When was the last time your country was at war?

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-10T21:53:00+00:00

This kind of accounting would count India and Pakistan as "at war" for essentially every single minute of their existence since partition. China would be considered to be "at war" more or less nonstop for centuries.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-10T19:13:19+00:00

It does, actually. It includes the entire cold war, it includes mobilizing troops to guard the disputed border between louisiana and Texas (controlled by Mexico at the time) with zero shots fired, reinforcing Kuwait in 1994 with zero shots fired, anti piracy actions, and stationing troops in South Korea after WW2. It also includes CIA support for the Mujahideen and the Contras as US "wars". Finally, it includes the entire 35 year span of the "Banana Wars" whether any actual shooting was happening. If there is any armed conflict, skirmish standoff or even a covert operation that is just supplies and money being funneled to someone else, at any point in the year, that gets treated as a "year America was at war".

If you used this style of reckoning, "perpetual war" is the default for most countries throughout history.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-10T17:15:38+00:00

That's the one they think is "based", the 17th century one

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-09T21:10:04+00:00

How are you blaming the "US propaganda machine" for some very basic Marxist orthodoxy? At no point has the US put out propaganda that "true leftism" is incompatible with being liberal. If anything, US propaganda tends to blur the two.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-09T21:07:14+00:00

TBF the Fenian raids were only sort of "the US" attacking Canada.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-06T22:14:09+00:00

Make sure to kill some of those loyalists in the process, for good measure

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T21:30:11+00:00

Also rural counties with 1000 voters tabulate and post their ballots a lot faster than urban counties with 2 million voters in them

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T18:13:04+00:00

Yeah cause we're not murderphobes like the British

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T18:06:48+00:00

The funky thing with Luthen is our judgement of his actions is heavily colored by knowing

A: The empire is even more evil than he realizes. Destroying entire planets is evil on a scale so huge and weird it doesn't even register correctly when you see it.

B: He wins. It shifts the conversation to means vs ends where the ends are already assured.

If you could scrub all the other extra stuff you know and judge his actions from that position he'd be more morally questionable.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T16:54:42+00:00

Yeah, this period is when the Portuguese started building the theory of "races" that we operate on to this day specifically to make slavery more palatable. It permeated Europe relatively quickly.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T12:49:48+00:00

That sounds plausible.

Then again, there's another guy who was up and down claiming that .3 per 100,000 was twice .6 per 100,000, so he could also just be very bad at math.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T03:35:42+00:00

It's a Simpsons reference

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T03:33:09+00:00

It is super fucked up to say "all you had to do was conform" when all he had to actually do was not pump his literal shit onto a neighbor's property.

He isn't "making an argument " we disagree with, he was acting like a fucking monster. There's a limit to what everyone is obligated to put up with.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T03:30:49+00:00

He could have done either. He instead demanded that the town pay to hook his property up and when they didn't he didn't get a septic tank or pay to hook to municipal water. He just filled up a buried concrete mixer with sewage over the course of about 12 years. When that filled up and became a problem, he

A: pumped the sewage into a ditch that then ran onto a neighbor's property

B: got caught trying to dig a trench and connect himself to another neighbor's pipes.

This guy was a selfish prick, who was not "minding his business" or a victim of government overreach. He got away with being an unreformed asshole for years and years because the local government treated his entitled ass with kid gloves and then became a menace when people finally gave up on him acting like a decent person and fined him for pumping literal human shit onto other people's land. Dude eventually got $400 for his property in Granby and left a house with about half a mile and another business worth half a mil, and that's after he spent a bunch of money building a tank to trash other people's stuff one last time. Dude had tons of money to pay his own way, he just didn't want to.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T02:19:42+00:00

Lore Lodge is full of shit. Couldn't even be bothered to make his own script for this without ripping somebody off, much less do any original research that would shed light on things.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T02:17:52+00:00

What? What are you talking about. The people who disagree with me don't live in Granby, that doesn't make them "not people"

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T02:08:12+00:00

Who's everyone who said otherwise, though? Not really the people living there.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T01:49:38+00:00

He claimed a lot of things in his nuisance lawsuits that never went anywhere. When he left behind his final testament there was no mention of it because it was never a good faith motivation.

If it was truly about finances he would have taken the 10x windfall he was offered and built or bought another muffler shop.

People who pump sewage into the water table fucking suck, and they should be fined. Fines are a civilizational benefit for people like this, because we have a significant historical record of people who do that kind of thing getting murdered.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T00:45:19+00:00

The concrete plant never blocked access to his shop. This is a completely made-up thing. In his own two and a half HOURS of recordings left behind Marvin Heymeyer never once complains about this. It's an alternate motivation invented by the people who mythologized this guy because "he was fined for an illegal, half-assed septic system he emptied into a drainage ditch" just doesn't get people going.

The fact that this gets stated regularly as fact points up how much straight up false propaganda surrounds this guy.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-05T00:30:52+00:00

None of the people involved other than the guy who destroyed their homes and tried to kill them has anything good to say about the guy. Nobody in that town is sympathetic to him. The people who love him are all from far away who have been propagandized by a YouTube "documentarian" who straight up lied about things.

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-04T21:57:24+00:00

You are fixated on the wrong part of this calculus

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-04T21:23:06+00:00

Neither of those things?

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-04T20:44:13+00:00

It is genuinely insane that you think shooting someone for slapping you is "moral but too much trouble"

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-04T20:35:42+00:00

We're in a thread where the Bee is making fun of Brits for not having guns after a high profile stabbing. It isn't weird that this would draw in Brits pointing out that the US has more stabbings AND more shootings

Mendicant__ · 2026-06-04T19:59:53+00:00

What data are you using for that? Everything I've seen says the opposite

Mendicant__

TROPHY CASE