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Ethel

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Posts posted by Ethel

    What’s up with Nebraska

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I’ll probably get some heat for this but here it goes. There have only been two members of this board who immediately cause my brain to say, piss off. Nebraska and Limpyloo. Call me a kook but speaking of the former have you ever taken a good look at this guys’ posts? If Maga he man Chad is one side of the spectrum Nebraska is the opposite. 

    There’s these old built in, I suspect genetic markers, which illicit an animalistic reaction. And Nebraska is one of them. If the worst of an LA scum edge lord online persona shinned through in the depths of the internet, it appear here in his form.

    Sup for world peace and Friendly Foils for life.

    Eat shit and live Nebraska

    Films Recently Watched

    in General Banter

    Posted

    On 1/29/2023 at 12:59 AM, J3FF3R00 said:

    spacer.png

    This was fantastic. Go figure, another highly entertaining Martin McDonagh flick. This one is as good, if not better than In Bruges in many ways… and it’s great to see Gleeson and Farrell back together again. They are both great in it.
    Some trademark classy gore to boot. 
    This one sticks with me. 

      Reveal hidden contents

    Highly relatable as we’ve all had a friend leave us or end a friendship, though this is fascinating because instead of being children, they are adults on an island with a very small population and the stakes are so high. 

     

    This was a really enjoyable watch. One of the better films I've seen in the last few years from a well-rounded (scenery, storyline, dialogue) and accessible point of view. It also has stuck with me some for perhaps the same reasons it might have for you, taking into consideration the "hidden contents" you've posted.

    • Like 1

    Russia is now bombing Ukraine

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Some food for thought.

    Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold – scheerpost.com

    Quote

    I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

    There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.

    How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.

    There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

    The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.

    In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

    “Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

    The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.

    The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.

    The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.

    Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.

    The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.

    I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.

    Now it's been all but confirmed certain material being fed to us about this war has been embellished or has a false narrative: Attack on Snake Island - Wikipedia

    Quote

    On 24 February 2022, on the first day of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, two Russian naval warships, Vasily Bykov and Moskva, attacked Snake Island.[50] Later on the same day, following a second attack, the island was invaded and captured by Russian forces.[51] Thirteen Ukrainian border guards, representing the entirety of the Ukrainian military presence on the island, were allegedly[4] killed during the battle after refusing to surrender. One of the Ukrainian border guards told an officer onboard a Russian navy warship to "go fuck yourself" when asked to surrender.[52][53][54] The response gained worldwide attention and became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.[55][56] President Volodymyr Zelensky posthumously awarded the Hero of Ukraine, Ukraine's highest award, to the 13 defenders.[55][56][57] Russian Authorities claimed that 87 soldiers had been captured on the island.[58] After the alleged incident had received widespread public attention, the Ukrainian Border Guard officially stated on February 26 that the thirteen personnel might be alive

    This war is no good regardless of who's right or wrong. What's really dangerous here is how the world, for the majority, is backing Russia into a corner. Ukraine is perhaps being used as a proxy war for bigger players. 

    BOC might have been right, albeit a bit off the mark: If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. 

    • Facepalm 3
    • Big Brain 3

    Mental illness is demonic possession

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Qi is put in different forms if this helps 杀气(kill qi?) 死气 (Death qi) 阴气 (Yin qi) 阳气 (Yang qi)(天气 地气 玄气 黄气) these four Qis are used as gradings more: 天地玄黄 Taoists uses 灵气 and might use 星辰之力 wu zhe uses 真气 or 刚气 Buddhists use 佛力 monsters uses 妖气 ghosts use 阴气 and 杀气 Demons/ devils use 魔气 and there's another type of demons that use you to become more powerful: the more u think they are powerful the more they get powerful. If you believe in something they can't win

    Black Lives Matter

    in General Banter

    Posted

    9 hours ago, chenGOD said:

    I had the same question. I think @Ethel's contention is that we should be venerating John Muir more because of climate change and ecological reasons. All well and good, but that cunt has a ton of fucking tributes and honours. So we're not exactly forgetting about him.

    I’ll point you in the right direction, “Philosophical beliefs”. Now if this whole BLM stuff is as you’ve indicated a voice in defiance of police brutality it wouldn’t be shifted towards one race. Systematic racism like my Polish ancestors experienced you say? Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcom X had quite a thing or two to say about ones own-self taking ownership of responsibility or a group with similar backgrounds for themselves.

    What’s going on in the US is pernicious. I’m not sure what will change it or where were headed. But by trying to whitewash our history and taking our societal grievances into a court of law the blame rest on each of us, individually, who condone it in bad faith. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli

    Black Lives Matter

    in General Banter

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

    floyd hasn't been made a hero. his image is a symbol of police brutality. you're confusing the idea of a hero as some kind of powerful life story of grand accomplishments with the idea of a regular person who was unjustly executed by the police.

    i live 4 block from where floyd was killed. no one thinks he was a hero lol. it's a reminder of how fucked up our society is. kinda weird you don't get this?

    Making not made bub

    Black Lives Matter

    in General Banter

    Posted

    12 hours ago, chenGOD said:

    I think it’s ok to be a criminal and not be murdered extra-judicially.

    This has nothing to do with the point/argument he’s making. E.g., We are making heroes of men like George Floyd and detracting from great men like John Muir. Welcome to damnation 

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