I used to think the end of America was going to be the worst thing that could happen. Now I'm just hoping my country (Canada) can get out of the way of what has to be the biggest own-goals in history. I mean, how is Trump even allowed out of a dementia ward, let alone in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth? Why did so many Americans think he was somehow better than someone who can actually string coherent sentences together?

Ah yes, the Basil Fawltification of America, but now the Major is the President, and Manuel is being shivved in El Salvador.

All the billionaires are mentally ill. It's not a natural human condition, and clearly leads in most cases to monomania, megalomania and some degree of sociopathy. They come to believe the size of their bank accounts makes them into gods.

It's why I think we should ban the concept entirely. After the first $100 million, maybe adjusted every ten years for inflation, you don't get anything more. Sure, maybe you don't become the big innovator, but honestly, a good deal of the time after the initial invention (if they actually invented anything at all, which with Zuckerberg is debatable), it normally ends up in some sort of Edison's lab scenario, where the big rich "inventor" is paying actual researchers to create things that the big rich "inventor" can claim as their own.

In the ultra wealthy simply become enablers of tyrants. Think Crassus in the First Triumvirate, an equal on paper, but in reality a background figure whose wealth served Caesar and Pompey the Great more than it ever served Crassus himself.

It's been a universal truth since the first days of Unix that root permissions allow unconstrained access to configure, execute, steal and destroy. Still, the fact is that while secured Linux installs are going to make running such an exploit very hard or even nearly impossible with regular user access, not all systems are secured. I've seen people intentionally reduce or remove security rules to get something running, so there are no lack of improperly secured Linux systems out there.

"Nice church you got here, Frankie. It would be a pity if something were to happen to it..."

For me, it drives my guts nuts, so I only have maybe a couple of drinks a year at social occasions. Other than that, I have a near full bottle of Crown Royal rye that I haven't opened in four years.

Apart from the immorality and violations of International Law of annexing the territory of a sovereign state, I imagine actually extracting rare earths in Greenland is going to cost a helluva lot more than the price China can extract and sell rare earths for. The plan seems like the delusional rantings of a narcissist suffering mid-stage dementia....

Hmmm....

Naval invasion of Greenland next, I suppose. "We have to stop Greenland's rare earths from falling into the hands of a country with huge reserves of rare earths!" Christ, even the imperialists who speared the Mexican-American War at least tried for some sort of rational justification.

If Jefferson Davis and the others had swung like Jodl, von Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis later did, and a lengthy period of military government in which all the symbols of slavery and the Confederacy were actively destroyed and an entire generation brought up learning about the evils of the fathers, then maybe. It didn't entirely work in Germany, well at least in East Germany, but I'd argue that the intentions of the Allied Powers was very much not to make the same mistake the Union had made with the Civil War.

Jesus Christ, even use Lost cause names for the war is enough to suggest you're not debating in good faith.

Lincoln sought to restore the Union, that was his primary goal, but the mere fact that he was an abolitionist and he was elected was enough for most of the slave states to secede. The irony of all of that was that there were still a lot of pro-Union people in those states, but for the leaders of the Confederacy, it had everything to do with leaving the Union before the numbers finally stacked up sufficiently against the slave states that all compromises could be swept aside and an amendment pushed through to abolish slavery.

And Lincoln worked very hard during his presidency to abolish slavery, even using patronage to buy the votes of sufficient Representatives to get the 13th Amendment passed.

A zygote is no more a human being than a tumor is. Misrepresenting science to promote a fundamentally religious position is precisely what I'm talking about.

What I, and more importantly my daughters, do with our bodies is none of your fucking business. None of us believe in your God, and we refused to be bound by what you think your god is telling you to do.

Hey, let's shift the goalposts, heck, let's move the goalposts to some other field entirely.

At some point they'll just start making visitors log in to their social media accounts from kiosks, and giving them boot anyways.

Lesson to all non-Americans, don't go to the United States.

So your argument is "These things I believe in because God says so can be defended, somehow, by not saying God says so, but ultimately, we are founded on God says so..."

Talk about incoherent. And economics led to the scientific revolution, not Christianity, at least not more than Islam (where a good deal of knowledge of medicine and optics came to Christianity through).

Your badly concealed argument still boils down to "God says so." Because no, you can't make an argument against reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights by anything other than invoking your God. I don't believe in your God, or in your historical revisionism either. Christian Supremacism, like white supremacism, is an evil doctrine used by those who want power over others.

Apart from equivocating over 19th and 20th century racism in the Democratic party and ignoring Nixon's Southern Strategy which inverted that curve, the Civil War was explicitly fought over slavery. You're just repeating the same Lost Cause myth that the Union allowed the former Confederate states to spread. The Confederate leaders made their reasons plainly known for secession, and it had everything to do with slavery.