ABigGuy4U
8d ago
"Beloved, believe not every spirit..." - Even if you are directly contacted by something higher, there’s no trustworthy way, from mere human perspective, to check its credentials, whether it is God or even genuinely stands for God.
A difficult problem, to be sure. On an unrelated note, do you have any thoughts on whether Jesus Christ came in the flesh, or only in spirit?
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
If you normally eat an unhealthy fiberless diet, a large serving of beans is going to hit a lot harder.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
I think it’s just a joke about how servile Russians can be in the face of hierarchical authority, and how superstitious they are. It’s like how the whole jam-boy thing got so far because it sounds like the kind of hilariously unjust and vaguely weird stuff colonial authorities often did.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
I think a mature civilization would conduct a large-scale military purge after losing a war to some quasi-literate goatherders with AKs and flip-flops backed by nobody after spending over $2 trillion on the war.
Kek you would think so, but they don’t call Afghanistan “the Graveyard of Empires” for nothing.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
China wants to LARP as Burgerland in WWII, and enter the war after everyone is already exhausted from fighting each other for years. Iran isn’t even going to really get started until after midterms in November.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
There’s a good chance you would see significant ground combat in Vietnam, Korea, or any of the island nations of Southeast Asia, plus your regular island-hopping to secure supply lines and airfields. Probably would be a lot of ground fighting with India too, but I imagine the Indians could mostly handle that themselves.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
500 tomahawks a year is terrible too. That’s five months of Russian-level Ukraine war expenditure or about four hours of a war with China.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
It was only won if America was the British Empire and could run a colonial police occupation for the next 80 years.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
There’s also the whole scandal with Lockheed trying to prevent Ukraine from producing their own PATRIOT systems, because Lockheed knows the Ukrainians could do it for one tenth the cost.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
On a literal level yes, he made a deal with the devil and got screwed. I’m talking about thematically.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
It’s a bit tinfoil hat, but I suspect many of them are completely sheep-dipped actors.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
If I was in that car with my girlfriend, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood not in that automobile cabin and then me saying, “OK, we're going to Applebee’s honey, I know it’s that time of the month, don't worry.”
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Myth Busters is full of shit. Hathcock used a fifty caliber Browning machine gun that he had modified into a sniper rifle. The bullet is the size of a man’s thumb, it could easily penetrate the layered glass of a rifle scope. They didn’t even bother to research that so they used a 30-06 round for the test.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
I think the vast majority of anecdotes you hear from actors are probably made up.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Not just the Cold War angle as a whole. I mean the insidious messaging that making pacts with strange extra-terrestrial creatures was worth it in order to win the twilight struggle. That’s horse shit. Eisenhower’s treaty document with the Pleadians (still in a vault underneath Edwards Air Force Base) is no less a “contract with hell” than the pre-reconstruction constitution that William Garrison burned.
And of course it’s Netflix, so there’s three, count ‘em three inter-species “love scenes”. They’re trying to normalize those alien harlots stealing our human boys. You just know she’s sucking out their brains too, that’s how she got so good at chess.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
The entire LA quartet is good. Skip the Black Dahlia, it’s the weakest and doesn’t have too much to do with the other three. Start with the Big Nowhere. The Underworld USA trilogy is also good, but it runs out of steam a bit by Blood’s a Rover. Perfida sucks, avoid. The editors ruined that entire second trilogy by cutting out its creepy emotional center.
LA Confidential is such a weird book. It’s like noir-horror Lord of the Rings. I wish there were more Ellroy readers around here. I wish there were more Ellroy readers at all.
None of them really capture Bond’s attitude to violence right. Maybe Brosnan, but his Bond is very guarded and opaque so it’s hard to tell. Physically, Timothy Dalton, he’s the spitting image of the portrait Fleming commissioned of Bond. In terms of his complicated relationship with women being closest to the books, your best bets are Casino Royale, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Secret Service. Many here will say From Russia With Love but I’ve never liked it for some reason. Ironically, I think the movie Bonds do really nail how book Bond would have interacted with a female superior: cold professionalism shot through with a hurt little boy looking for his mother.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
Giving someone a billion dollars will turn them into a demonic asshole a lot quicker than any dark magic.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
Given that Nikki’s body is covered head to toe in bizarre inscriptions and sigils by the end, I’m not sure how people don’t pick up on the fact there is a literal aspect to the movie in addition to the metaphorical one.
The James Bond from the books was a lot sadder. The violent and sexual wish fulfillment is still there, but Fleming was a lot more realistic about the consequences. He understands how sad Bond’s life and failure to connect with women are. In the books, the girl doesn’t just conveniently disappear at the beginning of the next movie. Fleming actually goes into exactly why the relationship ended up failing, usually because Bond is an emotional cripple. Sometimes because a hunky American Marine stole her heart, the wanker. The fact that he has no wife or children at 40 weighs on him.
And book Bond is just as effective a killer as his movie counterpart, but he takes a lot less pleasure in it. One of the books opens with ten pages of Bond brooding over a cartel sicario he had just had to stab. This man was trying to gut him like a pig, but taking his life still really bothers Bond.
Maybe this is because the books were written by a real womanizing killer.
Do you mean the recent scrape with Pakistan or something else?
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