Vilageidiotx

18th Century Ice Age

Sorry being a little lazy. I'll get to it soon here, i super promise.

how do you pronounce mahz

It's kind of like if JFK decided to shoot for the red planet instead of the moon.

If you could change one law in another country, which would you pick?

For personal gains? Okay.

I would require the British to give me all their stuff.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

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The Simpsons made their Trump episode after Trump already announced he was going to run. It wasn't a "wow the Simpsons predicted it" thing, though people tried to make that a meme.

But let's be honest here: Trump is famous for far more than his time on Celebrity Apprentice. He was practically the king of NYC in the last couple decades of the 20th century. He was invited to numerous talk shows to explain business, economics, and success. He was getting along with the common man long before he was ever running for President. He's been a household name since the 70's. The only people who see him as a punchline are people who don't know his history outside of the media narrative.

@j8cob

I am aware that he isn't simply his public persona, but the reality is that he was primarily known as his public persona. The "Guy from the Apprentice" narrative wasn't sewn from whole cloth in the last fifteen months by the media to smear a guy who had previously been seen as an Alan Greenspan type figure.

You go back six years ago when we didn't consider him a mostly political figure and you'd find people looking at him as that guy who builds flashy casinos with his name on it and yells at Gary Busey on television. Imma assume that most people haven't exactly read his book, for instance.

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What I meant regarding the collision of cultures was that people allowed for too much interconnection between races/ethnicities which resulted in a society where none of the participants can be truly happy.

While it may be true that culture itself changes, it should change naturally in an attempt to serve it's people. Culture is a representation of a certain racial/ethnic identity. As soon as the identity outpaces the culture or vice versa, there begins a stagnation and decline in society. You see this with the Roman Empire, where it eventually became flooded with individuals who were decidedly not Roman and did not conform to the practices of the Romans to such an extent where it preserved peace.

To say that a people and their values can be so malleable that they should not be preserved is a dangerous path to tread.

@Didgeridont

Well, first and foremost I think your reading of the situation between races isn't quite true. There are still racial divides in this country this is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. I live in a pretty mixed working class area and, everyone here being part of the same regional class culture, we get along pretty damned naturally despite race. If I drive downtown into the ghetto, or conversely if a black neighbor or co-worker went to a small town in the hills, then yeh, there is problems. But speaking of the part of the city I live in, I have more in common with a black neighbor than I do with a white man from Beverly Hills.

And I agree, cultures should be allowed to change naturally. That's kind of what I am saying actually. What I have just described is my natural cultural condition, but your theory seems to assume it is invalid and that I and my neighbors need to be artificially segregated so that I experience my culture more in line with your idea with what it should be than what it actually is. Which is to say simply that I find your concept too bizarre and rigid to ever allow me or those around me to experience culture naturally. There would have to be a culture Gestapo around telling me what Didgeridont requires my culture to be. Historically some regimes have tried it, and historically it doesn't work. The Soviets tried to enforce a culture and the people rejected it a few generations later. Franco attempted the same thing in Spain and the people rejected it only a couple of generations later. Culture is a moving thing, and if you put it behind a dam it only cracks the dam and floods outward on it's own.

And the Roman Empire doesn't work as an example. In the Mediterranean, particularly the eastern half, they absorbed cultures that were decidedly unroman and allowed them to practice their culture, and even their religion, so long as they followed civic law and refrained from converting people to cults. These places Romanticized slowly through a natural process of cultural drift. They had divisive citizenship laws this is true, but as time went on citizenship laws, for your average person, mostly just affected where you sat on the tax base. It's in the decadence of the post-Severan collapse that they begin to hold Germanic tribes introduced into their borders at arms length instead of integrating them, dividing the Empire into increasingly competitive power bases in the last century until those power bases basically tear the thing apart. They couldn't have kept those barbarians out because... well, they tried, they simply couldn't afford to. But by holding them at arms length instead of integrating them, they created the conditions for the empire to fracture as those Germanic power bases became independent.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

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It is clear that the civilization we are a part of is currently in a state of cultural decline. We are too eager to cast away the values that we once had in favor of newfangled ways of seeing the world. This is exacerbated by the fact that, due to the inundation of America with unsavory characters, we are a nation that is at odds with itself in terms of demographics. The white man has different values than the black man, and the red man, and the yellow man, and the pink man, etc. Instead of trying to understand our differences and promote diverse connections between each other, we have smashed ourselves together and tried to work with the aftermath of the collision.

@Didgeridont

We've always done that though. You could take this argument and transpose it into the world of 1850's politics and, honestly, it would fit perfectly. Swap the Irish for the Mexicans and Papacy for moral degeneracy and wham bam, you've traveled into the past 150 years.

And we didn't smash ourselves together. You make it sound like the United States was some weird international particle collider experiment done from the very beginning as a purposeful attempt at multiculturalism, when reality is way more chaotic. Some people immigrated here on their own volition, others came here as refugees. Others didn't have a choice; they where either assimilated by conquest, or in the case of the black man, stolen from their rightful home. And this is history. This is how it has always worked in the entire world in every nation for all time. People move, borders shift, cultures change. You can't really draw a line around a group of people and say "This is a culture" because as soon as you do, it makes connections outside of the line, or it changes from within. To attempt to freeze a culture is absolutely futile.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

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Class is an imperfect way to categorize people. As soon as whatever "bourgeois" are properly "class-struggled" against, new boundaries will be set to separate people. The most perfect way of creating cohesive social order is via independent, homogeneous ethnicities and social orders. Borders, language, and culture are all indicative of a nation that is not only united via common goals/ideas but is also controlled by proper moral boundaries and laws.

@Didgeridont

And these things shift. The cultural values and morals of two or three generations ago are as foreign to me as the cultural values of many other nations.

The things you are talking about are way too fluid. I can tell pretty easily that I don't have your common goals, or your ideas about what is proper morality or laws. You'd have to use force to keep me, and many many other Americans, in line with your concepts of how things are supposed to be. At that point can you say your method is any more natural or cohesive than another other method? It seems to me if you have to use increased force to keep your "cohesion" then your "cohesion" is rather brittle.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

okay this thread is getting into such silly territory it's a headache, so fuck it. but i saw this so i gotta say...

<Snipped quote by Gowi "And it makes America the punchline of a very unfunny joke.">

How? For trying to retake it's borders? For working against an establishment of media and politicians who have laughed at it and divided it for years? For stopping the destruction of our culture?

@Didgeridont

naw, the punchline will be we elected a celebrity famous mostly for yelling at people and living in a golden penthouse in the sky as the most powerful man in the world. he's going to have to do a helluva lot to get beyond his resume.

I mean, the Simpsons literally used this as a punchline once. A lot of the people who voted for him are going to use him as a punchline too. It's just sort of an obvious thing that is going to happen.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

Preliminary numbers portend that Trump performed better among immigrant and minority communities than any other Republican leader in my lifetime. If that is the case, the "whitelash" narrative is objectively and unequivocally incorrect.

@The Nexerus

Absolutely. The guys protesting on the coasts don't seem to understand what happened. Hell, the Alt-Right doesn't seem to understand what happened. They all tried to turn this election into a battlefield of the culture wars, but the culture wars are over and the average American has never heard of an "SJW" and doesn't care about what is being said on Tumblr. At the end of the day, this thing came down to the oldest political driver in the book: Jobs.

They party of the working man abandoned the working man, and they got their ass kicked for it.

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How would an army fight if the army isn't allowed to have guns?

[rimshot]

@Dinh AaronMk

I bet you there is at least one crazy old man in Nevada with enough guns and ammo to arm the entire west coast.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

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@Dynamo Frokane

did you just quote a post from 12 months ago?

2016 US Election: Day Zero

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It's a fun time to be alive and I'm soaking it all in.

@Dinh AaronMk

The west coast wants to secede, so I guess Trump's "Gettysburg Address" was really just a trial run for the real thing.

Grab your muskets, boys, time to shoot us some Johny Rebs.