It's all in the context though.

Yes, which is why all I emphasize the positive with my German heritage and not the glaringly obvious bad part.

Dude, half of the people that the US stops from being assholes in other countries were put in positions of power by the US to begin with.

Canada works hand in hand with the US in a great many military situations, especially the ones where bad men are quietly and discreetly removed from the living world.

Only Canada doesn't make a big deal about it and act like a parade should be thrown, and we aren't the only country that throws in with the big bads of the world.

 

The US certainly throws it's weight around when people start dying en masse in other countries, and sometimes those who are responsible for those deaths even get what they have coming. But being the biggest bully on the block just means that you are exactly that, and bullies don't just attack those who deserve it.

We didn't put them into power.  We helped bring about the power vacuums that led to their rise, maybe.  But so did the fall of the Soviet Union.  And the fall of Hitler.  And the revolutionaries that fought against communism.

(Dude, you may not know it, but you're using arguments first cultivated by Noam Chomsky.  He's the seed from which a lot of anti-American moral relativism came from, at least the "intellectual" ammunition for it.  I basically became an expert in the history of Noam Chomsky because my best friend in college was a Noam Chomsky fanboy.  I had to learn a lot to counter his generally terrible arguments in favor of Noam Chomsky's worldview.)

Really, it's much more complicated than any of us really want to make it.

Even so, tone it down a little. It may well be interesting to you, but I imagine most people who'd open this thread are looking for posts to do with the titular massacre, as opposed to the finer points of democracy versus communism.

The real discussion I was trying to have is John Locke + Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx + Max Weber, but that's more complicated than people probably want it.  Which is why I didn't point those four out, except John Locke.  He's awesome like that.

Fuck. Totally just listened to and sung Died In Your Arms tonight, Cutting Crew.

Feeling good. 80's pop .. Just cant't help but feel good.

And it's totally about the male orgasm during sex.

They come back if you resubscribe though. You also get discounts on stuff. I've been considering getting PS+ for a while now, but the disappointment comes from the fact you get two PS4 games a month, a PS3 game, and a Vita game. In other words, 50% of the free stuff is useless to me.

Yes, but it's not worth it unless you're a heavy gamer.  I'm a gamer, no doubt, but I'm not a heavy one.  Outside of the Yogscast annual Humble Bundle charity drive and Kickstarter/IndieGoGo, I buy so few new games a year.  And if you exclude new Zelda and Pokémon titles from that metric, it sinks to like one new game a year.

We could also talk about the fact that political/religious topics tend to get heated and angry, hence why they get shut down so people can cool off and stop waving their e-cocks about the place.

 

So I might need to do that.

I know.  Because everybody's politics don't dovetail with everyone else's.

But I love political discussion.  It flexes the philosophical brain muscles in my mind labyrinth.

Cannot wait to show that picture to my dad.  He'll probably upload it to Facebook or something else grandparents do these days...

But if obscure music genres don't exist, there's no way of showing people that I'm a cool kid by knowing them.

You liked them before it was cool, huh?

From this:

To this:

You can get exchange for $4 a month, 

Godaddy gives you a free 5gb IMAP/POP email with a domain. Currently on sale for $3 a year.

 

Email is cheap. 

Yes, it is.  $100 a year is still cheap for a business.

I keep seeing PSPlus stuff. Any idea what it costs? 

$50 a year, but any games you get for "free" brick themselves the second your subscription expires.

Any time someone ends their little blurb with "But who will stop them, realistically, if America doesn't?  Nobody, really.", there is nothing more I can say to derail that argument that hasn't already been said.

Tell me:  Has the UN been able to stop the advance of tyrannical regimes?  Ever?

Who stops bad people?  America does.  Who else does?  I can't really think of any examples post-WWII.

Helps to speak German, I guess! 

Totally what I meant to say. But yeah, the actual engineers do it as a career and enjoy it (I assume), the companies aren't run by engineers though. =(

My best friend is a computer science guy.  He's working on a brilliant idea, spent the better part of his life on it actually.  When he has a prototype, I'm gonna help him run the business built around it.

He's an engineer.  He doesn't understand business very well.  When business men decry the "engineer's mindset," they're talking about flights of fancy that don't mesh with economic, financial, and/or regulatory reality.

Several try and when they do, mass death through political prisoners, executions, torture, rape chambers, and famine seems to follow.  Basic liberties Americans take for granted are curtailed.  Freedom of the press is a wet fart.  Freedom of speech is laughable.  Freedom of religion is a joke.  (And that's just the First Amendment!)

Because property rights are a thing, Gol~.  Community ownership of something vs. individual ownership.  Individualism wins.  Our general over-riding sense of self-interest means true altruism does not really exist.  (Hell, an intro to psychology course taught me that the first time.  Very enlightening stuff, honestly.)

Yes, but categorically, some are worse than others.  It's the ones that don't want to figure out what is worse or better, the moral relativism folks, that bother me.  Learned a lot in my intro to sociology course about them.  Moral relativism is the opposite of exceptionalism.  I am an American exceptionalist.

The pros and cons of something is important.  For all its warts, America is still better due to our liberties structure.  We have the best foundation of rights.

This forum gets off-topic all the time.  Exempting some topics from that common behavior and then making an appeal to emotion as the argument in favor of such an exemption is an insult to logic.

The engineers are in it to advance science.  The people backing them financially are in it for the money (as if that even had to be said, as investors don't finance anything without an expectation of return on investment.)

Yeah, direct democracy has problems.  John Locke solved most of those with the idea that the Founders/Framers eventually put into place:  a constitutional republic.

Communism as a governing philosophy, much like socialism, is dependent on contradictions that tend to lead to authoritarianism.  (Authoritarianism on a mass scale is generally colloquially known as fascism.)

The 80 million dead was under, mostly, Stalin and Mao.  But you can also throw in Che, Castro, Pol Pot, and a few others.

I only check Facebook when pictures of my immediate/extended family's young kids get posted.  And really rarely even for that.  Because I use Twitter more these days than anything.

Generally you need to be thinking about your overheads when you start up a company. Again, if you haven't even got $100 for a venture to buy necessities, you need to wait and save up. There's no half arsing business.

The expensive part, in America at least, is probably the paperwork and filing fees for a business license.

I don't speak it fluently.  A little conversational but I am rusty.

I speak it enough to listen to songs in German and get most of the words/context.

From a report commissioned by Dick Cheney in 2001.

Noticed you didn't provide a link for that.  Also, the Iraq War started in 2003, so what was said before doesn't apply to what actually happened during the war.  And it should be noted Dick Cheney was the VP with little control over the Iraq War resolution, the war itself, or basically anything.  The VP has no real power.  Just ask Biden.

Just so we're clear on how facts work.

EDIT:  Googling the quote comes up with a bunch of links to disreputable and downright conspiratorial sites.

Affray, prove it then.  I'll be waiting.

You can't uninvent anything.  And the people making the future robot overlords may not know what they do when they do it.

You mean government? 'Politicians' more specifically.

(Communism as a governing philosophy.)

I block many people on social media if they do something bad enough.  On Facebook that's significantly rarer because I usually know the people personally.