Every clip they show of this amazing laser-guided precision weapon disperses randomly and misses 90% of the vehicles in the target zone.

Seems to me the lasers, rockets, computer chips, etc. are a bit wasted.

Typical American military. Spend $50 billion on a weapon system which is barely better than the simple low-tech solution and poverty-level wages for the people who will deploy it.

*promote

i would like to say a few things.

first,
i would personally like to welcome my anti-war democrats back to the party.it appears it only took voting in the worlds most successful used car salesmen and professional internet troll to get you fuckers to get off the bench.

saved a seat for ya!../pats seat

second,
while i can admire this woman's passion and self righteous indignation,i refuse to accept her moral condescension,because for all her flowery and bombastic condemnation of anyone who voted for trump was a vote for:racism,sexism,bigotry and hatred,and implies she has deep understanding the motivations for voting trump.

i submit that she does not.
i submit that she is a hypocrite.

i submit that while she decries her anger and outrage at the moral ineptitude of her fellow americans for failing to rebuke an obviously unqualified candidate,who openly used racist and sexist rhetoric to appeal to our most base fears and anxieties.

she was missing the main point.the main reason.

so while she stood upon her ivory tower aghast at the horror unfolding in front of her on election night,she STILL did not get it.

she watched in horror as her fellow americans ignored trumps obvious racism.
ignored the sexism.
ignored the proto-fascist verbiage.
ignored the narcissism and petty tantrums.
ignored pretty much everything leading an election night into the surreal and absurd.

because she didn't get it,and obviously STILL doesn't get it.

because voting trump was not a vote for:racism,sexism,bigotry or hatred.
a vote for trump was a "fuck you" vote.
a trump vote was a "no confidence" vote.

now of course there are those who are racists,and sexist and are most certainly bigots and hateful fuckheads..of course.

and there are those who are diehard rightwing republicans...of course.

but the majority of those who voted trump are NOT those people.the majority of americans have..for forty fucking years..tried to utilize a system to counter correct the political establishment only to get fucked in the ass by the very same system they were trying to correct.

you can go look for yourselves.it looks like a clock pendulum.swinging dem and then back to repub and then back again.

and what did the american people get?
nothing.
nada.
zip.
zilch.

they got:
expanding wars.
stagnant wages and jobs.
higher taxes.
higher living costs.
drone strikes and secret prisons.
a two tiered justice system.
private prisons.
debt peonage.

and a government bought and paid for by:big banks,wall street,military industrial complex and multi-national corporations.

all this while the american middle class fell off the map into poverty and working poor.

so while those who voted trump may be politically unsophisticated,they are most certainly not dumb.

they got it.
and they finally understood that the system that they had been raised to believe was "by the people,for the people" no longer functioned at that capacity.

so the very same people who voted for obama and his "hope and change" campaign.
voted trump.
the people who had become politically engaged by the message that sanders brought to the table,either stayed home,or voted trump.

this was a protest vote.
plain and simple.

your fellow americans just nuked the system.
because it was the SYSTEM that was corrupt and no longer was functioning.

i find their choice just as terrifying as you do,but i have to admire the audacity to just nuke the entire system.

but can you really blame them?
they tried for decades to course correct,but the two party dictatorship had a stranglehold,and they served not 'we the people" but money and power.so our fellow americans utilized their one power given to them by the constitution.

and the hypocrisy here is that when bush was in office the left was losing their shit,and rightly so,but when obama was in office all we heard was crickets....and a disturbing silence from the left.(i realize this is an over generalization.there of course was some noise coming from the left).

and this woman is so out of touch that she is convinced that voting trump was a social issue matter?

i am sorry sweetheart,but some things are just not that simple,and condescending from your ivory tower,prattling on about social constructs as if you have been given some moral authority to judge others,only serves to solidify your own tiny and secluded echo chamber.where everybody can smell their own farts and pat themselves on the back for how clever they are,without ever having to critically examine ones own position.

which just means that she will never..ever..get it.

that is my .02 anyways.
take it for what it is worth.

Or someone kidnaps your daughter and thanks to your preparedness and special set of skills you realize you're actually Liam Neeson.
This whole guns-for-safety-schtick has been debated online a thousand times. You know what protects you from crime? Tackling the very real social issues like poverty and racism that cause crime.
You have so many guns and yet your crime rate is so shitty. Mass shootings are routine in america. Where are all the good guys with guns to stop the bad guys when you need them?
It's not working. It simply isn't, crunch numbers all you want. Just look at Canada. They have guns. Yet, they seem to live so much safer lives. Is Mexico such a dangerous place because they don't have enough guns? They got the good Heckler&Koch rifles, you know.
You want to fight fights that I say should be avoided in the first place. Fix your social issues and less people will have reasons to try breaking into your home.
Same with the terrorist. Don't just bomb them, disable their ideological rethoric, disable their methods of recruiting.
We have islamic terrorists here in germany. They either try to build bombs (requires actual know-how) or they attack with axes and knives. Something must be working in our favor here. Same can't be said for the citizens of Paris or nightclub visitors in Orlando. They got shot.
The american paranoia is a reaction to an action that can be made far more unlikely to happen. Once you are ready to tackle the issues.
You can bring a fire extinguisher every time you go to the gas station in case a fire breaks out or you can just stop smoking around the gas station.

As a layman observer, I would argue the root of problems with segregated neighbourhoods, schools and racism in general is inequality. I suspect racism is primarily driven not by some kind of eugenic notion of superiority as in the past, but simply the perception that black people are on more likely to be involved in criminal behaviour because they are on average poorer.

Until you take redistributive actions to give disadvantaged people (and those policies can simply target people in poverty, not by race) more opportunities, the imbalance in wealth / income will persist, and so will the bias towards living in separate suburbs, sending children to separate schools not to mention employment biases. As it is, there is a regressive, vicious cycle of poorer education, weaker job prospects leading people into the informal / illegal economy.

Your video, Doug Stanhope: No Place Like Home - Poverty, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Chinese manufacturers poison children with lead paint on toys and melamine in formula. They build shoddy schools in earthquake zones, killing hundreds more children. The government is corrupt, the people, by and large, are on the verge of poverty, forced into making tough decisions like leaving their kids with the grandparents in the country while they work in the city and can barely scratch enough together to visit once or twice a year. At the same time, the wealthy class has ballooned at a staggering rate, government officials steal millions of dollars from taxpayers, or take the money in bribes, and offshore it so they can escape when the inevitable collapse comes. And all this is just barely scratching the surface of all the shit that goes on in China.

Yes, by all means, let's worry about one tree.

Poverty doesn't necessitate crime as much as age, sex and lack of parenting.

@RFlagg

A disenfranchised person would say that threats or promises about what Trump or Hillary might do in power aren't as effective as they used to be. People who understand that lies are part of the new game aren't going to be surprised when the game reaches the lying phase. At this point, each party promises the world but soon the game will move on and they will do as they please.

Playing the game is giving your consent to what the person eventually does - and that IS scary to some people. I gave my consent to Tony Blair, and I consider him one of the key players in causing some of the most terrible British/worldwide problems, including the current problems with Islamic fundamentalism. Personally my line has been crossed and I'm not going to be convinced by a 'better than the other' option.

'Better than the other' is EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT. They have already set the terms of the debate; now there is no other option but to choose between these two things that are not good enough. There is no time left, our neck is in the noose and we're voting to tighten it an inch at a time for fear of it tightening all at once. Climate change needs attention NOW; poverty and suffering are happening in our communities NOW; diplomacy has to happen in the middle east because children and families are dying and it is happening NOW.

I think the world needs change or protest now, I suspect we only disagree on the time scale. I agree Hillary would be 'better' than Trump. All I'd say is 'better than the other' hasn't worked in 20+ years. We might already be too late.

1. I *AM* an LGBTQ person, I don't speak for them, but I am one voice.
I tend to avoid harassing people.

2. No.

3. a) Both. They aren't mutually exclusive. I want women to be equal and I want legal protections in place to maintain this. This is not secret information.
b) They do.

4. Question 3b) suggests women should be responsible for their safety. Question 4 seems to criticize the notion of being responsible for your own safety. Glad to see unified thought in this. The answer is I expected random bouts of mockery, judgement, and violence. You know, the other 95% of my life.

5. Because shitting on a group that seeks to change culture to react similarly to loss of black life as it does for white lives, while pointing out where society fails to meet this standard is pretty charactersticly racist.
Also I don't say that "Kill all white people" is not racist.

6. Yes. Did you know that the permanence of objects, the transmission of ideas and culture and systems of law are based on events in the past? That by studying history we can understand how humans work in a unique way, that knowing that say, there was a WWI may help us understand the conditions under which WWII occurred and that this knowledge may help us decide what to do in the aftermath of WWII to avoid a recurrence?
That if a group has historically had problems, many of those problems have probably been inherited along with consequences of the problems (such as poverty, strongly inherited social trait). Yes. Linear time,human affairs, culture. They are all things that exist.

7. Yes, I have many examples of people doing this. Mostly this is due to short lifespan. But there are many manchildren in our culture, who seem to think that other people asserting boundaries is immature.

8. There are programs designed to help boost male education dropout rate. If you 'fight' for 'improvements in the fairness of social order ' to help achieve this, you are a Social Justice Warrior, and so you could just have asked yourself.
Also, American bias? Pretty sure this is not a global stat...

9. Because one focusses on correcting the inequalities between the sexes and was born at a time when women didn't have proper property rights, voting rights etc etc, and so it was primarily focussed on uplifting women and so the name 'feminism'. Egalitarianism on the other hand, is the general pursuit. Many feminists are egalitarian, but not all. Hence different words. English, motherfucker....

10. Nothing, as I am not.

11. No, my grandparents were being enslaved in eastern Europe by the far left and right (but more the right, let's be honest).

Seriously though, I don't remember the liberal protests of "Not all ISIS".

12. Ingroup outgroup hatred and distrust is a universal human trait. Race seems to provoke instinctive group psychology in humans, presumably from evolving in racially separate groups.

13. The phrase is intended to deflate 'Black Lives Matter' whose point is that society seems to disagree, in practice, with this. There's only one realistic motivation to undermining the attempts to equalize how the lives of different races are treated socially.
It's also designed to be perfectly innocuous outside of this context so that white people can totally believe they aren't being dicks by saying it.

14. My social justice fighting is almost always done in secret. I hate the limelight, and I hate endlessly seeking credit for doing the right thing. So I try to keep it to a minimum while also raising consciousness about issues where I can.
Hey wait, did you fall for the bias that the big public figures are representative in all ways of the group? HAHAHAHA! Noob.
Wait, did a man voicing a cartoon kangaroo wearing an Islamic headdress, superimposed on video footage of a woman in a gym grinding her hips tell me to stop trying show off how awesome I am and and to get real?

15. No, they are both not capable of giving consent. Sounds like you have had a bitter experience. Sorry to hear that.

16. I spent two decades trying to change myself. I tortured myself into a deep suicidal insanity. When I stopped that, and when society had changed in response to my and others plights being publicised sympathetically I felt happy and comfortable with myself.
You would prefer millions in silent minorities living through personal hells if the alternative means you have to learn better manners? What a dick.

17. Sure. It's also OK if you say 'nigga' in the context of asking this question. But I'm white and English. You should ask some black Americans if your usage causes unintended messages to be sent. I'd certainly avoid placing joyful emphasis, especially through increased volume, on the word.

18. Ah, you've confused a mixture of ideas and notions within a group as a contradiction of group idealogy. Whoops. I don't understand gender identity. I get gender, but I never felt membership in any group. That's how I feel, and have since the 1990s. The internet has allowed disparate and rare individuals to form groups, and some of these groups are people with different opinions about how they feel about gender and they are very excited to meet people other people with idiosyncratic views as they had previously been alone with their eccentric perspective.

19. If white men are too privileged then the society is not my notion of equal.

20. After rejecting the premise as nonsensical. In as much as I want rules to govern social interactions that take into consideration the diversity of humanity as best as possible, I recognize those same rules will govern my behaviour.

21. Women can choose how to present themselves. Video Game creators choose how to present women in their art. I can suggest that the art routinely portrays women as helpless sex devices, while supporting women who wish to do so for themselves.

22. You DO that? I've never even had the notion. I just sort of listen and digest and try to see if gaps can reasonably be filled with pre-existent knowledge or logical inferrences and then I compare and contrast that with my own differring opinion and I consider why someone might have come to their ideas. Assuming they aren't stupid I try to understand as best I can and present to them my perspective from their perspective. I don't sing, or plug in headphones or have an imaginary rock concert.

23. I have done no such thing. Look, here I am listening to you. You have all been asking questions that have easy answers to if you looked outside your bubble of fighting a handful of twitter and youtube users thinking these people represent the entirety of things and seeking only to destroy them with your arguments rather than understanding the ideas themselves.

24. Reverse Racism is where white guys are systematically (and often deliberately) disadvantaged - such as the complaints against Affirmative Action. I'm sure your buddies can fill you in on the details. The liberal SJWs you hate tend to roll their eyes when they hear it too. Strange you should ask.

25. No. I've never seen the list. I just use whatever pronouns people feel comfortable with. Typically I only need to know three to get by in life, same as most other English speakers.

26. I'm the audience motherfucker, and so are you. That's how it works.

27. I don't do those things, but yes, I have considered the notion of concept saturation in discourse. Have you considered the idea that people vary in their identification of problems, based on a number of factors. Some people are trigger happy and this may be a legitimate problem. Since you are aware of this, you also have a duty to try to overcome the saturation biases.
Similarly, if you keep using the word 'fucking', motherfucker, you'll find it loses its impact quite quickly. See this post motherfucker. Probably why you needed to add the crash zoom for impact. You could have achieved more impact with less sarcasm and and a more surprising fuck.

For starters, I have to oppose the implied thought that Saddam's reign of terror was preventing this sectarian violence. His rule through the Suni minority to wage genocides against the Kurdish and Shia majority and decades of brutal repression of same all served to make the sectarian hatred and violence worse. Tally up the hundreds of thousands he killed through genocide, the million plus he killed in the Iran-Iraq war and everyone that died by direct execution or deliberate starvation level poverty and compare it doesn't stand out as starkly and objectively a desirable alternative to today.

Now if you ask what would I do differently it depends on what level of power I've got to act with. Ideally, we can go back to first Iraq war and have Bush senior march on Baghdad. This would've aborted one of Saddam's genocides. Equally importantly, this would have kept the Shia Iraqi population's view of America as a liberating force. The standing in the desert and watching Saddam slaughter them thing still carried their mistrust of American forces after Saddam's actual removal later. That singularly stupid move of leaving Saddam in power, at the urging of most of the planet, drove the Shia population of Iraq back to Iran as their sole sympathetic ally.

Next step, after the removal of Saddam, whether we can do it back then, or only a few years ago as it really happened is to truly setup an occupation government. You don't bring stability to a region by immediately trying to transition to a democracy before the shooting has even stopped. The occupation government would be run by somebody with actual knowledge and experience with Iraq, rather than as Bush senior did by sending in a guy with zero experience and a two week lead to brief himself. The task you should place on this leader, is to setup a federated Iraq, with distinct and autonomous Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states. The occupation government would dictate things after taking input from Iraqi's rather than holding them to the tyranny of the majority as Bush and co allowed. The occupation would setup an initial constitution defining what laws and agreements spanned all three Iraqi provinces/states and what extent of autonomy they had to define their own systems of government. The American military's job would be to enforce this very basic constitutional framework. Each Iraqi state/province would be aided in setting up their own governments with a transition plan again dictated not voted upon. The transition plan would define the point in time when each state transitioned from occupation rule to a self determined future and rule of law.

The above plan on the whole would work, but Bush and co couldn't have managed post Saddam Iraq more poorly if they had actively tried to.

If zero time travel is allowed and we are to 'fix' things today, you need a lot MORE power. You need an army the size of America or Russia's and the political will to spend several years doing things the public will hate you for. The end game is still the same as above, a federated Iraq kicked off under a dictatorial occupation. To get there from today though you need to create stability. You need to take an army and march it across the entire country. As each city is cleared of militants you take a census of everybody and keep it because you need it to track down future militants. In entirely hostile locations like were ISIS has full rule, you bomb them into the stone ages before marching the army in. The surviving population is given full medical treatment. Now, as for sorting militants from civilians though, you do NOT use American style innocent until proven guilty justice. Instead, any fighting age males are considered guilty until proven innocent. This level of rule of law needs to remain in place until stability can be restored. You of course guarantee lots of innocent arrests, but your trying to prevent massive numbers of innocent deaths so it's required. As you stabilize the nation you can relax back to innocent until proven guilty and work on re-integrating the convicted.

You'll note that although the methods I'd declare necessary above are by any count 'brutal', they do not extend into Saddam's usage of genocide, torture and rape as the weapons of choice.

Not to poke or prod, but then what would you do to stabilize the country? His fear only worked if he killed harmless civilians, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. It's an all or nothing there.

The democratic government, hardly a corrupt government as the media would have you believe, is actually worse by far now than when Saddam was in power. (Yeah, that's hard to believe...but with the mass terror attacks, beheadings, raping of the Yazidi, unpredictable poverty, and the crime by non-terrorists, it is...) So with wholehearted empathy, I ask again. What would you do to help this even-worse situation?

I'm sorry, but that is an oversimplification too great to just allow you to apologise for and continue on with the point.

To suggest a narrative in which all Thatcher did was close a few factories and blame the communities for being too lazy to fend for themselves or find a new job is not only naive and ignorant of all the facts, but incredibly insulting to people from those areas.

An apology for oversimplifying? I personally think you owe one to the hard working people of northern mining towns that were not only made redundant by Thatcher (with no other jobs available), they were victimised by her and then blacklisted so that they would not be able to find work again - some have only been vindicated in the past few years.

The only redeeming aspect of your frankly disgusting ideas about deprived areas in the UK is that you are clearly not in possession of the facts. Lazyness? The miners were the backbone of this country, the WORKING class - you know? Steelworkers lazy?

To some people in this country there has been no recovery, they are more in debt than ever, they have less job and home security, they are depressed, there is no future and it doesn't even seem like their kids will be able to do any better. David Chameron appears on the TV and tells them we're all doing better and the recovery is going great and they laugh at him... THEY'RE USING FOODBANKS TO LIVE. Their families eat by the grace of generous community members who donate food... in 2016....... in the United Kingdom, ex-fifth largest economy in the world. Recovery!? That's how the recovery was FUNDED!!! By taking money from the poorest and most desperate in the form of cuts and austerity! They're using foodbanks right now so that you can claim the UK had a recovery. Disabled people committed suicide because they felt as if they were a burden, because they were scared and saw no hope, all so that people could claim we had a fucking recovery. But the average person is no better off and the debt that Osborne made such a big deal about has increased. He's missed every target he made for himself and redefined poverty so that the statistics looked better!

And that isn't BECAUSE of brexit - that was before brexit. Many people are blissfully ignorant of how some people have to live their lives in this country, especially those most influenced by the Westminster bubble. Politicians and political commentators have completely misjudged the mood of the nation; that led to brexit, that has led to Corbyn who in fact has been the ONLY man in parliament to be making these points.

And they think he's no leader? When he goes to work every day he has to deal with around 400 people spitting abuse and doubt at him. He stood in parliament with hundreds of them jeering him and faced them down and made the democratic will of hundreds of thousands of people (who were not in attendance) felt. He is the only man who looks like a leader right now, the only one who looks like he knows what the hell to do.

Although I'm in favour of sensible gun regulation, I'm not sure legislation alone will solve your gun problem.

The problem in the USA is, IMO, cultural.

The idea that you would need a gun for "protection" is quite foreign to almost every other country in the developed world.

But, as we've seen in threads here since Orlando, people in the US seem genuinely afraid that they will be "defenseless" if stripped of their arms.

Why is this?
When I've asked people before, I hear responses like "it takes the police 10 minutes to get to your house". Er ok, fund your fucking police?

But that doesn't address the fear of home invasion in the first place. Is it really that common in the US? And if it is, WHY is it?

It's simply not a concern for anyone I know in any other country (excluding war zones, etc). Clearly, if it is such a problem, having a gun isn't deterring people from doing this.

Maybe instead of looking at the short-term symptoms, you should be asking yourselves what is driving people to be so desperate that they are willing to risk their lives breaking into other people's homes knowing that the occupants are potentially armed.

The problem is essentially escalation ( the "Chicago Way").

10: "All the criminals have guns, I better have one too"
20: "Shit, if I'm going to rob that place, they probably have a gun, better go armed"
30: goto 10

Breaking this cycle means addressing inequality, racism, and poverty. People in the US aren't inherently worse than everywhere else, but your system is set up to incentivize criminals to carry a gun.

But FFS, at least stop burying your heads in the sand and let the CDC study this.

She's out in that dress and no veil.

Obviously Dad's not a fundamentalist.

Also it's worth noting that there are Christian strongholds in America that would be scandalized by such behavior from their youth and don't get me started on Orthodox Jews.

It's not a problem with one religion, it's a problem with the extremists within EVERY religion. Extremism takes hold more easily in poor/poorly educated populations, so the answer isn't bomb the crap out of them, the answer is to educate and lift them out of poverty.

none of what you said makes any point showing why gun control shouldn't be discussed or implemented. and i specifically didn't say "a collection of gun laws/regulations". i said "a collection of laws/regulations/policies". there is a plethora of policies or lack thereof that are talked about often to deflect from the gun debate after [yet another] mass shooting but it's always lip service. the main deflection de jour is "mental health" but very little if anything is done about that. and the problem stems from way beyond guns and mental health. minimum wage laws, health care, education, income disparity/poverty, mental health care, gun laws, etc. all play big roles in an event like this. guns are obviously the first issue that needs to be looked at but because of the second amendment, there is never a real conversation about it. it's just shut down. all without even validating the justification for the second amendment to begin with. it's just presumed to be an axiom.

but even accepting that it is, move on to the next issue and it's the same thing: obstruction of any conversation or modernization. "oh we can't do that 'cause it costs money". well, all the data shows not doing it (investing in education, health care, poverty, etc) is many times more expensive than investing in it. across the board.

so now your whole country just sits there feeling bad for itself, wallowing in how fucked your social structures are, and passing the buck from one issue to the next until the news cycle forgets about one specific event effected by all these things and moves on to the next event effected by all these things but is aesthetically different and the whole process starts over again. meanwhile complaining about ineffective your political system is yet consistently voting in low numbers for the entrenched or the psychotic. certainly never for the thoughtful or nuanced. [i'm being hyperbolic here, but your politicians and voting record as a poplulation are fucking terrifying if not useless]



point being: watching this happen time and time and time again: the tragedy, the grief, the looking for answers, refusing to see the answers that are plain as day from the outside, pointing to the closest issue you aren't directly effected by, and finally forgetting the whole thing and/or accepting it as normal is really, truly sad and tragic.