AreaSIX

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I agree, while the head of state is the more important and powerful position, the president certainly isn’t exactly powerless and handles the day to day business of government. But calling the leader the Ayatollah is slightly misleading. While it’s a requirement in the constitution that the head of state be an Ayatollah, Ayatollah itself is a religious rank, not a political one. So there are many Ayatollahs around, even more since the revolution as many believe that the rank has become somewhat inflated.





  • I didn’t write this, but I reread it every time I lose someone I love, and it has helped me a lot. Hope it can do the same for you.

    "Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

    I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

    As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

    In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

    Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

    Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks."


  • Red army’s stationed in Berlin at the end of WWII, but Sweden doesn’t consider that a big enough threat to join NATO. Russian army is now in eastern Ukraine, which would’ve been deep within the Soviet Union at the end of the WW, and suddenly we have to join NATO to keep safe. You know, protect ourselves against imperialism by joining the chief imperialist block and give the top imperialists access to 17 military bases on our soil. We’ve become so pathetic compared to the swedes from the fifties. They valued true independence, we gargle uncle Sam’s balls instead to feel safe. Sweden was uniquely independent, we’re now in alliance with Turkey and the US. That’s quite a fall from grace and it makes me sad. Like I’m losing what made my country special.


  • You literally wrote most south east Asian cultures are deeply pretentious. Having a Thai partner doesn’t somehow magically make you an authority on a region with close to 700 million people. You’re grouping together countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Burma and Singapore and calling them deeply pretentious. Bringing up a Thai partner to demonstrate some kind of authority in the matter fits perfectly in with the rest of it. I don’t have any issues believing you have a Thai partner and have spoken to many Thais. My issue again is with you thinking that fact gives you the authority to casually judge a region of 700 million people as deeply pretentious. And then doubling down.


  • The equivalent to the legalization of cannabis making people think of Thailand as a 'junkie nation’s would be the rampant sex tourism making people think of Thailand as a paedo nation. And they’ve been fine with that for decades. So I very much doubt that it’s because “south east Asian cultures” are “deeply pretentious”. Also, just grouping hundreds of millions of people from vastly different cultures together as monolithic and “deeply pretentious” ironically says more about your own levels of deep pretension than about south east Asian cultures




  • Why would you write nonsense like this when you obviously know nothing at all about Iran or regional dynamics? Iraq is a close ally of Iran, so no, they’re not “not far away from the top” of Iran’s regional opponents. Also, those who don’t like the general’s ‘clan’? WTF are you babbling about? Iran is not a clan-based society the way you seem to believe it is. I’m Iranian and the ‘clan’ of Soleimani is not a subject I’ve heard discussed ever. You seem to think the garbage spread by the Bushie’s in the 2000’s about the region is how things actually work. It’s a pathetically uninformed attempt at sounding smart. Read a book maybe?

    There are three candidates for these attacks. Odds all clearly point towards the Israelis as the top suspects. However, it could also have been carried out by the MEK, or the Islamic State Khorasan. But even if it did, the likelihood is high that Mossad played a coordinating role in the operation. There’s zero chance Soleimani’s ‘clan’, whatever the fuck that refers to, was a factor in this terrorist attack.








  • I love that you seem to think that it’s just as simple as pick up and move to the country you like. As if the red carpet in all other countries was always rolled out just for you. Let me guess, American? Can anyone just pick up and move to the US? Or the EU? Heard of all the crap around ‘migrants’? You don’t think you’d be considered a migrant if you wanted to move to Cuba, with all the restrictions that would entail? Or do you just assume that the whole world is just dying to welcome you to settle in their countries?