Gothouse [none/use name]

China: builds stuff in other countries

America: bombs the shit out of other countries

Who knew what the winning approach was going to be?

Don’t insult Harland Sanders that way. He was a real man, not like the rest of the fast food mascots. Colonel wasn’t a marketing term either, he was a real Kentucky Colonel, and he was awarded that honor long before starting KFC. He got it for outstanding humanitarianism.

For a long read about this amazing man’s full life, try here: https://www.damninteresting.com/colonels-of-truth/

One day in the early 1930s, Josephine and Margaret Sanders were beginning to wonder what was keeping Harland away so long. Last they had seen him, he was riding a mule up the mountain in a downpour, carrying an old lard bucket filled with bandages, scissors, antiseptics, and rubber gloves. He was en route to a nearby Appalachian community which lacked electricity, roads, indoor plumbing, and other modern conveniences. From time to time Sanders brought the families there free food, including full Thanksgiving spreads for entire towns, but most urgently the people needed medical care. He had been summoned because one of the townswomen had gone into labor. Having three children, Sanders had a little experience with childbirth, so he had become a self-styled amateur midwife. But this outing was taking much longer than normal.

Harland interrupted his wife and daughter’s worrying when he burst into the apartment and grabbed his trusty shotgun he kept behind the front door. He explained that it might be necessary to use a little “persuasion.” The baby wasn’t in the proper position in the womb, requiring more experienced intervention. But the allegedly drunken doctor was refusing to go, Hippocrates be damned. Shortly the doctor was appropriately persuaded, and he was seen riding up the mountain astride a wet mule. The doctor manually adjusted the baby’s position, and the delivery proceeded smoothly. The parents named their new son “Harland.”

In 1935 or 1936, in recognition of Sanders’ midwifery work, food donations, and his regular shuttling of townsfolk to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings2, Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon commissioned Harland Sanders as a “Kentucky Colonel,” the highest title of honor bestowed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

They weren’t left to rot. They moved the machinery lock, stock and barrel to China.

I used to know a guy who worked at a furniture factory in the Carolinas. (The Carolinas were once famous for furniture.) After Bill Clinton took the lead in admitting China to the WTO, he said they were selling at retail lower than his cost of production. So the company closed up the factory and moved the entire thing, including him, to China.

The machinery wasn’t left to rot. The workers were. And then they had a childish temper tantrum, and instead of retraining into 21st century high tech industries, they went and voted Trump into office.

Depends on how many assholes have been there before ruining it for everyone. If you’re near a university then it’s likely that they know exactly what weed is and have deported many morons for smoking it. Oh, and they can and will park a bus outside a music festival and piss test everyone there, and all that test positive get on the bus. The Chinese get a fine, the foreigners get deported.

You’ll get a couple weeks in the slammer where you’ll eat rice gruel and then get deported at your own expense, barred from re-entry for 5 years.

You can get the death penalty for smuggling and being a westerner won’t save you. They executed a British man, Akmal Shaikh, for taking 8 pounds of heroin into Xinjiang.

I love how this person is advocating for a war of aggression, an invasion. NATO is a defensive alliance.

“people may have to resort to violence” isn’t a Qanon idea, although I’m sure the NYT is having shitgiggles saying it is. It’s one of their favorite tactics, smearing a good idea by mashing it against a stupid idea.

The government should be afraid of the people, not the other way around.

This old canard, a favourite reference of censorship apologists, needs to be retired. It’s repeatedly and inappropriately used to justify speech limitations. The phrase is a misquotation of an analogy made in 1919 Supreme Court opinion that upheld the imprisonment of three people—a newspaper editor, a pamphlet publisher and a public speaker—who argued that military conscription was wrong. The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence. But the Supreme Court abandoned the logic of that case more than 50 years ago. That this trope originated as a justification for what has long since been deemed unconstitutional censorship reveals how useless it is as a measure of the limitations of rights. And yet, the crowded theatre cliché endures, as if it were some venerable legal principle.

Justice Holmes’ famous quote comes in the context of a series of early 1919 Supreme Court decisions in which he endorsed government censorship of wartime dissent — dissent that is now clearly protected by subsequent First Amendment authority. Socialist Party of America chair Charles Schenck was prosecuted and imprisoned under the Espionage Act.

After Holmes’ opinion in the Schenck case, the law of the United States was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that “obstructed” conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and march and petition against it. This is the context of the “fire in a theater” quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship.

Oh, and notice that the court’s objection was only to "falsely shouting fire!”: if there is, in fact, a fire in a crowded theatre, please let everyone know.

The Unabomber Manifesto is pretty critical of the left and I don’t know if this man should be being praised. I’d quote from it…but, you know.

The whole point behind this is that you’re seen drinking it, everyone knows it’s expensive, therefore you enhance your status in the presence of anyone who’s watching.

You can laugh, but there are people who run their lives like this. It’s the entire reason Apple can sell their products for way more than they’re worth: people love being seen holding them.

A rhetorical trick. Both can be true at the same time. Israel is an apartheid state, and it’s also running an ad to attempt to persuade the world that exploiting the images of dead children excuses apartheid.