Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
I appreciate Metallica but I don't know whats so special about them, that style of thrash metal was already being done on a much more advanced level by bands like Razor at that time, so if you had any personal disagreements with Metallica it seems historically it would have been quite easy to drop them.
As I said I don't mind them, personally they are not in my list of favorite thrash bands, but they are also not in my list of sucky bands, they are competent and accomplished musicians. I just felt anyone shouldn't have felt much emotionality ditching Metallica for whatever reasons as at that time other bands were already playing far more advanced thrash metal.
Yeah, people with botox pumped lips, pink tops, and sporty fancy wear. Basically the cream of the commercial listener who understands exactly zero of the musical substance, but is there, because ads were aired on TikTok.
Faith is not without a sense of humor.
Btw, perhaps you may not know that there's this crossover looks now - a mix of black-metal and hiphop hoodies, and all the KPop adopted this writing for their pikachu songs.
I think they've got some ineffable qualities, and frankly there's lots of other genres where people might decide to give them a listen...
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
Different styles. Slayer is more "history of death metal" thrash, Metallica is more "classic bay area" thrash. Personally I am more into the "history of death metal" type thrash and ambivalent about metallica but I appreciate them as artists.
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
>> Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse
Hah!
COuple of years ago I was sipping beer in some local bar and there were some music video running on a TV. Aged angsty men with an "AMERICA YEAH bald eagle screech" vocals and visuals. "What a lame Metallica copycats" I thought. And then the title card shown up...
I'm not advocating for it, merely observing that that seems to be the way in which the USA prematurely gets rid of politicians that it does not like. It's revolting, the amount of violence in politics and >> what even banana republics get away with and that's on both sides of the aisle so I don't give a rats ass about which side you or anybody else is on.
> War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral.
This is the right answer. When war becomes inevitable, we are forced to choose between morality and survival. I pass no judgement on those who choose survival.
The problem in modern wars is that those who start them claim that they do this for survival, but the claim is not based on any real action of the adversary or on any evidence that the adversary is dangerous, but on beliefs that the adversary might want to endanger the survival of the attacker some time in an indefinite future, and perhaps might even be able to do that.
Nobody who starts a war today acknowledges that they do this for other reasons than "survival", e.g. for stealing various kinds of resources from the attacked.
It has become difficult to distinguish those who truly fight for survival from those who only claim to do this.
Yes, agreed. Mainland China is not under any threat from Taiwan, for instance.
However, the Iranians chant Death To America regularly and openly. They have both an active nuclear program and a means to deliver a nuclear weapon. They are also heavy funders of anti-American militias and groups. It is incumbent upon the Americans to ensure that the Iranians do not achieve their nuclear ambitions.
Iran launched a 1-ton payload (e.g. nuclear capable) rocket with a 2000 km range two days ago. That rocket can threaten US assets and allies even into Europe. And, of course, and small ship or container ship even could carry a nuclear weapon into an American port.
>از همان ابتدا که وارد فعالیت هسته ای شدیم هدفمان ساخت بمب و تقویت قوای بازدارنده بود، اما نتوانستیم محرمانه بودن این مساله را حفظ کنیم
In English:
> From the very beginning when we entered nuclear activity, our goal was to build a bomb and strengthen deterrence, but we were unable to maintain the secrecy of this issue
Yes, agreed 100%. Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent. The smaller states in the areas are under constant threat.
However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
> Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent.
Agreed that some countries seek to dominate other regions by force or threat, but you and I are not thinking of the same "groups".
> However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
No, Iran poses no real threat to America, and according to Trump last year suffered a 10+ year setback in their nuclear ambitions. Do you think Trump was lying back then, now, or both?
The US is asserting dominance. Even Trump occasionally says so. Iran mostly poses a danger to their own citizens and, arguably, against Israel when conflict flares up in the region, but not to the US.
By the way, the current situation in Iran is heavily influenced by actions by the UK and the US in the region, back in the 50s. So maybe meddling is not the right course of action?
I thought that both the government in Beijing and the government in Taipei both claim that all of China is united, and that they are the legitimate government of that united entity.
Taiwan buys military equipment and operates it's own military very much like it is independent of China and views Chinese troops in it's territory as a threat.
You're arguing semantics. The west refuses to recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and refuses to recognize it as an independent country.
Whatever they claim, the west (and most of the world) due to Chinese leverage/power refuses to recognize.
Taiwan meets all the criteria for being a state. It controls land, population, it has a military, it has a government, currency, passports etc. etc. It's a de-facto country/state.
So you think North and South Korea are the same country? If not, which is the rightful country and which is the rebel? They both claim the same territory and that the other is illegitimate.
Do you think India and Pakistan are the same country? Or at least parts? There's a lot of disputed territories there.
Or do you believe Palestine is independent from Israel? They sure claim independence and Israel claims it's theirs.
Or what about the USA? The British sure thought it was theirs for a long time. Should France not have gotten involved in all of that?
> So you think North and South Korea are the same country? If not, which is the rightful country and which is the rebel? They both claim the same territory and that the other is illegitimate.
I know not enough about the conflict to declare which side is more justified.
> Do you think India and Pakistan are the same country? Or at least parts? There's a lot of disputed territories there.
Again, I know too little about the conflict.
> Or do you believe Palestine is independent from Israel? They sure claim independence and Israel claims it's theirs.
The Arab citizens of the holy land did not declare a state when the former ruling party (the Brits) left, the Jews did declare a state. The Arabs even rejected the UN partition plan and decided that the fate of the area would be determined by war instead. Which they lost, and though they had some territory after the war they _still_ did not declare a state on that land. Only 15 years later did they form a government and an identity, and yet still did not declare a state. Only after the Israelis conquered the lands in yet another war, and then almost thirty years after that, did they declare a state with provisional borders. And they have rejected every final borders proposition made to them since. And during that entire time, they have been murdering civilians, both Jews and those who support peace with the Jews.
So yes, clearly in Area A the Palestinians have limited sovereignty - limited only because they consistently refuse all attempts to provide them more sovereignty.
> Or what about the USA? The British sure thought it was theirs for a long time. Should France not have gotten involved in all of that?
Perhaps the French should not have gotten involved. I can imagine an alternate history where the British rule over the North American continent. The great result of the American Revolution wasn't the independent United States. The great result of the American Revolution was the implementation of a government based upon secular values and equality for all before the law. And even with the tools in place to implement that government, it still took almost two hundred years to enshrine those values into society.
And now, a mere two generations later, people have forgotten how hard the Americans worked to build that society and they are willing - active even - to discard it because of the few remaining minor deviations from perfection.
Your post reads as if you would rather those aggressors who threaten America to not be disposed of. How is the world a better place with the aggressors than without?
None of the recently attacked countries posed an imminent threat to the US.
In what kind of deranged world are we living that people are fighting against the notion that waging war on another country should be a costly decision!?
Yes, it is prudent to destroy the nuclear capability of a country that chants "Death to America" before they become an imminent threat.
Had the US waited until Iran were an eminent threat and then suffered a nuclear blast in one of her harbours, they would have nothing but "I told you so" to comfort them. Don't let your repulsion of war blind you to the fact that other cultures with different values don't have the same repulsion as you.
Perhaps Trump shouldn't have ripped up the treaty Obama achieved with Iran. The one where we could pop in unannounced at any time to inspect facilities to make sure there's no nuclear bomb making capabilities.
Trump has already claimed that he has destroyed all nuclear capability of Iran at the previous attack done by USA against Iran.
Claiming now that this other attack has the same purpose makes certain that USA has lied either at the previous attack or at the current attack.
When the government of a country is a proven liar, no allegations about how dangerous another country is are credible.
Moreover, just before the attack, during the negotiations between USA and Iran it was said that Iran accepted most of the new American requests regarding their nuclear capabilities, which had the goal to prevent them from making any weapons, but their willingness to make concessions did not help them at all to avoid a surprise attack before the end of the negotiations.
The Iranians claim that the previous attack did not completely eliminate their research efforts and that they are continuing on. Anyone who values the American way of life should most certainly ensure that Iran does not achieve nuclear capability.
That's cherry-picking. The Iranians said things, Trump said some other things, and your comment chooses to selectively believe some things the Iranians said (that their nuclear program wasn't entirely dismantled, in contradiction to Trump's claims) but not others (that they weren't pursuing nuclear weapons and the late Khamenei considered them immoral). It's now believed Israel was planning to kill Khamenei regardless of any nuclear talks, and forced the hand of the US.
I don't care what Trump says. I care what the Iranians say. Here is an Iranian, Persian language interview with Ali Motahari, deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament:
>از همان ابتدا که وارد فعالیت هسته ای شدیم هدفمان ساخت بمب و تقویت قوای بازدارنده بود، اما نتوانستیم محرمانه بودن این مساله را حفظ کنیم
In English:
> From the very beginning when we entered nuclear activity, our goal was to build a bomb and strengthen deterrence, but we were unable to maintain the secrecy of this issue
Like I said, you're cherry-picking. You believe some of what the Iranians say, and not the rest. You believe some of what Trump says, but not the rest.
And you do care what Trump says, since you're buying his bogus, self-contradicting justification for going to war with Iran.
Iran wasn't a threat to the US.
Edit: that 2022 interview you quoted from an Iranian not affiliated to any nuclear program or knowledgeable about it, and which later recanted/clarified it, has problems to say the least. Another example of cherry-picking. I'm not surprised it has since been amplified by Trump (a person whose opinion you don't care about) and by various Israeli news outlets.
Judging from what I've read, he claims that's not what he was saying, and that it was his personal opinion at the time since he wasn't involved in any nuclear program. You're latching to one person's words, since recanted/corrected, because it helps the narrative you like: cherry-picking.
More importantly, do you claim Trump was lying? (I do, to be clear, but do you?).
Let me repeat it because this is important: Iran posed no threat to the US.
I'm not an expert. Probably anti Western sentiment, anti any former allies of the deposed Shah, and pro Palestinian sentiment.
But in reality this doesn't matter, because you're now moving the goalposts: I didn't argue that Iran wasn't hostile to Israel.
I claimed that Iran's nuclear program was already destroyed for 10+ years (mission success, as claimed last year with total certainty by Trump), and that Iran didn't pose a threat to the US.
Now, if the US wants to fight Israel's wars, that's cool and dandy, but the majority of Americans don't support this. Remember "America First"?
If iranian politics would have allowed nuclear weapons they'd have them already. They could also have accepted gifts from some of their more friendly international relations.
Which it is well known that it hasn't been the case since the revolution, where the republic inherited the nuclear program the US pushed the king to pursue. The shia leaders consider such weapons immoral, and hence it seems like the main aim for the aggressors is to remove obstacles in Iran and rush them into getting nukes. It also has the side effect of increasing proliferation in Europe, with several states now moving towards extending or developing nuclear weapons.
This rhetoric about them getting nukes is a deception, it's for people who know little to nothing about Iran that are constrained to a rather racist world view. The animosity towards Iran mainly has to do with them having tried to move away from a monarchical type of government towards a more democratic, unlike US and israeli allies in the region, who are mostly kingdoms and extremely autocratic.
Do you not perceive a threat from a country with nuclear capability that chants "Death to America, Death to Israel" to be a threat to America? Venezuela I don't know about, but Iran was (is) most certainly a threat to America.
Iran has a strong nuclear weapon development program. Negotiations could not halt it - they stall negotiations and continue development. So if they continue development during negotiations, why shouldn't the US continue her own parallel military route?
As for delivery, Iran does have missiles capable of launching a nuclear weapon at American assets in the Middle East, or American allies. Or even to just float it over on a ship.
Negotiations did halt it. Then Trump went back on the deal.
There's reports Iran agreed to limit themselves to only medical grade centrifuges as recently as last week.
And no, Iran does not have weapons capability to reach the US, period.
They fundamentally did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. A threat to American strategic goals is not an imminent threat to the American people.
Negotiations halted Iran's nuclear program for, as per words of the treaty, "10 to 15 years". That was in 2016. If that treaty were not torn up, then Iran would be allowed to unveil their nuclear weapon in January 16, 2026. Yes, two months ago.
Is your claim that the deal was not preventing Iran from developing a nuke? Then why does the existence of the agreement matter either way?
Are you saying Iran would magically produce a nuke the very day the deal expired? Then why don't they have one today?
How does ending the agreement make it harder for Iran to get a nuke? How does "tearing it up" prevent anything that the agreement itself wasn't preventing?
If it's moral to strike at a country with nuclear capability that talks constantly about your country's destruction, then it's no less acceptable for Iran to strike the US than the other way around.
You can't condemn one and condone the other on that basis.
Iran has both reason and were developing capability to destroy a significant part of American national security. America absolutely must prevent that at any cost.
You could argue about how the rhetoric between the states got so bad that they each threatened each other's destruction. But the fact is that they got there.
I'm not familiar enough with Korean culture to know if suicide-for-ideology is culturally acceptable and expected. In Islamic ideology that is the highest honour.
No, my reasoning is culture. I do not live in the United States, I don't base my worldview on race.
There exists a culture for which it is an honour to kill Jews. Pretending that this culture does not exist is racism. Disregarding the differences in values of other cultures is the most disgusting form of racism - pretending that one's own culture is dominant or universal.
Treating culture as uniformly distributed and absolute is racism. Your racism is blinding you to truths, leading you to illogical conclusions like the idea that it's possible to make an accurate assessment of military threat based on "culture." Hence why I called it caveman logic - you're literally defining your level of fear of another group of humans based on how different you (erroneously) perceive them to be.
You seem quite concerned with the plight of the Palestinians so I'll use that as an example: Jewish people experienced the worst, most widescale crime against humans ever committed, and then a few decades later, a subset of Jewish people turned around and began doing the same (at a smaller, less industrialized scale). This demonstrates the perfect universality and programmability of a human, which includes "human culture."
Any human culture can be molded to justify any existent human action. To pretend otherwise is to engage in ethnocentrism - what you accused me off, the presumption that there's something special about your culture that prevents atrocities happening under it.
The second that makes your argument racist rather than logical (if you refuse to budge on the word "racist," swap in "prejudice" - the fallacies are the same either way) is the homogeneous angle you're applying. This should be an obviously fallacious statement: "Christianity is a violent culture that supports violence against Jewish people, discrimination against gay people, and school shootings." Why is it fallacious, though? I know lots of christians that have done all of the above, proudly tying it back to their religion. You see my point, right? You would, presumably, never walk into a room of white people and assume they all share identical values - do it in America, half probably are tearing their hair out in frustration at the values of the other half. Yet you do it to Islam / Arabs / Muslims, because, frankly, you are racist against Muslim people.
An argument that depends on making a blanket statement about a group of people fails for many reasons: categorization (how do you accurately and scientifically select who falls into this grouping and who doesn't?), resolution (how do you account for outliers within this grouping, and how do you determine who might be an outlier?), absolutism (how do you account for the fact that people change?), and due to above, how could you justify making any decisions based on a prejudiced framing?
Racist arguments are completely dependant on fallacy. With a rigid application of rational reasoning, they fall apart. They're illogical.
China threatens us, Russia threatens us, should we bombing them? Canada is threatened by us, demark, Spain, mexico, Cuba have all been threatened by us, should they be bombing us?
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