Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "The Rubin Report"
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After the Gulag leaked out, championing socialism became a tough sell. Since George Orwell - a former socialist - figured out it was all a sham, the elites switched tactics from "Socialism is great!" to systematically discrediting free-market capitalism. With generations indoctrinated against free-market capitalism, socialism became more and more popular amongst academics, who dared not speak its name until quite recently. Now we're back to the 1920s, again, where socialism represents some kind of utopian alternative to free-market capitalism and limited government.
Most people don't understand the basic principles and main differences between socialist authoritarianism and free-market capitalism. Nobody understands the concept of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand," because it's, well, invisible! It's far easier to parade a few people you used taxpayer money to benefit than it is to show the destruction of the engine of prosperity that lifts EVERYone. It's not an invisible hand. It's an invisible tide that raises all boats simultaneously, through millions of individual transactions and choices made VOLUNTARILY by people. The so-called 'left' (whom I see as re-branded authoritarian right with a kinder, gentler mask) don't trust the people, so they foolishly put all their faith in the most toxic power seekers in the country, rewarding foolish policies with votes, because there's Free Stuff in it for those who support total demagogues.
Most of the progress of the 20th Century was in SPITE of what the government was doing. Our free-market economy generated so much wealth and prosperity that the erosion of our prosperity by demagogues was not as great as the engine of prosperity: Free people incentivized to excellence by profit. The economy is NOT a zero-sum game. We CREATE wealth through hard work and innovation. And we get the most innovation from a free society that allows EVERYbody the right to KEEP what they build or earn. Socialists hate that. They want power and they want to MAKE winners they can show off, rather than LETTING people win on their own merits.
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Coming over from Africa makes you much different from somebody of African descent immersed in American entitlement culture. The excellent performance in our education and economy by Africans proves that it isn't skin color holding people back, but their attitude. There are as many or more white people infected by entitlement culture, but there's an expectation that a person of color think exactly the way white liberals WANT them to think (and vote), and if you think for yourself, they call you a race traitor.
There are people on the right who will call whites "race traitors" for NOT being racist, but they are a very small minority that are very much marginalized. On the LEFT, the least tolerant and most racist people dominate the conversation, and are singled out for praise.
What's ironic is how those who FOLLOW the narrative are called stunning and brave, while those like yourself, who THINK, are shunned, doxxed and abused in the public square.
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I've often thought along the same lines. And Trump Derangement Syndrome is a very real thing, and the last, spiteful, money-grubbing act of "crumbling media" is to infect as many as possible with it.
It is very true that a LOT of people think it's funny as hell that millions hang on every tweet. I see Syndromers all the time, at work and socially. They HATE the man. BOILING hatred. Want him DEAD.
As a Libertarian, at heart, I've always been disappointed by our refusal to govern ourselves, intelligently. My guy NEVER wins. But I've always just hoped for the best - and seen some of the best coming out in Dave Rubin Report and other outside-of-mainstream outlets - and expected the worst.
And yes, if Hillary had won, things would've continued more or less the same as Obama, with an Iron Lady hawkishness abroad that nobody anticipated.
I think folks are right when they say Republicans start wars. But nobody pays attention to how Democrats escalate the tensions and leave the pot simmering, hoping it doesn't boil over, but if it does, it gives them emergency powers and a nice bump in popularity.
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@Oners82 It's Democrats who suppress voter's rights, by opening-up the process to extensive fraud. Voter ID isn't racist. It's the ones who fight AGAINST voter ID who are racist and dilute the votes of everybody else. It's Dems who pushed the lock-downs and still push them. How's that good for the worker? How's that good for the little guy?
No. Dems represent the super-rich and the white-collar bureaucrat class, of which you're undoubtedly a made member, with your degrees and your high IQ.
You sound highly educated and under-informed. Typical postmodern "intellectual," bearing NONE of the consequences of your bad ideas, and parading around like you're an expert on everything, when the guy who's working on my roof has more common sense and practical skills than you do.
I suppose you like lots of regulations and think we need to pay higher taxes, too, amirite? Yes. You're so smart, you're the robber barons' best friend. They'll make use of you until you wake up, and then they'll silence you, because you you're no longer fit for (their) purpose.
You see some of the ills of society and rather than seeking to understand the cause, you always turn to government as the cure, rather than seeing those problems as unintended consequences of your profligate use of force to MAKE or COERCE people to do YOUR will. All your solutions lead to new layers of bureaucracy, new things to control and track. I bet you're a big fan of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, yet you're oblivious to some of its main themes. "I'm British. I know how to queue."
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We still have a lot of inertia to overcome. Students raised in an institutional spoon-fed setting want and EXPECT to be spoon-fed. They're CERTAIN that traditional lecture is "how they learn best." I know as a long-time lecturer how poorly even the BEST lecture serves the student audience. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, my students would actually clap at the end of lecture (like Jordan Peterson!), because I covered the material AND made them laugh. I was very entertaining and I know I covered the knowledge thoroughly.
I was winning awards and telling myself what a gifted lecturer I was. But when I checked their notes or graded their homework and tests, I could see that less than half of them were actually getting the concepts from the live lecture. Most weren't interacting directly with the knowledge. Most were interacting with the knowledge, indirectly, through me. Like I'm a high priest interceding with the Math Gods on their behalf, or Jesus Christ, even. And a LOT of lecturers LOVE that position. It feeds their ego. It used to feed MY ego.
I since switched to a 'flipped' format, with extensive resources on video and our face-to-face time free for questions. I don't insist on everyone's attention. Just their courtesy. Many self-motivated students just work quietly with an ear out for something they struggled with, previously, but most of the self-motivated can get through the assignments just using the videos and notes. And if they can quietly work with their earphones in, watching the video that applies to what THEY'RE doing, in the moment, then I'm all for that. '
But when they always wait for the next day's spoon-feeding, they're always a day or two or three behind where they should be. The questions they ask about 3.1 should've been asked on the day we covered 3.1, but they didn't even LOOK at 3.1 until after I lectured over 3.1.
"Traditional lecture" was wonderful, when there was only one guy in town who had the book, and "No you may not borrow my precious book." But I'll tell you all about it if you come to my lecture. Wonderful way to share knowledge in a time when few had books. But obsolete since books became widely available, and especially since the Internet made it possible to put the lectures on video. NOW your time with the instructor is wide open and he has 20 minutes to give to one question. Those who have the same question are ready for the answer, and those who don't have that question (haven't gotten there, yet or figured it out on their own or already asked about it) are free to work on whatever they want to work on, and I don't demand their undivided attention. I just ask that they not disrupt the conversations that are taking place.
Active learners LOVE what I do, because I don't get in their way, and I'm always available for questions and, because I'm competent in the content area (many math teachers are not, in my opinion), I'm ready for anything and not just giving a planned lecture with nothing off-script to trip me up, which I've seen many do. The worst ones are the "education majors," because they know everything there is to know about teaching (or so they think), except the subject being taught!
One of my colleagues wanted to tell everybody how to teach their classes because she had her brand-new PhD in education to show everyone. But she was actually quite weak in the content area, itself. This follows along with how things went in graduate school. Peers of mine who hit the wall as undergraduates switched to getting teaching certificates for grade school and high school. Peers who hit the wall in graduate school went on to get advanced degrees in education. And the teaching-certificate and "education doctorate" types are invariably the ones who seek to climb the ladder in administration so they have the power to tell everyone else how to run their classes. Invariably, the least competent people in the actual mathematics are running the math-education establishment.
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@christoph8365 Yup. She's still a gun-control, nanny-government, economically-illiterate progressive. Sadly, the nanny-government thing is pretty much in the Overton Window, nowadays, on both sides of the aisle. Progressives can see the rot in the military-industrial complex and some of the rot in the media-industrial complex, but they turn a blind eye to the domestic-industrial complex, consisting of Depts of Ag, Interior, Education, and all the rest.
I think the feds should handle national defense, national emergency, border control, and maybe the interstate infrastructure. Everything else needs to devolve to the states, and to the extent possible, states should devolve it to the counties and cities. And the cities should be run in such a way that build strong, resilient and self-reliant families. If you want that for your families, then you want government out of the way, and not mucking things up with its wrong-headed help.
Look at the homeless debacle in Portland. All kinds of generous citizens wanting to pitch in and convert an old prison into a homeless shelter, and DOING IT for a FRACTION of what city council is doing in a much less suitable place, serving many fewer people, at far greater cost, in a run-down cat-house with a collapsing roof. *SMH*. We pour millions and billions into helping people, and all it does is line the politicians' pockets in places like Portland.
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We've known that the Soviets and Maoists were BAD for DECADES. Hence the rise in Postmodernism, where internationalist socialism promoted itself NOT in its OWN name, but by systematically tearing down everything it is NOT. Marxist-Leninism is the only thing left standing, after "de-constructing" capitalism. The ideology discredits, one by one, every feature of free-market capitalism and individual rights. After word of the Gulag came out, they stopped campaigning FOR the Marxist takeover, and focused on campaigning against everything that is NOT Marxism.
Couldn't bring it in the front door, so they snuck it in the back door. Here, near the end game, they are more and more openly Marxist, which they absolutely couldn't have done 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Tearing down capitalism was the long game. Once that is achieved, the only ideology left standing is Marxism.
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Alex Jones espouses principles of liberty and freedom, opposes big government and crony capitalism, and has some whacked out stuff to say about current events that is WAY ahead of the news, to the point that it just sounds crazy.
Like the pedophile rings he was ranting about. Again, CRAZY. Next thing you know, you're reading about a thousand arrest warrants being served all across the country. So he's got some sources. He just comes out with some of it so far in advance of mainstream media.
That said, I've seen more than a little info-wars stories/videos that were a little light on the facts and biased as hell. Selling a narrative more than being news. But that's OK. Other channels/networks do it as much or more than Alex.
ALL news outlets are over the top in some way or another, or pushing an agenda, or protecting somebody with money from negative coverage, or something. And that's fine. It's human nature. But the pretense of objective news has gone out the window, which it should've done, the moment someone uttered the phrase "Farness Doctrine."
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@jennifers8843 Because it aligns with the values and political beliefs of most of the government. You can be conspiratorial about it or just chalk it up to human nature. I'm kind of mixed. I think there are a lot of useful idiots and probably a few dedicated Marxists who infiltrated the academy and nudge things in their direction.
Yeah, I've listened to Yuri Bezmanov, and yeah, I do believe that was the Soviets' plan to undermine us. I just don't think the Russians are behind it, even if its initial impetus was from the KGB. Frankfurt intellectuals also played their role.
Anyway, this stuff doesn't have much power, once people see it for what it is, and that's happening, conspiracy theory or not. Yeah, COVID dealt us a gut punch, and we're on the brink of high inflation times. But we're not starving peasants at the end of our rope after centuries of deprivation. We're also armed. So I think we're going to see the pendulum swing at Peak Woke. We may even be past Peak Woke, unless - and this is possible - the Algorithm's feeding my confirmation bias.
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Actually, the term "right" is kind of a misnomer. Yeah, there are certainly some conservatives who want us to live by Bronze-Age rules because their Bronze-Age books tells them it's God's Plan. But all the stuff we're talking about: free speech, the 2nd Amendment, and mistrust of state power? Those are what the original liberal were all about. What latterday "liberalism" represents is nothing less than rigid conformity and serfdom. If things keep going the way they've been going, it wouldn't be long before the closet aristocrats embedded in government pass on their jobs to their kids, and tell us that's what God wants us to do. We already see this in how celebs and politicians lie, cheat and bribe their kids' way into the most prestigious schools. These young mediocrities are being groomed for high office, NOT through any merit of their own, but because they build networks with other mediocrities, through family and school connections.
How do you think Al Gore became a Senator and then a Vice President? It wasn't because he was any good at anything or some kind of saint. It was because of his daddy, who was a senator before him. May's well call it primogeniture. First-born son gets his daddy's gig. Lord, King, whatever. Same with the Bush brothers.
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What Hamas - a creation of Israel injected into Palestine - did was terrible. But if what they did was terror, what do you call what Israel has done to Gaza?
In the American West, you had a similar ongoing conflict between ethnic groups. It, too, was very lopsided in favor of one side. What's downplayed/ignored is that the massacres and atrocities on both sides were committed by a very small number of renegades by enraged people (on both sides) lashing out in fear or retribution or both.
Your focus on the latest act of terror doesn't blind me to the fact that if you want to count dead children, Israel has killed more children in the last few weeks than Russia has in a full-scale conflict in Ukraine in almost 2 years. Let's not gloss over the open-air prison the Israelis are operating or forget there is such unbridled antipathy for Israel, Europe, and the USA in the Middle East. The USA picked up right where the British left off re-drawing the map of the Middle East by force.
But even the British didn't carve out an entire nation for the Jews and force hundreds of thousands, if not millions, out of their homes and off their land. The ongoing situation in Gaza is intolerable. The treatment of Palestinians is inexcusable.
I get that Israel is in a non-stop battle for survival, surrounded by hostile nations. But you have to ask yourself "Why is that?" Maybe it's because the USA under the UK's guidance, made a whole country out of thin air, called it "Israel," and evicted and oppressed the locals.
Under that logic, we should evict all European and African-descended Americans from America! How do you think they would react if someone came along and said "For the greater good, you must give up your home and your homeland," and used force to bring it about?
You're worried about 10 hostages, but don't mention 1200 Palestinian children killed. I guess it's OK to drop bombs on people, but if their feeble-best response is to chop off a few heads and seize 10 hostages, then that's terrorism? It's terrorism if you don't have advanced military hardware and bombers? You need to see this as - as Dave Chapelle called it - asymmetric warfare. There's a war being waged on these people and it's been ongoing for a very long time.
I'm not justifying hostage taking, but I see it as the consequence of way worse that's been going for a very long time. This is just ONE atrocity you can point to, and there's no denying it's an atrocity, but don't let your confirmation bias blind you to the big picture or the MANY atrocities committed by the side you happen to support.
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Adult vs Agitator and Activist. An adult is too busy working to make their corner of the world a better place to waste time on activism or agitation. An adult does the math, helps one or two people, and contributes to charities, in the sure knowledge that if everyone did the same, nobody'd be wasting time agitating or protesting or petitioning government, because they'd be too busy making tomorrow a better day, right where they're at.
Don't protest for Med-4-All. Hold a barn dance and a raffle to pay for a new x-ray machine or a couple more beds at the local hospital. People SENSE that the local medical care is a community - i.e., communal - thing. But if you can't make it work at the local level, there's no way the feds, who are operating at about 30 cents on the dollar efficiency, aren't going to fix it for everybody. You want to be active? Start fund-raisers for your local/neighborhood/community clinic, so medical care for everybody in your vicinity is a little better than it otherwise would be. Take pride in that as a community.
There's big status in being the rich guy who made a big contribution to the hospital. Local hospitals should have huge endowments, if people REALLY cared about their health care. It's just easier to virtue signal and complain when you don't get everything you want from somebody else. What's the health care industry getting from YOU, without being forced to it?
Before Johnson's Great Society, places like Harlem were pretty classy, and on the way up. And they were doing it the RIGHT way. Harlem had some very good schools in the 1950s and '60s.
Harlem was like a charter school, by today's standards, and one of the better school districts in New York City. Before and immediately after the REAL fight was won, for equal treatment under the law. "Leave us be, and we'll do just fine." Dems lost that civil rights battle and immediately built a federal plantation. Normal people of ALL colors are getting tired of the new racists calling themselves anti-racists. WORKERS of all colors are increasingly far-removed from what you college kids believe, and no wonder, when you look at the one-party capture of the academy. Boasting about one's degrees and IQs is like announcing to the world you probably need help tying your shoes.
I'm sorry, but that means cleaning your room, fixing good food, working on projects, including yourself. Like that stone wall for the raised beds.
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The ancients came up with all kinds of mythological explanations for things. "You have a dragon in your belly!" And the treatment for "dragon in the belly" was some herb, and that herb - it was said - would calm the angry dragon. Of course it wasn't a dragon in the belly. But the herb cured the stomach ailment, and the dragon myth became "science."
I think Peterson's trying to get at how we humans have (psychological) archetypes that seem to be hard-wired into our brains from birth. Universality of red = blood, light = wisdom, for instance (pulling these outta my ass, here). Actual scholars can tell you the common threads found between all religions. Religions grapple with unanswerable (by science) questions about life, death, and meaning. None of them are perfect. All of them address a deep need in the human psyche for meaning. True or false, it doesn't matter, IF THEY WORK. And even if they. DON'T work, people will eagerly embrace belief systems (faiths) that resonate with them.
Now put all this into a hopper and turn the time crank millions of years, from pre-human, to the first self-aware human, on to today. We in the West think in terms of Christianity, which derives from Judaism, which derives at least party from the Egyptians, which derives from archetypes apparently hard-wired in humans since pre-historic times.
What we're coming to find out is that it's irrational to hold religious convictions. It's also irrational NOT to hold religious convictions! And it turns out that the ABSENCE of any over-arching meaning for life is a sure path to extinction. That's why atheism is irrational. Without the mystical, society's not stable enough for scientific advancement. Scientific advancement exposes all the holes in religious doctrine. Rejecting religion leads to extinction, because religion fills a psychological need in self-aware, MORTAL beings. Without the religion, humanity stagnates. WITH religion (or its political-ideology substitutes), we devolve into hedonism, nihilism, and totalitarianism, replacing God and Morality with Government and Law.
I don't think Peterson is offering any kind of final answers to these phenomena. He's just pointing them out, and he has some PRACTICAL ways of coping that seem to help people live better lives. Life is suffering. Life is uncertain. Life is TEMPORARY. How do we resolve these facts of life in such a way as to keep life on the up-tick, without descending into chaos? Without harming others or imposing our will on others by force? That's kind of the role of religion. Finding things that WORK over long time periods, spanning many generations of finite-lived human beings?
My PERSONAL solution is to be scientific, with an overlay of "God is watching" and "Jesus loves me" from my early upbringing. It's superstitious. It's silly. But it helps ME interpret the world around me using reason to judge what IS and LOVE to set the goalposts. Over time, I try to work towards what SHOULD be, by understanding what IS.
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Actually, we haven't become more radicalized. What's happening is the people who feel the strongest are hijacking all the platforms, giving us a false dichotomy between crazy left and crazy right.
A "normal" person needs to pick and choose, and have the courage to call out lefties and righties when they go too far. Sometimes Jimmy Dore gets it right. Sometimes Alex Jones gets it right. But no "normie" I know agrees with anybody on everything.
For instance, Tucker Carlson gets a lot of stuff right, but he doesn't score any points with me when he cites divine revelation (his religious faith) as the source of his belief in something. I can respect that belief, but it's not moving the needle for me in the "That's RIGHT! It's in the BIBLE so it MUST be true," because I know a little something about the nature and motivations of the people who wrote the thing. Bronze-Age wise men were definitely wise, and definitely limited in their understanding.
For instance, making homosexuality a taboo is a fairly good survival strategy for a Bronze-Age tribe with no notion of disease transmission or safe sex. Men are dogs, and when men have the hots for other men, runaway promiscuity can take place. But in a modern society, making it a taboo actually leads to less responsible behavior. This is another reason I like the idea of the same recognition of marriage between same-sex couples as any other couple. Encourage long-term, monogamous relationships, rather than encourage repression of your desires for long periods, with short periods of zipless sex in restrooms or orgies, which are an epidemic just waiting to happen.
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I haven't read as extensively as JBP, but his sense is my sense, when it comes to a better, greener future for all. You want people to care about the environment, then RAISE their level of prosperity. A person living day-to-day is not at all concerned about the environment. They're worried about food, clothing and shelter TODAY. What's the best way to get there? Reduce the size and scope of national governments around the world. Guarantee the rights of person and property to ALL.
What's the best, most humane way to curb population growth? Raise the prosperity level of the people. Middle-class and above tend to have smaller families. For the poor, especially in places like India and China, there's enormous pressure to have more kids, because those kids are free labor and eventual pension plan. To a white-collar worker, children are an EXPENSE, and a HINDRANCE to their early retirement! They're a SACRIFICE made out of love, and not a way to make YOUR life easier.
China, a totalitarian state, instituted a 1-child policy, to achieve population stabilization by FORCE. That didn't work out so well, and millions of female children were aborted - some AFTER being born, because if you can only have one child, there's more to be gained from a male child.
These climate alarmists want to do the exact opposite of what makes sense and are totally oblivious to the environmental harm done by their idiotic plans, every single one of which is destructive to the aspirations of the little guy or gal wanting to improve their situation.
As soon as someone improves their situation, their higher values kick in and they seek to make their little corner of the world greener and more in harmony with Nature. It took me 'til I was 50 to afford my own home. What have I done to this property? Planted trees, installed solar, and insulated the dickens out of the place. My long-postponed prosperity also gave me the flexibility to purchase my home within walking distance (4 blocks) of where I work.
That's what these megalomaniacs in supposed power can't wrap their heads around. The world doesn't get better by the few things they can do by force. The world gets better by the individual decisions made by millions (billions) in their own best interests and in service of their higher values. But they need freedom and prosperity to get there, not feudal lords deciding arbitrarily that 'x,' 'y' and 'z' must be implemented by force, while 'a' through 'w' are prevented by their interventions.
There's no way a handful of regulators and lawyers can keep up with the ingenuity and new, better ideas being sought by billions of people right where they are and sharing their successes and failures with the rest of the world, freely, with, for instance YouTube videos on "My Passive-Solar Greenhouse." The regulations are written by big corporations to fit what big corporations are good at. Who's first in line for government subsidies? Billionaires like Elon Musk. If you think all the wonderful things he does and says aren't buttressed and motivated by government intervention, then you're not paying attention.
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On the other hand, some people tend to "disappear" without being immersed in the in-person work force. Some students will struggle to do their work, if there's no in-person meeting and daily work hand-ins, where they see everybody ELSE turning in THEIR work. I just think we need to catch the kids when they're young, and teach them how to use online learning tools, which are WAY advanced, compared to when I was trying to make it work 35 years ago, with the first phone modems operating at 9600 baud.
As with traditional lecture, there are students who THRIVE on the remote format. Some, especially adult learners who KNOW how to work, find the remote to be the only way to grow their skill sets while still taking care of family or working a full-time job.
The thing about remote learning is that the traditional teaching isn't working any more.
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Contented Man Actually, if you're conservative/libertarian and look for that kind of content, there are so many strong black voices layin' it down that conservatives, especially, don't judge blacks by their skin color. They know too many smart, thoughtful blacks who think more like THEM than ANY white liberal. On the "other side," you have a lot of white people who don't think at ALL like the people they claim to champion. To THEM, blacks are lesser and other, which is the ONLY justification for treating them differently in any way, shape or form! But I see Eric D July, or Barricade Garage guy, ABL, or Jericho Green as guys who are more like me on the big picture, more like my brothers, than any white liberal.
There IS a form of "privileged white" pushing the "white privilege" narrative. But it all comes down to thinking blacks need whites to SAVE them, when in OUR society, they mainly need whites to STOP trying to save them and leave them the hell alone! In their "good intention," they set up a system of incentives that couldn't do more to destroy the family, punish good people trying to help themselves through their own works, and put a drug dealer on every corner eager to recruit their 10-year-old son to gangster life in precisely the communities that white liberals "help" the most, if it had been planned!
But nobody talks about how the Jim-Crow through 1st Civil-Rights-Act period saw REMARKABLE advances in the black community. Harlem was a Great Place, with Good Schools. HBCUs were taking off, ALL without any government help and quite a few disadvantages. It wasn't until the welfare state kicked in that we went from "guarantee my rights!" to "You owe me a living!" This entitlement attitude captured more whites than blacks, but basically the same percentage of poor in both populations. There were just a higher percentage of blacks that were still poor at the end of the '60s. Add to that the fact that in a lot of those communities, whites and blacks intermingled, but the mixed-race ALWAYS goes in the "black" bucket, which is crazy, so things are skewed that way, too.
Everyone should read "Losing Ground." You can see the economic convergence of blacks and whites throughout the postwar period, UNTIL Lyndon Johnson. Then things changed. The gap between whites and blacks started growing again. Some of this is mirrors, because there was generally more cross-breeding in the inner-city communities that are hardest hit by poverty, so it all gets counted as "black," even though it's mixed.
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The elephant in the room is the history of Europeans and especially the British Empire re-drawing the map to please themselves and then getting the usa to do it for them, and keep the resources coming from underdeveloped countries in such a way that they never develop on their own.
I don't care how much we love our Judeo-Christian heritage or Christ, Himself. Who were we to create a nation-state from scratch against the will of the people living there? How many OTHER nations have perished over the millennia? Why does Israel get a do-over, enforced by, exploited by and exploiting overwhelming force from lands far away? What the Nazis did ini the first half of the 1940s doesn't justify what we did in the 2nd half, nor what we've been doing, since, to maintain a (mostly) soft hegemony around the world, except when we decide to "go hot" and wreak destruction around the world.
Hamas are renegade. We made them renegade, or at the least had a hand in the pathology we see manifest in ungovernable Palestine. Megyn sounds neocon on this issue. It's a knee-jerk reaction in American politics. Nobody asks "What right did we have to carve out a re-born nation by force in the region?" Go back a little farther in your history, Megyn. This is an ethnic/territorial dispute that's gone on for millennia. What business is it of ours?
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You're TOTALLY missing the point, Joey Koningsbruggen. Objectivist distrust government and would restrict its mandate to the original intent of the Constitution (without slavery and women not having a vote). We have added some nice innovations to the original (some good amendments), but the core truths (inalienable rights, limited gov't.).
The idea is that the gov't gets the monopoly for a very restricted set of tasks (defend the territory, uphold the Constitution) has been lost because politicians get re-elected by exceeding the Constitution, using force to benefit one group over another group.
I don't think a true objectivist, steeped in Ayn Rand's childhood under the Bolsheviks, and following her reasoning to Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal (not her famous works. Just her basic work, complete with footnotes), has much, if any, trust in gov't.
Quite the contrary. You don't seem to be getting the point about free trade between a society of free traders will always exceed gov't minimum guarantees.
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I think that ANYone who so brazenly challenges the group-think is going to raise the temperature, more so if that one wants to effectuate any real change. If you're afraid of that, you'll get nowhere. Things are so far the one way, with outrage being the main medium of exchange, you just have to hold your nose, call things as you see them, and SELL your point of view, which includes (as any salesman) vastly overstating things in order to get ANY movement towards something reasonable (make a sale).
I recognized Trump as a salesman from Day 1. Never thought much of salesmen. But the right salesman with the right product was definitely what was needed. It still may not be enough. I know a lot of respected people who are "smart," who are absolutely irrational about politics. And I also know a lot of weak-minded people who won't believe what's reasonable, until they see that "side" as the group for them to blindly agree with on everything (tribe!). We're kind of programmed that way - bred that way - after generations of "my tribe, right or wrong" being the ones whose tribe obliterated the competition and survived to pass on this trait to future generations. Religion kind of the same deal. You can find irrationalities and regressive features in 'most any myth-based belief system passed down from our less-informed ancestors, but also features that made those beliefs a SURVIVAL trait to be passed on.
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I would add that the people who abuse their positions of power because they think they know better than everyone else, usually do NOT know better than everyone else, and are the least competent people in the administration they seek to subvert. Brennan, for example, is a political hack, promoted FAR beyond his station by OTHER political hacks, who kind of adopted him as a mascot, because the one thing he was good at was kissing ass and doing what he was told. Brennan's a classic "climber." He got his foot in the door and based his entire career on personal advancement, at the expense of the job he was hired to do. Comey's the same way.
People who aren't too bright always think they're the smartest person in the room. I know, because I'm the smartest person in the room! LOL! None of us are immune, but the dumber you are, the further you run with such nonsense. If you're actually smart, you have some appreciation of the possibility you might be wrong. Idiots and narcissists operate under no such handicap. Hence, Brennan. And I doubt you'll see (m)any people in high places who don't believe they're there because they are The Anointed. They're special. They're more wise and well-intentioned than everybody else. Narcissism is everywhere in Washington. Even Trump is a narcissist. But he's OUR narcissist, fighting fire with fire.
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No, Dr. Drew. If they'd been totally up-front, more people would've chosen to not get these hasty jabs. The lengths to which they went to keep us in the dark on everything, from the unknown long-term risks to all the treatments that are available, they would've had more trust, but probably less compliance! They did everything possible to maximize the number of people taking the experimental jab, even when it's becoming more and more obvious to everyone that its value is very slight, and it comes with risks that are right up there with the risk of COVID itself, when you factor in the total absence of information/data on long-term side-effects and the unwonted "rush to Jab!"
I see a lot of people taking the "It's just a problem with the marketing" tack, and it's TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS, and yet ANOTHER dishonest attempt to build trust where none is warranted.
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It just goes to show how long they've had it their own way and had total domination of the public square, that they could be so blatant and clumsy about it. I think they miscalculated after unqualified success in mobilizing the population in the Iraq War, to where George W. Bush was even temporarily quite popular as Commander-in-Chief, for the simple reason that nobody wanted to cross the president when our boys were in harm's way, overseas. It's what the insiders wanted, so it was what all the establishment media pushed, and it was an unqualified success. Just drum up enough hysteria about Weapons of Mass Destruction, paint Hussein as the Devil incarnate, and then all the rest of the violence, bloodshed and wasted resources were justified.
You see it in case after case. War. Character assassination. "Crises" justifying infringements on liberty and confiscations they could never justify under ordinary circumstances. But the people are forming an immunity, thanks to the "fool me once" phenomenon and independent media insisting on putting forward a dissenting point of view. Thank goodness there are people like Robert Barnes around to cry bullshit on this, and have a big enough stick to back it up. Guys like Barnes (and Rubin) are our best hope.
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If Jimmy Dore applied the same disdain for government intervention, domestically, that he feels for our foreign policy, he'd be a libertarian. He KNOWS they're screwing things up around the world, based on lies and misinformation, but he can't see that the same exact people are screwing things up at home in the same way and for pretty much the same reasons.
Jimmy's half-smart. He sees through the military- and media-industrial complexes, but what he doesn't see is the reason things are screwed up is because of too MUCH intervening by the state. He wants MORE intervention. Totally wrong-headed, there. Is there some diverse Space Jesus who knows all, sees all, and will run everything by diktat? No. But when you believe there is (like a religion), you're just setting yourself up for tyranny and social and economic ruin.
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@eriknielsen1849 : I think you overestimate the need for a conspiracy to see things unfold as they have. But I agree that the lack of any accountability, and the continuing obstruction by Deep State actors within Trump's own administration, like Christopher Wray, and others, who CONTINUE to stonewall the release of information. Those guys who stalled and slow-walked everything Trey Gowdy was asking for as chair of intel committee. Those guys all worked for Trump.
But I see other theories having just as credible as your "They're ALL in on it!" theory. If you look at the political climate and the absolute control of legacy-media narratives from the Democrat side, PLUS the large fraction of civil service that were actively working to sabotage Trump since before he even took office, maybe there's something ELSE taking place. For one, I do NOT believe for one SECOND that Rachel Maddow, Don Lemonade, or Chris Matthews are secretly in cahoots with Trump. I don't for one second believe that they WANT their narratives falling on deaf ears. No. They're all shocked and really kind of in a state of disbelief that the same forms of propaganda that manufactured the public's consent so successfully, so many times in the past, are not getting traction.
I, too, was initially very concerned when I learned that Barr used to work for George Bush, Senior. I still have some reservations. But IF he's on the up-and-up, this is exactly how Barr should be playing it. And before I totally jump into the same ocean of cynical despair in which YOU are wallowing, I'm going to wait and see just how this all plays out. If Trump were truly a neocon, I think things would've played out much differently in Syria, especially Northern Syria, where the Kurds have been trying to carve out an ethnic homeland for decades. John Bolton would still be working for Trump, if that were the case.
As for wanting eggheads like Kissinger around, I think this is pretty much Trump's way. He has brought in a diverse set of experiences and beliefs into his cabinet, and the "chaos" reported by WaPo and other legacy snake-in-the-grass media is exactly what I would expect, if he didn't just hire people who just agree with him on everything. Reagan was similar in this regard, allowing his staffers and cabinet to have free-ranging debates amongst themselves, before he made his decisions.
If Trump were a neocon, he'd've wrapped himself in the flag and been at war with Iran by 2018. I think that was probably the neocon plan, all along. Iraq, Syria, Libya, then knock off Iran... There've been some bumps along the way. The missile strike after the false-flag chemical attack was not a good look. But as I read between the lines, I found out that the death toll from his missile attack in Syria was virtually nil. They KNEW the attack was coming, they knew WHERE the attack was coming, and people cleared out of the way. Russian shipping cleared the hell out with plenty of time before the attack, which I'm starting to think was mostly show, and maybe even to keep the neocons around him at bay a little while longer.
But we'll see. I think we're seeing Trump do as he pretty much always has. I think if he had acted as aggressively as you or I might have wished, in the early going, he would've been savaged in the media, sabotaged by the never-Trumpers lingering in his administration, and removed from office by any means necessary. Instead, he kind of sits on you. He can't track down all the leakers, directly. But he CAN slowly appoint his own people, and ratchet up the pressure on the leakers, who don't know if the new guy is one of their own, or somebody quietly looking over their shoulder on Trump's behalf. Instead of Trump looking over his shoulder out of fear of the never-Trumpers, it's the never-Trumpers who are hearing footsteps.
The proof will be in the indictments that Durham brings. Is he working for us, or is he just working for the insiders? As for Trump, himself, he's been saying the same things for DECADES. "We're getting ripped off in our foreign trade. The Chinese are thieves and liars. Uncontrolled immigration is bad and must be stopped. We have too many ridiculous regulations." Very simple ideas that were not and are not mainstream, unless you talk to the average working man in the street, who's sick of being bled dry so that rich, champagne liberals can fly around in their private jets and lecture us about global warming.
I actually wish Trump were a bit MORE ideological, but he's basically an FDR Democrat, like Reagan was, although Reagan made more ideological arguments about limited government, in general, and opposing Soviet Russia's "evil empire." I don't think Trump sees things that way. But as a practical man, whatever programs we have in place, he wants them to work and be run more efficiently. Not a philosophical break from big government. More of a "Well, this ain't working" kind of blue-collar appraisal of government.
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I don't think it needs to be a shrink. But yes. If it were legalized, there wouldn't be much or any money in selling it in the street.
Legal or illegal, every human needs to take that journey, either staying away or weaning away. It's not something that can be done "for them, for their own good."
Drugs are like a virus. Do you become an authoritarian to achieve herd immunity, or do you use more traditional, time-tested means? Think about what alcohol did to Native Americans. Then think farther back to what it did to Europeans for centuries BEFORE that. We kind of adjusted. Some still fell prey to drink, and still do, but most of us don't. We try to restrict minors getting it, with VERY limited success, but the culture just kind of handles it. Treatment's there for anybody who wants it, but we know from history that taking it on directly, through prohibition, just led to machine-gun fire in the streets.
So before you get too into the idea of legalization being stupid. Think about what illegalization has brought us. Life isn't perfect. Life is trade-offs.
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The greatest thing about Trump was what he did NOT do. As a 1970s Democrat, he believes in letting states rum most of their own stuff within their own means and learn from and compete with one another. He could've gone after South Dakota for not mindlessly issuing mandates. I'm sure a Democrat president would've heaped scorn upon and threatened sanctions against South Dakota.
That's the thing about America. You can't MAKE America. You can only LET America. Politicians want to make things happen, but their job is to stay out of the way and let people, towns, and states make things happen for themselves, within their own means. That was the unique thing about American history. The people were expanding beyond the means of any central authority on the East coast to control. The MOST the government could do was create a false imprimatur of legality to a culture clash that was happening on the ground, far beyond the state's ability to project enough power to impose order.
The Black Hills, part of which lie in South Dakota, were set aside for the Sioux, until illegal prospectors found gold, and then there was just no stopping a huge influx of people to the area. It attracted profiteers, profiteers profited, profiteers bought the government.
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Yes, but when the money is all in the one interpretation and censure and disrepute attach to any other, some get the impression that the one-note outcomes are political/ideological. And there is pretty strong evidence of some number-cooking and an abject failure of the climate models to align with the data as we get 5, 10 and 20 years into this foolishness. It's becoming painfully obvious their model is exaggerating the effect of man-made CO2.
That doesn't mean we all don't want to live cleaner. It's just that most of us are skeptical that government is competent, not COMPETITIVE, with the ideas the ordinary folks are coming up with, like Mass heater rocket stoves that use 1/10 the wood, with near-zero particulate emissions. The EPA can't approve them, because what comes out the pipe is only warm, by the time you run it through your mass. The people are evolving more rapidly than a government bureaucracy can hope to keep up with.
I think we, as people, know that it's better to live cleaner than dirtier, and probably not have too many babies. Let that percolate in society. Middle class want to source their food closer to home. We don't need laws to go local. Just some good advertising from the guy that put up the greenhouses on the North side of the canyon.
Yeah, the distribution network is marvelous, but sustainable living is all about import replacement, and that includes things like truck vegetables, and in my case, local grown, grass-fed beef or venison. I can see communities growing in that more sustainable direction, without any prodding. It's something that's high-value that most middle-class are more than happy to pay extra for.
Love to see Farmer's markets running year-round, where you the lady who grows the stuff you eat, and you've been out there, and it's totally sustainable, organic goods.
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@josm1481 No, the press was not impartial a decade or even 6 decades ago. They just hid it, better, and there was no competition for the legacy networks and legacy print media. Things only SEEMED better when it was just the NYT, WaPo, and NBC, ABC and CBS. I've been following it since the 1970s and the only difference, now, is that there are good-sized platforms that disagree with "The Message" and millions of people who realize they're being lied to, finally.
You upset about WMDs in Iraq? They pulled the same sort of stunt in Vietnam, 60-plus years ago. And if you opposed more big spending by government, EVERY network attacked you for being uncharitable and selfish, even though you contributed more to private charity than any 10 Democrats..
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Religions that persist have a clear survival imperative built in. Often by design, because the originators of religion are all about unifying people under one political banner, with God - and faith - as the unifying principle. They persist because they agree - whether thru science or "Divine Revelation" - with what science eventually ends up telling us. We can talk about civil unions 'til the cows come home, but the fact is that not a single human being who ever lived was the product of a homosexual union. LGBTQXYZ are all products of heterosexual unions.
I'm not a huge fan of state-recognized marriages, hetero or otherwise, because the advantages they build into having children mainly serve the state's endless thirst for tax revenue and cannon fodder. It's an artificial "grow!" imperative from an earlier time. But since it IS enshrined in the law, and MEDICAL and PENSION BENEFITS are attached to recognized unions, then ANY union - hetero or otherwise - should be recognized by the state, as well. It should be that people get married because they want to solemnize a long-term relationship. And if you share the same home, same bed, same LIFE for years, your spouse should receive the standard spousal benefits.
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Yes. I agree. Working and learning remotely is a boon to society, but bosses, teachers and students are poorly trained for it. I'm one of the exceptions Dave talked about, due to health reasons, and I was already working remotely before the p1and3m1c. For people who are MOTIVATED and TRAINED, remote work is highly efficient and effective. Zero commute time, massive fuel savings, and your BEST people aren't held back by one-size-fits-all, realtime, in-person groups, that never move any faster than the slowest group member, or an arbitrary schedule.
My best students slurp up the knowledge FAST. Going remote, I can stay out of their way and put more time and energy where it's needed. Students can work ahead, so they can slow down if a concept kicks their butt. Working ahead also frees up space for family emergencies. Got a funeral to attend or need to care for a sick parent/child/grandma? You've got some slack in your schedule for LIFE stuff, which is perfect for motivated students, adult students, students with lots of extracurricular activities of all kinds.
But the vast majority of students aren't trained to direct their own learning in any way. Much of the resistance to remote learning is the comfortable, in-person spoon feedings that generations of Americans have experienced, even though we know it's not really working. And of course, feminism in education is pushing most of the boys right out of the system, with lesson plans and teaching strategies aimed at females, with more emphasis on busy work and less on actual mastery of the material. Just so no one's feelings are hurt... Of course, no one cares about the feelings of students who are alienated or diagnosed as ADHD because they're normal and the lessons suck.
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That's why most conservatives and libertarians vote Republican, even though they're not that different from the Democrats. I don't agree with anybody on everything, but I'm closer to Ron Paul than damn near anybody else.
Democrats have been bad news pretty much since FDR, who used every crisis at his disposal to make the people think government was the solution to all problems and the source of their well-being. Now, 70 or 80 years later, we're seeing the real fruits of that abandonment of self-responsible freedom for the apparent blank check from the U.S. Treasury. Now, we're $31 trillion in debt, which is about $90,000 for every man, woman and child and $250,000 for every man and woman who actually PAYS federal taxes. The price of that false security? OBEDIENCE.
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When Obama abolished the Fairness Doctrine, the mask slipped. He green-lit the abandonment of pretense, and the mask slipped all the way off. I'm sure Obama felt like this was good for him, which it was, because all the networks, save one, worshipped him, and he used his bully pulpit to demonize that network, while sending his thugs to audit, surveil, and otherwise harass reporters critical of him and his evil administration.
But I think Obama set the stage for the destruction of cable and other legacy news. He reveled in his power while in office and even after, but the media that were once so good at manufacturing consent behind their pretense of professionalism and objectivity are now discredited. The tail still wags the dog to an alarming degree, but the establishment is also alarmed by the decreasing length of time their big lies last.
Now that they can wear their hearts on their sleeves, while pretending to be the same "objective" news, they're breaking the illusion that's been maintained for decades.
Increasingly naked censorship works for a while, but the public's developing immunity.
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The alliance that re-created the state of Israel against the will and the wishes of the people living in Palestine is fragmenting, and the will to support Israel is waning in the USA. The Balfour Declaration was carried out by the Allies after cessation of hostilities in WW II. Israel was artificially created and has been a proxy for the USA (and vice versa) ever since. Yes, its neighbors have been much more aggressive towards Israel than conversely, but all concerned need to take a step back and recognize that the decades'-long hostilities are due to a provocation by victorious allies after 1945, creating the state of Israel by drawing lines on a map.
What happened to self-determination? That's something the USA, Israel and other NATO (soon-to-be-former?) need to recognize, and instead of addressing the elephant in the room, they've dealt with each flare-up, piecemeal. I don't like what Hamas is doing. I think their leaders are ruthless and greedy scoundrels, who - as Rubin quoted - care more about taking the lives of Jewish babies than in preserving the lives of their own.
Things are just extremely tangled. They should have held a plebiscite, years ago, BEFORE Balfour, and let the people there decide for themselves how they wished to organize themselves into a nation. Now that Israel's in existence, the gentlest course would seem to be a 2-state solution, with holy temples held jointly, in some way, shape or form. But there I go, trying to tell everybody else what's fair. My only sure response is the same, lame, piecemeal "Hamas started this one" response.
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I was brought up Christian, though I'm no longer practicing. Well, I dunno. Actually, I do thank the Creator when I eat, quietly to myself. But I'm beyond the whole "Come by faith to live forever" dogma. I just see a lot of good in the creation of an archetype that I believe is all good and all knowing, and try to get to that "What would Jesus (or a good guy) do?" when facing moral questions.
But I don't believe, per sê. Not beyond the occasional superstitious twinge that God saw me flip that field-stripped cigarette (no filter) into the weeds. It's built in by years of indoctrination that I've grown beyond, in the "fervent belief" sense.
Anyway, I started this rant to say that a sincere Christian will just modify his understanding/interpretation of the wisdom in ancient scripture. You learn, if you live long enough, that it ain't all to be taken literally, not to mention the version of it that I was raised on was re-written by King James's court.
And the 10 commandments are pretty good, especially if you alter that 1st one from "I am the Lord they God...." to a humble admission "I'm a human and I didn't BUILD this world. I inhabit it and rejoice in it."
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Almost since our nation's birth, there have been robber barons eager to influence the government to tilt the playing field in their favor. It's called crony capitalism and it seeped into our system very early, with such things as land grants to robber barons and thieves to build the transcontinental railroad. The pesky natives obstructed this "noble goal," and so the robber barons got the U.S. Cavalry to back their play.
This and other corrupt/fascist plays by our government throughout its history are what fuel the Howard-Zinn characterization of American history. We didn't CURE our ills by asking government to solve them. We made them worse, or just created OTHER problems, also 'requiring' government intervention (i.e. force) to "fix." Zinn gets some things right, but totally mischaracterizes things to fit HIS state-centric world view.
Free-market capitalism is good. Crony capitalism is bad. Progressives claim that the latter is the former "run amuck,' when the only problem with free-market capitalism is it creates so much wealth that even idiot socialists can survive long enough to destroy it. Where America went wrong was NOT with free markets. Where it went wrong was when it DEPARTED from free markets, in the name of whatever latest lie they were feeding the public.
Not a HUGE Ayn Rand fan, but her book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" gives chapter and verse on regulatory capture and crony capitalism dating back to the 19th Century. This isn't about Reagan and Thatcher, although they both did little to slow the march towards a peculiar, fascist-flavored form of socialism.
If we just stuck to our limited-government principles in the first place, we wouldn't be ruled by multinational corporations, today. Government isn't the scourge of the robber barons. It's their partner in crime, and the most powerful partner the corporations could have hoped for.
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@PHeMoX European nations never enshrined free speech as a right. In different places, people may speak more or less freely, by custom, but the government can snatch it away at the government's pleasure. The U.S. government is the ONLY government in the WORLD that is explicitly constrained from infringing on the right to speak freely and voice your dissent, and the U.S. government chafes at the restriction and has done everything possible to control speech, without being caught doing it.
The Twitter Files show beyond a doubt that the U.S. government regularly censors the news on Big Tech and legacy media alike. There's no way they wouldn't ALL behave exactly as Twitter, FaceBook, the New York Times, cable news, and report the exact same things, with the exact same wording, inclusions and omissions if it weren't all coming from one place.
I'm done giving the benefit of the doubt. Any lack of transparency. Any redaction. Any suppression of stories. Any de-platforming of critics and dissidents. I'm just done. I am henceforth assuming that every bit of corporate-sponsored media are lying. I assume that any media for children published in the last 10 years is something I wouldn't want my kids to watch, until proven otherwise.
In the words of a system administrator: Hosts Deny: All is the default until personally vetted by me.
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It's not worse than it's ever been. We just know more about ourselves and each other. Why do you think liberals have been hyper-ventilating for 3 1/2 years? They're finding out that their comfortable little reality isn't the larger reality. It's just like 50 years ago, when a Christian nation realized that half the country hadn't accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Still a LOT of Christians who're convinced that half the country is under the Spell Of Satan. Well, now that other half of the country has discovered to its shock and horror that half the country actually voted for Donald Trump! DEPLORABLE!
Such periods are traumatic for some people. For other people, these times of paradigm shift are very consciousness-raising. I know my father was dragged into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming, railing against Walter Cronkite and rooting for Archie Bunker back in the '60s and '70s, and finally coming around to agreeing with me that the War on Drugs is just Al Capone with a deep tan. Legalize, regulate and tax the stuff.
Dad was offended by The Jeffersons and Good Times; whereas, we kids were ALL about KID DIE-NO-MITE! Acceptance of gays was HUGE for my parents' generation. I grew up during that paradigm shift, starting on the regressive side, and finally figuring out that there's only one person whose sexual preferences you should care about other than your own, and that's your partner's. The only exception is if you're attracted to citizens below the age of consent, and then it's a matter for your psychiatrist and, if you act on your preference, law enforcement and the courts.
Now the people who are freaking out are the Boomers who used to watch "Friends," and still do on re-runs, FAIK. The hip, well-adjusted middle-class yuppies are all very chic, very up-to-date on the latest dogma, and they're no different from my Methodist preacher extracting the meaning of life from the verse "He fed the dog."
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Mix of truth and lies. There ARE oil magnates with politicians on speed dial. You might be surprised how deeply embedded in the Green New Deal they are, managing its wording so that they can take maximum advantage of government subsidies and keep millions of small projects from ever getting STARTED, by controlling the regulations that will come with it. "We're going to have to take down your windmill, ma'am, because it doesn't have wheelchair-accessible entrance" or some shit like that.
That's the main reason I oppose Green New Deal, because I think the CULTURE is going green faster than a handful of eggheads in industry and government can even keep up with, and the last people we want in charge of how the changes are made are idiots like AOC, following the advice of the "experts" who are most accessible (and generous) to them. Arguably the biggest obstacle to EarthShip construction principles is government regulators. The guys preaching to us about environment are the same guys who won't let you build more green-conscious in an organic way.
No. To THEM it means a more efficient gas furnace hooked to their grid. A cracker-box wood-frame construction on top of the ground that's so tight you breathe your own effluvia. Can't have a house that breathes. You need to buy disposable air filters from an outfit in China...
Green tech and living in balance with nature is a ground-up phenomenon, and the people on the ground can share their successes and failures, INSTANTLY, with other people just like themselves, across broad spans of climate, altitude, culture, and resource settings, informally, over the Internet. We need more Kirsten Dirksen's, not more government programs that are just big money-makers for the people writing the fine print and first in line for the benefits.
The internal combustion engine is a fantastic asset to humanity. But driving 40 miles to work every day in a car is just a stupid way to live. People are figuring that out, but you don't need to punish them or use force on them. Living greener is already seen as a "good" in this culture, so let it play out!
And when I hear "shovel-ready" out of a politician's mouth, I about blow a gasket laughing and crying at the same time. They're the last people we want deciding how to clean things up.
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There are different kinds of intelligence. Not all kinds revolve around oratory. Most of the most gifted people I've known in any area lacked the ability to articulate things in a way that is most pleasing to others. Most of the best people, I really have to sit down with, ALONE, and give them time and space to "get it out," often with much necessary prodding.
And THEN there are the people - I think Trump is one - who deliver things in a way that is absolutely unappealing to many intellectuals, and certainly anyone who doesn't like his ideas - who can nevertheless reach people I never could, even with my absolute BEST attempts at combining truth, humor and precise word choice. The larger the crowd I'm trying to reach, especially on technical matters, the more pleasing I am to the top-level learners/intellects, but the less real meaning I seem to get across to the vast middle. Even people who LOVE the way I put it across, because I worked in something funny, miss the essence of what I'm saying. I've walked out of some of my absolute best math lectures, where I had entire auditoriums filled with students hanging on my every word and rolling in the aisles at every little joke, and glanced at the notes of random students, silently noting that what they put down was NOT the point I was making! I saw every hook I inserted, with the wrong - sometimes the OPPOSITE - idea dangling from it.
One of the amazing things about a perception-driven reality is how often people are right for the wrong reasons and how often they're wrong for the RIGHT reasons. In my college days in the 1980s, as a staunch libertarian-principle kind of guy, I found many of the people who were on "my" side of an issue, were there for the wrong reason. They would agree with me that the welfare state was destructive, but it came from a "DESTROY THE PARASITES!" place, rather than a "This is the velvet glove on the iron fist" place. The people stuck in the poverty cycle weren't evil, but the ones who kept them on "the plantation" with Free Stuff were demagogues. Since the Reagan era, this has expanded to much of the white middle class, who are so afraid they won't be able to afford health care that government intervention has made more and more ridiculously expensive for individual consumers and taxpayers, that they yearn to be on the federal tit just as much as the poorest person who can't even afford a checkup.
Jesus spoke in simple parables. Ayn Rand, whose fiction leaves me yawning, reached more people with Atlas Shrugged than she ever reached with MY favorite, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," a skinny paperback that is extremely dense and extensively footnoted. Character development isn't her thing. Donald Trump actually got himself elected president of the USA with little more than choppy sequences of repeated sound bites.
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A populist feature I hadn't noticed:s
The content creators who rise up out of the oyster grass to become major YouTube presences have more than their share of patrons, but ALSO more than their share of the $1, $2 or $5 contributions from us "small folk." To stamp out the voice of the "small folk," it's easy to see who's getting all the 2s and fews, and I imagine those small donations are more cost and less profit from the payment processors.
They don't like us small folk. We say mean things about bankers and our petty transactions cost more to process for what they pay. And there are so damn many of us.
Anyway, just by tracking the pain-in-the-ass channels that have many SMALL contributions, they can zero in on most of the subversive voices after they start getting traction.
The trouble from the banker's side is that as soon as they use this tactic, there are 2 more to take the last guy's place. They're in their own self-made version of Zombie Apocalypse, with all us small folk representing the zombies! It's like we are H.Y.D.R.A. Chop off one head, and 2 more appear. But they're doing everything they can to plug all the holes in their dam against free expression.
And their contrrol of "process" is very tight, and we haven't heard the last of them, nor shall we. The best we can do is marginalize/minimize their effect. I think the FreeThinkers are only just beginning to realize how deeply embedded this perniciousness is and what it will take to keep the power in the people's hands. As we peel away the layers of the Patreon onion, we see that there will also be every obstruction possible set in the way of free speech, now by banking laws, regulations and so-called "best practices." Best practices are more about the culture of banking and culture tends to trump the formal rule sets (or quickly be codified in rule sets).
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You are correct, ArtemiaSalina. "The market never lies." But government can lie to itself all day long and impose its will where it can. The bloated monstrosity that sits atop us, now, is unable to respond to the kinds of rapid changes taking place.
There are too many new things popping up that haven't been legislated on, yet. At some point, on some level, at all times, society is well ahead of government in the realm of "What's possible?" Thing about Uber and Couch Surfing and how established businesses tried to use gov't to lock those innovations out, even though they're a more efficient way to allocate resources, and just a way cooler way to interact with the culture you're visiting.
Kids with their noses in their smartphones can spread info nationwide in seconds, one text message or phone call at a time. As long as that infrastructure's up, there's just too much for gov't to process (in my uninformed opinion), and way more advantage in individuals having such coms available, as long as the stuff works.
Ideas. Good ideas. From rocket stoves to backyard vacuum-tube production.
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I adore Jimmy Dore, but like all my adorable progressive friends, he sees a lot of the symptoms and obvious abuses, but doesn't see to the root of the problem, which was putting government in charge of too much.
We do need a central government for the common defense, as long as there are other countries that would otherwise hurt us. But we don't need to police the planet, so gov't's gone too far in that direction. And there's nothing in the constitution about the federal gov't doing charity work. That's the job of us in our communities, and we should take pride in our communities.
Keepin' folks fed ain't the feds' job, except in national emergency, but to be in a state of national emergency - on a war footing since December, '41 - perpetually, for decades without end says that the feds have been totally unable and unwilling to declare victory and leave the petty stuff to the folks at home.
It's debilitating to our states, towns and neighborhoods, imo.
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Did it occur to you that you're all wrapped up inside a sunk-cost fallacy?
Maybe we should question the original idea of (re-)creating the state of Israel in 1948, when we were all full of ourselves, drunk with power, with the British full of plans for re-drawing the map of the Middle East one more time. WWII saw an extension of British colonialism by other (U.S.) means.
I think our leaders got all full of themselves and, guided by the British, thought they were playing the Great Game against the USSR and China, when the plain fact is, their systems just can't keep up if we make them play by the rules and don't let them get a hold of our intellectual properties. We'll always have a lead. Free people just create a lot more and invent a lot more.
Instead, we've grown our government and created something very akin to the totalitarian regimes our leaders claim to oppose, which is their reason for acting like Naxis at home, looking for ways to censor speech and control the flow of information, using external and internal threats as the excuse to go after people with dissenting opinions, who speak against their policies.
We're basically dragging ourselves down to Stalin's level. People more and more afraid and more and more distrusting of people on "the other side" of the aisle from them, with one side always figuring that the way to win is to seize control of government and use government to suppress the opposition. I think we're seeing that, now, but we're talking about who committed the worst atrocity or made the most outrageous statement. Rather than dwell on the wrong in others, spend more time on the underlying truths.
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I fear that by the time Obama came along, it was too late. But better late, than never, they say. Just understand that Democrats got the big government ball rolling. Republicans only stopped opposing the unchecked growth in size, role, and scope of the federal government in the late '80s and early '90s.
Now, it's very much uni-Party, but the MAGA/Liberty side is still concentrated under the Republican umbrella. But the Freedom Caucus wing of the party isn't calling the shots for the party. MAYbe it's changing, with the ouster of Ronna McDaniel, but that remains to be seen.
If you're for liberty and limited government, you will end up voting Republican more often than not.
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So it's OK to be authoritarian if you're on the side of the angels. What, then, distinguishes us from the authoritarian left? You're wrong on this, Knowles. You want to win, today, which will only ensure that we all lose, tomorrow. There's already a massive shift in public sentiment that could never have been achieved by resorting to the same abuse of power to which the other side resorts.
This is why I consider myself an original-intent Constitutionalist or just generally a classical liberal or libertarian. Conservatives have this sense of rightness that deteriorates into dogma that is easily dismissed by lefties. "God said..." is not an argument. Also, Knowles was obviously bloviating when he touched on the "indecency" parts. He didn't actually present a cogent argument for censorship of obscenity. Maybe HIS idea of obscenity is MY idea of keepin' it real. If there's a majority of Michael Knowles's in power, then maybe they decide my questioning of claims made in The Good Book is "obscene," or profane, or they'll decide that heretical remarks are obscene.
The thing about Christianity, itself, is it needs to evolve with the times, while remaining in keeping with core principles. I really like having the "Jesus Archetype" embedded in my world view. I think it's highly beneficial to an imperfect person inhabiting an imperfect world, to have that idea firmly in mind. When you're about to bite the head off of somebody, a quick "What would Jesus do?" is even better than counting to 10. I'm not sure it would have the same beneficial effect on my character, if it weren't hammered into me with a "Believe or die!" hook. It's quite a motivator and a bulwark against human tendencies to despair and devolve into hedonism/nihilism when faced with the fact of their mortality.
This descent that is all too common amongst non-believers is why Religion has always been - and probably always will be - a prominent feature of surviving cultures. Why? Because without it, civilizations start to crumble. Tribes go extinct. The reason there's religion everywhere you look is because the tribes that lost it perished! They were RIGHT and they just kind of died out, petered out, or got outbred! You can talk all day about how backward, ignorant and regressive Christian/Muslim faithful are, but they're having big families and everybody else isn't even reproducing at replacement levels!
Anyway, I think things are a lot more nuanced than Knowles is capable of conceiving or is willing to concede, because he's got a nice, tidy world view, and he can blather over the rough bits, like "Who decides what's obscene? The most vocal Muslim on the block?"
The only kind of censorship I agree with is keeping things G-rated if the kiddies are around. But is that the job of the people creating and posting the content or the job of parents to filter out everything except those things of which the parent approve?
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@Debra_Hasatheory If I got a cold, I might get tested. That's how the coof presents, initially, and I'd want to get treated, right away. Of course, my odds of getting proper treatment, right away, in the USA are slim to none, since all the off-the-shelf medicines that WORK are problematic for doctors to prescribe, and having been prescribed, are problematic to obtain. The health care establishment has gone off the rails, and it's 99% due to government intervention.
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The press has ALWAYS had an axe to grind. Until the 20th Century and especially WW II, muck-raking from every outlet was a given, and people knew the politics of every paper. Then during the war, the government got its hooks into the press, behind the scenes, and from then on, the new media (radio and t.v.) spoke with one voice, and the people were conditioned to BELIEVE the one voice. Alternative voices were drowned out and/or subverted, in the name of "fighting communism."
We'll see how well alternative media do in the future, but Big Tech dominates and has joined the government-insider chorus. You're not getting Dave or any other alternative voices unless you LOOK for them, and know what you're looking for. I hope against hope that these Big Tech platforms will wither and die, just like cable/broadcast media.
In the "old days," you had lefty, moderate, and righty to choose from, and could get a fairly good grasp by reading from 2 or 3 opposing sources.
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Common sense, scholarship, and ethics. HE MUST BE SILENCED!
-The Establishment
I think the bypass was justified on a right-to-try basis, with full disclosure, in a big enough crisis. That's not what happened, nor was it truly the crisis they told us it was. The mandates and the mass distribution of the experimental treatment to people - especially young people - at low or no risk of serious illness or harm from COVID, itself, was an abomination. An atrocity on Nuremberg levels. The suppression of successful treatments with off-the-shelf, re-purposed drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin, was criminal. Doctors in clinics, treating hundreds and even thousands of patients, were under no circumstances to share their success stories with colleagues and the public.
If all they'd done was NOTHING and SHARE every scrap of treatment and outcome information, peer-to-peer, we'd've had the treatment side of it licked in a couple weeks. Many doctors DID. Few spoke of it, so the sharing part never took place, and authorities were hostile to such sharing.
We all know this was an atrocity committed against the peoples of the world. I don't care if it was for profit or not. Those profits are FORFEIT. They were obtained by fraud, from inside and outside of government.
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Parallels between U.S. and Iran:
Antifa/anti-trump rallies are starting to draw more trumpsters than protesters. In ultra-liberal Oregon, police are routinely arresting roadblock protests. College presidents, who've been playing the game ONE way to protect their institutions from litigation-happy students and government mandates, are suddenly faced with dropping enrollments and smaller contributions from alumni.
I think if you talked to an Iranian about what's going on in Iran, they'd say some of it was probably upset over prices, but more people in the street in SUPPORT of the theocracy.
I'm still learning about how the Assembly of Experts are elected, but it sounds like when Khamenei passes, the people's voice can be heard for the next Ayatollah (is that the right term?), and it SOUNDS like this is the point in time where Iranian people get their periodic say on the direction the government will take, based on the choices of the "Experts."
For a country their size, it's an interesting model of government. I definitely prefer my Madison and Jefferson, don't get me wrong. But one of the things to which "liberal democracy" is prone is a moral decay and general unhappiness. RELIGION gives a lot of people a sense of belonging to something bigger, more lasting. And they can live happier, more productive lives. Well, some of 'em, anyway.
I think it's AN answer to the ceiling that Western society keeps bumping its head against. Once we've secured the dream, for the most part, we abandon it. We breed up the uneducated and the educated stop breeding! We are guaranteed an education, and then we make damn sure it's the worst fuckin' education possible.
My knowledge of the classics was ABYSMAL from the public schools. I never HEARD of the contest of ideas between Euripedes and Aristotle, although I was educated enough to understand the significance and meaning, when I just picked it up on my own MANY years later (Yay Internet! Yay Tom Richey!). Heh. I was deeply influenced by Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," which I stole off my Dad in my college days. Recommended for everyone. John Galt was too boring. But the straight, to-the-point stuff was more up my line, in a brief paperback!
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So come, make Israel by force, expel the people who lived there, and brutalize them for decades is responsible?
WW II was supposed to teach us that the end doesn't justify the means. Then we turned right around at the end of the war and committed a genocide in Palestine for "good reasons."
We're not the good guys in this. Israel's not the good guys. What they do is understandable, given the circumstances in which they've found themselves since 1948. But it's not righteous. The end does NOT justify the means.
Imagine if they tried kicking everybody out of New York City, to give it back to the Iroquois. It would be at war with the people around New York City from Day 1. Maybe the U.S. Government backs the idea of giving NYC back. Then the people who were displaced would be enemies of the state if they lashed out in reaction to being summarily kicked off the land they paid for.
You guys have a HUGE blind spot with respect to the State of Israel. It's a construct, an artifact of British Colonialism which was grafted onto the USA seamlessly after the war. We're a little less obvious about it (or we were), but it's the same old "Great Game" played for the narrow purposes of a handful of powerful people, in opposition to what's best for the people around the world.
You're cherry-picking history, Robert. I'm no historian, but I know enough to know how Europeans, especially the British, re-drew the map of the Middle East at their whim, depending on what their interests were. Got a leader who's not playing ball? Start an insurrection. Create chaos. Bring down the government. Re-draw the map, so the oil keeps flowing, with puppets in power or just a ruined nation that cannot defend itself from the predations of Euro/American commercial syndicates.
You're usually not Neocon, but on Israel, you're blinded by your cultural baggage and don't see things objectively, in my opinion.
I signed on to Daily Wire when Jordan Peterson joined the group, but I'm going to cancel. The top guy, Shapiro, and most of the people under him, are neocon. I don't think Peterson is, but he changed when he went to Daily Wire.
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Hollywood hasn't really changed. It's always pushed the agendas of the donor class and the government. What has changed is that the messaging from the establishment is so alien to what people know and believe that it's created huge backlash.
This doesn't explain everything that's going on, but the liberal messaging that's dominated since the 1960s, with your John Wayne and Clint Eastwood outliers, resonated pretty well, and could even be argued to be helping move the culture in better, more open-minded directions.
Anybody born before 1970 knows how homophobic society used to be. I think the Tom Hanks movie "Philadelphia," (I think), where Hanks played a gay man who was sick with AIDS, marked a real turning point for society. Jesus teaches care for the sick and unconditional love. Christians are also instructed that departure from hetero norms is a sin. But when they put a face and a back-story to a good man to an AIDS victim, the unconditional love, which is the Highest Level Teaching of Christianity, trumped the homophobia.
That was a turning point in our history, where AIDS had real potential to generate huge backlash against gay people. Instead, the media complex hit us with "Philadelphia," and a lot of Christians couldn't bring themselves to hate Tom Hanks. Major culture shift towards tolerance and acceptance.
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You appartly weren't listening very closely to Jordan Peterson. He's not against helping the poor. He's just against federal anti-poverty programs imposed nation-wide in one-size-fits-all fashion by a HUGE, out-of-touch and arrogant bureaucracy. Charity starts at home and filters out from there. If you want a kinder nation, you act locally and pray that the feds never get involved, because they will pervert it or they will be perverted by the most powerful special interests.
It's not about not being compassionate towards the weak and underprivileged. It's about saying "No" to huge, centralized institutions "corporatizing" the act of human generosity.
If all the liberals who VOTE for big spending would just open up their wallets and help as many people as they CAN, and be SATISFIED with that, and maybe influence others to be similarly kind and generous, the world would be a much better place. Instead, they vote to MAKE everyone pay for whatever charity some stuffed-shirts in Washington, in collaboration with the Bill Gateses of the world decide should take over.
Even that wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that those institutions encroach more and more into everyone's lives and make less and less sensible decisions, with the only end-game in sight being the kind of authoritarianism that even assholes like Bill Maher can see. He's an asshole because he doesn't see his own hand in the creation of these authoritarian structures, ripe for the takeover by a very small number of people, affecting policies across the nation and across the world.
We need to be more DECENTRALIZED so that the corruption and incompetence only reach so far and last so long before they're stopped. But at the national level, where they even control the money supply, they can make promises they can't really keep and muddle on for GENERATIONS. You try that shit at the state or local level and you run out of money in a couple years and people throw out the idiots and can recover in a couple years. When it goes on for decades, the hole is just too deep. The feds argue not over whether we should go DEEPER into debt, but by how much more. Every year.
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Here's the thing about "leftism" and "liberalism," to me:
The left believes in redistribution at its core. And this puts the left on an illiberal philosophical path, because the only way to redistribute is to water down what individual rights ARE.
We forget, every time that government does ANYthing FOR us, that we're opening ourselves up to JUST the kind of illiberal liberalism that you guys so clearly see, but which Brendan (and every liberal I know) fails to see is the LOGICAL consequence of their belief that government is good for anything but defending our soil and defending our BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS, which do NOT include a full belly or roof over our heads or medical care out of somebody else's pocket.
And I don't wanna get too mystical on y'all, but there's a yin and yang thing going on, here, where the more successful the left is in making everyone economically secure, the more resentment builds up on the part of those putting in more than they get out. And it's dangerous to just lump everybody (all those Atlases shrugging out there) as right-wing idiots, but the (so-called) left INVITES Hitler to rule, by ginning-up the (so-called) right to DO something about all the parasites living off their hard work (in their view).
Government is like Sauron's Ring of Power. Oh, the GOOD you can do by use of compulsion, but it destroys both compeller and compelled, in the long run, every... bleedin'... time.
I could go on (obviously) just drivelizing, but if you want a compassionate society, YOU be compassionate. Redistribution by force DESTROYS liberal values on the street. "That's what we pay taxes for. It's our gov't's fault that guy's livin' in a cardboard box."
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Depends on what you mean by "Christianity." Are you talking the subversive followers of Jesus fed to the lions at the Coliseum, or the government-integrated Roman Catholic Church (or Lutherans or Church-of-Englanders)?
By the time Rome got ahold of Christianity, it was pretty much not Christian, any more, imho. Still, a sincere Christian, coming up in almost ANY sect, with a good heart and a good mind, is going to be very OK with Enlightenment ideals.
Of course, that kind of Christian ends up rejecting much of what any organized Christian church is pushing, settling towards a semi-agnostic view that Jesus was a great dude and the lesson is Reason + Love = Heaven on Earth.
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A group of individuals could decide to live as an Intentional Family, and, in effect, live communally. You see it all the time in families of all types, here and there. So he's quite correct.
Thing about the guy who didn't want to give up his property is he wouldn't be a member of that family. As long as it's not imposed from above, it's not counter to NAP.
The irony, to me, is that those who want to live that way and see the whole world join hands and live that way, are going about it in exactly the wrong way. To get where they want, they need to SHRINK government, and the planet-killing excesses too MUCH participation by government invariably lead to.
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Yup. And I'm all in favor of "Intentional Family" and all that jazz, if that's what if people of like minds want to do. A good family IS Marxist. And if you COULD extend that notion from coast to coast, we'd be a perfect Marxist utopia.
Trouble is, the only libertarian way to do that would be from the ground up. The minute it's handed down from on high, it's at the point of a gun, and the NAP is violated, which few, if any, of the liberals I know, can wrap their minds around.
I'm 90% Libertarian, with a tithe for national defense. I used to go 15%, figuring the King's at least handy for building roads, but I'm 5% more purist, nowadays, looking at our history and how we'd've been WAY more respectful of the natives if we'd been libertarian about roads. If the locals wanna pool their money for a better road, let 'em. If a guy wants to build a toll road and he can make it happen thru free exchanges with others, let 'em. Otherwise, let nature take its course.
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As many are pointing out, below, we're not really "conservative" so much as we're libertarians or classical liberals. Technically, "conservative" in the political sense is that you defend the established order and tradition. That's not what we are. We're not reactionary, either, because we're not interested in "going back to an idealized past."
"Left versus right" is misleading as hell. It's a totally false dichotomy. It's more of a state-versus-individual dichotomy, and striking the proper balance between the two. We need SOME government, but we clearly have far too MUCH government, right now, and far too little diversity of thought permitted in the public square, in order to preserve an establishment that's just as out-of-touch, NOW, as the regressive right of the 1960s, and even more censorious and intolerant.
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I think I part ways with some of Peter's points around the 34:00 mark. I think he should give thought to DE-CENTRALIZING the educational project. One of the reasons this CRT is so all-pervasive is because our education institutions are centrally funded and centrally administered. One bad eye can infect the entire nation. Obama could push what amounted to CRT mandates through executive order (decree), by threatening all federal support to institutions that do not toe the line.
While we do the bulk of our education funding, locally and by state, the federal contribution is big enough to be irresistibly persuasive in the few instances in which school administrators and school boards might be inclined to resist what they already half believe, in the first place.
The power and perks attendant to embracing this bankrupt ideology are 100% persuasive to risk-averse leftists who are already inclined to go along with the ideology because they're almost all socialist or socialist-adjacent. This is "soft control." They can't directly punish an institution for resisting their mandates, but they CAN deny student financial aid to those institutions. Most schools depend on federal financial aid to keep the lights on. It's very difficult to break free, when your institution dies if the feds cut it off.
Here's another irony in this ideological war we're in. We wouldn't even know we were in a fight if it weren't for the use of coercive tactics to push the ideology so hard. When the end justifies the means, the means can often defeat the ends. The Nazis HAD to invade their neighbors, steal their gold reserves, and export their inflation to the conquered lands with worthless printed money that they forced conquered peoples to accept as payment for what they took. Their socialist spending had buried them in debt, and World War II kept the bankers at bay, for a time. They were on a trajectory to economic collapse that was postponed only by pillaging their neighbors.
That paragraph didn't go so well. My point was supposed to be that it's the coercive nature of the imposition of this ideology, top-down, that exposes it for what it is. If they'd been satisfied with "creeping socialism" for another decade or so, there would be no turning back. But they're so close to their ultimate goals that they've over-reached, in my humble opinion. They've peeled off the mask prematurely.
One GOOD thing about COVID-19 is the ZOOM learning exposed the empty-headed ideologues at the tip of the indoctrination spear. A student debating their teacher on tenets of CRT looks like the adult and the teacher looks like the petulant, bullying child in the dialogue. First off, the teachers have no business pushing a faith-based ideology. But more importantly, they're actually pretty bad at pushing it, effectively. Their fall-back position is appeal to authority. Students see right through that, and while we see the successfully-indoctrinated students marching and agitating, a growing majority of students reject the teachings, in much the same way students rejected the establishment's phony arguments for the Vietnam War.
The reason we HAVE those institutions was because it was the best and only knowledge production-and-dissemination mechanism available at the time. Now we have the Internet. You don't NEED big, brick-and-mortar institutions for 90% of what is taught in our colleges and universities. You only need the big institutions for things like super-colliders and other science-related apparatus. Electron microscopes, NMR and IR spectroscopy, ... Stuff like that takes some brick-and-mortar infrastructure. But little else.
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@CaliforniatoWestAfrica Without my father in the picture, I would've run roughshod over my mother by or before age 12. Dad was far from perfect, but he didn't tolerate any BS.
I remember how some of my peers would be out causing trouble or partying all hours on school nights, for instance. That was something that simply couldn't happen in our household without dire consequences.
Some rare women can do it all, at great cost to themselves, trying to do more than any one person should have to do. But the women who end up single, with children, usually aren't those kinds of women.
Bless you for overcoming your disadvantages. You can look at crime stats in a couple of different ways. While the vast majority of career criminals and/or people who spend their lives in poverty come from single-mother households, the flip side is that the vast majority raised by single mothers do, in fact, overcome it.
It's the same for being raised by abusive fathers. You're more likely to be an abuser if you were raised by an abuser, but MOST abused children do NOT repeat the mistakes of their fathers.
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Carving out nations by force in far-distant lands is not a "liberal" notion or the highest ideal of Western Civ. It's Old-World imperialism/colonialism. The state of Israel is an artificiality imposed by force on the people of Palestine. I don't care how great the Jews are or how "liberal" the state of Israel is made out to be. It's not sustainable without enormous external support against the will of every nation in the region.
Israel is the poster child for 'sunk-cost fallacy.' If we feel so strongly about a Jewish homeland, why don't we give up an equivalent amount of real estate for such a homeland here in America? Give 'em a chunk of Arizona or Nevada desert. With their know-how and work ethic and modern permaculture tech, they'd turn it into an oasis in one generation.
No. This is about (in essence) British imperialism, grafted effortlessly onto American foreign policy at the end of the failing British Empire. It's not their or our place to re-draw the map to please them or us.
When I look at the Muslim world, I see a lust to expand, but I also see centuries of invasion, for instance the Mongol invasion, that decimated and weaponized Islam. Brought out the worst potentialities. We picked up where the Mongols and then the British left off, and we wonder why they hate us and why they behave like Guerrillas in the Peninsular war against Napoleon. We call it "terror," when suicide bombers lash out, but call our conventional use of arms in a hopelessly lopsided war as "righteous."
WE shaped and promoted radical Islam, whenever we wanted to take out an existing government in the region, by arming ethnic minorities to fight as rebels against governments we didn't like. Mujahedeen in Afghanistan? We prepped and equipped them. Over and over, we fight agains the violence and spite that WE CREATED! And we blame the people we trained and propagandized into the most regressive and dangerous interpretation of Muslim belief for being violent and regressive.
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I taught at a college up in the mountains. I loved the regular people from the area. I mentioned this to a colleague who sniffed and said "I don't like being around those people." A paragon of liberalism, just like 90% of my colleagues, but they did NOT want to venture outside their bubble. I preferred the local ranchers, farmers, and outfitters. They were REAL. My colleagues were very judgemental, in a very twisted "Toe the liberal line or be ostracized" way that struck me as more conservative than liberal. Very regressive, hidebound people, without an original thought in their heads. Just deadly, dull conformity. And what made it worse, was they insisted they were the tolerant, open-minded ones, when they were anything but. Very stifling atmosphere.
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