188600+ entries in 0.056s
mircea_popescu: you have no idea how clueless people in the streets of a quaint european town are.
mircea_popescu: yes dude, most of the "investments" are that. "oops we lost the money". right.
mircea_popescu: it used to be latin, affero, where it meant to bring (ferry comes from the same fero root). it moved into french, where it meant to take over. it then slowly moved into a more figurative "to give oneself the airs of an office one does not yet have", at which point it moved into english, "to give oneself airs".
mircea_popescu: it's really not that rare. just uncommon to be speaking english.
mircea_popescu: your proposed "not pashtun" is not equal to my actual position! nor even very similar.
mircea_popescu: magda realised she's dealing with a fraud so she killed herself and her kids. logic!
mircea_popescu: bwahahaha yeah, that is SO VERY TOTALLY what happened.
mircea_popescu: According to the FBI, Steve Schneider—Koresh's top aide, who "probably realized he was dealing with a fraud"—shot and killed Koresh and then killed himself with the same gun.
mircea_popescu: i sorta feel about these like i imagine you feel about rats.
mircea_popescu: in any case, i know that if it were possible to never ever run into either an idiot or idiot droppings, i'd gladly carry cases for the rest of my lives.
mircea_popescu: it's more complicated. the benefits that acrue from living in a sane society are not directly apparent in insanity-land. best one could tell the porter of 1950 was way happier than the bill de blasio of 2010.
mircea_popescu: this is broadly missing the point, because the sides you'd know about pre aren't a good representation of the sides that actually exist post.
mircea_popescu: this is exactly like saying cca 1915 that "you don't expect to ever live to see computers and if you do you'll prolly be on the side of polishing the casings".
mircea_popescu: this is universal. if the hrt team gets blown to bits, they run off. what fucking "aerial bombardment", you think that's how it goes, someone feels like it one day and that's it, go ?
mircea_popescu: in any case, i have had opportunity to try this in the field : when i maneuvered teh demonstrators around the "security cordon", they didn't do anything. they fell back. cuz wtf were they gonna do.
mircea_popescu: you scream louder and that's the end of the fucking story.
mircea_popescu: old men put all their all into their first scream because that's all they got.
mircea_popescu: if you're thinking an ailing, falling under its own weight bureaucracy - not even this one in particular, any one - is actually brimming with the virility of youth and ready to escalate until nothing's left you're seriously from a different movie.
mircea_popescu: "areal bombardment until nothing is ever mentioned again in the agitprop press"
mircea_popescu: the likely response would have been exactly what argentina response is in similar to scale incidents
mircea_popescu: in fact anyone even survived to tell the story because these derps allowed it. could just as well have executed the entire bunch.
mircea_popescu: the funny thing is, that the "marginally retarded" (which they were) had the usg agents so badly beaten it was fucking ridiculous.
mircea_popescu: "After the ceasefire, the Branch Davidians allowed the ATF dead and wounded to be evacuated and held their fire during the ATF retreat."
mircea_popescu: you are attempting psychiatry on an undefined, noncorporeal entity ?
mircea_popescu: i do not for a moment believe the ridiculous antics of nutty neoprotestant biggots in rural texas are a nucleation for anything.
mircea_popescu: i dunno that this nonsense sexual stellarity is all that common in practice.
mircea_popescu: which i guess describes the us as well as it describes polynesia, sure.
mircea_popescu: oh right. how about the time when "it was decided" only the one schmuck can fuck, and the husbands of the women involved are to be liek you know, celibate now.
mircea_popescu: and challenged his opponent to a RESURECTION CONTEST ?
mircea_popescu: like, for instance, the one time that dude vying for power with some other dude DUG UP A CASKET
mircea_popescu: anyone familiar with the antics of the victims there ?
mircea_popescu: btw, since all the cia talk necessarily leads one to thinking of waco :
mircea_popescu: even their current one (wacth am rhein iirc ?) is good.
mircea_popescu: for instance. but there's dozens of perfectly passible ones
mircea_popescu: i mean these ppl do not understand wtf an anthem's supposed to be or what is this toothpaste.
mircea_popescu even vaguely remembers the rsr anthem, notwithstanding that we DIDNT actually have to do it in school.
mircea_popescu: "According to a 2004 Harris Interactive survey, nearly two out of three Americans (61 percent) are unable to recall all of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner"
mircea_popescu: pushing a point, but no, even the teeth clenching arabs were in love with the usa.
mircea_popescu: nobody seriously professed a hatred of the usa, or professes a love of the us.
mircea_popescu: it was replaced by "the us", but much in the way things changed from the pre-brejnev soviets to the post, it is now a label to distance oneself from.
mircea_popescu: there WAS, briefly, a thing called usa. it started cca 1905 and ended cca 1960
mircea_popescu: "usa" was the brand name a few disparate centers of population and of a few slightly more coherent centers of production used for a brief interval between two european wars.
mircea_popescu: for one thing "usa" did not exist from the very start.