Anony Mous

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Posts by Anony Mous

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  34

  20 Years Occupying Afghanistan, Nothing Achieved

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  so the occupation of afghanistan is coming to an end and, as predicted, they achieved absolutely nothing in that 20 years apart from:.

  the death of 2,300+ service personnel and tens of thousands more seriously maimed or injured.. handing $billions or even $trillions of taxpayer dollars to defence contractors (so the military industrial complex wins, even if the military doesn't have a clear victory).. has this lengthy but short-term military occupation really changed anything in the country?

  it doesn't appear so.. i said at the time that the us wouldn't have the staying power to enact real change.

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  Anony Mous

  The problem in Vietnam was McNamara and the doctrine of proportional retaliation. So he quite literally flew planes in that were ordered to hang still just to get shot down, they weren’t allowed to respond, because, hey they were shooting at them with WW2 era flak cannons, a rocket wouldn’t be proportional. Dozens of planes were lost and they weren’t allowed to retaliate.

  Same was the debacle over the AR15/M16 - it wouldn’t be fair to have burst fire, because the enemy didn’t have them, so soldiers were sent into the battlefield with semi-auto guns that were less capable than the same gun produced for civilians. Likewise it was decided that they should have slightly altered rounds to limit the production lines, because “gun control” was high on the Democrat agenda.

  It literally took acts of Congress to force the JFK and LBJ administrations to properly equip the military. And then when LBJ signed the order to stop bombing the Vietnamese and retreat, they literally had thousands of people flee in shaggy boats and the US military refused to pick them up or assist them. Thousands drowned, about 90% of the boats did not reach their destination, between being fired upon by the communist regime and the poor situation these people were in.
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  51

  Why Is Nothing Being Done About Looters?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  looting is happening everywhere like never before.

  brazen thieves walk into stores and bring a bag with them and simply throw whatever they choose in the bag.

  popular chain stores have closed in certain neighborhoods because it’s just not worth it.

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  Anony Mous

  https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/thenatureofviolentcrimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020
  

  https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
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  51

  Why Is Nothing Being Done About Looters?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  looting is happening everywhere like never before.

  brazen thieves walk into stores and bring a bag with them and simply throw whatever they choose in the bag.

  popular chain stores have closed in certain neighborhoods because it’s just not worth it.

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  Anony Mous

  @jan: try to buy a gun in Walmart: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/reporter-tries-buy-gun-walmart-083700384.html

  I already quoted you statistics that show violent crime per capita being 4-5 times worse in the UK (1.6%) compared to the US (0.3%). Yes, you’re more likely to be shot down instead of knifed down in the US, anyone with experience can tell you that gun wounds are generally smaller and easier to treat than knife wounds. Gun crime often happens within the radius that a knife would be more effective.

  Violent crime has dropped across the world historically because of greater access to wealth, so you do have to adjust for that as well. Even though overall crime dropped, in the UK knife crime nearly doubled in the decade after the gun ban. It then slowed a little bit and has been ticking up again in the last 5 years. After the gun ban, gun crime in the UK kept pace with the overall crime rate and has been ticking up again in the last 5 years, especially against police, so as a share of all crime, gun crime did not drop in the UK after the ban, it seems like criminals don’t care about the law.
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  55

  'covid isnt real'

  by joey jojo in

  1. social
  2. current

  im not here to start a debate.. ive heard the above expression countless time over the past year and a half and genuinely want to know what it means.. if you feel this way, do you mean :.

  a. there is no covid19 virus?.

  b. covid19 is real but not a threat of any kind?.

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  Anony Mous

  @rocketman: the narrative is indeed that regions with low vaccination levels are going to be hardest hit.

  currently in the UK, 70% of the population is vaccinated, likewise NY (73.8%) and CA (88%), yet where is it trending up most cases: NY, CA, UK. We were told last year that a 60-70% vaccination rate would mean herd immunity, so the masks and lockdowns would cease.

  You can do a simple correlation analysis, there is no correlation between the rates of vaccination and the rates of new cases. The best states in regards COVID cases are still red states with better access to healthcare, vaccines and fewer lockdowns. The worst states are still blue states with heavy regulation.
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  34

  20 Years Occupying Afghanistan, Nothing Achieved

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  so the occupation of afghanistan is coming to an end and, as predicted, they achieved absolutely nothing in that 20 years apart from:.

  the death of 2,300+ service personnel and tens of thousands more seriously maimed or injured.. handing $billions or even $trillions of taxpayer dollars to defence contractors (so the military industrial complex wins, even if the military doesn't have a clear victory).. has this lengthy but short-term military occupation really changed anything in the country?

  it doesn't appear so.. i said at the time that the us wouldn't have the staying power to enact real change.

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  Anony Mous

  What was achieved: women and girls got an education, many people got access to health care. Biden basically started by letting the Taliban takeover 1/3 of the country in the last few months, then declaring its a war that can’t be won.

  The occupation was good for the people living there, just because their government had issues did not mean it wasn’t a resounding success in comparison what came before or is coming now. The late Cristopher Hitchens even praised the occupation for all the good that it did, and he wasn’t exactly a war hawking neo-con, the region has always been in religious conflicts because the small group of Islamist extremists, funded by Iran, is only defended by small groups of regional tribes, the US made those small groups of tribes into a unified front and they won.

  During the Trump era, we even had a deal going with the Taliban, which they reneged on as soon as they noticed the new White House wasn’t willing on following up with prior threats.
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  55

  'covid isnt real'

  by joey jojo in

  1. social
  2. current

  im not here to start a debate.. ive heard the above expression countless time over the past year and a half and genuinely want to know what it means.. if you feel this way, do you mean :.

  a. there is no covid19 virus?.

  b. covid19 is real but not a threat of any kind?.

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  Anony Mous

  @rocketman: please point to any longitudinal study on the vaccine. All we have is instances of young people not dying when they got the vaccine, because they weren’t dying from it before. Pfizer recently reduced their efficacy of their vaccines for the Alpha and Delta variants to just over 50%, basically a coin toss whether it works or not, which is the same rate as the original data on dying of a COVID infection with severe symptoms. Sinovac had long been proven not to work at all. There is also an increase in blood clots and other heart disease associated with the vaccine to the point it is currently more dangerous for a young person to receive the vaccine than getting COVID, which was already on par with getting struck by lightning for people under 55.

  All that is easily found in the data.
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  55

  'covid isnt real'

  by joey jojo in

  1. social
  2. current

  im not here to start a debate.. ive heard the above expression countless time over the past year and a half and genuinely want to know what it means.. if you feel this way, do you mean :.

  a. there is no covid19 virus?.

  b. covid19 is real but not a threat of any kind?.

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  Anony Mous

  @rocketman: not useless, counterproductive. So worse than useless. Locking people up means more people will gather in air restricted spaces. You can’t go to the beach on your vacation or during a heat wave, so you’ll stay in a tightly packed hotel, apartment or restaurant where the same air gets circulated around for literally hundreds of people. And then you get outbreaks.

  The vaccines haven’t been proven to reduce the risk of death at this point, the disease is taken the expected curves, the vaccines, ready in August/September were literally held back for over 6 months until the disease had run its course and the US elections were over. If you’re not naturally immune yet, you must have been living under a rock for the last 2 years.

  Now the vaccines are killing young people with blood clots that had literally zero risk of dying from COVID. COVID was designed to cull the weak and elderly and it did so. Why? Perhaps because China and Europe has a problem with too many elderly and not enough young people which will be leading to an economic collapse and regional instability?
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  29

  The bus stop analogy

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  suppose we were naïve observers, given the following data, and asked to draw a conclusion.

  we see people gather at a busy bus stop several times a day.

  at first one person, then another, and another, until they form a group.

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  Anony Mous

  @paddy: and that is exactly what I was saying. There is no non-materialist viewpoint in science. You have a testable hypothesis proven or disproven by observation or you don’t. What we experience as a thought is well understood in the neurosciences and you can indeed observe that people have brain activity before they become aware of the thought. As Lawrence Krauss says: the why question is really a how question.

  What slimboyfat and some others theorize is that really, this doesn’t prove anything, because you could be wrong. Well, that’s true, but then come with a testable hypothesis that improves on the current understanding and predictions and observations we can make. Just because we could be wrong does not mean something metaphysical is happening, we know Newtons laws are wrong, but they are still useful enough to fly to the moon, there is a lot to learn about thoughts and consciousness but that doesn’t mean it is not something that exists outside the physical processes we know off or somewhere outside our brain as some would like it to be.

  I think we all know what a thought is, it is the inner monologue going on in our head that parses and interprets and attempts to predict the future based on the information we receive from our senses. The thoughts we have are directly related to our current observations as well as historical information (memories) we have stored, in whatever abstract method we do that. The reason we know that in psychology is that we can put ourselves in the other persons shoes (figuratively) and based on the prior information we know about that person, we can deduce their thoughts, we also know most people think the same way about the same things, so even though we abstract things in our own way, as a group, we can quite accurately predict thoughts and actions based on very little information (we just need to know gender, age group and sociological status) which is what advertisers do on a daily basis.

  Chalmers, quoted above is a dualist. He believes that the “simple” consciousness is easily explainable by physical processes, whereas the more complex questions can only be explained by supernatural (although he doesn’t say as much, he just says that some things can’t be reduced to natural explanations, which is basically the same as admitting supernatural intervention). In my opinion that’s just the god of the gaps argument, but I’m sure those people wouldn’t admit that.
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  51

  Why Is Nothing Being Done About Looters?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  looting is happening everywhere like never before.

  brazen thieves walk into stores and bring a bag with them and simply throw whatever they choose in the bag.

  popular chain stores have closed in certain neighborhoods because it’s just not worth it.

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  Anony Mous

  @jan: once again, those tropes don’t bear out reality. The recent London massacre was performed by knife and couldn’t be stopped because nobody had guns, the facts are that more people have died in mass shootings and mass terrorism in general in Europe than in the US. In the Western World, Norway and France top the list in mass shooting deaths but Asia and Africa have places with higher numbers. The problem is once again, the media, the EU is treated as if it were a mass of different countries whereas the US gets its entire population lumped together. Just as with COVID, if you were to treat US states like we treat EU states in statistics, you’d see a particular trend which doesn’t comply with the media narrative that gun control works. Top US states: Illinois, California and New York.
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  51

  Why Is Nothing Being Done About Looters?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  looting is happening everywhere like never before.

  brazen thieves walk into stores and bring a bag with them and simply throw whatever they choose in the bag.

  popular chain stores have closed in certain neighborhoods because it’s just not worth it.

  1. 
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  Anony Mous

  @Jan: how about knife murders? Should we ban knives in the UK as well?
  In the UK 1.6% of the population is victim to violent crime annually and this has increased annually since guns were banned. In the US it is 0.3%, and this has decreased since the Clinton ban on assault weapons expired, thus lower crime rates is partially due to the presence of guns in society.