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[–] 169 points 3 years ago (21 children)

American government told the whole world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. America used this as justification to invade Iraq and murder its people. It turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction after all.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Since giving waterboarding a go I've found myself disgusted by any government that allows the use of waterboarding on anybody - governments that encourage it are even worse, and the way the Americans handled Gitmo is fucking disgraceful.

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    [–] 113 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    P×dophiles are flocking to churches because they're unregulated by the government. They're becoming a safe haven for these sick fucks because they often attempt to handle conflict and scandals within their own walls. Also, due to a high need for childcare, often no background check is needed!

    A "scandal" is bad for business attendance numbers, so they like to keep it quiet, if they can.

    My family has gone to so many churches throughout the years, and at least 5 or 6 have had the sexual abuse of a child come to light within church leadership.

    I am dead serious about this: KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF CHURCHES!!!!

    EDIT: I forgot to mention that most clergy are not bound by laws that would make them mandated reporters for child abuse.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago

    Even when it does come out, church people often rush to support the perpetrators. They do the “I’ve had a beer with them and I like them so they couldn’t be a bad guy” thing that I do not understand at all about people.

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    [–] 112 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (20 children)

    The MOVE bombing. The fact that the Philadelphia police dropped not one but TWO explosive devices on the roof of their house via helicopter is still nuts to me. What made it even worse was the fact that the fire department showed up and let it continue to burn, destroying 61 evacuated neighboring homes and leaving 250 people homeless.

    Any time I tell someone about it that hasn’t heard the story, they’re skeptical.

    Another one is the time I learned that I was under local surveillance for being an activist that was part of a local non-violent black liberation org. The police would send a unit weekly to check my whereabouts and movements. I learned through a friend of a friend that didn’t even know who I was, but knew my name and that I was on a surveillance list. Pretty sure they were checking in on everyone involved.

    Edit: if this comment has taught me anything, it's that you're better off not engaging with pointless nitpickers and police apologists. Fuck me for having an opinion.

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    [–] 92 points 3 years ago* (19 children)

    Got cheap, no-name, unbranded LED bulbs off of eBay. Years later, not one of them had broken.

    But Philips LED bulbs? Those things don't last a year. In fact, none of the high-rated, "high quality," top-ten-list, LED light bulbs have ever outlasted an incandescent in my experience.

    If you want your LEDs to last, buy the no-name bulbs, guys. The Phoebus Cartel is still out there.

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  • [–] 62 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    Boy do I have a video for you. It's regarding the cartel and light bulb engineering if you'd be interested:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

    Monopolies are scary though, especially if they can make such collective actions without telling anyone.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Ha, I was about to dig out that video.

    I will say in regards to LEDs, it's a bit of a tricky thing. Philips in general are terrible, I don't know what they do, but they're also really pretty. Amazing for rarely-active mood lighting. For actual lighting, I use the white-tone-changeable Ikea bulbs, and they seem to last forever, hot as they get.

    That's the weirdest thing: The Ikeas run hotter than the Philips, yet still last longer. I really get the feel that Philips optimizes purely for color, smoothness and softness. They know what people use their overly expensive stuff for since in some areas they got little competition. It's annoying, but for those purposes it also works really well.

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    [–] 81 points 3 years ago (16 children)

    I was involved in the BLM protests of 2021. The cops were legitimately pulling people off the street into unmarked, black vans. Some of the people that were grabbed were not even involved in the protests, they were just outside past the citywide curfew.

    I had heard about this happening in Oregon and Washington through the ever reliable internet, but I didn't actually believe it until I saw it happen in my moderately sized Midwestern city.

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    [–] 75 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    Theres a huge network of private surveillance cameras, microphones, and other sensors constantly collecting everyone's information and selling it to whomever can pay, or just straight up giving the feds access to the data.

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    [–] 58 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    There is a huge amount of fake and bot accounts on social medias, probably as much as the population of many cities, made and used to manipulate the public opinion.

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  • [–] 58 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I was driving with a friend on in Louisiana about 3am one night in the late 90s. I thought I saw something ahead in the right lane so I moved into the left lane just in case.

    As we got closer there was a giant shadow of some kind with only tiny reflectors at the edges. It was a HUGE matte black boat filling the lane on a matte black trailer with no plates. Closest comparison I can come up with would be one of those river patrol boats from the Vietnam war.

    We were on cruise so it took a few seconds to pass them. The boat was being towed by a matte black F-550 (?) MDT with no plates and no lights other than headlights.

    I did not look up at the driver when we passed. I have no idea if this was a drug thing, an intel thing, or what.

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    [–] 49 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

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    [–] 49 points 3 years ago

    COINTELPRO. Since I learned about that the whole Ehrlichmann story about criminalizing drugs to oppress black communities and possibly even CIA involvement in the opoid and crack epidemics seem pretty plausible to me.

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  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    ITT: People who don’t understand the topic.

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (9 children)

    The people in charge in the U.S. want to eliminate transgender people so that they can have men and women in neat, separate boxes and continue to oppress women as they have been for centuries.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 years ago

    I personally think it's more about manufacturing an 'other' to blame everything on and unite people in hate.

    There's little benefit to targeting women for oppression in the modern economy - they're just more undifferentiated labour to be exploited (though it remains possible to pay them less). I think this was meaningfully different when living off a single income was a realistic proposition.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    There's no single unified group of "people in charge in the U.S.". There are various people with varying amounts of power. Some of them are religious nutters who interpret their religion as saying that anything other than traditional gender roles is satanic. Some of them are opportunists who see religious nutters as useful idiots, they rile them up over transgender issues in order to get their support for other things (i.e. tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.). Some of them are somewhat liberal, but are still uncomfortable with transgender people and see their political opponents using transgender issues to rile up their base while they do really destructive things (tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.), so they focus their efforts not on defending transgender people, but in trying to attack what they see as the real issues. A small minority of "people in charge in the U.S." are transgender, or very concerned with transgender issues, and are doing everything they can to fight for transgender rights.

    Don't forget that the majority of the "people in charge in the U.S." are over 60 years old, and so even basic gay rights are a major departure from the world they were raised in.

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    [–] 38 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    The Green Party in my country is blocking the development of green alternatives to the industry that is one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gasses and various other pollutants (there's a reason most of our rivers are no longer safe to swim in and the levels of certain cancer-causing compounds are 10-100x the EU safe limit in some areas' water supplies), while private corporations and the main right-wing party are pushing for their legalisation.

    A certain local indigenous group (which is technically a registered corporation) doesn't really like people mentioning the fact that they're currently driving an endangered native animal extinct by turning the only area they inhabit into dairy farms.

    Also most of the politicians in this country are liars and/or sociopaths, but that kinda goes without saying lol

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    [–] 35 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    Celestial Seasonings tea and Shen Yun both have ties to cults. With Celestial Seasonings the cult that founded it no longer own or profit off it thankfully, but their tea is shit so I still don't recommend buying it.

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    [–] 32 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    "You will own nothing. And you will be happy"

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    [–] 32 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    I've seen a UFO while I was truck driving. Most amazing thing I have seen to date.

    Edit: On the night of the Dec 11th 2020 at 9:30ish I had stopped for the night to sleep whiledriving towards Colorado on I25 in New Mexico. I had stopped at a truck parking area maybe 10 miles away from Old Sunshine gas station and parking area. I was gazing at the stars and milkyway and enjoying the lack of light pollution when I witnessed it. Where the sky had previously been black and full of stars a blue light appeared for 10 or so seconds and then shot directly upward in an ice blue streak. At first I didn't think anything of it until it moved incredibly fast straight up. It was instantaneous. I used to be ing the Air Force so I have seen all kinds of Arial vehicles. Never seen anything like this.

    I couldn't find a mile marker but the coordinates are "35.3965167, -105.4138241".

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    [–] 31 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I drove by a house in my neighborhood. There was a pure white van, no windows, license was VAN 3. A man was walking towards the van dressed in white coveralls and gloves.

    As I passed, I stared at him. He stared at me with cold murderers eyes. I've seen that look twice before and both guys turned out to be murderers.

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    [–] 26 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    If been in courses and workshops where people from the government party in my country teach people how to use twitter, specifically to boost the president and ministers posts. So they were training real people to act as bots and generate artificial engagement.

    Also they are 100% using bots, and when bot accounts are removed they loose followers and claim that "imperialistic social media want to censor us".

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    [–] 26 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    The CIA regularly intervenes in the reddit moderation process

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    [–] 25 points 3 years ago* (17 children)

    Media has been using nonviolence as a propaganda tool to quash rebellions and silence dissent in the U.S. for decades.

    Think about it: almost every single story you ever see across all media that has the heroes using violence in a positive light, especially revenge content, will always portray that character's actions as a negative even when objectively they are not. They always look to the same playbook of cliched arguments, one-liners, and tropes to do this. They are all oversimplified caricatures of or misrepresentations of nonviolence, violence, and revenge, justice, forgiveness, etc. A lot are just outright lies or ad-homs.

    It's even departmental policy in some companies to force writers to write their scripts in such a manner.

    The only director I've ever seen rebel against it is Quentin Tarantino and I don't think he has been doing it deliberately.

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    [–] 21 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I saw UFO's. I don't want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn't believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one's phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn't match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I've ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO's, and that scared the shit out of me. I'd love to find a non alien explanation, because I don't want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn't believe someone else telling me this story.

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