Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "The Jimmy Dore Show"
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@hangerq5735 Something was definitely fishy about that story. And some of the interviews were clearly performative, with a guy laughing and joking until the cameras start rolling, and turning on the tears like a faucet for the interview.
Alex got out over his skies a lot. He didn't as often as some think, because a lot of the rants I saw were when he started out with "If this is what's going on, then..." If you came in on the "then" part, and didn't know it was a hypothetical, or if CNN left out the fact that it was a hypothetical, then you would definitely have a low opinion of his performances. Some people like that performative stuff, like Mark Levin or half the commentators on sports and news channels.
But the damages assessed against Alex Jones were political. The lawsuit was political. The system has been weaponized against dissent for a long time, and for the past 10 years, the liberty and common sense voices have been the dissenter, which you probably don't know, given the talking point you threw out there.
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@theywouldnthavetocensormei9231 We gave up the moral high ground long ago, trying to emulate the British Empire model.
What would/should we do if Russia/China staged a coup in Mexico and poured military aid into Mexico and talked $hit about how its purpose was to take on the USA?
U.S. officials assured the USSR that NATO would not expand if the USSR decided to do what it did. Then as soon as it did what it promised, we said "We are the only superpower, so we do what we want, and expanded NATO. Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, ...
Meanwhile, at home, we are increasingly authoritarian and collectivist, making ourselves into a version of the USSR.
I'm just not buying the "But they are worse!" argument that I've been fed all of my life.
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Now that we KNOW that human beings will abuse their powers when granted them, maybe you progressives will be in less of a hurry to give government so many responsibilities, each of which gives it more authority and power over us. Progressives feed the dragon and then complain when their houses burn down. Conservatives say "Stop feeding the dragon. Of COURSE it offers you all your heart desires. It's its nature! But one day, your home will be ashes! Don't fall for it!"
But when it comes to these fake attacks on Trump, we see eye to eye. I agree that there are real things of which to be critical. Knee-jerk, Deep-State-lookin' missile strikes after what was VERY likely a false-flag chemical attack, when Assad had the situation on the ground WELL in hand. The only thing that could've cost Assad the war with the rebels was something stupid, like a chemical attack, provoking U.S. intervention.
I still think that the WAY "we" executed that missile strike, we intended to do minimum harm. It was mostly symbolism. Some conservative conspiracy theorists suggest Trump was just throwing Deep State a bone, to keep them off his back a little longer, while keeping the Russians from getting too pissed-off, by warning everybody out of the vicinity before the attack. Supporting that claim is the fact that the Russians DID pull their people out of the affected area ahead of time. So you know they had the heads-up. So you know Assad had the heads-up.
I think Schiff's number of "Avenatti moments" is becoming too great for even the legacy media to ignore. Guys who are the most brazen about making unfounded accusations end up having the most to hide, a lot of the time. Jimmy Swaggart will preach fire and brimstone and then hire a hooker, because he "just wants to watch." (I think he DID only watch, but that was it, for him, when it came out.) The champion of women's rights just can't keep his hands to himself at work. The guy digging up 10-year-old tweets turns out to have some 10-year-old tweets of his OWN.
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@PATTHECATMCD : Yep. They're trying to tighten the screws. I think - HOPE - that these 19th-Century-style elites are going to find that the old ways of controlling perceptions no longer work. They're taking it as far as they can - and farther in the UK in many ways than in the USA - but I think they will eventually be tripped up by a new transparency that - it turns out - works AGAINST the elites as much as it helps them.
Yeah, they can spy on ALL of us, and singly any of us out for retribution. But they can't single ALL of us out. There're just too damn many of us. And the tech they weaponize against us, time and again is weaponized against THEM. It turns out that their intrusions against us can just as easily turn into intrusions against them. Yeah, you can use your old-school political-machine bullshit to deny Bernie the nomination, but your arrogance left a big hole in your servers, you got hacked, and now all the back-and-forths are public domain, and your lies and deceit are writ large for all the world to see.
Strzok manipulated the process at FBI/DOJ in the time-honored way, and got tripped up sending love notes to his mistress on his FBI-issued phone, before Mueller was in place as special counsel to wipe the phone - which he faithfully did, which is why the compromising texts are ALL from the time before Mueller was Special Counsel, to execute the cover-up.
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And any big state has a lot of city folks living in situations FAR different from the situations of people in suburbs and rural areas, especially. In cities you have a gun-fearing populace who are all the time shooting each other, and a gun-embracing culture in the countryside where NObody gets shot. Real estate can run in the millions per square foot in the city. In the country, it's $1,000 per acre. Totally different settings. Totally different kinds of problems and people and problem people.
The idea that centralized administration and control is how we should run things runs counter to liberty and good management practice. You need the people to know what they're about where they are, and not be told what to do by strangers living in artificial urban environments and gated communities, a thousand miles away. Federal intervention is for acute, short-term crises, but it's no way to run things day to day. Trouble is, every ACUTE problem the government sets out to solve turns into a CHRONIC problem, with immortal agencies whose existence (and paychecks) depend on there being a problem that only they can "solve."
Is it any wonder that 10s of millions of people are on food stamps? We have an entire INDUSTRY (industries) devoted to "solving" the problem of hunger. No surprise, there are more and more hungry people every year, which is used to justify MORE such programs and spending, when in actuality it should only be used to justify firing ALL their asses!
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@Kiyoone We used to have trains and local rails in all the cities. Then Goodrich (or was it Goodyear) wanted to sell tires, so they greased palms and regulations pushed the local transit rails/trolleys out and brought us buses, which are far less efficient and pollute a lot more.
This is your government at work. It will make whatever it wants sound like the morally superior path, but really they're only helping their buddies, who in turn, donate large sums to their campaigns or give high-paying nothing jobs to their family members, etc.
If we got the government out of everything, there would be for-profit rails flourishing almost everywhere. But, like Nazi Germany, as soon as the government decides it's going to take over an industry "for our good," things go to shit, eventually, and everyone points fingers, but it's all the same. Whoever gets scapegoated for the history books, it was the government intervention and use of government force that threw everything out of whack and changed our decision making from "What makes sense and will make a sustainable profit" to "What does the government want, so I can be sure to cash in on that tax rebate or subsidy?"
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@allianssd I want the America imagined by George Washington:
A union of autonomous states, all abiding by the u.s. Constitution and managing their own affairs, with free trade and free markets between and within each state.
A federal government that defends the Constitution from without, enforces the Constitution within, and enters into no entangling alliances.
If you want to become a state, put in for it and abide by the Constitution. Then we'll defend you as our own. Otherwise, it's not our place to run the world.
Very simple. And with the tech we have today, Citizen Oversight, where they are, is far more potent than government oversight by an understaffed bunch of bribery targets. We should be a nation of whistleblowers who need no force to effect change. Just by unrestricted right to expose shenanigans without interference of fear of reprisal. When the people know, they all stop buying. That's the best protection against shenanigans.
Then add one more thing: Grow a culture that won't buy anything from any outfit that isn't 100% transparent. Don't comply with any government mandate that is not fully explained, justified, with 100% open books on all the facts available.
People always say that education is the problem, but get the government out and the people will educate themselves overnight.
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Venezuelan oil isn't exactly sweet, light crude. It's the crudest of the crude, and requires enormous investment to get it out of the ground and refine it for a profit. It was never going to be easy, but with outside oil companies building the infrastructure and operating it, they could make a solid profit, which they immediately spent before they got it, so that everyone could have a microwave in their socialist utopia.
They started running out of money and decided to nationalize everything, and in their wisdom, forgot that they knew nothing about the oil business. Then oil prices took a nosedive and they were stuck.
There's still a lot of oil, there, but their government is a huge obstacle to their ever developing the resource in a measured, sustainable way. Their government saw riches on the horizon and spent them before actually earning them.
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@dpersonal4187 : The 2 major parties are viral. As soon as a 3rd party becomes a threat, one or the other of the major parties will appropriate the message and absorb most of the voters likely to vote for the 3rd party.
In elections where I'm not in "lesser of two evils" mode, I typically vote Libertarian, even when they field a dumb-ass, like Gary Johnson. That's what I did in 2016, which was basically a pro-Hillary vote. But the choice was between the Car Salesman and The Witch, as I saw it in 2016. Trump's done a far better job than expected, in my opinion.
Domestically, he sure pisses off the Progressives, who are quite mad when it comes to domestic policy, and pleases Progressives by pulling the hell out of Syria and now, Afghanistan. But to a libertarian-minded person such as myself, Trump's doing the same thing, abroad that he is at home. Cutting down government meddling. Progressives have this unbelievable faith in the wisdom of bureaucrats. They criticize the HELL out of them, and then eagerly vote them even MORE power. Insane.
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@sugarshane8622 : Free-market capitalism is not business hand-in-glove with government. That's fascism you're describing, and we're all against that. The thing is, if we didn't make government over everything, there wouldn't be bureaucrats to be bought off and tilt the playing field in their cronies' direction!
A lot of people are so caught up in catching robber barons doing evil robber baron things, they create the very agencies that are the main tools of the robber barons! Washington, D.C. is a cesspool. Big companies HAVE to lobby and contribute to politicians' campaigns because not to do so means that the next laws and regs are going to destroy your company. The problem isn't that politicians are corrupt. We always knew that. The problem is we let them (BEG them) to legislate and regulate, which creates 4 or 5 powerful people with the power to make the robber barons' dreams come true, and who will also create nightmares for them if they don't open up offices in D.C. and attend committee hearings, etc.
What we need is to disempower the central government to lord it over every little thing, and go back to protecting our borders and enforcing the U.S. Constitution. They do both, very poorly, just as they do the million other things they have no business doing: poorly.
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This is how a dominant party behaves, as soon as it gets the chance. With the legacy media in their hip pockets and a captive voter base stretching as far as the eye could see, they fall into all the same patterns of unchecked power. Progressives are good at seeing the symptoms, but never blame themselves for the engines of inequity the create by supporting the big government in the first place.
If you don't want government corruption taking over everything, you need to limit the mandate of government. It's the only cure. Progressives are always tempted by the carrot and then whine about the stick, because smart as they think they are, they NEVER make the connection.
"This thing we created is out of control!" cries the progressive.
"Why did you create it and what's your plan to get rid of it?" asks the conservative.
"Oh, we want to keep it around. We just want it to do what WE say," answers the progressive.
"That's not how the world works," says the conservative. "You can't have it both ways. You can't turn your wishes into reality without old-fashioned hard work. Quick and easy government solutions aren't quick, they're never easy, and usually have the opposite of the intended effect over the long haul. Project your thinking beyond tomorrow and look a year or two or 10 or 20 down the road."
"That's too hard. And how can you be against Free Stuff, you Nazi?"
"Free Stuff is the Nazi's calling card, idiot."
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@GGGR2012 : If you had that money to invest, yourself, instead of just taking what the government decides, you'd be RICH when you retired. And yes, their ultimate solution is to keep their promises with worthless dollars. Inflation is the most insidious tax and the worst destroyer of people's wealth than anything else. Governments - especially governments with 'progressive' economic policies, invariably punish prudence, frugality, and savings. They do it in the name of helping the weak, but the net effect is to punish every honest schmuck who's trying to do the right things, isn't rich, but has a chance to improve his situation. Democrats hate those kinds of people. To them it's rich people and poor people and they want to keep both groups the same over the generations.
America is where we're supposed to have a rule set that fosters the little guy getting ahead. That's not how it works, and a big part of that reason is progressive-liberal policies.
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'80s was the calm before the storm that had already been brewing since the '40s and '50s, as the USA (and the world) adjusted to the New Hegemon, the accidental empire that must never be named, like Fight Club.
We beat the USSR in real terms, but we seemed to lose the ideological battle in the process, with an ever-growing, ever-sprawling welfare state, and takeover of the whole country by a new bureaucrat/technocrat class in Washington, who know they're smarter than we are, but have no real connection to the daily concerns of the people, and nothing but handouts and government takeovers by way of "solutions."
In the 20s, word got out about the true nature of Soviet Socialism, and it took them 60 years of deconstruction of and government intervention into the free-market capitalism that was always our biggest strength, to a point where close to half of the country thinks capitalism is evil and socialism is good. You couldn't say "socialism is good" for 40 years, but now, even though state intervention has created a fascist framework, we're brainwashed into thinking the problem is "unbridled capitalism." I'd much rather have "unbridled capitalism" than have the government and a handful of the biggest corporations working hand in hand for their own mutual benefit. It never ends well.
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Janusha : As the ancient Chinese observed: ORDER ARISES SPONTANEOUSLY. People are already growing noticeably more resistant to Internet trolls. More and more you see trolls start their shit, and people just talk around and over them, just like parents talk over their kids. "Let the grown-ups talk" is about all I'll give a troll, beyond a thumbs-down and a big ignore.
Same deal with the chaos of information bombarding us. We, as intelligent consumers, check out what people are saying and find voices that are more truthful, reasonable, and even entertaining (like JIMMY!). Over time, the good stuff gains more followers. Sure, the nutcases get their followers, also. But that's OK. The world isn't perfect. Some people are just dead set on fucking up, and there's nothing you can do about it until they commit a crime against persons or property. Or at least that's how it should work.
But now we've got Speech Police and we're a hair's width away from Thought Police, because, after all, we're all super-duper racists, even if we don't know it, right? Don't like what CNN's got to say? Well then, obviously, you're a racist, even though you don't think so. That's how this shit works.
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Trump also has a responsibility to the working poor, whose jobs are threatened by illegal immigration, the poor in the neighborhoods that are taken over by Mexican drug cartels, and the middle class workers who are footing the bill for Democrats' supposedly well-intended vote-buying machine. Build That Wall.
And if you're old as dirt, like I am, you've seen the Democrats pull this kind of shit every time we try to pass meaningful immigration reform that shows RESPECT to the people who come in the front door and RESPECT for the American citizen. But it's been bait and switch for as long as I've been watching it. "Give us amnesty and we'll get you border security, later" . Well, "later" never comes. For DECADES.
Finally a president with the balls (AND THE MANDATE) to stand up to them and say we're proceeding no further until we secure our nation's borders. Securing the borders was and IS government's #1 job, and government wants to stick its nose in, EVERYwhere, except into the very first job they were constituted to perform.
Democrats insist government do everything except its job. Sick of it. Trump needs to wait the bastards out.
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hoodiewoman louisiana : Foreign meddling is a by-product of democracy even though the people, by nature, don't like it and don't like war. This was one of the "problems" for leaders of so-called democracies, around the end of the 19th and on into the 20th century. It was solved by propaganda. Step by step, persuade the people how terrible some foreign leader is, and slowly overcome the resistance to violence by demonizing and dehumanizing whomever the elites decide it's in the elites' interest to destroy.
Lately it all starts with
1. nexus of terror designation.
2. economic sanctions.
3. no-fly zones and "surgical" air (drone) strikes.
4. need for "regime change."
5. Operation Iraqi freedom, destruction of Libya, occupation of Afghanistan, and, most recently, supporting/destroying (nobody's sure which) ISIS in Syria.
These bastards never stop. And they're no different from Victorian-era imperialists, except for how they cover their tracks and hide the fact that it's imperialism.
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You say "went back" as if journalists once were unbiased. This is a myth. The Founding Fathers put the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights so ANYbody - popular OR unpopular - could speak their mind. They were under no illusions as to the objectivity of the press. The press, to them, were the pamphleteers who DARED oppose the establishment.
Objectivity was a myth created near the beginning of the 20th Century, when, in their ignorance, they couldn't IMAGINE there being more than one or two channels, EVER. On RADIO. So they came up with the "Fairness Doctrine" that was supposed to ensure journalistic integrity. But it was all a bunch of made-up shit, and it took a New York Minute for the rich and powerful to reach their tentacles into CBS, NBC and ABC, to PRESERVE the Existing Order, or to drum up support for war or new government programs or whatever those bastards were selling, OR to simply NOT report things that were embarrassing to the power elite.
Just forget about objectivity in journalism. Instead, DIVERSIFY your sources. I'm a hard-core libertarian, who thinks Jimmy Dore is an unaligned socialist. He's not humming the Internationale, or anything, but his philosophy on the proper scope and role of government is essentially socialist.
But Jimmy GETS IT when it comes to imperialism, abroad. So even though I'm a freedom, self-reliance and limited-government kind of guy, Jimmy's one of my favorite sources. I just with he were more of a classical liberal (Get government off my back.) instead of a Progressive (Big gov't's OK, so long as it only does what I want it to do). That's a fallacy. Government is poison. We should only take it in small doses: National DEFENSE (not OFFense), enforcement of the U.S. Constitution. That's it.
Progressives are like farmers, who see that a ton of fertilizer/pesticide on their 20 acres is good, so 10 tons of fertilizer/pesticide on their 20 acres must be 10 TIMES as good. Meh. Bleah.
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My take on the last year or so is that he prevented something that would've gotten worse, with no end in sight, if Hillary had won. I think it would've been full-on "enrich the virtue-signaling oligarchs" in their seats of privilege, at the expense of everybody else, from insider stock tips to sweetheart-deal speaking gigs, to not-even-thinly-veiled pay-to-play going on in plain view.
I LOVE the venom and hatred of the president being spewed. He is VERY MUCH on notice, as ALL presidents should be, that we are watching, and some of us hate him so much we'll make shit up and BELIEVE it the next day. All presidents should be under this kind of scrutiny.
I think we're discovering that things got lax, because the same crew got used to having their own way for too long. A 2-term presidency represents close to a decade of the same guys, who all know each other, doing favors for one another, from insider stock tips to sweetheart land deals, to not-even-thinly-veiled pay-to-play taking place in plain view.
And we see a pattern of lawless behavior (and relaxation of compartmentalization of intel at Obama's discretion) that was ignored, if it was in the right cause.
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What we could use - and it's already happening to an extent, quite organically - is for you independent journalists and content creators to create some form of consortium or organized co-op, where you share info and divide-up the regions of coverage, for a truly independent media that fact-checks itself, in the natural course of things. Take it all the way down to the citizen-with-a-smartphone level, bypassing and rendering obsolete the kind of big-corporate news models. Something akin to a wiki but more resistant to corruption by a handful of highly motivated asshats, whom we see corrupting whatever chunks of Wikipedia they target. You can go in there on Monday at noon to correct blatant falsehoods or mischaracterizations of history, and it's GONE before 1 p.m.
Just a thought. Journalism should be a bottom-up thing and not a top-down thing. It should be raw and uncensored. Messy, chaotic, and mostly truthful, with opposing viewpoints hashing things out publicly, in a format that forces people to take turns.
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KELLI2L2 : Many didn't like the neocons around him, and some of the things he was doing in the Middle East seemed to have neocon fingerprints all over them. Only history will tell how much of this was Trump buying time by pussyfooting around and playing along with them, until he had his ducks in a row and was ready to announce the withdrawal from Syria. I felt like Trump's big "missile attack" was more of a show - maybe purely for the folks back home - than any kind of strategic "destroy the bad guys" stuff. From what I gathered, he basically told everybody where he'd strike and gave everybody time to clear out oft the affected area.
Anyway, the point is that it seemed pretty half-hearted, but the talking heads, with total buy-in on the false flag chem attacks were thinking Trump finally did something right, and I know it pleased the entrenched deep-state neocon types. Maybe that bought him the time and the room to get us on our way out of there before New Year's.
But the scattering of resignations from this surprising move, which idiot reporters say was entirely due to the Erdogan conversation, are probably a good thing for his admin. If it smokes out some neocons (mutter-mutter John Bolton mutter-mutter. ) like Mattis, who LIKE that sort of thing, that's probably a good thing.
I just wonder if this was Trump's plan, all along and the beating-around-the-bush stuff over the last couple years was for his own political survival if not physical survival. No way of knowing, at this point, but the dumber people make Trump out to be, the more he seems to win on issues I care about, and the entire weight of the establishment opposes.
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@Chill_Im_Probably_Trolling It's OK for you to be right about foreign policy but to be a nincompoop about socialism. Maybe COVID taught you nothing. You do NOT want your health care determined by bureaucrats, and that's what you're asking for when you ask for socialized medicine. Yes, we should care for our weakest members of society, but we should do it from the ground up, not from the top down, or we'll have Fauci's telling YOUR doctor what they can and can't treat you for and what treatments are and are not permitted. It's an illusion.
What progressives don't understand is that fascism is built on the tripod of state-run media, education and medicine. When you have all 3 under state control (which we essentially have, today), the people will believe ANYthing, first of all because they WANT to believe, second of all because that's all they KNOW to believe, and third, because to depart in any way from the state's positions is to risk losing your health care and free education.
Progressives just don't get that the government isn't their friend, even though they'll spend hours listening to Jimmy Dore explaining how corrupt the establishment is. Do you REALLY want those motherfuckers teaching your kids and telling your doctor what to do?
If you want the poor to be provided for, give YOUR money and encourage others to do the same. Don't hold all of us at gunpoint for your one-size-fits-all, bureaucratic, government-centered solutions. They're not real solutions. They're hopium.
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Russell, you're exposing your economic illiteracy by whining about the minimum wage. It's not MEANT to be a living wage. It's supposed to be an entry-level wage, and the idea is that you build your skill set, gain experience, and work hard, so that you no longer have to accept a minimum wage.
You're all upside-down in your economic and TRUE fairness to individuals. A job flipping burgers is not a career! It's a starting point. I flipped burgers as a teenager and once or twice in my 20s, but the entire time, I was working to IMPROVE myself, so I could earn MORE.
Now, after MANY years clawing my way up through my education (that I paid for) and work experience, I make out all right. When I was making minimum wage, I was still living at home, mostly, and when I did move out on my starvation wages, I had to get a roommate or multiple roommates to make rent and feed myself.
But I didn't settle for that. Nor should anyone else.
Anyway, you should do some economics research before trotting out your minimum wage claptrap, which only exposes your ignorance.
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Better yet, Jimmy, how about we take the government OUT of education, health care, etc., so that every little thing doesn't HAVE to become political? You come right up to a better way of looking at the actual trade-offs, and then you're right back on politics. Ask anybody about education. They'll all tell you how important it is. Then ask them if their kids would learn to read if the schools were shut dow. All of them will say 'of course MY kids will get educated. It's the guy down the block whose kids won't get educated, and THAT'S why we need public schools."
So what happens? The good parents' kids get shoved into big classrooms with all the bad parents' kids, and the school has to teach to the lowest denominator, and your kids have to go to classes that are continually being disrupted, slowed-down, and side-tracked by a handful of knuckleheads that would get kicked out of any GOOD school. How about those people be the ONLY people who go to public school, and all the parents who care get to KEEP their money and CHOOSE their schools?
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Bernie's only talent is acting self-righteous and promising Peter's money to Paul. He can't even manage his own campaign. Of course, his socialist ideology is intellectually bankrupt. The only reason progressives have the right to talk shit redistribution is because of liberty and LIMITED government. You progressives think forced redistribution is the answer, when you all KNOW that politicians serve themSELVES and top-down governance ALWAYS leads to worse problems than the ones progressives bitch about.
Progressives are the REASON we live in a corporatocracy. They wanted government to protect them against robber barons, oblivious to the fact that robber barons will ALWAYS pull the strings of ANY small group of people who are "in charge." Income inequality exists, but fixing it by force (government action/regulation) is the ANTI-fix. You're just putting all the power into the hands of a handful of big corporations. The best, albeit imperfect solution is social consciousness, transparency, and open competition.
Example: We spend more per pupil than ever before in history. The reason the public schools are failing is because they operate without any competition or accountability. Education should be a very cheap PRODUCT that 90% of parents purchase for their kids, the same way they buy food and clothing. If we viewed education as a PRODUCT rather than a government BENEFIT, kids would learn more, and it'd be about 1/10 as expensive as the current, corrupt and rickety public-school system.
Jimmy recognizes "career climbers" but supports an ideology that subjects ALL of us to such people. He's RIGHT to scorn government corruption and incompetence, but thinks (ironically) that government is the solution. It's not. Help your damn neighbor. Be responsible. Government is for the small fraction of people who can't. Government intrusion mainly increases the size of the fraction of helpless people, who would otherwise be OK, and with a little bit extra to help their neighbors. Now, every time somebody gets a hangnail, progressives DEMAND a new government program, feeding the dragon they bitch about every day.
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Not quite, Jimmy. Yes, things are being run by criminals, but it's progressives like you who gave them the power they have by insisting that the federal government fix everything, when the only way society gets fixed is from the ground, up.
You'll never be able to fix things top-down. That's what's wrong with your thinking. You want to fix medical care? Abolish the Department of Health and Human Service. You want healthy, safe, affordable food at the grocery? Abolish the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
You want to be safe during a major health crisis? Abolish National Institute of (ill) Health and the Centers for Disease Control.
You can NEVER be sure that the people running these institutions are without sin. Of course you're going to get pathological people rise to the top in these major institutions, if not today, then next year or the year after. The underlying problem is your insistence that we centralize everything in Washington, DC and give ANYbody that much power.
Russell Brand has woken up to this. De-centralize. Leave decisions to the local communities and gasp families.
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It's not even about whether masks do what they say or not. It's about NOBODY weighing the trade-offs and nobody sincerely trying to minimize the harm. If they were, then they'd also try to make sure everybody was able to make a doctor's appointment. People die of all kinds of different things. The giant brains in government didn't weigh things rationally. They just seized on the small array of solutions most beneficial to themselves and then used coercive, deceptive, and secret means to exclude all others.
Same with climate change. Whether you believe it's a looming catastrophe or not, the elites latch onto one solution or one set of preferred solutions, excluding all others, and accuse you of science denial, because you're more worried about the drawbacks to their schemes. "Listing drawbacks is literally genocide."
How about making it easier for people to incorporate permaculture/Earthship concepts in their homes, instead of harder? How about selling people on the idea of a nifty little EV to zip around town in? That'd make sense. But no. There's no comparison to an internal combustion engine if you need to do a lot of work or cover a lot of ground. We don't have nor do we want the infrastructure necessary for full-on EV future. Makes sense in the city. Makes no sense in the country.
Even if sincere, the nature of government is to bureaucratize and for bureaucratic elites to eventually run amuck. We're in the "run amuck" phase, right now, and hopefully the people who want to call themselves "liberal" will wake up and realize the government can't solve the human condition. Good people who care about and look out for each other as a culture come closest of any means discovered to date. Such people operate best in a limited-government setting. The minute you put an agency in charge of solving homelessness, it is no longer your responsibility to help anyone, because you cheerfully pay your taxes. smh
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It was just a matter of time. I doubt these crooks will ever be prosecuted. If there were actual WILL and PRINCIPLE on the Republican side, they would have gone full attack mode during lockdowns. They didn't. They just waited for the political winds to shift, and THEN they suddenly grew a brain and a backbone.
Due to my job and my particular situation, I was able to just keep my head down and keep working, without being forced to take an experimental medication. I can't tell you how I would have responded if it was "get the jab or lose everything (but save your soul and your health)."
The inhumanity, corruption, stupidity, cowardice, and greed were on full display.
People think that changing leadership will change this, but unless the cabinet appointees GUT their own departments, which none of them will do once they're in office and enjoying the POWER of the post.
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@Spanky Harland : The Bolsheviks were helped by two main factors: The Tsar was a murderous tyrant and their bellies were empty. They lost power due to two main factors: The Bolsheviks were murderous tyrants and the people were radioactive (Chernobyl). The big enemy of ruling by fear is that people will stop following you if you FAIL. You can rule by fear as long as you keep winning. The Tsar lost BIG-time to the Japanese. The Soviets were proven incompetent by Chernobyl.
Incompetence at the top (or just the absolute impossibility of effectively running a command economy (like progressives seem to want, btw) from the top down, no matter how smart you (think you) are. Shit won't be more fair when you appoint one top dog commissar to ensure fairness. An economy is built on individual choices by individual people, every day. By the time the government gets around to fixing a problem, it's too late, and they probably couldn't fix it by force, ANYway. But you buy one shirt that falls apart after one washing, and you will NEVER buy a shirt from that asshole, again. In a command economy, there's just the one shirt-maker, you take what you get, and you keep your damn mouth shut, you ungrateful bourgeoisie mother-fucker!
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It's 1 Ukraine v Russia. It's Ukraine + Military Might of the "West." But even THERE, the numbers just don't add up for Ukraine. American and European production capacity is a fraction of Russia's. Ukraine can go through a month's worth of American production in a few days.
All the military aid Ukraine has received is a tiny fraction of what is needed, and the West's stockpiles are empty! We don't HAVE any more to give without cutting into our own reserves. We simply don't have either the reserves, the energy, or the manufacturing capacity required to fight a conventional war against a great power. The Green Agenda took all that away. Maybe if we got China to side with us against Russia, we could keep up, but that ain't gonna happen!
We don't make our own stuff any more! This isn't 1939! We off-shored ALL that stuff!
The only way we could stop Russia on the ground if they WANTED to invade Western Europe, would be tactical/strategic nukes! And that's my fear in Ukraine.
Our leaders are systematically taking away our energy and industry, and think they can rule the world with banks and finance. We can - and have - for a time, but the underlying fundamentals are catastrophic for the West. We're cutting our own throats on all the wacky, insane identity politics and "We want our cars and phones but we don't want them made, here" policies.
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@davidmaisel8062 : Actually, is says a lot that there are so many conservatives on the Jimmy Dore channel. It also says something that we generally behave ourselves and discuss things, rationally, compared to some. Conservatives come here because he's smart, funny, and he's half right on about half the issues. Good conservatives are anti-war, big-time. Jimmy calls it like he sees it. I don't have to agree with his bifocals to respect his integrity. He's the guy I want at all my parties, to sit and argue politics all night. Anything conservatives and progressives agree on is something that should probably be the law of the land. But other forces conspire to keep us apart.
You want to size down the military to DEFENSIVE needs, and us to mind our own business? And libertarians are more open-borders than otherwise, especially the purists. I think open borders are fine, when people on both sides are livin' more or less the same and more or less the (a) right way. But a lot of those banana republics are so corrupt, they'll never maximize the brain power of their people for a thriving economy and a thriving middle class, which are the key to getting people to live cleaner and have a reasonable number of babies, without compulsion. Gotta evolve that kind of culture, and it starts by protecting people's property rights. That house a guy lavishes thousands of hours of improvements on, because it's HIS and he wants it to be beautiful. You don't get that in Section-8 housing.
I just wish he and his cast were better-schooled on the real roots of freedom and prosperity, and how it isn't something the U.S. is hogging, but a way of life and treating each other, with equal protection under the law (for most of us), and respect for property rights. 90% of what's wrong in Africa is every time a guy builds something to be proud of, somebody with a gun comes along and takes it from them. I think Africa would explode, economically, if they all respected the rights of their people.
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@philippesantini2425 : Jones has at least a passing familiarity with principles of liberty and limited government, with which conservatives agree on the core level. But the theatrics is what keeps his audience coming back. I enjoy keeping up on what he's saying, but from a distance, and usually only to get a peek into what will be in the news as fact in 6 months or so, long after he gets lambasted for saying it.
But on 50-60% of his schtick, he's not much different from Rachel Maddow, starting out on a totally speculative idea, then proceeding straight to being utterly outraged IF the speculation be true. Like Rachel's "Imagine if the Russians decided to hack our electrical grid..." The next half-hour will be spent talking about all the bad shit that will happen if the Russian plot to target the electrical grid comes to fruition. By 5 minutes in, the "if" part is taken out, and she's foaming at the mouth about how awful it will be, so stock up on canned goods!
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It's tough to drill down to the hard-core facts on this one. When we regulate Google and other Big Tech like utilities, and ACCEPT that they are monopolies, we end up cementing them in the position of BEING monopolies. Google WANTS net neutrality, and if they get it, does that mean they become and remain THE dominant platform? If so, are you sure you LIKE the way they censor and de-monetize? And if you don't like how they control who gets a platform and who doesn't, does that mean that the NEXT step is putting unelected bureaucrats in the FCC in charge of how they operate?
We're only NOW getting out from under the "Fairness Doctrine" that turned the news we got for about 100 years into nothing more than government and corporate propaganda? Do you really trust those same people to NOT eventually do the same sanitization of the Internet, by locking-in Google on top, and Verizon and AT&T as monopolies? Maybe you don't like the idea of pricing according to the bandwidth consumed. But maybe if it's all guaranteed to be the same for everybody, then all incentive to push more data through the pipe than is currently be pushed will be removed.
It sounds good, but I think maybe the American public is being sold a bill of goods that won't come due until the Internet is as shitty as the legacy media (NBC, CBS, NBC for most of the past century, with a little more when cable hit, and a LOT more when the Internet hit, finally exposing some of the lies that were universally reported as truth on a small number of highly centralized and highly controlled media outlets)
Remember the explosion in innovation and choice, when they finally broke up AT&T? When they finally de-regulated, and suddenly other companies were able to compete? Maybe Net Neutrality will be the reason that most of us NEVER get fiber-optic Internet, because there's no incentive to put it in. They'll fool us into thinking that the government-regulated "utility" we have is in our best interest, while we fuck ourselves up the ass on what we MIGHT get if the 2-tiered system incentivized competition.
Maybe instead of whining about better treatment from the local monopoly, you should leave the door open to new competition. When you use government to insulate the market from the real cost of ANY product or service, people always end up paying more for less in the long run. Sounds good. Might be shitty. And all in the name of fairness, the same way that "fairness" turns out cities into shitholes.
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Israel is just a problem for everybody, including Israel. You don't just step in and create a nation by force, but that's what we did. The history of the region is very complicated. Israel has been a state, off and on, for a very long time, and lived under various empires over the centuries as more or less autonomous vassal state, and at other times as a true, independent state.
Once created and recognized as a nation, then those rules apply. Some Arab states still refuse to recognize Israel. This makes it OK to screw with them. Israel's generally seemed to expand in response to attack. Give up the Golan heights, and before long, there are mortars falling on Tel Aviv. So they re-take the heights. Refuse to give them up. And when the Egyptians were warring with them, they grabbed land from the Egyptians.
It's kind of similar to how the Soviets basically annexed Eastern Europe after WW II, as much, I think, to have a buffer between Moscow and crazy Europeans as anything else.
A lot of stuff like that. A lot of stuff I don't know about the settlements. One thing I do know is that wherever the Israelis take over, it goes from wasteland to productive land. I think they're net exporters of agricultural goods, surrounded by neighbors who can't feed themselves, without imports.
Lots of bits and pieces.
Anyway, I agree with just about everything you said, although I'm still not sure I grok the whole picture regarding Israel. The more I learn, the more gray it becomes.
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@ptbot3294 : Yes. Anyone with access to more than the "Uncomfortable and self-conscious teen being harassed by Native American" that was spun into "Racist white supremacist smirking at noble Native American" can see that the Black Hebrew Israelites were hurling vulgar invectives at EVERYONE, but they got a free pass. Nathan Phillips, would-be professional outrage activist ("I'm outraged. Give me money:" i.e., Talcum X wannabe), went into the crowd, which parted for him, except for the one kid who just stood his ground, smiling.
I get that same nervous smile in tense situations, where I know I have to stand my ground, without blowing my top. It pisses people off, because they misinterpret it as a smirk, when it's just the goofy half-smile I get when I'm in a situation that could go South if I succumb to the same emotional outburst as the person in front of me. I've lost a lot of arguments on emotional grounds, because people see the OTHER person, who's going off the deep end as the victim, when really they're just weaponizing their outrage to garner sympathy. I just stick to the facts and keep my emotions under a lid.
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@O'Shay Muir : So you're saying they've been fighting a 2-front war against libertarians and sincere conservatives on the one side, and Progressives and sincere liberals on the other. Because that's a theme that runs through 70-80% of normal people on both sides. But it's way more visible on the left, because of all the meet-you-for-brunch liberals who still watch lamestream media, and jumped on the Iraq War bandwagon.
It's just a theory, but there are a LOT of conservatives/libertarians who love the way Jimmy eviscerates them on this front. Jimmy's still way out in left field, domestically, because he hasn't yet figured out that government will ALWAYS take things this direction in ALL things government touches, INCLUDING (and especially) domestic programs. You want to see all the worst features of what you're protesting against? (poverty, racism, education and health) . Just ask the government to "fix it" for you. Then I guarantee things will get more fucked up than they were before you asked. And why the hell did you ask? Why don't you roll up your sleeves and HELP the nearest person to you who needs help? If all liberals/progressives ACTED on their feelings, on the ground, we wouldn't HAVE to ask the government to help with poverty, health, and education!
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@Dead_World_Walking : Easy stereotypes, but you have NO understanding of how hard it has been to be a principled conservative for the last 50 or 60 years. Tell it like it is and they tear you a new asshole. Mention "limited government" and be called a racist.
The FACT is that in a society that's immersed in left-wing ideology, the "bad boys" are now conservatives and the conformist choir boys are all on the left. If you're on the left, you won't see a SINGLE principled conservative on lamestream media or in the schools. It's EASY to be left. It's CONFORMIST to be left. The free spirits are all on the right, nowadays, and it's why they meme better.
Remember how edgy and noncomformist Rolling Stone was back in the '60s? THOSE kinds of voices - and most of the creativity - now seem to reside on the right. Now it's not your school teacher ramming Jesus down your throat. It's your school teacher ramming postmodernism down your throat. And the rebellious youth are rebelling against the same Establishment, just from the opposite direction, because all the New Puritans are on the left! Being "conformist," nowadays is almost 100% a phenomenon of the (neoliberal, postmodernist) left. Shaming and harassing for holding any view that's not in line with the dialectic. Bullying someone in public because they wear a Trump hat. This is all coming from the left, and if the left don't police their own membership, they're going to be a marginalized minority very soon.
And yes, I remember the '80s, where I found myself agreeing with regressive traditionalists on this or that issue, only they supported the same side for some pretty stinky, authoritarian reasons. And there are still a small number of true regressives who are going to vote Republican because God told them. But don't believe for one second that that stereotype in any way characterizes the conservative movement or the vast majority of limited-government types. The regressives on either side never care about how big government IS, they just want it to do what THEY say, in tribalistic fashion, as if you could tame that tiger and he'll be happy with his bowl of Purina when you are meat on the hoof.
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Assange is where you see crossover between principled conservatives and progressives like Jimmy Dore. Free thinkers on both sides of the political divide abhor the use of force and violence abroad in our name. Liberal people - real liberals - don't like dirty tricks abroad. Liberal people - real liberal people - want to shine a light on as much as possible. Top-notch intelligence-gathering? Essential. And you don't have to infiltrate high government to pretty much know what's going, just by going through their durn garbage, with full forensics. Heh. Dad went on numerous "spy missions" - i.e., dumpster dives - in the parking lots behind stores they wanted filled with Potlach Forest Industries products. P&G did the same sorts of things. You can tell a lot by the empty boxes, alone. But I digress. As usual.
"Regime change" is a catch-all term that basically justifies going to war with whomever the powers-that-be decide is the bad guy. And yes. It looks bad when millions of dollars change hands between Russians and the Clintons right about the time Hillary was in a position to veto the Uranium 1 deal. She should've recused herself - in which case the other 8 people who voted for it would take all the blame. But she's the one of the 9 who had veto power and she didn't. Having made that call, her hubby pulling in $500,000 for a speaking engagement in Russia, and paid for by oligarchs, reeks of corruption. So does money finding its way into the Clinton Foundation from similar sources. To have spun this whole thing into suspicion of collusion by Trump with Russians is brazen genius. Balls of brass, nay, steel.
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When you raise the minimum wage, by law, all you're doing is making everything more expensive for everyone, including and especially those who work for minimum wage! You're also eliminating many jobs for teenagers, who usually aren't WORTH that much, until they learn how to work!
Here's a story:
Man owns a bodega. There's a homeless man he befriends, and tries to help the guy out, time to time. The homeless man volunteers to sweep the walk out front. The bodega owner, let's call him "Steve," pays him $5.
Steve isn't very rich. He's just getting by. The homeless man, let's call him "Mike," is grateful, and before long, he's stocking shelves, sweeping the floors inside, etc. Steve doesn't have much to offer, but he does have a room in the back where he sets up a cot, and so Mike has a safe, warm place to sleep at night.
Then, Russell Dobular happens by, and being the knight-errant justice warrior that he is, he notices downtrodden Mike and asks him what he's making, because his clothes are pretty raggedy. He's clean and his clothes are clean, but they're next to rags, so he asks what Mike is making.
Mike loves Steve to death, so he tells Russell about the arrangement they have and his hopes for the future. Russell, a champion of justice, reports Steve to the Labor Relations Board, because of his PERCEPTION of the unfairness.
Steve is given a choice of either paying Mike more, or being sued. Reluctantly, Steve informs Mike that he can no longer work there, and Mike is back on the street. Russell, all puffed-up with self-righteous self-importance, goes home and brags to all his friends how much he cares....
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@Benjamin Figgins : The U.S. has abandoned innumerable proxies in the past, when it suited the U.S. elites. Trump's not a member of that club. He just looks at it and doesn't think using proxies for regime change is cool. Most people don't remember the shit that went on in Africa in the '60s and '70s, when any dictator who messed with the Soviets was our "friend" and without sin. The Soviets were not nice. No doubt. But just as we used Hitler as an excuse to model much of OUR system after HIS, in the "war effort," so did we use the Soviets as the pretext for all kinds of bullshit.
Classic Machiavellian thought. Make us afraid of our economic insecurities to grab power (the federal welfare state) and our international insecurities to grab power. Progressives get it half right, but have no fuckin' clue that the BEST bulwark against poverty is a free market with minimal government interference. It's when the government gets involved when robber barons can set up the system THEIR way, by bribing, conning, or coercing the 5 or 6 people we foolishly give the power to decide for us.
In the age of smartphones, the average citizen - and threat of exposure - is a far stronger (and less corruptible) defense against abuses by private companies. And if you read and understand your Adam Smith, you would see that the REAL explosion in prosperity that brought MORE people up from poverty than any 10 government programs was property rights and limited government. Progressives abhor BOTH, which makes them as much a part of the problem as any Deep-State asshole. Not because they're evil, but because they're stupid and feed the dragon they all like to bitch about all the time.
Don't like poverty? Use your freedom to generate some personal wealth and HELP SOMEBODY OUT! If more people LIVED that, we'd be much better off. If you think government (career) bureaucrats are going to do a better job on health care than you and your local community, you're a fool..
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Every time some idiot does something stupid with a firearm, y'all want to pass laws that make no sense, and do nothing but further restrict the law-abiding citizen.
I'd like to see licensing for firearms coming with some required training, and make that training a very easily-obtained and common elective in junior-high or high school, just like Hunter's Safety was when I was a kid. I learned all about firearm safety at 11, in a community full of kids that would harvest their first deer at age 12 (and save their family a ton of money at the meat counter).
If you pass the training, then there'd be no delay in the purchase of a firearm, because you're untrained. But everybody should be trained in firearm safety before they're 18. Age 11 or 12 seemed to work just fine in our rural community. We respected guns, but nobody feared them, any more than they were afraid of a car or a tractor, although all 3 had high mischief potential.
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America (re)created Israel by force, without asking anybody who lived there, except for one ethnic group. We set Israel up to be forever embroiled in war. The bad things Israel does are totally justified because they're constantly being attacked.
They are always being attacked for a lot of reasons:
1. Israel's creation, by force, by foreign powers.
2. Israel's willingness to act as the USA's proxy.
3. USA's willingness to support any and all adventurism by Israel.
4. Israel's great success defending itself.
5. Israel's hypocrisy of maintaining an ethno-state with the trappings of democracy.
Israel's not pure bad guy. The constant attacks from safe havens in neighboring countries makes Israel aggressive towards neighboring countries. People forget that Israel gave up the Golan Heights, only to be attacked by missiles and artillery from the Heights, which they re-took and refused to give up.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but from a distance, whether I'm right or wrong on the details, the fundamentals are pretty clear. Protecting and preserving Israel (and Western interests) in the Middle East, by force of arms, creates thousands of new terrorists every year. The terrorists are bad. Spanish Guerrilleros in the Peninsular War (against Napoleon) were bad. But to THEM, they were locked in an ongoing, asymmetric war, where the enemy had modern weapons and they had nothing but determination and past atrocities against them and/or their families driving them.
The USA has no thought of exiting, let alone getting as far as an exit strategy. There will either be forever war in the region or a relatively brief period of chaos after the USA pulls out. Either way, it's going to be bloody. Do we rip off the Band-Aid or do we do nothing until we have to amputate the arm?
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That's changing. In fact, it's better to use the term "legacy media," because those old networks, newspapers and magazines no longer manufacture consent like they used to. I see a lot of progressive crossover into conservative/libertarian sites and certainly a lot of conservatives and libertarians checking out Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and others on the left for their take, as well. I can disagree with socialist lefties on domestic policies, while still agreeing with them on a lot of the foreign policy (anti-war) stuff. There's really a lot of crossover.
And I think conservatives and progressives recognize a lot of the same problems on the domestic side. I bet if legacy media weren't driving the conversation 24-7, that there's a lot of crossover between the so-called right and so-called left. Maybe you'd find more agreement on the social safety net, for instance, if progressives could get away from notions of running everything from Washington. You might be surprised at how much a conservative is willing to chip in, VOLUNTARILY if it's "of, for and by" the members of the LOCAL community and not run by a handful of people in Washington, who can (and usually are) bought off (or misled or blackmailed or just plied by women or simple flattery).
Instead of wringing your hands over federal Med4All, why not hold a damn fundraiser for your own local hospital? See how much money you can raise for un-met medical needs of your friends and neighbors! Take in a homeless person! Build your OWN homeless shelters, and volunteer to help manage and maintain them! Pitch in! Don't bitch about everybody who isn't! Don't use FORCE to impose YOUR morality on everybody else!
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They're mostly good people who only give news a half-hour or an hour a night, and they watch the networks they've always watched. They're not bad people. They just only see one side of all the issues, whether they watch CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and on the BIG issues of the day, FOX also falls in line. If it's war, FOX is for it, just like all the rest, and Pfizer's their biggest advertiser.
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In fairness to his colleagues, legal probably told everybody not to make any contact with Miller, with various real and implied threats. Universities and the risk-averse nitwits that infest their halls (Did I mention that I'm a professor?), are going to do what their chair says, especially if their chair mentions "legal." Half the professors are lazy/incompetent and keep their heads down for that reason and the other half are so into their discipline that "No contact" is easy to do compared to engaging with the real world. If they're really into their teaching or their research, getting a "Don't do something" from on high is actually quite welcome. "At least this e-mail doesn't want me to do extra work to no purpose, like they usually do. This 'ignore someone' e-mail is right up my alley."
That's probably too fair. Just the way this guy talks and the fact that he was (correctly) taking on COVID propaganda as early as September, 2020, tells me he's probably on the wrong side of a lot of political issues, there. He sounds like a free thinker, so he's probably on the wrong side of one of their sacred cows, like affirmative action or school choice. A few chance remarks around the water cooler, and the entire institution is literally talking about you. "He's one of them. A deplorable."
I've always been one of "them," but as a classical liberal, I'm way ahead of them on war and peace and most social issues, and I've been around the block enough times to know how to hide my free-market-capitalist beliefs, without actually betraying them, at least long enough to get tenure. If I were a progressive I could bang on all day about politics at work, and it would HELP me get tenure. Thank God for long hair and hanging out with lefties, because - let's be honest - they're more fun to party with. My blonde pony-tail was great camouflage, 'til I started going bald in my mid-50s. Can't do the hippie gone to seed thing. But now I'm old enough to be eccentric.
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This is why government, itself, should be restricted to its proper role and scope. It's only by exceeding its proper role and scope that it can act on behalf of big corporations. This is the fatal flaw in progressive thought. You're so eager to solve the human condition, yesterday, and government has the monopoly on use of force to MAKE THINGS THE WAY WE DEMAND, INSTANTLY. So, being in a hurry, and being a little lazy, you demand that the government solve the problem, and that opens the door to corporate capture.
Corporate capture is inevitable, then, because lawyers in the legislature are legislating WAY over their heads when they depart from basic guarantees of liberty, and basic enforcement of laws against persons and property. So they bring in the "industry experts" with all the "best reputations." And they craft legislation with the appearance of solving the problem that guarantees that the big corporation will not be significantly harmed, and any harm caused THEM will be visited on their smaller competitors times 10, assuming they even have the resources to comply with the 500-page document filled with bureau-speak gobbledygook. And even if the big corporation runs afoul of it, it has a team of lawyers to twist the deliberately vague and contradictory language to wriggle off the hook. But if you're a Mom 'n' Pop, who can't afford a $200,000 attorney (or million-dollar legal TEAM), you just go out of business.
This shit has been going on since the transcontinental railroad days, if not before. Review your history. For a good, short treatment, I suggest Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." She was talking about this shit damn near 100 years ago.
I feel that all progressives should add "Wealth of Nations," "Blackstone," and "The Federalist Papers" to their reading list. It may put your Howard Zinn in perspective and make you question your insistence on looking for federal-government solutions to human problems. But you're always in too big of a hurry, and so you tend to make bigger problems due to unintended consequences of the use of force.
Opposing the welfare state, as designed, doesn't mean you're FOR poverty or selfish. It just means you disagree with centralized solutions imposed across an entire continent, when different (DIVERSE!) conditions prevail in different places. What works for one state doesn't work for all states, hence the idea of federalism in the first place.
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MSNBC's "adpocalypse" is definitely taking place. Their ad revenue is directly tied to their viewership, and the Nielsen ratings are in the public domain.
Good to see her losing market share to Sean Hannity. He gets more of the facts right. But he's very similar to her in droning on over and over with the same exact talking points, day after day. I don't see how that can be popular for either one of them, but I guess that's the American audience for you. For me, the 5th or 6th "bought-and-paid-for dossier" line was as many as I could stomach, and I haven't watched Hannity for a long time. Except for being WAY more truthful, Hannity is just as repetitive an attack dog for FOX as Maddow is for MSNBC.
I'm OK with that, but let the ratings decide whether they sink or swim.
Honestly, I'm GLAD that the masks (and the gloves) are off. I HATED the previous 40 or so years of total partisanship masquerading as "objective journalism" that the Internet has FINALLY exposed for all to see. The Press is SUPPOSED to be partisan! And everybody's supposed to KNOW what axe you're grinding!
Personally, I'd just as soon listen to mostly Ron Paul and Jimmy Dore and have the two of you have regular knock-down drag-outs on the welfare-and-regulatory state. Let the polar opposites on the proper role and scope of government have it out. I think there's a HUGE middle ground on the "Yes, we measure our society by how our weakest and poorest are faring," and I think you'd be surprised at how compassionate we libertarian/classical-liberal types are when it comes to a social safety net. The MAIN sticking point is how close to the FAMILY you make the assistance. Progressives are always in a hurry and want to just pass one law for all 300-some million of us; whereas, the libertarian types want the FEDERAL government the hell OUT of it. Not their role. Compassion starts at home. Family. Clan. Neighborhood. Village. County. And on up the chain.
It should never be a federal thing, unless we're being invaded or we just got hit by a giant asteroid (national-scale natural catastrophe). It's just too easy to lose personal accountability and personal responsibility the farther from the individual it gets. And it only takes one robber baron manipulating the fine print to fuck things up for all 300-some million of us. But for it all to work the best for the most, with minimal infringement on the rights of the individual, you want and NEED 90% of individuals with their shit together, followed by 90% of families picking up the slack, followed by neighborhoods looking out for the families in trouble, and on up. By the time it reaches the state level, if the underlying communities don't have their shit together, there's no hope for the state that's comprised of those underlying communities to manage.
Food for thought?
I'm leery of the Universal Basic Income, but that would definitely be a lot easier and cheaper to administer than a grab-bag of programs with all different kinds of standards, procedures and red tape, requiring an entire bureaucrat class, with so much overlap and redundancy (and duplicate bureaucracies).
I tried to be site coordinator for a federal grant at my college. It was called CO-AMP (Under the LS-AMP umbrella), and the idea is to encourage underrepresented groups (women and minorities) to engage in and succeed in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math) disciplines. The entire grant was something like $7,000, and I saw all these deserving kids doing good things and wanted to reward as many as possible with as much as possible. So I built a rubric that factored in such things as need, likelihood of success, amount of progress, grades, etc. And I distributed the money according to the objectively-reasonable point system I devised, with the assistance and oversight of a few colleagues and higher-ups.
It wasn't a TON of money for any one person. I had 20 or 30 candidates, and the top ones were getting something like $700 each, then it went down to $500. and so on down the chain, to maybe $200. Seems like "crumbs," but if you've ever been at the bottom, that extra $200 or $700 is HUGE. It's a family night out once a month. It's some better shoes. It's most of the price of a computer or smartphone or surface or iPad.
It took a lot of doing to push through this zero-overhead thing put together. What the CO-AMP people wanted was to send one or two - maybe 3 - kids to some faraway conference, where they could get their pictures taken, and of course, fly ME around to get MY picture taken with these WONDERFUL and SPECIAL students. There were funds set aside so I could fly down to Birmingham, Alabama for a big circle-jerk meeting, where everybody virtue-signaled and (of course) got their picture taken. I want on that ONE junket, and I was disgusted.
"How much for the plane ticket and weekend stay at the Hilton? $2,000? $3,000? Fuck THAT. That's $3,000 I could lump on top of the $7,000 earmarked for - you know - the people I'm supposed to be HELPING. So give me a $10,000 budget, with NO free vacations and the rampant grab-ass and partying that we wonderful bureaucrats so richly deserve on these larks (I mean "serious conferences."), and I'll put EVERY SINGLE NICKEL INTO THE POCKETS OF HARDWORKING AND DEPRIVED STUDENTS!!!
Well that wasn't going to happen, so I just decided to forego wasting taxpayer money on a high-dollar photo opp.
The kicker? What made me think of this in the context of UBI and simplifying the administration of public assistance? It turned out that EVERY FREAKING NICKEL I wangled for my "fellowship" recipients was taken OUT of OTHER assistance they received. So it was ALL just a big fucking waste of my and my students' time, IF they were receiving any OTHER federal assistance. So, rather than a reward for distinguished performance, with an admixture of real need thrown in, it was just a big circle jerk, and I was the fool. I COULD have made myself look like this White Knight/Savior, if I just played the game and took every opportunity to make speeches and have my picture taken with the one or two students that won the lottery and got to fly off to Nicaragua or Brazil or Canada or - even better - someplace overseas. If I were only interested in looking and seeming important, instead of just busting my ass to find the most deserving people trying to break into STEM on a shoestring budget (Maybe some BEEF in that next meal, instead of another round of rice and beans), it would've been much less work and I would've pleased the kind of assholes that run this kind of shit.
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Yes. It's all about the manufacture of consent, so that a small number of people can set the agenda for all.
The public reaction to the old methods of control is why legacy media is dying.
The Internet is the next battleground. We in our bubble think everybody must know about this stuff, but the average person isn't curious enough to make sure Jimmy's in their feed. I hold my nose when he tries to push big government programs. Jimmy's totally wrong about that. Russell Brand is a former "progressive," who finally understood that decentralization is key.
Brand understands the need to decentralize. Jimmy wants to have his cake and to eat it, too, so he's always pushing big government and simultaneously ranting against the inevitable consequences of big government.
Jimmy's stuck on the wheel. When he finally grows up, he'll be a full-on libertarian, and not an almost-perfect libertarian who still wants Free Stuff. Jimmy believes in some mythical nanny government, run by saintly geniuses, who always have the people's interests at heart, and are always the smartest person in the room.
sigh
Jimmy needs to accept that the best we can do is the best we can do, with as little government help or hindrance as possible. Government hijacks all the good things we do or would do for each other.
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Wouldn't surprise me if the panic over the RussiaGate is because they've been doing shit like this and it hasn't worked - or hasn't been working like maybe it did when they first started - so they figure someone else must be doing the same thing better than they are, and they're casting about blindly, looking for "the source." Most likely, it's their own ineptness, disconnect from how real people think, and a growing immunity to the FakeNews and Manipulation Machine spreading like a virus through the general public. This would also explain why Democrat establishment types are so up in arms. They thought they had it all tied up in a bow, and yet these toxic anti-establishment memes keep rolling over their efforts like a tidal wave.
Pretty conspiratorial, but we all know how cut off from real working people the DNC (and RNC) is (are). We all know how arrogant they are. We all know how incompetent they are. So, just like the way they run the government (incompetently), that's how they run the manipulation (and vote-harvesting) machine(s). And, with alternate sources like Jimmy Dore and a multitude of Jagoff Comedians, basement pundits, and the like, their mask keeps slipping and the mind of the public slips out of their grasp, as well.
They carefully stage "reports" for consumption in American homes, like they always have, only there's a jagoff citizen with a smart phone, standing off to the side, showing where the yellow "Crime Scene - Do Not Cross" tape ends just beyond the frame of the news cameras, but in plain view to anybody standing there. They show Proud Boys punching out an Antifa mob, and portray it as right-wing violence, but ANOTHER jagoff with a smartphone shows the whole sequence, which started with bottles and rocks being thrown into a conservative demonstration, that the Proud Boys have been joining to keep the violence down and protect demonstrators from Antifa harassment and violence. The only reason the Proud Boys exist is to protect conservative events from fascists (knowingly and unknowingly) masquerading as anti-fascists.
They think they have this techie stuff all in their hip pockets, but there's a big old hole in their jeans. And their arrogance exposes them time and time again. Like Hillary's e-mail server. In an earlier time, that shit would've been swept under the rug by insiders, but this or that little tidbit of truth will surface, due to their own incompetence and failure to keep EVERYbody in line. It's a cheater's way of thinking and operating that can work very well for a very long time, but as cheaters, they really don't know how to do things the right way, and they miscalculate what everybody else is doing, AND they project their own underhandedness on everybody else.
They're like the poker player who cheats, so when he deals off the bottom of the deck to give himSELF 4 aces, he KNOWS the bastard across the table with 4 aces is cheating! LOL!
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All by design. Trump's their excuse to do what they already wanted to do. The Democrat Party's on life support with the people, but dominates government, education, media, and public health. People wonder why the German people thought Hitler was such a great guy. Well, he had government, education, media and public health. Public health (Jimmy, STOP with Med-4-All) was taken over by the German government (Bismarck) way back in the 19th Century. You think Bismarck did that out of kindness? No. He was trying to keep the (Junker) aristocracy relevant, and "We will take care of you" was a big part of what kept the German people loyal and obedient.
The MODEL for German "single-payer" health care was taken directly from the arms industry. Krupp Steel had marvelous, nanny company towns, where all their workers got free health care, cheap food, cheap housing, and better pay. They paid for all of that with lucrative weapons contracts with the government (decades before Hitler). They made more profit than any other company so they could afford it. That was what inspired Bismarck, especially the LOYALTY OATH that Krupp employees had to sign in return for their benefits. Didn't even NEED the oath for them to be loyal to the guy (Old Man Krupp) handing out the goodies!
That's why I harp on this. All federal government aid is more about authority and control, not helping people. It lays the foundation for future Hitlers, every time!
GIVE UP ON YOUR UTOPIA, JIMMY. LIFE IS TRADE-OFFS. DO THE BEST YOU CAN WHERE YOU ARE, FOR THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU. YOU WILL HAVE A BETTER COMMUNITY WHEN YOU EXCISE THE POWER-HUNGRY FROM THE COMPASSION LOOP. COMPASSION IS HUMAN-TO-HUMAN, NOT BUREAUCRAT-TO-HUMAN. The government NEVER wants to help you. It wants to use you and control you. You want to help people? You and all your progressive friends get off your asses and help people without using force on everybody else. Just understand that human misery knows no bounds and you won't ever fix everything. Just understand the government will do a worse job. We're paying billions to fight poverty and our streets are filled with homeless. Think about it.
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Here's the thing: They've staked a claim on a niche audience that buys the conspiracy tripe. For them to change that tune, they lose even THAT niche. As a combine, the MSM (excluding FOX) are still a bigger chunk of the viewing audience than FOX. Worth going after. But they're reduced to fighting each OTHER over that chunk, even as that chunk keeps shrinking. It's long-term STUPID, but they're so caught up, and so tied to TODAY's ratings, and conspiracy theories are their Main Chance at a bigger share of that still big, but shrinking market, they're all fish on the same mouth-bloodying hook. They're all looking for today's "bump" like the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, looking for any kind of short-term victory in a losing war.
This is also happening in the SJW movement, where they can - and do - employ communist/fascist tactics in the street to steamroll anybody with an opinion that is not THEIR opinion. I think the Berkeley protests and ESPECIALLY the Evergreen "takeover" illustrate this to a 'T.' Yes, Naima Lowe was able to generate quite a following of idealistic but callow youth that she could turn into a hate mob and run roughshod over EVERYbody. Drunk on that power, drunk on that apparent WIN, she and the NPCs she personally programmed basically went on a just-this-side-of-lynchmob campaign to bully and harass everybody else. Total win. Those professors who just wanted to go to work and do science were TOTALLY cowed and humiliated. Heady stuff for the protesters. BUT the idiots were SO lacking in self-awareness that they actually recorded their doings on VIDEO and BROADCAST it, and everybody watching on YouTube who wasn't already up-to-date on their NPC programming could see who the abusers and the haters in that scenario WERE.
So, these kinds of people have an unending string of "successes" on their back trail, and every "win" only hastens their eventual defeat. They're like the Celts against the Romans, killing 3 Romans for every Celt killed, thinking they're winning, but there were 10 times as many Romans, and they just kept building roads, establishing strongpoints, and destroying all Celtic means of feeding and replacing themselves, until all of England (up to Hadrian's Wall) was Roman. "Victory" after "victory," but fewer and fewer warriors around the bonfire to celebrate with each passing month, and less food at the victory feasts.
I love the fact that independents, like Jimmy Dore and Mike Tracey can make out pretty good - a new middle-class of media - with low overhead and a relatively small, hard-core cadre of contributing subscribers. We see this in entertainment, in particular music, as well. You don't NEED to be signed to a major record label to make out. You don't even need to sell a ton of music in order to have a large enough following to fill a decent-sized venue. I think the Grateful Dead gave all their music away, and it didn't matter, because they had so many loyal fans, their shows were always sold out and they made millions off their live shows.
There's a medium-sized level of success available to THOUSANDS of independent content-creators. It's no longer "Get the backing of a major label or be stuck playing in seedy bars forever."
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You're one of very few who ever say this. Liberal means liberty, limited government, and tolerance for others.
This is what left is also supposed to mean. The Founding Fathers were liberals. What the so-called "left" seeks to do is create a paternalistic/maternalistic government that solves all of our problems for us, and in return, we are expected to OBEY. In other words, the so-called socialist/Marxist "left" is just re-branded feudalism, and hence, very regressive. You might even call it "reactionary right," because when you get past the labels and the rhetoric, the so-called "progressives" are trying to drag us back to old monarchic models, and aristocratic forms.
Today's bureaucrats see themselves as lords and ladies.
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And the kicker is that the training is SO BAD, they insist we take the same training every year! LOL!
The paradigm will wither and die, because it's behind the times, wasteful, and doesn't even provide the service it purports. Just ask kids BASIC math, science, history questions, during Spring Break in Cabo. Sure, they'll all go home and sympathize with Antifa, but none of 'em could tell you what fascism is, who started it, and what its essential features are.
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Fauci will duck, dive and prevaricate until he can't. He HAS to double down, just like all the rest of the crooks in his and other agencies and departments.
Chances are good he will never have to stop or admit any guilt. But it sure would be nice to see him face increasing pressure to come clean. I vote for freezing all his assets and denying his pension, royalties, and other income, until he comes totally clean. Maybe just threatening to strip him of everything, the way he stripped millions of others, would induce him to rat out the people around him.
Maybe just turn up the heat under the seats of all his corrupt fellow travelers in the NIAID, WHO, NIH, CDC, DOD, FDA, and anybody I missed. I have a feeling if these rats see their ships sinking, they'll do what rats do.
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@BobWidlefish I'm not an anarchist. As long as there are nation states who wish us ill, we need the military. Where our freedoms get infringed is when we support politicians who promise us free stuff, when everybody knows we're lucky to get 20 cents on the dollar back in actual services, when we farm out what we should do for ourselves to the federal government.
No. We need some form of limited government. The problem is that everybody wants something for nothing and the feds are the only cats who can print money and spend beyond their means for DECADES.
We used to understand this. Back when Davy Crockett was in Congress, there was a bill on the floor to help out the widow of a war hero. It was about to pass unanimously, when Crockett stood up to make a speech. He said "I'll give up one week's salary to help this poor woman. If everyone in this house did the same, that woman would be provided for. The People's money isn't ours to spend on even this very good cause." This shamed the Congress and they dropped the matter. None of them put up a week's salary for the widow, except maybe Crockett.
This is what we're up against, only we don't have ANY Davy Crocketts any more. These politicians prance around like lords and ladies, as if it's THEIR money they're giving away. It's NEVER their money they're giving away. It's OURS.
We don't need to eliminate government. What we need is to reduce the federal government to its proper role and scope. That would mean eliminating about 80% of federal programs and at least 50% of the budget. Let them focus on defending the Constitution, PERIOD. Then the main thing they did would be the military, and ALL of our attention could be focused on making sure that the Department of Defense is just that. A department of DEFENSE. But hell, we don't even need a declaration of war to go to war, any more. All conservatives, libertarians and progressives should be PISSED about that.
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@Ndnative3431 Yes. Deaths were also magnified by depriving people of common-sense, off-the-shelf, EARLY treatments that good doctors were having great success with. Early, aggressive treatment, like saline/iodine nasal spray when you first started experiencing symptoms killed off most of the infections before they got into the lungs. So of course, those doctors were threatened, blacklisted, and, if they tried to stand up to the pressure, terminated.
I think Fauci or one of his pals got royalties for remdesivir.
And to this day, the people who stood up to the establishment remain largely blacklisted.
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Sorry for the free-writing I always do. sigh One RELEVANT point, though, is that the MSM had inside sources that USED to be considered scoop-of-the-century SOLID, at the very top of the Obama Administration (Brennan, Clapper, Comey, etc.) who were PUSHING the lie. They had more confirming sources than Woodward and Bernstein had in their wildest wet dreams! And they're going to fall back on that, and claim there was just unprecedented (Yeah right) lying and misinformation being peddled.
But YOU guys (and a ton of sources in the middle and on the right, whom you ignore) didn't have to dig very deep to realize that what those highly-placed asshats within our own government just weren't saying things that squared with easily-obtained public-domain FACTS. Reminds me of kooky Christians who insist that the world is 4,000 years old, when the mile-deep Grand Canyon displays thousands of feet of well-graded, 1/2-inch-thick foreset beds that could ONLY occur by slow processes over millions of years. You just don't get a thousand-foot-thick column of well-sorted, finely-bedded foresets (Coconino Sandstone, Hermit Shale, Kaibab Limestone, e.g.) in anything less than millions of years. You have to start making shit up, like a Satanic Conspiracy that dug everything up, sorted everything according to grain size, squirreled-away all the BIG chunks (Where, I cannot guess), and presented this Grand Canyon lie to mislead all of humanity, in order to harvest souls.
They're STILL incompetent and dishonest HACKS, but they COULD go after Brennan, Comey and the like, as the agents of a vast hoax. I don't think they WILL, because that's, uh, awfully conspiratorial. It's more likely they'll USE those asshats as THEIR excuse and blame somebody else for how all the lying leakers were, themselves, misled, in a comedy of errors that nevertheless went after the right people for the wrong reasons. So they're still "right," but they just got a "few facts" wrong. And unless I miss my guess, the trail will lead RIGHT BACK to Trump and a GIGANTIC conspiracy involving the Russians! LOL!
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Our system is broken because of all the guys like you who think free education creates a skilled citizenry and Free Stuff of every kind generates wealth, rather than eating it, and taking it from the guys like the guy you're interviewing in the street. You just see the pie and want to control the pie-cutter instead of a system where merit is rewarded and victimhood isn't a way of life. You want a system where "compassion" is at the end of a long form brandished by a bureaucrat instead of from people who care about one another. If every libtard would shut the hell up and help ONE PERSON instead of virtue-signaling about how much I'm helping (which I do but I don't carry a sign or shout from the rooftops. I just fucking HELP.), this society would spin like a top.
You mean well, but all your proposals cut people off from personal responsibility and cripple people's ability to help one another by siphoning off every spare nickel into government coffers, to be dispensed the way the fat cat libtards in government decide, while they feather their nests and help their cronies. You see the nest-feathering and the crony capitalism and you turn right around and empower those same people to do the same shit, by looking TO government, instead of looking to yourself.
And I won't even go into how all your government programs force everybody with a decent job to work more and consume more at the expense of Ma Earth, because it's not enough to provide for yourSELF, but you have to work another 25-30% more hours per week in order to pay for all your well-meaning but misguided bullshit programs. It's all pie in the sky for you progressives, and it's never out of YOUR pie, but out of somebody ELSE's. Oops. Guess I did go into that.
Maybe $5 an hour is the difference between a kid having a job sweeping the sidewalk and buying his OWN sneakers with his OWN money, but you eliminate ALL those jobs with your $15/hour bullshit, and then piss and moan at all the youth crime and underemployment. You mean well, but you're progressive dumb-asses who would lead us down the path to the gray and equally-shared misery of socialism. You wring your hands at the unemployed black man at the same time that you take a sledgehammer the bottom rung of the ladder so he could climb under his own fucking power. You're just wrong-headed about domestic and economic policy.
If only you applied the same principles to the economy and everyday life that you do to the imperialist war machine... They're two sides of the same exact coin, and it all has the effect of disempowering individuals here and around the world. Government's not the solution. Government's the problem. Pare it back to bare minimum and use your platform to hold up people who HELP as leaders and virtuous citizens. Instead, you only see virtue in those who campaign to make government a little bit bigger every day.
The hand that feeds is the hand that controls. The velvet glove of Free Stuff covers the iron fist of Compulsion, Conformity and FORCE. You think you're only using that power for good, but concentrating the power in one place just raises a beacon to fat cats and climbers. You're part of the problem and you don't even know it. And when you try to run over people, they're not going to care that you have a good heart.
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Just keep on keepin' on. You're going to alienate the ign'ants, but you're going to know that the people you meet who see it a lot like you do are going to be true to their word and REAL friends, and not just attention seekers, virtue-signalers, and just plain low IQ. Surround yourself with those people. 'Most any plumber, dry-waller, electrician, cable guy, what-have-you who has a skill and just wants to make a living off their hard-won skill is 99% likely to be a MAGA type. These are the people with actual competence who despise those who just make it harder and harder to live prosperous and happy lives by self-improvement and hard work.
Those are the people you want on your speed-dial when you're in trouble. Not the libtards who will happily refer you to social services, and congratulate themselves on their wokeness, and their capable navigation of the bureaucracy skills. You want the guys who're gonna bring you that plate of lasagna or shovel your sidewalk for you, when they know you're laid up or have just suffered a death in the family. You want the guys who are good at actually accomplishing things with their OWN hands, but are all thumbs when it comes to playing the system. You and they miss out on government-provided Free Stuff, but you and they will be a community of competent people who just know how to get things done, and shit will just basically work better than anything provided by a paper-pushing bureaucrat who insists you fill out 10 forms, only to say "Sorry, you don't qualify" with a smug look, when you checked the wrong box on the 10th form. Surround yourself with those kinds of people and life is about as good as humans are capable of making it.
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@msorani6139 I've been around since the early days of cable t.v. CSPAN was just getting its start, and I watched innumerable hearings. I got a real sense of what was said versus what was actually happening.
Nobody can sit through all that stuff for very long, but I had a keen interest and it was really quite revolutionary for its time (late '70s and early '80s).
Social media is a similar "breakthrough event." We'll see how long it takes the establishment to really put the clamps on it. So far, they've made great progress, but there's a lot more "leakage" than there was with the cable industry, which was easy to control.
A major difference is that the communication is 2-way. CSPAN had its call-in shows, but they could really only manage a few callers per hour. Now you can have comment sections and like/dislike numbers posted in real time.
They already eliminated the dislikes, which I consider just more of the same "creeping control systems" at work. But you can still read between the lines, and, as long as not too many people use the "Show dislikes" hack, they're going to "permit" that. I just pick up on actual dislikes 2nd-hand, from those who got the app and use it.
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He had a LOT of support in America right up until Pearl Harbor. Then everything changed. As Hirohito's ally, he got thrown into the same bucket, losing all support except the tiny number of actual Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
To me, the great irony of the '30s and '40s was that we basically became Nazis in the name of fighting them, and we never looked back or questioned the unfettered growth of government and government power since. Guys like Jimmy LOVE government intervention when they think it's helping the disadvantaged. Then they rail against the corruption and abuse of power by "health" agencies in the government.
Dude, if you want to help the disadvantaged, then HELP them. Don't campaign for the government to do all your charity work for you, with OTHER people's money. Just shut the hell up and open YOUR home and YOUR wallet, like I do, as a LIBERTARIAN. I don't play the shame game to take OTHER people's money. I put up MY money and MY time. You want to solve poverty and homelessness? Then DO something. YOU give up something, instead of using government power and government force to impose government's idea of "help and compassion."
Bureaucrats check boxes and garner power to themselves. Free people giving freely is something else entirely and you totally miss the boat on THAT. It's easier to bitch about what somebody else is or isn't doing.
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@baldiedash1 : Many models of government can work on a small(ish) scale, especially if the people are more or less homogeneous, and aligned with government policy. The bigger and more diverse a nation is, the less power you should give the central government, so that the PEOPLE can decide most matters closer to home. I don't favor a state religion, but the U.S. Constitution only said that the federal government was silent on religion (as is science). If a state wanted to be stupid, that'd be up to them.
America is too diverse for ANY state to adopt a religion in the modern era, unless there's a Muslim takeover. And we see how eager Islam is to impose Sharia wherever their numbers are significant enough to bully communities into it. Christianity used to be like that, but the Reason and Love flowing from the lessons of Jesus Christ eventually put the kibosh on those Puritanical practices.
The only religion I'm really concerned about, nowadays, is the leftist ideology that's taken Christianity's place. Question bloated government and be labeled a heretic (white supremacist, bigot, hater, racist, denier, ...), in similar fashion to those assholes in our past who made the lady wear the Scarlet "A" on her dress. No amount of bullying and harassment is out of line, when going after heretics. All the features of a religion, with the unspoken article of faith in Government as God.
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One of the biggest problem for Soviet defectors and exiles was "decision paralysis" in grocery stores. Not only was there always peanut butter, but there were 6 different brands fighting for their attention. They'd freeze up. Lock up. Feel helpless. Stand there not knowing what to do. In the Soviet Union, the bread aisle was all just one kind. And for a good part of Soviet rule, you stood in line to get any. In a capitalist system, there are 10 brands fighting for your attention, all trying to out-do the others, and bread is plentiful.
I've always found this ironic, because I'm partial to those coarse Russian black breads. Lithuanian rye is the best. Tear off hunks and slather on some butter. Never seen American bakeries (except where Lithuanian immigrants lived) that could match it. Don't know if it's the flour, how they grind it, or what. Just a perfect balance of weight, leavening and flavor. American bakeries trying to go old-school make it a little too dense.
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Vivek ain't lyin'. Speaking as a math teacher, it's been a 30-plus-year battle, trying to uphold standards. There's lots of pressure from peers and supervisors to water things down so that more people pass with good grades. That's the definition of "success," nowadays. But in the old days, "success" meant you had mastery.
Let's not kid ourselves, though. My dad was a process engineer in manufacturing and he said that even really good engineers need basic training in the real world and in the industry-specific knowledge they need. It could take years, and that was before they gave their pronouns on their applications.
This meant that hiring an engineer straight out of college was understood to be a 3 to 6 year project. So the company would invest in that engineer for years, and, often as not, once they ran up their experience, those former trainees would instantly look for a better-paying gig, which they could usually get.
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They've gotta do something. You can't BUY good memes, these days. You're at the mercy of the creativity of your side. And I think that's what's happening, now. You can't just win with money and boots-on-the-ground machine. Some dipshit will come along and Kekistani your ass, and all that money gets flushed down the toilet, NOT because some quiet conservative respectfully and calmly tries to reason with you as you become more and more offended and louder and louder.
Instead, what the right (which REALLY should be the LEFT, because libertarians and their like have been the ONLY ones who've consistently spoken truth to power, and warned our neocon and neoliberal friends that beyond Life, Liberty and Property, government really has no role in our lives, and we're increasingly freaked out by all that's wrong with the world, because we made the mistake of asking government to help us with EVERYthing, and NOW we wonder why government is EVERYwhere and shit don't work right and we're off killing people in foreign lands we don't even KNOW. What up with that?
Say "No" to those who would make us serfs. Don't want to be lorded over? Don't ask for help on every fuckin' thing under the sun, from welfare to health care, even to food (Since when does the FDA have YOUR best interests at heart? Nah. But Monsanto's in good with 'em, I understand.) .
PROGRESSIVES actually ASK for the NEW SERFDOM. They no sooner threw off the chains of the monarchy than they started scheming to put us under iron rule of civil-service oligarchy. High-level government officials are the new princes and dukes and kings. They bestow favors on those who give them money. The regulatory agencies are run by the industries being regulated, or rather, the most ruthless and most powerful big companies IN the industry, thereby preventing any new competition from breaking into the free market. People bitch about capitalism run amuck and the fact is that our system is very fascist, with government giving unfair advantage to big companies at every opportunity. And it's not because people are bad. It's just the nature of the thing and the nature of the power to destroy (Power to tax is the power to destroy (when you don't pay your taxes)) that is vested only in government. Government is the ONLY institution in the nation that has the right to use force. As such, why the HELL do we want it to run ANYthing other than what it absolutely MUST (National sovereignty, Life, Liberty and Property).
Jimmy Dore thinks everybody should make $15/hour no matter how worthless (inexperienced) of a worker they are, and everybody should get free health care. These were BOTH the primary features of FASCISM that made them it popular (along with COMMUNISM) in their early days. I think Stalin converted close to a million people by hooking them up with black-market potatoes! LOL!
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@bryanb3352 That's what Windoze shills have been saying, for years. Linux is more robust than Windows for servers.
I can't tell you how many times my old Windows NT IT dept told me I couldn't do x, y, or z, because of security, when I KNEW LINUX was doing x, y, and z, without a hitch.
They always acted so smug and wanted me to be impressed with how much they knew and how much overtime they were putting in, when IT depts that knew what they were doing were spending a lot of time sipping coffee, and learning new things, because everything was running, uninterrupted.
We had network outages all the time (early 2000s), while my commercial servers that I bought, separately, never failed.
I'm sure I'm out of date, but I definitely have anti-MS bias.
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Actually, in an economic system grounded in fiat currency, it makes SENSE to stay in debt. That way, when and if the bankers decide to hyper-inflate the currency, you get yours back by paying off your shit in worthless dollars. That's why you should always go for the best FIXED rate that you possibly can. And even if there isn't a big crash, the way they quietly inflate the currency, every year, your ACTUAL interest rate on a loan is quite a bit less than it says on the loan application.
Being in debt is a hedge against inflation. It's crazy, but it's true. Under the current setup, you're a FOOL if you behave with traditional prudence, saving money in savings accounts that pay less interest than the rate of inflation. Why save? That money's NEVER going to be worth more than it is, today. Get as many toys/real estate as you can, and live for today! It's how the system is rigged. Go back to a gold (or other commodity(ies)) backed currency, and all of a sudden, it makes sense to save, again.
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Yes. That's why I just smh at the media meltdown over Helsinki, and to me, it was Trump going to Europe and reminding them that USA is the heavyweight in the NATO equation, and Putin was more of an equal than EU was. Still a nuclear power to rival the USA. You don't shake a stick in the face of a man with a Colt .45, and Putin's well-heeled. Exacting a nonviolent price for not playing nice, in the way of economic sanctions, tariffs, and the like. You don't need to come to blows to sit on an uncomfortable opponent. You can make it tougher to do business, or at least not throw good money after bad in security arrangements that continue to guarantee the security of Europe, 70 years after they should've been on their own... That's not our land. Why is it our responsibility, and why do we pay the lion's share of NATO?
EU has nothing to tell us. We have everything to tell them.
Russia's interests are a mix. Some in line with ours. Some not. But beatin' the war drums, like neolibs and neocons? Nah. Hell nah.
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Democrat voters aren't swayed one way or the other by Kamala's incompetence. She's the figurehead for the team, and so nothing bad should be said about her and of course, she's Not Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. She doesn't have to be for anything, because her side is united in anti-Trump, and there are quite a few establishment Republicans and think tanks that are, also, so it's an uphill battle for Trump, no matter what Kamala says or does.
That's my takeaway from the Biden 2020 campaign, the Biden debate, and the Harris campaign. They don't care. They just want the power, and they're all united in that. Her terrible showing is the establishment thumbing its nose at us.
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Leontief Input-Output Matrix is standard fare whenever introducing systems of linear equations.
Socialists and war planners love these matrices, because it makes them feel god-like. "See? All the outputs we need are controlled by all these inputs over here." Great for military logistics, and achieving very narrow goals over the short term, but terrible for planning entire economies, because every input along the way needs to be ORDERED, and the guys ordering don't care about the conditions at the coal mine or if you had a bad crop this year, or if there's labor unrest (or people dying) at the factory because the quotas are impossible to meet.
Input-Output matrices make no allowance for innovations that haven't yet been discovered or invented or for unexpected downturns due to external (or internal) factors that weren't built into the model. That's the beauty of a free market. as one thing shifts, everything shifts, all on its own, as everyone in the economy is trying to make their little piece of the economy the best they can make it, out of personal self-interest. The top-down planners have no concept of that. They just like to order people around.
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Chavez decided to take over the oil industry in Venezuela and redistribute the proceeds without thought to keeping the oil money flowing. Venezuela's got the thick crude, but it takes new tech to extract it and a lot of refining capacity. Chavez took the money from previous production and put nothing into investing in future production, because like all socialists, he just thinks money creates itself. Because of the difficulty of extracting and refining, Venezuela's oil isn't profitable below $100/barrel, and $90/barrel is the cut-off for all the competition, including the frackers. So Venezuela wants all oil producers to curtail production, so Venezuela can make money off their oil.
This is the problem with Progressive/socalist domestic economics. All these wonderful things to spend money on, but no real understanding of where the money comes from or what NATURALLY sustaining processes look like (Free Markets!). Maduro continued the stupidity. Mismanaged the economy, rather than fostering free enterprise, making Venezuela a 1-crop economy, like much of the Middle East. This always happens under socialism. There are exceptions, when you have a homogeneous population, like much of Europe, where citizens have a sense of duty and don't just see a free meal.
I'm not defending what we did in Iraq or Libya. Or what we were starting to do in Syria. And I'd be pissed if we sent troops to Venezuela. But I do think Maduro's a failed socialist dictator. He went from elected president to dictator in this last, Soviet-style, election, where fraud and voter intimidation were very widespread.
I don't believe in overthrowing socialist governments. I think we should advocate against socialism, and let them tear themselves apart. I think promising people everything will be taken care of by government just sets you up for shortages and poor quality of goods. You take the enlightened self-interest out of the equation, and weaponize greed for destructive, rather than constructive purposes. You want people's greed to be channeled into making more money because you offer higher quality at a lower price. You get return customers by treating people right. Government control of the economy undercuts that.
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Shapiro's a Zionist. No doubt. His reason (and scholarship) go out the window when it comes to Israel. The history of the last few hundred years is ignored. No, I don't think Hamas is all rainbows and unicorns. But the elephant in the room is the (re-)creation of the state of Israel, by force, in 1948, by a bunch of arrogant and deluded evangelicals in partnership with the worst kind of what we now call "neocons" of that era.
Israel's been locked in a never-ending war for its survival ever since, and it's been our loyal proxy and we've been ITS loyal proxy, ever since 1948.
Must we live in a state of forever war, pursuing a sunk-cost fallacy in perpetuity, or do we admit we had no right to genocide the people in the region and carve out a nation by force that hadn't existed for centuries? The blowback from our actions in 1948 is ongoing and will never end.
Who the hell was Balfour to dictate national boundaries in 1914? Who the hell are we to follow along and impose his vision, by force, forever, against the wishes of virtually every nation in the region?
I say we give up some desert in the American West, if everybody supports a Jewish homeland enough to wreak destruction around the world for its preservation. Give the Jews a section of desert, somewhere, and in one generation, it'll be an oasis, a land of plenty, for all who live there. I'll chip in.
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The ESG put them into debt because the ESG projects didn't make money. As long as that money was there, I think a lot of the middle men and movie execs don't care if the project makes money, because they're all getting paid, pretty much, regardless. What they DO care about is the money source drying up, and maybe that's what's happening.
I think, too, that the institutions pushing ESG don't necessarily care if their media projects make money, as long as they're successful in moving the Overton window, which pays dividends on their other, unrelated projects.
For instance, if the propaganda is good for Democrats and Democrats will spend money on ESG projects in other areas, then the losses studios incur on the individual movies is more than offset by gains elsewhere, for instance, continued government subsidies for EVs and penalties against internal combustion vehicles. If they can shape policy through their influence, they don't really care about the movies making a profit, as long as they dominate, culturally.
But now, they're clearly not dominating, culturally, and they have to re-think their plans to "force behaviors," as Michael Fink puts it.
I think we've reached the tipping point on that game by institutional investors. I think they're going to pull back from movies not because they're not making money, but because they're not getting the cultural traction they were paying for.
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@jjs5191 The only difference that exists could be eliminated by de-centralizing the power as Russell Brand, another progressive, has proposed. LET them try their socialist schemes of redistribution on the local level, and see how it works. I think we would do more for the underprivileged if charity was 100% voluntary, and people garnered "virtue points" by giving their OWN time and money to helping others, rather than campaigning endlessly to make it a government thing, run by politicians and bureaucrats with other people's money. There's no virtue in that. Just a form with a bunch of checkboxes.
Progressives push their programs on the federal level because they can get their wet dreams passed everywhere all at once. But you can't have those programs imposed in one-size-fits-all fashion from the top down. What works for North Dakota doesn't work for Georgia. Conditions and the people are vastly different. But worst of all, you put all the charitable functions of the society in the hands of a few people, and from then on, it's only as good as the people running it, and bad people are like moths to the flame, when all that power's concentrated in one place.
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You progressives always have these "nice ideas" but never think about long-term consequences of your fake virtue. Real virtue is helping someone. Fake virtue is making everybody else pay so you can feel good about yourself.
And this is how it always turns out. Democrats realize that they can't do anything they want, if they destroy or alienate the business community. So, they compromise with "business leaders," which is another way of saying they work things out with established bigger companies, so that the bigger companies can prosper, and it cuts any up-and-coming competition with those existing businesses with laws (and regs) written in such a way that existing companies can just pass on the added cost to consumers, but small start-ups can not.
In other words, you guys' "social engineering" always leads to crony capitalism and essentially fascist features of political economy.
And you guys fall for this shit every time. It'd be pathetic if all it did was hurt the people with this fake compassion/virtue, but it doesn't. It hurts everybody, but ESPECIALLY people at the bottom, trying to claw their way up. And hard-working people, whom you guys rob so you can feel good about yourself and feel all noble and better than everybody else, when really you're just about power and wielding it to serve your own lunatic government-and-big-business-first-in-the-name-of-people-first.
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Yes. There were 250,000 rally-goers there, easily. If they WANTED to storm the capitol, they could have very easily. It was all set up to provoke them into doing just that, but 249,500 of them just took pictures at the rally and went home. If that's not "mostly peaceful," I don't know what is.
We're seeing 1984 play out in real time, with some key differences: there's a little thing called the Internet that has broken the media monopoly, which is a crucially important feature of top-down rule.
Now that Jimmy understands this a little bit, will he EVER say to himself "This Med-4-All business will put the same bad people in charge of everyone's health." He was one of the biggest protesters against the COVID response, but can't connect the dots to Med-4-All. Give people maximum autonomy and make them be responsible for themselves, their loved ones, and their local communities.
We'll start seeing doctors be honored, again. We'll see doctors with the freedom to help people out of kindness, rather than just blindly obeying whatever the bureaucrats. "Do we have a form for that? No? Sorry, sir. There's nothing we can do."
Compassion is human-to-human, NOT taxpayer-to-bureaucrat-to-10-page-form-to-the-patient. You have people spending money that's not theirs taken from people they don't know and given to other people they don't know. They have zero concern for the cost of the treatment or the quality of the treatment. They just have to make sure all the boxes are checked, like a casting director for a Hollywood film made for "modern audiences."
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@edbenti5007 : Honest progressives can see the bullshit, when it's glaring, and the smear campaign against Trump is pretty glaring. What progressives don't understand is that the policies they support are at the root of many of the problems they then point out.
If only progressives would apply the same principles of government meddling, abroad, to government meddling, domestically. It's all the same thing. Elites get their wonderful jobs and wonderful powers, and it becomes more about protecting their livelihoods than actually serving the people. And when it's GOVERNMENT, incompetence means MORE money rather than losing your job. Solving problems isn't good for your career. But finding problems that they can take money from hardworking people to help whatever it is they think they're helping, will guarantee their position and pension.
Mainly, as a libertarian, I'm sick of people who virtue signal with other people's money. War abroad and poop in our streets at home.
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Oh, Jimmy won't like that "Constitutional Conservatism" thing. He thinks government should take care of us and now he's vainly seeking Mr. Goodbar to run a perfect nanny state, with saintly geniuses in all the top spots.
Well, we all know how "Mr. Goodbar" turned out. Even if you find him, government spans multiple lifetimes, and that genius-saint you put in power at first is inevitably replaced by someone corrupt or incompetent or both, and they visit their incompetence on everyone all at once.
Try your progressive schemes on the local level, Jimmy. Then see if that model can scale to the state level. I'm pretty sure you'll fail at the local level and the best you'll get is a really good charity organization that does good, but without the monopoly on force that the U.S. Government has over all 350 million of us.
Progressives want the FEDERAL government to be the nanny government, so that everyone will be SAVED at the same time, without having to actually make your schemes sustainable on the local level. And if, by chance, your scheme IS sustainable on the local level, then you don't NEED the feds to come in and muck everything up with rules and regulations put in place by lobbyists in Washington!
Malone is spot-on!
I don't consider myself a "conservative." I'm more libertarian. A "conservative" is someone who'd outlaw gays, because we always did in the past. A libertarian is only concerned about both parties' informed consent, because gay relationships are no infringement on the rights of others.
My only issue with homosexuals was their irresponsible and promiscuous sex that spread venereal diseases, and then expected me to pay for the hospital bill. No. You do "you," but you also PAY for "you."
Eat all the pie and cake you want. But don't ask me to pay your doctor bills. I'll smoke all I want, and I'll pay my own freight.
That doesn't mean I'm against helping others. I'm on the local food bank's speed dial. I gave a free car to the lady our local "Habitat for Humanity" built a house for. She zipped around town in that little car for YEARS. I've taken in homeless people. The last one I took in, I paid thousands of dollars for much-needed dental work.
None of that had anything to do with the government. I didn't get a tax write-off or anything. I just know that if all the progressives campaigning for free stuff (like Med-4-All) did as much as I did, there wouldn't be much need for all the government programs you want. If there's not enough will in the populace to help their brothers in need, what more good do you think a government made up of members of that populace are going to be genius-saints?
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Euro countries have a big advantage: single culture. single tradition. Also, they're SMALL. USA is a nation of malcontents. That's why all of us sailed over the Atlantic. Cultural norms in Europe prevent much of the problems associated with the welfare state.
You keep beating the drums for socialism, but it only works (and only for a time) because of those cultural norms and a sense of duty. Free medical care keeps us under the thumb of the establishment's idea of what medical care should be. After Fauci, anybody who pushes federalized health care is not very smart.
Try it in your TOWN. Try it in your STATE. If you can't make it work, there, you're a fool to try to make it work for all 50 states.
The American system is already dominated by the feds and huge institutions. What you want is something as close to the doctor and patient as possible.
The problem with socialized health care is that the promises made and the keeping of those promises is all subject to the fiscal wisdom of the U.S. Congress, and we all know THAT'S a SWAMP. I don't want a bureaucrat 2000 miles away deciding what's covered and what's not covered.
And when you promise everything to everybody, everybody wants million-dollar care for a contribution of little or nothing. Costs spiral out of control, and then the government has to ration the care for everybody, regardless of how well they take care of themselves. Meanwhile our government has us all fat and unhealthy, with health costs spiraling out of control.
How does England handle it? They promise you everything, but you're going to have to wait 6 months or a year for this, that, and the other. The American system is on-demand.
Re-think your pie-in-the-sky, economically and socially illiterate socialist schemes for America.
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Conservatives DGAF about dumb-ass platforms injecting their politics. We don't like it, but it's their right to be politically motivated jerks. And it's my right (and Sam Harris's right) to pull the plug and no longer patronize these bad-actor platforms.
True conservatives see this as opening the door to competing platforms. My guess is that Sargon, as a leftist, wouldn't be against government regulation, if the regulations help Sargon. He's totally OK with government interfering in anything and everything, like most progressives, so long as the interference serves their short-term interests.
The thing that I, as a classical liberal, fear, is that the outrage against abusive, politically-motivated censorship by so-called "neutral platforms" will create a groundswell of support for government sticking its nose in and sanitizing the Internet the same way government sanitized the major news networks, almost a century ago. If government does NOTHING, Free Speech will prevail.
I wouldn't be at ALL surprised if the worst, most dominant platforms, are deliberately PROVOKING outrage, just so they can get the government to step in, because you KNOW those big outfits will control the regulations and the regulators, and competing platforms will not have any kind of chance to really compete.
I hope that the NATURE of the Internet is such that no matter how hard they squeeze, we still control things at the grassroots level, and apparent domination, today, can become bankruptcy, tomorrow, IF YOU LEFTIES WILL LET THE MARKETPLACE DO ITS THING. And again, Sargon of Akkad is clearly left-of-center in his understanding of the proper role and scope of central government. Like most of that persuasion, scratch him and you see he bleeds an elitist attitude to rival any Progressive/Libtard.
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Barney Frank and Chris Dodd gave us the meltdown in 2008. "If they have a pulse, they get a loan, whether it makes sense for them or not."
What happened in their big drive for more home ownership? Banks approached people who either owned their houses, outright, or had a nice, affordable mortgage, and told them they could borrow against that house's value for home improvement or just for a vacation. "You don't have to pay us anything for 5 years! Go to Europe! Tour the Great Wall of China!" Then the bubble payment came due, and the foreclosures began.
Those hedge funds and mortgage-backed securities, which had been rock solid for over a century, because banks only loaned to people who proved they could and would pay their debts. The investors who were putting money into those securities were pretty conservative investors. What they didn't know is that the "Affordable Housing Act" or whatever it was, lowered the standard of qualification for a loan.
It made the assets toxic. But the guys doing the trading weren't the biggest culprits. The biggest culprits were Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and the U.S. Congress, because the bill sounded so good and it meant to help people. Plenty of people in finance saw clearly what was happening. They should've blown the whistle. They deserve blame, too.
But the main problem was the misguided "progressive" legislation that thought it could "wave a magic wand" and everybody would own houses, immediately. That's how all progressive government spending programs turn out. They just sap the energy and wealth of the people who actually make, grow, and build things.
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Did anybody notice the instant banning of Alex Jones was done on the same day by companies who all got their start from government grants and/or enjoy enormous tax breaks not available to the rest of us? Apple, YouTube, FaceBook... All those outfits are government-sponsored and they do the bidding of their masters. Not that it's any hardship doing so, since their masters GUARANTEE them a competitive advantage over anybody who dares to challenge them in our so-called free market. It ain't a free market and it SHOULD be. Just the rich and powerful are never content with what they have. They always want more, and to the extent that they CAN manipulate government to their advantage, they WILL manipulate government to their (short-term) advantage, which is why we all need to convert and become Libertarians, because only Libertarians understand that the real answer is to NOT PUT GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING, IF YOU CAN AVOID IT. Bad enough we agreed, way back when, to let them defend our borders.
They can't do THAT, apparently, but they're eager to fail at everything else, too! And we LET them! We ASK them! (After days, months and years of non-stop propaganda from media who SHAMELESSLY shill for establishment neocons and neolibs, 24/7, 365. Want to know what the power structure wants? Just check CNN.
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I don't know if Assad did or didn't use chem weapons on his own people at SOME point (or his daddy at some point in the more distant past), but I agree with Jimmy that Assad had the upper hand in the situation in question, and the only thing that COULD stop him was some sort of false flag chemical attack that would bring in outside forces to a situation Assad had well under control. The LAST thing Assad would've wanted to do, at that point, was snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, with a very stupid act.
More likely, Assad's enemies sold that story in order to get and keep outsiders involved. I don't think Trump was able to overcome the momentum of neocons' and neolibs' delight in meddling abroad, with a never ending list of bad people to go after. His missile-attack reprisal in the port city of Tartus (?sp?) was announced ahead of time and loss of life and property were minimized. The Russians got plenty of heads-up and pulled out their people and ships. And, eventually, Trump disengaged us from Syria's internal goings-on. It's now starting to look like Trump actually gets it, and the delays in getting to the right place on our foreign policy appear to be more about getting his OWN people on board.
We'll see if the Deep State puts up with this, and/or how far Trump's tentacles reach into the innards of the Ship of State. He's been hiring and firing people for over 2 years, now, and I'm sure HIS culture is beginning to impose itself.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to see a Declaration of War BEFORE we put our troops in harm's way on foreign soil. Liberals tend to sneer, but it's a Big Deal to send a 20-year-old to a foreign country to shoot and be shot at. Our leaders do NOT think it's a big deal. Just a natural extension of policy, to be employed wherever and whenever the elites see fit.
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Probably some nice nuggets in "A People's History of Fake News." From the first pamphleteers to YouTube, there hasn't been a media outlet that didn't have an axe to grind because its ownership/management group had an axe to grind, interests to protect, enemies to attack. What we learned from Hitler was the power of controlled media. But rather than fight against it, we set about systematically controlling the media. Now it's a toxic mix of government and corporate interference.
When it was useful to treat Indian lands as OUR lands, then "The only good injun is a dead injun," and Manifest Destiny. Not that we were any different from any other civilization running into an existing civilization. If one can take what belongs to the other, history teaches that it will, and it will generate whatever useful lies will serve the takeover. So a study on "Fake News" over the centuries would be most interesting. We can't un-do mistakes of the past, but maybe we should re-think how we basically don't allow the tribes to really own the 'reservations' we say are theirs. Tribal members don't really own their own land, and it removes all incentive from seeking to improve their land, which I would think Indians would have rare abilities and insights into what that meant.
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Yes. The Democrats do nothing but project their sins onto others. They accused Trump of being "literally Hitler," because they knew that in his shoes. they would abuse the power of the presidency to no end.
I think pot helps you make connections between things you wouldn't otherwise, and in that sense, fulfills one of the functions of the dream state, at least in part. It's just not good if you want to follow a very complicated line of reasoning. IOW, you can make connections but you lose focus.
Kind of like Heisenberg uncertainty. When you're really close to something, you don't know where it's been or where it's generally headed, but you know exactly where it is at that instant. You have to back up to see where it's been and where it's headed, but then you can't see precisely where it is at that instant. (Heisenberg's about wavelength (from a distance) and position (from up close).)
Pot kind of shuts down your dreams, in a way. It's not that you're not dreaming, it's that you don't remember much/any of your dreams. Otherwise, dreams are your subconscious mind's way of alerting the conscious mind to patterns/behaviors in your conscious world that you're not noticing.
For me, it's getting a negative gut reaction to someone, but not really knowing why. Just a vibe. But then in a dream, all the little giveaways in their body language or their smiles not reaching their eyes sorts of things jump out at you. At least that's happened to me. I'll consciously wonder why I don't like a person and then a dream will bring all the things that don't add up and string them together into a little drama.
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Education can now be delivered GLOBALLY at ZERO MARGINAL COST. And hell, many content creators put great stuff out there for free, so the cost of making the education modules themselves is ALSO free. So why do we have to spend $10,000/year on every single fucking student, when they could learn EVERYTHING NEEDED FOR COLLEGE ENTRANCE and 90% of college education, itself, for NOTHING? It's ridiculous! Education shouldn't be free. Education IS free!
And people are figuring that out. These brick-and-mortar institutions are obsolete, except for the high-dollar apparatus in big engineering schools and medical schools. Virtually ALL THE REST OF IT IS THERE FOR THE PRICE OF A MOUSE CLICK! Public education is a HUGE scam, and unless you want to play Russian roulette with the people running those institutions, hoping against hope that they will NOT indoctrinate your kids into Hitler/Lenin Youth, Progressives - GOOD Progressives - should campaign AGAINST public education. You're IDIOTS to think government is providing the service you think it is. And although MOST educators try to do the right thing, you're basically handing the government a loaded gun and begging it to point it at your head, when you send your kids to state-run schools.
You guys are locked into this mythical 19th-Century world view, and it's the 21st Century, already. Central control and administration of KEY human products and services should be avoided at every turn. But you jerks just look for MORE things for the bureaucrats and power-mad robber barons to take over and run "for us." It's NEVER "for us." It's always "to us." Seems great, but it's just a can full of worm-eaten and spoiled SPAM.
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This is what flame-breathing Democrats don't seem to understand. If it's open season on political opposition and they lose their grip on the levers of power, everything they're doing to Trump, now, can be done to them, down the road.
Recall that "nuclear option" that Democrat majority in the Senate passed, in order to get Obama appointees (and presumably Clinton appointees) confirmed in the Senate. They eliminated the filibuster on judicial appointments. Then - horror of horrors! - Donald Trump was elected in 2016! His judicial appointments sailed through Senate confirmation process, and there was nothing the Democrat minority in the Senate could do to stop it!
Democrats are all about winning TODAY, on the theory that if they can win decisively enough, they will hegemonize the political process in perpetuity. But if they lose, they will never recover, because of all the lies and abuse of power they employed for the win. I think it's inevitable that they will lose, because their outrageous behavior is being exposed by left and right.
Iraq War, RussiaGate Hoax, Hunter's laptop, Ashley's diary, Branch Covidianism, transgender ideology, intersectional identity politics, ...
For the time being, it's an uphill battle, because the security state is in league with both Democrat and Republican (RINO) leadership. MAGA Republicans are making inroads, and Jimmy agrees with them on most things, except Jimmy thinks big government's a GOOD thing, if only it does what Jimmy wants, which means Jimmy's one of those guys who believes Sauron's One Ring is fine, as long as it's in the right hands, when what Tolkien (and I) is (are) saying is that no one can be trusted with that much power in one place Find another way.
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Yes. The left is authoritarian. Authoritarianism is inevitable, when you put the government in charge of your health, education, and welfare. With responsibility handed over to the state, the state will inevitably assert authority. Not only that, but the allocation of scarce resources will not be decided by the people on the ground, but by bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of miles away, trying to balance their spreadsheets.
What progressives don't understand is that ANY government program can parade its success stories, so you think they're doing good, but what they don't show you is all the people who are harmed. Top-down is what you're pushing, Jimmy, even as you see the many problems associated with it. So you're trapped in an eternal game of wack-a-mole against institutions much bigger than you, when really, you should've been content just trying to help people, one at a time, out of your own pocket, instead of insisting that these enormous engines of injustice and waste be created.
It's not right to coerce people to support your half-baked idea of "sharing," when all you and your ilk needed to do was open up YOUR wallets, instead of virtue signaling with other people's money. Such hypocrisy, but you don't understand enough to realize how contradictory your views are.
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: Religious faith is a tonic to the soul and psyche. And the fact is that BILLIONS of people follow one religion or another. So, in the world in which we find ourselves, try to be tolerant, but don't give up what's right because some dogmatist, who insists on literal interpretations of books written by men.
Overall, I think Judeo-Christianity has operated on principles that push society ahead. Guided by Love and Reason, people naturally re-interpret was pre-written-word shepherds thought about their world. They were probably among the most enlightened of their time, and the written word really got going largely because of religious institutions. Sure, organized religion is fraught with corruption, and will be twisted by destroyers to do destruction. But there are still underlying principles. The power of literacy.
That hick up in the sticks, living in a hovel, up in the high Appalachian mountains got his first reading lesson out of a Holy Bible. Malcolm X went from street hustler to thinking (and reading and writing) man, because he fell in with the Muslims in prison. The Catholic Church kept the light of Classical Greece and Rome alive through the Dark Ages. The wisdom and learning of centuries was kept alive.
They also browbeat a lot of good scientists, whose facts contradicted Church Doctrine. The parallel in the current era is Leftist Orthodoxy in the role of Catholic Church, ignoring and suppressing any facts or arguments that go against The Collectivist Narrative. It's OK for people to be crazy, except these people want my freedom and all the fruits of my labor and my childrens' and grandchildrens' labor (Skyrocketing national debt. Fiat currency.). There's no end to the damage the libtard orthodoxy can do, especially now that it seems to be all tied up with the Military Industrial Complex, keeping us on a permanent war footing by keeping us frightened of all the evildoers around the planet. So that makes it OK for us to kill foreigners.
What could go wrong?
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@yarweiss : How bad do you feel about slavery? How far back do you need to go to see the day when the state of Israel was destroyed? And which time? And by whom? Fact is, the Allies re-drew the map after World War II, going from one extreme (The Holocaust) to another (Creation of a Zionist state by force, in 1947).
Fucked-up deal, no matter how you slice it. And the question becomes "What do we do about it, now?" Are you a "From the river to the sea" person or a "Here we are. Can't we try to get along?"
I think for every atrocity by Israel, I can count about 10 committed against them. In some ways, they're like the kid who gets in trouble, because he finally snapped and beat the living tar out of the playground bully, and put him in the hospital after months of torment . Since '47, their neighbors have tried to destroy them, many times. Israel has always out-thought and out-fought them. "It's terrible that they seized and hold the Golan Heights." Well, what would YOU do if people were sitting on the ridge right next to your town and lobbing mortar shells and missiles at you?
I can't say I know ALL the in's and out's. I definitely don't have a religious dog in this fight. What is, is. The question is always what is the best move to make, next.
As far as BDS goes, I would love it if more Americans did more research on where the stuff they buy comes from. I think it's a growing movement. Myself, I try to buy American on everything, when possible, and avoid Chinese, because I just don't trust them. Besides, it ain't right to buy products made in a factory that has to use suicide nets to keep its workers from committing suicide. If they think they can make a buck by poisoning me with formaldehyde, they won't hesitate. And I wouldn't mind one bit paying an extra penny (or pennies) a pound to get migrant workers a better wage for the backbreaking labor they do, while most of the money goes to middlemen.
But as far as targeting Israel, I'm not so sure. It's hard for me to judge. The Jews were shocked, BIG-time by pogroms of the early-mid 20th century and then had an instant country made that it's been all they could do to defend, since its creation. They've been on a war footing since Day 1. It's like the USA walked in and told Syria, "From now on, SE Turkey and NE Syria are KURDLAND. We declare Kurdish Homeland." Should the Kurds turn that down, or make the best of it? And wouldn't Turkey and Syria be at their throats from Day 1? How might they behave? I expect a lot like Israel's behaving.
It's an artificiality created by outsiders driven by guilt and religion. Toxic stuff.
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Joe was trying to say he was the running mate of the 1st black president, the president with the first black (She's not really black.) vide president, and who appointed the first black woman to the Supreme Court. he just can't articulate it, properly, but you know what he means, there.
They go from forgiving everything he says to deliberately misinterpreting what he says, depending on what suits the Democrat elites at the moment. Clearly the Democrat elites are moving on from Joe. Once the big money leaves the game, the Democrats lose, because they threw in with big money and gave up on small contributions from the working and middle class years ago.
That's not to let Republicans off the hook, but their history of the last 50 years has been many more small contributions compared to a small number of big donors. That's been changing in recent years, to more of a donor-class kind of party, instead of a middle-class party. Hence, uni-party. Both parties are taking money from the same people.
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This is why federal regulations aren't suited to purpose. This has been true since the 19th Century. Nobody remembers when they created the Interstate Commerce Commission to - they said - take on the robber barons in the railroad industry. What happened was the ICC was instantly capture by the biggest, richest, most corrupt robber barons, and PROTECTED them! That's how it always works. The government isn't your friend, progressives! Quit looking to government to solve your problems for you. Even if YOU win, you're going to subject millions in the future to being CRUSHED by the political machine!
The best, albeit imperfect solution is free markets and constant vigilance. Companies that fuck up should go broke and they WILL, because word gets out, unless the government's censoring it and quashing stories. This is why we need independent media and this is why I'm PISSED that the "stimulus" package includes huge payments to failing media companies that need to DIE, already! Meanwhile, independents like Jimmy Dore, who are built to THRIVE as independents will once again be pushed aside by government force and coercion, which is why NONE of y'all "progressives" should be progressives! Idiots! You want a truly liberal society, vote for SMALLER government!
Companies that do things right will prosper. The government either today or next week will put all its resources into protecting the big-money people. Always. Don't trust them. Don't ask them to solve your problems for you! The Chinese get this. With liberal/progressive big government running everything, all the Chinese need to do is spend a few million bribing people in high places. Don't give those bastards such high places!
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This is so true (and proud to be 420th!). I've been tracking the 'intelligence community" blunders, distortions and outright lies for decades. When they asked Trump who he believed, his own intel community or Putin on Russiagate, he said "Putin," and I cheered! Then he broke my heart and walked it back, because of media outrage. I bet Putin gave it to him straighter than his own people.
The "intelligence community" got all the stuff on the ground wrong, and overestimated the Soviet military threat by a factor of 5 or 10. And they ignored the actual threat, which was spying and subversion.
There's ONE thing the CIA is good at: Covering up its incompetence, and driving the military-industrial complex. And lots of subversion and war-mongering, abroad. I don't care how bad a sovereign nation is. "Supporting freedom fighters" is not legal, under OUR law or under INTERNATIONAL law. They learned NOTHING from the Shah Reza Pahlavi's overthrow, after we installed him as a puppet. Now, Islam is our biggest threat, and it's really just BLOWBACK from these assholes thinking they can play the world like their own private game of chess. And they get it WRONG.
Now, the Russians. THERE'S your chess players. And they're more like Karpov than Bobby Fischer. Defense, first. Aggression, later. Subvert whenever possible (cigar smoke in the eyes).
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Liberals in the '80s were staunchly against war, but also staunchly in favor of nanny government. To this day, those same liberals love nanny government, even after seeing it in action through the medical establishment's handling of COVID-19. Those guys don't work for patients. They work for the government. You should be terrified with every encroachment of the federal government over the practice of medicine.
With the peer-to-peer communications now available, free market is the best way to weed out the bad doctors from the good. Best service for best price will only happen in a free market. We don't KNOW what a true free market in medicine would look like, because the biggest customer, for generations, has been the federal government. It decides what will be paid for whatever service, what services will be offered, and how those services are to be rendered. Not doctors and patients, where every patient knows their doctor's complete track record.
When you want to defend against bad actors, you don't want one big agency whose top officials are few in number, to make decisions for everybody. You get one Fauci and you're screwed. But it's not just the one guy. It's everyone in the organization being tempted by enormous royalties and future jobs in pharma, if they just go along with what the company wants. So they do. They're rich for life, and everyone pays more for less.
Regulatory capture is a thing. Who will watch the watchers? Add a layer of watchers, and you merely double the million-dollar investment to buy off the layers that came before. It's still cheap, when that bureaucracy can move billions of dollars one way or the other with their executive decisions.
There will always be charlatans, and fools who fall for them. But we don't have to have everyone under the same umbrella, so that one charlatan can do massive harm to the entire nation.
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@cameronherrick6639 : Bernie's the worst, because all he thinks about is redistributing wealth, without understanding how all that wealth is created. He's a typical progressive, promising hard-working people's money to other people. Eventually you run out of other people's money, because you disincentivize prudent and responsible behavior. Why work hard if some socialist is just gonna take it and give it to somebody else?
Students are all pro-socialism, until it comes to giving THEIR grades to somebody who got BAD grades. They of course don't see that the same applies to ANYthing of real value that you earn.
The key to a healthy society is successful AVERAGE people, who give to others, voluntarily. If only progressives would put THEIR money where their mouths are and quit telling me what to do with mine. I give to charity all the time. The local food bank. People I meet who need help. If you progressives did the same thing instead of trying to do everything by force, we wouldn't have near the problems we have, today. But it's always gotta be the authorities doing it by force, for you people. And the "authorities" ALWAYS screw it up, and waste it, through mismanagement and corruption, because they get paid more the more they fuck things up!
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That's because people on the left think government should be our parent, but that they can still be free. You're one of those. Jimmy's one of those. It doesn't work that way. You give the government responsibility for your well-being, you automatically give it authority over everything you say or do.
You're slow. Jimmy's slow. But it's slowly sinking in. Oh, you can see the authoritarianism, but you refuse to see your hand in creating and nurturing it, by insisting the federal government take care of your health, education, and welfare, which is why Americans' health, education, and welfare has been in decline for decades, and why you and I have less control over our own lives than we did in the past.
A government that protects everyone from failing is a government that prevents anyone from winning.
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The WORST censorship has been going on, non-stop, since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. He was that era's Obama-hope-and-change candidate, and he milked every crisis to garner more power to himself, even to the point of making himself president for life, and falling short of packing the Supreme Court and trashing the U.S. Constitution.
In service to "the war effort," back channels from the White House to all the major media outlets were forged, all in the name of "fighting fascism," because we could SEE how crazy Hitler's propaganda was, and how the German people, saturated and indoctrinated by it (and by the state-run education and health systems), were !
Americans at Nazi propaganda. It was so cheesie, so hackneyed, so , that we believed we would fall for something like that. So what did our government do? It created its version of quiet, behind-the-scenes censorship that violated the 1st Amendment, but - I mean - supported.
*Even the progressives/socialists were on board with the war effort, once Hitler attacked the USSR. Before that time, Hitler was seen as a "fellow traveler," because his government wasn't all that different from Stalin's, in form and function.
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Except for the whole progressive "I want the government to be my Mommy" thing, progressives, libertarians, and conservatives have more in common than otherwise.
I think you get close to 100% agreement when/if progressives would apply their principles in a decentralized way, in local communities that are like-minded. It's because they can't always get that local utopia they want that they try to make the federal government implement their wacky ideas everywhere at one, by force, from one place. I think Russell Brand is starting to get there, finally seeing the dangers and the sheer folly of concentrating all authority for everything into one, central place. All it takes is one Fauci or one Jim Comey to mess up the lives of over 300 million people in one go.
If progressive economics and "equity" ideas are great, then bring them about in ONE place, and by your example, become the model for other communities. But no. It's always "Force this on everyone, and let's see what happens." Dumb. Bad policy. Top-down planning and control is why the soviets and Chinese were never really competitive, until we started implementing their ideas in the usa. We've become the top-down, totally corrupt, and totally inept authoritarian state our ancestors rightly held in scorn and derision.
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Government are the thugs we reluctantly authorize to kill worse thugs who threaten us. No more and no less. You don't ask the Marofia Don to run your health care system. And it's because we already DID ask that health care is the way it is, now, and a culture of entitlement reigns. Ironically, medicare-4-all might be a less damaging way for government to participate in the healthcare system. The system we have is essentially fascist/socialist, but nobody's really admitted it or structured things to run efficiently. Thing is, anybody can go to any emergency room and receive free health care, right now (after a long wait).
We already divorced the users of the SERVICE from the actual price of that service. It's all set up so you save money by avoiding checkups, short term, and store up health problems that cost big money, long term. If ALL the government did was pay for a free checkup for everybody every year, and they caught stuff, early, that would probably save a ton of money. But it still begs the question of there being ANY service not directly related to national defense being provided by national government. It's just too easy to fuck things up for everybody when you allow a handful to decide how any good or service will be rationed for the general public. That's tyranny. And guys like Jimmy Dore want government bureaucrats to run health care, and I just think that's one of the dumbest, most fascistic ideas, ever.
Free health care was how the fascists got their START! It's an essential feature of fascist takeover, invented by Junkers in Germany when industrialization was making the people a little too independent and uppity. Kept the Junkers on top for another couple generations, as I recall, and paved the way for Hitler.
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Reagan decided there should be more Americans owning their own fishing boats (like Barney Frank decided more people should own homes), made low interest loans available, everybody got into the fishing business, and they scraped the sea-bottom, wrecking the ecosystem off Cape Cod. Reagan wasn't averse to interfering in the free market, if he thought he was smarter than the free market. And people in government always think they're smarter, the anointed... Their position proves their superiority (to them).
I'd love to see the big firms broken up, but not by force. What's needed is a press that actually reports what's going on, and the public would boycott the bigger outfits and buy from the smaller, and information + freedom would do more to police the free markets than anything the lawyer types in government will ever do. We know what will happen when we put those bastards in charge.
The robber barons ALWAYS got ahead by influencing government. And we, the people, always fall for the same lie: "Government needs to DO something!" The public outcry signals the paradigm shift without the government doing anything. But the government then always does something, to gain status and get re-elected. The 5 years later, the robber barons own the legislature and the regulatory agencies on all those matters. Think about it.
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Socialism is government-owned-and-operated.
Community building is voluntary and free-market. It has collectivist aspects, but only in the sense that people in the community cooperate and share, voluntarily. There is no force involved. That's where you progressives get it wrong. You want to save the world in one fell swoop, and that requires the use of force and coercion.
That's the whole point of enlightened self-interest! Community-building is a form of free-market capitalism. People want to do good and be SEEN doing good.
When the government takes over, now you're paying taxes to solve all the world's problems, and not only do you have less disposable income to share with your neighbor, voluntarily, you no longer have any responsibility to play the Good Samaritan and help a guy out. You already paid people to help that guy out, so his plight is someone ELSE's responsibility, so NATURAL self-supporting communities get chopped off at the knees.
The key, here, is it's people working with each other, not just sitting around waiting for the government to hand them a check or free housing or food. It's not a bureaucrat checking off boxes on a form, who makes $100,000 a year doing nothing BUT checking off boxes, without ever laying eyes on the recipients.
It's not his money he's spending and it's some faceless nobody (to him) that he's supposedly helping, so he has little concern whether the money is spent wisely nor does he care whether the money solves their problems.
He's just the middle man who makes 10 times what his "clients" make, and if only he could get more clients, he could grow his department and administer more people, and make more money for himself, as lord and master of his own little taxpayer-funded fiefdom.
That 6-figure bureaucrat doesn't want to SOLVE poverty. All he wants to do is SERVE poverty. If he SOLVES poverty, he's out of a job!
Socialism administered by the state inverts the incentive structure and the moral responsibility we have for our fellow human beings. It also creates a LOT of people who are beholden to the government and as corruption creeps into these big institutions, as it always does, nobody wants to upset the apple cart, because that means an end to their gravy train!
Our government employs 25 million people and there are 100 million recipients of government programs. That's more people than voted for either party in 2024. These are dangerous times! The makers are in danger of being voted into serfdom by the takers.
Take what the government deigns to give you. And obey. That's the path we're on and that's why so many are pessimistically optimistic with the ouster of the Democrats. Now the question is what kind of job the Republican majority will do with its recent victory. There's hope, but hope is faint. Uni-Party still rules.
The Democrats love war as much as any Cold-War Republican, and the Republicans are just as beholden to the welfare state as the Democrats. Neocon Democrats started with Scoop Jackson in the '70s, and then Reagan made Russia-Russia-Russia a winner for both parties. Welfare-State Republicans kicked in during the '90s, when they stopped making liberty-and-limited government arguments against the welfare state.
Now it's "Spend spend spend on every nutty handout and every murderous war" and "both (supposed) sides" are in it, together. The most Republicans will say about the handouts is they need to be managed better. Democrats don't say a word against forever war, however. They're the two sides of the same coin, as far as this libertarian-type is concerned.
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Trump made a huge mistake, believing guys like Fauci without doing his due diligence. I don't think it occurred to him how corrupt and unscientific the whole process was. He was desperate to open things up, but he couldn't use force. The ONE thing he could push ahead was the development of what the "experts" told him was hope of a cure.
Even with Warp Speed, I don't think Trump would've mandated people take the vax or even tried to mandate it. Warp Speed brought the Defense Department into the picture. Joe Biden's inauguration marked the weaponization of the whole thing, with Defense Department backing. They also had the backing of all federal agencies, so they were more than happy to go after Christians who wanted to go to church or meet with one another. They even busted churches who held their ceremonies in the church parking lot, using their radios and a low-power broadcast.
Warp Speed - and how the media would spin it - was Trump's biggest weakness, because it split the base. This was why I wanted someone like Ben Carson or Vivek Ramaswamy or RFK, Jr. These guys have guts and smarts. I was actually worried about turnout by Republicans, because so many of us felt that Trump mishandled the crisis, trying his best to get re-elected.
Luckily for Trump, no matter how bad he was, the Democrat alternative was clearly insane and nihilistic. The Democrat alternative was destroying the middle class at a record-setting pace. The Democrat alternative was telling boys and girls that "boys and girls are not a thing." The Democrat alternative was saying "Sure. We want our kids to be read stories by men in dresses, with convicted child abusers in the wings."
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Here's A counter to the alarm:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/22/ocean-global-warming-is-not-actually-global-at-all/
It seems that Indian Ocean and South Atlantic are where the greatest jump is obtained. Interesting to note that they didn't get the bad-ass Argos monitoring system that went to DEPTH. Basically the IPCC itself says that our ocean-temp measurements before 2003 were worthless, because surface temps tell us little about the heat in the larger column of water. But yeah, if they're NOW saying that it's warmer, and not just at the surface, that's significant.
In the article cited, above, they say that the increase in 1/3 of the the planet's waters and not in the other 2/3 (most of the Atlantic and Pacific) makes it hard to argue that the apparent increase is due to global CO2, else the temperature increase would be universally measured, and not just in 1/3 of the region measured. It might be an indicator of geothermal causes unrelated to the teeny tiny atmosphere that forms a thin-as-gossamer shell around a pretty good-sized planet. We know we're big. But we also know we're not THAT big.
The oceans are a major buffer against atmospheric change. If they're taking a lot of heat out of the system, then it gives the alarmist view longer legs, fer sherz. But the only path I see to reducing emissions is middle-classing the shit out of the planet. Western democracies curbing their pop growth, naturally, due to prosperity and selfishness? Isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't we want to export that, rather than import a bunch of people who haven't learned, yet, while more people like them continue to be generated under their backwards, non-person-respecting governments back home?
What's the path to prosperity? Fossil fuels. Want to reduce emissions? Get that woman in Sri Lanka some gulldurn propane! Right now, she's cooking over a wood fire, and breathing that shit and making all her neighbors breathe that shit. Meanwhile, Western democracies can start worrying about falling birth rates when the USA gets down to, say, 100 million souls. Meanwhile, encourage S. American countries to respect their people's rights to persons and property, and enforce the rule of just law. Prosperity and free trade will do the rest, and in another 30 years, they'll be prosperous enough that children are more burden than retirement plan, and birth rates will fall in THOSE countries like they have in ours.
There's really nothing wrong with how we live. We're just encouraged to breed like rabbits by governments that sup off our blood and sweat. Why must we over-produce? To pay taxes to government just for breathing or daring to occupy some actual ground that we can call ours and maybe grow some food.
And then, the one Jimmy Dore can agree with me on: Our war machine consumes fuel like nobody's business. Scale that shit back, too. Minimum necessary to DEFEND us. No more regime change. No more Iraqi Freedom or Libyan Slavery (Weren't those the slogans for the two 'regime changes?')
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This is the USA. You don't tear down a statue of Jefferson Davis. You put up a same-scale statue of Frederick Douglas, who towered over Davis, right next to the Davis statue. We don't hide from our history. We expand on it, learn more about it, show more about it.
Tearing down statues and banning/burning books is what Nazis and violent communists do.
In my opinion, slavery was on its way out, regardless. But we found the most bloody and upper-class-enriching way of going about ending it. There wouldn't have been a war at all if the Northern factory owners weren't pissed off that the cotton from down South was being sold to the UK, which offered better prices for cotton and made better finished products than USA factories. And if the North really meant well, why didn't the former slaves all get their 40 acres and a mule?
Instead, they did a federal "reconstruction program" wherein carpetbaggers from the North bought up prime real estate in the South for 10 cents on the dollar. And did the plight of African-Americans really improve that much or did they just paint lipstick on a pig, making field hands into sharecroppers, like serfs of old, which is pretty much the same as slavery, only the land owner just kicks you off your land if he doesn't like you or you piss him off, leaving you with less security and scant little freedom, as a practical matter.
And who fought and died in the Civil War? Poor people from North and South, once again settling beefs between rich mofos on both sides of the conflict. MOST people in the South neither owned slaves nor looked down on African-descended Americans as lesser than themselves.
I think they should've let a few Southern states go ahead and secede. They would've come around in less than a generation, as all the states around them prospered and stopped respecting ANY of their illegal property rights to other human beings. The Underground Railroad would've become an interstate highway to freedom, and nothing the South could've done about it. Instead, 99% of those who fought and died never owned slaves. 90% of the soldiers from the South weren't defending slavery, but were defending their state's sovereignty against Northerners who were more racist than they were!
I'd rather see a model of the USA that's open to other semi-sovereign states join, if they want, and enjoy our protection as long as they respect the rights of THEIR citizens. And let them secede if it isn't working out for them. But we stick with the 50 states, insist they all remain, and don't even talk about other countries/states joining us for mutual protection. We should never be in wars of defense or aggression on behalf of other sovereign nations. We should only defend our country, and let other countries join our union if they wish. But never hold a state against its will.
The primacy of the federal government is too great. It should just do the basics and let the states run their own affairs, as long as they follow the U.S. Constitution. There's your Med-4-All Jimmy. Let individual states adopt it and make it work for THEM, if they can make it work. Imposing it from the top down will be a disaster. North Dakota and New York State are like two different universes. Hell, upstate New York and New York City are like two different universes. One rule set for all? Needs to be very basic rule set, with wide discretion for each individual member state how they want to run things. If your Med-4-All is so great, then the states will learn how to do it from each other. If it's not, we're way more likely to find a better model with 50 simultaneous experiments underway.
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It's always been like this with the right. I remember voting Republican in the '80s, because I'm a hard-core limited-government guy, and most of the people who were voting Republican that I knew were very regressive in their thinking.
All my liberal friends voted for the wrong guy for the right reasons.
All my conservative friends voted for the right guy for the wrong reasons.
Only I, of all people on the planet, ever voted for the right guy for the right reasons (is what I thought).
I liked hanging out with the liberals. They threw better parties and had better drugs. We could hold debates and still be friends. That lasted until the Obama administration, when the left went crazy with the identity politics and so freaked out about Donald Trump that they simply couldn't be reasoned with.
You guys are kind of the "sane liberals," even though you still haven't dealt with the cognitive dissonance you experience every day, when you insist the government do MORE while at the same time fighting for liberty. Your left hand and your right hand are in an arm-wrestling match of which you are blithely unaware.
My conservative friends resented "freeloaders." They voted Republican because they despised welfare recipients.
Me, I saw the slippery slope we were on, back then. It wasn't the "freeloaders" I was worried about. I was worried about the bureaucrats who wanted to run their lives. I know my history, and I know how the welfare state was the thin edge of the wedge for German fascism.
Free medical and free education aren't to HELP the people. They're part of a system of CONTROL. Control health care (loyalty for life!) and education (indoctrinate the (Hitler) youth!), you have yourself a captive population, and we're seeing that play out in real-time, today, with more government overreach with each passing day.
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People age differently. You'd be surprised at how many people in their 70s and 80s want a job of some sort. Lots of people die not long after retiring, because they no longer feel useful. My mom's 85, and it's a shit situation for me to be laid up, but she perked up like you wouldn't believe, when she could help me out coming over to stay for a few weeks and cooking for me.
When I get older, I'll probably want a relatively easy, part-time job, not so much for the money, but to keep my mind sharp. Otherwise, I'd probably smoke and drink myself to death in a year or two. But it's nice to have an easy job that you're not at ALL worried about being fired from.
My point is that these stories aren't necessarily elder abuse. But when an elderly person is still working in their 70s because they have no choice and they HATE it, it's heartbreaking.
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Look at how the big operations already mess with voices they don't like.
IMHO, pushing net neutrality in the name of fairness may only cement the big boys on top, with a heavy-handed government fucking things up for the little guy. In the ABSENCE of a big government presence, I think there's a better chance of outfits who treat people WELL to compete.
Net neutrality needs to be a SELLING point, and let the people vote with their money.
The best way to fight motherfuckers is to encourage new business models to prosper, than to impose what's "right" by force, from on high.
I DO believe you should be able to access whatever you want, but I think that in the long run, leaving it up to people to decide as consumers (free traders!), without interference, is the best thing for REAL net neutrality.
This means rather than waiting with bated breath for the next move from the FCC, we should simply look for better vendors. TELL vendors what you want and expect. They LOVE to survey people, right?
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Pfizer wouldn't be free from threats of being sued if not for a MASSIVE government intervention. That same government that Jimmy insists should run our health care.
Cognitive dissonance much, Jimmy? Liberty is the way out of this quagmire, not more government.
You want all the healthy people to foot the bill for all the unhealthy people, regardless of the decisions made by the unhealthy people. In a situation like that, health care costs go through the roof, because the irresponsible people get a blank check. That's when you progressives - to perfect your socialist schemes - will turn full-on authoritarian, because if the government is paying and people are abusing the system, then we need to cut them off or somehow hold them accountable, so more government intrusion. We'll outlaw everything that's bad for you.
"Liberals" think this is OK. We'll just make people live healthy.
What's the answer? Make everyone responsible for themselves and encourage people to be charitable. It's not perfect. but your way is tyranny and bad health, which we've seen plenty of, but you don't see it. You think that bureaucrats can be made into instant geniuses and instant saints, so we only have perfect people telling everyone what to do. sigh
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I think the missile launches were more show than anything else. Big show. Lots of bang and boom. But they gave plenty of warning, warned people out of the area. People got out of the area, and big show.
Possibly (Yeah, it's a reach.), he was throwing Deep State a bone. But rather than feeding Isis just to fuck with Syria (and Russia), he basically said "You're on your own." That's a major departure from feeding rebels false hopes, just so you can see them kill your enemies and get killed in the process. It makes sense, in a totally Machiavellian way, but is not a moral policy for use to be pursuing, which is why I like Jimmy Dore.
I just don't see how meddling with other countries' internal politics - even seeking regime change - is very moral. And it always blows back on us a year or two or ten down the road, when things get "so bad" that we are then JUSTIFIED in more stupid shit.
Obama didn't put on any big shows. He just quietly dumped tons of bombs with non-stop drone attacks, and kept things stirred up.
I may not like Syria, but I'm glad we seem to be going through the herky-jerky motions of getting the hell out.
Only time will tell how much is Trump just being another style of pawn or if he actually disengages us, over time, from a lot of our Cold War mentality.
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Schellenberger's still deluded, just like all so-called "liberals," because he believes that we can have nanny government take care of us and we can still be free. So you guys rail against censorship and authoritarianism, but you're the guys who brought it to us, by insisting that government care for us from cradle to grave.
That's serfdom, fellas, no matter how you dress it up or lie to yourselves. You want your cake and to eat it too. You want Free Stuff and you want to be free. That's not how the universe works. You create these enormous bureaucracies to run everything and then you're all pissed-off because bureaucrats are trying to run everything by diktat.
Don't like what the FDA's doing? Liberals wanted the agency to have the powers it quite predictably abuses. Then they act all shocked and surprised, when anyone with any understanding of history could've predicted this is where we'd end up. In fact, we DID predict this, and you scoffed at us.
These problems are of your own making, and you will be stuck on a wheel of treating symptoms without treating the disease. The disease is making the mistake of believing that the state is your source of well-being. The state doesn't care about you. The state cares about the state, and is jealous of power and always seeking to expand its power. It's the nature of the beast.
You welcomed the beast into your home and now you're crying because it tore up your living room!
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@IntensitaliansDick : You don't know many libertarians, then, fool. I'm a libertarian and I help people AND pay taxes that hurt my ability to help more people. Progressives love to virtue-signal on somebody else's dime. Conservatives contribute far more of their wealth to charity, voluntarily, than libtards who TALK a good game, but use every trick in the book to avoid paying more taxes. The worst are the super-wealthy libtards, who talk about raising taxes on everybody but won't voluntarily part with one nickel of their OWN money.
You guys see the golden goose represented by my paycheck and set out to GUT IT for the gold, inside.
You guys bitch about abuse of power by careerist politicians and bureaucrats, and then you turn right around and say "Let's give government MORE power!" What could go wrong? Feeding the dragon is fun, and then you get to whine about getting burned, totally un-self-aware of your own hand in the abuses you see.
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@Deargodwhat : Seeing this, did it ever occur to you to NOT give those bastards in government as much power as you insist on giving them? Did it ever occur to you that the government regulations and regulators you guys always scream for are the REASON things are as crazy as they are? Did it occur to you that the USDA and the FDA are the reason why only fake-organic foods at the grocery store produced by big-corporate (non-organic) farms get the label "organic," while the REAL organic farmer, just down the road from you can't even sell his 100% organic crops as "organic?"
The list is endless. Everything you guys think you're going to "solve" by government intervention becomes a chronic problem the minute we put 5 guys in Washington in charge of it? Those 5 guys will all be bribed, coerced, or otherwise manipulated to do the bidding of the most corrupt asshole in whatever business it is they're regulating. In a Free Market, in which none of you assholes believe, trust and your good reputation set a far higher standard than government minimums.
Housing construction is regulated up the ying-yang. That's why so many foundations leak, nowadays. Think about the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel. Very highly regulated industry. Substandard construction, signed-off on by a bought-and-paid-for bureaucrat they call a "building inspector."
You guys seek the appearance of perfection, and abandon what's good or BETTER. The EPA won't sign off on a rocket-stove mass heater, so the only way to burn wood at 90% higher efficiency is to build it, yourself, or with the help of volunteers. They probably don't MEAN to be anti-environment, but they're fuckin' bureaucrats and the rules say 300 degrees Fahrenheit at the roof line or not approved. So harvesting ALL the heat from a 45-minute burn that is cleaner than ANY government-approved wood-burning device is against federal regulations.
We see it over and over. Monsanto sues a farmer because their GMO pollen was blown over his crops. He didn't ask for GMO pollen, didn't WANT GMO pollen, but he is at fault, because he's violating Monsanto's patent. Shit like that goes on all the time. You clean the garbage and junk off the vacant lot next door and they slap you with a fine for disturbing a wetlands.
You guys push endlessly for big government, blissfully unaware that big government is the only way robber barons can prosper in perpetuity without fear of competition from little guys. Then you rail against corporations. Then you push for higher corporate and capital-gains taxes, which are always passed on to the consumer - US - and restrict the ability and willingness of anybody to take a risk on a venture that could actually provide JOBS. You guys are too busy dividing-up the wealth that you already see, to understand where it comes from or why that wealth always vanishes when you guys get your way.
Your narrative > reality. Feels good to talk about all the people "you" are helping, when really you're just sucking the prosperity and autonomy of everyone around you.
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Last I checked, the tax cut gave us a bump in revenue, the same way a price cut can increase your profits.
You knuckleheads may not know this, but Colorado wanted to help fish and game by X amount, so they jacked up the price of out-of-state hunting licenses by the desired amount. Revenues plummeted, because out-of-staters stopped buying the licenses, because they were so damn expensive. Same deal with things like capital-gains taxes, which never hurt big business, directly, because they just pass on the cost to consumers that you knuckleheads think you're helping. But it does stop people taking risks, because the returns are smaller.
But I'll agree 100% on the SPENDING side. Trump's military spending might be the only reason the Deep State is letting him live.
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The fact is, right or wrong, we made ourselves dependent on Chinese products. I think we should wean ourselves off a good bit of it, but not before we know what we're going to replace their products with. But we don't need a trade war and we certainly don't need a hot war with ANY major power or super power, especially in their back yard, which is where the USA does all its fighting, which makes the people a lot more OK with what they're doing, like the French people were when Napoleon Bonaparte was dominating the continent.
They weren't bad people. They were just told that it was the "right thing to do," "Isn't Bonaparte charismatic?" and most of all "There's nothing anybody can do to stop us." They enjoyed some great economic benefits from the spoils of Europe, and so they didn't ask many questions about right or wrong, because things were good and seemingly going to keep getting better, forever...
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@stanspb763 Russia is more like America used to be than America is, now. They're even openly and aggressively Christian. I think it's a culture war they're fighting with Islam. They want traditional Christian values as a counter-weight to Islam, and it appears to be working.
I think it's sheer pragmatism on the part of Putin's government. The "traditional Russian Orthodox" angle also gives them historical claims to parts of Turkey they want, in order to lay claim to Mediterranean beachfront property, which Russia has been denied by Western Europe for centuries and by the USA and NATO for the past 80 years.
Russia is also on a sound financial footing, by most accounts. Basically a gold-standard currency, budget surpluses, etc. They don't waste money on the sex life of the snail darter or bringing LGBT and transgender messages to Pakistan. Yes. Our country is spending money to "liberalize" Pakistan.
I'd be interested in knowing how the quality of health care is in Russia. It was terrible under the Soviets. Nobody wanted to be a doctor, because socialist promises always end up cheating someone, and in the USSR, they cheated the doctors. Most doctors dreamed of being farmers.
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"I hate the fact that you're not socialist enough. We need MORE government! I'm done with the Democrats."
You realize that the infrastructure and control systems associated with your socialist utopia are EXACTLY what a would-be tyrant would want in place to become fully authoritarian, don't you? No. Obviously, you do not.
Look at the history of Germany. You know one of the biggest reasons the people embraced the Nazis was because of generations of free health care and education, don't you? The people got used to being taken care of, and that their obedience and loyalty to the state was considered their duty, don't you? You realize that government-run education was the primary means of indoctrinating the young people into Nazism, don't you?
You're right about so much, Jimmy. You see the abuse of power, but you insanely think the problem is the government doesn't have enough power. You're always shocked and surprised, like Charlie Brown, when you discover the people you gave all that power to are not saints, and they're USING the power you insist on giving them to create tyranny.
You see the symptoms, but you never see the underlying issue, which is giving these SOBs responsibility for your well-being. With that responsibility comes AUTHORITY. You want authority over your own life? You tired of being censored, de-platformed, and de-banked? Quit asking the government to take care of you! You're just asking for the worst people to end up with power over you, if not today, then tomorrow.
And now we're in the "tomorrow" stage, and you still don't get it.
"We don't trust you! You're corrupt! Now give us more stuff!" Fools.
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@warriorwaitress7690 : He'll dramatize the situation to make his point, sometimes overly so. Sometimes with a snide sarcasm, as well. The thing is, people like you want to have open arms for everybody, but you're making promises to those people with OTHER people's money and often safety, for affected areas along the border. I can't imagine living along some of those corridors without high fences, big dogs, and a gun to hand, anywhere on the property. Communities ARE under siege in some areas, and it's all part of the virtue-signaling WITHOUT A FREAKING PLAN. So the people delegated to actually DEAL with those people are absolutely overwhelmed. Not to mention our medical establishments, who drop everything to deal with these nonpaying emergency cases. Are YOU sending $1000/month check to one of the affected hospitals, or is that just their problem?
This is why there's a HUGE nationalist-populist movement going on in Europe as we speak. Uncontrolled immigration has caused great unrest and upset, because their social services are strained to the breaking point. They really didn't (and still aren't) prepare(d) for the burdens they were placing on themselves by accepting all the refugees. The U.S. is much bigger than the current x-many-thousand illegals who come in each year, compared to the size of the Euro countries and the numbers THEY've allowed in. But it's still a real problem for America.
Stemming the flow of illegals would be the best jobs program, ever, for underprivileged, under-trained working poor already living here. There's an illegal, packed with 10 others in one small house, who can TAKE $30 a day, but you need at least $50 a day, minimum, to keep your family in an apartment, and that's if the missus works, too.
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Knocked it out of the park. If FB is a publisher, they can cull their content any way they wish, AND bear the consequences (lawsuits!) when they get it wrong. The ONLY way they can avoid bearing full responsibility for ALL content is if they are the PLATFORM they claim to be. If they're a PLATFORM they can't shut ANYbody down.
Is the phone company responsible for YOUR conversations? No. They're just a platform. You'd be outraged if they listened to your conversations and decided what conversations they would allow and which they wouldn't.
Alex Jones just relays information. Some good. Some bad. I don't think he ever deliberately puts out bad info, but he definitely will rush to get stuff that comes across his desk out in the public square. When it's crap, call him out - and many do. But sometimes, he's 6 months or a year ahead of the wave, with last year's debunked story being confirmed, reluctantly, by mainstream media when something happens that forces them to cover it.
Alex has been pushing pedophile ring stories, predicting mass arrests of human traffickers and sex traffickers. Now we come to find out that some really big names have been falling like dominoes. 4,000 arrests and counting. And a lot of illegal border crossers are MAJOR human traffickers. Our Southern Border is the main pipeline for human trafficking into our country.
Now let's go down the rabbit hole a little farther and ask ourselves "Why the big push to abolish ICE?" While they're busting a major child sex ring, Antifa and their fellow travelers are out front, PROTESTING ICE. Coincidence? Maybe. But ICE is our main weapon against the international sex and human trafficking trade on the North American continent. And did anybody notice how quickly the Schumers, Pelosis and every dumb-ass liberal took up the refrain AGAINST ICE at about exactly the same time? And not 2 years after making impassioned speeches about reforming and IMPROVING our immigration enforcement?
Nobody gave a FUCK about children separated from their parents under the previous 2 administrations. Hell, they even used pictures of such children under the Obama administration to demonize Trump! It's like Global Warming. As soon as the hockey stick is proven to be a fabrication and that global temperatures have leveled-off, they pivot OVERNIGHT to "Climate Change," with all the same stupid policy proposals on CO2 reductions that EVERYONE - EVEN THE PROPOSERS - admit will have negligible effect on climate. And all the policy proposals are anti-U.S., anti the poor and weak (the proposals invariably jack up the cost of energy, which hurts our weakest citizens, which MIGHT be acceptable if it weren't perfectly well known that the policies just push money around (into Al Gore's pockets, in particular), to no real purpose!
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When Shapiro first became prominent, it was pretty glorious watching him shred low-information progressives. But from the start, I was suspicious of his neocon tendencies and Zionist positions. Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and most of the Daily Wire crew are all Zionist. I respect Jewish culture and tradition. They're an asset to most societies. As with any group, there are bad apples and people who believe crazy stuff.
I'm sorry, but the defeat of Adolf Hitler did not justify the creation of an apartheid ethno-state by force, with backing from abroad. Say what you will about Muslims and Arabs. Our creation of and use of Israel as a proxy in the Middle East is shameful and has cost the lives of millions, at great financial cost to the USA.
Every "victory" is just a worse defeat beckoning from the future. You don't do wrong to do right, no matter how right you think you are or your cause is. "By their fruits shall you know them." The fruits of the Israel Project are oppression, apartheid, war, and genocide. We're storing up a lot of bad karma in our arrogance, and I just hope the whole world grows a brain and a moral compass to put an end to forever war.
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He's never spoken truth to power. He's always shilled for big government and cradle-to-grave government intervention. Kind of like all you so-called "progressives." You know what they call a system that cares for everyone? We call it "serfdom." Your Lords and Ladies will run your life for your own good, whether you like it or not, and in return, they will enjoy special privileges that you don't. You will get whatever it pleases them to give you, and you BETTER be grateful! If not, you BETTER keep your mouth shut!
We call them "public servants" and "public officials," but really they're just re-branded Lords and Ladies. Fauci was a little king. The heads of all agencies are the equivalent earls and barons. When the mask slips, they say things like "I am the science." Malignant narcissists in all those top spots. None of them face any negative consequences for their bad decisions.
I wish you liberty-minded progressives would wake up and realize you're feeding the monster that you despise. Just running around chasing your tails, without ever once stopping to think about the people you're empowering to do real harm, with the Authority YOU insist they be given. When you make the state responsible for anything, you give the state authority over that thing, and authority over YOU in ways you can't imagine.
Your ends are noble. Your means (the state) will never get you where you want to get. Work locally to make YOUR corner of the world a better place, yourself, and be content.
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Breaking up these companies by force is putting your trust in another small group of people. FaceBook and Google were baisically government-backed to start with. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of their excesses were for the express purpose of causing an outcry so that government will regulate them like a utility, thereby cementing their monopoly position on top of the heap, forever. Government is doing NOTHING to control FaceBook, and FaceBook is losing their ass, because people just up and walked away.
The same thing's gonna happen to YouTube, if they keep up THEIR shit. De-platform all the sincere conservatives and progressives and we'll find other platforms, and YouTube will lose ITS ass.
It's harder to imagine this with Google, itself, it's such a big monolith. But back in the early 20th Century, they couldn't IMAGINE there being more than a handful of networks (radio or television) and that was the excuse for building the highly regulated monolithic "mainstream media" that we ALL know are just front men for big corporations and government. It was because they were SURE that the airwaves would become clogged with so many stations that they had to CONTROL how many people GOT a channel and what they could do with it.
Maybe all it will take is somebody suing Google for various bits and pieces of the data they collect and keep to themselves. Maybe it'll be a small outfit that does online shopping, LOCALLY, to out-compete Amazon. I use my Instacart all the time, and they send a shopper to the grocery store and pick up groceries for me for a small fee. Much less than my time is worth that I'd spend actually going myself, so well worth it to me. If Amazon.com gets fat and bloated and abusive and inefficient, I can see the Instacarts branching out into other products, and slowly replacing Amazon.com in small ways, and a jillion other companies nibbling at the edges.
"Monopoly" in itself isn't bad, unless it starts misbehaving. THAT's when it's bad. And there are market forces that can and will act against it when it starts fucking up, unless you protect the monopoly with government laws and regulations that ALWAYS end up doing more to deny entry into the marketplace by competitors.
Comcast is slow as fuck putting in fiber optic to a LOT of places. Start regulating it as a utility and I know it'll NEVER bring fiber-optic to MY neck of the woods, and they'll make it nearly impossible for anybody else to break in and do it before them. The cable industries already have most of the county officials bought and paid for, to prevent anyone else from coming in. But that's not a problem of monopoly. It's a problem of government bureaucrats abusing their power. And how do you think those big moguls got to BE big moguls? Buying off politicians!
That's not capitalism. It's fascism. Government stepping in where it doesn't belong and controlling shit it has no business controlling. And we fall for it every time, even though we know that the average politician and city and state bureaucrat is LESS trustworthy than the average citizen!
Amazon.com stretching tentacles into print media (WaPo) has an easy solution: Stop buying or reading the Washington Post.
Government regulation always ends up concentrating the power. FAA came along and we went from 100s of independent airlines to a handful of too-big-to-fail companies that the government could then step in a bail out without anybody batting an eye. Same with the big banking bail-out under Obama. We regulate the SHIT out of banks, and no surprise, they all coalesce into one banking mega-beast. The more we do to control them, the bigger and more powerful they get. And it's mainly because people don't understand how the use of government power and how easy it is to control EVERYbody by just bribing or corrupting a handful of assholes in key positions in government, from the City Council on up to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Let these bastards keep abusing their power. As long as government stays out of it, the people are free to buy from somebody else. And they will. When you look at most of the robber baron bullshit of the past, the government never did ANYthing until the public was already turning their backs on the octopi, and that's assuming it wasn't government officials giving the robber barons an unfair advantage at the very beginning. The government "regulators" ended up in the hip pockets of the regulated. That $500,000 fine from the EPA is just the cost of doing business to a BIG company. But it will destroy a small business, and, chances are, the small business wasn't really doing anything wrong, but the big company helped write the regulation that took them down.
You see it in Congress all the time. They pass laws regulating an industry and who do you think they ask HOW to regulate those industries? That's right. The richest lobbyists FROM those industries! Be careful what you ask for! They create an agency to control an industry and then you're surprised when you see a revolving door from the top echelons of that industry to the regulatory agency. Then you scratch your head and wonder how things got so bad, when MAYBE if you kept the fuckin' politicians OUT of it, the PEOPLE would use their purchasing power and their voices to call out the bullshit and to find alternatives.
These monopolies get fat from no competition, and they end up with incompetent twits running the show, and THAT'S what opens them up to better alternatives from competitors. The only way to shut DOWN those competitors is to shield the monopolies WITH government. Why do you think public schools suck so bad? And it's all in the name of curbing the fat cats, and the fat cats cry all the way to the bank.
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With the communications and transportation we have available to us, now, the people have never been more in the driver's seat in all of history, and we're being sold a bill of goods that we are somehow helpless and need more government, right when the biggest drag on the people IS the government. Do you think we, the people, would ever DREAM of dropping bombs on Iraq, Syria, Libya, ....? Think about it. We're entering an era where transparency is every bit as much a sword in the hand of the PEOPLE as it is for the elites who would rule us. This is the biggest problem with progressives. They think they're helpless, when they're NOT.
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I'm a big fan of helping people. I'm not a big fan of government doing it.
Every time people push for more federal programs, what you're really seeing is the privileged classes slamming the door behind them. What the poor need and want more than anything is an opportunity-rich environment, and every single government program creates one more hurdle, one more bull$hit form to fill out, one more requirement your Mom & Pop has to satisfy, to keep the regulators happy.
"What? You don't have wheelchair ramps? Too bad. You need them, or we'll fine you and shut you down."
"What? You can't afford to hire somebody to spray antiseptic on everything and run around the place with a roll of paper towels? (COVID nonsense) We're gonna have to shut you down."
"What? You give a guy a cot in back and $20 a day to help out? That's illegal." (The guy was living on the street and that cot was way better than the shelter full of drug addicts)
"What? You're not paying this teenager with his first job $15 an hour? We're shutting you down."
All the political solutions do is get in the way of our helping one another and caring better for ourselves. Also, they make us all hostages to the popularity-contest winner's idea of a solution, when solutions are going to be different for different people, and you visit every mistake the politician makes on everyone at once, instead of a more "free market" which would reward and punish according to the wisdom and hard work of the individuals involved.
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Genocide or not, the creation of the State of Israel, by force, in 1948, created a situation where a foreign-sponsored nation would be eternally at odds with its neighbors. No matter how "morally" Israel defends itself, there will be war, violence, and famine as long as it continues.
The establishment is desperate to pursue a sunk-cost fallacy, a sacred cow, that is an artifact of British imperialism (USA picked up where UK left off).
Everyone points to the Balfour Declaration, but Britain made MANY such declarations/promises to ethnic groups throughout the region, in return for fighting as proxies for Britain against the Ottoman Empire. World War I was very good for Britain. They knocked out their only rival in the Middle East and their biggest rival in Europe, with American help. This propped up a functional empire, even as the British Empire was falling apart, outwardly.
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Nationalizing oil sounds good to a socialist/progressive, but you just end up replacing oil companies with government bureaucrats, who make up the rules as they go along. If a company pollutes too much, it can cost them everything. If the government pollutes too much, you get an "... and that's a GOOD thing" speech.
You know what makes the oil in the ground worth something? Somebody investing in extracting and refining it. You know. Like a business. When you put the government in charge of producing something, quality and quantity both go down. You can keep prices down, indefinitely, if nobody notices that the government makes up the difference by taxing everybody - or worse - borrowing.
Everybody thinks it's cheaper, because they don't notice all the hidden costs they're paying. That's the nature of government intervention. Parade the people you help in front of the cameras, but hurt everybody a little bit to make those photo ops possible. Those little hurts add up, but they're so spread out, the government escapes blame. Meanwhile, grandma's buying cat food because she can't afford tuna.
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War was a lot tougher to push us into, until the establishment took over all narratives through the back door, with Fairness Doctrine, and a small number of major outlets that big money and big government controlled by controlling a handful of people at the top of those major outlets.
What really HELPS the establishment is free public education, which indoctrinates our youth, and gets the policies they want from the votes of the indoctrinated.
To break out, getting rid of Fairness Doctrine was key. Like Abby Martin's saying, only I distrust her big-government mind set. Big government will NEVER behave itself. Quit kidding yourselves, Progressives, and push for max freedom. Max mobility into media market by competing ideas. People distrust the chaos on the current Internet, but the fact is, nobody's going unchallenged, any more, and Internet forums allow for WAY more nuanced discussions.
Jimmy Dore's just one example. But other voices are providing a far superior product to the commercial-tv outlets, trapped into their paradigm. Nobody likes what "the other side" says, and a lot of people want to see those "divisive" voices silenced, depending on what side they're on. But we NEED ALL VOICES, and something closer to the truth will emerge.
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You obviously haven't seen as many married couples in operation as I have. It's WAY more 50-50 than you think! Women have forgotten their half of the contract made with men long ago, for the survival and procreation of the species. A lot of the rules that women don't like were put in place to drive us men to be stupid-hard-workin' and stupid-brave on their woman's behalf. I see it in couples, all the time, where each gives just a little more than they have to, and they're both very pleased with the whole arrangement.
For instance, she drives on dirt roads one day, and the next she has to work, so her husband washes her car, because he knows she doesn't like gettin' done-up for work and showing up in a mud-covered vehicle. Not something she asked. Just something he knows she would appreciate.
She takes the trouble to start up an herb garden, and their meals are seasoned from the ground beside the house. He knows just what she wants at the store and he gets it on his way home. Or vice versa. Things are becoming more fluid, and that's OK. People are so uptight.
I'm seeing, now, where divorced couples are doing 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off, too, which is pretty cool schedule to be on. You're with your kid, 24/7 for two weeks and then you're off working for 2 weeks, while the kid(s) stay with the other partner. You get a lot more quality time with your kids when you're OFF for 2 weeks straight. You start itchin' to be out after 2 weeks. Then you start missin' 'em after 2 weeks.
It depends on your perspective. Did the bad guy just kill the good guy and rape the girl, or did the girl trick 2 men into fighting to the death over her, so she could keep the better fighter, because she DGAF about either one, but wants the bad-ass in her bed, and a tougher baby in her belly?
I mean, you can read Shogun and think that it's all about male dominance, but Mariko went to bed with Richard Chamberlain (quite the heartthrob in USA at the time), and decided the war for the good guys. She was as good a fighter as any man, but in a 1-on-1, she'd eventually tire out, and was as good a swordsman as probably 80% of the Samurai of her time. She was the most accomplished and well-rounded character, save Toranaga (Ieyasu Tokugawa), with the purest of motives. Master of 4 or 5 languages, renowned poet. People say there aren't enough female leads, but the Mariko character was THE hero of the book.
In between all the male strutting, Mariko could get close to ANYbody, because of her pedigree and womanhood. This made her a deadly assassin. She had the greatest warrior/general in the country wrapped around her little finger. And she cucked him to sleep with Blackthorne (the Chamberlain character in the Hollywood series). And stayed his hand when he would've slain the adulterous sailor.
And the fact remains, that until buff females start a new generation of bigger, tougher women, anything athletic is going to be male-dominated by genetics. And until crazy men start implanting wombs in themselves, none of us are gonna be carrying a baby inside of us. Rape of a man is an awful thing, but a rapist planting his child inside a woman by force is possibly the cruelest crime of all. One woman described a fetus as a form of parasite that you choose to feed or not kill, as it is inside of your body.
Kind of a weird way of looking at it, but as long as that baby's inside of her, I'm not sure you can say society has any say. I think there's a STRONG cultural bias against seeing a pregnant woman smoke or drink or do drugs. Society only recognizes citizens. And babies, so far, only issue from biological women. And as long as we're on the Japanese theme, I don't think the Japanese during "Shogun"s period gave a baby a name for something like 5 or 9 days, while the decision was being made whether to keep the child. If it had serious issues, they may or may not choose to keep it, often depending on how badly the father thought he needed a male heir. Girls were fine, as they could be married to other <i>daimyo</i>s. Girls got trained just like the boys, but separately. Seems like the women are subservient, but their sons would inherit their husband's estates, so all kids were good. But a man still needed a male heir.
I'm not arguing for medieval Japanese ways of doing things, although they were very clean, very good with burns, drank tea, and slept under mosquito nets, so they were well-adapted to the conditions of their day. Their only flaw was they didn't make silk like the Chinese, and they needed silk. So a lot of gold from Japan to China for silk for a very long time.
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Here's the dirty little secret of YouTube: There isn't enough advertising revenue for them to keep all their promises to content creators. If they don't find excuses to de-monetize and shadow-ban a huge chunk of content creators, YouTube loses a TON of money.
So at the root of all this is YouTube consumers refusing to pay for the content they consume.
As for Fauci, keep in mind, progressives, that he is EXACTLY the kind of guy who would be running your wonderful Med4All program: somebody who would lie to your face for some "higher purpose." Do you realize how many "ends-justify-the-means" motherfuckers end up in the highest civil service posts? Do you think Med4All would be any different? Even if it's set up PERFECTLY (which no one really knows how to do), the corruption would set in and within a couple of years, the political in-fighters, lobbyists, and incompetent career-bureaucracy "climbers" will run everybody's health care.
We see how the CDC got it wrong. Repeatedly. But you want these people deciding from Washington, D.C. whether or not your treatment will be approved, and not only that, who and how you are treated... "Yes, it was her turn for a kidney, but Politician X's or Bureaucrat Y's survival is more important to the collective than some faceless worker such as yourself.
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Capitalist class causing hyperinflation? No. More like, Maduro's approach is Ocasio-Cortez's: We'll print however much we need to do what we want.
Forbes published an article in 2014 that seemed to cover how Chavez and his successor, Maduro, just saw the oil as a cash cow, and it's more like rainy day money. Due to the difficulty of extracting and refining that thick crude they have, they need the price of oil to be at least $100 per barrel. Or they did, in 2014, when the article was written. Two oil companies that wouldn't go along with Chavez got nationalized, if my understanding is correct, and Chavez got on the wrong side of the people with the expertise to handle Venezuela's unique situation.
The writer said that the Venezuelan president(s) didn't understand how much up-front money, time, and technology it took to keep the oil flowing. And it's more of a long game, because you want to be selling when the price is high.
Something no one talks about is how invested the Chinese and Russians are in Venezuela. Part of why Venezuela had any oil money was all the eager investors, willing to jump in with both feet and get the oil flowing. And with prices what they were, they generated a lot of revenue. The socialist president saw all that revenue and started acting on his promises. Everybody was thrilled. But after the current slug of oil was tapped and they needed to develop more, the money wasn't there, and production dropped off. The "evil frackers" like it at or above $90 a barrel, which is on the low end of profitability for Venezuela. Basically, they overspent, I think.
That's what happens. Anyhoo, they were having problems clear back when Hollywood thought Trump was a Democrat.
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The Russians and Chinese probably have a right to be kinda pissed, right now. Maduro's the guy they made their deals with. The Russians, I know, have a lot invested, and some number of properties and installations become theirs, if Venezuela can't pay her bills, or there's a radical change of government. They can't like the American saber rattling. They can't like seeing Abrams, Bolton and Pompeo in Trump's circle.
I half believe that the neocons who appear to be influencing Bad Orange Man are only there for posturing and bargaining purposes. Trump may be the greatest salesman of all time. And a good salesman will tell you 'most anything to hear you say "Yes," in return.
Ask for the moon and the stars, and "settle" for a stack of gold bars.
That's what he does. He'll be adamant, one day, just to make something THE ISSUE, and then reverse himself on, for instance, DACA. He'll stick a thorn in your paw just so he can be the guy who takes it out. One day it's "fire and fury such as the world has never seen," and the next, he's the first president to meet face-to-face with the North Korean premiere since the partition.
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Dems didn't fast-track Trump's appointments. They fast-tracked Obama's by changing the cloture rule for appointments, and they never for a minute thought Trump would be the next president. It's not like they rolled over for Trump. They rolled over for a long line of Democrat presidents that didn't happen. I always felt that the filibuster was one of the coolest things about our system. If 1/3 (plus 1) of the senators feel REALLY strongly about something, they can keep the 2/3 from passing it. They can't pass anything of their own, but they CAN stop the OTHER side from passing anything, either. "Meet us halfway, or we'll just keep on a'talkin' 'til the cows come home, 'n' then we'll talk some more."
It's an obstructionist tactic that you can easily steamroll in a real emergency, because you'll 2/3 plus 1 to sustain a cloture vote, and they'll have to let you put your bill up to a vote. Filibuster's been used for many years to try to hold the president in check through his appointments. In the bureaucracy, that means that temporary appointments can run for years, and "acting" secretary be the secretary and not much changes. But in the courts, those seats remain vacant.
Republicans played this very smart. And they got very lucky. They stalled Obama's appointments to the maximum extent possible for a close-2nd minority. Then the Dems passed what I think they called the "nuclear option" that required only 50% plus 1 to force a confirmation vote. They thought they were so smart, but apparently Obama was still way behind on his court appointments, and the Republicans absolutely SWOOPED on the opportunity. The Democrats thought they were so clever at how they were leveraging a bare majority, but they didn't think ahead to the day when the other party would hold a majority in the Senate, with a Republican sitting in the White House! It's like a Ronnie O'Sullivan clearing the table with a 135.
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This isn't just Hillary. This is the entire DC-Beltway Establishment. It's the one thing Democrats and Republicans (the entrenched ones) BOTH are like. They make it up to be this big national-security thing, and then you come to find out it's because a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend in the oligarchy has a buddy who'll be supplying the missiles to the defense department, and business has been slow.
"Oh, sure. You'll get my vote on the grain subsidy, buddy. You bet. Alternate fuels! Green technology! You can sell that to your people back home." It's a crony system, where everybody gets to make noble speeches and everybody gets their goodies in the fine print. Nobody takes a hit for making a stand on principle. They all pretend to operate on high principles and they all scratch each others' backs to stay in power. It's disgusting, but it's just human nature.
That's why you need to limit the scope of the federal government. No centralized organization is equipped to direct the affairs of everyone, and it creates engines of corruption that nobody can stop, due to inertia, and how things get done. You make a principled stand in DC and you'll be smeared up and down with shit, and hung out to dry.
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@tcorangemen : Republicans marched with MLK, Jr. Democrats fought it tooth and nail.
But yes. The two parties are one. Cold-war Republicans = Democrats. Spend a lot of money on programs that don't work Democrats = Republicans.
Each party took the worst thing about the other party, and made it their own.
"I have this big program that costs $1,000,000,000,000!"
"That's an outrage! We should only spend $999,999,999,999!"
"I have this country I want to drop 1,000 bombs on!"
"That's an outrage! 999 bombs will do the trick!"
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You're cherry-picking your numbers on "health care outcomes." But beyond that, don't criticize capitalism for the failures of our own, essentially fascist setup in health care, today, where government decides what gets paid for and how much is paid. Insurance companies assholes? Sure. But why? Because government's the biggest player, and when they decide to pay $90 on a $100 service, the hospitals overcharge the insured patients to make up the difference.
Most folks would chip in, voluntarily, if and when asked. But you want to bureaucratize it, so all those decisions are made by a small number of higher-ups in the medical field who are INSTANTLY targeted by the fat cats.
Do insurance companies gouge? Sure. But why? For profit? Surely. But if they could still make a profit charging less, then a competitor would undercut their rates and they'd lose their ass. But when the government can (and does) step in at the drop of a hat and decide what will or will not be covered, and all the fat cats in government and big medical, big pharma and big insurance sit down and decide amongst themselves what they ALL need, well, they ALL get taken care of, and we, the people, just pay a higher price for EVERYTHING. And when the gummint can step in at any time and declare this or that treatment WILL be covered, if the insurance company doesn't have a HUGE rainy-day fund, they can go belly-up.
No. The best, albeit imperfect, answer, is to let the market and humans WORK. Every progressive idea has at its heart the giving up of responsibility and authority to government and that never ends well. You're just too shortsighted to see it, because you just see the money on the one hand and the need on the other, et voila! Take the money and serve the need. BY FORCE. Idiots. You're just setting the people up to be taken down by the greediest and most sociopathic among us.
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Legacy media are digging their own graves, and blaming everybody but themselv es for it. They can keep on for a good long while, with so many billionaires willing to subsidize them. Controlling the conversation by operating giant propaganda machines is petty cash for those types. But it's getting harder and harder for them to hide, because of jagoff comedians in their garages putting out "un-redacted" video.
Many in #walkaway and already on the right watched full-length video on Antifa and BLM protests, unlike CNN consumers. They figured out right away that what the media was reporting bore little or no resemblance to the facts on the ground.
What's amazing - and may represent a watershed moment - is that the actual facts emerged and legacy media - for the first time - actually did some mea culpas. But they've been cherry-picking video of protests for DECADES, to spin their narrative, and with a monopoly on the cameras and the news, they've been getting away with it since LONG BEFORE the "Saddam is Hitler with WMDs" bullshit. But now, everybody and his dog has a camera. And you spin the story to ridiculous lengths to fit your narrative, and there's 1,000 dumb-asses with cameras uploading their crappy hand-held-smartphone video, PROVING that the narrative is false.
They can't fight that, directly. So, they're looking to call in their cronies in government to shut down people like Jimmy Dore. They're comin', Jimmy. They're fine with you on Nanny Government stuff, because it feeds the Government Beast, but you're RUINING their narratives on the foreign-policy front, with simple, checkable facts. So they're gonna come after you, too, eventually, if you let them "regulate" the Internet (sanitize it so they can go back to one-note reporting and commentary).
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Insurance companies are downstream of government policy, which is a mish-mash of public and private, where on any given day, some bureaucrat might decide "You're going to cover this procedure that was just invented." How can an insurer make reliable actuarial tables if the variables change at the whim of government? What happens when the government sets an artificially low price (or high price) for medicare payments for a given procedure?
No surprise, doctors push people towards treatments and procedures the government pays more for, whether they need it or not.
You see part of it, Jimmy.
What you don't see:
There was no such thing as health insurance before Roosevelt instituted wage freezes (bad policy). Big corporations immediately started offering health and pension benefits, because it was a loophole in the law. They could compete for the best workers and keep them happy without ever violating the wage freezes. Small companies couldn't offer the same benefits.
Before health insurance, each town had its hospital or hospitals and did its best to help everyone. People donated a lot more to the local hospitals than they do now, and the community ran fundraising efforts (an excuse to throw a party!) and treated doctors like kings (and queens). Doctors exercised a lot of discretion, and maximized the quantity and quality of health care within their means and within the limits of what the COMMUNITY supported.
For what they had, back 100 years ago, they did a lot more for a lot more people for a lot less. We'll never know what it might have led to by now, because the government hijacked the system and now we're at government's whim.
You can't insure a human's health. Not really. When you wreck a car, it gets "totaled." You could give it "life support" with really expensive repairs, but you don't, because it's not worth it or not affordable. There's a different calculus for health care. You don't "total" a human.
When the government guarantees everybody with an ailment gets government help, what happens if too many people get sick in a year or every year? Does the government just borrow money? You like that idea? There's no end to it. What ends up happening is government becomes the rationer of health care. Oh, you'll get your heart transplant, but it'll take us 10 years to get to you. You'll get your cancer treatment. Now get to the back of the line and wait your turn.
Resources get stretched. Compromises are made. The best doctors leave the business. The best candidate doctors avoid the business. Because it's free, demand is unlimited.
But there's an up-side to it: People are more loyal to the government when it gives them free stuff. Give them free stuff long enough and they forget how to take care of themselves or think for themselves. People are always talking about Nazi this or fascist that, but the ones screaming the loudest are the ones that insist that the national government run health, education, and welfare. Germany also had state-run media.
We wonder why Germany went nuts, because we forget that the people were treated like children, indoctrinated in state-run schools, and propagandized by government monopoly on media.
What's also surprising to most people is that we've had state-run media for decades. it just operates in the background. Back in the day, it was 5 or 10 phone calls to the head honchos of 10 of the biggest print, radio, and tv outlets. "Squelch that story. Emphasize this other story."
Twitter files shows how that decades-long culture of news manipulation became so ingrained, that they thought it was OK to have the FBI and other federal agencies telling Twitter what accounts to ban, shadow-ban, or otherwise censor. Every time it was an attempt to keep false narratives supreme across all media, and they were tremendously successful. They also did a tremendous amount of harm to our mental and physical health, and enriched themselves out of our pockets and out of our grandchildren's pockets (Have you checked the national debt, lately?).
Sorry to free-write on you. Anything but grade calculus... Now back to grading their final math projects. Chained to this chair for 12 hours. I gotta break it up!
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@SclountDraxxer Broad agreement on the military- and media-, health- and education-industrial complexes.
On health: Do away with federal. Devolve HHS (FDA, CDC) to the states. I don't believe we need government agencies like those at all. I think competition and consumers demanding accountability and transparency with their dollars, combined with instant, global communications in the hands of virtually everyone would clean things up faster, more effectively, and with less collateral harm than government intervention. But we don't know, because the gov't hijacked all of the organic means by which a true free market would regulate things. But that's my pragmatic libertarian opinion that most liberals refuse to accept.
"People are too greedy. It'd never work."
"So your solution is to put all that power into the hands of the people who are the greediest power seekers of all?"
But the compromise position is to devolve those powers to state and preferably local political entities.
Same with education. I believe all education should be private. It should be like buying your kids' clothes, with all the price and quality options there are for sneakers. But the compromise is 100% local control, local funding and School Choice. No federal mandates. Let towns and states compete for the best education systems.
Same with health. Medical care should be 100% private. The compromise: Get the feds out of the business. Local towns should take pride in their charitable contributions to the local doctor(s) and hospital. Don't WORRY about the next valley or 2 states over. Do the best you can with what you have wherever you are. We're lucky to get 20 cents on the dollar by the time all the federal bureaucrats take their cut, and all the Local bureaucrats who manage the federal stuff on the ground take THEIR cut.
My doctor spends 1/3 of every day filling out paperwork for the government and government-regulated insurance companies. Medical benefits were unheard of until FDR froze wages (horrible, fascist intervention). When he did that, Big Corporations started adding medical benefits as an end run, to give themselves a huge advantage in the labor market.
Nationalized health care was invented by Bismarck, based on the biggest arms manufacturer in Germany's "company towns." Take over health care and people will be as loyal to you as though their lives depended on it, which they literally DO! The Krupp company required employees to sign a loyalty oath and a non-disclosure agreement to get the health benefit. Bismarck liked that. A lot. And it set the stage for a Hitler, later, with a public that was conditioned to trust its parent-government leadership unquestioningly. And, with public education, Hitler indoctrinated an entire generation of young people to the new, Nazi World Order.
What did the USA do before FDR? Private doctors and lots and lots of charity. We had the best health care system in the world, before the government hijacked it. And after COVID, no one can deny the fascistic outcomes, there. Truth was censored. Lies were rammed down people's throats... And for decades, we were told fructose was good for us, but animal fats were deadly. Exactly backwards. But the Sugar Lobby bribed a few politicians, et voila!
Remember when Big Tobacco was telling us what brands were doctor-recommended?
De-centralize. Russell Brand's a bleeding socialist, but I can agree with him on that one guiding principle. Give NO man or small ground that much power over everyone's lives. I think it's bad even at the state level, but at least then, no one person or group can impose their mistakes and corruption on the entire country all at once. Some states will do great. Some will suck. Just like people.
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One thing I noticed, growing up in the '60s and '70s was that the non-conformist hippy types all looked, dressed, and talked the same way. It was a strange, twisted kind of conformity that they claimed to be rebelling against. They weren't protesting conformity. They wanted a new orthodoxy, and they were less tolerant of any deviation than their parents ever were towards their spoiled children's self-indulgences and experimentation.
I remember seeing this same cohort later in life. They had hippy churches, and the rigid conformity I saw, there, was more constricting than the more (then-)conservative Methodist Church I grew up in. If you wanted to get on, socially, at the little college, you went to the Unitarian Church, and let everyone know what a good Democrat you were. When I was younger, the Methodists stuck to "love Jesus, obey God, sin less, and don't judge others."
Really, the hippies were never about expressing yourself, freely, even when they were brandishing signs demanding free speech. It was always only about what side they were on at the time. Now that generation IS the establishment, and their disdain for free speech is undeniable.
Even when history has proven them wrong, they insist on their blind, pro-establishment hot takes, because they feel they ARE the establishment, life is great for them, and preserving their privileges makes them support the established order that serves them so well.
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@BradenENelson : I don't think anybody seriously doubts climate change. Many doubt whether CO2 emissions drive it. In fact, I'm not sure why they're focused on just eh CO2. I think it's other stuff that we emit that is probably a bigger deal. If you could tie CO2 emissions to, say, SO2, SO3, H2O, CH3 emissions, say a simple proportionality constant, then you'd have a good case for tracking CO2 as an indicator.
I think we could turn the Sahara green if we put our minds and some elbow grease to it. I think greening up Saharan Africa would be something we could all agree on, without having to create a whole 'nother layer of government control on people, that will eventually all be administered by the kinds of idiots that always end up at the tops of those "fail to grow your domain" outfits. That's why I'm not a progressive. I think you guys waste way too much time asking government to do things you should just get off your asses and do for the folks in your immediate area. But then I'm old school. I see compassion and charity in human hearts, not on spreadsheets in government offices.
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What we need are classical liberals: Limited government, free-market capitalism, and an end to foreign meddling (entangling alliances that drag all into war over brush wars). "End justifies the means" has to be abolished. The proper means IS the proper end. Improper means can get you the win, today, but destroy you ini the long run.
Nothing wrong with Christianity. It's as legit as any other belief system and better than most. As with any big movement or institution, it is just as prone to being hijacked by power seekers as any other movement or institution. Jesus TRIED to weld REASON onto faith. "If the law says one thing and the Golden Rule says another, go with the Golden Rule." You know what they got Jesus on? Healing the sick on the Sabbath! He broke Mosaic Law when he did that. The Romans didn't care. It was the Pharisees who took him down, just like the Fruit of Islam took down Malcolm X.
Things have flipped. Those who call themselves 'liberals' are now the dogmatic reactionaries, protecting the status quo. A segment of the conservative side are the same way, only waiting THEIR chance to re-take the Establishment, and ram THEIR beliefs down everyone's throat.
The broad middle can agree on getting government off our backs. The Big Compromise between left and right is to get the federal government to devolve 80% of its duties to the states. We don't need HHS, FDA, CDC, Interior, Agriculture, Education Departments. Let each state EXPERIMENT with health and social services, and learn from each other on a smaller scale. Don't want high taxes? Move to a low-tax state. Want Free Stuff? Move to a blue state. Let the people have options and vote with their feet.
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Don't like big oil making big donations. But I also doubt that fossil fuels are a significant factor in climate change. CO2's just too weak of a greenhouse gas, and its effect on climate is PROBABLY far less than the damage to the poorest and weakest and most backward among us done by raising the cost of energy. I want it as cheap as possible for that woman who cooks inside her home on an open fire, made of the wood she gathered from the nearby forest, to get a Dad Gum Propane Service. FAR cleaner and cheaper, if we can get that supply chain going.
Send 5,000 Antifa to 3rd World Countries to teach Mass Heat Rocket Stove technology to every person who burns wood for heat. There's a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions and deforestation for heating purposes (if the EPA would get their head out of their ass and approve these Green-Tech devices that harvest virtually 100% of the heat in the wood and emit ONLY CO2, CO, H2O, because they reach refractory temperatures in an insulated riser pipe and burn it down to the simplest form (No tars, creosote. No waste.) and then run the exhaust through a heat sink. Burn in the morning. Place stays warm all day long.
The average person is well aware of environmental concerns and trending away from dirty living, like burning lots of gas, for example. That's the solution. Green Tech will be as good as the free market can make it, and get there, faster, if we leave government out of it. But the EPA can't even find a place in their regulations to approve the technology! By EPA Regs, the air going up the chimney needs to leave the pipe at the roofline at 300 degrees, Farenheit. But you can put your hand in front of a mass heater setup. Maybe 150 degrees? 120? Last I checked, that reg remained on the books, so if you want a rocket stove mass heater, you basically have to build it yourself, because I don't think you can sell them, commercially, without running afoul of the EPA.
And that's kind of the way things are, nowadays. The people are miles ahead of the government, but the government keeps trying to run everything. We can't just come up with great ideas and use them, if government has its way. The elite technocrats are simply less competent about everything than the people they want to boss around.
We're transitioning to cleaner alternatives. Western Civ has curbed its population growth. Everybody's crying about it, but it's what we WANT. Climate change = CO2 is pretty flimsy. But burning fuel does add dirt to the air, so we want it to be curbed, somewhat. The questions are "How severe is it?" and "What's the cost-benefit analysis tell us?"
Short term, the biggest effect of CO2 in the atmosphere has been additional greening of the planet. More uproarious growth. Bumper crops in different places. Now this is not to say that CO2 emissions and deforestation aren't good bellwethers for our likely impact on the environment in all sorts of ways. Probably not a bad measure of man's net level of activity and pollution.
But just going after CO2 emissions without addressing bigger problems, such as overpopulation putting the actual strain on the closed planetary ecosystem. We just generally need to think a little greener, and, instead of importing people from the 3rd world to OUR world, we need to teach people in the 3rd world how to put a lid on THEIR population growth. And I think we'll come to find out that the best way to bring those folks UP is to SPREAD fossil fuels to THEIR countries, until THEY get to a critical point in prosperity, to where THEIR population stabilizes and maybe shrinks.
Hey, let's worry about too FEW babies when mankind becomes endangered. Until then, the least harmful way to bring the most people up is to raise their standard of living. And not in fake ways like setting Jimmy Dore's $15/hour on the price of sweeping the floor. No. If you're making a career out of floor-sweeping, then your only hope is to one day be the boss of 20 other floor-sweepers, because floor-sweeping is just not worth $15/hour. You can find a kid who'd spend 3 hours and be overjoyed at his first $20 or $30.
But as ABL would say, "... I digress."
I hope some folks will think about this. Western Civilization achieved its goal of 0% population growth, but the means by which we achieved it were with government control systems and fascist feedback loops between government and favored businesses (crony capitalism) that require an ever-growing economy and population, to pay for all the boondoggles they've thought up. We're in a pretty good place, right now, and we just need to tweak welfare into work-fare, and a couple things like that, and I think we're golden, if we can avoid adding too many people, HERE, just when we got our shit together.
Instead of importing a kazillion people, how about we look for ways to teach people in shithole countries (I'm not afraid to say it!) the path to prosperity, rather than let our good intentions tear down OUR prosperity.
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@alejandrosolano7421 The Earth has been warming linearly for millennia. When you take out the fraudulent climate science (over-hyped hockey stick starting in 1978, when the general cooling during the 20th Century since the 1930s ended), and temps returned to the trend-line, you see the same linear trend. Very gradual.
EVERY "approved" climate model vastly exaggerates the warming trend. Try to apply those models to known climate date from the 1900s, and they all predict boiling oceans by 2023. You're the victim of a lot of revisionist and carefully cherry-picked and edited data. As with COVID, "The Science" is politically driven.
These same people were SURE global cooling was going to bring on an ice age, back in 1977-78. And no surprise, they offered the same authoritarian solutions as the they do, now.
I'm a libertarian who's an avid fan of permaculture. The government, itself, is the biggest obstacle to my plans and dreams of a sustainable, locally-sourced way of life. The EPA doesn't approve a lot of the greener things I'd like to do. Government intervention is pricing much of what I would like to do beyond my means. Forcing everyone to buy EVs for EVERYthing is increasing the cost of actual, practical EVs for tooling around town. I don't want to see 250,000 expensive and environment-destroying cars from GM. I want to see millions of light vehicles for city folk to get around town. But a Tesla's too expensive for most people, and even the "long range" EVs entail a lot of "Will I make it to my destination?" angst for everybody traveling outside the big metro areas.
The environmental human-rights cost of cobalt, copper, lithium and other resources needed for this elitist pipe dream are HUGE. And nobody knows how to recycle lithium batteries yet! Who knows when or if they ever will or what the cost will be. Meanwhile, Scotland cuts down millions of trees for its wind-farm madness.
NONE of this is well-thought-out, unless you're one of a handful of politicians, influencers and corporations in on the grift.
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WHO is a prime example of how power is concentrated in a great cause to form a great institution, and the great institution, funded not by its own money, but by the money of others, is always doomed to capture sby the donor class. NGOs are obviously the creatures of their donors, but they don't hold power over people like government agencies and U.N. (U.N.?!) bodies, but there's never enough money to feed these institutions, and they also become the creatures of their donors.
And the way the "donations" work is always very low key. Maybe no money changes hands, but there's a cushy 7-figure position on a corporate board in the government official's future.
If you think the EPA, FDA, UsDA, DOE, or FBI are working for us, you're a fool.
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nmcnmb : I've seen him be pretty talking-point-of-the-day partisan Republican. Rush does that, too. His principles make him the enemy of Democrats and so he starts defending Republicans like a partisan Republican. For instance, while it is important to dig to the bottom of the provenance of the evidence used to secure the warrant. But I think most of us want to give Mueller plenty of rope to turn up whatever dirt he can, wherever he can.
But the scope of his investigation of Russian activities and collusion with Americans has somehow never came close to Hillary's crew, but boy Mueller shore is upset about Manaforte's tax returns from a decade ago. He really hates tax cheats, even though Rosenstein declined to prosecute the exact same case, about a decade ago.
It's actually very funny.
Still, I kind of want to know the truth of the matter, whatever flimsy excuses they made to get it started. Sure. Go after the Russians. Ferret out their foul deeds. The Chinese, too, while you're at it, but it seems pretty clear this is not directed at the president (even though it is).
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As a student of the run-up to World War II, it broke my heart, the way Neville Chamberlain signed away Czechoslovakia at Munich. I was drilled on how "Appeasement" was a bad policy that only encouraged aggression. So when Iraq was presented as a Middle-East Hitler, I was pre-disposed toward active measures. But the yellow-cake story sounded a little bit fishy, but still, Saddam was very bad. Orange-man bad. And OMG WMDs!
I remember how EXCITED people were. All my Democrat friends were watching the embedded reporters' reports just as breathlessly as much as any crazed prepper with a fetish for big guns. That also bugged me. Everybody was so behind the war effort. Obama voting AGAINST the Iraq War really set him apart from the rest. As a Democrat, he was too state-centric for my taste, but I had hopes I could get behind the guy on foreign policy, at least. Saw some encouraging signs, at first, like taking down the statue of Winston Churchill. But then he slipped smoothly into neoliberal/neocon gear, just as vicious and underhanded as all the rest. Maybe more so, because Obama was always the good guy.
Lock up reporters?! That's an OUTRAGE!!! What? It was just Barry? Well, he must've had a good reason. Now, what were we talking about, before?
When they didn't find the WMDs and I saw burning oil wells stretching from the foreground clear to the horizon, I knew I'd been had. This is what stopping Hitler at Munich looks like. Hmmm. I think a lot of OTHER people knew they'd been had, too. I think that's a big part of why the same old MSM (now "legacy media") started losing traction. They were at their absolute zenith after 9/11, put all their weight behind a war, succeeded, and things have never been the same, since. People are finally sick of it. It's gotten to the level of PRAVDA and TASS at the height of the Cold War, and this isn't exactly Soviet Russia (yet). They try to put the clamps on, but there's nowhere near the dominance that you saw just a few years ago.
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@veepedaldude9404 : $5 billion isn't even 1% of a trillion-dollar-plus budget. And why do we call them budgets, when they're anything but? Doesn't "budgeting" mean spending within your means? But that's what you get when every libtard progressive seems in league with every war-mongering weapons manufacture to grow government at every opportunity. The reason gov't can't stay within its means is because the people IN government STAY in government by spending money on EVERYthing, to pander to EVERY interest group.
That's the funny thing about interest groups. They all think they're just tweaking things for THEIR benefit, when, by the time government is done, it has catered to ALL the interest groups, often working at cross purposes to do so, pleasing no one and serving no one. Whatever your pet cause is, quit asking government to tilt the playing field for YOUR cause, because you KNOW it'll do the same thing for EVERY cause, and by the end, we're broke and wondering why shit's so fucked-up.
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Take out the profit motive, you destroy the quality of the product or service, you ninnies. Everything government takes over gets more expensive and lower quality over time. Free markets aren't the problem with health care in our nation, today. The biggest player in health care is - and has been for DECADES - the U.S. Government! You idiots want to put bureaucrats between citizens and health care they receive and you seem to think that's going to turn out good, when it hasn't EVER turned out good.
I get that you're well-intentioned, but you two are weak on history. Bismarck took over health and the Nazis took that AND a total takeover of education, and controlled the populace, and even WEAPONIZED the populace against, oh, I dunno, maybe JEWS? Make it a taxpayer-paid thing and when the government does its rationing (and bloats itself on taxpayer largesse), they will INEVITABLY start targeting fat people, drug users, smokers, drinkers.... for shame, censure, and even lynchings, as the public sees things going to shit and the government dishes up another group to be targeted as parasites.
Freedom isn't perfect. It's only the best. And you Progressives think that because it's "your idea," that suddenly the bureaucrats and government officials will be enlightened THIS time, when history shows that's NEVER how it works out. You want people prosperous. That's the key. The gap between high and low income doesn't matter. What matters is how well off - objectively - the poorest of us are, and their ability to use a little elbow grease to improve their OWN situation.
You can make a case for local safety nets to the extent that the localities can afford or have the will to support. But JUST when you're showing how wise you are to the bullshit Deep State and our imperialistic ways, you argue for these SAME clowns to run our health care and education? You're the agents of your own enslavement.
And now, more than ever before in history, access to education has NEVER BEEN CHEAPER, and yet you want to throw more and more money at legacy institutions that just get more and more expensive and turn out more and more ignorant citizens. The evidence is plain. Apply what you know about false flag gaslighting neocons on the foreign policy front, and apply that same understanding to DOMESTIC policy! They're the same power-mad assholes in ALL areas of government, and the BEST we can do is minimize the harm they can do to all of us at the same time. That's where Jimmy and Tim are ignorant.
Some sort of BASE health care, like free checkups, preventive care, and the like, make sense. But the farther it gets between the people paying for what is received, the more you break down the connection between personal responsibility and personal authority. You give health care to the gummint and you get what the gummint thinks you should have. Not what you or your family or your neighbors or your community think is needed.
Progressives are like farmers who see a little bug spray helped the crop, so 10 times the pesticides will be 10 times better, right? And at the same time, you destroy the engine of prosperity that has you dreaming such hifalutin' dreams about all the good you could do. Sustainability is where it's at, and just being able to use the might and wealth of government to fix a symptom makes you think that all problems can and should be fixed that way. The world - humanity - doesn't work that way. You've got to HAVE the wealth in order to redistribute it.
Progressive policies are hard to argue against because they can always point to immediate winners, chosen by government, to parade in front of us, but nobody notices the guy who was just getting by on his own, with aspirations of upward mobility, who gets CRUSHED by all the rules, regs, and disempowerment (not to mention loss of VOLUNTARY COMMUNITY) that are part and parcel of using government force to "fix" human problems. Human problems are fixed by the humans immediately concerned, and NOT by burea ucrats, technocrats and other unelected sons of bitches whose careers DEPEND on the persistence and growth of the problems we "hire them" to solve.
This is why Democrat-run cities are crushed by debt and more and more neighborhoods are permanent and growing shit-holes. You guys are part of the problem. Libertarian-leaning people want government fucking up the international AND national scene LESS. Progressives have this weird blind spot. The same SOBs you hate in the military industrial complex are ALSO the ones running all the fucking regulatory agencies. EPA will fine you $50,000 for cleaning up the trash-filled vacant lot, next door, voluntarily, or shut down you business for a minor infraction, while protecting the Monsantos and the General Electrics for doing much worse, because once those agencies are created, they're INSTANTLY THE PAWNS of the fat cats.
Neither of you guys are smart enough to understand what a UNICORN MED4ALL is. Who could be against it? Only someone who understands history and human nature. I love Progressives for their heart, but I despise them for their ignorance. And what makes you think the UK's health care is all that great? Whether your kid (or you) lives or dies is decided by some motherfucking technocrat with a spreadsheet. And you KNOW that dude's family gets extra-special good treatment. We see this shit all the time in EVERY government "help" program. The insiders get better deals than ever before and the people on the fringe get kicked to the curb even more forcibly than ever, PLUS you cripple the ability of ALL the people who were getting by on their OWN hook, because all you think about are the helpless ones. The end result is that the people who were JUST on the cusp of being middle class (which means better off than kings and queens of 200 years ago, by the way, thanks to capitalism) are helpless.
Why do you think the Yellow Vests are marching all over France? The promises never match up with reality. They're just good intentions, you saps. Progressives are like Lenny Small in "Of Mice and Men." You just want to hug everybody, and stroke their hair, right? What could go wrong? Well, you matched your good intentions with the might of government and you CRUSH PEOPLE, without meaning to, You crush their ability to fend for themselves, yet somehow think that a government comprised of their contributions can somehow do what they cannot, while you give them 30 cents on every dollar you take from them.
And in the former Soviet Union, ALL the medical talent fled the field. Sure you're guaranteed the care, but you're at the end of a LONG fucking line and you get whatever they DECIDE you're gonna get. In a free market, you get better care for MOST, because of competition. And you have much more flex for helping the poor by voluntarily beefing up YOUR community's hospitals. In a society where all that shit is "gummint's job," nobody gives a shit and nobody takes responsibility for helping the local hospital. But you make a STATUS SYMBOL for your community and the members who chip in the most, because the COMMUNITY takes PRIDE in their health care.
Progressive policies: The "good" done can be demonstrated anecdotally, but the HARM done is more diffuse. You just notice, over time, that shit works less and less well.
And all the money you want to spend on your high ideals requires ever-expanding population and revenue, which is the REAL reason we're destroying the ecosystem. People left to their own devices will dial back the # of children they have, NATURALLY. But they've got to raise themselves up to that point on their own.
Try and understand.
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Anybody who actually watched the Democrat debates in 2020 should have known this about Biden, already. I think he was given the nomination because he's obedient to his puppet masters, first of all, but second of all, I think the DNC knew that whoever won the presidency on their platform would be unelectable, if he tried to carry it through, and of course they did try to carry it through.
Biden didn't get out a single coherent sentence throughout the debates. He was plainly an empty suit all the way back in the summer of 2020.
I don't know if he's still compos mentis and putting on an act, or if he's just acting like it, for plausible deniability and to thwart prosecution. He was caught on tape detailing his extortion of the Ukraine government to make them stop investigating Burisma and other oligarchs with whom he (and many other politicians) had intimate ties, including children with high-paying, do-nothing-but-sell-influence seats on the boards of major Ukrainian companies.
I think there were more Democrats on the list, but there were also prominent RINO Republicans, like Romney, on the list.
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Trump wasn't anti neo-con. He's got a neocon streak a mile wide. But he didn't understand how things worked. He just saw an insane policy that cost the USA billions, while the people we were spending billions on were helping Russia's economy by buying oil and gas from them. He wanted them to buy OUR oil and gas if we were going to prop them up.
What Trump didn't get was that in return for the massive subsidy, we got NATO's support in all our adventures around the globe, especially in Iraq. And Trump bragged about the oil fields in Northern Syria, where we have troops on guard.
Trump is pro-USA, and just wanted NATO countries to pay their fair share. He didn't know or care about the ongoing quid-pro-quo for that subsidy. Our spending kept Euro leaders in line.
China is a major gangster nation. Gangsters running it. Gangsters pursuing predatory trade practices and subverting foreign governments and institutions with bribes, blackmail, and other behind-our-back tactics. CCP subversion propaganda is a big part of the social divide in America. Commies are always better at cloak-and-dagger/subversion than we are, and generally terrible at the fundamental stuff, like innovation that you get from FREE people that compelled people simply can't match.
Liberty at home has always been our biggest advantage, creating an engine of prosperity that is matchless. Top-down socialist/progressive/communist ways of thinking always fail, because they try to FORCE what they want; whereas, free countries LET their people do what they want and keep what they earn. Marvelous incentive system for creativity that all the nanny-government nations lack. That's what's so sad about the way America is going. We're headed in the USSR/Communist-China direction in how we run things.
There's a federal rule governing EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, from gas can spouts to EPA regulations that make it so you can buy a gas guzzler, but you can't find an affordable compact pickup truck anywhere, because they don't get good enough gas mileage! But if you build a truck BIGGER, with a bigger footprint (length and width of wheel base), the gas mileage requirement set by EPA bureaucrats says that's OK. My Tacoma is a mid-sized truck. It should be a COMPACT truck. The sweet spot is a small V6 (with or without hybrid) that gets 20 or 25 MPG. Enough power to travel the Interstate and maybe tow a little trailer. But those are illegal because of the EPA.
I could go on forever on this, but we are very much a top-down government on fascist lines. You can still own stuff, but they tell you what you can own and what you can do with what you own. And it's the lefties who insist that federal agencies do MORE, which makes you progressives the thin edge of the wedge of fascism in the USA, where medical boards punish good doctors for following their Hippocratic Oath, when it is in conflict with Big Pharma or Big Food profits.
We GOD Big Pharma and Big Food BECAUSE of federal interventions squeezing out the little guys. You guys complain about the little guys getting squeezed, but you insist that the machine that crushes them should be bigger and bigger and bigger, world without end. You're trying to perfect socialism by fascist means, and then you're surprised when things go to heck in a handbasket.
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@BloodMoneyLLC : The Kurds are not a monolith. Sure, they'd like to have their own country, but I think most of them just want some form of self-determination within whatever borders they find themselves, like everybody else.
And as for Israel, I think they're more about their own survival, so they do the bidding of our Deep-State types to ensure our backing, without which they would probably have disappeared, long since.
The irony in Syria is that while Assad's definitely a dictator-type, his government is secular, and has treated the Kurds and Christians much more fairly than any of the other countries in the region, except Israel and Egypt.
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