Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Rushy

Pages: < Back  1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 240  Next >
41
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 03, 2024, 02:36:32 AM »
Putin supports a candidate because it is best for Russia. They did it in Crimea, Venuzuela, they're doing it in the Czech Republic now. The Mueller Report wasn't just accurate, it was just the tip of the iceberg. While the words "Russia Hoax" were coming out of Trump's stupid face, the Russians had the Solarwinds attack already underway and were exfiltrating huge amounts of our most secret data from the highest level of government computers at that very moment.

At the time of the Mueller report, the connection between Russia and Republicans was just political, Russia supported Republicans in the election and Republicans would support Russian expansion in Europe. But now the connection is ideological. The Republicans want to BE Russia, they want to have a leader with absolute immunity, they want to ban books, federalize elections, incarcerate homosexuals, jail their political opponents, have government run media and churches.

People that think the "Trump is a Putin puppet" narrative has never applied to the real world and still parrot Putin's propaganda are concerning.

I like how you say "The Mueller Report" like you've read it. But, if you had read it, surely you would give more specific information. And yet, you don't. Why is that? Ah, it's because it contains none. So, even if you had read it, which I find doubtful, it would still not help you. Sad!

Go on. Give me details. Give me convictions. Tell me the wide ranging stories of horrific collusion. I want to hear it all. Enlighten me.

42
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Americans think democracy is in peril
« on: February 02, 2024, 03:07:07 PM »
https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-democracy-peril-2024-election/story?id=106803471

Considering that America doesn't have a democracy, one has to wonder how in the world it could be imperiled. But, pedantic arguments aside, why are majorities of both political parties absolutely convinced the American government is soon-to-collapse?

Surely, it is not healthy to be so absolutely convinced the current sitting president, Joe Biden, didn't actually win the 2020 election. But, in contrast with that, it also surely isn't healthy to be convinced Trump winning the election would somehow result in him making elections illegal. Are both sides really itching to force "my politics" into the office so much that the allowing the other side to win is unacceptable? How has such a large portion of the American population become so divorced of reality in a world where reality is more accessible than ever?


43
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2024, 02:20:41 PM »
He successfully manipulated Trump many times while he was in office, and if Trump is reelected, he'll undoubtedly do so again.

If you mean by "successfully manipulated" he avoided doing anything while Trump was president. Putin repeatedly said he didn't want to perform any major actions while Trump was president because he felt Trump "didn't understand the details of geopolitics". In other words, Putin watched Trump kill an Iranian general in response to a single American death and knew Trump would overreact to Ukraine. Putin waited until a weaker leader like Biden got into office, then invaded Ukraine, knowing Biden wouldn't do anything.

The "Trump is a Putin puppet" narrative has never applied to the real world; that anyone still parrots it is concerning. Yes, Trump said Putin was very, very smart. He also said Kim Jong was very, very smart. He also said Ted Cruz was very, very smart. Trump says it about literally everyone he wants something from.

inb4 "Biden giving old outdated weapons to Ukraine is definitely doing something!" and "Putin planned the invasion while Trump was president!" even though the buildup didn't start until after Biden won.

44
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: NATO Shenanigans
« on: January 25, 2024, 09:18:17 PM »
I can't believe they let Sweden join, despite all of those Swedish terrorists wreaking havoc across Europe!

45
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: January 22, 2024, 10:16:33 PM »
Vegas odds are currently in Trump's favor. If you believe Joe "c'mon man" Biden is going to win, it's an easy bet and it makes big bucks.

                Odds         Implied % Chance
Donald Trump   +120                 45.5%
Joe Biden      +200                 33.3%

46
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: December 20, 2023, 02:01:26 PM »
Looks like Trump might not be on the Colorado ballot.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/politics/trump-colorado-supreme-court-14th-amendment/index.html

Look, fellas, our democracy is in danger. If we don't start banning people like Trump from running, people might elect the wrong candidate instead of the right one.

47
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: December 19, 2023, 07:59:47 PM »
Our democracy is in danger!
We have a democracy?

Our current form of government is capitalism.

48
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: December 19, 2023, 07:27:49 PM »
Our democracy is in danger!

50
Technology & Information / Re: Why does that child have my computer?
« on: August 09, 2023, 10:50:41 PM »
Sounds like a pretty cool child to me, imagine responding to the coolness of your child by reporting them to the ministry of wrongthink.

51
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Superhero Movies & Comics General
« on: July 31, 2023, 01:25:53 PM »
I watched Multiverse of Madness, it was okay. They gave Wanda a lot of good backstory and character in Wandavision then just threw all of that away and made her a generic "I am insane because of le dark powers" villain.

The whole movie is about the scarlet witch wanting children. Seems like a pretty easy problem to solve, really, I could help her solve it and I don't even have any superpowers.

52
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: July 16, 2023, 07:59:12 PM »
Wait... what political power did Joe Biden have via his son?  The VP of the US has a lot of power and I can't imagine that Hunter inserting himself into a company he's not qualified to operate somehow increased Biden's political power as VP of the USA.

I pointed out his family made enormous amounts of money in positions they weren't qualified to be in. I don't know where you got the "political power increase" thing from, but I suggest you start reading sentences a bit slower or something.

53
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: July 16, 2023, 04:07:48 PM »
Hunter does come across as a bit of a slimeball and for some reason the Republicans eat it up. You know what though? Hunter's not our President! Our President is so unimpeachable they need to attack his family. That they are so unapologetically doing so is the real disgrace.

The entire point of this debacle is that Joe has been using Hunter as a scapegoat and liaison to enact personal corruption. I think you, and everyone else here, knows perfectly well that this isn't just about Hunter. He's not some random man who happens to be connected to Joe Biden. The meme of "I didn't vote for Hunter!" and "you just don't have anything on Joe!" is nonsense. Hunter didn't find himself on the boards of foreign oil and gas companies because of his extensive executive knowledge in how to run oil and gas companies. Joe used his son to personally gain from his political power. Now neither Joe nor his son will face consequences for doing so. This is okay to you because obviously they are not the same person and the idea of them coordinating with each other is utterly impossible.

Sometimes I think the idea of family members interacting with each other is so completely foreign to so many Democrats that they cannot even imagine it...


55
Science & Alternative Science / Re: Nuclear Bombs Do Not Exist
« on: July 07, 2023, 12:42:43 PM »
Right.  Since you have not even provided one Word of evidence for your quackery let alone "proof" (another word that escapes you) I will consider your tirade a win on my part and (may, unless taunted) exit gracefully.  Yeah, although I have some coin, spending 10's of million's of dollars on weaponry and battling military red tape on your unlikely edification is not going to happen.

Oh, of course, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on bombs that if we used the entire world will supposedly end. On the other hand, the idea that other people took that money to buy yachts is inconceivable to you. At this point it's just sad. Why do people like you desire so much to be scammed and belittled by your own government?

Bye, bye now.

This is the second time (possibly the third?) you've told me you're going to leave the thread. As I said before, no one will miss you, you've added nothing to the thread and as far as I'm concerned I've been very lenient with how I've responded to your addled nonsense.

This is incorrect in multiple ways. They weren't "remote villages". Hiroshima was in the top 10 largest cities in Japan at the time and:

A top 10 largest city made entirely out of wooden huts? Use your noggin, AATW. Surely you didn't just google the population and think "ah yes this number obviously matches the pictures of Hiroshima".

Again, I'd urge you to look some of the "after" photos. Some of the masonry buildings remain standing but you're acting like they were pristine and only the wooden ones burned. That's simply not true. In fact in this image you can see some of the masonry ones are seriously damaged. That building at the bottom looks like wood actually and is standing, maybe it was protected in some way by another structure.

Masonry buildings are also damaged in firebombing.


Your claim of firebombing makes no sense. How would you deploy enough firebombs to wreak that much damage in one go? The witness testimony clearly describes a single explosion.

They firebombed a remote village, killing the entire population, then had "eye witnesses" describe fantastical nonsense.

That's firebombing, is it?

Yes.

And you surely understand about the half-life of a radiation source?

Do you? You told me earlier that Hiroshima was fine and not radioactive at all after some cleanup. Which truth are we going with now? The more convenient one?

Again, the physics is similar but not identical.

Blowing up an entire village and boiling a large tank of water are not "similar".


56
Science & Alternative Science / Re: Nuclear Bombs Do Not Exist
« on: July 07, 2023, 02:34:32 AM »
Yes, that is one of your ridiculous claims, and your evidence for it is ... ?

Asking the same question over and over again is rather boring. If you don't intend on providing the evidence I asked for (you can't, because nuclear bombs do not exist), then why bother wasting your time in this thread? I have proven my point quite considerably. Nuclear bombs have not been made, are not currently being made, and will never be made. They do not exist. It's a scam, like religion or Australia.

57
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Aliens!
« on: July 06, 2023, 01:17:40 PM »
https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rp7w9/from_the_late_2000s_to_the_mid2010s_i_worked_as_a/

Probably fake but a fun write-up. Did you know birds have a unidirectional respiratory system? I learned that today from this post. So, even if it is mostly fiction, it does seem to have some pretty neat biology facts in it.

58
Science & Alternative Science / Re: Nuclear Bombs Do Not Exist
« on: July 06, 2023, 12:51:40 PM »
That's pretty much my point. So why then would that be part of the evidence you would accept. "They" could show you anything, you wouldn't know what you're looking at.
And then they'd either have to cut to another camera to show the explosion, or there would have to be a long shot of them retreating to a safe distance. Either way it would be easy for you to claim it's not the device you were shown the inside of that exploded. It's just a bizarre criteria you set for the evidence you'd accept. It makes zero sense.
You dismiss the mountain of evidence already available to you and then set a level of evidence you would accept which would be far less compelling than what already exists.

It's not a "mountain of evidence" and I think this thread makes that pretty clear.

It makes me think that masonry is stronger than wood. The three little pigs know that, dude. As for survived the blast easily, have a look at the pictures. Some of the buildings are standing, but they're hardly pristine.
EDIT: I don't think "small wooden villages typically have populations of a quarter of a million people, at least 90,000 of whom died in the explosion. That's quite the fire bombing...

My point is that it's not a coincidence that two remote villages with no military value were targeted for this demonstration of a super-mega-ultra-bomb. They were firebombed in such a way that is was known they would be basically flattened, but the masonry building survived because it doesn't burn. Otherwise, you must be saying that all we need to do to survive a nuclear bomb is to be in a masonry building. Well, no wonder no one uses them, most modern cities are made of concrete! The bomb is useless after all!

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/peace-and-war/the-manhattan-project

More propaganda.

That isn't what I suggested you provide evidence for.
We agree that Hiroshima happened, right? You've said it was "fire-bombing", but have provided no evidence of that. The best you've come up with is that less strong structures were more easily flattened than stronger ones. But your thesis doesn't work.  For that level of destruction to have been conventional explosives there would have had to be thousands of tons of them. How was that dropped on them? It was a single plane which delivered the bomb.
There is witness testimony of it being a single explosion and there was a radiation signature from the bomb. Evidence of all that has been provided.

Remember when you claimed that nuclear bombs have radiation that lasts practically forever but somehow Hiroshima cleaned it all up in just a few months then rebuilt? Comedy at its finest.

It is a feature of the willfully ignorant that they will reject any evidence that goes against their beliefs.

That's what all of you have been doing in this entire thread. You are so inundated with propaganda, so blasted with fictional stories of nonsense, that you'd prefer to believe it. This is always the case with people who have been lied to. It will always be easier for you to stay with the lie than be told it was a lie, because it requires accepting that you were lied to and deceived. To be deceived is to be weak and no one wants accept weakness. Therefore, you'd prefer the fairy tale over reality. This is the same thing that keeps people religious long into their adult years.

This here is 100% pure bunk.  Do you realize this proves, beyond any shadow of the tiniest doubt, that you do not understand the slightest thing about where nuclear energy comes from.  Yet you still feel qualified to discuss it and taunt me for wanting out of this discussion?  It is now obvious why you don't accept any of the evidence presented - because you are not able in any way to see that it is evidence.  So, again, no point it having a discussion with you on it.  You have just put in writing you don't understand any of it.

Ironic. Let me guess, you, too, incorrectly believe mass can be magically converted into energy? I guess in your mind, when you burn the gasoline in a car, it just goes "poof" and turns into energy.

Maybe you should look up how the bombs are claimed to actually work instead of quoting your favorite pop-sci equations. Here's a hint: even nuclear bomb liars don't claim you can extract all the mass of a nuclear bomb and turn it into energy! Wow! I hope you look it up and feel silly afterwards.

Nobody is asking for that.  You have made some monumentally ridiculous claims here.  We are asking for evidence for those claims.  You have provided exactly none.  Which leads us (me, anyway) to think you have none and you were really just speaking out of your extreme lower digestive system anatomy.

No need to be so rude, especially after you said you were going to stop responding, something I personally looked forward to. It's funny how people such as yourself jump straight to insults when I've said none in this entire thread.

Update here:  Let's add to this the fact that you are asserting that something that is already accepted as an established fact does not exist.  In this case, yes, the onus is squarely on you to provide evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the established fact is wrong.  Into other words that nuclear weapons don't exist.  The best way to do that is to use your superior knowledge to show they can't exist.  Another way would be to provide irrefutable evidence (in the true meaning of "evidence") that all the things that happened that are currently explained by the use of nuclear weapons are better explained by some other means (that's the thing you have not done).

Sorry, gee, I forgot that if a lot of people believe a lie and assert it as fact, it magically becomes true. What a strange world. I guess propaganda really is a form of sorcery!


There is no longer any point in arguing about nuclear weapons.  The only evidence you say you will accept is not something anyone here can provide.   ::)

No one can provide it because nuclear bombs don't exist. If I asked you for a video on the US president being presented a unicorn as a birthday gift, I suppose you would have similar trouble finding it. Most notably because it didn't happen.

59
But more than half of Americans do have one. No one is required to get one but then they end up working low income jobs and you get people like Bishop who might say they don't deserve to have a liveable wage if they didn't want to get a "real job."

The idea that no degree automatically means "low income job" is simply not true. There is some mild correlation with having a degree and making more money, but as I said before, this greatly depends on the degree. You also have high income degrees like medical doctors causing the average to skew over degrees that typically don't result in any improved career prospects.

But it's not just affordability. I would argue that it's more necessary to get a college degree in this country then it is to buy a home as without a college degree you will likely not earn enough to ever be able to afford a home anyway.

Also, more than half of American households have two incomes so generally the burden is shared at least. And there is definitely a difference between starting your adult life in debt and choosing to go into debt because you decided you can buy a home later in your adult life.

And if you say again that you can choose to not get a degree, you are technically correct but I'd refer you back to my first point: No one is required to get one but then they end up working low income jobs and you get people like Bishop who might say they don't deserve to have a liveable wage if they didn't want to get a "real job." So damned if you do and damned if you don't.

As I said before, if it is a debt problem, then it should be equally shared among debts. There's nothing special about education debt. If anything, we are too haphazard about demanding young adults go up to their eyeballs in debt to get a degree that they have a very good chance of not even using for their career. The meme of college being necessary to make more money or have a better life is simply not true. Higher education is not a trade school, we have for too long conflated "got my degree" with "skill certification for better job".


Sounds like a good idea to me. Also, why are we "slinging out free money"? You had to qualify for Biden's student loan forgiveness program: You must earn less than $125,000 a year for individuals, or $250,000 for married couples and/or head of households.

For some definition of "qualifying". At "must make less than $125k per year as an individual or less than 250k as a married household" you're "qualifying" 95% of the country. We've already discussed what it means to give out free money to the wealthy.

Young adults who are debt free contribute more to the economy and would probably be more likely to start a family. But yeah, I'm also all for a general debt forgiveness program. It'd be more of a bandaid then solving any issue but as you pointed out, no one here is qualified or capable of fixing the situation. Shit just sucks.

I personally believe that just paying off debts, no matter what kind of debt, is treating the symptoms and not the disease. It's a form of kicking the can down the road. It's useful as part of a wider solution, but I have as of yet seen zero politicians propose debt forgiveness as part of a wider solution. Instead, they use it as a carrot on a stick to bring out the young voters. Those voters who time and time again prove to be an easily scammed and limitlessly naive bunch because they are always 18-22 years old.

60
Ok well you can try to have an imagination and maybe agree that things need to be regulated more. Or just say you think things are going great now and we should continue on without trying to improve anything. :)

Also, "Economists do know, however, that price controls can be theoretically beneficial when imposed appropriately on a monopolist or monopsonist, and they do tend to work better in imperfectly competitive markets."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/publications/regional-economist/2022/mar/why-price-controls-should-stay-history-books#authorbox

A price cap on insulin, for example, was extremely necessary btw and the government finally realized that.

If universities don't fall into that category then fine. Let's just all continue to spend ~120,000 for a degree or whatever it is now. Young adults definitely deserve to enter into the work force with that level of debt in order to get a job that pays maybe $20 an hour.

No, I don't think price capping universities will work, but to that point I don't understand enough about economics to say if they will or won't. Further, if you want serious discussion about solutions to the problem, you'll have to start reading reports from analysts. No one here, including you, is qualified to have a deep and thoughtful discussion about how to "fix" the financial considerations of universities, aside from the general notion that some of us believe it costs "too much".


Further, I would like to make the point that no one is required to get a degree, which is why coincidentally, most people on the planet don't have one. It is purely an optional cost with risks associated with it, just like purchasing anything else. You can make the point that subsidizing education is generally good for the country and economy, but I think this varies by major considerably.

Many people can't even afford to buy houses anymore so maybe let's stop making that comparison because I can't see how that helps the argument.

We're making that comparison because about 40% of Americans have mortgage debt. About 20% have student loan debt. Does it not make more sense to subsidize Americans trying to pay for homes than for education, if your argument is based on affordability?

Fundamentally, if you have a bunch of money to hand out to people, handing it out only to people with student loans should be a low priority. There are plenty of Americans that have greater need of that money than those who took out student loans. If we're worried about people paying off their debts, it should be a broad "pay off your debts" program based on the person's situation at the time. Slinging out free money for specific kinds of debt is not a solution.

Pages: < Back  1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 240  Next >