for god's sake can we please primary biden, please

[grindy]

^ Good one, guys!

Here's another ridiculous US President - the guy's in a wheelchair !!

And him being in a wheelchair was hidden from the public for a long time through various deceptions, in order to not make him appear weak...

[SGR]

And him being in a wheelchair was hidden from the public for a long time through various deceptions, in order to not make him appear weak...

An even worse deception in the same ballpark was when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that essentially paralyzed him and greatly limited his functional capacity, and his wife Edith Wilson surreptitiously ran the country for the last year and a half of his second term without the public knowing...in a way, we've already had a woman president, albeit an unelected one.

Over the last century, historians have continued to dig into the proceedings of the Wilson administration and it has become clear that Edith Wilson acted as much more than a mere "steward." She was, essentially, the nation's chief executive until her husband's second term concluded in March of 1921. Nearly three years later, Woodrow Wilson died in his Washington, D.C., home, at 2340 S Street, NW, at 11:15 AM on Sunday, Feb. 3, 1924.

[Guybrush]

Oh believe me, I know all too well about the crimes of Stalin and the USSR. When I was in college, I was rather obsessed with Soviet history (and the morbid terror of communism in general). From the great purges, to the gulags, to the Holodomor, to dekulakization, Stalin placed no value on the human life he was eviscerating in an attempt to fast-track industrialization. The Ukraine famine was so bad, residents were resorting to cannibalism. Here's a picture to give you an idea of what was going on - a couple selling human flesh (this picture is from the Povolzhye famine of 1921-1922, but gives you an idea).

'Gore, disturbing'

[close]

Despite the insane cost of human life, Stalin and the Soviets still weren't industrialized enough to handle the war effort against the nazis on their own. In American schools and popular American media, we often overstate how important our direct military involvement was in WW2 - while in Russian schools, they tend to downplay the contributions from America in terms of how important we were to winning the war. In reality, one of the most important US contributions came through the Lend-Lease act, in which we provided the Soviets with a boatload of military equipment and raw materials:

The link I provided also contains some quotes from Stalin and Khrushchev confirming their belief that without US aid, they wouldn't have been able to win the war. Put morbidly, America provided the Soviets the machines, and the Soviets provided the meat to use them.

If anyone is interested, this is probably the most extensive and detailed book I've read if you're just interested in morbidly awful things that happened in many Communist regimes:

Nice post, @SGR 😲 Morbid, informative and interesting. The details you mention about the lend-lease act is something I wasn't aware of.. or if they mentioned it in one of the WW2 docs I've seen, I must've forgotten it.

Thanks for sharing!

Famine and cannibalism in Ukraine and other soviet territories is something I've heard about. Specifically, I heard a podcast about the russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo who was born in 1936 in Ukraine. His Wikipedia page has this to say about his childhood there:

"The family seldom had sufficient food; Chikatilo himself later claimed not to have eaten bread until the age of 12, adding that he and his family often had to eat grass and leaves in an effort to stave off hunger. Throughout his childhood, Chikatilo was repeatedly told by his mother Anna that prior to his birth, an older brother of his named Stepan had, at the age of four, been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbours, although it has never been established whether this incident actually occurred, or if a Stepan Chikatilo even existed. Nonetheless, Chikatilo recalled his childhood as being blighted by poverty, ridicule, hunger, and war."

So terrible!

[Lisnaholic]

^ Yes, times two about SGR's post. That photo is of a terrible thing - that people were reduced to such an extreme. Likewise, what you wrote about Chikatilo's childhood.
I haven't investigated much about rural Russia in that era, but I did read about life in the gulags and the forced labour that went on in the area around the mining town of Magadan: that's the huge easternmost part of Russia where the climate alone is a continual punishment.   

[SGR]

That's news to me about Chikatilo. I knew about Chikatilo, but I didn't know about the context of his childhood. Awful evil he witnessed, likely an evil that he internalized - and an awful evil he ended up carrying out on others.

This is the kind of thing that's kept me coming back to old-style web forums like MB and SCD - with only a few posts, we can end up, on a thread about primarying the current US president, discussing World War 2, Soviet collectivization and famines, and Ukrainian serial killers. You just don't get that same kind of magic on places like Twitter or Reddit. 

[Lisnaholic]

^ 

I bet Majorie Taylor Greene could bring us back on topic, though. In fact she is running a new political ad:-

A vote for Trump means:-


"Welcome home, Honey ! I've just made some apple pie"

Vote for Biden and his communist policies and America will become:-

'Gore, disturbing'

[close]

I am Majorie Taylor Greene and I approve this message.

[Lexi Darling]

I saw that video. It's so freaky that the "wholesome suburban mom in the kitchen" angle is what they're running with. I mean, I wouldn't ever want to promote being me to anyone, let alone all of America. 

[DJChameleon]

I saw that video. It's so freaky that the "wholesome suburban mom in the kitchen" angle is what they're running with. I mean, I wouldn't ever want to promote being me to anyone, let alone all of America. 

Trad con movement has been growing lately and it seems like a trendy thing but there are trad con men and women on social media like gaining popularity lately.

[Lexi Darling]

Trad con movement has been growing lately and it seems like a trendy thing but there are trad con men and women on social media like gaining popularity lately.

Yeah, I'm familiar unfortunately. And of course despite being a housewife I am not traditional or conservative anything, I just wanted to make a silly self-roast, haha.