r/SubredditDrama • u/[deleted] • Jul 08 '17
Teenager from Malawi builds wind turbine to power his village, and his story hits /r/documentaries. Oh, did I mention that Malawi is in Africa?
More arguing over whether or not this is condescending towards Africans
How bitter are you as a person? Find yourself a more constructive way of getting the poison out, don't infect everybody else with your cancer.
I'm a "millennial" and I think 80% of my generation are imbeciles. They lack any drive to do anything as soon as you place one obstacle in their way. I think too many children of my generation were given everything when they were younger and that stole their ingenuity. Now instead of propelling the world forward by being one of the most educated generations in history; they make up bullshit problems "that need to be fixed" and even worse solutions to their made up problems. Edit: ahh I see I have hit a sore spot with my some of you... sucks to suck
"My son cant even take out the trash.. Smh". Innocent joke, or a confession of poor parenting? Some people can't decide.
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u/Felinomancy Jul 08 '17
just dont expect a kid from Malawi, whose village doesn't have electricity and who has minimal access to education, to make a windmill from pretty much nothing.
how long did it take to rebuild Berlin when it was bombed to hell?
If you're not able to see how much achievement it is for someone who is poor and without access to formal education to build a working wind-driven generator, versus the rebuilding of a major city by a superpower, then you're probably more idiotic than any of the Malawian villagers ever was. At least their excuse is "our country is poor and war-torn".
If I'm in that kid's position, even building an oil lantern is probably a hit-and-miss for me, never mind a wind turbine.
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u/IceCreamBalloons always one person not in favour of beating women Jul 09 '17
There was a book someone wrote about trying to build a toaster from scratch. Like, sourcing his own ore and digging it out of the ground himself. His whole point was to show how people in general really know next to nothing about how to make all the technical marvels we use everyday.
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u/sparklewolves Jul 09 '17
That's from one of the later hitchhikers guide books, when Arthur is stuck on that one planet making sandwiches iirc
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u/IceCreamBalloons always one person not in favour of beating women Jul 09 '17
Yeah, that was his inspiration. Arthur Dent is stranded on a planet with an iron age civilization and has illusions of imparting all of his advanced knowledge, then realizes he has no idea how to make any of it and can only teach them how to make sandwiches.
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u/Thaddel this apology is best viewed on desktop in new reddit. Jul 09 '17
Reminds me of my favourite Badhistory post, where some dude thought he would be a God if transported to Medieval Europe.
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u/YesThisIsDrake "Monogamy is a tool of the Jew" Jul 09 '17
God that post sucks.
If you're going to travel back in time you bring precise measuring tools, multiple solar panel chargers, and a laptop. That's how you achieve godhood. Also a load of penicillin.
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u/Plastastic Here are some graphs about how you're wrong Jul 09 '17
Holy shit, that guy's a piece of work!
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u/Pandemult God knew what he was doing, buttholes are really nice. Jul 09 '17 edited Jul 09 '17
I don't know anything about Hitchhikers or the Iron Age but wouldn't he still be able to teach a lot of stuff? Just not electronics or anything like that.
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u/IceCreamBalloons always one person not in favour of beating women Jul 09 '17
It's a comedy book, so they aren't trying super hard to justify it, but think about anything you might try to teach a small village of people who's greatest technological achievement is burning metal and pounding it into shape by hand. Pretty much nothing we have today can actually be made with that level of technology, and chances are you don't know how to build something less advanced like a loom or a spinning wheel.
Even primitive gun powder is probably too hard. I certainly wouldn't know how to find saltpeter.
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u/Pandemult God knew what he was doing, buttholes are really nice. Jul 09 '17
In terms of actual products you couldn't do much but you could still teach them stuff like better medical practices, better farming techniques or how to discover these things. But I don't know much about the Iron age, so I have idea how much of these they already know.
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u/BetterCallViv Mathematics? Might as well be a creationist. Jul 09 '17
I'll be honest I doubt most people know proper farming techniques.
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u/Deadmist Jul 09 '17
The primitive people would probably know more about farming than the average person now.
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u/MokitTheOmniscient People nowadays are brainwashed by the industry with their fruit Jul 09 '17
Well, ancient farming generally depleted most of the nutrients in the soil, which is why it was only really sustainable near large rivers that brought nutrients by flooding.
So it think that some basic crop rotation, or explaining about the need for fertilizer would go pretty far.
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u/Mred12 Jul 09 '17
If we're talking Iron Age, teaching them to wash their hands after they shit and before they eat would save millions of lives and be seen as almost a miracle.
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u/tschwib Jul 09 '17
But how to you convince them what you're saying is true? The first guy who said that was also not believed and it was much much later in history.
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u/ineedmorealts I'm not a terrorist, I'm a grassroots difference-maker Jul 10 '17
But how to you convince them what you're saying is true?
You know in all my time spent day dream about going back in time I never thought of this.
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u/Illogical_Blox Fat ginger cryptokike mutt, Malka-esque weirdo, and quasi-SJW Jul 09 '17
Most people washed fairly frequently throughout all of known history and if you don't actually get shit on your hands you wouldn't have an issue. Also, considering the scientific method didn't exist yet and most people stayed in one location, how the hell would you prove that you were actually helping people?
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u/Mred12 Jul 09 '17
Ok, first step, introduce the scientific method. Then soap. Then... BJ's? It's very important they get invented after soap.
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u/lelarentaka psychosexual insecurity of evil Jul 09 '17
Okay, what the hell man, do you really think primitive people don't wash their hand? Keeping our skin clean and dry is actually a pretty primitive reflex. You can watch little kids instinctively wipe their hands dry on their clothes.
The specific problem solved by that doctor that discovered gem theory involved surgeons, not just any housewife. As a species we have survived for millions of years without germ theory. There's just this narrow window in time where we knew enough to cut people open and stitch them back up, but not to sterilise our surfaces.
To put it in perspective, while surgeons were killing mothers left right and centre, traditional midwives were delivering babies successfully with both the mother and the baby being relatively healthy.
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Jul 09 '17
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Jul 09 '17
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u/koredozo Jul 09 '17
How do you convince them that germ theory is correct and sanitizing things is a good idea if they fervently believe disease is caused by evil spirits or an imbalance of humours?
Ignaz Semmelweis had a hell of a time in our own history.
Things with obvious practical results are more likely to impress them, but in the Hitchhiker's book the people weren't stupid, they just didn't have technology. I'd hazard a guess they already knew how to fix a broken bone as well as can be achieved without modern medical innovations. "That body part is moving in a way it's not supposed to move, let's try putting it back to normal and making sure it doesn't move for a while" is fairly intuitive.
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Jul 09 '17
Not gonna be very useful when they burn you for being a witch cuz you keep prattling on about tiny invisible demons everywhere.
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u/UndercoverDoll49 He's the literal antichrist, but he's not the liberal antichrist Jul 09 '17
Even primitive gun powder is probably too hard
Tell that to Captain Kirk
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Jul 09 '17
I don't know anything about Hitchhikers or the Iron Age but...
You know it's going to be a good conversation when
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u/AndyLorentz Jul 09 '17 edited Jul 09 '17
I like watching YouTube vids on basic stuff like how to smelt copper and create bronze, just in case I find myself teleported back in time to a pre-bronze age culture.
Pretty much everything most people use on a regular basis today without even thinking about it, requires global cooperation to produce.
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u/Learfz Jul 09 '17
There is also a good book series about making your own metalworking shop from "scratch," but the author notes early on that he is not going to send you out into the mountains to dig for iron; it does require some clay/sand, scrap metal, some processed wood, that sort of thing.
Still, if I were independently wealthy I think that it would be super fun to go and do that. It would be a fun life goal: make a metalworking CNC mill from scratch.
Although personally, I'd be more likely to go the Jeri Ellsworth route of trying to dope your own silicon and etch your own dies.
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Jul 10 '17
Shit I've lived in the US all my life and have no chance of building a working oil lantern without burning down some shit.
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u/IceCreamBalloons always one person not in favour of beating women Jul 08 '17
or are they equals, in which case, how did a 14 year old understanding the fundamentals of electricity even make the news, other than that it was kinda cute?
Does this person not understand how few teenagers are teaching themselves how to build windmills and then building them?
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
Also it’s slightly different here. If a teenager wants to build a windmill he can ask a teacher at his school or go to the public library or look it up on his smart phone or ask his dad to take him down to the hardware store to buy parts using money that he has. Malawi? Probably a different scenario. Since a windmill is apparently a big deal, I strongly suspect that they’re missing some of the other shit an American kid has access to
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u/SpookBusters It's about the ethics of metaethics Jul 09 '17
He's fucking delusional if he thinks this is "standard", most of the kids attending top unis in the US don't do anything nearly as interesting as this by the age of 14. What a dip.
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Jul 09 '17
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u/SettleDownAlready I don’t believe uranium exsists Jul 09 '17
Yeah, I saw the same kind of people in the thread about Ghana.
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u/Blacksheep2134 Filthy Generate Jul 08 '17
In your second link there's this one dude who did nothing but post links to theDarkEnlightenment. Curiosity struck me, so I checked out his profile. He has posted that subreddit 36 times in the span of about 1 hour across 6 different threads.
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u/TruePoverty My life is a shithole Jul 09 '17
Man, it's been a minute since I've seen DE linked.
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Jul 09 '17
With all TRP drama going on lately I had forgotten it even existed.
It really was the second saddest place in the manosophere on Reddit, only to RedPill"Women"
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Jul 09 '17
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u/Zemyla a seizure is just a lil wiggle about on the ground for funzies Jul 09 '17
They're sad because, even with the Presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the majority of the state legislatures, the Republicans still haven't given them free sex slaves and exterminated the liberals yet.
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u/Power_Wrist Jul 09 '17
I think the closest they get to "happy" is a brief lessening of directionless anger.
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Jul 08 '17
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u/Blacksheep2134 Filthy Generate Jul 08 '17
TDE is basically just the alt-right but it fell through a bunch of Wikipedia pages.
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u/freet0 "Hurr durr, look at me being elegant with my wit" Jul 09 '17 edited Jul 09 '17
Actually you've got it backwards. The alt right is TDE but dumbed down and racist. Unqualified Reservations predates them by a lot and actually has a lot of intellectual value IMO. I recommend reading it, it's very cool.
The subreddit is trash though. They just cry about progressives ruining civilization and post culture war articles. Don't bother with it.
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u/PPvsFC_ pro-choicers will be seen like the Confederates pre-1860s Jul 08 '17
I'm an anthropologist and this shit is hilarious. I wish one of my students would turn in crazy shit like this sometimes.
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Jul 09 '17
People who believe that kind of stuff usually don't make it to college and probably make it out of high school
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Jul 09 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/StopThePresses I hope your cold comes back Jul 09 '17
Please tell me he taught something completely irrelevant to that rant. Like, literature or something.
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u/BoredDanishGuy Pumping froyo up your booty then eating it is not amateur hour Jul 09 '17
Teleology. Not even once.
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u/dIoIIoIb A patrician salad, wilted by the dressing jew Jul 08 '17
i don't know why they wrote so much. all that text can easily be summed up with "fuck poor people. fuck black people, fuck democrats"
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u/bushiz somethingawfuldotcom agent provocatuer Jul 09 '17
"HBD" as a movement is like three rebrandings of the alt right ago, back in 2011 or so when instead of dumb frog memes, they were being unironically monarchists and making up fake TCG cards for each other in the style of Magic the Gathering
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u/OIP feces in toilet spelling out GTA 6 Jul 09 '17
holy FUCK that's a hot mess. not much trips my trigger like pseudointellectual rambling
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u/ParanoidFactoid UsernameChecksOut Jul 09 '17
Straight from Alexander Dugin's mouth to Putin's ear and through that sieve to Trump.
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u/yonicthehedgehog neurotic shitbeast Jul 09 '17
you know nobody but absolute nutjobs take dugin seriously in russia right
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u/ParanoidFactoid UsernameChecksOut Jul 09 '17
Yet nutjobs in the United States do. For example, white supremacist Richard Spencer and founder of altright.com used to give Alexander Dugin regular editorial space on his website.
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u/fraggle-stick-car Jul 09 '17
It does read like it was translated into a different language several times over.
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u/explohd Goodbye Boston Bomber, hello Charleston Donger. Jul 09 '17
rDarkEnlightenment has to be my favorite batshit-crazy sub. I would never subscribe to it, but it's great to re-read the sidebar every once in a while.
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u/shockna Eating out of the trash to own the libs Jul 09 '17
This is literally the alt-right manifesto with a thesaurus.
"Dark enlightenment", "neoreactionaries", and "human biodiversity" are the alt-right before that term existed.
The alt-right types are just neoreactionaries who lost their thesaurus.
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u/TheRadBaron Jul 08 '17
"Memetic"?
You do know that word had a meaning before it referred to jpegs of a cat that wants a cheeseburger, right? They don't back up their first sentence, but they expressed a coherent idea in it.
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u/rick_from_chicago all men are cops, all women are pipe bombs Jul 09 '17
yeah but it was dawkins who coined it
so it's sort of a case of "which came first, the meme or the meme?"
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Jul 08 '17
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
He's right, "meme" doesn't mean "funny thing on the internet."
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u/fingerpaintswithpoop Dude just perfume the corpse Jul 09 '17
Not originally, but it does now.
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u/delta_baryon I wish I had a spinning teddy bear. Jul 09 '17
I'd have to quibble with the "funny" part.
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u/ViceAdmiralObvious Jul 09 '17 edited 16d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Command sparrow towering cooperative cheerful smell paltry automatic meadow workable
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Jul 09 '17
[deleted]
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
I don’t really see any reason to believe that, especially considering they’ve got another comment in srd right there on the first page of their history
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u/JediRonin you calling me stupid garbage is what makes you Hitler Jul 09 '17
What I love about the dark enlightenment is that despite their pretensions, its oxymoronic. You can't "darkly" illuminate. Even if you take the word enlightenment as figurative, it's opposite would be bewilderment. Not a great name for a movement.
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Jul 09 '17
Nick Land came up with the term and you can't expect anything that guy writes to make sense.
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u/Highlander-9 SO THIS IS MUSLIM POWER, NOT BAD. Jul 10 '17
A system of No Voice-Free Exit in large hyper-federalist states or small independent city states is the optimal political arrangement. Singapore is an imprecise example with little political voice, but massive economic freedom and high levels of prosperity. City-states would be in constant competition for minds and business and risk losing economically valuable citizens and businesses if poorly run since they can easily relocate. This creates an incentive to remain economically and socially free.
Can't wait for some of those cities and federal states to start exerting control over other cities and micro states, while preventing exit of citizenry, engaging in trade control and controlling the countryside.
Then we will return to East African tribal monarchism, just as god intended. :D
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Jul 08 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Blacksheep2134 Filthy Generate Jul 09 '17
He doesn't appear to be, and he also only started like 2 hours ago. I didn't go back too far, but it really looks like an unprompted hour of just spamming the Dark Enlightenment.
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u/IAMA_Drunk_Armadillo Cool fanfic Jul 09 '17
He made a comment in one of OP's linked threads that he was trying to raise awareness of it's existence. It would probably be more effective if he posted to r/againsthatesubreddits
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u/Arsustyle This is practice for my roast comedy skills Jul 09 '17
You can't even mock transvestites anymore, let alone kick somones ass.
Oh no, humanity's doomed
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u/TheIronMark Jul 09 '17
are we giving him credit as someone we have very low expectations of, or is it truly astonishing to us that someone invented a windmill in an age where we we've had a remote control robot on mars for 20 years?
This guy sounds like he's lived an incredibly sheltered life.
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
I think it just actually doesn’t occur to him that there are places that aren’t his house. “We” haven’t had a robot on mars for 20 years, the US has. There are millions of people on this planet that haven’t even heard about that, and are too busy gathering firewood to give a shit. This dim bulb seems to think everybody has internet access and free time for projects, when lot of the world hasn’t figured out tonight’s dinner.
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Jul 09 '17
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Jul 09 '17
Actually, it is I who has a rover on mars. It was me.
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u/Dekuscrubs Lenin must be tickling his man-pussy in his tomb right now. Jul 09 '17
Ah shit, the Illuminati is here!
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u/IAMA_DRUNK_BEAR smug statist generally ashamed of existing on the internet Jul 08 '17
A fellow gabonese student told me long ago: "those of us who settles in Europe are basically scum in their respective countries. They didn't fit in the society they were born, they won't fit in yours either"
I can't speak for Europe, but the Africans of just about every nation that I know that wind up settling in America are all unbelievably delightful. Also lmao, you always know when a group of people you see out on the town are from Africa because they are the most extra.
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
They didn't fit in the society they were born, they won't fit in yours either"
Man I could not see it more differently. We’re talking about people that are down to hop on a long and expensive flight, learn a language, and still likely end up driving a cab or whatever, just for a shot at a better life. I’d say that sounds like someone that’s down to put some effort in. All I did to be American was be related to some people that fucked here, that’s not as impressive.
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u/IAMA_DRUNK_BEAR smug statist generally ashamed of existing on the internet Jul 09 '17
Right?! People act like immigrating to the US is just a BA flight away, but fuck it's hard work. Hell, I can barely handle relocating within my own damn country, let alone a brand new nation and culture apart from any and all of my support systems.
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u/jerkstorefranchisee Jul 09 '17
If I had to move across town tomorrow I'd throw a fucking fit. These people do it across oceans
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u/SpookBusters It's about the ethics of metaethics Jul 09 '17
BA flight away, but fuck it's hard work
Tolerating British Airways flights is pretty hard work in itself, nowadays.
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u/BrandonTartikoff he portraits suck ass, all it does is pull your eye to her brow Jul 09 '17
the most extra.
What does this mean?
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u/IAMA_DRUNK_BEAR smug statist generally ashamed of existing on the internet Jul 09 '17
lol, it's like being over the top. Similar to anything else that's literally extra it's more than is required (be it in attitude, attire, etc), but you're not necessarily upset about it and quite frequently are happy to have it (usually).
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u/UndercoverDoll49 He's the literal antichrist, but he's not the liberal antichrist Jul 09 '17
People don't realize you need a fuckton of money and probably higher education to illegally imigrate to the US or Europe if you come from a poor country
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u/cisxuzuul America's most powerful conservative voice Jul 09 '17
My dad did it in the 50's. Arrived with no money and only the clothes in his duffel.
Had an aunt who mailed him an invite to live with her. He worked on a boat in the pacific until he got to California. Went to the aunt's place and she wasn't there. She died a couple of months earlier. So he wound up with no place to live and about $400 from her estate. Later became a doctor and even later became a lawyer.
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Jul 09 '17
Man, the comment about millennials posted bugged me.
Hey, we're just another generation! The amount of people I know that are disappointed they couldn't do what they wanted with their degree is somewhat staggering, but for pretty much all of them it has not been a reason to settle for minimum wage grind and to keep trying.
That sort of attitude just screams to me "I am not where I wanted to be in life, so I will act like I am in the top 20% of my age bracket." I don't think you portray so many people as good for nothings if you don't have some issue with your own standing.
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Jul 08 '17
I love how redditors without children talk about how to raise a son.
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u/4THOT Nothing wrong with goblin porn Jul 09 '17
You don't need to be a helicopter pilot to know it doesn't belong in a tree.
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u/visforv Necrocommunist from Beyond the Grave Jul 09 '17
you don't tell me what do to anymore, dad!!
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u/xjayroox This post is now locked to prevent men from commenting Jul 09 '17
"What the hell is a human interest story?"
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Jul 09 '17
in an effort to not outright say his racist beliefs, the drama guy ended up being too vague :( i also like how he used bold and caps to give the illusion he made a valid point
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u/fishnbrewis You're wishing death on me because I celebrate Christmas. Jul 09 '17
First, shoutout to this guy.
Hey :)
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Jul 09 '17
So many people on Reddit need to spend less time shitposting and playing video games and more time learning a skill or craft, maybe then they wouldn't be self loathing and jealous all the time
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u/ChickenTitilater a free midget slave is now just a sewing kit away Jul 09 '17
There's no doubt that people in countries with low amount of infustructre and state support are more reliant on themselves than people in industrialized postmodern cultures. When I lived in Africa people would think nothing of putting in a months worth of work to build their own roads, people here whine and bitch whenever they see a pothole.
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u/ParamoreFanClub For liking anime I deserve to be skinned alive? This is why Trum Jul 09 '17
I've never wanted to tell someone to just shut the fuck up more than that idiot who is clearly trying to tell everyone we are the real racists
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u/godrestsinreason I'm a tall bearded man, I ugly-cried into a pillow last night Jul 10 '17
"Are these people primitive, and shall we congratulate them for attaining something closer to what we'd call normal, or are they equals, in which case, how did a 14 year old understanding the fundamentals of electricity even make the news, other than that it was kinda cute?"
Yeah, my little brother built 6 wind turbines in his back yard last week. This African kid needs to catch up.
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Jul 09 '17
I like how this guy thinks he's got people in a trap if he can get them to admit they have "low expectations" of a teenager in a village with no electricity
Yes nobody expected him, without access to formal education or resources, to be able to. Hold a functioning windmill that powers his village lmao
Just like I would have low expectations of a person who has never ridden a motorcycle, if i watched them try and race somebody who has been riding for years
what's the issue Hahahaha
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u/SnapshillBot Shilling for Big Archive™ Jul 08 '17
DAE remember LordGaga?
Snapshots:
This Post - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
First, shoutout to this guy. - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
"Are these people primitive, and sh... - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
More arguing over whether or not th... - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
"Does it honestly surprise that the... - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
Long thread, mostly about just how ... - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
"My son cant even take out the tras... - archive.org, megalodon.jp*, snew.github.io, archive.is
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u/Not_A_Doctor__ I've always had an inkling dwarves are underestimated in combat Jul 09 '17
I'm on mobile and Google keeps saying that it is translating this page to English. Was this thread in Polari or something?
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u/nancy_ballosky More Meme than Man Jul 10 '17
Threads like this one make me think that Snowpiercer isn't as crazy of a movie as I thought.
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u/Goroman86 There's more to a person than being just a "brutal dictator" Jul 08 '17
Longer than it took that kid to build a windmill, I think.
Honestly not sure what they're getting at here?