Oh no but see, the Soviet Union was a transitional dictatorship because of a complicated and sometimes heated argument between Lenin and European Marxists that my government badly interpreted for me when I was a child, and definitely not because a greedy Georgian murdered his friends and seized power. It was real socialism because that's just how socialism works in the real world. Not that you'd know anything about how the real world works. :smug:

Lenin left a kind of last will where he didn't say who he wanted in charge, except he did say not Stalin in particular.

Not that I think Lenin was all that great, but I think he would have been a step up.

Also yeah, people don't know anything about anything. Seriously the understanding of history most people reflect is shockingly poor.

yeah, well Marx also said that "it's that it is better to cast your seed in the belly of a whore than spill it on the ground". I hate it when people cherry pick the Bible

I'd also like to point out that Jesus was a strong supporter of the Second Commandment--OH SNAP, what a goddman hypocrite

ftfy

I didn’t understand this post at first, but apparently many people believe this quote is in the bible. I guess he’s drawing a direct connection between people who misattribute everything bad to socialism and semi-Christians who believe asinine things and resent when their betters quote the bible at them.

something like that, I didn't mean to dismiss your quote from Marx and just wanted to post some non-sense. And yeah that's an oft-misquoted "passage" from the bible.

Although the actual quote it is probably a corrupted version of is almost as amusing.

the real world is you getting a job and shoving it. no alternatives *****.

god used to be rad. now he's all lame and like "i love you"

God, whenever BC: I don’t like it when people exploit the vulnerable instead of helping them, like society and I expect.

“christians”, 2019: don’t masturbate.

The passage y’all are talking about was the hebrew pension plan for widows, not even joking. Childless widows would get a kid out of the family who would grow up to support her. Dude was using her to get off instead.

Certainly for us from prudish cultures the sexual aspect of it takes prominence, but once you understand the context it’s pretty clear how it generalizes.

incomprehensible

Yes, I know it’s incomprehensible to you. That was the point.

It always bothered me that christians would use this narrative to speak against jerking off. God was mad at Onan because he was cheating on his wife, boning his sister in law, but pulling out so as not to have a kid, as was his responsibility for the reason you espoused. It was also meant to continue the name and family of the deceased brother. The child was, for all purposes, the dead guys kid and heir. Onan likely wanted his brother's estate, so he avoided fathering his brother's heir but still banged his bros wife whenver his old lady wasn't in the mood.

"I dunno man she ain't getting pregnant. Better try again in the morning."

What he did was a little bit worse than "lol don't touch urself"

Evangelicalism, or how to read historical texts with no understanding of historiography.

I wish I wasn't constituted as skeptical as I am, since being Catholic would be neat with its actual intellectual tradition.

Oh. I see what you did there.

^ ya something like that, Steven.

The Hebrews didn’t have any ****in 401(k)s or Roth IRAs. There was no planned retirement, you worked until you were too old or inform to work and then your kids supported you. Old people without kids had nobody to support them. If a woman got widowed without kids, she wasn’t gonna remarry, so she was doomed to die. Alone. In the wilderness.

So this is how it worked for the ancient Hebrews. If you’re a widow, and you don’t have any kids, your dead husband’s siblings have to give you one. This means sex, yes. But this also means child support. This also means the kid is legally recognized as your dead husband’s, and will in the future exclusively support you, even though his brother was the biological father and even paid for the kid to be raised and for you to survive in the meantime.

Onan didn’t want to pay child support. Or he wanted his brothers estate. Or whatever. What we know for sure was that he didn’t want to sire a kid. He did, however, want to sleep with his hot sister in law. So Onan pulled out.

Today, we’d consider this a wacky arrangement. It’s sex with your sister in law. But we have welfare and our women aren’t chattel. Our society is fundamentally different. To them it wasn’t about sex, it was about supporting your family (even if family by marriage) in a host of ways, including the biological. Our culture descends from a stodgy and sexually embarrassed island of social darwinists so there is very little about this passage that makes sense to us beyond the spilling seed part.

So to the ancient Hebrew, it was exploiting a vulnerable person, a family member no less, to satisfy his personal desires at the expense of their financial and biological needs. And for that, Onan was damned. The passage isn’t really about sex at all, in a modern version it would be written about guys like the Sears executives stealing pension money.

time to set up a Gofundme to pay for air traffic controller gasoline bills for driving to work?

what could possibly go wrong

Trump running the country like he runs his businesses: tons of new debt, refusing to pay loyal employees, and having no respect from anyone but morons.

Don't forget the suspicious mob ties and money laundering

giving the libs what they want to own the libs

I like how Trump caved literally right after Roger Stone got arrested. Distract the base with weakness so they don’t notice all of the crimes.

It seems to be working, too.

Apparently 175 gigabytes of data of Kremlin-related documents and communications have been released. Maybe something interesting will turn up?

Whoever leaked it, face down in a lake.

Whoever published it, face down in a street.

Interestingly, it wasn't Wikileaks that published it. I wonder why not, I thought they were the wiki for leaks...

Lemmiwinks, I love Lemmiwinks

Wikileaks doesn't publish material critical of the Russian government.

Odds are if you find anything relevant for you in any way, then you live close enough to Putin for him to murder you.

OK, so then either Putin is capable of murdering everyone in the United States, or else Krelmin policy is irrelevant to Americans in any way.

(The first statement, of course, being obviously true of Russian heads of state since at least the 60's...)

At any rate, interesting ≠ "relevant for me" (what does that mean?)

(Sorry, I'm a little tired, I think I wrongly assumed you were using the word "you" literally. Also, maybe you were speaking tongue in cheek, since Putin is known to murder people across the globe.)

Please learn how to edit a post.

As soon as I'm over 9000.

I couldn't find anything which suggests official Kremlin communication was leaked, nor are any of the leaks new. The website simply collected a bunch of old leaks, and most of them sound like state-allied Russian corporations, Facebook messages, etc. The group's leader was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to two years in prison:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB

It sounds like things which show the private sector of Russians operations. Probably won't have any information about hacking activities against the U.S., anyhow.

The article you linked on second look seems to be drumming this up to be more than it is. Note phrases like this:



Basically they have no evidence it was leaked in response, but hey, they're totally allowed to share some hearsay that people believe that. It's a completely tenuous link. But yeah if you want to comb through 2014 documents from the Russian PM.. be Russia's guest.

I don't think I ever said anything about the 2016 election hacking. That's not what I meant by "interesting". From the article, the new leaks seem mostly to have to do with the Kremlin's expansionist wars. Maybe it feels like a long time ago now, but this is the kind of geopolitics that used to be on the radar of American administrations.

I'm aware, that's why I quoted the article. I wonder if there's any useful information for American intelligence, or if it's all common knowledge stuff for them.

Oh, well that's probably an interesting question, but I think that line was more the NYT and/or its sources editorializing to politicize what looks to me like part of ongoing efforts by Russian transparency activists to weaken the propaganda efforts of their government. And yeah, I'm sure much of it has been published before, though it's telling that Wikileaks previously refused to help them do so.

At any rate, I don't think this is particularly interesting news, though it could be in the future if something interesting turns up that will get published somewhere, once somebody dives into the data and finds it. That said, I think Russia's expansionist wars have sort of fallen off of the radar of the 24-hour cable news cycle, last I checked.