You’re arguing with the mirror, buddy. There’s one anti American, anti democratic, anti fact, delusional cultist here. ROTFLMFAHS!!! You’re so silly.

Whine some more, kiddo. More sour grapes from infantile sore losers. You only insult yourself with these kindergarten insults. Your opinion is less than worthless. You calling me a “Tool” for the left only verifies I’m on the right path, if you had something nice to say, I would re-examine my position immediately. You are such a ridiculous full fledged cultist in a failed cult of personality. Keep screaming into the dark.

You CLEARLY hated Obama because he was black, you liar. Called him a Kenyan (as an insult), a Muslim (as an insult), a thug, and in private much much worse. Lie to yourself, we know the truth, and you are a well known verified racist liar no one trusts to ever tell the truth.

You also CLEARLY have problems with strong women too. Hated Clinton for being a woman in power. Pretend you aren’t sexist, it won’t fool anyone, you are a well known constant liar, who would listen to you complimenting yourself?

You hate Harris for the same reasons. Being black, and being a woman. Her being intelligent, professional, knowledgeable, reasonable, level headed, well spoken, and accomplished only pisses you off, doesn’t it?

I and really totally disagree, but after Trump, leadership skills aren’t a prerequisite, and you have no leg to stand on. That’s it.

We’ve never had a leader with less, worse leadership skills than Trump, who never led anyone who wasn’t willing to follow him literally anywhere. Jim Jones was a better leader, he actually cared about those he misled….Trump doesn’t care one whit about anyone not named Trump, and when the chips are down, only people named Donald John Trump. That’s it.
Her leadership skills are infinitely better than her MIA predecessor, Pence, his were non existent.

Obama led conservatives from depression to a healthy economy. True, they obstructed him for the entire 8 years, but he was leader enough to make serious progress anyway, including growth that eclipsed Trump’s dismal 1% gdp growth per year, and health care for all Americans.

Woefully diminished is still exponentially better than his predecessor, whose cult tried to overthrow the government and make us a dictatorship. I still blame him for Trump, if he had run in 2016, the nation, probably the world, would be in such better shape it would be unrecognizable.
I wanted Butigieg, a super smart, knowledgeable, thoughtful, disciplined, younger president, but Biden kicked Trump’s ass despite multiple massive Republican fraud schemes, so he is a major success. That’s it. Nothing can change that…just like no attempted rewriting of history can make Trump anything but a massive failure on every front.

Go pander your idiotic cultist babbling somewhere else. You only come here to troll, no one ever agrees with you besides your sock puppet accounts, you just enjoy being a nasty liar, trying to trigger libtards with nonsense and prejudice. Here’s the problem, Bob. It doesn’t work when you have no real gripes to complain about and no one cares what you think.

I note you still can’t say who she slept with or how that got her elected….I did explain the top two in Trump’s administration got their positions by sleeping to the top, they had zero leadership skills, zero experience, and zero accomplishments. Harris is overqualified if Trump was only underqualified. He also had no leadership experience or skills. He didn’t run the companies he owned, those he tried to failed miserably, and no one goes to work for Trump twice.

Lots more whining and crying, but not a single fact in your posts, Bob. You seem allergic to fact. I understand, they tear at your fantasy world and, when you’re forced into reality, you must live with the piece of excrement you have become.

ROTFLMFAHS!!!

Economy
Unemployment
Gdp
Debt
The right has abandoned these as important because they failed miserably compared to the left? LMFAHS!!!

Trump only put Trump first…ever. Anyone not cheering for him constantly was the enemy. If you’re so disengenuous to only count Trumptards as Americans (despite their being rabid anti American terrorists) he put them first…only if you don’t count Trumps, Putin, Xi, Lil Kim, Saudis…. That’s likely what you think….it’s your speed.

Biden’s growth average is crushing Trumps. Derp. Trump averaged 1% growth per year…last year under Biden growth was 5.7%! A growth increase of over 9% from Trump’s horrible very bad no good last year!!! Near double Trump’s best year.

Trump had a loss…a fucking loss for his last year. Negative growth for 1/4 of his presidency, with no one else to blame because it was his last year, not his first year when he rode Obama’s recovery wave. If the economy had tanked in June 2021, you could be right that Biden can’t keep it up, but it didn’t. Sorry, even numbers must be liberal now, because they certainly disagree with you. Derp.

This planet…where everyone but Trumptards live. You might visit sometime. On Planet Trump, maybe not….but it’s in a different universe where white supremacists aren’t racists but civil rights leaders are, where the pandemic and 2020 and Jan 6 never happened, and where Hunter Biden is a multi billionaire.
Here on Earth, Biden’s leadership has led to economic recovery, gdp growth, lower unemployment, higher wages, a strong unified European front opposing Putin, and soon an end to pandemic measures.

Putin invaded under weak president Trump too, you fucktard, with zero repercussions, he was also identified conclusively as having shot down commercial aircraft over Ukraine, with not a peep from Trump, and Trump totally gave up on Crimea too, even before taking office, removing all sanctions and green lighting Putin’s expansion for years….holy shit you can’t possibly be ignorant of that, so I know you’re just trolling because you have nothing. So sad, little man.

Trump bent over backwards far enough to lick Putis scrotum as he fucked Trump’s leaky sausage hole repeatedly. He never once stood up to him with any action….never. He did take many actions to embolden and reward Russian expansion. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine as Putin was invading them…not only did nothing against Russia but actually hobbled the Ukranians fighting for democracy against Putin. Trump put Putin first….correction….second, right after Trump.

Trump is a coward who hides from leadership and service (actually despises the thought and ridicules those who do serve as suckers and fools regularly) and instead rage tweets like a child. Biden confronts Russia by destroying their economy in a week and plunging them into the dark ages. I know you can’t face it, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Trump is a leader like Jim Jones….totally delusional, insanely narcissistic, ridiculously untruthful, and ready to destroy any and everyone in an instant instead of admitting a mistake. You drank the whole pitcher of flavor aid and went looking for more.

The Delta variant is just as infectious from the vaccinated as from the not vaccinated, but +-90% fewer vaccinated seem to catch it and at least 98% fewer require hospitalization. It is far more transmissible, and in the unvaccinated seems to have higher mortality rates than previous variants. Vaccinated and non vaccinated may be totally infectious but have no symptoms.
That means wearing a mask after getting vaccinated is still good science and proper public policy based on current knowledge. Masks protect others from the wearer , they don’t protect wearers from the unmasked sneezing or coughing. They aren’t signs of fear or weakness, they are signs of recognizing a civic responsibility, something the Right wing called a virtue before following Trump into the darkness.

If more people had gotten vaccinated, the delta variant might not have been a problem. Just like if more people had masked up and distanced early, COVID might not have been 1/10 the problem it has been. Now, thanks to anti science conspiracy theorists who refuse public health orders we have Delta and likely have an epsilon variant coming by fall and get to go back to full quarantine with no vaccines.


You don’t attack using germ warfare by infecting your own country. 🤦‍♂️

Not going to ban you for your opinion. But saying a veteran should have been kia is pretty goddamn low. You are, as all the dumbass motherfuckers on the interweb who have been calling him a traitor are, referring to the fact that he broke during his POW incarceration.

Here is a brief excerpt of the new techniques that came out right around the time he was captured. Techniques that were so insidious that the military had to REWRITE the code regarding breaking under torture.

"Some were physically tortured, some of them succumbed to the pain and broke, some did not, but there was also a new technique employed, and it took time.

Put into a dark box, not large enough to even stretch out, it is called sensory deprivation, and along with other enhancements, it turns a person insane, malleable, and open to the most ridiculous suggestions. like confessing to the war crime of being ordered to bomb hospitals and orphanages, and doing so.

Some of those who broke under this new kind of interrogation feared to be repatriated, thinking they would be tried for collaboration upon their return. American psychologists and psychiatrists, after interviewing some of these ex-POW’s, determined that, given enough time, anyone, if not everyone, could be broken.

John McCain made them start all over on him a number of times, until his Vietnamese interrogators finally gave up, and threw him into a miserable cell, and not back into his horribly, miserable dark box. His conduct, during his interrogation period, and thereafter, was nothing short of heroic."

Now, if you ever go through enhanced interrogation techniques, please feel free to report back to us how you managed not to break or suffer mental damage from them. Until that time, I find your opinion to be ill informed and lacking weight.

EDIT: Before you go saying I am a fanboy, I didn't care for him as a senator or presidential candidate. He was gullible enough to get sucked into the Keating Five mess and I didn't feel he would be a good president, so I voted democrat in 2008, even though I generally vote republican. I can still recognize him as a war hero and for his service though. The man was not a traitor.

I think you misunderstand my opinion of TLJ here.

Had this video been used to build a script for TLJ, it would have been better than TLJ because ANYTHING would have been better.

As evidence, we can compare TLJ to a two-hour video of a garbage fire, and indeed, the garbage fire would have had better writing.

The movie was terrible.

If they were going to have vaudevillian humour in the opening scenes with Poe prank-calling Hux---while dozens of star destroyers with hundreds (thousands?) of fighters sit there idle----they may as well have gone full 'Snakes on a Plane' B-movie fan service and let Ackbar do the same thing with an "it's a trap" gag. But that wouldn't do, because that would involve some kind of consistency. And one thing I can't stand is scripts and characters in stories that contradict their own being.

e.g. Luke "I see good in the most evil villain of movie history" Skywalker considering killing his own nephew, because maybe he's too far gone. Darth Vader wasn't too far gone, but somehow the son of Leia and Han was? See how that kinda goes against Luke's character? There are a million ways they could have written the fall of Ben Solo into the dark side that didn't involve violating the essence of existing characters.

A garbage fire wouldn't have done that. A garbage fire would have known better.

TLJ was terrible movie that just happened to have the massive budget for some cool special-effects scenes and some A-list actors wasted on an awful script with a thin, scattered plot.

Now maybe TLJ is your favourite movie, and if so, whatevs. We just have different taste I guess. I'm not going to get into a flame war over a garbage-fire.

Science is the search for truth, not god.
If you are conflating knowledge of the truth with closeness to god, I won't argue.
The more scientific discoveries that are made, the more I see the lack of a need for a "God(s)" to explain it all.

As I see it, God lives in the shadows of ignorance, whispering explanations of the unknown to those that can't accept the 'answers' are unknown, and every time the light of knowledge is directed into those shadows, we see there's nothing there but our imagination and 'God' recedes farther into the dark crevasses.

Not only that, but when you suffer at the hands of cold, calculating oppression lacking entirely in humanistic compassion, when its flashing a badge and looking down on you like lesser than an enemy, but a nothing, a problem, a defect barely worth your time that simply needs handcuffs and a room without a view. The bounds of civil society begin to evaporate, because you no longer have a value to western civilization. Your pursuit of happiness ends and the collapse of your individual capitalist worth plummets.

And then nothing matters. Nothing. I fully understand why some people pick up guns and bombs and go on rampages. Even if it sickens me to consider such atrocity, i get it. Im staring into the darkness and it stares back and it makes sense.

Maybe after years of worthless surveillance, the powers that be will begin to understand this simple and very human truth. Dont devalue other humans.

Ever.

I think I could go gently into that dark night with that kind of send off.

You mean drag me into your darkness.

No thanks

^ I know, I'm so disappointed. Just let the baby birdy get torn asunder, pwetty pweeze?

I blame the secret desire for bird death on that annoying bird Tweety, and the annoying Road Runner, and those infuriating ducks Daffy and Donald... Road Runner cable...

Can this bird just DIE please?!

Oh and I definitely do not equate the killing and stuffing of birds with the hatred of women, driven into my dark and empty soul by my antagonizing mother. No, no, no. Nope.

Is it harassment if the pretty girl on the bus catches you staring at her reflection in the window, like, 3 times in a row?

The most awkward interaction with women is at night, when they are walking alone in the dark, and you are behind them and they can see your shadow from the street lights and your footsteps getting nearer. I can't slow down and just keep distance because then I am a stalker. I can't speed up because then I am chasing her. So now I am trying to do all the things I think a rapist wouldn't do, which is exactly how I imagine a rapist would think, so I try to stop thinking like that. Tension mounts until I am within striking distance, when she takes a quick glance over my shoulder and sees my grimace (a poor attempt to produce a friendly smile), and accelerates to the maximum possible walking pace without offending british insensibilities. Her max is my medium, so we continue onwards into the darkness in silence, a couple of feet apart, air full of tension, neither willing to deescalate by crossing the road. Awkward. But maybe that's just me.

Unwanted attention is pretty uncomfortable. To me, harassment suggests sustained unwanted attention. I guess the problem is for the guy it's not sustained, but for the woman it is. If she is getting it from every corner, then the net result is harassment. Catcalling is just plain rude and disrespectful tho, no excuse for that.

Jews have the old testament.
Christians have the old testament and new testament.
Muslims have the old testament, new testament, and yet a newer testament.

All 3 share the old testament.
The 'violence promoting' scriptures are found in the old testament - which all 3 have in common.

Reza is right.
If people want peace, the religious of them simply ignore the violent edicts of their religions.
If they want to be violent, the religious of them legitimize it with excuses from their religions.

He's also right about the national hypocrisy. Al-Qaeda at the time of 9/11 was a pet organization of members of the Saudi royal family.
But instead of going after the Saudis (who also today finance ISIS), we go after 2 countries that are unrelated to the attack.

Look at today's irony. Assad in Syria (who we wanted deposed because he was friendlier to Russia than the U.S., and allowed Russian bases on Syrian soil [in the middle east]) is now fighting ISIS, while we ally with the Saudis who are supporting ISIS.

We also didn't mind supporting the Mujahedin (Jihadi fighters) in Afghanistan when they were fighting our enemy. We had no problem throwing Afghanistan into the dark ages when it suited us.

Ultimately, extremist Islam is a foil, meant to rouse western people's emotions. As national policy, we don't _actually_ do anything to stop it, we just use it as an excuse to do whatever else is of national interest.
Who would be the boogey man if extremist Islam was gone? We need a boogey man if we want to keep excusing and paying for a large military. People simply don't have the foresight and patience to maintain a strong military without someone scaring them into support. Particularly now, when we don't have the manufacturing capacity to quickly build a large military.

However, Reza is ignoring Turkey's and the Pacific islander's Muslim problems. Indonesia and the Philippines have extremist Muslim organizations doing attacks home (Philippines also has Christian terrorists). Turkey is a large source of Muslim fighters pouring into Syria.



The various related religions also have historical developmental differences.

Jews were for a long time in such minorities that they did not have the political capability of waging any campaign of violence. They were either too small, or too busy being occupied by European powers (Rome, etc).

Christians did have a long period of majority, starting around 400ad when Rome decided that a good way to control/pacify any dissent within the empire was to make the empire 1 religion and make Rome the head of that religion. They elected Christianity as the state religion, forced everyone in the Roman empire to convert, and you had a continent's worth of Christians.
This included north Africa and Middle East - and is when Jews (by now called Palestinians) were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity (**and few hundred years later forced to convert from Christianity to Islam).

Although, Christians had the benefit of the Inquisition(s) to temper their enthusiasm for Christianity. A large part of the population was killed for consorting with the devil. Once it got so bad that everyone knew someone who had been convicted and killed - and everyone was sure that those killed were innocent, it cast a large doubt on Christianity as whole. People questioned if the devil even exists, or if it's all a sham. The distrust and resentment paved the way for the eventual birth of Deism and Empiricism. A time when the scientific method and physical observation started to take over.

Islam is still a young religion. They still have to experience their religion becoming all powerful, and the inquisitions that inevitably come from absolute power. The one good thing about Islamic extremism is that it makes the people living under those conditions more likely to suffer. Once the suffering becomes so pervasive that everyone is suffering, the people will start to dislike/distrust their religion, and the extremism will resolve itself from the inside out - like it did with Christianity.

The bigger problem would be if things are 'too tolerable', and the religion grows more extreme (no one is inclined to say 'no'). The biggest problem would be if the religious leaders 'solve' the balance issue, and manage to stabilize the oppression at a level that is as extreme as it can be while still being permanently sustainable. Then the religious leaders can live the life of power without the threat of deposition.

-scheherazade

Thank you for your gracious words. Merry Christmas to you too! Today is the day the Lord has made so I try not to dredge up the past too often, and I can tell you that I appreciate what you've said either way. I am growing in grace, and only in grace. As you said, it is a prayer for wisdom and grace alone which allows me to interpret scripture. Certainly, when I first started to pursue God, I had no earthly idea of where I would end up or what I would have to go through to get there.

What I am doing is essentially, submitting myself to God and allowing Him to remake me into the image of His Son. This is a process that is initiated, executed and completed by the Spirit of God. It is not my whim but the very real intervention of the Almighty in my life, whereupon the old me is extricated and the new me is molded by the Potters hands and seasoned with fire.

If there was anything I objected to in your words it was the implication that Christianity is like spiritual training wheels for those who can't hack it in the real world. This was simply my flesh, objecting; a spiritual pride that ironically came from my journal into the occult. I don't have that notion anymore; I have no trouble admitting that I am nothing and can do nothing without God, and that there is nothing in me which is of any value unless God put it there, and that for His glory.

I have volumes of things I wrote on esoteric spirituality, abstract thoughts, poetry, philosophy, life the universe and everything. I churned this stuff out as if my mind was a computer spitting out lines of code, I excelled at it, Enoch; as it seemed to me I was ascending the very heights of being, a kind of godhood, tapping into the very beating heart of it all. But God brought me crashing back down to the ground and He offered me a choice:

either crawl back into your darkness and reconstitute your construct or give up everything and follow My Son into the Light.

I didn't want to do it. I preferred my reality. Yet, to go back would mean to purposefully delude myself and that was what I absolutely refused to do. I was interested not in what I preferred but the truth. That's why I am a Christian.

Either way, I see that you are pursuing God, and I respect that. There is a difference in personal revelation, and we both have our opinions of that. That's fine and I think the truth can and will speak for itself. Even Buddha said, there are three things which cannot be long hidden; the sun, the moon and truth. Yet, there is something he missed which is that we can supress the truth. I could have rejected Gods revelation and reconstructed my reality, but thankfully I chose not to do that. Not everyone makes that choice. I have spoken to an atheist on this very website who denies he has a soul even though he has had an out of body experience. Sometimes people will take that rejection to their grave, which is why Christians are so urgent about letting people know about Jesus Christ. I don't know what your view is on the afterlife, but, the bible says we only have one shot and then the judgment. This is why I preach the gospel here, and everywhere. Not for myself, but because God loves these people and He wants them to know it before it is too late to do anything about it.

Thanks again for everything and I am praying you have a wonderful day tomorrow with your friends and family. I pray the Lord will give you a deeper revelation of His love. God bless you and yours.

Hilarious! I would LOVE to meet the person who wrote this.

"In the future we will put a HAL like A.I. in everything and take away all fail safes because it will make everything better.Or will it? DUN DUN DUN!"

I think this writer might just be the next Isaac Asimov! I for one have been jolted awake by this razor sharp view into our dark future!

@oritteropo

I'm hoping it really is mainly procedural means the NSA have. Already before this, I've been operating under the assumption anything I haven't personally encrypted using keys controlled only by me is not secure. Used to be I only went the whole mile when I felt it was necessary, now I'm starting to move as much of my net presence into the dark as I can, out of principle more than any immediate need. But if strong crypto is compromised, as some now worry... Things get ugly.