The Gaming Den

With it looking like a cross between Lisa Lampanelli and Joan Rivers....I don't think anyone would have to worry if it was worth a fuck (pun intended), because only 3 people in the whole world would want those two people combined.

On the lighter side in new suicide bombings women know they have 72 virgins waiting for them.

But I have to ask if it was Muslim behind this bombing, and a woman that did it, would it be a suicide bombing, or murder, since women have no rights and are property....or maybe then just defective merchandise?


Its fucked anyway you look at it.

Prak_Anima wrote:Or the military has something better. (Maybe the Navy's got their own sex bot for those long missions...)

Mahoromatic
Steel Angel Kurumi
Battle Angel Alita
Koi Koi 7

Need I go on?

PA wrote:(Maybe the Navy's got their own sex bot for those long missions...)

That's some wishful thinking right there.

As someone who as served in the Navy, the last thing they want you to do at all is to have any sex that even inches in the direction of being normal.

Besides, do you think they'd hook up the fucking enlisted sailors up with something that sweet? We can't even get non-John Wayne toilet paper and you think we got some damn money for sexbots? If that ever happens there will only be like two sexbots on the entire ship and everyone has to share. But they have to fuck in the hangar bay in front of everyone so no one steals them back to their berthing.

Fuck that. If you want undeserved sex so bad, join the Army. All the brown people you can rape.

How are Hatians supposed to have an agrarian society in which they don't own the land and the US tariffs all their products to not compete with other US protectorates?

-Crissa

I was listening to NPR, and they're talking about possibly repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and to allow gays in the military. Now, I think this is a good thing. The part that baffled me is that they said something about Congress wanting to put together a panel to figure out the best way to go about this.

Isn't the best way to just simply repeal it? What's the complication? Or are they worried about fairness and how to handle people previously discharged?

Of course that isn't the best way. If the government didn't over complicate things and make them incomprehensible then it might actually prove to be effective.

Crissa wrote:How are Hatians supposed to have an agrarian society in which they don't own the land and the US tariffs all their products to not compete with other US protectorates?

-Crissa

If you're asking me about this, the solution is for the US to stop keeping them dependent. The problem isn't the Haitians stubbornly refusing to be agrarian; they're acting rationally here. The problem is the US manipulating their economy (and overthrowing any Haitian leaders who want to change it in the name of fighting Communism) to make agrarianism unfeasible.

There is no solution that can be implemented in Haiti, because if they tried the US would come in to restore profitability.

RobbyPants wrote:Isn't the best way to just simply repeal it? What's the complication? Or are they worried about fairness and how to handle people previously discharged?

Probably a bit of that, but mostly because they don't want to have a sharp rise in murders by homophobic military members.

Well, Haiti isn't a US protectorate, but yes, we have overthrown leaders. We just seem to have no interest in dealing with them fairly over time. If they could sell their sugar and sweatshop products in the US and buy food, it wouldn't be a problem.

But they can't, so it is. See also Mexico.

-Crissa

It is a mistake to place all blame on outside forces: corrupt cultures create broken governments. "We" is not being used correctly here, and it's annoying to see.

Non-corrupt government is really hard. Being invaded, destablised and deserted makes it even harder.

It's kinda like Venezuela or Cuba, as well: They have some resource that's large enough that they were able to throw off the chains of colonialism in the modern era.

But that doesn't mean they don't go without shortages because the US fails to let them buy food or trade normal things - like fuel oil or building materials - and instead they have to trade halfway around the world to get a fair deal.

The US seriously seems to be totally about fucking over its neighbors. If we could invade Canada for their delicious oil without angering Britain and Europe, we'd do it. We totally did it three times against Mexico, and no one but Mexicans and poor Americans (not the US kind) care.

-Crissa

Venezuela is actually the US's 15th largest trading partner in terms of total volume. Through 2009 the US exported $9b there and they imported $25b to us. In terms of trade relative to GDP it's swinging way over its weight relative to the other US trade partners, with the exception of Canada and Mexico.

Not only that, but building materials are generally local, concrete in particular. Venezuela's real problem is that their inflation has been about 20%+ yearly for the last decade.

Cuba is still catching US hate for nearly starting World War 3. I think everyone except Miami Cubans and Rush Limbaugh are over that, but if we've normalized relations with Vietnam and not Cuba it's because of that.

Basically you're full of shit, at least in regards to Venezuela. The place is being run by a guy with a strong sense of nationalism, a need for intense, pandering populist support and not a great understanding of economics. The bottom's probably going to drop out within a decade or so and it won't have anything to do with US meddling in South American affairs.

We do that, but not on the same scale. Honestly, the Cold War ended. The War on Drugs took its place in regions, but Duvalier and Pinochet have been replaced with Fujimori and Chavez and a bunch of other home-grown jerks. There aren't any more death squads, but life isn't much better for most of South America in the two decades since the dictators were run out.

How does Venezuela's local inflation have to do with the import price of food?

The answer: It doesn't. Local inflation means that while more people there have more money, big corps can merely make more money by shipping the same amount of food instead of more. The fact that they're allied with the very companies complaining that the Venezuelan government is nationalist and charges them for the oil they extract inside the country has as much to do with it - starving people don't vote for their current government any more than out of work people do.

Building materials are not 'mostly' local. If you do not include steel in your concrete, you get (drumroll) what happened in Haiti. While you need to assemble concrete locally, the low price of oil has made shipping things like wood and steel and composites the norm.

I've always lived in places that specialized in some building products or other... Half of those factories are literally not there anymore. Literally; they took all the steel and carted it off and there's acres of bare pavement where once big factories once stood.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:I've always lived in places that specialized in some building products or other... Half of those factories are literally not there anymore. Literally; they took all the steel and carted it off and there's acres of bare pavement where once big factories once stood.

Is the cement factory that runs trains past New Brighton beach still there?

Crissa wrote:How does Venezuela's local inflation have to do with the import price of food?

The answer: It doesn't.

Explaining why this is so fundamentally wrong is more effort than I'd care to expend, but I suggest this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

The short version is that you absolutely have no idea what you're talking about.

Building materials are not 'mostly' local. If you do not include steel in your concrete, you get (drumroll) what happened in Haiti.

Rebar, structural steel and piping are generally smaller parts of construction - most money is spent on the actual concrete, or systems if it's an industrial plant.

Also? Venezuela's main exports (past oil) are steel and construction materials.

The place is just flat-out run terribly.

mean_liar wrote:The place is just flat-out run terribly.

Nevertheless, I preferentially buy from CITGO. The lesser of the evils.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Is the cement factory that runs trains past New Brighton beach still there?

They make crushed rock products which are delivered across the state.

I think I should inform you, though, that you're talking about Frank's home area, not my own. I grew up in Curry and Grays Harbor counties, and have only recently adopted Santa Cruz as my home.

Of those places, only the factory my father worked in at Brookings still exists. Only two others of the ones I visited as a child still exist. And I actually visited dozens of factories, some repeatedly because they were there to be seen! Admittedly, they now have a huge Casino in the town where I graduated High School, but my Primary school was converted to a mini-mall as they no longer need that many classrooms. The town I spent much of my childhood is 1/4 its size when I lived there twenty years ago.

Anyhow, I'm not sure why I'm explaining this; it should be obvious to anyone looking at the label on anything that globalization has happened, and products once made merely miles or mere hundred miles away are now made thousands of miles away.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:They make crushed rock products which are delivered across the state.

Crissa wrote:I think I should inform you, though, that you're talking about Frank's home area, not my own. I grew up in Curry and Grays Harbor counties, and have only recently adopted Santa Cruz as my home.

Ah, I assumed that since you gamed together, you must have lived nearby. It was never my home even though most of my relatives once lived there.

Crissa wrote:Of those places, only the factory my father worked in at Brookings still exists. Only two others of the ones I visited as a child still exist. And I actually visited dozens of factories, some repeatedly because they were there to be seen! Admittedly, they now have a huge Casino in the town where I graduated High School, but my Primary school was converted to a mini-mall as they no longer need that many classrooms. The town I spent much of my childhood is 1/4 its size when I lived there twenty years ago.

Anyhow, I'm not sure why I'm explaining this; it should be obvious to anyone looking at the label on anything that globalization has happened, and products once made merely miles or mere hundred miles away are now made thousands of miles away.

I assume you're explaining it because I asked, and because people like to talk about themselves. It's an interesting story even if you already know the shape of globalization.

It was bad enough they shipped hundreds of logs overseas.

But now they don't even do that. They ship them east, instead, on unstable log trucks, because it's cheaper to contract drivers and their trucks and let the state build the highways than to maintain the rails or ports.

-Crissa

So, the asshat who is blocking an R18 game rating over here decided to do something even worse. Then people yelled so loud that he had to backflip after getting his dirty law passed. SA backs down on internet comment curb

The death squads in South America totally still exist, and were still getting US funding at least in 2008. And frankly, since guys with CIA ties were caught tapping the phone of a democratic senator, I am not at all convinced that the US stopped doing that, or would stop doing that even with a Presidential order to do so.

Recall, in 2008, right-wing governors suddenly got a bunch of machine guns and used them to fire upon government workers, and presumed Morales supporters like "poor people." The uprising failed, but significant evidence indicates Bush administration involvement in the failed coup.

In 2002, members of the army staged a coup that temporarily seized control of the capital. The Bush administration recognized them as the lawful government of Venezuela before international media could determine if they had actually won, and indeed they ultimately lost. And everyone with a brain acknowledges that the Bush administration funded and supported that coup.

In 2001, Colombian right wing death squads intervened in an ongoing labor dispute with American oil companies by murdering over a hundred protesting workers, and if you don't think American money bought that, you're pretty naive.
http://www.icem.org/en/77-All-ICEM-News ... eath-Squad

So when Peru has an outbreak of right wing political death squads that started in 2007, and continue at least until Last fucking Year, why would we think that the US isn't involved in that?

Recall that we've been operating The School of the Americas since 1946, and that most of the death squad leaders in recent years and past decades have been graduates of the program. Even new political violence that the US at least officially condemns is very frequently directly attributable to US funding and training for right terrorists from previous administrations and generations. For example, last year's Honduras coup was sponsored and organized by guys who got their funding and training from the US. Like Osama Bin Laden, the US is responsible for giving those guys weapons, training, money, and logistical support even if they aren't actively assisting them today.

So when death squads kill hundreds a year in Brazil (which they only started even getting called on by the government since 2003), what are we to think? Seriously, I don't know of any specific US ties to right wing death squads in Brazil, but that doesn't mean they aren't there!

Right wing death squads are not a cold war era policy decision that is over. The School of the Americas isn't even closed. We're still doing that shit. As late as a year and a half ago, it was still getting direct presidential support. And Obama is not that left wing on a lot of issues, he could be signing off on these operations too! Johnson did.

-Username17

Z Mag is not a credible source, Frank. MAYBE Covert Action Quarterly. But Z is a rag that consistently reports only one side of the story. In some sense that's only one small counter to the biased drivel coming from the other side, but it's still a biased rag. But that's only an aside.

The magnitude of violence in Bolivia is not 80s Contra-level and hardly indicative of the sort of coup d'etat policies you'd expect. Home-grown political violence in Bolivia goes both ways, and you've got extremists on both sides:

http://www.hrw.org/en/node/87510

So, you have Morales supporters blamed for violence and opposition supporters blamed for violence. I'm sure there are plenty of eyewitness accounts of both.

Given the magnitude of changes Morales' government has enacted in combination with the tit-for-tat violence, class stratification, and marginalized indigenous populations I fail to see why you'd lay the foundation of violence on shady US involvement when there is a strong tradition of home-grown violent, reactionary paramilitary organizations working with the military and police going up against equally-driven government supporters.

Blaming the US is a nice way to earn populist support down south, but it hasn't addressed any of the issues of violence: there's a very real and deep split between the rich and poor in Bolivia and honestly, American doesn't own this one.

As for Venezuela... evidence always turns up with these things, but there's none here. Most states in Venezuela's neighborhood were pretty much hoping the coup succeeded - and so did the US. Material support for the opposition and hoping Chavez fails are different things. I'm pretty certain the US wanted him gone and were ready to accept a new government, but absent evidence I don't believe that they actually had any direct or indirect involvement in the coup. It's always possible that there were actors at the fringes - CIA elements are always a good guess. However, any support would've been a far cry from meaningful, a far sight from Nicaragua or Pinochet. Coups are made and broken by international support and domestic reaction, and in this case there was no international support for the plotters - they failed on their own merits. No US Marines showed up to "stabilize and protect the populace" or any other bullshit like that.

There simply were enough moneyed, powerful domestic interests in Venezuela that wanted Chavez gone. They leveraged TV and the military as best they could and failed.

Official wrap-up, for what it's worth:
http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/13682.pdf

The ties to the SoA are ugly and old and yes, the place should be shut down. But the idea that every horrible thing done by its graduates ever is the result of some sort of US mindmeld that transforms peaceful military men into Engines of Capitalist US Oppression, independent of their extant political views or associations is bullshit.

I just fail to see why the idea that there are domestic movements in South America that are violent and act on their own is so alien. Every time some bullshit lousy thing happens, the cry goes up: "the US did it!" Honestly, sometimes people are just shitheads on their own without special grooming or assistance from the US.

mean_liar wrote:Z Mag is not a credible source, Frank. MAYBE Covert Action Quarterly. But Z is a rag that consistently reports only one side of the story. In some sense that's only one small counter to the biased drivel coming from the other side, but it's still a biased rag. But that's only an aside.

Did you read the link? They were reprinting a public letter composed and signed by a group of intellectuals. There is no "story" and there are no "sides"; its a primary document*.

*With regards to z-mag and this reprinting. Normally it would be considered secondary.

mean_liar wrote:Z Mag is not a credible source, Frank. MAYBE Covert Action Quarterly. But Z is a rag that consistently reports only one side of the story. In some sense that's only one small counter to the biased drivel coming from the other side, but it's still a biased rag. But that's only an aside.

Did I read the link? Yes, I read the link. My bashing of Z was an aside.