Fun fact for the MiG-25: The engine lifespan is that low because it literally uses a pair of cruise missile engines. They're built to be used once. I can't speak for the MiG-31, though.
EldritchFeminity
joined 2 years ago
Unfortunately, this isn't how it usually goes, and few people are good enough at that to convince somebody. Most arguments end with neither side convincing the other of anything important. Humans are emotional creatures, and feelings often are justified into "facts" even long after they've been outright proven false.
People have tried this with Republicans for at least the past 20 years, and look at where we are now. All it did was allow the racists to couch their open bigotry behind the lie of "it's just a joke," and respond to any real pushback against their hate with "so much for the tolerant left."
They're a cult, and there's one depressing fact about cults: the deeper in someone is, the harder it is to pull them out - and after a certain point, it's almost impossible. There's a sunk cost fallacy to their beliefs that becomes harder and harder to shake because to admit that they're wrong would be to admit that their actions aren't justified and their core beliefs are bad.
My point was that that also applies to the military. Just because they have a duty to uphold the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that they will perform that duty.
The swearing-in of the President starts with something very similar, if not identical.
And yet, here we are.
Personal responsibility only gets you so far when the big money actively fights against it. I think the answer lies in both holding companies like Google to higher standards as well as improving access to the knowledge we need to navigate what the world has become. It doesn't help anybody when the FBI has recommended people use an ad blocker for over a decade but nobody has ever heard them say it.
And the only time the Bible ever made mention of LGBT people is if you go all the way back to the Latin text where one of the people that Jesus healed was a soldier's slave where the word used was a type of male slave the Romans usually kept for sex.
And as far as I know, the Torah makes no mention of LGBT people either, but Hebrew supposedly has pronouns specifically for FTM people that expressly recognizes them as men trapped in the bodies of women.
When all this stuff was written, LGBT people were simply a fact of life that nobody thought needed defending because the two genders bigotry and homophobia came later as a package deal with the spread of European Christianity (and the problems with Islamic culture are the direct result of the US spreading radical Muslim propaganda, as mentioned before - it was exported out of the Middle East). It's not the religion itself that's the problem, but the people who use it as a shield for their hatred. Bigots will be bigots, and religion is just an excuse that they can twist to justify their actions. India has been having trouble for years with Buddhist extremists who are just as bad as the worst of the crazies in the US, and Buddhism is probably the most peaceful religion in the world.
It's like the 2nd Amendment and the US Constitution - old documents created in a different time with different problems being reinterpreted to justify modern hatred.
Iraq, 1960, before US operations in the region during the Cold War:
Muslim extremism is a direct result of US intervention in the Middle East to use countries in the region to fight a proxy war against the spread of communism. The CIA had a years-long operation where they literally air-dropped extremist Muslim propaganda into the region to radicalize the population.
We destroyed the largest democracy in the region and installed a dictator at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) because they elected a man who was going to kick them out and nationalize the industry due to the horrible pay and working conditions they forced on the country. Al-Qaeda started as CIA-backed resistance fighters known as the Mujahideen. The list of issues created by European and American meddling in the region is miles long - neo-colonialism at work.
Yeah, the better idea is to rally the population into a general strike (wishful thinking, I know). 3.5% is the magic number for how much of the population is needed to bring the entire economy to a screeching halt through economic violence.
They don't need to do that, the army is already deployed. They can just make something up like they always do.
More likely to be "let go" only to be rehired one county over immediately. That's what they do with the cops with records that they can't simply handwave away.
I think this law requires you to upload a photo of your ID and says that it's the website's fault if underage people use it and they face a hefty fine. It's a lot more than the standard "click to pinky promise that you're definitely 18" because PornHub already has that.
Exactly what I was thinking. The most effective way to fight bigotry is through lived experience, and that's one of the reasons that it's such a huge problem in the US outside of the cities. Most Americans will never leave their state and will die within 25 miles of where they were born.