I think a lot of people use it instead of Iranian. Technically it might be an ethnicity. But, for example, I can find restaurants that advertise having Afghani food but no restaurants with Pashtun or Tajik food, restaurants with Syrian food but not Arabic or Kurdish restaurants, etc. But, while most restaurants go by the name of the country, not the ethnic group, there are no Iranian restaurants, only Persian ones.

AFAIK, a lot of Iranian-Americans go by “Persian” because there was already such a stigma associated with the name Iran.

He’s failing my secret purity test. I can’t tell you what the purity test is, because it’s secret! If I told you what my purity test was, he might find out and pass it. But, if he passed it because someone told him what it was, that wouldn’t count. So, all I can tell you is that he failed it! Trust me bro!

Bored of Peace

Maybe… but not being able to find 30 seconds to post this major news for over 90 minutes? It seems more likely to me that whoever posted it found out about it closer to 8:30.

Bernie isn’t far left by international standards, but I wouldn’t put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he’d still be trying to move things even more to the left.

And Biden as “far right”? It has lost all meaning if you’re applying that label to him.

I wonder how he found out. I’m guessing the person who leaked it on 4Chan is probably a political staffer, or something. Initially I thought it was a prison guard or a paramedic. But, I’d have expected them to leak it sooner. Say you’re a 4Chan user and you’re a prison guard. Would you really discover his body, call an ambulance… and then wait over an hour and a half before posting on 4Chan?

It has been a while since I saw it, but you’re right. I mostly remember it as drama, not comedy.

Point Break? I think Keanu was a heart throb who could do action, but who had started in comedy. Will Smith was more a comedic actor who could do action, but was mostly doing action-comedy.

Yeah, he was huge. Stallone and Schwarzenegger were bigger names for purely action movies. But, Keanu and Tom Cruise were the action stars who the teenage girls wanted to watch.

I think it’s all the years of Fresh Prince of Bel Air that makes me think of Will Smith as primarily a comedic actor at that point. Because, he and Keanu really had a similar path. They started with comedy and then proved they could do action. I guess Will Smith’s action movies were a bit more action comedy. Men in Black is definitely a sci fi action comedy. Bad Boys was an action comedy. Independence Day wasn’t really a sci fi action comedy, but he did punch out an alien. But, Will Smith did do Enemy of the State, and I don’t remember much comedy in that. For Keanu, Speed isn’t an action comedy, but there’s some light-hearted stuff in it. But, Point Break (from what I remember) was a more serious tone.

But, I think by 1999 if you were hiring Keanu Reeves for a purely serious action role, that wouldn’t be seen as strange. And, if you were hiring Will Smith for a purely serious role, it would probably be seen as wasting his talent.

It would have been a very different movie. So, maybe people couldn’t picture Keanu in that forgettable action comedy called The Matrix. But, Keanu did show he could do comedy. His first big movie was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He’d also done Parenthood. In addition, he’d shown he could do action movies / thrillers with a bit of comedy when he did Speed, and fairly serious action movies with Point Break.

Will Smith has done plenty of action movies, but all of them are at least somewhat comedic. He’s shown he can do serious roles too, like Happyness, 7 Pounds, etc. But, I don’t think you’d hire him for a science fiction action movie without having him do some comedy. I’m sure Will Smith could do a straight dramatic science fiction action movie with no comedy, but AFAIK he’s never done it.

IMO Keanu is a much more limited actor than Will Smith. But, The Matrix played to his strengths.

I guess you could also give it a Gen Alpha slang name that someone old enough to be a dad is too old to understand.

Like, call the boat “Low Key Salty”. Simultaneously a play on words and Gen Alpha slang. Best if used for an ocean-going boat docked in the Florida keys.

If these are dad jokes, what would a funny name that isn’t a “dad joke” be like?

At 8:16 a.m. on August 10, 2019, an anonymous 4Chan user posted…

It beat ABC News journalist Aaron Katersky’s post about Epstein’s death on Twitter, now known as X, by 38 minutes

Is that in any way surprising? Someone with insider knowledge posted about it before a journalist was informed?

In the Wikipedia article about his death they said that he was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at 6:39 AM. More than 90 minutes before even this post on 4Chan, he’d already been taken out of his cell, rushed to an ambulance, driven across NY, taken to a hospital, rushed into the emergency room, and pronounced dead. There were so many opportunities for someone to notice that and post it somewhere.

In a sense, this means you pretty much clear the jail guards, ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc. of suspicion. Can you imagine that they saw a dead Epstein, but sat on that for 90 minutes before posting it to 4Chan?

What’s surprising here isn’t that it was posted first to some forum used by random Internet chuds. That’s what you’d expect. What’s surprising is that they were competent enough to keep the news quiet for nearly 2 hours.

On the other hand, we all know he did not commit suicide and got killed by the Pedoresident following the playbook of his BFF putin to try to save his fat orange pedo ass

No, we don’t. That’s a dumb conspiracy theory.

Yeah, it’s more: “Oh, you want to renounce? Guess we better audit your last 5 years of tax returns with a fine-toothed comb.” In addition, you have to do two separate interviews with US officials, plus pay a $2.5k USD fee. Plus, you might be hit with an exit tax if you have any wealth – and that includes retirees who are counting on using that wealth for their retirement.

Also, some conspiracies are always going to be right, but the details matter.

“There’s a cabal of rich people who run the world!” I mean, yes. Obviously. But, the method matters here.

“Rich people make blood sacrifices in cult meetings, then replace the president with an android and the prime minister with a clone” is not the same as “rich people buy up newspapers and throw lavish fundraising dinners.”

As for the main conspiracy, IMO it’s not credible that everybody in Epstein’s circle was a pedophile. It’s not even credible that everyone in his circle knew he was one. I’m sure you don’t become a billionaire without already being the kind of person who has a problem with empathy. But, Epstein’s circle wasn’t just billionaires. It was also intellectuals, politicians, artists, etc. Even if 99% of them were either pedophiles or perfectly OK with pedophilia (which seems unlikely) that remaining 1% could ruin his life.

What’s believable is that he had an enormous circle of rich and powerful people, and that a small subset of them were in an inner circle where the child rape happened. In that case, it isn’t that every rich and powerful person is part of a pedophile ring. It’s that rich and powerful people were meeting and conspiring, and also some of them were pedophiles.

Having said that, I’m perfectly happy if the popular story is that everybody who was buddies with Epstein is a pedophile and should be removed from society, if not removed from the realm of the living. Those people deserve that kind of punishment, but not because they’re pedophiles. But, it’s too exhausting to try to convince people that someone like Bill Gates deserves to have his life ruined, even if he isn’t a pedophile.

You have to file taxes with the US, most people with US citizenship living outside the US don’t actually have to pay anything.

As for why to keep filing:

• renouncing your citizenship is difficult and expensive
• it’s hard to avoid the US

Let’s say you have no plans to ever live in the US again. Does that mean you never want to visit friends or family you left behind? Does that mean you’ll never go to a sporting event, concert or professional conference in the US ever again? If you’re flying internationally, will you always be willing to pay extra and do extra work to avoid being on a plane that makes a stopover in the US?

For most people it’s a few hours of work, and/or a hundred bucks or so once per year to keep their options open and avoid major headaches.

The 40% that didn’t vote would probably have also broke 50/50 for Trump vs. Harris if they’d bothered to vote. But, most of them probably live in states like Massachusetts or Wyoming where one party’s lead is so huge that their vote really wouldn’t have had any effect.

Stop deflecting and trying to blame non-voters when the real problem is the people who voted for Trump.

“If you count third party candidates who have absolutely no hope of winning, it turns out that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2024. Sure, more people voted for him than voted for the perfectly normal democratic candidate, but if you add her votes to the votes for the Green party candidate, the Libertarian Party candidate, the Socialism and Liberation party candidate, and RFK Jr. Combined, they all got very slightly more votes than Trump. So, America isn’t cooked.”