A bachelor's degree essentially has the same value a high school diploma did 30 years ago. If you want to go into a trade, great! If not, then you need to wipe out four years of career time, then pay off 50K in debt. I'm a big fan of higher ed, but the way it's done and administered is a racket.

Yes they do. So do three hundred million other people that support everything around the military. I just always find it funny that these weirdo small government hawks are always insanely pro-military. We don't need the armed services to be the size it is, but it exists for it own sake.

It's a severely underrated movie.

"Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do."

Dude, you get paid with tax payer money. We subsidize you.

But...that is what they're called. Like, that's the name of our numbering system. They're not adding anything, it's the literal name.

How is that intentionally misleading?

No, not really. I think you're focusing too narrowly on the original definition instead of looking at the practical application. Marx never really left a roadmap to or communism; that was mostly thought up by Engels and Lenin, who adapted it from earlier socialist thinkers. What I'm trying to say is: it was the interpretations and adaptations of his work that make it important.

The governing body of utopian Marxism (which is really what you're describing) is the proletariat; everybody is the governing body. Each communist government, from the early Bolsheviks to the Cubans now, knew they could never really hope to achieve that, so they created the Soviet, or council, system in it's stead, with the idea being that representatives of smaller Soviets would meet in a larger council. It worked exceedingly well in Russia until about 1930 or so.

If you really truly want to discuss the epistemological semantics of the term and philosophy of communism I can. In a practical sense, they are communists, and all but one (Putin), is a member of a formal Communist Party, and Putin was once head of the KGB, which is really about as communist as one can get. Sure, theres a wide gulf between late-Soviet, Maoist, Korean, Cuban, Titoist, utopian, etc etc, communism, but that really is just splitting hairs.

Thom Hartmann calls libertarians "Republicans that want to smoke weed and get laid."

Exactly. They have this fantasy nation in their head that doesn't exist because, well, it doesn't work.

How about...neither? It's not an either/or proposition. We haven't had a war with North Korea or Russia yet, so why do we have to think that's suddenly on the table now?

Leone is a master at showing, not telling. You can gather from just a few looped frames the gist of what is happening in that scene. The showdown is very intense, and takes a lot of it's inspiration from samurai films and Soviet montage editing.

100% agree. People here love to equivocate and "whatabout" everything without actually looking at the context, cultural or otherwise.

It's not "it can be said" about T'Challa though. His blackness is integral to his character. Heimdalls race is not. I get what the picture is trying to say, but it's doing it in bad faith and intentionally misrepresenting the issue.