So much for being a christian nation.

I thought that myth was debunked a long time ago.

Israel. Because of course it is.

You need a special oven to make Beijing duck. Doubtful anyone could make anything resembling the real thing. It would be like trying to make Texas BBQ brisket in a wok.

There's the opposite: "Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit" which you can find here: https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com/. It removes the stupid elf woman and all of the non-canon related idiocy. Like the theme park ride through the rapids and the attack on Dol Guldur. It does remove "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates" which is canon, which is a pity.

It's Quentin Tarantino's fault. Before Pulp Fiction, movies were an hour and a half. That's the thing I like best about older movies: you're in and out in 88 minutes, including credits. But he made Pulp Fiction which was two and a half hours, breaking all the rules, and it was a wild success. Hey, I don't blame him, when you've got a movie as good as that, the only thing better is more movie.

But nobody else made movies as good as Pulp Fiction. They just made longer movies. I don't have that kind of time or commitment. I can't get invested in a 3 hour movie only to find out 90 minutes in that it's crap and not likely to get any better.

Oh, and Quentin Tarantino was thick as thieves with Harvey Weinstein. He knew. All of them knew that women were being molested by high ranking Hollywood producers and none of them said a goddamn thing. In fact, they had no problem with it. Wood chipper. Feet first. For all of them.

If I had known that Peter Jackson had directed The Frighteners I would have been scared beyond belief for the future of LOTR.

Fortunately I only found out afterwards.

Madeline Albright falsely claiming Saddam had WMD and calling for invasion in 1998.

Here she is on 60 Minutes, saying that 500,000 dead children were a price that was worth it. Coldly saying yes to the death of half a million children. I enjoy these moments when their masks start falling off. People who get in these positions of power don't have empathy towards humanity. Read the article on 'What "Psychopath" Means' in scientificamerican.com and you'll see who these people are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYagQuqK31s

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

-- "60 Minutes" (5/12/96)

Yup. He was right in the middle of his froth-at-the-mouth Trump hysteria and then he went silent for a few years. #Metoo'd.

OK boomer

Removed by mod

That's misogynist too. If you really need something that simple that explained to you, you're too entrenched in your own misogyny to either understand or accept any answer I give anyway, and I'm not wasting the finger calories.

tend to assert this by being snide, pedantic assholes

It's because they think that's how humans relate to each other. It's how they've always been treated when they were at the bottom - so naturally, now that they're at the top, that's how you treat people who are at the bottom. Because how would they know any differently?

Kids, this is why you don't take pleasure in inflicting trauma on other human beings, no matter who they are.

Texas arch-reactionary misogynist protofascist drivel

"Liquor in The Front" gimme a fucking break

"A more direct application of U.S.-backed liberalism happened in Russia. After communist rule collapsed in 1991, at the urging and advice of the United States' government and economists, Moscow embarked on a program of "shock therapy" to restructure Russia around the principle of market exchange, adopting accelerated privatization of state industries, deregulation, fiscal discipline, and the shedding of price controls. This experiment was a major effort in the project to enlarge the global liberal order at a rapid clip. It had the support of the leading institutions of global capitalism, the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury Department.

"Harvard academic Jeffrey Sachs, one of Russian liberalization's architects from 1991 to 1993, set out the program's logic in The Economist, a journal that champions the cause of the liberal world order. "To clean up the shambles left by communist mismanagement, Eastern Europe must take a swift, dramatic leap to private ownership and a market system. West Europeans must help it do so."47

"Swift, dramatic leap," a vast program grounded in classical liberal economics, took on the tempo and zeal of the revolutionary communism it aimed to replace. These rapid reforms replaced an oppressive and failed communist system. They did so at Washington's continual insistence that Russia reform itself on "our conditions." But the results on many measures were disastrous: capital flight and deep recession; slumping industrial production; malnutrition; the rise of criminality — a criminalized economy, in fact — intertwined with a corrupt oligarchy enjoying a concentration of wealth; and the decline of health care and an increased rate of premature deaths.48

"As Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz observed, by eschewing the more gradualist path of Poland or China, the consequences of the program were profoundly illiberal.49 "Liberal order" visionaries are quick to give their ideas credit for the prosperity of nations from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim, finding causation in correlation. They deny such a direct link between their ideas and the problems of post-Soviet Russia.50

"Yet it is hard to accept that measures like sudden privatization and the rise of monopolies in a corrupt country were not related to asset stripping and capital flight or that "eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies that sustained tens of millions of impoverished families" did not play a major part in the social ruin that followed.51 Western technocrats, diplomats, and politicians were deeply implicated in the new order's design."

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/world-imagined-nostalgia-liberal-order

When Cato is accurately dissecting the mistakes, you know it's bad.

I do think the Soviets dropped the ball on adopting computers and technology

"We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."

-- Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff

They had to spend that much on military, though. I thought it was more like 40%. Any less would have been to invite a US invasion. And they would have brought winter coats this time.

Red Army should have rolled over all Europe in 1919, not stopping until they got to Portugal. That was the plan.

BUT

fucking Polacks

The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming.

Never could have kept together. Mao wasn't going to play second fiddle to anyone. Mao aside, Soviets could be very high-handed in teaching the "correct" form of socialism and watching it totally fail in China didn't go over well.

Plus, the line in China was agrarian peasant, not industrial worker. Incompatible systems.

Punching down is an act of bullying. It's not noble. You should remove this post.

So it's OK to punch down on the poors as long as we dislike them. Gotcha.