Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Powder Miner]

Yeah but he got that by agreeing to 1 trillion years for The Donald and 79 years for the rest of us.

Well, that's pretty impressive, 993 billion net gain of aggregate lifespan.

[Frumple]

because this is the de facto general us thread because we don't actually have one for some reason I'm going to put this here.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/28/452540839/children-get-married-in-the-u-s-too-15girls

Wanna' say the youngest still on the books as legal is 14? Something like that. Forget which state(s) it is. Law books haven't exactly been hiding that marriage can occur below the age of consent, heh.

Parental consent part is probably the most morbidly amusing part of it, I think, to me. Go figure, you strip fundamental rights from someone and legally consider them what amounts to subhuman, and some of them get legally screwed over. Who would have thunk?

[DoctorMcTaalik]

Just googled it, and in my home state, anyone between the age of 15 and 18 can get married in my home state with parental consent. However, I already knew that. Here's what I didn't know:

Applicants wishing to apply who are younger than 15 must obtain a circuit court order.

So yeah, kids under 15 can apparently get married with court approval. Dammit, Missouri.

[Flying Dice]

I'm not even going to bother looking up what the situation is here in Kentucky. Probably something like "Y'all can only marry 'em at sixteen unless their mammy or pappy sez yes, in which case twelve is good, and y'all can fuck 'em as long as they're not yer brother or sister y'all don't get caught." 

[BFEL]

Am I a terrible person for laughing at that?

[mainiac]

No, you are a terrible person for being here.  You laugh because you are terrible.

[Bohandas]

Also, Chomsky isn't a total hack, but he isn't completely trustworthy either. He definitely has an agenda that he sometimes pushes to the point of ignoring the truth. I distinctly recall him trying to argue that the Khmer Rouge were perfectly reasonable people who were being viciously slandered by media and that the killing fields weren't a thing.

That was back in 1977. But it's easy to point out one time someone got something wrong and ignore the fact that baseless propaganda against non-US aligned countries was a real thing, and pretty frequent.

The "yellow rain" of Vietnam. This stuff found on leaves in the jungle was claimed by the US State Department to be communist chemical weapons used against their own populations. I read about this in scientific american. several hundred samples were collected by various countries, and sent around the world, with many labs in different countries testing them and everyone that concluded it was harmless bee feces. Even the samples directly collected and tested by the US Army were bee poop. The one sole exception was labs which received samples handled by the US State Department. Those samples were a veritable cocktail of the most toxic synthetic substances known to man. Yeah, so hundreds of samples are taken, tested and verified to be a harmless natural substance across the world. What are the chances that the US State Department just happens to be the only organization which ends up with all the toxic ones? It's not a credible coincidence. It's much more likely that they doctored the samples as a propaganda attempt.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yellow-rain/
^ I'll give you an actual citation for this: Scientific American, 1985, September 1st issue. This covers the scientific evidence and the fact that only US State Department-handled samples contained poisons. So, it's basically common knowledge that the state department was fabricating evidence against communists even if you were well-read of mainstream literature like Scientific American.

Given that examples like the above were pretty common during the cold war, I give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt, since in 1977 no-one had really verified the details. If you believed every anti-communist story that came out in the 1970s - 1980s you'd also believe in the Yellow Rain and many other fake stories. Fake stuff was common, so it's not stupid to be at least a bit skeptical when the next one comes out.

I think spraying shit on people counts as a chemical and/or biological weapon.

[smjjames]

How come you're responding to a post that is almost a year old?

[Bauglir]

That might be the most significant case of l'esprit d'escalier I've seen recently.

EDIT: Ninja'd!

[Reelya]

I think spraying shit on people counts as a chemical and/or biological weapon.

The stuff was pollen that had been processed by a bee's digestive system. The idea that the Soviets harvest bee poop as a weapon is ludicrous. The pollen was also from plants native to that part of Vietnam. So they would have to have this huge factory in the jungle processing bees day and night, then add T-2 mycotoxin (the purported chemical agent), then put the stuff into canisters and deploy over the same rainforest. BTW, there's no known industrial process for synthesizing T-2 mycotoxin, so you have to cultivate mould on agar jelly plates to get enough of it. The logistics tell you instantly that this is impossible to be true. Knowing the basic details basically makes the Soviet Yellow Rain belief on the same level as Chemtrails or the Fake Moon Landing belief. If you're making a chemical weapon, you just wouldn't use "vietnamese jungle bee poop" as the main component, then combine it with something you need to grow on agar jelly plates! There's simpler stuff you could have made.

Also, the claimed symptoms only match the very lowest level of T-2 mycotoxin exposure (skin rashes, vomiting, diarrhea). The only supposed survivors studied turned out to have fungal skin rashes. High levels of T-2 mycotoxin exposure causes the skin rashes and diarhea, for sure, but also bone marrow degeneration, and necrosis of both muscles and skin, with open bleeding sores all over your body. So the actual substance doesn't just make you drop dead, it makes you look like you've caught ebola or something. If that's the case, there should be photo evidence, which there is not.

The bees did it. Charge the bees with chemical weapons violations xD.

[Bohandas]

Calling all abortion murder shows a breathtaking lack of understanding of the concept. Just promise you won't start singing "every sperm is sacred."

If you don't know the difference between a gamete and an embryo you're even more ignorant than the religious right.

EDIT:
Being versed in a bunch of bs that was originally written in ancient latin and greek at least means that preseumably they know that "haplo-" means one and "di-" means two

[Bauglir]

Bohandas. I'm going to need you to stop. Stop, and look at the dates on posts before you reply.

Also, nobody implied they didn't know the difference between those things.

[Bohandas]

Not intentionally.

[Bohandas]

How come you're responding to a post that is almost a year old?

I came across it during a topic search for something else.

[Reelya]

Well, rather that a drive-by oneliner you could make a reasonable contribution to the discussion. There was no nuanced point in your response to my old post.