carl retweeted
I’m a fully pro a wrestler and am an a actual pizza chef
This quoted post is unavailable.
carl retweeted
When 4'11 Freshman Dru Joyce shut the crowd up, drilling 7 straight threes to save LeBron’s high school championship.
carl retweeted
Iran Is Morally Superior To The United States
Iran isn’t continuously bombing and invading countries around the world, toppling governments, circling the globe with hundreds of military bases, targeting civilian populations with siege warfare and brandishing nuclear weapons at its enemies in the name of securing planetary domination. Only the United States is.
Reading by Tim Foley.
carl retweeted
Iran is better than the United States. The United States is worse than Iran.
This is true not because Iran is especially good, but because the United States is especially evil.
Iran isn’t blanketing a major metropolis with military explosives, killing over a thousand people including hundreds of children. The United States is doing this with its partner in crime Israel.
Iran isn’t continuously bombing and invading countries around the world, toppling governments, circling the globe with hundreds of military bases, targeting civilian populations with siege warfare and brandishing nuclear weapons at its enemies in the name of securing planetary domination. Only the United States is.
The US empire is the single most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. No one else comes anywhere remotely close. Not Iran. Not anybody. Every government in the world is morally superior to the most evil government, and the most evil government is the United States.
Whenever I say this I get US empire apologists going “We’re only the ones fighting the wars and dropping the bombs because we happen to be the ones with the power to do so!”
But that’s false. The US isn’t the world’s most vicious government because it happens to be the most powerful, it’s the most powerful government because it’s the most vicious. It’s the power structure which was willing to do whatever it takes to rule the world, no matter how profoundly evil.
Genocides. Starvation sanctions. Nuclear brinkmanship. Imperialist extraction. The deliberate creation of failed states and humanitarian catastrophes. Policies designed to keep entire regions in a continuous state of division and strife. The United States and the globe-spanning empire structured around it have inflicted depravities upon our species which cry out to the heavens for vengeance. If you could truly comprehend the scale of the suffering it has created over the years, even for a second, you would never stop screaming.
Another objection I’ll encounter when I make these observations is “Well, I’d rather live in the US than Iran!”
And it says so much about the western worldview that people think this is an argument. Sure it’s probably nicer to live in the United States than Iran, especially now, and certainly ever since the US has been deliberately strangling the Iranian economy with the explicitly stated goal of making its citizenry so miserable they wage a civil war against their government.
But it’s so revealing that westerners see someone saying Iran is better than the United States and think it’s a statement about where they personally would prefer to live, because it shows how completely invisible US warmongering is in their worldview. Washington’s acts of mass military slaughter simply do not count as immoral or abusive behavior in their eyes, because they are being inflicted on foreigners overseas. So they automatically assume the comparison is asking which country would make your feelings feel nicer to live in as an individual.
The fact that the US government happens to export the majority of its abusiveness to other countries outside its own borders doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical, it just means the people bearing the brunt of its savagery happen to live in other places. Their lives don’t matter any less than American lives, and only a warped, American supremacist worldview would feel otherwise.
The US government is quantifiably morally inferior to the Iranian government. It is quantifiably more tyrannical, more murderous, more destructive, and more megalomaniacal. It is the very last power structure on earth that should have any say in who leads Iran and how the Iranians ought to conduct their affairs. It is not morally qualified to be making those decisions.
carl retweeted
The Jetson ONE personal air vehicle costs $128K.
You can fly it without a pilot license after a quick 5-day training course.
Needs an $8,000 deposit. has backup batteries, a ballistic parachute, and radar that handles auto-landing. top speed 102 km/h
carl retweeted
You are not describing history.
You are describing the American bedtime story about history.
Let me remind you what actually happened on our soil, not in your textbooks.
North Vietnam did not "invade" South Vietnam.
Vietnam was one nation that foreign powers divided on paper and expected us to accept the way a prisoner accepts the shape of his cell.
There is no "North Vietnamese people" and "South Vietnamese people."
There is only one Vietnamese people separated by a imaginary line drawn by outsiders.
You talk about 1954 as if the partition was destiny.
It was not.
The Geneva Accords mandated free and fair elections in 1956, so the Vietnamese could reunify peacefully.
Eisenhower’s own intelligence admitted Hồ Chí Minh would win by 80 percent.
That is why the United States blocked the elections.
That is why your puppet regime was installed.
That is why the country was carved in two to prevent democracy, not defend it.
You call our president Hồ Chí Minh a "brutal scourge."
Your CIA called him "the George Washington of Vietnam."
The only thing dangerous about him was that he wanted a Vietnam not ruled by France, Japan, or America.
But let us talk about the Gulf of Tonkin, since you think "the rest is history."
There was no second attack.
There was no assault on the Turner Joy.
There was only American radar chasing ghosts in a storm, and a White House searching for the excuse it needed to unleash a war it had already decided to fight.
McNamara admitted it.
The NSA declassified the evidence.
Your own navy officers testified the incident never happened.
Yet from that lie came three million Vietnamese dead, eight million tons of bombs, Agent Orange burned into our soil and our DNA, entire provinces turned into moonscapes.
And you still recite this story as if the United States came to rescue us from ourselves.
Let me be very clear:
America did not enter Vietnam to "help" South Vietnam.
America entered Vietnam to prevent the independence of a country that refused to kneel to Western power.
The people who fought the United States were not foreign invaders.
They were farmers defending the same land their ancestors defended for over 2,000 years against the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Mongols, the Ming, the Qing, the French, and the Japanese.
We were not fighting for communism.
We were fighting for Vietnam.
And we won.
That is the part your version always forgets.
You lost a war you cannot psychologically accept losing, so you rewrite it as a morality play where America tried to save a "good" Vietnam from a "bad" one.
There was no good Vietnam and bad Vietnam.
There was only Vietnam
And the empire that tried to break it.
The rest is not history.
The rest is denial.
The United States military entered Vietnam to help south Vietnamese from the brutal scourges of communism in north Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, who decided to invade and overtake south Vietnam. Initially, U.S. involvement was limited to military aid and advisory support following the partition of Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The pivotal moment came in August 1964, when two U.S. destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported being attacked by North Vietnamese forces. And the rest is history.
carl retweeted
Never forget when Hank Hill struggled to remove the cap on a can of WD-40, he grabbed a smaller can of WD-40 to loosen it 😭
carl retweeted
Breaking Bad ended 12 years ago today.
On the DVD, there’s an alternate ending where Bryan Cranston wakes up as Hal from Malcolm in the Middle — and the whole series was just a nightmare.
carl retweeted
Any time the public is having a white hot emotional reaction to a scary event and demanding the state take action to protect them, that's precisely when it's most important to resist the pull toward emotional hysterics and think rationally. We learned this lesson with 9/11, we got another reminder after October 7, and it looks like the lesson is being repeated again with Charlie Kirk.
We're already seeing many authoritarian agendas rolled out in response to Kirk's assassination. Everyone feeding into the emotional frenzy of the moment is manufacturing consent for these tyrannical escalations and shoring up more control over what you're allowed to say, express, and think.
Calm yourselves down. Find your inner clarity. Start thinking clearly about what's going on here. Do you really want the government to increase its control over what kinds of political speech are and are not allowed? What kinds of political assembly and expression are and are not permissible? Will you still feel the same way when the other party is in power? Are you really comfortable signing away your freedom of thought and expression, forever? Whose benefit do you think that would be for? Yours?
Get a hold of yourselves. This isn't the time to for blind rage and sobbing. This is the time for thinking critically. This is the time to look around with clear eyes and keen alertness. They're pulling something over on you. Stop playing along with it.
carl retweeted
If someone’s not mourning the death of Robert Redford in a manner that’s consistent with your views, make sure you set up a database, call their employer, and get them fired.
carl retweeted
This scene from Little Miss Sunshine still hits like the first time. Wildly, Alan Arkin almost didn’t get the role he won an Oscar for because the directors thought “he was too virile.” He called it the most flattering rejection he ever received.
carl retweeted
Fuck your feelings. But my feelings are precious.
Violence is never ok. But people I don't like should die.
Free speech is when I can say what I want without consequences. But your words have consequences.
You should respect the dead. But I can mock them.
Cancel culture is wrong. Except when it's used on people I disagree with with.
When you do it, it's wrong. When I do it, it's right.
carl retweeted
Let me get this straight.
Charlie Kirk was allowed to say whatever racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ BS he wanted, because of free speech, but we aren’t allowed to say anything negative about Kirk for fear of retribution from Republicans, because we aren’t allowed free speech.
