Post a controversial opinion

Ivanka looks like her father

Yeah, was mostly thinking I was jealous of those abs.

(xpost, obvs)

Young donald is p handsome

for a cross between barry pepper and donald moffat i guess he wasn't so bad

The two traps about posting here are 1) if you do, it's like you're patting yourself on the back--"Look at me, I have a controversial opinion," and 2) no one's going to post anything actually controversial, because who needs the grief of people getting angry at you. Really, all you can do is post a not-actually-controversial opinion--about a celebrity, about a movie--where the great majority of people disagree with you.

Along those lines, except for Catherine Keener and Betty Gabriel, there was very little I liked about Get Out.

the real controversial opinions were the friends we made along the way

Hmm. He's cute in a dime-a-dozen way.

― some sad trombone Twilight Zone shit (cryptosicko), Wednesday, April 5, 2017 7:07 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's cute in a flip-a-dime-off-his-abs way.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 5, 2017 7:08 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha <3 alfred

To Pimp a Butterfly wasn't that good

a dime, is that all you're paying him?

abs, bleh

Controversial opinions you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here?

Looking at the development the last five years, it's getting clearer and clearer that the West should have bombed Syria in 2013.

Do you have a detailed plan for how that would have worked and what the consequences would have been?

No, but I'm assuming things hasn't turned out according to your plan either, so that point is moot.

possibly the "let's bomb shit" plan has to reach a higher standard of theoretical efficacy than the "let's not" plan

Even so, at this point the 'let's not' plan has gone so catastrophically wrong, that it's moot as well.

I'm just wondering how ballsy a controversial opinion is being proposed.

"Syria would be better off if Assad had been forced from power even if it meant ISIS and Al Qaeda taking over a much larger portion of the country" would be a bold one I'd be interested in hearing defended. "Open conflict with Iran and Hezbollah (and possibly Russia) would be a price worth paying for attempting regime change" would be another. Even "I trust the US to get it right in Syria despite the catastrophic failure to plan for consequences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya" would be good. I'm not even saying they're wrong so it'd be interesting to hear them thought through in detail.

"In retrospect, something should have been bombed"(what? where? to what end?) is both meaningless on its own and not particularly controversial if it can apparently unite Clinton, Rubio, latter day Trump, CNN, MSNBC.

All that is just counterfactuals. I'm saying it was worth the risk of regime change, of regional war, of whatever, because we did the opposite and it has failed disastrously, and whatever would have happened it would have been handled by Obama instead of Trump.

^^^literal garbage from the biggest fool on ilx

^^^he posted controversially

was gonna say, "leaving Trump to step up to the plate in the middle of open conflict in the whole region"

The west should have bombed Denmark last year.

the west should have bombed Ed Sheeran's house last year

That's quite probably the least controversial opinion posted in this thread so far.

imo all those supposed non-payers in NATO could put some peacekeepers on the ground, right

around Ed Sheeran's house, I mean

If that had been the mission back in 2005, I might not have been a conscientious objector.

who lives near Sheeran? think we need to scope out whether collateral damage is a concern.

if it's Jedward I say bombs away

the clear (well, translucent really) glasses frames currently in vogue are ugly as fuck

Absolutely clear glasses

I regret my lasik surgery, 17 years ago, that allowed me function without glasses. For better or worse, the coke bottle glasses were part of my identity, and without them I was forgettable.

Cyclists in cities that are not especially bike-friendly and have yet to adapt to a rise in number of cyclists make the streets 100% more dangerous for drivers and pedestrians

Pedestrians, yes. Drivers, no.

Fuck drivers IMO

Pedestrians > Drivers > Cyclists

Wimmels possibly OTM, in which case, this should spur cities like this one to adapt and become more cyclist-friendly.

so if there were no cyclists in those cities there'd be a 50% reduction in accidents/injuries/'danger'? it's a good controversial opinion anyway

pedestrian friendly much more important

Number of drivers killed by cyclists continues to be zero for the foreverth year in a row.

Lol

Fuck pedestrians. Luddites of our times.

Removed from their modes of transportation, I'm sure a person that occasionally rides a bike has murdered a person that occasionally drives a car.

Cyclists certainly have killed pedestrians. Just be grateful these wankers aren't driving cars imo.

and pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists have all been killed by this guy

http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/images/300437/300437_full.jpg

yes, some pedestrians have been killed by cyclists -- on average, somewhere around 1-2 a year. Motorists kill more than 5,000 pedestrians and 800 cyclists every year.

speaking as a driver (and frequent pedestrian), I can say that it makes driving far more difficult when you are not only on the lookout for pedestrians, other drivers, traffic lights, cabs, potholes, street signs, construction, and all the other things you've learned to pay attention to in your decades of driving experience, but also a rising number of frequently death-defying cyclists who don't follow the rules they so emphatically demand that everyone else follow. I've watched cyclists blow red lights and stop signs, make illegal left turns, not signal, and ride against traffic, and this was just yesterday.

and obviously when I said 'dangerous" I didn't mean 'dangerous to me and my car' and only someone who doesn't actually drive would automatically jump to that conclusion. I meant dangerous to everyone, because cyclists are in danger whenever drivers don't know how to adapt to this growing trend (or won't), pedestrians because of course, and drivers because they begin driving like assholes when they're constantly freaking out about the obstacle course that has become modern city driving

I get rural areas that haven't modernized but the area I grew up in totally adapted to be cyclist friendly, so don't get some of the more reluctant cities that don't.

an observation:

in most cities, the overwhelming majority of people are at various times both pedestrians and motorists (incl folks who take rides in cars occasionally) and so we empathize with our fellow walkers and drivers a bit more and can more easily discriminate i.e. "that guy is a terrible driver," "that person in the crosswalk on the phone is an idiot," versus "drivers are terrible," "everyone crossing the street is an idiot." Meanwhile, cyclists are a self-selecting minority and thus most folks, having never been an adult urban cyclist, readily stereotype them with a broad(er) brush.

basically the same phenomenon with people in overwhelmingly white communities having much harsher views of other ethnicities than people who actually live among them

there's probably some consistent threshold of proportion of cyclists in the population that, once crossed, makes things safer all around. This paper goes into much more detail about it and references Smeed's Law which is another one of my favorite eponymous laws

http://www.vehicularcyclist.com/safeinnumbers.pdf

This is partly a knock on cyclists, partly on city planners, partly on people like me who are set in their ways. They've added all these bike lanes in downtown Toronto, and I'm worried that as I pull into a parking space one day, there'll be a cyclist clipping past on my right (which some will do and is completely stupid). That's not something I've ever had to think about in almost forty years of driving, and I keep catching myself pulling in without checking my right blind spot.