Spare me your communist propaganda about "breadbaskets". Moscow obviously did not have enough money to pay Moldova for the agricultural exports, so they made symbolic gestures instead, like sending statues of Lenin, building lavish Party offices, and TALKING about how the region is such an amazing breadbasket.

Good for them. One day, their dictator Lukashenko will finally be gone (even Fidel Castro did not last forever) and they'll be forced to find an honest job.

Former slaves states and benefactors of the USSR, "Russophobes"?! After all the abuse they endured at the hands of Communist scum? How dare they dislike Russia!


Isn't Putin also a foreigner? Doesn't he live in Switzerland with his sexy mistresses and that stupid bear he keeps riding?

It's good that you brought that up. It seems to me, Russian-style corruption is one possible endgame for some of the more extreme Libertarian ideologies. When the USSR collapsed, it would've been a Libertarian dream: conducting epic business deals with minimal state interference while the government was in shambles, and then they shaped future Russian governments into a giant shady oil/gas export business. Maybe any government can be re-interpreted as a business, but with only 25 years since the last revolution, Russia's government is like a gang of juvenile delinquents.

I'm sure that both Kim Jong and Putin have a lot of "penis envy" for South Korea. South Korea has the latest and greatest flat-screen display technology. North Korea and Russia do not.

@panju1 now your list should have 2 things. And when you figure out natural numbers, you can start counting more from the article.

And housewives all around the world say "my husband's penis size is more important to me than his career or earning power."

And he's hung like a horse, rides on bears, and lives with mistresses half his age in Switzerland. Yes, the Russian president is so SEXY, and that is so important for the average Russian. They may be poor, but at least they can have PRIDE

Putin's most serious opposition is in the Western countries. But the Russians are obviously experiencing a lot of propaganda and brainwashing that "the West" is some evil enemy, rather than just people who are trying to live peacefully on the same planet.

When the West is using hot water (metaphor for oil) to take a shower, Putin is like a bullying brat who keeps playing with the other taps to make the shower uncomfortable. Yes, he's very "serious" and a "great leader".

Well, at least Russia has Putin instead of one of the oligarchs.

Ahhh... rich suckers parting with their money. So satisfying!

 
OMG, what a circlejerk...

Just because the advertising focuses on cheating, therefore all the members must be cheaters, right? They say assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups, except in this case I have my doubts about the amount of sex people on the bitcointalk-forum-raised-to-the-power-of-the-politics-subforum are having.

Warning! The following information may cause some readers' heads to explode...

There exists this weird thing called "swinging", where bored couples have fun by switching partners and stuff. And it's only cheating if there's some element of secrecy or lack of consent.

/warning.

Also, feminists? Seriously? That would be like lesbians hacking "Grindr" for having too many males.

Genetics = I think it's wrong, therefore it must be bad programming.
lack of nutrition = programming error.
poisoning = programming error.

None of those options acknowledge an individual's ultimate sovereignty. They're either a slave to some deeper program, or a victim of chance. If those are the only options, then there's no such thing as suicide.

Well, for anyone who *hasn't* died of fright, we can only speculate about death's nature, and whether it is or isn't a choice. I think that the existence of the 'self' is fundamentally tied to an ongoing need for some entity (the ego) to intervene and make decisions in life, including when to die.

The human ego has an incredible capacity to fool itself, taking risks -- literally risking death in some cases -- and putting itself in harm's way. How many intelligent people have wilfully ignored exhaustion and "accidentally" drowned? Or crashed while driving at excessive speeds for fun? Or OD'd because they guesstimated that their drugs were more diluted? Probably millions around the world every year. But none of it counts. It only counts as suicide when death occurs, it's symbolic and ostentatious, and probably presented with a note to loved ones, which may or may not make nice reading.

How do we distinguish between stupidity and deliberate suicidal behaviour? Is 'stupidity' just another narrative that observers invent in order to rationalise our fear of the unknown?

And what about all the people who knowingly risk death but survive? Daredevils? Or maybe we're just witnessing one of many possible worlds, and in this case they were lucky? Does survival against the odds make someone smarter or less suicidal?

^Open questions. I don't claim to have all the answers. Challenges welcome.

Madness! The Mehicans, questioning Murican privilege?!

The examples are just limited by your imagination. Animals often stand on roads. Why do people always assume that the animals are stupid or naive? If they're in a herd and getting chased by a predator, why assume that it's lack of fitness or bad genes if one of them runs more slowly? Maybe they're less motivated?

We invent these narratives that sick animals isolate themselves from the herd because they're just evolutionary zombies that have been programmed to protect the herd against diseases. But they could also be suffering, and deliberately exposing themselves to predators. While I think evolutionary theories and modern biology have contributed a lot to science, I also think they've been manipulated by Christian dogma.

To calling dying of fright a "chain reaction" is to rely on various beliefs about how things work.

And Nature defies your opinion.
Many species, including humans, have built-in mechanisms for the body to shut down and die in response to extreme pain or fear thereof. I see no evolutionary advantage for any living being to just "give up and die" when that so-called survival instinct could still save it. If anyone has an explanation for how dying of fright could be an evolutionary advantage, I'd like to hear it.

If death occurs prior to any actual blunt trauma or irreversible damage, this suggests some aspects of advanced intelligence, even in small animals with primitive reptilian brains, which flies in the face of idealist beliefs such as "humans are special" or "animals lack our intelligence".

If a small bird gets captured from the wild and it dies of fright, this indicates several things:
-it has the mental capacity to forecast future events, and make an estimate that it's about to get eaten or somehow brutally hurt.
-it has the capacity to extrapolate pain levels that it has never experienced.
-in order to have basic concepts like "getting eaten", the primitive bird brain must therefore have language structures to understand those things.
-it probably has an ego and a subconscious mind that protects it from unmanageable suffering by controlling the physiology of the body. The ego could even participate in deciding how long to fight for survival, and when to bail.

This raises further questions:
Why the heck should a subconscious mind (or just biological programming) inside an intelligent being give a shit about protecting/nurturing some immaterial ego when the entire system is about to crash?
The evidence in nature hints that certain beliefs about reincarnation or rebirth, or some other post-death growth, could be correct. A counter-argument could be that suicide is a completely different thing from survival in the animal kingdom, but I disagree. It's always associated with unmanageable suffering, some forecast that it will continue or get worse, and it's all about protecting the ego. "Taking action" to manage your own death is completely natural, given that we naturally evolved these large brains that decide to do weird things.

But why would they want territorial "gains"? Aren't they simply fighting for independence on the land they've got? Why would they want more land? You make it sound like they're working for Moscow. Or at least, Moscow keeps sending resources to those useful idiots. A couple of years ago, nobody ever heard of LPR or DPR. Why not? Obviously because they didn't have any money or guns back then. Think about that.

This thread makes me feel uncomfortable.

You don't have a fucking clue where I live or don't live. It's a bit creepy to see how someone can be so obsessive that they latch on to some old quote or post they found. Do you also break restraining orders and go through your ex-boyfriend's rubbish disposal to find old receipts? Well, at least the US has equal opportunity so that mentally deranged people such as yourself can obtain infinite guns without being "discriminated" against.

I've explained it several times. Since you're obviously "skipping over" what I've already written because you're unable (or unwilling) to see reason, I've got nothing more to add.

You're twisting so many things around, it's hard to know to where to start.

You falsely believe that "less guns" in society would somehow be socially costly. I showed that to be incorrect a couple of pages back, linking information that gun suicides far outnumber gun murders in the US. The article explains how there could be a lot less deaths in society if "law abiding citizens" didn't have so many guns lying around and within easy reach. They linked it to research proving that a lot of suicides are opportunistic, not premeditated, and that simple measures in other areas in society successfully reduced the amount of deaths. As examples, they talked about suicide-prevention fences on a bridge, which lo-and-behold, reduced the total suicide rate in the entire town despite there being other bridges. And when coal ovens were upgraded, the same thing happened: less opportunity = less death.

Because there are so many MORE gun suicides than gun murders to start with, there would have to be a large spike in the murders to compensate for a slight decrease in the suicide rate. And that won't happen either because most gun murders ALSO occur at home, and most likely by a family member or spouse. Not home invasions.

A spike in home invasions wouldn't make sense either. If it's not a relative or friend, then it's a stranger, and they most likely won't know if there's a gun in the house or not, or whether it's safely locked up or not. If there's a gun at home, it's useless all safely locked up. And if it's not locked up, then your family is a bigger risk to you in the first place.

There's no need to bring Mexican cartels into it, or arming the poor. The simple fact is that after adding up the biggest factors, having guns at home puts you at more risk of dying than not having guns at home.

LOL
Questioning your character is completely relevant in a discussion about social concerns. Like you're so righteous to disguise your selfish aims (untouchable gun rights so you can defend yourself against the evil government) as caring about the poor and wanting everyone armed so that they can supposedly defend themselves against each other. You're SO gun crazy that you even managed to fake some social empathy.

LOL, I wasn't going bother responding to your drivel any more but,



No, you fucking don't pay the costs. That's a fucking lie and you know it. In fact, I'm almost certain you're one of those people who fight tooth and nail against all types of "tax coercion", whether or not you use the infrastructure and other tax-funded things. You then justify it to yourself with a utopian Anarcho-Capitalist ideology or some Libertarian variation thereof. In other words, your factual stealing is acceptable in your mind because you really really don't like taxes, a lot more deeply and emotionally than the superficial way that most other people don't like tax. And you rationalise the greed by imagining an elaborate utopia where everything is private and tax-free.

It wouldn't be so bad if your preferred alternative was actually a good idea, but it's not. It never stands up to scrutiny. Guns are a glaring case where tax-free utopias fail: you guys want to have tax-free fun, even though you know that the social costs are NOT ZERO, and you know that you're NOT PAYING those costs. Other taxes don't count because everyone else has to pay that shit too!

And in some cases you have no means of privately paying reparations to someone's family if you accidentally injure or kill someone. Are all gun owners millionaires? Unlikely! Are they all comprehensively insured for that sort of thing? Un-fucking-likely. Would they all voluntarily pay insurance if there weren't any state or federal governments "coercing" them? Un-fucking-likely.

You're like one of those geriatric 90 year old smokers, who spend hours bitching about why do THEY have to pay exorbitant taxes on cigarettes, when it's all the OTHER old smokers who are a drain on the health system, and they're still healthy. Their BS argument conveniently ignores the fact that the government had their sorry ass covered during all those decades they spent smoking and risking their health despite being broke. In the US' case, admittedly the coverage might have been a bit weak due to your obsession with "private insurance or die on the streets" mentality, but it was definitely NOT ZERO.