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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’ve been in the US two months ago, in a very Democratic city, socialising with only very anti-Trump people. Not a single one cared what happened outside US borders. They were upset about the inflation, cost of living, loss of privacy and civil liberties, etc. There may be some who do care about the US foreign policy, but unless thousands of Americans start returning in body bags, there won’t be enough critical mass to stage any revolt or even protests worthy of Trump’s attention.




  • One thing to recognise here is that neither governmental party was able to field a viable candidate against her. FF, the major government partner, had their candidate quit the race after the first debate. FG, the junior partner, nominated a candidate who clearly didn’t want to run, due to all the skeletons in her closet the media are now dragging out.

    To be fair, however, the government always faces an uphill battle. Our President, despite being largery powerless, had been viewed in the past two decades or so as the moral counterweight to the immoral government. Nominating a former government minister was thus a very tone-deaf decision.



  • I grew up in a country with a large Roma minority. Before WW2 they were travellers. They roamed the country in search of odd jobs. My grandma told me that they always paid them to cut their grass into hay bales, or to fix their pots and crockery.

    Then communism came, and they were forced to settle dowwn and hold jobs. The vast majority never adjusted, and they treated their housing as temporary camp sites, devastating everything and then demanding new housing. This, naturally, created discontent that was aimed against the Roma, instead the authorities who forced them to change their way of life.

    I now live in Ireland, which sees the same kind of “racism”, even though they are white: the Travellers. As the name suggests, they also come from the roaming background. They are also forced to settle, and they are treating their halting sites as temporary camp sites. I have one nearby. I pay some people from there to clean my driveway or gutters. They do a better and cheaper job than professional contractors. I know that it’s impossible to live a nomadic life in a civilised society, but sometimes I think how nice it would have been to let them roam again, and not care about them anymore.





  • Smith is an awesome ensemble actor. He has great chemistry with his co-stars in buddy movies, be it MIB, Bad Boys, Hitch or even Independence Day. As Fresh Prince, he had a whole cast to play off. But he can’t carry a movie where he’s the only star. It becomes evident that he doesn’t have the range, and his attempts to act come across as forced. I think people already realised it and are avoiding such movies. The Bad Boys franchise proves that he’s still a bankable co-star, and hopefully he’ll accept that position in his future work, rather than soloing vanity movies.








  • Not OP, but I did the same, when I first realized the US was on a slippery slope towards idiocracy (and, in fairness, I realized it three decades after many intellectuals already warned about it). In my case, I was fortunate to work for a multinational, which agreed to transfer me to a country within the EU, and to take care of the paperwork. Over a decade later, I have citizenship here, my own house, and I feel fully integrated into the local society. And I don’t need to worry about college tuition for my kids. They’ll have a choice of free education anywhere within the EU, and by the time they’re old enough, they may have access to a wide variety of educators who left he US.