Moonbox

Actual stable minds don't get their information from the anoms on 4chan and telegram. The information they're getting is very different from the carefully curated delusion you've wrapped around yourself to cope with Russia's failure. The reality is you're betting on a second rate economy smaller than Canada's trying to overwhelm a motivated defender with the material backing of an alliance whose annual military budget is nearly 20x that of Russia's in peacetime. In this conflict, the only advantage Russia has at this point is a larger manpower pool, but that doesn't really matter because they're too poor to equip it. The only tragedy is that the invasion happened in the first place. Your hypocrisy and lack of perspective is astounding. Not only have you already gone on record telling us you hope Ukraine gets destroyed, the fact that you can't post more than 2 sentences without a low-effort and juvenile insult makes your accusations of immaturity pathetic and hilarious in equal measure.

Not talking about everyone having the same one. There's a huge grey area between where we are now, and a "socialist system". The assumption of an immediate default to that as soon as we change anything is silly. and that's really the point of these conversations. Can we make things better? It's not about taking things away from you.

A good filter for finding the best and brightest is to find the people who claw their way up from nothing. Give them the chance and see if they sink or swim. If they sink, then then that's too bad, but the ambitious ones among them are often the most able and the most driven. too often they don't. Growing up in a rich town and in a rich neighborhood, most of the guys around here ended up working for their dads doing nothing remarkable and the girls finished school, married a dude who worked for his dad, and became highly-educated stay-at-home moms. When you have everything you need whether or not you apply yourself, it's too easy to be happy not applying yourself. That's not the end of the world, and I'm not saying we need to take that away from them, but as a society we are not handing the tools and opportunities that we could to the people who would make the best use of them. When people are not motivated to work hard, too many of them choose not to. While I agree that we don't want to go in debt subsidizing education for poor folk, that doesn't mean we can't more aggressively work to provide them with these opportunities. If you know anything about our tax system, you'd understand it's a joke and designed to fleece the upper-middle class and lower-end upper class, while making things easy for the richest of the rich. I always laugh when I hear people complain about poor people paying no taxes, when in fact it's our very top earners who are not paying their share.

A choice? How is it a choice to be born in a trailer park and have to work way harder and claw your way up even to even the middle class, compared to the rich kid whose father paves his way paying for everything and connecting him to everyone he needs to know? That's not a choice. No, that's communism. The truer system would be one where the child is at least started off with the same opportunities in terms of education, health and post-curricular activities. We don't even offer that.

One more time I'll say that systematically racist is not the right terminology. That would suggest that we have deliberate policies and methods explicitly designed to make things harder for minorities. Nobody is saying that. Systemically racist, on the other hand, points to the combination of unconscious, naive and sometimes completely innocent biases inherent in a society built and shaped by a dominant majority. You seem to just be focusing on the word "racist", taking it as an accusation of malfeasance or something. If you can't or won't acknowledge the difference here, I'm afraid there's not much to discuss because you're really just arguing with yourself. Nobody is telling you that. Your ability to drag yourself out of poverty is admirable. Consider your experience a success story and a testament to your resilience and worth ethic. Growing up in poverty is a huge disadvantage and the challenges it represents could be considered a systemic problem in Canada. Poor kids don't get the same opportunities as rich kids. That's a fact. The system is therefore biased towards rich families (systemic problem).

It's not aimed at white people. We're the predominant culture - the norm. The efforts are aimed at improving the situation and opportunities for minorities that are visibly struggling, and hopefully get them up to a point where we don't have to have these discussions anymore. There's tons of evidence. Economic status is heavily correlated with single-parenthood, and both of these are strong predictors of future prosperity for children.

You still have to show where I misquoted you, goof! ?

Airliners aren't hard to fly. Half of my hockey team are pilots and the keeping a jetliner in the air and doing basic steering etc is apparently something a total amateur could do. Landing it is a much more complicated prospect, but they didn't have to worry about that, did they? The hardest part about the 9/11 attacks would have been navigation, and it's likely these dirtbags had plenty of training on that. Still waiting for you to explain how/where I lied. You can keep repeating this and your toothless insults, but the fact that you can't (or won't) actually explain it just makes you look foolish. ?

but he says it's a misquote, even though it's a direct quote! ?

Stay the hell outta this, he says, after saying:

No, it really doesn't. I've already described the difference. You can reject that and insist on the wrong meaning, but then you guys are just missing the point entirely and arguing with yourselves. Nobody said they do, but we're a predominantly white country with predominantly white leadership, so the bulk of our efforts are better spent focusing on becoming better ourselves rather than pointing at how the Samoan Canadian community doesn't hire enough Latino workers.

Show me where I misquoted you. Still waiting. ? My only concern this whole time was the folly of poorly trained, underequipped Russians invading Ukraine and dying in the tens of thousands, killing tens of thousands of Ukrainians in turn, and accomplishing nothing.

Years ago, Neville Chamberlain was following your playbook. ?

Translation: "Let Putin take what he likes." As expected, you weren't condemning the invasion - just the people helping Ukraine defend against it. ?

When was that? Show us. Was it before April?

Did he call for restraint or negotiated peace when the invasion started, or was it only after Russia's impotent army derped into a wall and found itself pathetically losing against a much smaller enemy.

You're still not seeing the distinction. Systematically racist is not the same thing as systemic racism The first is overt, institutionalized and intentional. The latter is insidious, general and often subconscious.

That's why you're having so much trouble with this topic. Nobody is saying that Canada is systematically racist. We're saying that systemic racism is a challenge that ethnic minorities face in Canada. Those are two very different statements and mean very different things, and we can't really debate many of your points. The former is something you consider an accusation meant to put you down or subvert you. The latter is an appeal to try to remove challenges that ethnic minorities statistically and also verifiably face. I can say in the same breath that Canada is probably one of the least racist countries in the world, while still affirming that systemic racism is a substantial problem problem. Measuring ourselves against China, Russia or Saudi-Arabia doesn't really help anyone.

You want to believe Putin will win. He will not. He's running an economy smaller than Canada's and trying to beat down a motivated opponent with the economic backing of all of NATO (with at least 20x the resources). If the Russians were motivated to fight, he might have had a chance, but they aren't. They're quickly realizing how full of shit he is and the already unmotivated Russian army will continue to lose cohesion. Once the Russians toss Putin out of power, it'll be interesting to see how you cope with that. How will you rationalize even the Russians not believing all of Putin's lying and propaganda? Because we have 100+ years of history that tells us Putin wouldn't stop there, so it's in everyone's interest to thwart him now.

They were direct quotes, you goof. Those two bolded statements (in the exact same post no less!!) are perfect examples of your screwy reasoning and loose grasp on reality. You couldn't even go a full paragraph without contradicting yourself and proving how completely full of BS you are. ?

The psychological conditions for the rot to set in have always been there, I would say. The human mind is pretty much the same for all of recorded history. Psychological framing, coping mechanism and heuristics have always been there. Conditions (especially economic) provide the backdrop for narratives to form. When everything is going well, people are usually very complacent. When they're not going well, the tendency to blame outside influences are easy to take advantage of. A shrinking middle class and increasing poverty are ripe conditions for this.

Yes. That's why we're doing it. ? Sadimir is a delusional villain and it's very much in our interest to see him toppled, or at the very least cucked. So far #2 has already happened. We'll have to wait and see if he survives this self-inflicted disaster.

At least these judgements show that there are limits, and that there can be very serious consequences for it. Alex Jones, I think you'd agree, is more of a symptom of the rot. It's easy to just blame it all on Trump or the Republican Party or the conspiracy clown parade, but the foundation for all of this was set in the decade(s) leading up to it, with years of no-compromise politics, weaponized outrage and out-of-touch policymaking that completely disregarded the sentiments of a hundred million Americans.

Yeah this is beautiful. He’s financially ruined and deserves every lump he’s getting. Now he’s raving about how nobody is going to get any money (because he’s hidden it all) but the forensic auditors will be all over him for the rest of his life. This restores my faith in humanity…just a little. To see a vicious idiot like Alex Jones get his just dues is encouraging. Being a 100% amoral piece of shit has consequences.

but there won’t be, because Russians officers have families and aren’t going to be interested in nuclear apocalypse because Sadimir is having a tantrum and not getting his way. As he continues to lose this war, the lies that prop up his regime are being stripped away. It’s 7 months in an he’s still trying to pretend it’s a “special operation.” Even the dumbest and most servile Russians are having trouble believing that now. There’s really no winning scenario for Russia now. They can either dig their heels in and reinforce failure, or cut their losses and come back to reality (sans Putin). Militarily, they’ve already lost.