I was declawing my cat with the shoes that I wear inside the house and accidentally spilled milk from a bar all over my roommate’s homework that he was looking for answers on yahoo answers for. Should I blot it up with the silk or cashmere scarf?
Need answer fast.
You own silk and cashmere? Capitalist! The secret police will be over for you in ten minutes. Ten minutes later, neighbors eat your cat.
Ah, I do love the classic posts. It’s got everything:
We should collect these somewhere, just so we can compare who did it with the most style.
If I remember the timetable correctly we’ve got a few more days of Commissar before he starts flaming people in the wrong forum, gets warned by the mods, flames the mods and accuses them of being ignorant partisan fascists and then gets banned. There will follow a 50% chance of a sock popping up to tell us that we only banned him because we were unable to best him in honest debate.
Serious questions for the OP:
[ol][li]Have you renounced your Belarusian citizenship?[/li][li]If you have not renounced such citizenship, how did you manage to avoid the military service obligation on your return trip?[/li][li]If you have not renounced such citizenship, how have you managed to travel into and out of the country without a Belarusian passport?[/li][li]If you do have a Belarusian passport, why do you insist that you are a soviet citizen?[/ol][/li]
My next batch of serious questions will depend on your answers to these.
Do you seriously expect us to believe a cite to the propaganda arm of the evil empire? Everyone knows that that website was specifically created to blind the sheeple to the communist paradises of the world.
Here are some examples of how healthy the people in Belarus are.
As long as you weren’t watching a Mel Gibson movie, you’re golden.
Yes. You will believe it.
Or else.
Todays topic is North Korea. A feather in the cap of communism or a link to medieval times? Only Commissar knows for sure.
Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
You saw?!
Off to the Gulag with you!
Capitalism slept with your best friend while you were out of town.
So to recap (yet again), I’ve made two points.[ol]
[li]Belarus is a giant stain on the human rights record of modern Europe.[/li][li]I understand why you might not know this because they suppress anyone attempting to talk about it in Belarus.[/li][/ol]Your rebuttal has been:[ol]
[li]The US and other countries have state run agencies, such as the Post Office.[/li][li]State run agencies are not inherently a bad thing.[/li][/ol]See how those don’t line up?
Yes, clearly I’ve doomed my argument by linking to that known hot bed of bias, BBC News.
You know, at least Nigeria promised me $10 million for going out to visit.
No, you’re wrong yet again. Most governments are not managed by one individual. That’s a dictatorship like what Lukashenko is doing in Belarus. Most governments have a series of checks and balances designed explicitly to prevent a single individual or small group of individuals from running the country.
If you don’t believe me just watch how little is going to be accomplished in the US in the next two years. Obama can’t do much without any help from Congress. If you prefer a parliament style try and picture what Harper could do in Canada without any support.
I really, really, really want to like North Korea. Jong Il is just hilarious. From the way he dresses to his obsession with basketball to his claim that he hit 7 holes in one on his first try golfing, the guy is so batshit insane I can’t tell if he’s serious or just the world’s greatest performance artist. Then there’s the satellite he claims North Korea put into orbit which continually broadcasts hymns of praise about him and his father. Which every other country on earth is just too primitive to detect.
And the Ryugyong Hotel is awesome. First they build a giant concrete mess to be the world’s greatest hotel, but run out of money. Then they photoshop it out of every picture, despite the fact that it casts a huge shadow over everything and claim that it never happened. Finally they get enough money to put windows on one side because, “everyone knows you only window one side first to see if you like it before doing the other side.” Suddenly the hotel is back in pictures, and they deny they ever photoshopped it out, claiming that it always looked that way.
If it wasn’t for the whole starving his people into the stone age, kidnapping people from other countries, and working hard on trying to nuke Japan, Jong Il would be my favorite head of state on the planet.
Lies and Slander! :mad: There were never any such thing as gulags. Those were just perfectly peaceful summer camps that got a little out of hand. You filthy Americans send your children to summer camps all the time. Is same thing in Russia.
I’d like to see answers to these as well.
I would love to see answers to these qvestions, comrade.
This may shed some light on some of those questions.
I think you’re missing his point. The argument he’s trying to make isn’t that nationalized entities are inherently worrying, but instead that it is important for the press to, among other things, report objectively on the government, so the people actually know what is going on. In order to report objectively on the government, it’s important that the press have a level of independence from the government, because sometimes the press will uncover government waste or misdeeds, or might have information disproving a claim the government makes. If the state controls and runs the media, the risk exists that they’ll suppress stories like that, because obviously the government doesn’t want to be criticized. That’s why, in the west, those media outlets that are state owned or state supported, like the BBC or PBS, make sure to be governed and controlled independently of the government, so that they can maintain objectivity. And even in those cases, you have people criticizing the BBC and PBS accusing them of bias.
Interestingly, all of the Belarussians and Ukrainians I know personally (not many, admittedly, but I live in a small city, not a large metropolis) tell me they’re Belarussian or Ukrainian, not Soviet. Some of these people are even old enough (i.e. “over 40”) to have grown to adulthood before the breakup of the Soviet Union, so it’s not as if they simply don’t remember the USSR.
Are you talking about China here? If so, you’re 17 different shades of stupid.
You believe that BBC News is an unbiased source of information? Really? My, my, you are naive, my friend…
Look, I’ve been using BBC.com for my primary news source for many years now. I like it a lot; it’s global in scope, quickly updated, relatively detailed, and provides a nice overview of what’s happening at any given time. One thing it most certainly is NOT is unbiased.
BBC has a very pronounced pro-NATO, pro-capitalism, pro-election, anti-socialism, anti-authoritarian bend. Read a couple articles, and this quickly becomes apparent. A couple examples:
(1) You will almost never see a neutral article about a socialist nation on BBC. Most articles are openly critical and full of allegations made by Westerners… I have seen articles about China that had nothing to do with human rights but still managed to end with a paragraph or two criticizing its human rights records as viewed by Western organizations. Interestingly enough, these organizations often criticize the US and UK, as well. Those allegations don’t make it into articles about the US and UK.
(2) Similarly, articles about nations that the BBC does not like tend to include a lot of derogatory language. For example, it will often slip in the phrase “hermit kingdom” when talking about North Korea. Clearly, this is an opinion-based label that does nothing to add to the story other than to insult the nation. Some people (including yours truly) like to call the US “the Empire.” I have never seen the BBC slip this phrase in when discussing the US.
(3) My favorite example: the BBC will never, ever refer to Myanmar as Myanmar. Instead, it will always use the colonial name “Burma.” If refusing to call a nation by its current name because you hate its government is not an expression of bias and partisanship, I don’t know what is…