joepinetree

My last post took a pause on the culture argument.  I will accept that it might be bias from the media, although my personal experiences are valid I believe.

Your last question about the Irish is a good one.  My problem is I don't see these communities that are riddled with crime doing a lot collectively to get out of it.  They seem to expect the government will take care of them eventually (which Democrats especially have proven they won't).
You make a lot of good points, but Canada also prosecutes people who call a student by the wrong gender pronoun or refuse to take their shoes off in their own home where Islamic people live, so you, working for one of the most radically liberal governments in the world, are extremely biased.

Wait, what?
I think I've found the issue here: you are basing your opinions on virulently right wing websites.
I googled your claim about prosecuting people for not removing their shoes. A bunch of extreme anti-Muslim websites made the same claim you did. But when you read the actual case, you see that it is something very different:

https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onhrt/doc/2017/2017hrto436/2017hrto436.html

So once you actually read the case, you see that the landlord wasn't "prosecuted" for refusing to take his shoes off. The Muslim tenants simply asked that they'd be notified when the landlord was about to arrive for showings (since they were about to vacate the place) so that they could do their prayers before they got there. He also asked that when the landlord got there to show their apartment to potential new renters they'd wait by the door a bit before entering so that his wife could put on her Hijab. The tenants also requested that the landlord not wear his shoes when entering the area for the daily prayers (not the entire apartment). The landlord not only ignored all of that, but decided to walk across the prayer area in shoes even when prospective tenants had agreed to take their shoes off. And then for good measure he shared jokes about Muslims on facebook.

So no, no one was "prosecuted for wearing shoes in their own home."


Likewise, the whole thing about being prosecuted for using the wrong pronoun is only found in extreme right-wing websites. It refers apparently to bill C-16:

http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-criminalizing-pronoun-misuse/

And the whole interpretation by the extreme right wing websites are nothing but falsehoods intended to create hysteria.


So perhaps rethink some of the sources you are relying on in the future.


As for what brought us here, let me ask you the following:

It turns out that white collar crime costs substantially more to society than property crime. As a society, we lose more money to fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, corruption and so on than we do to arson, burglaries, robberies, etc. As you can imagine, white collar crime is concentrated among the wealthier classes and are more likely therefore to be committed by white people. Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, the Barclays scandal were all committed almost entirely by white people. Should we ask what is wrong with white culture? Or is it more likely that the issues were caused by things beyond the color of their skin?

I've read a fair bit on WW2, i'm an enthusiast not an expert, broadly I'd have to agree with Hatorian though, just from my interpretation of the events, the Soviets play against Japan was more opportunistic in terms of getting the best deal out of the post war settlement , and was only fully agreed to at Yalta in 45, well towards the end of the war.
That compared to the slog of the US's years of Leapfrogging strategy, makes the Soviets experience in pacific theatre pretty incomparable. That said in the West it feels like the soviets contribution beyond Stalingrad is hugley underestimated, if you mention Kursk or even the Battle for Berlin to most brits and you get blank expression.

There is a massive difference between saying that the Soviet invasion came late or wasn't as important as the American contribution in the Pacific (though that is still completely ignoring Khalkhin Gol) and saying that the US was the only ally to fight a war on two fronts. No one disputes that the US did the most in the Pacific. But Hatorian pretty specifically said that only the US fought on both fronts, which is demonstrably not true. It is moving the goal posts to go from saying "only the US fought on two fronts" to "the US was the main allied force in the Pacific."

And Khalkhin Gol was perhaps the most important battle of the war that no one talks about. Japan was pretty evenly divided in terms of whether the plan should be to go south and capture European colonies or go north and take over Siberia for the raw materials. When Zhukov kicked Japanese ass in Khalkhin Gol, the Japanese decided to just focus on southward expansion, which necessitated destroying the American fleet.

It's a phenomenal film.
But as a WW2 history buff, I always wonder when we will have enough distance from the cold war so that we could have similar cinematographic treatments of where the bulk of the European action actually happened, which is the eastern front. Give Christopher Nolan the budget to do a similar treatment of the Battle of Kursk or the fight for the grain elevator in Stalingrad.

ladies and gentlemen the next President of the United States.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

Are you kidding? she would lose a statewide election in about 40 states, she couldn't win a single state Trump won.

in fact she would push WI, PA, and MI further right, and probably slide NH, MN, and ME into the Red column.

just go run in the rust belt on confiscating guns, allowing sanctuary cities (which is a losing issue when polled in California) and shielding illegal alien criminals from deportation.

just put the Bologna family in front of a camera and she's not getting elected anywhere outside of CA.

So I would like to make my endorsement for her nomination for the democratic party.  

How many people would have predicted that a Black man called Barack Hussein Obama would become president when he was in his first year in the senate? How many people would have predicted that Donald Trump would be the next president back in 2013?

With the current approval ratings, the real election in 2020 will be the democratic primary.

Theory: in the opening scenes, were we seeing the original GR's? There must have been a departure in the 1830s/1840s, and the leftovers were standing on that roof trying to be taken as well. Then we see them all in white robes/nightgowns sleeping on the floor of the church. So then when the second departure occurred 7 years ago (in show time), the GR's formed either in tribute to the GR's from 1844, or by strange coincidence, in the same way, in their own little cult group, wearing all white. Might be a stretch but it makes sense to me.

Btw, did I miss something? What happened to Erica?

The opening scene is a reference to the real world millerites, which are the precursor to seventh day Adventists. Even the pastor was cast to look like William Miller.