The US: saving the world from itself
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Among other shit that happened in the last 4000 years.
But...like what? Perhaps if you normalize across world populations, but unless you do that, it has to be something in the 20th century.
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@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
righteously battling communism
How the fuck was South America a threat to anyone? Especially Nicaragua? And many of the people you murdered there weren't even communists, but socialists.
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@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
But...like what? Perhaps if you normalize across world populations, but unless you do that, it has to be something in the 20th century.
Ever heard of the Black Death? FYI, it killed over 75-200 million people - over five times more people than Hitler, six hundred years earlier!
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Ever heard of the Black Death? FYI, it killed over 75-200 million people - over five times more people than Hitler, six hundred years earlier!
And your theory is that it was a human caused event?
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@asdf said in The US: saving the world from itself:
How the fuck was South America a threat to anyone? Especially Nicaragua? And many of the people you murdered there weren't even communists, but socialists.
A non-Communist South America isn't a threat, agreed. Socialist / communist, close enough.
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@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Socialist / communist, close enough.
I hope that comment wasn't meant seriously. In case it was, my two-word reply is: Nicaragua! SRSLY?
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@asdf said in The US: saving the world from itself:
I hope that comment wasn't meant seriously. In case it was, my two-word reply is: Nicaragua! SRSLY?
A non-Communist Central America isn't a threat, agreed. Socialist / communist, close enough.
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@blakeyrat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
banning lead in gasoline and paint
The US banned lead paint outright in 1978. The UK banned it outright in the early nineties.
So, that's all good, right? No.
Interior lead paint (where children live) has been illegal in Great Britain since 1926. It's been illegal in France, Belgium, and Austria(which didn't even exist then! I think it was still the Hapsburg empire? ) for 107 years! Greece, Australia, the League of Nations, 1922. Poland, 1926, Spain, 1931.
The US has been criminally, tragically slow at banning interior lead paint. Painting bridges with red lead is bad, sure, but it was legal to paint baby cribs with lead paint in the US for way longer than it should have been.
Wait, but what about gas? The USA banned tetraethylead in consumer gasoline in '96, California in '92. Not a terrible showing, considering NASCAR only banned it in 2008, Africa as a whole banned it in 2006, and Algeria still uses it(Refinery retooling or something. Supposed to be done in 2015). Not exactly a great showing either, considering they were slower than Chile, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Canada, and Colombia.
Claiming the USA has an excellent track record on lead is just false. It's not the worst, but it's pretty bad.
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@Khudzlin
don't forget were the military learned they anti-communits techniquesalso, it's chile, chili are the peppers
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@boomzilla you're delusional, communism wasn't going to happen in south america.
socialism maybe, and even if it weren't the case, are you really defending the support of a governement that kidnapped, tortured and killed people just because they expressed a barely leftist opinion?
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@Jarry said in The US: saving the world from itself:
are you really defending the support of a governement that kidnapped, tortured and killed people just because they expressed a barely leftist opinion?
No. I was thinking about Allende.
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@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
And your theory is that it was a human caused event?
OK, I admit I haven't read that part carefully.
But as of human-caused events, @asdf already provided a good example.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
And your theory is that it was a human caused event?
OK, I admit I haven't read that part carefully.
Didn't you learn anything at school? The Jews poisoned the wells, that's what killed everyone!
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@boomzilla
the one that came after allende
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@AyGeePlus said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Austria(which didn't even exist then! I think it was still the Hapsburg empire? )
Austria was a stand-alone country since 1804.
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@Jarry said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@boomzilla
the one that came after allendeI think they probably went further than I would have.
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@asdf said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Didn't you learn anything at school? The Jews poisoned the wells, that's what killed everyone!
We must have been going to different schools - on my history classes, Jews dindu nuffin ever since their inception.
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@MrL said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
I'm sure that if I did some research, I would uncover many more Polish comics about almost regular people having crazy adventures. But no superhero comics.
Well, there's Wilq and Likwidator...
Sure, and Jeż Jerzy.
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@blakeyrat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@asdf It does. The US has a great environmental record on protecting endangered species, banning lead in gasoline and paint, banning asbestos in home products, etc. Whales are endangered now because after the US banned whaling, most European countries doubled-down, built huge factory ships and went to town on whale meat. Well into the 1950s.
You make it sound as if US involvement in WWII is the only thing that makes the existence of the US tolerable. (Which is weird in itself-- what about WWI?)
Blah blah blah. Blacks' and women's rights.
Go fuck yourself.
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@Jarry said in The US: saving the world from itself:
also, it's chile, chili are the peppers
It's easy to confuse them - they look almost the same.
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@Gąska saving that image for the next time i need to troll a chilean
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@Jarry no need to - it's #1 Google result on "chile chili".
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@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
I blame you guys for starting the damn war in the first place
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@blakeyrat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
The danger in asbestos is if the fibers can escape into the air and be breathed-in. Most applications of asbestos make that impossible. Like, that fire fighter's gear might be dangerous if you somehow put it into a shredder, but it's not something that'd keep me awake at night.
I took a geology elective in college. The professor there said there were three types of asbestos. It's been a long time but I think two had curly fibers and one had straight, or the other way 'round. According to him, only one of the two types of fibers was even dangerous. (That doesn't help if you don't know which kind is in your building, obviously, though. But I guess in theory you could have it tested and if it was the non-dangerous kind, not have it removed.)
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@dse said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Problematic regions in Pakistan, Israel,
Hey, who redrew the maps of the rest of the Middle East, too, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, without paying any attention to tribal distribution? I don't believe it was the US.
Sure, the US has made mistakes. Some of them have been bad ones. But we're not the ones that are causing the worst pollution, and we're not the ones that are behind killing people by the millions, etc., etc.
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@asdf said in The US: saving the world from itself:
I'm aware that South America was very densely populated before the Europeans arrived, and the research is truly fascinating.
Are...are you trying to claim that, of the ENTIRE WORLD, or at least the parts that are excellent for humans, nobody lived in North America? Even though there was a land bridge right there?
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@dkf said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Normal people use years with 12 months in.
How long do you think the Nazi government lasted? (In the contect of this discussion, I'm not going to quibble about the exact length, given that it didn't last an integral number of years.)
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@FrostCat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Are...are you trying to claim that, of the ENTIRE WORLD, or at least the parts that are excellent for humans, nobody lived in North America?
Wow, your reading comprehension is way worse than blakey's. Also, your shoulder aliens seem to be crack addicts. At least I don't have any other explanation for your post.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Among other shit that happened in the last 4000 years.
What've you got that compares to tens of millions killed, that we haven't already talked about here?
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@FrostCat mostly things not (directly) caused by humans. As I said, I misread Blakey's post.
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@FrostCat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
(That doesn't help if you don't know which kind is in your building, obviously, though. But I guess in theory you could have it tested and if it was the non-dangerous kind, not have it removed.)
I worked in a lab testing materials for the presence of asbestos for about five years. Everyone tests before removing because the test costs several orders of magnitude less than the removal work.
Also, the type of asbestos isn't as important as the size and shape. In order to be dangerous, asbestos fibers have to get stuck in your lungs. Fibers that are too big won't become airborne or will get filtered out in your mouth and throat. Fibers that are too small pass through your lung tissue.
We did a cheap version of testing where we considered everything in an air sample that was the size/shape of dangerous asbestos to be dangerous asbestos. If the concentration of contaminants was below the regulatory limit with that assumption, then you don't have to even check if it is actually asbestos. We had an electron microscope that we used if we needed to actually figure out what the stuff was.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
mostly things not (directly) caused by humans. As I said, I misread Blakey's post.
Gotcha. No harm, no foul.
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@Jaime said in The US: saving the world from itself:
I worked in a lab testing materials for the presence of asbestos for about five years
Well, all I know is what he said. Since it was just an aside one day, he didn't really go into detail.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@FrostCat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Gotcha.
No you didn't.
I realize that you might not realize this, since your first language is "I speak through a fistful of marbles", but "gotcha" also means "ah, I understand what you were saying", and it was, in fact, in this sense that I used that word.
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@FrostCat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
your first language is "I speak through a fistful of marbles"
Try do correctly pronounce Polish letters with full mouth. I dare you.
Edit: for clarity, I mean the hard ones, namely ć, ź, ś, and dź.
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@blakeyrat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Much like the "emissions testing" thing, not banning asbestos isn't a sign that the US is somehow doing things wrong, it's a sign that the US is full of pragmatic and practical people who don't waste time and money on feel-good proposals that accomplish nothing.
Or, as with leaded petrol, it's a sign that profits beat everything there and lobbyists work very hard to keep it that way.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Edit: for clarity, I mean the hard ones, namely ć, ź, ś, and dź.
Gesundheit?
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@dcon more like gezundhajt.
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if it weren't for ww2 my grandparents wouldn't have met and I wouldn't be here. ww2 was a net positive for the world.
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I agree with comrade @Jarry
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@fbmac ssshhhhh they'll figure out
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@blakeyrat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
the US is full of pragmatic and practical people who don't waste time and money on feel-good proposals that accomplish nothing
That's... not entirely true. At least, it was more true before the rise of government-backed cartels such as the medical industry, the banksters, etc.
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Obligatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1mlCPMYtPk
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@FrostCat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Among other shit that happened in the last 4000 years.
What've you got that compares to tens of millions killed, that we haven't already talked about here?
Well, there was that one time when Europe sneezed on America and killed over 90% of the population.
Although I think @blakeyrat already mentioned that.
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@lolwhat said in The US: saving the world from itself:
the rise of government-backed cartels
It's hilarious--well, not really--how many people look at that sentence and think more power to the government will work this time, rather than "any given institution should have less power, so that such cartels couldn't even arise."
http://libertyupward.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/wants-more-government.jpg
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@Jarry said in The US: saving the world from itself:
also, it's chile, chili are the peppers
In French, the country is called Chili. And we don't use almost the same word for peppers and pepper.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Among other shit that happened in the last 4000 years.
The Nazis killed more human beings than existed 4000 years ago.
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@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
Ever heard of the Black Death? FYI, it killed over 75-200 million people - over five times more people than Hitler, six hundred years earlier!
... and? The plague that hit the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries killed far, far more than that both in absolute numbers and percentage-wise.
But neither was caused by human action. (Well, not actions you could justifiably blame on people with no concept of the germ theory of disease.)