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Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

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  • Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    -Jean-Paul Sartre

    Replace ‘anti-semites’ with ‘right-wingers’, and there’s your answer




  • Conservatives love this idea, to the point that they don’t even bother thinking about who is going to pay for it. If you did mandatory service for people 18-20 the armed forces would be roughly 20 times larger than it is now in terms of personnel, 10 times larger if it were mandatory for men only. Military spending is nearly 1/4 of the total budget as-is, where is the funding going to come from if you have 10 or 20 times as many people to arm and train?

    And what the fuck are you going to have them all do? They’re just gonna bum around and fuck for two years and then go get free degrees on the GI bill, driving up the cost even further.

    Truly, the party of fiscal responsibility.








  • The problem with GDP per capita is that it conveniently overlooks the possibility that a lot of that GDP is artificially inflated thanks to money that never actually moves around and stimulates the economy, because that country is a tax haven for foreigners and shell corporations, which is pretty common in the Caribbean.

    Head to Nassau and walk around sometime, let me know if you still think the Bahamas is in good financial shape.

    But I agree, rainwater collection is what they’ve been doing for hundreds of years, they just need to find ways to do it more efficiently.