, and how it relates to the Epstein Affair.

8. EPSTEIN

Taking all of this into account, we are left with two extreme possibilities which would explain everything that we have read in the past week:

1) There was a ship filled with Carthaginian noblemen which escaped the fall of Carthage, and somehow they not only integrated into Roman society, they managed to take total control of it, along with the rest of the world. They did this in total secrecy for thousands of years, secretly carrying on their sick and depraved religion of child sacrifice through a brutal tradition of blackmail and murder. They have since that time been in control of all aspects of culture and every living human being, and the procession of history has been one massive illusion. Everything you know is a lie, it's all been a hoax perpetrated for centuries and they've managed to cover up all the traces of their misdeeds. We are but the cattle of the worshipers of Moloch.

or

2) This is exactly the same loving story that has been pushed onto the public in Western civilization since Cato was raging in the Senate. It worked for Cato, it worked for the xenophobic English in 1290, it worked for the Spanish Inquisition, it worked for the Tsarists, it worked for the Nazis, and now during the presidency of Donald J. Trump it's working again. All you have to do is make up a story about an evil conspiracy of Jews that want to murder your children, and people will follow you anywhere. There are how many millions of Q supporters now? How many of them literally believe in Moloch? That they were literally sacrificing children for their moon god? poo poo's not real fam, go get some fresh air.

And one could even go so far as to say that it's all made up, it's all a lie, an elaborate psy-op, that the victims are actors, that the murder was a hoax, that it's all just a well thought-out theaterpiece meant to turn your average American against the Mossad and encourage a new era of total mistrust and isolationism.

https://twitter.com/ldrinkh20/status/1161960553465700352?s=20

But I personally think the truth lies in the middle. I think that he was deffo an intelligence asset and loving teenagers and blackmailing people and being blackmailed himself and involved in a bunch of illegal poo poo that he may or may have not had permission to be involved in as an undercover agent. And then something went wrong or too much leaked and they had to pull the plug, either by murdering him or putting him into witness protection. And I don't think we will ever know the truth because there intelligence agencies at play putting out disinformation and double disinformation. But I am also kind of thinking that there were some white supremacist trump supporters in on this who were taking advantage of it to promote the ancient myths of blood libel and Moloch to brainwash a bunch of sheeple for their own purposes. But who the gently caress knows? Maybe it's a CIA pay-op to encourage proletarian revolution because they did an analysis and realized it would be in the best interests to have a a more socialist society in its rivalry with China and cooked this up to overthrow the yoke of the capitalist oligarchy (probably not though). The beauty of this sea of insanity is that you can project whatever you want to upon it, and it's broken so many brains that it will keep people talking for generations. Anyway, thank you for reading about the Phoenicians and the history of antisemitism, I legitimately think that more people should know those bits of history and I am glad that I was able to use the death of Epstein to bring some attention to those matters.

If you want to have some fun, try to imagine what Jeffrey Epstein was thinking when he was reading about Qanon for the past two years.

9. POSTSCRIPT

Oh right, and my theory about the cow. Almost forgot. I think that he bought it after one of the CowParades, because that's exactly what a rich socialite in the 90's would do, and got sick of it in his house at some point. Then he realized that he could keep his bodyguard from bothering him if he forced him to move the cow around just because he wanted some personal space (so that he could molest children).

Civilized Fishbot posted:

you know, at least when the fuckng black plague was happenng, people had a framework to understand what was going on. it was the wrath of god. now look at what we have to explain the loving immesseration of everyone. this whole loving country is just aching to kill itself. we can't report on the suicide epidemic because every time we tell people how to kill themselves, they do it. now they're starting to take a dozen people with them half the time. and what the gently caress is the expanation if you read in the newspaper? loving russia??? look at how everyone is loving sck and dead and dying al alone. that's what makes this like the black plague. nobody is coming to help you or save you because nbody gives a poo poo. the only person who ever cared about you is your mother when you were in the womb, and you bailed on that poo poo like a loving moron. there's just a loving plague doctor showing up to tell you how you're going to die, and his name s donald loving trump, and he's our loving alienation from god. look at this poo poo and show me any majesty, any glory, any loving soul. it's loving decrepitude and pain and sadness and living death on every level, at every scale. it's a complete loving retreat from god because we were too scared to love each other and now we're all going to die alone vomiting in thousand degree heat after a blue ocean event unleashes some loving woolly mammoth STD, and the whole time, trump is going to be eating loving mcdonalds

Joementum posted:

You brokebrained fucks are ruining my life, at my new job I work as a suicide prevention officer but I was up all day posting "tpmru" so I fell asleep at about 6:00am and accidentally hit the off switch on all the cameras with my elbow. When I woke up, I let out a scream that echoed through the hallways and sounded like it could have come from any of the cells. Then I checked on one of our prisoners and saw he was dead, so I relocated his extremely buff cellmate to a new location.

life is a joke posted:

People definitely hate the boys in blue type of cop, but that's like a direct surface level hate at how they bully everyone and are generally assholes. The Kamala type of cop comes with a deep humiliated hatred for all the times people in your family and social circles get sucked into the system and never escape, and different versions of Kamala make you sit around for hours to find out that you missed a deadline on filing a form for the 2015 pot arrest and you need to pay a fee and if you don't they'll put out a warrant, or other Kamalas use your picture in a news story about a gang bust because you were wrong place/wrong time and got swept up in a sting and even though you don't get charged you lose your job, and they seized your valuables as evidence in a crime you had nothing to do with but another kamala tells you that you need a lawyer to appeal to get it back but you probably won't, or you got caught with weed or committed a crime of desperation and you have to say "yes ma'am/sir" to the Kamala who is lecturing you about being responsible and if Kamala doesn't feel like you're acting weak and deferential enough you get sent to jail for 30 extra days and miss all of your bills and rent and now there's more court fees and you'll probably be back getting humiliated by another Kamala within a few months and that's pretty much it forever now. This is the experience of millions and millions of Americans, it's painful and humiliating and expensive. People don't even want to think about it.

The democrats: let's run Kamala!

Marx Headroom posted:

Love learning about alien terms for "Shits on fire" like repo and feezlebox only when shits on fire

Marx Headroom posted:

Me: Why am I getting evicted and launched into the sun?
Economist: Run on murples injected a liquidity flop
Me: Ah, okay.

Grondoth posted:

Sméapoll


Pollum

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

what's the deal with leftcoms? they say they're coms, but also the left -- but those are the same things. why do they have to be more left than the other communists? who the hell are these guys???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V2sBURgUBI

R. Guyovich posted:

i was in line at the dmv the other day. boy it took a while, huh? hey anytime you're ready to start withering away, state, be my guest!

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

left-communism. have you ever noticed ... a lot of negative associations with the word left? "left-handed compliments." "'what are we having for dinner?' 'leftovers.'" you go to a party, there’s nobody there. "where’d they go?' 'they left.'"

Turtle Watch posted:

There was actually supposed to be a scene in a recent Bernie ad about his massive uncircumcised hog but then it had to be cut due to length.

turn off the TV posted:

https://twitter.com/FoxReports/status/1214694834012934146

spacetoaster posted:

That was her code for "Purchase Ratheon, Aerojet, and York" stocks.

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1215076490351607809?s=20

CharlestheHammer posted:

you think at some point Warren would have asked what ghosting means.

Lansdowne posted:

liz: of course I know what ghosting is, my ancestors even had ghost dance to drive out all you white invaders

A HORNY SWEARENGEN posted:

Joementum posted:

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1186308116981395458

TheIncredulousHulk posted:

I call on Barack Obama to suck my penis

Tiler Kiwi posted:

now, let me be clear. the call has been made by some that i should suck increduloushulk's schlong. i've heard it, on the, uh, the cspam boards. *gives a grin to the crowd* pretty rambuncious bunch. *press corp laugh at his easy humor and relaxed nature, before he sobers up in to wise father mode*. But now is not the time for blowing, or sucking. Now is the time, for Americans, of all walks to life, to get together and lie down in the ditches. It's been raining hard out there, in the streets, but someday that sun will come. But until then, there's gonna have to be people serving as boardwalks so my nice new shoes (thank you Michelle) don't get all muddy. I'd call on mr hulk to join them. A wise man once told me, that you have to learn to drown in the mud before you can get your whole cock taken down a presiden'ts throat. Thank you, and may God bless America.

Korean Boomhauer posted:

fondling stalins tits and rear end

Dang It Bhabhi! posted:

lol "cocksucker" as a pejorative. Sucking cocks is like the most blessed thing imaginable.

quote:

There's a strange idea that because the future is so unknowable, the past must be the reverse of the coin, absolutely understandable. However, this isn't true. Memory is mutable. Sources always have problems. The real truth is that we're fumbling around in the dark with a tiny flashlight that illuminates one spot at a time, the present. 21st century pop culture in no way reflects that.

quote:

There's a microchip in there, which is quite literally a rock that humanity taught how to add by putting lightning inside of it, and it does that math very VERY quickly. There are other components generally based off of the first chip that do other specific things, like remember long sequences of numbers.

Doing math and remembering numbers are how we started with computers. Everything else is logic based on those two things.

quote:

It goes hand in hand with the popularization of the theory that capitalist cultural production can drive positive social change, a notion that is now described as woke. This theory necessitated interpreting films as if they were being observed by an extremely stupid and gullible person.

The idea is that every piece of media should be interpreted as something that could be dropped on the planet of the gangster aliens from Star Trek, who would then build their entire society around it, and basically ended up turning into the Satanic Panic for millennials.

quote:

I sat a marketing course recently, and observed that several of the case study examples had absolutely nothing to do with selling a product, even though they purported to be. The specific example was of some coffee house that wanted to expand and needed a new campaign for it and you talk them into making a youtube channel for their coffeehouse, and the question asks "how would you prove your youtube channel for the coffeehouse is good?" and of course the answer was "get a lot of views and thus demonstrate wider brand awareness and push key youth demographics towards engagement by using a language they talk" etc etc

And I realized in a moment of absolute clarity that they were not teaching me how better sell coffee, but instead to better sell marketing to people who sell coffee, who have extremely well-founded views like "youtube views and coffee sales have absolutely no correlation whatsoever" and need talking out of these silly notions so they can pay you.

quote:

Random Anecdote: Wal-Mart store managers get bonuses based on inventory accuracy. It's seen as cutting down on shrink and optimizing the just in time inventory process. Since none of the people in a typical 3 shift store setting (Receiving - Stocking - Accuracy Check) actually bother to give a drat in their interactions with the system, you had store managers getting terrible inventory scores, until they figured out that you could just clone the inventory data every day and get 100% perfect accuracy. It took a system-wide update to close this loophole, which pushed inventory scores back into the gutter, because nobody had actually bothered maintaining inventories when all scores were always perfect.

This went on longer than you think it would have.

quote:

A lot of the reason why the small town Americana patchwork has a lot of pathos is because it is, in a lot of theoretical ways, the original affluent society that people sometimes romanticize with hunter-gatherer tribes and such.

The assumption goes something like: everyone knows each other. Life is simple and uncomplicated. Everyone has enough to eat and drink and has access to community medicine and recreation. There's enough space to go around, but there's also an ok number of people present, so nobody is either too crowded or too lonely. Nobody works too hard, but nobody is too lazy, either. Everyone pulls together in this wholesome little mini-society.

The reality, of course, is that much like the hunter-gatherer tribes of old, there's lots of deviations from all that which makes it at best a quaint delusion and at worst a vicious lie. with hunter-gatherer tribes it's just straight violence, because it turns out that tribes of a couple hundred people will fight each other over food/water/tools/women on a nearly yearly basis and it's hard to have an 'affluent society' when your chance of being murdered or abducted as raid loot on a yearly basis is a double digit percent, and that's even assuming if you're fine with getting a grass poultice for a cut rather than neosporin and gauze.

Americana's deviation is that it turns out that it's insane to expect every person to slot nicely into the huxleyesque top-down vision of what the wholesome mini-society is and should be, and whatever finely checked and balanced micro-economy you had going during the golden decade of Gays, Alabama or where ever is most probably not going to exist in another 15 years when little Bobby and Shelly grow up. And that's assuming that your mini-society isn't implicitly reliant upon the big crazy world you're seeking to escape in the first place, like the coal towns of West Virginia that collapsed when the world decided they didn't need to set their stupid rocks on fire anymore.

This is also why Americana is so goddamned funny despite having the underlying aura of decay and tragedy. Everything is kinda lousy because it's built on a delusion and a stubborn refusal to change, but the delusion is generally so obvious to someone who's thought about the ramifications for more than a few minutes that it seems impossible to think that the folks who bought into it didn't see it on some level or another.

I feel like it's important to be clear that Americana in this context is specifically Smallville USA stuff. City living is completely different, suburbia is completely different, actual country living is completely different. Specifically talking about these tiny towns of a few thousand souls that don't really have a reason to exist but keep plodding on through a twisted combination of momentum, welfare checks, and fear of the unknown.

quote:

ok so let me see if I've got this right -

in normal times there would be a large number of standing offers to buy a stock of it dropped a significant amount, with the size of the total increasing rapidly as you get further from the current price because people think "oh hey that would be a good deal because I think the company's fundamental value is X".

now however once you get away from the current price there is essentially nothing. probably because the money that would be hanging out to buy discounted stock is currently off chasing leprechaun gold at 6x leverage and because nobody is actually basing anything on fundamentals so once you get away from the "it must be a good deal at X-1 because it is currently at X" folks there's nobody.

due to that if someone big needs to sell (for example to satisfy a margin call triggered by another investment going south) the price is going to poo poo itself. and because a lot of the holdings of the stocks are on margin if that happens the holders might be forced to liquidate other stocks to satisfy their margin requirements. but those other stocks have the same situation going on so that forced sale might cause them to poo poo themselves too in a potentially explosive chain reaction.

that about right?

quote:

Because I hate myself I watched one of those Youtube videos about how The Last Jedi is terrible and one of their criticisms crystallized a lot of the fervent hate of the film.

They complained about how Finn didn't have a character arc in TLJ and posited their own replacement. What they suggested went a little bit like this: "Finn should fight Phasma and lose because his power level is lower, then he should learn some new skills and powers and fight her again and draw, then he should learns some new power and fight her for a final time and win and complete his heroes journey"

What this narrative genius described is a video game, and not a very good one. This "superior" replacement arc is about Finn increasing his power level until he exceeds the bad guys power level, then he wins. It's not a character arc, Finn doesn't change perspective, doesn't learn anything, doesn't come to new understanding. He just gets better skills.

Finn's actual character arc has problems, especially if one wanted him to take more of a centre stage, but it's still a proper arc. He starts off with a certain perspective, learns throughout the story the flaws in that perspective, and develops and changes his world view and becomes a changed person and still manages to get a climactic fight in.

This youtuber was arguing a that the films should have been more simplistic, and more boring. A lot (not all, chill) of the criticisms revolve around this kind of thinking; Luke should have been a cool badass, Poe should have been a cool badass. All these characters should have been always right, and just got more powerful, until they're more powerful than the bad guys. Then they win. Anything more complex than that is "ruining my ChilDhOoD

quote:

An example of the unintended consequences of colonialism comes from the Victorian trade in native body parts. Fascinated with tattoos and skull binding, it became fashionable in the late 19th century to collect mummified bodies, tanned human hides and etc. Sometimes they would be purchased from the owner while they still lived, and arranged to be transported after death.

However the way in which body parts were obtained was not usually a concern of collectors. This caused serious trouble in places like the Peruvian Amazon when western explorers discovered the Jivaroan practice of creating shrunken heads. The heads were traditionally collected in the course of small scale feuds and tribal warfare, and sparked sensational demand for the objects within western markets. A brisk trade quickly sprung into existence, with guns, machetes, and other modern manufactured goods exchanged for human heads.

While the Jivaroan had since times immemorial engaged in headhunting and warfare, now they could expect a hefty bounty for every head taken. Fueled with newly plentiful modern firearms, now men were fighting and killing not just to settle personal vendettas, but with the expectation of profit for every person killed. Predictably this led to massive increase in warfare and violence to a scale never before seen. While this violence was contained to indigenous communities deep within the Amazonian jungle collectors were more-or-less oblivious to the bloody fruits of their curio cabinets.

However when the heads of Indian warriors began to become scarce, the headhunters expanded their list of targets. First to include Indian women, who previously had never been used to create shrunken heads. What really caught people's attention though was when the Jivaroan began targeting the neighboring mestizo communities, and entrepreneurial Peruvian traders unable to satisfy their buyers demand began manufacturing their own shrunken heads, killing or stealing bodies themselves. This finally got the head trade banned, although an underground market continued for many years.

paul_soccer12 posted:

Reserved

paul_soccer12 posted:

Reserved

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

https://www.cracked.com/members/PurpleTowel

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Raskolnikov38 posted:

ram dass in hell posted:

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Dolphin posted: