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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. The chatter is that the landing craft was full of Shahed drones and other munitions.
  2. This is a bit OBE as an article, the foreign affairs committee passed accession and it will move to a full vote.
  3. Some mofo with a red nose mix dog just let a leash slip and and it went afree our little guy. Luckily I had the harness on him and was able to lift him up to get him away, the fucking thing bit my leg. Photo of my threatening creature below. I told the guy to get his fucking pit bull out of the neighborhood. “It’s not a pit, it’s a mix! He never does this.”
  4. My grandmother, who spent every Christmas at our place, always read that. She lived to be 99, about 80 days shy of 100. The first year I was living overseas, my parents mailed me a cassette tape of her reading it. I still have it somewhere, thanks for reminding me I need to get that thing digitized.
  5. Just cracked open my Christmas even beer. Got a nine year old who says she still is pretty sure Santa is real. I think she’s just playing it safe, but it’s fun as hell that she lets me. And I don’t have to put stuff together at that age, but get to eat the cookies. It’s probably the last year I’ll get full buy-in, but it will be almost as much fun when they realize Santa never stops coming, whether they believe or not, as long as they are my kids. The downside is now her older sister is hard as hell to buy for.
  6. A serious response to why? Well, it starts with the facts that: 1. People don’t choose in a vacuum, they are constrained by culture and facts. Religion is neither downstream or upstream of culture, it’s more like a pond where both culture and religion mix into each other. 2. The default setting for humans is oppressive patriarchy and so most women in most places make the best choice available to them. Matriarchy is an anthropological curio. Secular egalitarianism as we conceive of it almost unknown outside of the Western world and places influenced by the West. It probably is not possible without antibiotics and birth control. There’s some cultural factors at play as well. With these constraints, monotheism in a lot of places— maybe most— worked out better for women than the available options. The early Christian church was viewed as a religion for women, children, slaves, and the poor. Thats not Christian propaganda, either, that’s what Roman pagans alarmed at the rise of the faith wrote about it. One big reason was that they viewed it as a bad influence on women that led them to abandon domesticity for service and semi-leadership roles in the church. Another reason is that Christians did not practice infanticide, which in the Greco-Roman world (as everywhere, even today) affected girls far more than boys. Pagan husbands of Christian women were what early Christians viewed as prime conversion targets. It’s not hard to see why wives might prefer the religion where a night at the brothel was forbidden rather than expected of men. Again, antibiotics and whatnot. Before them, sexual mores we view as repressive were a lot more feminist. This carried on into the Middle Ages and modern era. No coincidence that many of the women’s voices we have preserved are from nuns. Liberation was a not an option, and if you wanted some autonomy and education, the church was one of the few places that offered that. The oldest girls school in the United States, as elsewhere, is a church school. It’s hard to peer back into the Bronze Age and Judaism. For Islam, women absolutely experienced a step up from their status under Arabian paganism. And for all these faiths, for most of history, for most people— it wasn’t like your husband stopped going to church or mosque and became an enlightened feminist. Usually, if that happened it meant he was going to go drinking and philandering (again, antibiotics!) Not getting married wasn’t an option. It’s easy to forget that the temperance movement went hand in hand with suffragism, it was both religious women and progressive politics driving that bus because they viewed alcohol as driving poverty, abuse, and neglect. Again, this was a rational choice at the time for the place most women found themselves. And to this day this still holds true in a lot of places. You’ve mentioned monotheism. But the largest polytheistic faith (Hinduism) as widely practiced is hardly more woman-friendly than even the most hide-bound evangelical and likely a lot less. It was the British, after all, who stamped out suttee, a practice that can’t be called very feminist at all. The status of women in traditional Buddhist or Confucian societies is also not at all better than in monotheistic ones, nor can most traditional animistic societies be called egalitarian. That’s not a defense of the misogynistic elements baked into monotheistic faiths. They’re bad! And antibiotics and secular options and choices for women are good! It’s a good thing that women don’t have to depend on the graces of organized religion to improve their lot in our society. It’s just how things were and still are for most women through time and space. TL;DR, women aren’t irrational and have long had good temporal, not just spiritual, reasons for being religious.
  7. Tucker thinks UFOs are from the devil.
  8. Yeah, that was mid-90s shenanigans. I remember the fight, too. The Harlingen schools drew the line at grabbing kids from the town, and it really was bullshit to have these kids that could have been in college all there just to play ball. Kind of IMG-like but shadier.
  9. Can confirm this on the professional front. It is unreal how much gotdam time I spend refereeing interpersonal conflicts among my younger staff that cannot have a discussion and work things out. Any sort of disagreement or guidance is treated as a personal affront.
  10. Besides the readiness issues that @FartingMonk mentioned, this admin is one that tends to run all they can from the White House (NSC) and not to give much credence to executive agencies and their experts. They’re very directive on foreign policy. It’s been trending that way for a long time and the Obama admin was similar. One big indicator is the announcement of the coalition and then the elapsed amount of time with no information and still dribs and drabs of what will actually be happening. It’s not as much OpSec as you think, what’s most likely happening is dithering and paralysis at the NSC, which is supposed to be a coordinating body and not a policy making body. They’re not making decisions and they don’t have people there who can make these decisions. They’re asking for options and options and then coming back with questions and other asks and so things just grind to a halt.
  11. Rumors have been floating around maritime twitter for a while, and I refrained from posting. If Rogoway writes about it, it’s legit. There are serious cracks in this coalition and many of the most capable partners will not put ships under U.S. command and will only escort their ships. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/cracks-form-in-new-naval-coalition-drone-strikes-spread-to-indian-ocean Like it or not, these are signals about confidence in American leadership. The PC where the Pentagon says that they will act as “highway patrol” is unsettling. Like it or not, it’s unacceptable that a terror group backed by Iran is flinging missiles at shipping and we are basically just trying to hunker down and react. This will not end until the people shooting are shot back at. Also lots of talk that the operation and its contours is being done at the NSC by non-Navy, non-shipping people. Which tracks.
  12. I’ve told this story before, but when you were really young and before, MMA played an independent schedule against mostly valley big school teams. They played Harlingen, San Benito, and later South every year and they just got wasted each year. Some wealthy MMA alums decided they were sick of it and embarked on a project. They’d promise to get grades up for kids needing to get their scores to play NCAA ball and went out and recruited D1 level athletes in football and basketball. They’d even take kids after their senior year and play them as long as they didn’t graduate. They recruited Nigerians to play hoops. All legit because they didn’t play in a league. And for a few years it was just a BLOODBATH. They made “City Championship” banners and would just kill every team in the valley. They then recruited a kid from HHS who was a good DB but had grade problems and that was the end of the fun. Valley schools told them to go to hell and didn’t schedule them. They kept it up for a while, playing a crazy schedule with teams far away but eventually packed it in and joined one of the private leagues and cut that shit out.
  13. One of the more wack displays of this was at a youth group thing. One of the teenage girls sat on the stage with a rose in her hand. Then a boy would come up, take the flower and compliment its beauty, and pluck a petal. This thing kept going till the petals were gone and the last boy went up and commented that the flower was all used up and he didn’t want it.
  14. Purity culture was definitely a thing, likely still is. Seems like the 1990s and 2000s were the peak. There were different levels of engagement, just like people are differently religious. Most people didn’t do the ball and father pledge thing, but elements were around. If you were in or around conservative-leaning Protestant churches, or FCA, or prayer groups…it was definitely a thing. Big enough for it to have been part of the Jonas Brothers’ shtick and to get a South Park send-up.
  15. https://defector.com/youre-supposed-to-be-glad-your-tesla-is-a-brittle-heap-of-junk
  16. To be clear, I was asking why @BeardIP focused on especially girls needing to be advised not to have sex, and not asking you why you rightfully called out this subculture.
  17. Barrons writes that Tesla accounts for 14 percent of all recalls in the U.S. but 1 percent of all calls sold. In addition, Honda’s recall didn’t involve any injuries, only warranty claims piling up.
  18. @Mrs Whiggins nails a lot of it. It’s very similar to obsession with purity in super-rigorous Muslim cultures. Purity codes developed for a time a place when STDs killed, and illegitimate children exploded social bonds and communities. That’s also why girls were married away at about the time today’s Americans hold these “purity balls.” That’s why dads took it seriously, he would literally lose money if his daughter was “impure.” I actually agree with a lot of what @BeardIP says. There are lots of reasons that a high view of human sexuality would encourage sex in committed monogamous relationships at an age where you are grown up to handle it. It’s good for your interpersonal relationships to not be addicted to porn. I think that’s equally true for boys so I don’t get why you frame it as especially true for girls aside from the old adage that boys can’t become pregnant. Besides being totally creepy, purity culture is misogynist as hell and incidentally, if you’re into that sort of thing— very much opposed to the gospels and epistles where physical purity rituals are constantly dismissed as legalistic and at odds with a high view of grace. Not that sexual ethics were discarded, but the idea of ritual impurity for any person was. I mean, he kind of says this explicitly when he forgives a woman accused of it and then elsewhere goes onto say that any man who looks at a woman with lust (something he realizes everyone does and will do) has broken the law just the same.
  19. I’ve got big balls I’ve got big balls They’re such big balls And they’re purity balls And he’s got big balls But she can’t touch balls And we have purity balls for them all!
  20. Most of the precise stuff that can go on their strike aircraft needs to be guided in manually, that’s why the Su-34 is a two seater. They don’t have FLIR targeting pods. They’d been chucking dumb bombs with guidance packages from a distance and it actually kept them farther away. Seems like AFU got a German Patriot and deployed it smartly. Imagine how well they’d do if we stopped being assclowns about more aid.
  21. Seeing lots of folks casting doubt on the F-16 story. It is Rybar, at the same time, there’s a pattern of not announcing things till they are being used.
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