I recently re-read this as well as Robinson Crusoe. I find both to be very interesting in that you get an understanding of dominant philosophies of the time, the traditions of life, language and more subtly writing; how all of those developed together and reflected upon each other.

But they are also both incredibly dull. I sort of wish I could read it as someone from that era read it, because I imagine it might be a little like seeing a film with revolutionary use of new film tech like sound or colour for the first time. It might be another old western, but it's engaging with parts of your brain you're not used to using in that particular medium. Whereas we're used to advanced and refined versions of the same thing, because it influenced so many.

@SDGundamX those cultural factors are all true, and none of it contradicts my point. Both culture and inborn personality traits play a role. A place where murderers have been routinely caught and removed from the gene pool for centuries is going to be a place with a lot less genes for psychopathy. Not so much in a frontier society without effective law enforcement for much of its history, like the US. The US isn't the worst in this respect, but it hasn't been civilized for nearly as long as Western Europe or Japan, and this is a source of both genetic and cultural differences.

In open warfare of govt vs people, drones don't matter, just like jets don't matter. I already covered this above.



Nowhere is an oppressive dictatorship - until it is.
[redacted]
I feel like people are too distracted with instagram and other B.S. to bother learning about how the world works.
History is long. The current peace is an anomaly. When things go bad, there is little warning. If you're lucky, a year or so of build up. If you're not lucky, weeks or days. Shit likes to spiral.
In bad times, you have only what you have on hand.


Most western countries with [regardless of gun ownership] don't have a population that's F'd in the head.
Nothing stops a German gun owner from taking his AR15 and shooting up a concert.
Storing his guns in a safe that he can open doesn't mean anything.
Paying for a new license card for every few guns doesn't alter the guns.

Gun laws, as proposed, are fluff. Nothing that makes people safer, nothing that prevents ownership, but plenty to crap on collectors.
* 10 round limit = 2 second pause to reload
* Gun show loophole is a misnomer.
* (re. above) Only private sales (gun show or not) don't require checks - but you still end up in court if the buyer does something bad.
* Assault weapons ban only bans pistol grips and threaded barrels. Cosmetics. Just google "California compliant AR15" (they already have a de-facto AWB).
* There's already laws against straw purchase.
* There's already laws against crazy people buying (already part of the background check)
* Registration is pointless as gun control. Doesn't alter the guns or who has them (background check already tells gov who, when, and where bought a gun).

(I'd sooner vote for mandatory roll cage and 6 point harness in every car. Could eliminate 90+% of car fatalities in one rule - if people cared enough.)


By the way, gun owners hate people like the Vegas shooter even more than anti-gunners hate people like him.
Precisely because assholes like that shooter make anti-gunners turn on their frustration on innocent gun owners.

The call to "do something" is the phrase that perfectly describes the sentiments that led to actions, that in turn became described by either "famous last words" or "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".





We had shit health insurance before Obama. We had shit insurance during Obama (only you're required by law to buy it, even if it's not a good value), we continue to have shit health insurance during Trump, and no matter what trump does, it will still be shit.
Problem is that the insurance company lobbyists draft the language of the law (no matter the party in charge), and it's not for our benefit.





Re. Minorities, most are living normal lives. The white eutopia that the few vocal people complain about, doesn't exist. At least I have yet to see it. Don't let a few thousand people in a nation of millions guide your thoughts about overall social norms.

I'm happy to see them protest. Frankly, I wish white people had the same solidarity that black people have. When a black gets shot by a cop, they come together. When a white is shot by a cop, other whites say "he probably deserved it". I wish the black community good luck and success.





Yes, I wish we weren't jailing more people than anywhere else on the planet, over things that harm nobody.
I wish we had the drug laws of Portugal (decriminalization)
I wish we had the legal system of Sweden (no jail before conviction).

Know how I said that most countries don't have as many people that are F'd in the head? Same applies for people in government.
None of this shit will get fixes.
Republicans are bible thumping retards that funnel money to defense contractors and campaign donors.
Democrats are buck-passing censors that funnel money to insurance companies and campaign donors.
And people just pick a team and bark at the other team, while each gets fleeced by their very own side.

-scheherazade

This isn't accurate at all on Columbus either.

Every educated person knew the Earth was round, they even had a pretty good idea of how BIG it was. Which is why nobody was insane enough to try the trip to the East over the Western sea. It was too far, they would simply die.

Columbus was an idiot who got the math wrong and thought the Earth was a lot smaller than everyone else knew it was. He didn't even really convince the Queen he was right, she just had lots of ships and on the off chance he might be right, she gave him three because the reward was worth the risk.

He then went on to slaughter a few million islanders in the Caribbean because they wouldn't tell him where the gold was (they had no gold).

So... he was basically an idiot and a homicidal maniac, responsible for one of the largest genocides the world has ever known. Yay, let's celebrate a day for him, America! (oh and he also never set foot in what is now the United States AND the first Europeans to come to the Americas were several hundred years earlier).

This Lego kit is triggering the fall of western civilization.

This would never happen in Western Washington.

We can always tell who has been on a ferry and paid cash, because the ferries are the only ones who ever give $2 bills in change.

(Although with credit card rewards being what they are these days, few people pay cash anymore....)

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

That is how communism fell in Eastern Europe. The ruling elites realized that they would be better off if they just gave up on the ideology and kept their property. Everyone else was so poor by western standards that meaningful investments had to come from abroad, the ex-communists mostly just changed shirts and kept their social "leadership" roles. Reagan and Kohl just talked the talk, the important part was the willingness to give up power, that was how bad the economics of socialism were. Some people still remember socialism as if it was something awesome, a thing to be proud of. One time border guards celebrate anniversaries never pausing to think about the fact that for 40 years they were employed to stop people from LEAVING their country. THAT is a sure sign your country sucks.

Haven't most people in the Western world?

There are only 5 good westerns (westerns I like and would recommend), spaghetti or not, these 5 should have a "subgenre" with a respectable name.

Spaghetti western makes me think Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - laughable movies.

And it's well known that there's no other western power ready to step in.

Which is why this commentary affirms that the US is ceding power to Russia and China.

In the US, the central government cedes power to the States. In the world, there are other strong central governments who will step into the power vacuum. The weaker European states will be forced to react to the paradigm shift.

Outside of the western world the right hand is commonly used for eating with, never the left.

It's not just that. Doesn't every even moderately educated or moderately intelligent person in any western democracy know that it's inappropriate, unethical, or even possibly illegal for a head of state to interfere with the justice system for personal gain.

Was gone for the weekend and it turned into word fights (almost)...

It is so hard to carry on a discussion... the heat too easily turned up. Sorry if I contributed in the heat.

Thing is, I don't think any of us need to argue for God's omnipotent or his non-existence. God can select to do or not do anything he wants. He can choose to reveal Himself to a believer or a non-believer, or NOT to. What's the point. It has been argued for millennia and I doubt we are "The Chosen One(s)" to end this. And I think, most of us in our Western society, whether you're Christian or not, we know quite a bit about the Bible CONTENT. But the 99.99% of us non-Bible-scholars probably don't know the exact CONTEXT of the tough stuff. The churches avoid them too for obvious reasons.

For me the important things is, there are really horrible things done in history (and present) in the name of religion. Allow me to be a bit self-serving and consider these terrible, inhumane events as evil beings hijacking their religions so they can get away Scot-free. We can't allow that in this day & age. Hold the evil doers & hypocrites accountable, not the religion.

When I read the Bible, I see all the crap that makes no sense too, but I see the discrepancy as humanity making progress. There are so many years between us & the Bible's original writings (or oral pass-me-downs), words & meaning invariably changed (and not always for the better). Could it be the clear-as-day word "gossip" (its Hebrew equivalent) was not part of its language yet? Therefore Paul said those sexist things (in our modern eye)? Or just people speak funny in those days? I can't be sure.

So, I *try* to figure out the meaning of those difficult Bible verses by keeping the context of Jesus' teachings in mind. I mean, come on, all he want is us all having compassion towards each other, be respectful of God and oh, there's the promise of heaven. Like, THAT'S IT, that's the gist of it. Anything else is pretty secondary & incidental to me. The part that concerns between human-human interact? Yes, it's hard to put in practice. But it's not hard to understand what's needed to be done. E.g. If someone offends my religion, should I go on the defensive and then all Super-Saiyan retaliation mode? Or should put my focus into finding out why he offended me and try to understand the reasoning behind it, and if possible, do something positive about it? I believe Jesus asks of us the latter.

Thing is, as a Christian (granted, some Christian might not consider me one that much, maybe?), I'm OK to leave a lot of things in the Bible in the "gray zone"... because it is *I* that haven't the smarts to comprehend what's written fully. But I do think I understand its purpose enough to know what I need to do to be better. The world is full of hurt, we can't just standby and focus on sometimes pointless fights (ironically I'm typing this post, lol, mea culpa, but hope it's worth it), better put more energy on making things better -- like Jesus, arguably the most progressive thinker/doer of its time, wanted to make the world a better place. Jesus didn't spend his time setting up a religion, he was there for a peace & compassion revolution.

Seriously sad that when the topic touches on religion, there're way too much stereotypes & presumptions on every sides. I see the reality as far more nuanced. I can understand, and in fact conditionally support, a lot of the abolition of "Religion" with its ritualistic practices in today's society. I really don't trust anyone loudly proclaiming themselves "devout" but support sexist/racist/unjust policies. The smell of hypocrisy, ulterior motives & power corruption are too great. Don't sheepishly give them the political & God forbid... military power to do great harm to humanity. History has proven that time & again.

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