WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

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All the venomous spiders and snakes and other batshit weird stuff has built up the immunities of Australians to being the buff guy on beaches who kicks sands on scrawny little aids. Also Australia found out a while back that 'pray the aids away' doesn't work while the US has merely graduated to 'pray the gays away' and remains experimenting with abstinence only sex-ed in some places.
author=pianotm
Good point. As much as I loved Avatar, I'm not too blind to realize that the story is completely derivative (Hell, forget the Disney's Pocahontas similarity; Mr. Cameron additionally borrows plot and story from T2 and Aliens and the machines look strikingly familiar. I suppose if Cameron had to rip someone off, there was nobody better than himself).


It's my understanding that Avatar is basically Dances with Wolves in space. (A very bad dumbing down of the plot, but still!)

Also Cameron ripped off some guy for the Terminator movie and got sued. Lemme go find out who actually wrote the original story... ah, okay. It was actually a trio of short stories by Harlan Ellison, but yeah.

Look who got an acknowledgement as a "thanks to the works of" on the movie!
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
What is this nonsense, and from where did it spawn? Are bots acting up again, or what?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
It seems pretty self-explanatory to me personally, but if you really sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt.
I think we need to call the Ghostbusters. Or use google translate/babelfish and hope people aren't flagellating themselves.
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
How does it come dat omnes speaks latin all of the sudden?

Edit: And LockeZ that sentence of yours is some biblical stuff, estne?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
It's not Latin, it's lorem ipsum. I don't know what the deal is with the topic.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
author=Red_Nova
How in the actual hell do Australians cut down on HIV/AIDS so efficiently? Do you just straight up put them to death?


Safe sex, universal health care, acknowledgement that AIDS is a disease not a curse from <insert deity here>, and the bowling reaper.
Well, it's in the Welp forum for a reason. It's just random silliness and a good way to destress. Try it, it's fun~

And yes, it's Lorem ipsum. >.<)b


Yeah, it helps that we have good health care and are taught about AIDS in our school years - about how it is a disease, how to avoid catching it (and other) diseases, what causes infection and what doesn't (drinking a gallon of saliva - maybe. Kissing someone - no) and the like. And yeah, the bowling reaper, of course.

It's really just being well-educated on the subject, having condoms and the like in our high schools (as well as centers where you can go and get condoms, morning after pill and pads/tampons for free if you're a teen and desperate) and just being well aware of what not to do (sharing needles if doing drugs, for one).

Not demonizing those who have it so that they feel comfortable about sharing that information with partners and people who might be at risk from being exposed also helps.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
One thing I find hysterical, a mate of mine tells me that when he goes to chemist to pick up condoms it's all cool, but if he buys a pregnancy test they automatically wrap it in a brown paper bag. It's like the are saying show the world you are about to have sex, and safe sex at that, walk proud! As opposed to, oops someone went and had sex and didn't use a condom, better cover that up, slink out of here in shame and we will never speak of it again.

Overall though Australian's are pretty good at trying not to do stuff that will kill them, unless it's for fun in which case all bets are off.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Oh, come on, I thought lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse ac sem dapibus, varius ipsum mattis, molestie nunc.

@The Australia discussion; my favorite thing about Australia is Sea Shepherd.

author=Gleason
It was actually a trio of short stories by Harlan Ellison, but yeah.

Look who got an acknowledgement as a "thanks to the works of" on the movie!


Everyone robs the greats...at least they worked it out.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
author=Liberty
Yeah, it helps that we have good health care and are taught about AIDS in our school years - about how it is a disease, how to avoid catching it (and other) diseases, what causes infection and what doesn't (drinking a gallon of saliva - maybe. Kissing someone - no) and the like. And yeah, the bowling reaper, of course.

It's really just being well-educated on the subject, having condoms and the like in our high schools (as well as centers where you can go and get condoms, morning after pill and pads/tampons for free if you're a teen and desperate) and just being well aware of what not to do (sharing needles if doing drugs, for one).

Not demonizing those who have it so that they feel comfortable about sharing that information with partners and people who might be at risk from being exposed also helps.

It's stuff like this that makes me question the USA's system of education. How come everyone else's teens in the world are less stupid and forward-thinking than ours? Why does everything have to be associated with a deity, especially when the good book these nutjobs follow doesn't even support their ascertainments?
author=Ratty524
author=Liberty
Yeah, it helps that we have good health care and are taught about AIDS in our school years - about how it is a disease, how to avoid catching it (and other) diseases, what causes infection and what doesn't (drinking a gallon of saliva - maybe. Kissing someone - no) and the like. And yeah, the bowling reaper, of course.

It's really just being well-educated on the subject, having condoms and the like in our high schools (as well as centers where you can go and get condoms, morning after pill and pads/tampons for free if you're a teen and desperate) and just being well aware of what not to do (sharing needles if doing drugs, for one).

Not demonizing those who have it so that they feel comfortable about sharing that information with partners and people who might be at risk from being exposed also helps.
It's stuff like this that makes me question the USA's system of education. How come everyone else's teens in the world are less stupid and forward-thinking than ours? Why does everything have to be associated with a deity, especially when the good book these nutjobs follow doesn't even support their ascertainments?


I would actually like a clarification on this as well, because from an outsider's perspective the US looks like a god damn train wreck right now. Every week there's some new controversial lawmaking bullshit coming out of there.

I would personally blame it on North American government being a cesspool, but then again I don't have a lot of experience with government dynamics because the Canadian government apparently never fucking changes
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
WARNING THIS POST IS TL;DR, but everything in here is a contributing factor to the decline of the United States. If you really want to know, get comfortable.

Well, that is a long, long history lesson and not one that is easily paraphrased. It's not easy to say where it started, but I think it's fair to go all the way back to the original colonization of America. The genocide of the Native American tribes is not a secret by any stretch of the imagination, but the United States government certainly does its best to bury that fact. How many of you from the U. S. know that Andrew Johnson ordered the extermination of all Native tribes? This was what really drove the plains wars; to make room for expansion, mandates historically went through the army to purge indigenous peoples from the land.

Now, many of you might not be able to connect the dots from genocide of the Native American to modern unrest. Those dots have been well hidden, but a bulb may light for you when I tell you that a government established on such atrocities must necessarily be built on a foundation of secrecy and suppression. And what people don't know is that the systematic genocide of Native American's continues today. There are policies in place designed to prevent Native Americans from learning their native languages, policies that forbid the teaching of Native American culture in school (think how much you know of NA myths and legends, crafts and teachings), and policies in place that forbid practices known to have religious significance to Native American peoples. The last I heard, there are only 60 people in the world that speak the Navajo language, but that was a decade ago, at least. Politicians who claim Native American heritage are systematically ridiculed by the news media. On Native American reservations, 80 percent of women are raped.

Enough of that for now. It's a branch of the main course of this subject. The next group of people we brutally victimized are the African American people. Now, if you are the typical product of the U. S. school system, then you have been led to believe that slavers went to Africa, attacked tribes and kidnapped people to be sold as slaves. This is patently false. As early as the late 1700s slavers were landing on African shores and meeting with chieftains. For a price, usually gold and jewels, these chieftains would sell members of their tribes, generally undesirables, such as people with birth defects, albinism, twins, various congenital illnesses, or trouble makers. What your history books did tell you was that the people who purchased these slaves strictly enforced illiteracy, forbidding reading and education in general. Those who were well read were usually killed.

It is on the backs of the Native American and African people that the United States was built. If you think any of this has been abolished, you are sadly mistaken. History books have been written to tell a fanciful fairy tale of righteous northerners standing up to throw off the shackles of slavery. This is so much bullshit. The Union had begun to pass laws regulating state and municipal commerce, which was what piqued the ire of the South. This led to protest and general complaints against intrusive government. In response, the Union began to issue laws that absolved state powers and forced them to abandon individual rules of law. This led to a vote of secession, which stayed at a deadlock for several years.

In fact, the question of slavery didn't come up until well after the war began. Why? Because Abraham Lincoln began to toy with the idea of freeing slaves provided they rise up against their Southern masters. In fact, Lincoln was hoping to resolve the war without freeing the slaves. Our government, at the time, fairly unanimously believed that slavery was essential to the U. S. economy.

The U. S. in general always resented the freeing of the slaves. This is another thing you didn't know if you didn't look beyond your schooling for your education. School books often don't talk about the lynchings. They don't talk about how a pregnant woman tried to call the police when a mob murdered her family was hung upside down and lit on fire, her baby cut from her stomach and stomped to death (no arrests). They don't talk about the Rosewood massacre of 1923, and I'm sure none of you have heard of it, when white people went through an all black Florida community and systematically murdered the entire population. They don't speak of how people in Key West kept slaves well into the 1930s.

Now, consider all of the above. This is what's known, and has been suppressed by the U. S. government. Imagine what they successfully managed to hide. How many of you would be disillusioned if I told you John Smith never even met Pocahontas? It's a fairy tale. It never happened, and neither did the first Thanksgiving.

Of course, what nobody touches on, are either too afraid, or too indoctrinated to mention, is that this was all based upon Christian values. Our U. S. ancestors believed that the word of god entitled them to take slaves, steal land, and slaughter anyone who got in their ways. You can open the Bible at random and 9 of 10 times, you'll find a passage justifying slavery, genocide, rape (because women are described in the Bible as being subhuman), and homophobia. Christ describes how a slave that does not obey his master sins in the eyes of god.

So tell me, does all of this make any of you proud to be an American? Let's fast forward to today, where 4 million migrant workers are stuck in fields at 4 dollars an hour, the women forced to have sex with the white foremen, the workers beaten, all under the threat of deportation (uneducated, never knowing that such abuses entitle them under U. S. law to asylum and immunity from deportation). The African slave made ten cents an hour. At the end of the week, he could buy all the food he needed and had lodgings provided by his master (under deplorable conditions). What will 4 dollars an hour today buy you? The same, maybe? Do you really think we don't have slaves in the U. S.?

Now, this isn't a nuts and bolts of "why". I haven't discussed government secrets and the philosophical principal of government growth. I'll touch on that here, saying that no matter a government's origins, all governments will become totalitarian. The reason is because as a government grows and the population expands, the governments hold on power and control over the people diminishes, necessitating stricter regulation. As such, all governments will eventually become totalitarian police states. This, obviously, is a discussion in and of itself. This is merely the basic principle of the life-cycle of a government. Consider our government's current level of spying. The NSA has become so obsessed with knowing every detail of our lives, that if a regular person acted like them, he or she would be permanently committed as criminally insane. This irrational obsession is one of the signs of fatal over-regulation. Great Britain and Australia are showing symptoms, also. Spain and Greece have gone over the bend (in those countries, they are no longer hiding their disdain for civil rights and police may now murder protesters without fear of repudiation).

Now, before we move on, knowing the above, would you want your people educated? Now, our Founding Fathers understood the nature of government only too well. They knew that a true government cannot naturally remain liberal. The government they built was their ideal, but they wanted it to have longevity. Democracies historically don't work, and they had to add elements of a republic in order to make it functional. The key to maintaining their free government was the 2nd Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. No, it wasn't for hunting deer. You see, they wrote a legal manifesto that clearly spelled out our rights: (1)free speech, religion, petition, assembly, and press, (3) The right not to be subservient to the military--the quartering of soldiers, (4) the right to be secure in person and property, (5) the right to not be forced to bear witness against ourselves, (6) the right to a speedy trial (7) by ones peers, (8) the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, (9) that another person's rights don't negate yours, and (10) that the federal government shall not be able to directly influence your life. Now, why was (2) the right to have weapons so important? Because they felt that it was the people, the civilians of the colonies that secured our freedom from the British, and that no matter the era, the common man should have the right to carry a gun, and that no matter the era, should our government ever be run by a tyrant, we should have the right kill him, unless, of course, he leaves upon being asked nicely (which he probably won't meaning the only likely way to remove him would be to blow his head off). This design came courtesy of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the key to maintaining a free government lay in the common man's power to violently resist a standing army, an army being that which carries the might of the offending tyrannical government.

Moving on. Our education system is in shambles. Only three fifths of a percent of the national budget goes to the eduction system, an education system that has been so over-regulated it is actually detrimental. Yes, going to a U. S. public school will make you more stupid.

The U. S. is imperialist. Our nation survives by conquest. What it doesn't have, it takes. If somebody else owns what the U. S. wants and won't sell, they'll simply kill him. They bully and intimidate their own people to submit the will of the government.

Go here for an example of the true face of the U. S. government. A doctor can be imprisoned for informing patients of the actual medical consequences of exposure to oil, its fumes, and the contaminants that come from fracking.

Our economy is thriving, but unemployment continues to go up. This is because all of our jobs are in China. Here's what John Angelos has to say about that. So, what do you think? Do you think educated people would put up with a system like this for so long? We still believe that Betsy Ross created the American Flag, that Pocahontas' tribe sat down with settlers for a feast (if that had actually happened, what do you think our relations with Native American people throughout history would have been like?). The people of the U. S. are fed utter bullshit like it's the truth. Instead of reading about Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, or Hellen Keller, all we concern ourselves with is Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. We totally ignore history, and we totally ignore the fact that Wall Street is robbing us blind, but flash photos of kittens and you have our undivided attentions.

We are uneducated because we've been over-saturated with everything that distracts from what's important. This is because the government knows that in order to be proud of America, you have to be uneducated. America is a shameful nation with a shameful history. It is a land bereft of moral fiber and glutted on arrogance and ego.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
That's why I watch KERA World. So many good things you'll never hear on a conservative network.
Piano makes me want to move to Canada...not that they're perfect either but.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
I read that whole thing, piano. I kind of suspected as much, but one bit doesn't add up with me:
Enough of that for now. It's a branch of the main course of this subject. The next group of people we brutally victimized are the African American people. Now, if you are the typical product of the U. S. school system, then you have been led to believe that slavers went to Africa, attacked tribes and kidnapped people to be sold as slaves. This is patently false. As early as the late 1700s slavers were landing on African shores and meeting with chieftains. For a price, usually gold and jewels, these chieftains would sell members of their tribes, generally undesirables, such as people with birth defects, albinism, twins, various congenital illnesses, or trouble makers. What your history books did tell you was that the people who purchased these slaves strictly enforced illiteracy, forbidding reading and education in general. Those who were well read were usually killed.
One of the famous slave rebellions, The Stono Rebellion, involved slaves that were likely trained in the militia or at least war veterans from Angola. If the slave trade was so discriminant about who was put on their ships, how would traders let these guys slide in?

EDIT @ Gleason: Wasn't Canada founded by somewhat of the same thing?
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I never said the slave trade was discriminate about who they put on their ships. The tribal chiefs decided who was sold. They wanted to get rid of their undesirables, but slave traders would want to make sure there were enough strong backs to make it worth their while. The trade of humans was and still is a business, however horrific it may be, with its own risks.
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
There were clan wars in Africa. They could easily buy strong warriors as they were hold hostages by another clan. But I don't think its clear one way or other. Any past (and most of the current ones) western interaction with Africa was a dirty mass filling ocean with loathe and blood. I don't have to remind you about colonization taking place in nineteenth century and its result which stays till nowadays.
If Slavers did trade with Chiefs it was for the reason they felt too superior to natives, that they refused to hunt them down personally.
If I were living in past centuries I would always advise to let Africa live its way (It's not possible anymore as we damaged it far beyond regrets).