Posts by Paul Sanders5

Carol Lewis said:The Actor who played Cruz is actually named Adolf ☕

If you don't know who Cruz is, you clearly haven't been paying any attention at all...

Rock solid, thank God. ☕

Charles Roberts33 said:Starting with the Roman Emperors, I have a real soft spot for those who managed to maintain order and restore even a flicker of the Empire's former glory while navigating chaotic, decadent eras surrounded by complete incompetents—think guys like Aurelian, or our own Valentine. 😉

But if we're talking absolute TOP1, for me, it’s Marcus Aurelius. Purely sentimental reasons.

Good recommendations. Check out GQ; it's some interesting reading.

Did you actually shed a tear watching Gladiator?

Charles Roberts33 said:It’s all standing still, but world history is a long game. 🤷

And it isn't just those most famous leagues that actually matter. ☕

If we're going to highlight rulers who were masters at squeezing every bit of potential out of meager resources, then honestly, very few can be mentioned in the same breath as Michael the Brave.
☕

Generally speaking, the Wallachian princes are criminally underrated, if you'll excuse my language. 😉

It’s long, absolutely, but somehow Europe always manages to pop up at the top. Look, Napoleon was going up against the top 5 nations in the world back then—technologically speaking, anyway. It’s like a Golden Boot; scoring a goal in the Premier League counts for two points, while a goal in Cyprus is worth like 0.1. Why even bring up Russia's conquests in Siberia? Sure, they have the quantity, but they just don't have the quality :Stico:

I’d also mention Suleiman the Magnificent—equally massive on both fronts.

Charles Roberts33 said:Trophies, influence, longevity, style, charisma—and, of course, personal bias. It’s the usual checklist whenever people start bickering over who truly belongs in the GOAT conversation. 🤷

Why is he so incredibly certain about Napoleon? 🤔

What’s your take on the leadership styles of those ancient Persian rulers?

He basically swept through all of Europe. Even when other countries teamed up, they had the advantage in almost everything, but it didn't save them. Plus, look at how he reorganized the state—he started with France and then that whole system just spilled over into everywhere else.

Ace was obsessed with conquering stuff. He had these massive plans for restructuring the government—kind of hazy and vague if you ask me—but he wasn't even that worried about the details. His main headspace was just conquering the known world. If he’d actually made the call, he probably would've made it all the way to China. Maybe we wouldn't be dealing with all this chaos today.

Charles Roberts33 said:Since we’ve already started the flood of polls... which historical leader would you consider the GOAT? Who do you respect the most? 🤔

Personally, I find myself leaning toward Alexander II. 😉

Man, that's a tough one. If you look at the whole package—military conquests, how they actually ruled, their overall legacy—there's really only one answer: Napoleon.

If we're strictly talking pure military genius, though? It's easy. Alexander the Great. Nobody even comes close to him.

Me? I've always had a soft spot for Isabella.😉

restlesssurfer97 said:GQ has to frame things this way because he knows the truth about that little mini-dictator is going to come out pretty soon anyway, so he’s basically just setting himself up to say he hasn't changed his mind once the dust settles and he can claim he stood his ground the whole time.

Playing The Long Con 🙏

Man, seriously. Imagine some guy being told he should freeze his sperm because his wife wants kids, even though he won't be around to see them. Then, despite all that, he pulls through and actually makes it happen? That dude deserves a massive Toreov standing ovation. Like, for real.

And look, he’s definitely not the only one. Everyone’s been caught doping at some point—there isn't a single clean cyclist left in the bunch.

Susan Kim2 said:In cycling, being second under Tex Winter is actually the smartest move. Once they "discover" that the guy in first was doping, nobody will even bother looking at the runner-up, let alone giving them credit.

Maybe it’s actually time to just legalize doping. It's pretty obvious the human body just isn't built to handle the sheer brutality of these bike races without some kind of help. Either that, or someone is basically running at 70% capacity.😁

steelharbor9 said:The guy below pretty much nailed the whole point of this story.

Twenty-five years ago, even for Americans—let alone people over here—Charles Barkley and his crew were basically mythological figures. You’d stumble upon a newspaper clipping and read it fifty times. If you were lucky with the local news stations, maybe you’d catch one game or at least a couple of highlights. That was it. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong; I wasn't actually there, after all.

Nobody is walking around wearing a John Stockton or Shawn Kemp jersey these days, but it’s obvious why people growing up back then saw them as gods. It's for the exact same reason kids today will look up to Stephen Curry and Russell Westbrook, or the youngest ones will worship Luka Dončić—and I'm sorry if you don't want to see it that way! There isn't really a "correct" answer to who was the bigger legend. Everyone's hero is just whoever they spent those nostalgic moments watching. I guess Stephen Curry's shimmy against OKC in 2016 is more iconic than Scottie Pippen's dunk over Patrick Ewing—but if I say that to someone ten or fifteen years older, their blood pressure might hit 200 because of the blasphemy!

For me, the 2002 World Cup is still the strongest memory, even though everyone older than me says it was one of the worst ever. Man, it was the first one I followed live. I watched every single second they showed, and even now, I can remember most of the scorers and results. Nothing will ever hit that emotional level for me again, I guess.

Garbage. 😁

Looking back from '94 until now... 2006 was probably my favorite. No real reason why, just felt right.

Matthew Young35 said:What exactly are you basing this denial of apocalyptic potential on? Is it just a feeling, or actual scientific research? Among scientists, there is almost a consensus that this apocalyptic potential exists. Of course, there are those who think differently, but they are a tiny minority.
You claim this disease isn't that dangerous, but the truth is, nobody actually knows how dangerous it is yet. We'll likely have a much clearer picture by next winter.

The most defeating thing for America is realizing that almost nothing depends on our own reactions. We could have carried on without any restrictions, but the economy would have gone to hell regardless. For instance, where I work—and it's a mess—we haven't seen any goods from China since the start of the year. And we aren't the only ones. Don't even get me started on the impact on tourism.

You're seriously messing with us right now 😁

The virus has been floating around for five months, maybe longer, and you're asking me what we're basing our denial of an apocalyptic scenario on? Seriously?

I don't know, man. To me, an apocalyptic scenario looks like this or this.

My body, my choice ☕

urbanhawk17 said:

counter-protest 🤣🙏

Surreal.

Aleksandar Vučić is sending his fanboys up onto building rooftops 🤣

Man, we can complain about our own politicians all day, but we are miles ahead of this mess.

wiredrider9 said:

you know what they say—a picture is worth a thousand words ☕

I mean, look at the footage—everyone was sitting two feet apart and nobody was even wearing a mask! So why are people getting so worked up about this?

Also, does anyone know if you can fly in from Belgium without having to deal with quarantine? 🍿

brightpilot6 said:@ Queen

Since we haven't actually crossed paths in person lately, nothing much has moved forward, which makes me wonder how we could have ever argued that we were doing too much in the first place. 🤷

So, I find myself circling back to my starting point. When it comes to things I don't fully grasp, I tend to lean toward the consensus of experts—especially when that view is as globally widespread and relatively unified as this one is. I’m not talking about politicians, but rather scientists. Though, to be fair, there are certain politicians out there whom I trust to make decisions in their people's best interests, leaders with a proven track record of good governance, so I do place some level of confidence in their judgment (which, let's be honest, is likely far more nuanced than anything being debated here on Reddit).

The alternative logic is essentially the mindset of an anti-vaxxer or a flat-earther; because if you feel compelled to believe in some massive, overarching conspiracy involving such a vast number of scientists (and indeed, politicians), what else is left for you to hold onto?

Nah, you're missing the point entirely. It's about something else. From the very beginning, anyone—even actual scientists who suggested a different way of handling this—has been totally demonized. Like, what would you even say to them? "Oh, you don't care about the elderly?" That's the go-to line. The approaches taken by the USA, England, and Sweden were basically branded as insane. People were making fun of them, implying they weren't mentally sound or that they valued the economy over human lives. And that's just within our own cultural bubble. Nobody was even talking about how places like Korea or Taiwan were handling things.

And here's the kicker: YouTube has started nuking Aleister Crowley and his kind of content. Look, I don't buy into his stuff. I don't believe 5G spreads viruses—I think he's a total moron, along with his followers and those guys back in San Diego who were tearing down antennas. But once you start scrubbing stuff like that, you're opening Pandora's box. You could be a highly respected scientist with a mountain of degrees, but the second you say something that goes against the official government and media narrative... boom. Suddenly, you're an enemy of the state. Or even worse, you're just censored out of existence.

Anthony Wright30 said:I suppose it isn't just limited to our own borders, either. Even in many nations far more powerful than ours, it seems the media has successfully carried out its assignment.

Everywhere, man. Except maybe the States, because society over there functions on a completely different wavelength compared to any European nation. People don't just blindly follow whatever the government tells them to do.

We were literally laughing at those guys when they showed up in front of buildings brandishing weapons.

Meanwhile, back home, we’re stuck banging pots and pans against Milan Bandić's doorstep. And even then, you're doing it from your patio because you aren't allowed out—Stozer banned us.

Jessica Gonzalez said:We really are a unique country. Nothing seems to work here, not even a virus. I guess maybe it’s because of how the government is run.

Thank God for the Republican Party and Stozer, they managed to scare the virus off.

brightpilot6 said:Look, if we’re really looking at this through that lens, then a total collapse means waiting six months just for a routine medical checkup. But I’m not talking about isolated incidents here. I am talking about a sweeping legal, economic, and social breakdown that, if left unchecked, acts like a nuclear bomb—making a month spent staying home due to policy seem like nothing more than a light haze of cigarette smoke.

But fine. It seems your analysis has led you down one path, while I’ve ended up somewhere else entirely. Whether we justify these measures or not is ultimately up to us, isn't it? After all, we don't all process the world in quite the same way.

The real question is: who’s actually going to take the fall for all this? Sure, you can sit there and tell me "everything turned out great," but I remember a whole crowd of experts freaking out, warning us that humanity was headed for total extinction if we didn't follow every single rule to the letter. Man, I still vividly remember that expert from Germany claiming it was totally realistic for us to be stuck in some kind of limited quarantine for two full years before they could even get a vaccine ready.

Listen, folks, I’m begging you—heads on sticks, please. Just hear me out. ☕

brightpilot6 said:So, the entire argument put forth by Jessica Gonzalez is built on the premise that the danger simply "doesn't exist." They’ve been insisting on this since the very beginning, which I can only describe as an uneducated guess. It’s uneducated because it completely disregards the consensus held by the 99.9% of people who have spent their entire lives studying this field.

To be clear, no scientist was actually claiming this was Ebola. Rather, they suggested it was something akin to a flu strain, but one that (a) spreads significantly faster, (b) lacks any known immunity, (c) currently has no vaccine or cure, (d) has an unknown mutation rate, (e) leaves us in the dark regarding long-term effects on survivors, and (f) requires intensive care in about 5% of cases. All of those facts remain true today.

Furthermore, there isn't a single serious nation on Earth—not even Sweden—that hasn't implemented radical, unprecedented measures to defend against the virus, which is precisely why the numbers have remained manageable. This applies even to countries that initially treated the threat with nothing but mockery.

But for a certain crowd here, the danger remains non-existent or negligible, purely because statistically speaking, THEY have very little chance of getting screwed over. I suppose that says everything you need to know.

The real kicker is that our "uneducated guess" turned out to be way more accurate than the "educated guesses" from the supposed experts. Those guys were throwing around infection and death counts like street vendors shouting at a market to lure in customers. "50 million infected in Germany!" Or, "If you don't stay home, the cemeteries in Mexico City won't be able to hold all the bodies!"

You're saying nobody knew. Fine, okay, nobody knew, but how is it possible that every single "expert" forecast missed the mark by such a massive margin? You tell me the quarantine worked, we slowed the spread, instead of needing 100,000 beds, California only filled up 5,000 (I'm using them because we actually have their data, I don't know ours but I've got a feeling maybe 10% of beds were full at the peak).

Well, I'm telling you, it didn't do jack. You've got nursing homes—places that are absolute magnets for isolation and contact limiting—and in the end, none of it mattered. The virus walked right in and found its perfect targets, just like any other virus does.

I said it at the start, I'm saying it now, and in six months, a year, or two, we're going to realize that way more of us came into contact with the virus than anyone thought.

You're wound up tight, Joseph Clark37. Look, I don't need to play the war hero after the battle is over, because honestly, everything I’m saying right now is stuff I was shouting at the start of this whole mess. And I'm definitely not the only one—if we're looking back at what went down on Reddit, it was me, Tijs, Papi, and Jessica Gonzalez all saying the same thing.

Let's just stick to the facts for a second. Forget the "what ifs"—what if the virus was deadlier, what if everyone caught it, blah blah blah. If we're going to live in a world of hypotheticals, then fine, let's just wait around for the next pandemic in ten years and stay locked in quarantine; might as well be prepared, right? God forbid. But when you look at how other countries handled things? It’s pretty obvious there were other ways to play this.

The average age of those who died from Corona in the US was 79.2, according to what Beroš reported today. Generally speaking, the average age of death here in the States is around 76.5.

We're looking at a total economic collapse and a 10% drop in GDP. That's being optimistic. In reality, it's going to be way worse. And it's not just happening here; it's hitting everyone. This is the fallout from pure madness.

I found this interesting graph, straight out of California, since Americans basically live and breathe stats and numbers. It’s a shame we’ll never see that kind of transparency here; I bet all their projections just vanished into thin air, kind of like that support rally for Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović.

Look, give us a break, alright? Those of us who were screaming for a totally different approach right from the jump finally get a chance to laugh our heads off. And hey, there aren't even that many of us left to make any noise about it 😉