Lurker > Vampire_Chicken

Star Warts

Tenacious D in the Prick of Destiny

Dead Man Wanking

"Why wait?"

Full Dinner Jacket
Drive Hungry
The Evil Deaf
Poultrygeist

TurtleInFreedom posted...

That makes me curious, if Trump was Catholic and was excommunicated by the Pope, is that good or bad for his politics?

Trump would deny he'd been excommunicated and his cultists would believe his word over that of a clearly communist pope. It's the doctrine of (Republican) presidential infallibility.

"wolf = flow" backwards is actually "wolf = flow" backwards...

Tsiegretlop = poltergeist backwards

He's still young enough to change his career direction.

I was a bit disappointed that "forcibly" didn't involve Francis dragging Strickland out into the street and throwing a cardboard box of his belongings after him.

Imagine celebrating Earth Day by baking a birthday cake with 4.5 billion candles.

JuanCarlos1 posted...

Money isnt happiness

Until you've been poor. It's not everything, but it sure as fuck beats not having enough of it.

It's not exactly a profession made for publicity-shy introverts, is it?

Always felt that Brooklyn Nine-Nine worked well enough without hearing an audience...

America has a very real existential threat to democracy, civil liberties, and human rights looming like a colossal, dark storm cloud on the horizon, only 14 short months away. Hope for the best -- but prepare for the worst.

They were fun times. They're some way in the past now, but they're still treasured memories.

lilORANG posted...

They turned me into a newt!

...

I got better...

You can't separate your mental well-being and your physical well-being into absolutely watertight compartments. Just as your body can have sick days and need treatment sometimes, so can your mind.

UnfairRepresent posted...

Lol Americans don't know who that is

Just sounds like you're calling the article writers brave.

Cruella "homeless people shouldn't be allowed tents in winter" Braverman.

divot1338 posted...

How do they decide who gets to be Michael Jackson?

With a knife fight.

Smackems posted...

When have I not

Sometimes I even smell vampire chickens

I'll have you know that undead poultry have a severe allergy to some aerosol deodorants, they can be as deadly as garlic.

divot1338 posted...

If its $10k to keep them from doing bad shit then its worth it.

I feel there's legitimate skepticism that teaching someone to finger-snap will stop them from burgling your house.

UnfairRepresent posted...

The Prison Service said: Schemes like this help cut crime, which protects the public and saves taxpayer money.

I feel crushed beneath the weight of compelling statistical evidence.

Smackems posted...

No they're smoking weed with the beavers

And if you've ever lived in a neighbourhood that smelled like beaver...

Smackems posted...

Nah they're just trumpers

There's voting for an outsider to give him a chance because he might be a breath of fresh air, and then there's voting for a billionaire Wall Street insider who surrounds himself with white-collar criminal cronies because he's supposedly "one of us" and is going to "drain the swamp". I mean, JFC.

I've no idea how the guy who was supposed to have served 240 hours of community sentence managed to get away with having done only three over the previous twelve months. I did a 240-hour sentence myself myself, and my supervisor at the charity where I had my, um, "placement" had to report to my probation officer each week to certify how many hours I'd done. But maybe the system had tightened up a lot by then.

ai123 posted...

It's the jury that determines guilt.

As something of an aside, when I sat on a jury and we were looking closely through the documents that had been submitted in evidence, we discovered that a key document (a credit agreement) that was central to the prosecution case was in fact unconnected to it (it was for a completely different car), yet neither the prosecution nor the defence had spotted that. It was scary to see such incompetence by supposed professionals. Did they just not bother to fucking read this stuff, or something?

As for highlighting efforts at rehabilitation... In another case (this time it was a bind-over that we sat in on), the defendant's barrister laid great stress on the amount of hard work his client had done during his community sentence. When the judge pressed him for specifics, there was some embarrassed mumbling and paper-shuffling by the barrister before he was forced to admit that out of a 240-hour community sentence, his client had completed no more than three hours over the course of a year.

Nothing is more likely to make you lose your faith in the system than to see it at work up close.

It's perfectly possible even for people who are politically conscious to become so disillusioned and cynical about political tribalism and the system that in the end, they throw up their hands in despair -- because they feel no party truly represents them, and that all winners of the game only play it to serve their own interests -- and become sick and tired of politics.

ai123 posted...

It's the jury that determines guilt.

If defence lawyers had that attitude, you might as well send everyone to prison on the say so of the cops.

I don't think you would want that. Would you?

My objection is to lawyers who would literally advocate for the Devil himself if he paid them enough. I've no respect for anyone who locks his salary and his ethics into absolutely watertight containers and uses the Nuremberg defence of "just doing my job", as if it was a supreme virtue. How do you feel about corporate lawyers who defend major polluters against small communities? Who know their client is guilty as hell, but will try every trick of casuistry to get them off the hook? Do you see them as heroes fighting a noble fight to uphold the legal system?

Lawyers are a necessary evil. But some of them, I feel pretty sure, lean a little too heavily towards the evil.

At the end of the day, it's about being able to feel that warm glow of satisfaction at knowing you've helped put a murderer or a rapist back on the streets, free to do it again. You know, a proud achievement you can boast about to your wife and kids. After all, they're probably not going to be the next victims.

ANort175 posted...

"Ah fuck it, guess we're watching Big Brother then..."

And then things suddenly go from bad to worse when your foot accidentally knocks over the pee bottle that, until now, has saved you from having to move...

UnfairRepresent posted...

I had a dog that used to love to climb on the back of the couch and try to sleep between my head and the wall.

It was awkward as fuck

Especially when that TV remote control is tantalizingly just inches out of reach unless you lean forward and trigger a dogalanche.

I need to give a shit because wifey is immunocompromised and even though we're both multi-vaxxed, if she caught it -- from me or anyone else -- she could be severely ill and take a long time to recover (if she's lucky). So we have to live our lives, take the same precautions, pretty much as if it was still 2020, while nevertheless trying to function as normal people out there in the world. It's a difficult balance to achieve.

If she caught Covid from someone who was knowingly Covid-positive but didn't give a shit that they were infecting others, and the worst happened to her... Let's just say I would blame that person.

Trump supporters will back this to the hilt, unquestioningly. They will happily rip up the Constitution and wipe their asses with it because, at heart, they simply don't give a shit about democracy or even America: all they care about is power -- absolute power for Trump, at any cost. They'll cheer and clap as their country burns to the ground because for them, it's all about just one man. There is no one more unpatriotic, more anti-democracy, more profoundly anti-American than a Trump voter.

Ask her if she defends memorial statues that glorify Lenin or Stalin as a way of protecting history against erasure.

If you can't look after all of them properly, don't have them. End of story.

My flu jab side effects took about 30 hours to kick in.

My cat fell asleep on my head once while I was slumped on the couch. I decided it was safer to move her than to try to balance her on my head when I went to the bathroom.

HylianFox posted...

At the very least it has better artwork than "Johnny the Walrus" which looked like it was drawn by a preschooler who had both their hands cut off and was forced to draw using a pencil clenched between their buttcheeks.

Stop giving away the secrets of the creative process.

Sahel posted...

Seeing the estimated casualties of the 21st century wars such as Tigray war being 600,000 at most and the Iraq war being at 1,033,000 at most, it could get worse. The War to End All Wars, later called World War I should have inspired humanity to prevent more wars. Or at least prevent from reaching the scale of the World Wars.

The Second Congo War (1998-2003) caused the highest human losses of any conflict on the planet in the nearly 80 years since the end of World War II, with a rough estimate of 5.4 million deaths; but in western countries, it barely registers as even a blip on the radar of global history. "Oh, it was fought in Africa? It doesn't matter, then."

The First World War cast a long, dark shadow over the Second in ways that are still little appreciated.

Genocide. Massacres and summary executions of civilians. Murder and mistreatment of POWs. Strategic terror-bombing of cities. Police-state repression in occupied territories. Ruthless asset-stripping. Destruction of cultural treasures. Spiteful scorched-earth policies. Deportation and forcible relocation of populations. The overworking and starvation of civilians and POWs as slave labourers. Incarceration and brutalization of minority nationalities in concentration camps. The fomenting of jihadist terrorism.

Much of the above might sound like a litany of Axis transgressions in WWII but in fact, theyre crimes of the Central Powers during WWI. People who think WWI was the last of the "gentlemen's wars" haven't a clue. Instead, WWI was a shrieking klaxon that warned of the extremes of brutality to come within the next few years.

Foppe posted...

Never heard of him.

Then that's good news.

Foppe posted...

But in some cases the data itself is too taboo to question by the then current historians, and later historians dont dare to look at it because it would be a career suicide.

I'd point out that David Irving didn't lose his libel suit against Lipstadt & Penguin Books because he "dared to question" the primary sources, but because he was proved to be a manipulative, pro-Hitler disinformation specialist who frequently distorted the record through fabrication, selective quotation, misattribution and misrepresentation.

I mention this because I can't think of many topics which would invite "career suicide" for "taboo-breaking" modern historians other than challenging the consensus on Hitler's regime.

Foppe posted...

The winner writes the history books.

The losers write their own history books. For years after the end of WWI, the German Foreign Ministry waged an all-out, largely successful propaganda war against the Treaty of Versailles.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Fundie: Ban gay marriage. It violates the sanctity of marriage.

You'd think that conservatives would be happy when two people want to declare their love and faithfulness to each other before God and their families and friends, in a traditional, hallowed institution, regardless of their genitalia, wouldn't you?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I think that when children are involved divorce isn't something to be entered into lightly, but no one should be condemned to live in an intolerable prison.

cjsdowg posted...

But a lot that popularity isn't natural. It comes from lies from our government and media

That's what I mean by a "manufactured consensus"; foreign policy tends to drag public opinion along behind it, rather than it being driven by public opinion. Nevertheless, popular support can still be genuine even if it's (unknowingly) founded on a falsehood.

I'll bet you a lot of the Trump voters who applauded him for "getting America out of Afghanistan" were the very same right-wing hawks who, at the height of war fever in the 2000s, savaged critics of the War on Terror as anti-American, unpatriotic, and worse still, spiritually French for "not supporting our boys", and were gung-ho Cold Warriors in the decades before that.

Twin cravings for blood and organic poultry feed.