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hpslugga

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Posts posted by hpslugga

  1. 12 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    It's always weird to me when people come to threads like this to defend people like Epstein. Why? What's in it for you?

    Tribal instincts mixed with faith. These people seriously cannot see beyond the Blue Team vs. Red Team diarrhea we're fed daily, and they just come to believe it and practice apologetics in blind defense of it. The Religious Right is a perfect example of this. They could have more than enough evidence to prove Trump has committed every single one of these alleged indiscretions and they will not believe it. Why? He's on the red team. Similarly, they could more than enough evidence to disprove, for example, the notion that Obama was born in Kenya, and they'll still believe he was born in Kenya. Why? He was on the blue team. 

  2. 10 minutes ago, Zombie said:

    You want to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who admitted on tape to grabbing women by the pussy without their consent? 

    "Presumption of innocence" is easily the most over-abused phrase in our entire political lexicon. It's like people don't even know what it is anymore.

    It only applies to the presiding judge and all jurors in a case. Seriously, that's all it means. It doesn't apply to the public, it doesn't apply to the media, and it most certainly does not mean "assume that anyone who makes the accusation is on a vendetta against the accused, or that it's some monolithic conspiracy against the accused, until and unless that negative can be proven wrong."

    • Like 3
  3. 9 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

    This cunt is the epitome of Southern Baptist preachers.  Bigoted, misogynistic and ignorant.  It's like a prerequisite for the position. 

    I'd say it's the exact opposite. They're not ignorant. They know that they're spewing bullshit. Being in that line of work demands it. When you go into it, you have to go through an area of study where it is your duty to offer limitless excuses to defend contradictions in the sacred texts and for the reality that no evidence of a supreme being or an afterlife actually exists and that they only live in argument, and that when engaged in a debate you literally have to memorize every single logical fallacy that there is in the desperate hope that Gish Galloping the opponent to death will obscure the discussion. They call it "apologetics."

    • Like 2
  4. 14 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    That being said, whether these issues in Central and South America were caused by the US, or whether they would exist no matter our interference or not (and while I know it is easy to argue we caused this, but there is no guarantee that circumstances would be better without our involvement at all)

    There's only one way to find out. If and when we attempt that and when we've rectified the evils that we've inflicted upon them, it'll be at that moment that we can say that our hands are clean of this and all that other stuff that you addressed. But we're not in that position, so it's pointless to speak of the issue as if we were. We can only control what we do and until we've gotten our shit straight, we've no right to chastise peoples and governments of other countries. 

  5. 35 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    Then change the fucking rules. 

    Again, I’m not sure why you chose to quote me earlier because that’s not what it was about. It’s about what drives these people to come here in the first place. My whole thing about that is that if you don’t want all those things to happen here, don’t give them a reason to come here. If they aren’t given a reason to come here, then they have no reason to come here. That’s what my entire post was about, and you've had precisely nothing to say about it.

    Quote

    We are a country of laws. 

    The Leahy Law is one of those laws that our government routinely violates, and wouldn’t you know who won the pony, it creates immigration and refugee crises.

    Quote

    You talk to me as if I am a Trump supporter.

    I couldn’t give two shits and a holler if you were or weren’t. He didn’t invent these arguments and he didn’t even create the concept of a wall (not that this was what we’re talking about). Nothing he’s ever said about immigration is original. This has nothing to do with him. Even if today he were to address the nation and say that he was wrong about everything he said about immigration, I would be saying the exact same things that I have been.

    Quote

     However, there are real issues facing this country, and sticking our fingers in our ears or our heads in the sand is not going to make it go away. 

    Again, you didn’t read a damned thing that I said. I never suggested sticking fingers in ears or any other entry. What I said was that our government needs to take measures to stop contributing to those people’s plight as it is a driver for them coming up here. Again, you’ve had nothing to say about that and you’re displaying a piss poor level of reading comprehension. 

     

  6. 18 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    Then change the fucking rules. 

    Again, I’m not sure why you chose to quote me earlier because that’s not what it was about. It’s about what drives these people to come here in the first place. My whole thing about that is that if you don’t want all those things to happen here, don’t give them a reason to come here. If they aren’t given a reason to come here, then they have no reason to come here. That’s what my entire post was about, and you've had precisely nothing to say about it.

    18 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    We are a country of laws. 

    The Leahy Law is one of those laws that our government routinely violates, and wouldn’t you know who won the pony, it creates immigration and refugee crises.

    18 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    You talk to me as if I am a Trump supporter.

    I couldn’t give two shits and a holler if you were or weren’t. He didn’t invent these arguments and he didn’t even create the concept of a wall (not that this was what we’re talking about). Nothing he’s ever said about immigration is original. This has nothing to do with him. Even if today he were to address the nation and say that he was wrong about everything he said about immigration, I would be saying the exact same things that I have been.

    18 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

     However, there are real issues facing this country, and sticking our fingers in our ears or our heads in the sand is not going to make it go away. 

    Again, you didn’t read a damned thing that I said. I never suggested sticking fingers in ears or any other entry. What I said was that our government needs to take measures to stop contributing to those people’s plight as it is a driver for them coming up here. Again, you’ve had nothing to say about that and you’re displaying a piss poor level of reading comprehension. 

     

    • Like 1
  7. 28 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    The immigration system, as it stands, is shitty. And I am not addressing refugees. If you actually meet the definition of a refugee (and a lot of these people do not), then we absolutely should streamline the process and let them in.

    However, I have a serious question. A lot of these people have no education and no skills. How will they support themselves and their families? Those who bring children will enroll them in an already overcrowded public education system, generally needing ESL services. When they are sick, they will tax a system already burdened with too many who cannot pay.

    That IMO is the crux of the issue. If they want to come here, and work their ass off, great. Come on in. However, we need to work out what services they are eligible for and which they are not. We also need to figure out how to pay for it.

    Hell, we need to do that with our own poor and uneducated.

    First, that's an issue that's independent of what I was addressing. Slorch, Chrispy et al weren't anywhere near bringing up those topics. They're just right wing lunatics who believe that the way to deal with this issue, which I repeat they do not take nearly as seriously as their rhetoric indicates, is to shame immigrants/refugees to fucking death and to treat them like absolute shit when they do come here. I'm not sure why you chose to quote me to air out that grievance.

    So just to start, define "a lot of these people," and how do you know they don't fit the definition of a refugee? A refugee is, per the UN, "someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so."

    I cannot find a single possible way that any of these Hondurans that are caravanning up here do NOT meet that definition. That's really the brilliance (as well as the idiocy) of US propaganda. A bunch of people are coming up here as refugees, so what do we do? Challenge the assertion that they're refugees. How do we do that? Again, obscure the political situation. My experience has been that most of the people who take the position that you take aren't even aware that these are Central Americans (in this particular case, Hondurans) who are coming up here. They're under the misunderstanding that it's all Mexicans. That's a remarkable feat of obscuring the situation.

    The Zelaya coup was a textbook example of this type of obscuring as well. Zelaya introduced a handful of positive, popular social programs that were meant to improve the standard of living of the average Honduran. He then proposed a non-binding referendum that was to ask the population "would you support a re-writing of the constitution?" Immediately, the right-wingers throw their hands up and start running around like chickens with severed heads accusing Zelaya of trying to rid the constitution of the amendment that says no Honduran can serve as president for more than 1 term. A "power grab," they called it.

    So they kidnap him, escort him to another country, and someone else takes over. They also removed 4 Supreme Court justices based entirely on the grounds that they'd voiced opposition to the coup, a move that the ICHR condemned rather strongly. 

    Then enter Hernandez who "wins" the 2013 election, and just boldly inserts himself in the 2017 election, bearing in mind that aforementioned provision in the constitution that says no Honduran can serve as president for more than 1 term is still in effect. They never rewrote the constitution and they never amended that provision. He just put himself in the election and "won" again, so what those effeminate right-wingers "feared" about Zelaya actually did happen with Hernandez, and those pussies couldn't be bothered to protest it in the slightest. Why? Well clearly it's only ok when they actually do it, but not when some slightly left-of-center president even vaguely proposes it. I distinctly remember arguing that exact event with several shaggy posters and not one of them has said "you know, I was wrong about that. That was just a power play by the right wingers." They've been unusually silent about it, even though they have an obligation to correct a hideous and glaring error.

    What's happened since Hernandez was "reelected?" Well two thirds of the country now lives in poverty political freedoms are profoundly insecure, there is definitely violence being perpetrated https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/12/honduras-government-deploys-dangerous-and-illegal-tactics-to-silence-population/, social services are basically nonexistent because the government is so obviously corrupt, etc. This is about as close to Guatemala and El Salvador of the 1980's that we've seen. So what does our political leadership and, to no small extent, the elite media do? Downplay the situation. Shame the people who leave. It's an abject disgrace. Don't believe the hype.

    Second, your remark about the "overcrowded public education system" has a very simple fix: tell your government to stop fucking teachers and administrators at every given turn. Stop fucking them on pay, which de-incentivizes people to go into that line of work to begin with, and that has the odd consequence of having large average class sizes. You won't get that result with Trump/DeVos. With them, you get the exact opposite because they don't know about education, they don't care about education, and they only see profits to be made from education.

    Third, the idea about them not being educated/skilled and/or part of the workforce and abusing the health system is just a joke. Aside from what everyone else has already explained to you, for every one of these people you could find doing that, I can find literally hundreds of citizens who commit these abuses. 

    • Like 2
  8. On 7/3/2019 at 1:33 AM, slorch said:

    IDGAF, nor do we owe them anything.  The notion that we do because they made the trek is bullshit.

    Aside from everything that's already been said to you regarding this repugnant pair of sentences, it's not even about "owing them because they made the trek." In fact I've yet to read anything serious that in any way implies that.

    But since you mentioned it, if we owe them anything, it's for creating the catastrophic conditions in which they lived that served as the catalyst for making ANY trek. I cannot for the life of me understand why people like you, Chrispy, ChickenSandwhich, et al are trying so hard to pretend that history and that reality aren't there. I cannot understand for the life of me understand why you'd rather feverishly concoct a fraudulent picture of the world that can only be derived from make believe and pretend. You guys seriously think in your own minds that you're "telling it like it is," and you're not. You're climbing up a tree to tell a lie in lieu of standing on the ground to tell the truth. What's worse is that the tortured logic and rhetoric that you guys are using has precisely zero power of persuasion. When responsible people browse the internet (or whatever database they fancy) and they see things like:

    "Operation PBSUCCESS,"
    "Francisco Ventura and José Humberto Mejía,"
    "Oscar Romero,"
    "Roberto D'Aubuisson,"
    "Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan,"
    "Lt. Col. Sigifredo Ochoa,"
    "El Mozote Massacre,"
    "US rejections of El Salvadoran peace talks,"
    "Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Joaquín López y López, Juan Ramón Moreno, and Amando López," 
    "Roberto Suazo Córdova"
    "Manuel Zelaya 2009 coup d'etat"
    "Juan Orlando Hernandez"
    "Nicaraguan Contras"
    "Nicaragua v. United States ICJ"
    "Effects of the Drug War on Latin America"

    ...they're not going to like what they read about them, especially when they learn those are tips of a few icebergs, and they won't be moved in the slightest by the typical political theatrics that you guys are employing. It's no different than John Silber's Make-Shit-Up-24-Hours-A-Day-And-Call-It-Straight-Shooting schtick. 

    You guys go back and forth between just flat out denying that these histories exist, mitigating their impact, or the even more grotesque route of offering apologetics in defense of them in the disgraceful manner that Chrispy did with his garbled I'm-a-partisan-non-partisan horseshit. I'm not interested in having a conversation about an issue like immigration with someone whose value of history is such that it cannot accept basic historic realities, and good luck finding anyone worth a shit who is interested. That refusal alone proves beyond any reasonable doubt that you and those others don't really care about illegal immigration.

    If you did care, you'd be howling at the US government to terminate any and all practices that facilitate and/or encourage it. The foreign military policy is but one component (it's the biggest, but it's just one). Don't forget the fact that employers (especially the largest ones) who employ illegals (mostly for jobs none of us citizens would even consider) do so free of any real fear of prosecution, the ill effects of the Drug War on those countries, NAFTA, etc. You guys don't talk about any of that, though.

    Foreign policy? Gotta kill all the commies! We cannot allow other countries dictate the course of their own affairs! They have to do what we want them to do!
    Drug war? Gotta burn all that weed and cocaine and kill all those damn dealers!
    Looking the other way when businesses are hiring illegals? STERNLY WORDED LETTERS!!!

    That's y'alls M.O. You guys just make excuses, blame everyone and everything else except your own government for what it's actually done, and believe in bullshit that's on the level of "Christopher Columbus discovered Ohio in 1942." At this point, I cannot tell you anything other than you have the obligation to concede the various points that have been raised against you and that you need to, at the very least, rehabilitate your argument. What you guys have presented so far is fractal wrongness, and simply restating it isn't going to cut it.

    • Like 4
  9. 10 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

    Researcher Reports Soviets Created Child-Trafficking Rings in the West for Blackmail - The rings are believed to be still operating

    "A scholar on Soviet Russia has uncovered claims that former General Secretary Yuri Andropov wanted to subvert the West by creating child trafficking and pedophile networks to blackmail business leaders and politicians.

    [...]

    The Soviet leaders had begun planning the program in the late 1970s, when Andropov was chairman of the KGB—the Soviet intelligence agency that was set to run the operations. Nyquist noted, however, that the program was controversial even by the standards of the Soviet leaders.

    [...]

    The program the grandfather described was a classic honeytrap—a method of espionage to lure people into compromising sexual encounters for blackmail. This program took it a step further, however, by using children as the bait.

    It was a form of “false flag recruitment,” according to Nyquist, where the KGB agents likely did not reveal themselves as agents to their targets. He noted that “if the KGB honeytraps somebody, they don’t know who they’re working for, because the KGB officer may be somebody who speaks English without an accent who merely references themselves as part of an organized crime group.”

    [...]

    In the 1980s and into the ‘90s, shocking cases of pedophilia and extreme abuse began to emerge in the United States, Australia, and Europe. Many of the cases involved high-level officials. Some were prosecuted, but many were thrown out due to lack of physical evidence and child testimony not being recognized.

    Among the most prominent cases was that of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile accused of holding underage girls as sex slaves on his private Caribbean island. He flew numerous top politicians and business leaders to the island on his private plane, dubbed by news outlets as “The Lolita Express.” According to press reports, the plane has a bed that was used for sex with young girls. According to the same reports, flight logs from Epstein’s plane show that former President Bill Clinton flew on The Lolita Express 26 times.

    Numerous girls alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein, and Epstein was charged by the Palm Beach police department. Yet after a plea deal, he was sentenced in 2008 and served only 13 months in prison for one charge of soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old girl.

    A 2006 court filing, cited by the New York Post, says that a police search of Epstein’s mansion found he wired it with hidden cameras to record his guests engaging in orgies with underage girls, which he could use for blackmail.

    Epstein was very well connected. It has been reported that Epstein kept contact numbers of figures including Tony Blair, Naomi Campbell, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, and Richard Branson, but no flight logs have ever surfaced showing any of them ever flew to Epstein’s island. Many of his A-list contacts dropped him after his 2008 conviction.

    Often overlooked in Epstein’s case is that the father of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was deceased media tycoon Robert Maxwell, whom Ghislaine accused of sexually abusing her.

    [...]

    He said the overall system, if true, would have given the Soviets and later post-Soviet participants significant power in establishing networks of influence and control. He noted that even just among business leaders, since they often fund politicians and political causes, by blackmailing them “you’re suddenly getting into the fringes of the political system. You’re able to penetrate the political system.”

    “Pedophilia, if you look at it, is an important tool for corrupting, controlling, and manipulating a foreign government, and sabotaging its economy, sabotaging its political process, even sowing confusion,” he said. “This whole thing can be used in all kinds of creative ways to hurt the target country.”

     

    f Putin

    BUT PIZZAGATE!!!

  10. 32 minutes ago, achooloco said:

    We were mad then dipshit. 

    When Obama was doing it, the uproar was coming from the same base of people that it’s coming from now. The difference? Well there really isn’t one except for the mental block right wingers have when it comes to 1) maintaining the delusion that “the left” and “The Democratic Party” are in any way near the same entity 2) their infantile obsession with whataboutism 3) the fact that even in the context of #1, Obama’s opposition party raised precisely zero protest over this. Seriously, what Republican demonstrations were there in opposition to these facilities in 2014? 

    • Like 3
  11. 3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


    Of course...the point is...climate change is causing INCREASED desertification. Places that used to sustain agriculture...now don’t. So people have to leave them.

    God you people are so fucking stupid that it hurts.

    Dude, you’re addressing someone whose schtick is using a half sentence to reply to someone else and following it with an ellipsis to make it seem intelligent.

    • Like 1
  12. 8 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    So what?

    I was just about to say, that doesn’t change my view one bit.

    1) I’ve leveled harsher criticisms against Barack Obama than any of our resident right-wingers ever could have in their wettest dreams

    2) The Trump administration isn’t bound to that. This admin is not unlike any other: they revere the law only when it suits their purposes. This suits their purposes, so they revere the law.

    Oh and even considering point number 1, harsh as I was on him, I’ll be the first to tell you that trading Obama for trump is like trading your house for a tent.

    • Like 1
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