Edited by le_nelson_mandela_face ()
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i was posting about the dumb "putin is destroying healthcare because he wants to kill as many americans as possible" thing everybody's laughing about and kind of went down a rabbit hole. my first instinct was to make the salient point that if I were putin and i wanted to kill as many americans as possible i would fire my thousands of nuclear weapons. but then i was reading some tankie say that a main reason there was no nuclear war between the USSR and US was because the guidance systems weren't good enough to reach their targets. (i was also reading a person who denies that nuclear bombs exist, which is apparently also a thing.) but gps, that shit you have in your pocket, can find your location within 10 feet. do you know how big just one nuclear detonation is? you can miss your target by 1000 feet and it still works. off by a mile and you'll still fuck them up incredibly. maybe that isn't true for hardened underground bunkers but it sure as shit is for any metro area. no, i realized that the reason there was not a war was that the conflict between communism and capitalism was too grand, too meaningful, to be the thing that ended civilization. such a thing could never be our end. for us the reason had to be trivial, localized, petty, completely avoidable. near its end we worried about nuclear war from the USSR starting as the last gasp of a dying, desperate, corrupt party, but it was us all along
on this note i randomly read this on twitter and wept
http://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:a person who denies that nuclear bombs exist, which is apparently also a thing
somebody is actively maintaining a tripod page in 2017 for this purpose and its a riot
Google - "how to start an a-bomb explosion?" - and you get no answers at all! Reason is that there is no way to make an a-bomb explode.
holy shit
About 0 results (1.02 seconds)
@ByYourLogic pic.twitter.com/duzAS40HCc
— Peter Fries (@Peter_Fries) March 15, 2017
The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017
me: extremely plausible
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i should thank my grandmother for being a tradcath who took me to latin mass because if i could understand a word and wasn't sitting on wood-veneered adamantium there's a chance i might have not been an atheist before puberty
whoa i didnt know that about you, ill add you to catholic crew
1. to marry someone
2. to not be killed
tears posted:i just found out that newt gingrich was an adult convert to catholicism
There's an indelible creepy type that fits to conservative Catholic convert opportunists, Bobby Jindal's another, they think it'll wipe away tawdry pasts of infidelity or uncomfortable ethnicity by birth and allow them to make moralist appeals in presidential runs, but because the people who work with them on conversion do so enthusiastically, the converts don't realize they're both painfully out of touch in their political strategy and likely to be viewed by most members of their religion with suspicion immediately. They're like this guy with a blog I used to read who was raised in some mainstream Protestant sect in the United States and talked someone into helping him convert to Skverer Hasidism and moved to Israel and then started his blog, which was about his plan to make Israel the center of worldwide polygamist revivalism. He'd never gotten married of course.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i should thank my grandmother for being a tradcath who took me to latin mass because if i could understand a word and wasn't sitting on wood-veneered adamantium there's a chance i might have not been an atheist before puberty
^ like goatstein could say this out loud into a microphone on national television and more Catholics in the U.S. would vote for him for president than would probably vote for newt gingrich, they'd be like "Hell yes definitely one of us"
guy: hey this seems like my scene
congregation: *is skeptical for some reason*
i do ahve all these creepy evangelical relatives though...had to sit through a wedding where my cousin pledged to obey her husband and do everything he said :S
tears posted:like most people in britain my knowledge of the catholic church comes mostly from reading The DaVinci Code and watching anime
hellsing bay-bee
But yeah I tend to urge people on the left to realize that even if they just want to see Catholics at large as prey for their own opportunism, they should probably understand that Catholics as a global group of laypersons and even parish priests both are a pretty crucial slice demographically speaking and tend to be more sympathetic to the left than the right in the current moment, with the current Pope's master trolls again as good evidence... among other endearing qualities we'll happily go to our graves covered in wounds from people we thought were our own side, we have a lot of precedent for that and we're crazy enough to think we'll get rewarded for it after the fact, so I hope we prove useful. Personally I think we'll just prove indispensable in a lasting way to advancing those politics in this fallen world but whatever.
edit: i was also a cub/boy scout for 10 years