C H E R,
Y E S.

I knew there had to be a catch.

I loved it. Visually amazing. The critics were upset because they were clearly expecting something profound, but they obviously watched a different trailer to me. Criticising Valerian and the city of a thousand planets for lacking depth was like criticising Frozen for having too many songs. It was always about the visual appeal, and it had a lot of visual appeal.

Tubes. Lots of tubes. Plenty of kept animals are bred by artificial insemination.

Donald Trump is the same, though. Admittedly it was his father’s money and lots of grift, but isn’t that how a lot of them get started?

Whoa, your argument took a 180 pretty quick there!

Remember that for Republicans: Every accusation is a confession.

Via trump, because that’s the whole thing.

I love how hard you try to convince me of things that I know you know that I know are false.

You started off “but when did I ever day anything incorrect?” by now it’s just one big bullshit factory!

Which part of tax breaks for rich people are you struggling to understand?

Check the outside drain into which that pipe exits if there is one. The hair and gunge may well now be partially blocking it. Ours backed up under heavy rain quite frequently until I installed chicken wire an inch above the grid down there

Removed by mod

That’s just restating your conclusion, not explaining why. What on earth have oligarchs and plutocrats to fear from the russian oligarchy form of government being installed in the USA by putin’s man trump? Further wealth? Uncurbed power and influence? No, they fear none of this. Consequences are for the little people.

Interesting that this is so absolutely true and we all share this experience so keenly that they didn’t even need to mention ai in it yet we all knew that was what it’s about.

I don’t see why. People took a fairly partisan view over whether it was true that trump had Russian help in the election and I think trump is right that he would get away with shooting someone in the street and his base would still support him. I don’t think being in the Epstein files is what’s hurting him, it’s not releasing them. I think it has embarrassed him to have given a blowjob to “bubba” but I don’t think it has harmed his rating.

Interesting. I like it enough to give it my upvote.

Why unupvote it? Do you normally do that? Is it a principal? Or was it just that one?

Sigh. The EU banking sector is not destroyed and seizing Russian assets did not destroy it. That’s what Putin wants to be true, and it’s what he gas announced to be true, by Putin is no more truthful than trump is.

That’s a strawman.

Lol, it was you who made it! I said trump is under Putin’s influence and you said that this or that group would never allow Putin to take over. Putin doesn’t need to take over when his deputy is already running the country and destroying a lot of what America stood for during my lifetime.

In the UK, the government is formed by the party that has the majority of seats in Parliament. It’s unusual for the government to not have near complete control over what gets passed in Parliament. There’s also a principle in our unwritten constitution that Parliament is sovereign and no Parliament can bind its successor.

So for example, when the LibDem/Con coalition of 2010-2015 formed, they passed a Fixed Term law saying that (instead of the prime minister being able to choose the election date as long as it was within five years), the election date would always be five years after the last one, unless two thirds of Parliament voted for a general election.

You’d think that when the Cons gained an overall majority that, as usual, was under two thirds, they would have to stick to fixed terms, but no, of course not! They simply passed a new law revoking the old one.

You seem to think that rights means something that’s in the constitution, and Britain doesn’t have a written constitution, nor does it seem there’s a way of getting one, but the American constitution is illusory, because it binds only honorable presidents who pay attention to the supreme court and the supreme court ruled itself out of power when it ruled that trump couldn’t be prosecuted for actions he took as president. Of course they left themselves room to call a Democratic president’s act not official on the grounds that it was illegal or unconstitutional, but they were too busy ruling trump king to realise he was never going to party attention to their adverse rulings anyway.

Tyrants are enabled by sycophants who deny it’s happening right up until they support it happening. On which topic, your denial that Putin couldn’t possibly have trump in his pocket because this or that group wouldn’t have allowed it flies in the face of the facts that (a) absolutely it was known that Putin wanted trump to win because that would weaken America and strengthen Russia and (b) the people you mention that would have stopped it all really like an extreme right wing government.

It was hyperbole.

You mean it was wrong, but you don’t accept that word when used about you.

But this is a gish gallop on your part. Steve Bannon would be proud of you of he gave even one tiny shit about who you are.

No, confiscating Russian assets did not destroy the EU banking sector, it just provided a bunch of cash to spend. The EU banking sector is doing very nicely post brexit. London used to be the main hub for European banking. Now we’re not in the EU, not so much, and Frankfurt etc are thriving.

Whereas if Putin takes over

What? What an enormous straw man! Putin doesn’t need to be US president when he has trump appointed to do it for him. And he wouldn’t be eligible to be US president and the Americans wouldn’t allow him to stand for either party, and they would rebel if he tried military occupation and it would be impossible for Russia to overcome the US military. But Putin isn’t anywhere close to that stupid! He doesn’t need to be US president, he just needs someone who will so what he wants. Enter stupid, nasty, thin-skinned, easily duped, flattery-swallowing, compromat-laden, racist, geriatric, easily influenced donald trump. Putin had this idea a long time, I suspect, but it was only really with the reach of twitter that he could pull it off.

You’re increasingly openly taking Putin’s side of every point, which is probably why you set off my bad takes alarm in the first place.

As I said elsewhere, it would be unusual for a vast number of folk to not contain annoying or argumentative people, but I worry about tarring a whole category by always bringing up examples of bad behaviour and mentioning the category as part of it.

For example: “There was this manager shouting at all the women that they needed to keep in shape to impress the customers, but he was obviously badly unfit and overweight and dressed really shabbily.” OK story. But “Fat middle aged guys who don’t lift a finger to try to live healthily can be so annoying when they dress badly and then shout at women that they sold keep in shape and to impress clients.” Not OK, makes it about the category of people.

But, clearly I wasn’t there and I didn’t know that you were criticising a drawing!

It sounds like you had a bad experience and whilst I very much don’t want to generalise from it, I also don’t want to belittle it.

Did you downvote your own post?! The scores are +0-1 when I’m seeing it (and the-1 isn’t me).

Considering there was a 17 hours gap, it’s quite possible that someone had the time to read and downvote it before you saw it.

Yeah, but on my instance, anything you post automatically has a +1 from yourself, which you must have removed.

Your takes on trans people and intersex people seem to all be from concern trolling media and third hand stories. Trans people are like witches that hand out curses that cause harm? I think your skepticism alarm should be going off.

For the record, molesting children is absolutely not OK under any circumstances. I forget what the statistics are, but I remember that the number of incidents of trans people being sex offenders is far lower than you would expect from the prevalence of trans people and of sex offending in the general population.

It seems to me that you were fed a lot of negative stereotypes of trans and intersex people when you were young, and I worry that you are interpreting finding the lack of evidence of any of this in the real world now that you are older as a change in the world when it might be wiser to take it as evidence that the negative stereotypes were always sensational, overblown and inaccurate.