Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Timcast"
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"Give me the right to bear arms?" No Tim. The right exists. Nobody can GIVE it to you. And nobody should be able to TAKE it FROM you. RIGHTs exist independent of government. Rights supersede FEDERAL governmental authority.
That said, we have a long tradition of frontier towns passing local ordinances against open carry. EVERYbody open-carried when the towns were first established and the only women in town were prostitutes. But when WIVES started arriving, schools and churches started being built, drovers hitting town after a long trail, armed with pistols (a necessity in those times), the womenfolk wouldn't have it.
The basic rule of thumb is: the more chaotic the situation, the more people can and should bear arms, legally. In the communities where gun violence is WORST, I would END the local gun-control ordinances against the law-abiding carrying (concealed or openly), until the thugs simmer down. Then maybe get civilized, again, and pass ordinances against guns. It's all about the number of thugs per square foot. Nothing like an expectation that the citizen you're fixin' to rob or beat has a gun on 'em to change the calculation and persuade you that an honest job is more profitable and less risky.
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"Regular people" have NEVER been C-SPAN callers, Tim. They're left, right and in-between, but they've always been a very small minority of civic-minded, politically-aware individuals. I recommend a year or three of C-SPAN addiction for everybody. Nothing like sitting through a Congressional committee hearing to learn just how freakin' STUPID and absolutely partisan most of our politicians actually are, or some of the horrific decisions being made thousands of miles away by total assholes, who pretend like THEY'RE being generous, when it's YOU who's footing the bill for their billion-dollar study of the snail-darter or honey bees!
They throw money around like it's WATER, and make out like THEY'RE DOING SOMETHING, when really all they're doing is throwing money down a rat-hole, in order to look good to some interest group or political action committee or industrial cartel for their OWN power.
C-SPAN also carries major events like MISES Institute, or Council on Foreign Relations or "think tank" of your choice, so you know what they're ACTUALLY pushing for, and their reasoning. I don't think it takes more than a year or so for a person to see how The Swamp works, and become much more conservative/libertarian in their outlook, although quite a few who go in hard-core liberal come out much the same. That's OK. Not everybody gets it. And I certainly don't get everything. I just came away from my early-'80s C-SPAN addiction pissed off at all the decisions being made in Washington that were NONE OF WASHINGTON'S DAMN BUSINESS. But that's just me.
I think everybody would benefit from seeing how the sausage gets made. But it's not for everyone. It's very tedious and boring, but you DO get to call in on a national t.v. program and have your voice heard! Those call-in shows are KILLER!
Of COURSE government's way too big. There's no penalty for spending more. Just praise. And there's no award for being prudent and thrifty with taxpayers' money. Somebody testifying about a problem? We'll just fix it with ANOTHER multi-million- or multi-billion-dollar program, because NONE of their privileged lives will be affected. Only the working class and middle class will feel the pinch, when the bill comes due. And we KNOW that government is the most wasteful institution in the land. 20 or 30 cents on appropriated funds are all that go to the actual problem. 70 or 80 cents on every dollar just goes into the pockets of the permanent ruling-class bureaucrats and their always-expanding staffs.
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From the border of Western Europe, South to Cape of Good Hope and East to the China Sea, ALL people are more conservative than everywhere to the West of that border. Everywhere but in the West, people are totally accustomed to bending the knee to tyranny, and have zero patience for the supposedly "liberal" nonsense of the West, where the term "liberal," itself, means you're a regressive, government (king/despot) -centered idiot, who'd be more at home in conformist, authoritarian societies.
In the whole rest of the world, socialism is just another flavor of authoritarianism. Only in the West is it considered a trendy, "liberal" sort of thing, even though it's the opposite of what being liberal means. It's the opposite of liberty and free expression.
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Tristan Verheecke : Yes. Tim prefers the fascist flavor, where you preserve the illusion of private ownership, while the government regulators tell you exactly what you can and can't do with anything you own. There is ZERO functional difference between a state that OWNS the means of production and a state that CONTROLS the means of production. The effect is the exact same. There is ZERO functional difference between a Nazi government that openly indoctrinates a generation of Hitler youth and a "kinder and gentler" nanny government that does the exact same indoctrination "for the children."
Who can be against educating our kids? The big lie is that the average parent is incapable of choosing and purchasing very good education products for their own kids. This illusion is preserved by the existence of a state-run monopoly that spends millions - even billions - saturating us with propaganda telling us how wonderful 'free education' is, and, because it's funded through taxes, SEEMS like it's really cheap. It AIN'T! Failed schools in the inner city are spending $10,000 a year per pupil. But nobody notices, again, because it's all funded by taxes, and the cost to the individual is almost invisible, until you look at state and federal budgets and realize just how much is spent.
Then go into the schools and see how many actual TEACHERS there are, compared to 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. NOW, teachers are a pretty small fraction of the total number of employees at your local school district. Do a time-series on the ratio of full-time faculty to staff and administrators. The numbers are STARK. They've got HORDES of "academic advisors," and "compliance officers." Maybe the NEW round of "Equity and Diversity" hires that swept the entire nation is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I don't know. But I know they do nothing but look for people who are offended and/or offensive. And when they're REALLY good at their jobs, the students are spending all their time protesting and staging sit-ins and takeovers of college campuses. Why are the students so upset? Because administration and all the left-wing, identity-politics-type teachers are TELLING them they should be upset, in spite of being some of the most privileged kids in human history!
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The pull-out of 2,000 troops in Syria is NOTHING compared to the 40,000 we have in the region and whom the 2,000 will join. But it's a step in the right direction towards a more disciplined (military) spending profile in the federal budget. Reducing the likelihood of war is GREAT for the budget. Getting NATO countries to pay for their OWN defense is a good thing, budgetarily.
And Trump doesn't have to make any big cuts in the welfare state to get the domestic side to come down. Work requirements for able-bodied food stamps recipients has had a HUGE impact wherever it's been implemented. Don't want to call anybody a freeloader, but it seems that a sizable percentage of people can get along without food stamps, when there's work attached. Still a lot of work to do on multi-generation welfare way of life, where babies are brought into this world in a totally disrespectful way (into shithole family and community situations), when they're not killed before birth.
Democrats want to address the shit that happens. Republicans want less bad shit to happen in the first place, and it starts with the family, and Democrat policies that destroy family.
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This is your standard "Portland-style" arrest, where the victim is arrested for their own safety, inasmuch as the police are not allowed to or even inclined to arrest any member of the mob who attacked the victim. Portland Antifa has it all worked out, where they can "ambiguate" who did what with masks and disguises and numbers, with an escape plan for the actual culprit.
These scum make life miserable for everyone around them, and they can't be touched. The mayor's in on it with them. Shop owners are terrorized. Antifa in Portland literally runs an extortion racket down town. If you don't have an Antifa sign in your window, your window will be broken. You don't dare offend you, or they will hurt you in big and small ways, and just harry you to death.
They don't actually KILL their victims. Just surround them with a mob and threaten them, spit on them, hit them, throw urine and other toxic liquids on them. Make life a living hell for someone, and take great glee in it. And they get protected, because they're "fighting fascists."
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@jewnbugshekelstein5180 It's not the race of people that matters. What matters is their value system. I have more in common, intellectually, with Thomas Sowell and Eric July, who are both black, than with 99% of white liberals. It's culture and intellect that matter, not skin color. Whatever your skin color, the minute you're among those who MAKE more than they TAKE, you're trending to the libertarian side of things.
That's why there was such a HUGE push to defraud this election. Blacks, Latinos, erstwhile liberals... they're ALL #walkingaway from the DNC in alarming (to Democrats) numbers. Unfortunately for Democrats, blacks and latinos may no longer be treated as "captive" Democrat voting blocs. It's terrifying to Democrat machine, and so the machine's pulled out all the stops the last 4 years. They think Trump's the reason. Trump's just the RESULT.
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Be sure to bring up Hearst when people say they yearn for the "good old days," when news was objective. It's NEVER been objective. The 1st Amendment is there to protect dissident/dissenting speech, based on the ORIGINAL PAMPHLETEERS of the American Revolution.
It used to be more subtle, is all. I noticed this in the 1970s, when I was coming of age. They "objectively reported" what they reported on, but unless you did a lot of digging, you wouldn't know how many things they chose NOT to report, thereby suppressing 'inconvenient truths.' In the '70s, though, you didn't have 100 people on the street with video cameras in their hand-held devices, so when legacy media cherry-pick and slant reports on Antifa actions or the Covington Kids, there's a viral video from INDEPENDENT media that shows what's REALLY happening.
Doesn't mean I trust independent media. I just want to see competing media (not media oligopolies) put it all out there, and let the public pick and choose what's more believable. I like biased reporting, and I want to see left, right, middle, space-alien, and overweight bubble-gum chewers to put out what THEY see, and fact check ALL the SOBs.
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That's because he has certain collectivist ideals he can not abandon, and the madness he sees flows from those collectivist assumptions. This leaves him in perpetual war against the symptoms of group-think, without ever attacking it at its group-think, collective-good-uber-alles roots. The collective good is best served by a perfect dictator, and there is no such thing as a perfect dictator. And even that perfect dictator runs up against the fact that people who follow his dictates are forever unable to think and do for themselves, without being told, which create NEW problems. You basically can't have a good community if its members are not responsible and essentially self-sufficient. When your society consists of responsible and self-sufficient individuals, there's plenty of "extra" to take care of the small percentage who are NOT. But if you focus entirely on the symptoms and those who are NOT responsible and self-sufficient, you end up creating a society of dependent and self-entitled victims. He sees the dependence and the self-entitled victim types, but doesn't have any understanding of what drives it. You have to create a setting that celebrates and rewards the responsible and the self-sufficient, but leftists only see those types as either oppressors or the bank account they're going to use to support the downtrodden. Either way, their policies tend to destroy responsibility and self-sufficiency.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, or so they say, but if you've got shit parts, you're going to get a shit whole. The paradox that leftists mostly don't understand is that the best citizens are fostered and maintained by a form of government that doesn't protect everybody from everything. Well, we live in a society that seeks to protect everyone from everything, and you really see it in the colleges and universities, where they even go so far as to protect our young-adult students from IDEAS. So they spend all their time pushing programs and ideas that STUNT us, and then they need more programs to help all the stunted people running around. World without end. Amen.
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In our earlier days, "journalism" was openly biased, and new outlets would spring up around specific issues, everybody knew this, and knew where they were coming from. The 20th Century was extremely dangerous and damaging, operating under a FALSE "tradition" of objective reporting. It was much harder to fact-check what CBS, NBC and ABC, and the print media were peddling in the '40s - '90s. They made pretense of giving us the news, unvarnished, and you really had to dig to get the actual facts and realize that the mainstream media were peddling half-truths by selective reporting and commentary.
Now, all it takes is one guy with a smart phone and an Internet connection to transmit the complete footage of the Covington Kids, and PROVE that all the legacy (no longer "mainstream") media were peddling outright lies. Obama did us all a favor by ending the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" that had put the American public to sleep. He THOUGHT it would create an impenetrable wall of propaganda for the Demokkkrats, but all it did was flush them out into the open.
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Tim needs to learn what the term "classical liberal" means. Classical liberals don't support huge war machine OR huge federal poverty programs OR dictatorial regulatory agencies, at the beck and call of the robber barons. Classical liberals ended the aristocracy's stranglehold. Liberals like Tim invite them back, then act all self-righteous and say shit like "That's not what I meant!" If you knew history, then you'd know that's EXACTLY what you've been asking for.
Tim needs to learn the non-force principle. No force against anyone, except those who use force against others. This is the libertarian ideal. And everything you want nanny government to do FOR people inevitably becomes what is done TO people. Furthermore, the more that is done FOR people, the weaker they become and the easier it is to do TO them. It's a vicious cycle of dependency that only stops in one of two ways:
1. The people decide to stand on their own two feet, helping each other voluntarily, or
2. The creep towards socialism destroys the warp and weft of society, to the point where the champion of collectivism comes in and takes absolute power in the chaos.
In the case of 2, the death toll is always horrific, and people yearn - too late - for the days when you got to keep what you earned and earned social status by being generous with YOUR wealth. Nowadays, people gain social status by insisting somebody ELSE pay for their ideals.
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@internetzenmaster8952 : Disagree. You can't be on the right without hearing TONS of dissenting opinion and news you'd rather not hear. If you're on the right, there is no echo chamber in which you can hide from news and commentary from the left. The left is just too pervasive. Also, the right-leaning independents spend most of their time dredging up provably Fake News from the left, of which there is an endless supply.
As Tim pointed out in numerous videos, the right know what the left is doing and saying. The left only listen to each other. There's no one on the left offering legitimate critiques of the right, as far as I can see. All they get is "The guy's a conservative, which makes him a white supremacist we all can, should, no MUST ignore. Do not engage!"
Sure you've got your fringe nutcases on both sides, but from center-left to far left, there is a huge segment of the population that never hears any dissenting opinion, except for things that Trump puts out, because he refuses to be denied, and has the bully pulpit of the presidency behind him. That's why they're so FREAKED about Trump. People on the right find his imperfect rhetorical flourishes REFRESHING and understand the underlying truths that he "boorishly" expresses or hints at.
In my opinion, boorishness is what America's all about! We're SUPPOSED to be crude and absolutely unvarnished. We LIKE blunt truth, ESPECIALLY when it offends the entitled snowflake class. It's been that way since we first thumbed our noses at King George, by dressing up like natives and dumping English tea into Boston Harbor! What a delightful romp that must've been. People dressed in deerskins, wearing warpaint, and probably cussin' and laughin' up a storm the entire time!
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@itsokaytobeclownpilled5937 : Perhaps you haven't noticed the frenzied resistance he's met at every turn. I think Repubs AND Dems would've banded together to impeach him if he'd pulled out of Syria before this. You have to prepare the ground before you.
And really, bad as illegal immigration is, IF we can control the border and return to SANE immigration policy, then the illegals who are already here just mainly need to be assimilated. The key is to stem the FLOW. If we do THAT, then we can absorb the people already here, no problem. Just turn off the welfare cornucopia. If you are here in this country, and aren't a citizen, and can't show means of support, then go back where you came from. We USED to require those attempting to enter our country to SHOW that they could support themselves, before allowing them in.
What? You're just here for the Free Stuff? Sorry. We're fresh out. Turns out that we're gonna take care of our OWN, first. And that's the hole in the left's argument for open borders. You're leaving your own people in a bind just so you can virtue signal. If I were a poor person in the U.S., I wouldn't vote Democrat at ALL, until they pull their heads out of their asses on open borders. They swamp poorer communities with illegals and the crime that comes with them. It's destroying a sizable chunk of the butt-hurt-and-guilty-elitist-white-liberal coalition.
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The old ballot-box-in-the-closet thing was going as recently as 2016 down in Florida. It got Snipes fired down in Broward, where a lot of this weirdness seems to happen, from crooked elections to mass shootings used to push the gun-control narrative.
But you are exactly right! Society's evolving beyond these establishment so-called technocrats. The old "Machine-Politics" way of operating is a rusting steam ship. They keep pulling the same levers of power they ALWAYS have, and they're just not responding. Control of the major news media no longer works, because the major news media are no longer major! People have options, and those who exercise those options realize how shallow, vapid and dishonest the "major media" are. In fact, we need to do away with the term "mainstream media" because they're so backward and fringe. "Legacy media" or "backwater-traditional media" are more apt.
Their stranglehold on college campuses is total. But the traditional colleges, as institutions, are dying. They will either adapt in keeping with the times or they will pass away. The trouble is, they're so bureaucratized, that they can't make timely adjustments. They just get more and more ossified, with everybody seeking to identify problems, identifying problems, and hiring more people to solve those problems, causing spiraling growth in administrative overhead.
You see a company building office buildings? Yeah, they're going broke. On the way down. Thinking in hierarchical, 19th-Century terms.
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@muellersgame8001 Actually big-corporate donors are mostly Democrat. You're 20 or 40 years behind the times.
BOTH parties favor big corporations, especially when they're virtue-signaling against big corporations.
A little-reported FACT about Dems versus Republicans is that Republicans have dominated small-donor contributions and Dems have dominated 1% donations (i.e. billionaire class) since Ronald Reagan. b
Left versus right, Dem versus Republican is kind of a false dichotomy, since Dems have always supported big military and foreign interventionism, and Republicans stopped even pretending to resist big spending about 30 years ago.
The left is fighting a 1950s caricature of the right that they've built up in their minds, a caricature that is actually closer to 1950s DEMOCRATS, than the Republicans who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act against the vocal and often violent resistance of the Democrat party. The right is fighting the most rabid lefties, which are also a caricature of what most liberals stand for or think they stand for.
I think the average Republican is closer to reality than the average Democrat, although Republicans have a real knack for being right for the wrong reasons; whereas, Democrats tend to be wrong because of their good, but poorly-thought-out intentions.
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Given the enormous amount of basically "false canon," you CAN do a serious, peer-reviewed paper, with massive references cited to back your claims or assumptions. Boghossian, Pluckrose and Lindsay proved this. It wasn't EASY to spoof academia. You had to know the literature that came before. But once you mastered what these mutual back-patters and "affirmers" had written, before, you could publish absolute drivel, and even win awards for it, as the aforementioned spoofers proved.
They later got in trouble for submitting falsified work, but only after they TOLD everyone that the work was a fraud. If they hadn't been out to prove that the peer-review process was broken, their articles would still be a part of the canon, and available to be cited as peer-reviewed articles in their own right!
This is almost exactly how the RussiaGate Hoax became "canon." Nobody really checked the Steele Dossier. No. That's not right. The FBI checked it out in 2015 or 2016, concluded it was garbage, and then went to the media and the FISA court to wiretap the Trump campaign, based on what they KNEW was false. But there's the criminal part of it. The incompetence part is the news media refusing to fact-check ANY of it, and running with the smear campaign as if the Steele Dossier were canon.
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I think you can blame Democrats like Barney Frank for giving anybody with a pulse a mortgage. And a lot of older folks who had spent decades building equity in homes with affordable mortgage payments were descended upon by predatory lenders, who told them they could buy new cars and boats with all this "found money" and when they spent the money and couldn't make the balloon payments, they got foreclosed.
People like to blame the hedge-fund managers, but for many years, those real-estate mortgages were very secure investments. Until Barney Frank decided more poor people should own homes, so he did what all libtards do, and that's fuck everything up by doing shit that sounds good, but hasn't been thought through. Bush II, who got a lot of the blame, warned against this loosening, but nobody listened to him. Just accused him of hating poor people, which is what Demokkkrats always do when they're bent on destroying America for their own personal glory and reelection chances, usually, but sometimes just because they believe they're doing good when they're doing great harm.
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Break up the public-education monopoly. Re-structure the welfare state to get father's back in the home. Getting pregnant shouldn't be the preferred way to start a household, in communities where almost no one can afford a place to stay out of their OWN pocket. But if you're a girl and you get pregnant, there's food stamps, WIC, AFDC, Section-8 housing, and the whole 9 yards, including government-paid child care while they go to government-paid college!
I'm from a previous generation, but a lot of this stuff was already in play in the '70s and '80s while I was coming up. In a mostly white community, I went to college out of MY pocket, working different shit jobs and still living under Mom 'n' Dad's roof. It was not good for the ego, but I could either give up or just keep my head down and grind my way through a geology degree and a math degree. I was close to a math degree by the time I graduated in geology, but the extra year for the math degree opened up a path to graduate school that paid for itself (teaching math on an assistantship for free tuition and a SMALL stipend that was like GOLD).
Mom 'n' Dad were too well off for me to get any kind of assistance, but they weren't well-enough off (too stingy?) to actually pay for my school. I played around too much in high school to get the kinds of scholarships that would've paid for school, etc. BUT I knew a number of WOMEN from homes as affluent or MORE affluent than mine, who had free apartments, Pell Grants, WIC, AFDC, Food Stamps and the whole 9 yards because THEY, with Mommy and Daddy's under-the-table support, set up new households of their own, and got themselves pregnant. They knew how to manipulate the system for their benefit and they DID. All it required was having proof that they were not living with their parents for 6 months or a year. Mom 'n' Dad still made sure they had all the finer things, like t.v., stereo, album collections, clothes, etc. that were never handed to ME. But made themselves scarce when the social worker lady came around, so it appeared that they had no visible means of support.
Luckily for me, there weren't video games to keep me busy 24/7 allowing me to escape into fantasy, sitting on my ass, because I'm 90% certain that's what I would've done. No video games, so everything stimulating was OUTside the house. Luckily I was in a small rural town, so there were miles of country to explore, a multitude of fishing holes I could risk my life, every day, getting to, while keeping a low-enough profile to not get caught and chased off the property by the farmer whose land I sneaked onto, for the largemouth bass in his pond. LOL! We were pretty ornery kids. But the point is that there was all this stuff we could do OUTdoors that kids don't seem to have, nowadays, and kids in cities NEVER had.
It toughened us up and forced us to invent our OWN fun. And when we were big enough, there were jobs on the local farms, from picking rocks (NE Pennsylvania is some rocky soil!) to haying to hiring on for the daily grind as a hand on a dairy farm (2 milkings per day, and all the feeding and mucking and spreading cow shit on the fallow corn fields that entails). In the town, itself, there were lawns needing a kid to mow for a few bucks (Seemed like MILLIONS), lawns to rake in fall, sidewalks to shovel in the winter. Nobody talking about $15/hour, and nobody talking about "full benefits," tax withholding, or workman's comp. If you were big enough to move snow, you were big enough to clear off Miss Luce's sidewalk for $5 and a cup of hot chocolate, while she fussed over you for how COLD you must be, because "Where's your coat?" Well, your coat was forgotten on the snow bank out front, because you stripped it off after about 5 minutes of shoveling. Hat, gloves and boots was all you needed or wanted, while you were working.
Now most of those jobs are taken by either illegals under the table or by grown men working for $17/hr (local landscaper figure), who have no ambition to do such shit jobs all their lives, and who may or may not show up for work on any given day, because they're IN those jobs because they just aren't very reliable workers and haven't done anything to improve their skill sets. In MY day, those jobs were all occupied by teenagers, like me. And the actual established businesses doing that kind of work catered only to very rich people. And even THEN, those "professional" outfits were mostly staffed by teenagers looking for after-school and seasonal work.
We could get much or all of that kind of thing back, if we could only rein-in some well-intentioned but dumb-ass libtard notions about the human condition and how to "fix it." In reality, the human condition is un-fixable, and the best we can do towards living better lives together is to give people maximum authority, autonomy and RESPONSIBILITY. Simple things like "If you bring a child into this world with no visible means of support, you done fucked up, instead of "You done won the lottery!" It's a crappy lottery to win, and it's a dead end and likely a short life for the children, but for a girl raised in a government-supported home, it's the surest way out, so they can at least be the head-of-household in yet ANOTHER government-funded household. Better to be the welfare mom than the welfare kid, by far, I imagine, or so it probably seems to a young girl, with no father - just a bunch of "uncles" who come into and out of her life, offer no financial support, and just enjoy the privilege of sharing their momma's bed, when The Welfare ain't around. And by the time they're 13-14-15, those "uncles" with zero stake in their family, just see a younger, untouched version of the by-now used-up and overweight mother they're shacking up with for however long. Low-life man plus tender young shorty? Recipe for abuse, there, and millions of cases proving it, despite rampant under-reporting. (This is part of #metoo's power. A kernel of truth buried in a generally intolerant and misandrous movement.)
It's ironic, in the wake of rejection of Christianity by the larger culture, how many Baby Jesuses we have running around, magically tumbling out of wombs in the absence of any visible human father. Might as well re-name all welfare mothers "Mary," as they evidently were impregnated by God, himself.
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@FerunaLutelou : Tim's in that uncomfortable place where he can SEE the corruption and lunacy, but he doesn't see his government-centric philosophy as the root cause, so he rushes from one crisis to the next, never quite understanding why. It's all rooted in a misplaced faith in government institutions. He doesn't see the aristocracies that inevitably arise. One would think that the last 10 years or so would've taught 90% of society, but there's great resistance to admitting the fatal flaw in statist thinking - at home AND abroad. Progressives tend to see the problem ABROAD, but they don't see the malaise at home as the other side of the same government > people assumptions at the foundation of all so-called liberal ideology.
I say "so-called," because liberal USED to mean speaking truth to power and wanting to be left alone. Wanting to LIMIT government. But leftists have twisted it to mean "Everything under government, nothing against government and nothing against government." I.E., fascism. People don't know what fascism even IS, nowadays, but Hitler would be quite at home in the Democratic Party. And he would marvel at the manipulation of media to promote Party propaganda. Far smoother and more sophisticated than the basic shit he did.
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@coyoteblue4027 : Why do you jump from him pointing out facts to "Russian Conspiracy" coming from him? Fact is that Chavez and Maduro have been throwing money at feel-good projects that win affection in the short term, but which have made their country broke as hell. Chavez and Maduro end up dealing with the Russians and Chinese because virtually no one else will, and the Russians and Chinese are more than happy to bide their time, and they - unlike a private oil company - can put real teeth into agreements these bankrupt banana-republic socialists tend to break.
Russians and Chinese are in it for the Long Game, and they know that they'll get their tentacles clear into the heart of Venezuela, and Venezuela will be dancing to their tune if they continue their profligate spending on feel-good giveaways that make you Progressives' hearts fill with such joy. That's the thing about Progressives. They love to point to the obvious winners of the giveaways, and ignore the not-so-obvious losers, even when the hyper-inflation and economy-destroying debt are obvious to everyone except Progressives!
You're so full of wishful thinking and "If only everybody were as enlightened as I am" delusion, that you blithely ignore all of history, all the PERTINENT facts, just like a child.
Having said that, I am NOT a big fan of the way the USA throws its weight around. I wish we'd just get OUR shit together and only trade with countries that respect the rights of their people, including rights of free expression and especially the right to keep what they earn. Unlike most Libertarian types, I don't mind economic sanctions against rights-abusing governments. It's when we start sending guns, supporting rebels, and bombing other countries that I have a real problem. I think we can express our values to the world by LIVING them and choosing not to do business with fuckers.
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Or "There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" by Milton Friedman. And at least read the Cliff Notes on "Wealth of Nations" and the writings of de Tocqueville. A more recent, in-depth study of the actual impact of the Great Society, in particular, and the Welfare State in general, is "Losing Ground" by Charles Murray. And finally, the ONLY Ayn Rand I could ever sit through from cover to cover: "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal."
That last title gives chapter and verse on how the government pretends to protect us from "evil capitalists" while actually providing cover for robber barons. It's short, sweet, and has page after page of endnotes, if you REALLY want to dig in and do the research. Just one example: You know why American cities have so many buses and so few trolley/rail systems? Because Goodyear wanted big tire contracts, and there wasn't any money (for Goodyear) in metro rail systems.
Speaking of rail systems, it was the government who paid people to kill off all the buffalo, in order to punch the transcontinental railroad through. And they made MANY thieves rich beyond imagining by picking and choosing who got rights-of-way (free land, right on top of the main transport center!). It would've taken a lot longer to get that railroad done, if it had been done purely through capitalism, because a capitalist would have to NEGOTIATE for a right of way and PAY for that right of way and make the railroad actually pay for itself. "Bad" as capitalism may be, the alternative is FORCE, and we should all agree that FORCE is wrong, unless it's used against those who would use force against YOU.
But yes. Tim was brought up on the big lie that things would be much worse if we didn't have bureaucrats running everything for our benefit. If you CARE about the underprivileged, then SHARE. Don't tell ME I must contribute to YOUR preferred form of sharing. I help people all the time. I'd help more people if I didn't pay so much in taxes. It's not enough for latter-day liberals to give. They must force EVERYONE to give, in the amount and manner dictated by liberals (but actually implemented by bureaucrats, who have to make do with whatever amounts the liberals decide they will have to work with).
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Dodd-Frank was their best effort at making home ownership more affordable. The result? The financial melt-down and a record number of foreclosures, many of which on homes that poor people were thriving in, until the bankers came, saw the equity they'd built up, and made NEW loans, at higher rates with higher payments. The poor home owners bought themselves a car or went on a big vacation, and it never caught up with them until that first balloon payment.
Getting a home loan at a decent interest rate is one of the main protections the average person has against tax-and-spend policies and the inevitable inflation that follows the inevitable deficits. If you can lock in a low rate on a 30-year mortgage, that $1,000/month payment won't seem like very much when, 10 or 20 years from now, $1,000 is going to be worth about $300 in 2020 dollars. It's one of the best inflation hedges a person could find.
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@Gr3nadgr3gory : People keep trying to make it a one-side-right, one-side-wrong dichotomy, when it was very nuanced. The English paid better for cotton and had better manufacturing to keep it profitable. Big money up North wanted to MAKE Southern planters sell their cotton to THEM, rather than just look for the best price. If they'd sold their cotton to Northern manufacturers, abolition would've just been a social movement against which slavery wouldn't've stood for much longer, regardless, the same way Christianity took over Rome. But that wouldn't be in time to help Northern manufacturers.
And I think if you look at the history of the USA, you could make the case that all states had the right to secede, if they didn't want to be a part of the United States. Lincoln couldn't have that. He wanted the nation held together by FORCE if necessary, and you could argue that that is a turning point in American history, where National Power superseded state's rights. The feds used to have to 'rule' by the CONSENT of the governed, and Lincoln said 'Hell no! We rule from the TOP DOWN, not from the BOTTOM UP.
Another odd fact about the period is that while Northerners thought slavery was wrong, they were at the SAME TiME, more racist against blacks than most Southerners. Lincoln, himself, said slavery was wrong, but of course blacks were still sub-humans, unable to fend for themselves or behave responsibly. Of course, they made those conclusions based on the mind-set of people who were enslaved (never good for the intellect or self-agency).
The number of Southerners who actually OWNED slaves was very small. Most Southerners were NOT big plantation-owners. Most Southerners weren't that much better off than most slaves.
In sum, I think a lot less people would've been killed, and blacks would've won their equal place in society much more quickly, if we hadn't fought a war that killed more Americans than any other in American history. And devastated the economies of North AND South. How much easier would it have been for blacks to claw their way to the top if the economies weren't destroyed? And you KNOW that the South simply switched to share-cropping after the war, trapping poor people on the land they worked like serfs.
Serfdom is the 'next best thing to slavery,' and it's what Democrats have been aiming at, since the Civil War. They always paint it as "compassion" but the net effect is dependency on your 'betters' for whatever they choose to allow you to have. The 'Rona virus really brought this mentality to the surface and put it on full display.
America is based partly on the idea that people who are free are more prosperous. It's not about making you well-off by edict from on high, which is impossible. It's about giving you the freedom - and the rights to what you earn - to help yourSELF be economically successful, by your own effort and ingenuity, so long as you don't violate the rights of others to do the same thing.
Nobody's guaranteeing you will end up at the top of the ladder. Consult the Pareto distribution to understand that's not how things work. There will always be a small number at the very top, no matter how you structure it. Democrats want an extremely small number at the top, and all of them being the few at the top of government. And of course, they want to run the government, so their little club is at the top. Democrat voters, on the other hand, are to be 'taken care of' by people superior to them, and they're supposed to be grateful. The Republican approach is "If you do things with LIBERTY and FREEDOM, you will have more people CLOSER to the top, and nobody will STAY at the top forever, because of competition.
The main obstacle to free and equal competition? Government. Everything it does to help out the little guy boomerangs and makes the robber barons MORE secure at the top, and no room for MORE people at or even close to the top.
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Blasey-Ford didn't "remember" it even happened, until her therapist did a regression. I personally think her politics and her subconscious and a boost from hypnosis had her believing something that wasn't so. She didn't say anything about Kavanaugh until after therapy, many years later, and it JUST happened that Kavanaugh, whom she hated as a partisan Democrat, was in the news, ripe for a suggestible person under the "treatment" of a psychotherapist.
There was a rash of these "suppressed memories" cases in the '80s, and a lot of parents were railroaded, based on "testimony" from children, who were putty in the hands of their "therapists." A process of positive and negative feedback... "Did he touch you HERE?" The kids got positive feedback for answering their "therapists" in the nastiest way possible. Turned out that it was all just the therapists planting the ideas in the kids' heads. Satanic rituals, molestation, the whole 9 yards, mainly because of what the therapists wanted them to say.
We're seeing something similar - I think - with therapists, parents, and bureaucrats wanting there to be more transgender kids than there actually are. "Did you try on Mommy's shoes? Yes? Definitely transgender kid."
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Oh, there are men in the game, especially the philosophical foundations that got the ball rolling. Over the years, fallacies have worked their way into the canon, and ridiculous conclusions are drawn, perfectly reasonably, because the underlying literature is full of holes. But you can do what looks like highly scholarly work, but is total gibberish, as Sokal and then later, Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose demonstrated.
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This is standard operating procedure for white middle-class liberal women. This is why they vote Democrat. They KNOW how to use the system to their advantage.
In college, while I was living at home and paying my own way through school, I met up with a couple of these virtual-signaling fluff pieces. They would argue all high and mighty about how tough life was for them, raising their children on welfare in subsidized housing. Turns out the fathers of those babies were still around. They just didn't have to support the families they started.
A few years into the acquaintance, I learned that BOTH of these "heroic" women had PARENTS in town, who were richer than MY parents, and who supported their girls with gifts (nice t.v., stereo, furniture, the occasional CARE package of food and money), that they NEVER reported, because that would cut into their Free Stuff - and especially their Pell Grants.
Horrible women. Still talk and act like Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.
They both earned their degrees in English. Spent maybe 10 years teaching. Got huge infusions of cash when Daddy dies. And another when Mommy died. My mom's still alive. None of us kids took a nickel when Dad passed away. But we supported Mom as best we could, and she's living comfortably in her own home, with one of us looking after her in the home and others close by.
Both are the worst kinds of drags on society, promoting programs that helped THEM but that lock REAL poor people in poverty for generations.
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nlpjohn : How does Amazon do that to you?
I switched to DuckDuckGo, but even though they don't mine your data like Google, their feed is just as sanitized, nowadays. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post are all at the top of the search results. And depending on what you're looking for, you just can't find it on DuckDuckGo.
And I'm kind of a crusty old bastard, who isn't afraid to do some serious digging, based on knowledge of certain subjects. People who don't have pre-existing knowledge are always funneled into 'safe spaces,' regardless of what search engine I use, any more.
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@red_ford23 : People who think this is like 1930s Germany don't know their history. And the only people looking at ALL like brownshirts (or blackshirts) are the Antifa types who think it's the 1930s and that they're the good guys opposing the Nazis.
It's all kind of weird, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. I think the Antifa totally do NOT get it, but I also recognize that there IS a big Nazi 'presence' in our country, but it's not what people think it is. Crony capitalism is pretty fascist and you see it going on all the time. That's an easy one that many people can see.
One thing AOC got right was kicking up a fuss against Amazon. Why should Amazon get a special deal that the street vendor isn't getting? That people think AOC messed up on that one is kind of appalling. Basically, Dems and Republicans all thought AOC was wrong, because it cost her state billions of dollars. And that is true.
But in her innocence, it just looked like crony capitalism, because it WAS! But of course, AOC never questioned the high taxes and regulations that made Amazon want a sweetheart deal. If NYC cut the taxes and (at least the stupid) regulations, Amazon wouldn't need a special deal from them. The regular deal they give ALL their people would make NYC an attractive place, what with its being a transportation and communications center and all.
The parallel to the '30s that I see is in the federal takeover of public education. They're indoctrinating our kids in all KINDS of weird ways, now. Just like the Nazis.
And the MEDIA. The state doesn't really control the media, outright, but it controls the daily narratives, with leaks that insiders want the people to be distracted by.
And don't get me started on health care. Bismarck saw that as a wonderful power grab for a deteriorating aristocrat class, and Hitler's Germany rested on the tripod of health, education, and media. With those 3 things under direct (or indirect) national control, the German people, in their idealistic zeal and great pride were lambs to the slaughter. Very dangerous when your people have a strong sense of duty. Typical of northern European cultures, where you share or the village dies, and sharing = status.
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Chris A. Medina : Zero Nordic countries are as big as Texas, alone. A plan that seems to work (btw, it's breaking down) for a modest state-sized COUNTRY, with homogeneous culture is one thing. A NATIONAL plan for a nation whose individual member states are bigger than most European countries, with widely varying geography and cultures is simply ludicrous. Hell, there's more cultural diversity in any given U.S. state than there is in most Euro countries.
I think the feds need to butt out and the states, counties and towns need to make their OWN provisions. Maybe one way of doing things works really well, and other states will copy them. That's fine. But one-size-fits all makes as much sense for a union the size of ours as one-size-fits-all lectures makes sense for education, in a classroom where every student has different skills, attention span, learning styles and aptitude. (I.e., government run schools are stupid in modern societies that want to make any progress).
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@artoriassif3728 The main reason he does that is to avoid copyright strike under Fair Use. If he spends most of his time talking off the top of his head, then it's not just theft of the original work of others, but "commentary."
There's definitely a niche for somebody scanning the news and putting together a tight 10 or 15 minutes per day together, like Paul Harvey did for ?50? years. Distill it all down to 10 minutes of pure gold would be great, but HE makes more money by wasting most of the time people spend listening to him.
I think his open-format stuff is great for younger people without much political/historical education. They all kind of learn something. Tim's learned a fair amount just by reading lots of articles, but he doesn't have much behind it. Not a lot of historical or economic literacy. None of the stuff that's taking place is actually new, but the young people are "discovering" things that they'd already know if they actually did some research.
It's tough slogging, but to get at REAL history, you need to drill down to original accounts from actual participants, and then filter for their bias. Most of what we're taught in school or that is found in history books is NOT the personal accounts of people involved. For instance, 99% of what passes for the history of World War II is the unfiltered opinions of Nazi generals. Most of it remains un-revised, even after the Berlin Wall came down and old Soviet records have been revealed.
When I was in college, I researched the actual memos and correspondence of the leaders of Great Britain and France before World War I. You don't have to be a Kaiser Wilhelm fan to believe that the British, French and Russians did everything possible to hold down Germany, including taking back territories Germany had won from France in 1870, destroy their colonial empire because it competed with the British, etc. It was dry reading, but quotes like "I could think of no higher purpose than to take back those stolen territories," or words to that effect from the French PM/President put things in a totally different perspective.
When you do that, it destroys the narratives that are fed to us in public schools. I don't mind that Tim's a high-school dropout, because most of what I learned about history came after I was done with my formal education. But you've got to do the research and do the readings. A guy named Harry Elmer Barnes did that for World War I, and others have done it for World War II. Such scholars are very unpopular, because they challenge dominant narratives.
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@joe_tiger : OAN's got their conservative bias. You should keep tabs on what they're saying, and fact-check them. They get some things wrong or over-state some things. Mostly looks like youthful enthusiasm. But they get some things right that "the majors" do NOT get right. I hope that you don't take what the majors (legacy networks) say as if it's gospel, because they've been spinning the news for wealthy, corporate and government masters since the 1940s. Probably before that.
This proliferation of new outlets is to be encouraged, not scorned. I also follow progressives like Jimmy Dore. I don't agree with them on the proper scope and role of national government (unless you're a country the size of Ohio), but he's honest and well-informed on SOME things. And if you don't watch these outlets you hold in contempt, then you will never realize how BAD the legacy networks are. They're really bad. They've kept it hidden, because they have their pals running the supposed fact-checkers, like Snopes and others. In other words, they're getting "confirmed" by people who agree with them on everything, already. Those blue or green check marks don't mean shit. You just need to diversify your sources and support the ones that are more accurate more often.
This is why advertising revenues have been slipping, especially of late. The New York Times is projecting 15% losses for Quarter 1 of 2020. So that's a spike, due to COVID, but they've been slipping for a long time. And I doubt they recover from the COVID slump. But I think a number of smaller outfits are getting a big bump, right now, because they're smart and nimble, compared to major institutions like NYT and others. We're entering an age where things change too fast for big, unwieldy institutions to adapt. Decentralization's the future.
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@Rune Jensen : It is the nature of government and humans to manipulate the rule set to favor one person or group over another. And you can NEVER root it out! ALL YOU CAN DO IS LIMIT THE POWER AND SCOPE OF THE ONE ENTITY GIVEN A MONOPOLY ON USE OF FORCE: Government. That, at root, is the problem with Nanny Government. And it doesn't matter if you're invaded by ne'er-do-well immigrants or not. Immigrants just put more pressure on the institutions and bring matters to a head, sooner.
It may even be beneficial, because people get shocked out of their apathy and ideology before things get too far.
Northern societies do tend to be more homogeneous, but the same issues with takers-vs-makers eventually come to a head, because nanny gov't creates self-sustaining and growing pockets of takers. It is a tiny percentage, but corrupt government (and corrupt people) make that tiny percentage of "entitled types" grow, over time. It's kind of inevitable, although Northern culture has a lot of immunity to it, because of their strong tradition of duty to society, and altruism.
Free markets and free societies get it the most right. But we no sooner come close to getting one of THOSE, and somebody has a "great idea" and government starts growing again. Government's necessary, but it's also an extortion racket. Give it only the bare minimum, and leave the rest to the people.
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Free markets weaponize greed for the good. You end up behaving morally because REPUTATION matters more in business than anything else. You can't be a cheater for any great length of time in open and transparent free markets. You PROFIT by treating people BETTER than the next guy, and by being SEEN giving to charitable causes. Rather than compelling kindness, you want to incentivize it. That's the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, where things just sort of invisibly improve, without ANYbody forcing anything on anybody.
Government regulations? Phshaw. The standards of any enlightened businessman are far higher than any government minimums, and peoaple will buy from the guy with the highest standards. You can only remain a cheat in a capitalist system with the HELP of government. And the robber barons KNOW this. That's why the super-rich LOVE big, strong government agencies. Because then they only have 5 powerful government officials to bribe, brainwash, flatter, or extort, in order to write the regulations yourself. This strategy is ONLY available to robber barons.
That's why you limit what government can do, because it forces EVERYone to play by a fair rule set. But once government gets involved in ANY industry, you see consolidation, because the big outfits, with teams of lawyers and influence in government can navigate those regulations. That $50,000 fine is petty cash to a BIG company. But it bankrupts a small company.
Capitalism has a bad name because of all the crony capitalists of the past (and present). But they ONLY get to manipulate the system when you put a handful of government bureaucrats in charge. Then the big boys just have to corrupt that handful. We see it in media, most clearly. None of the networks broadcast ANYthing damaging to its owners and their friends.
That's what's so cool about independent media.
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White people speak for me all the time, too. And I agree with no man 100%, unless it's Thomas Sowell or Jordan Peterson, and I bet I could find something they say that I don't like, although they're pretty bulletproof scholars, AFAIC. Peterson's just less pure of a libertarian, because he doesn't take a stance on government doing SOME things to help the poor and downtrodden. Sowell, like me, is on record stating he thinks family and community are where charity lies, and not on the federal or state level, with exceptions for natural disasters.
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Moscow, ID's an island of leftism in an ocean of conservatives. I was a lone libertarian in the socialist hippie crowd when I was a student, there. Very enlightening. In a weird way, the lefties are more conservative, censorious and judgemental than the most regressive Christian fundamentalists. There's zero forgiveness in those kinds of people, and an almost pathological attention-seeking tendency. Kinda creepy and culty, sometimes. Other times, very free, loving, and caring.
They're the kind of people I like partying with, but wouldn't want to see in a position of authority.
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Yes. And what seemed like odd passivity in spots may turn out to be just LETTING them win, and letting the world see what happened. I think if Trump had acted any sooner, we might have had a coup, already. He pushes, but not too hard. Then lets the Dems beat him on procedural grounds, and they can't help themselves. They twist the process all out of shape and no one stops them.
But if you look across the Atlantic, you see how the center-left have done basically the same thing, and the people are rising up. "You don't represent us!" UK voted for BREXIT, but the bureaucrats in London and Brussels have fought it tooth and nail, by controlling the decision-making process at the top. The people are getting sick and tired of that shit, and are finally rising in rebellion. It's ugly stuff for the center-left in Europe, and any thinking person, watching the American Left use the exact same tactics to secure short-term WIN, knows this will lead to the shattering of the center-left coalition, and a rapid growth of support for the right and center-right.
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@HelplessGazellle If you're an honest (i.e., deluded) progressive, you're censored in the same ways as a libertarian or conservative. From THEIR perspective, the big-business bias towards multinational corporations comes from the right.
It's not about right versus left. It's about the elites versus the common person. What the so-called "left" doesn't understand is that the policies they promote empower top-down control systems that they proceed to complain about, because that top-down, federal-program approach will ALWAYS be corrupted/subverted by corrupt or incompetent individuals at the hub of power, messing things up for everybody with one decision by one person. Federal programs are toxic. Progressives always think that big programs would be fine, if only we had the right leaders. They don't understand that the wrong leaders will inevitably come to power, with all the levers of power that they shouldn't be given but that the progressives eagerly afforded them, trying to save the world, by force, from above.
The world will be saved from the ground up by the people.
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@ShadowKatt : With much different rules. We don't stick Christians in the octagon and watch lions eat them.
Sports are where we let our young men test themselves without going to war. Historically, what the young bucks did between wars was go on raids into neighboring countries. This was very annoying to border tribes, but it was sort of given a pass, because of the importance of toughening those young men up to defend the nation during war. It was seen as a way to keep from going soft, in a time when invasion from outside was a near certainty. If not this year, then next year. If not this generation, then the next generation.
You steal some of our cattle. We steal some of yours. And we don't go to war over it.
In UFC, we get to see our best warriors prove themselves in stylized combat, where every precaution is taken to keep everyone alive. It's actually quite civilized, especially compared to gladiators of Rome, who risked their lives every time they entered the arena. That's not a guy with padded gloves coming at you, with a referee there to stop you if the other guy's in real danger. It's a guy with a freaking SWORD, who's fighting for his very LIFE, and the only way he can preserve HIS life is by taking yours. Oh, and the feeding Christians to the lions thing.
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@durgan5668 : Both of you are fools to have principles in the current setting.
Actually, no. Because when you forego the special privileges, it makes you stronger. You can't fake your way through life. You have to earn everything by MERIT, and that makes you more competent, more meritorious than the moral and intellectual midgets always looking for something for nothing, or artificial advantage for the privilege of pigment or vagina.
And you find people like you in all walks of life. Black, white, male or female, those who make it on the merits recognize one another and prefer dealing with one another, rather than someone who plays games and shames others to advance their own interests.
If Jim Crow was any indication, this is all good for white men. Blacks made more progress under Jim Crow than they've made from the handout.
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Businesses in blue cities would be better off without any city government at all. Then they could defend their businesses, period.
Lock-down just means you can't do business. It doesn't mean you can't defend your business from criminals. For THAT, you need the city government to actively prevent you from defending yourself and your business. That's the real horror of BLM/Antifa. As thugs, they're very weak and inept. But with the active assistance of local government, they can extort you and terrorize you and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it.
If not for meddling socialists, rooftop Koreans, Nigerians, Irish, Germans, i.e. AMERICANS would've done just fine defending themselves as a community against the looters and rioters. This kind of shit can only happen if your local authorities (ab)use their powers to feed the negative and starve the positive.
That's why the shit didn't spread beyond the wildlife preserves we used to call "cities." Locals lining the streets with rifles, shoulder to shoulder with local police when Antifa/BLM tried to take George Floyd riots to the outlying towns. They got sent on their way. It didn't take violent confrontation. Just calm, armed citizens ready to defend persons and property against goons who'd been given the green light where they came from.
Mayors like Ted Wheeler in Portland and Jenny Durkan in Seattle, among others, thought they were the thin edge of the wedge of a "re-imagining" of city government, along progressive (thug) lines, and paint it over purty with phrases like "summer of love" and "de-fund the police." Instead, what we're seeing is they are and will remain islands of dysfunction, a laughing-stock of the rest of the world.
We've been SO prosperous for SO long, that people who live in dream land/clown world have been able to prosper and even rise to prominence. So their nonsense has had the appearance of "this is how the world works" far beyond its actual sustainable level. We can AFFORD the idiots... for a time. But eventually, they will break what their betters have built and we will be forced to step in and take over, actually paying attention to trivia we spent decades ignoring, because government is the LEAST important thing in our lives, and only becomes important when the wrong people are running it, which they will, when times are good and people are busy doing other things and not watching.
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Muslim societies were some of the most enlightened of their time, for centuries. But they eventually give way to the fundamentalists, every time, or they'd still be in power in Spain. Christianity has evolved like a virus to keep in step with better (scientific) understanding of the world around us. Islam is still stuck in the 8th Century, and every time they start acting moderate, the hard-core fundamentalists go on a rampage. This is why Muslim countries are relatively backward in all the important stuff.
That said, the old-fashioned appeal of a moral centering that Wester societies have lost is very strong. You see drugs, violence and gangs in the streets (or in prison) and Islam offers an alternative that is at least internally consistent and addresses the main issues/problems of a decadent, decaying society. Christian Fundamentalism is much the same, in the hands of the regressive types that always migrate to the top of both Islamic and Christian (and secular) power structures. People who want to control other people are the danger. Self-governance without tyranny is the hardest thing to create and maintain, because it requires good sense and personal responsibility on the part of its members.
When the West goes all-in on "rights" and forgets "responsibility of the individual," it sows the seed for all kinds of regressive reactionary responses to solve the apparent problem(s). Liberals do more to feed intolerance than to help people, when they divorce people from individual responsibility in the name of "compassion." That compassion, implemented in totally fucked-up ways by government bureaucrats, creates all KINDS of scapegoats for regressive assholes to hold up as "parasites," in order to mobilize large blocs of the population to do some really nasty things.
The history of Man is a history of unintended consequences, paving the road to Hell with good intentions and an insufficient grasp of human nature and physical reality.
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@asdharleychuck123 : I'm not sure I quite understand exactly what your point is.
In my opinion, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all, if it weren't for Great Society and government-run education. Under Jim Crow, before the Civil Rights Act(s), BLACKS WERE CATCHING UP! With NO support and NO schools of their own, they BUILT schools. EXCELLENT schools.
Then it was like a switch was flipped, under Lyndon Johnson, and instead of looking to THEMSELVES, they started looking to white and white liberals to magically solve all their problems. They were told - and too many believed - that just electing blacks to government office would change everything for the better, and they lost sight of what they had been doing all those years they were catching up in spite of every obstacle thrown in their paths.
Over the years, there have been surges of Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, and other nationalities of immigrants. Each sort of stuck together and did for one another, with Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, and other ethnocentric businesses, churches and so on. BLACKS were doing the same exact thing until we dreamed up the Great Society, and it short-circuited their progress, in my humble opinion. Great Society wasn't just a war on poverty (that was horribly executed), but an ATTITUDE OF ENTITLEMENT that permeates our entire society, and disproportionately affects blacks, almost certainly because a higher percentage of blacks were still lagging when those programs were implemented.
My father used to tell me, when I was getting grumpy about my handicaps that "The best advantage you have is your disadvantages, son. You KNOW how tough it is, and you're gonna try harder. It'll make you MEAN. It'll make you a FIGHTER." The "protect-us-from-everything" nanny government that liberals all seem to worship has robbed millions of blacks, whites, native-Americans, and others of that HUNGER and that DRIVE.
I know the system doesn't keep blacks back, directly. I know racism isn't it. I know it's the victim mentality and the expectation that it's somebody else's job to fix things for us, that cripples us more than anything else. Hell, you can't even get a piping hot cup of coffee at McDonald's any more, for fear some idiot will burn themselves and sue McDonald's - and WIN!
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@illbeyourmonster1959 : "Strong social safety nets" have their own problems, when they are paid for and administered by strangers from 1,000 miles away, with ZERO connection to the local community. State and federal programs cripple the good in the local community. And what nobody seems to realize is that the nation is the sum of its local communities. "Borough" used to mean autonomous local community that cared for its OWN needs, and only paid the central government a tax to build infrastructure, raise armies and defend the nation.
Liberals don't believe local communities are CAPABLE of caring for their own needs, but think that somehow the federals ARE, even though the feds take ALL their money from the local communities! It's ridiculous. Leftards will talk all day about "sustainability" and then turn right around and propose one unsustainable plan after another, with the bottomless coffers of the federal government somehow generating the wealth that none of its constituent communities can muster.
Think about it. The reason the feds always take over is that nobody can really afford the kind of gold-plated services everybody wants. So they just beg the feds for assistance, and the feds happily oblige. On the local level, you can't hide from the costs of your utopian ideas. But on the federal level, they just send the money, run up the debt, and our children and grandchildren get to pay for our self-indulgent, selfish, and demented desires.
Forget about student-loan forgiveness. Every child born in the USA, today, is tens of thousands of dollars in debt at birth! All so that baby-boomers want for NOTHING and so war mongers can run never-ending wars of (what amounts to) imperialism.
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@ECP90 : Actually, Fascism is the means by which Western societies "Progress" into Socialism. And when you're on that insane path, you set yourself up for the exact kinds of economic and social crises that drive the most regressive and violent factions on the left. When you look at the American system, we have adopted virtually every feature of Nazi Germany's political economy, with government over everything, nothing outside of government, and nothing against government. Stranglehold on the public square that only the Internet has broken, which is why the elites are feeling so threatened, right now. They only have about half of the dumbest citizens on their side, and falling fast. The majority they saw stretching out endlessly before them has imploded, with libertarian values held by most people, EVERYwhere, are beginning to express themselves in the polls.
Hitherto captive voting blocs are peeling away from the Democrats. If more than 10% or so of blacks vote Republican, it DESTROYS the Democrats. And Trump's popularity among black MEN is climbing upwards of 30% in some polls. The wahmen are still 90% Free Stuff for Me, but the men are waking up.
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@merkkenem Can't fine or lock up everyone, but they can sure as hell single out any one of us they please. You and I will be criminals just waiting to be arrested whenever Big Brother gets around to it. This is Totalitarianism 101. Make everyone a criminal and target whomever you please. It doesn't take many conspicuous examples before the vast majority will bend the knee. Or that's the theory.
Personally, I think it can only go so far. They have this vision of an oppressed people on the verge of communist revolution, but they lack numerous key ingredients:
People aren't desperate and starving. And those who ARE desperate and on the verge of starving DESPISE the lock-down artists.
A tradition of liberty that's still DEEPLY ingrained in a majority of us, with over 2 centuries of high-quality life and prosperity.
An armed populace.
Those 3 things never existed anywhere the nutcase lefties took over. You need a starving population that's been oppressed for centuries, not an overfed population that's done pretty much as it pleased (modulo the rights of others) for centuries. You and I and 50 million or so others are armed, and can only be pushed so far, before we take 2 or 3 or 5 bastards down with us. Contrast that with a few hundred thousand wackos who think they're Lenin or Chavez.
We see some of the trappings of the classical commie take-over, but not the substance. The most dangerous thing is the toxic corporate-government marriage that ushers in socialism with one small fascist feature after the next. But that's why Trump won the nomination and eventually the presidency. There's ALREADY push-back against the direction our institutions are going, and those institutions cannot function without the support of people who actually make things and transport things and maintain things.
At best, the wack leftists will rule over ashes, and beg the makers and doers for a crust of bread as we go on about the business of making our lives better, in spite of all obstacles. The MEANS at our disposal are unprecedented in human history. I didn't change a single thing about how I lived during the lock-downs, except wear the hated mask on Dr. visits. I've been armed, with at least a month's worth of food in the pantry for the last 20 years. And there are millions like me. We're not preppers. We're just regular folks with canned goods in our pantries that we've been rotating for decades.
When you look at REAL commie take-overs, people would give their eternal allegiance for one free potato when they're starving, after years of living damn near at starvation. We're armed. We're mobile. We're a totalitarian's nightmare.
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@Xeranx : There's some good work being done in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology . Needless to say, these fields are heretical to feminist everything, and every program of study ending in "studies."
And beware of Engineering Degrees that begin with the word "Environmental," because most "Environmental-Engineering" Programs are made-up programs that give you a bullshit general science degree, without a SINGLE engineering course (No strength-of-materials, electrical-, mechanical-, civil-, geological- engineering courses in the entire curriculum. It's a degree that sounds like it incorporates many different kinds of engineering into one, larger engineering program, but there's not actually any engineering in the curriculum. So it's an important-sounding degree that doesn't train you to actually DO anything.
"Environmental Engineering" is a weak stab by small, 4-year liberal-arts schools to attract students. The 4-year liberal-arts colleges are DYING.
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When you saw how the FOX mgmt was fixin' ta cancel Laura Ingram over nothing and then Tucker Carlson over nothing, how they DID cancel Trish Regan (who is over the top, sometimes), the CORPORATE bias was just starting to peek through. FOX This Morning crew are pretty lame, except for the hot blonde they plonk in the middle - for eye candy? But they're hard to watch, because some of the things the 2 guys say come from a weird - I dunno - tradition-for-tradition's-sake sort of place, that makes them easy to dismiss by Democrats.
I used to think Greg Gutfeld brought something smart and funny to the table, but he's in that "Biden's the winner" club, rather than remaining skeptical, which any objective person SHOULD be. I know I didn't want Al Gore to win, but when he was contesting the election against George W. Bush, I wasn't going around celebrating Gore's defeat. I sure wasn't ready to celebrate George W's victory, other than just being glad the Democrat didn't win. I'm less Republican than I am libertarian and anti-DNC.
Newsmax has a lot of the same opinion as OAN, but it's more mature-sounding. They sure make the case for conservatism, but don't overstate the case, like OAN sometimes does. I support both channels, because I like to encourage ANY news outlet that doesn't kiss corporate ass.
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Body piercings and tattoos have always been a turn-off, for me. The more they do themselves up to be different, the more they're actually grasping to conform to perceived norms. I just think of all the books they could've read while they were obsessing on their appearance or sitting in a tattoo parlor.
I'm contrary on that sort of thing, though. Women who cake on the makeup and spend an hour on their hair every day are an instant turn-off. Always have been. It was intimidating when I was in junior high, because they seemed like grown women, when in my own head, going through puberty, I was just a boy and saw myself as a boy. But that "girls mature quicker than boys" thing aside, as a grown man, experience taught that the more they were done up, the more empty their head was. Then I thought about all the time they'd spend every day just primping, times 365 days a year, for years, and figured those kinds of women probably didn't grow, mentally, as fast as the women who don't waste all that time..
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Science fiction author David Brinn described a society in which you couldn't vote until you'd gained your full citizenship certification. You had to pass a history test, be able to perform a certain level of first aid (like an EMT), manage your own finances and pay taxes. That way, everybody voting had a real stake, and weren't just looking for something free taken out of somebody else's pocket. And UNTIL you got your certification, you were your PARENTS' responsibility.
Bottom line is that people who live OFF the government (taxpayers), including people IN government, shouldn't be allowed to vote on what that government will be. Those in government and dependent on government will always vote for more government, and that's where we are, now, with a government that's bloated, inefficient, and has saddled our children and grandchildren with 10s of thousands of dollars of debt the INSTANT they are born.
We should be ASHAMED of ourselves for the national debt. Of COURSE it'd be nice if this that and the other were all taken care of. We should ALL have a private plane, even if it means our kids will have to pay for it after we're done flying around.
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Sanji Kun : I think he's pretty liberal on social programs, but he looks on them as a businessman would, and thinks they should be run more intelligently. I don't think he's an ideologue. His goals are very pragmatic, and he's just very dogged about achieving them, and he's always open to new ideas. I don't think he's dead set against socialism, so much as he knows where he wants to get and he knows it's a buzz word with which to smite Demokkkrats.
I think Trump's career before being president, gave him some unique skills and experiences for the job. While everybody was having Trump come give interviews or attend this or that, so they could kind of bask in the light of his celebrity, and pretend the goofy things he said were funny or clever... All the while, Trump was watching THEM. One of the reasons he speaks as he does to different people is that he knows them down to the ground, and he can probably list a half-dozen or a dozen people who are just like them. That's one of the things we "commoners" don't understand. Trump was hanging out with rappers before he ran for president as a Republican.
We're approaching Year 3, and Democrats are no longer asking "How many miles have been built?" with a sneer on their faces. I think it's cool that Trump's the first president people complained about for wanting to spend more on our borders and less on the defense of Europe from the now-defunct Soviet Empire.
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The death by 1000 cuts strategy has another layer to it. People see Antifa intimidating citizens in the streets and they get mad. They join the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer to defend the weak and helpless against Antifa mobs. They mop the floor with Antifa. This makes Antifa the VICTIM. This "proves" that the made-up white supremacists they claim to be fighting are actually a thing.
Very hard to defend yourself without being cast as the villain, especially when the local city government backs Antifa and the legacy media back Antifa.
But people see through this. There are just too many smartphones and hidden cameras in existence for 20th-century tactics to work, any more. Antifa is living in the 1960s. So are the hippies in the establishment, trying to re-live the days when they could still get a date with a hot teenager. Be surprised how many dirty old men are pulling the strings on these actions. Basically, arrested-development types who hang out with juveniles, because juveniles are easily swayed and will do crazy shit if you explain it to them in the right way.
Nothing sexier to a co-ed than a 20-something man with a dark and brooding manner. Hippie chicks flock. Soy boys flock to the chicks. I got recruited in grad school, because I ran in certain circles (Mostly weed), and I was in grad school, so I was considered OK to be a 'faculty sponsor' of the local chapter of "Public Interest Research Group). There al ALPIRG, COPIRG, CAPIRG... Just one of the fronts.
My main hook was my despite for the National Forest Service, which practiced a lot of crony capitalism. Small timber companies working the same land for generations do selective cuts. But when the Forest Service gets involved, suddenly there are free roads built to Old Growth Forests that wouldn't otherwise be economically feasible, just for the timber harvest. They go in and CLEARCUT. We'd be much better off with widely scattered hippies in earth ships, TENDING the forest, with humans as a positive force of Nature, rather than a "Rape Nature for maximum short-term profit" effect.
We, as humans, should be stewards of the land. But we, as political creatures, with huge engines of destruction we call "government institutions," are rapers of the land. Planting robber crops for maximum short-term production and profit, rather than tending the land, revitalizing the land, and slowly claiming the deserts with smart land use - restorative land use - that most people NATURALLY follow, when they're working their own small chunk of land.
I never saw the Forest Service do ANYthing to really PROTECT the forest and PROPERLY balance profits with nature. Everything the Forest Service did had a negative effect on the small timber companies, who were on the land for generations and wanted the land preserved for future generations. No more selective cuts. No more "Harvest a few of these trees, here, for a nice little meadow with better forage and more biodiversity.
Anyway, so I got involved in those groups in grad school, and there were always the hard-core Earth First!ers who would trickle in and out of meetings and be treated like superior beings by all the younger kids (idealistic and ignorant undergraduates). It was all about making your bones in a significant "action." Some actions I supported and participated in. But I never glorified the radical types, who'd spike trees (to kill loggers). I had to bite my tongue probably a million times, trying to support what was good, there (Lots of sustainable living projects, the local organic food co-op, and so forth). There was a strong nihilist/communist undertone much of the time.
Anybody who sees things black and white is probably part of the problem.
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I think Progressives are socialists, and I despise their domestic policies. But I feel like the anti-war Progressives are at least half right, and their motives are good. They just don't understand that they can't have their liberal-utopia freedoms and simultaneously live under the huge government programs they love. But they're fun to argue with, and they are DEFinitely under siege from neoliberal establishment types.
Take the SJWs out of the picture, and there's room for compromise with Progressives. I've got no problem with a strong social safety net, but it needs to be built from the community level up, rather than the shit all flowing downhill from Washington, DC. Make federal support irrelevant by raising LOCAL funds for YOUR local hospital. Run things, locally, and your programs will truly reflect the ability of the community to support the kinds of programs Progressives love.
When we look to the feds for help on everything, we weaken our communities and we can agree to spend money we don't actually have, which just stores up trouble for everybody. Progressives who work LOCALLY to help people in their neighborhoods are great. It's when they see all the "good" they could do with OTHER people's money, taken by force by government, that they get de-railed. Donate to the local homeless shelter, the local hospital. Have fund-raisers for both. I think most communities would give very generously, if everybody hadn't given up on helping, locally, but instead campaign for federal politicians to lord it over us serfs, in return for Free Stuff. Gotta break that kind of thinking.
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Trump follows the Constitution. How awful. After 8 years of Obama, where the end justified the means, I found Trump's policies and real restraint to be very refreshing. Where Obama would weaponize federal agencies (IRS, FBI, Intel) against political foes with ZERO pushback from Congress, courts or media, I DREAD there being another Democrat in the White House. I also dread seeing an establishment Republican in the White House. Trump's about the only outsider with enough clout, enough guts, and enough sheer orneriness to stand up to the business-as-usual insiders who RULE us.
We're not SUPPOSED to be ruled. We're SUPPOSED to rule ourselves, subject to some very clear limitations on OUR power, which can be summed up by "Your right to swing your fist stops where my face begins." Beyond that, history proves that the people will do better for themselves and their neighbors when left the hell alone, until and unless we infringe on the rights of someone else. But the siren call of Free Stuff has repeatedly wooed the masses into giving up freedom in return for a false security, guaranteed by politicians and administered by technocrats, both of whom despise us and seek to manipulate us at every turn.
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@coyoteblue4027 : I think the logic behind Guaido was that he was elected president of the assembly. There was general agreement that Maduro run a very crooked re-election campaign, and used intimidation at the polls to "win."
That being said, it's something for Venezuelans to sort out. 9 times out of 10 when the USA starts up with its bullshit because of perceived corruption in some other government, they end up driving that country into the arms of our enemies.
But I'm a way back beyond the bend libertarian on most things foreign-policy related. Sovereign countries are sovereign. If they want to vote to become the 51st state, and we accept them, because they play by our rules and abide by our constitution, then defend them like they're ours, because they ARE ours. Otherwise? No entangling alliances. If we followed that, WW I would've been another pissing match between inbred Euro elites, the Germans and French would've had to work out who owned the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine between them, and the USA wouldn't have had to go to war a 2nd time to defeat Hitler, who was the creation of the Versailles Treaty that never would have been, except for the decisive advantage we gave to one side, by getting involved in a war that was none of our fucking business.
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@isaacvitela5131 : Pffft. That only comes later. But the fact is, that a woman who'll "hook up" with a stranger in the club scene is absolutely NOT respected by that man, no matter what he says. From the moment of hook-up on, the only time he'll think about her is when he's out drinking (like the night he met her), and he'll call her at all hours looking to get laid if he fails to find another stupid woman who looks good through beer goggles. Can't tell you how many times I wooed a young lady with my dreams of the future, talking all night, making her fall in love, while my main/only goal was the honey.
She thought "this one is special," and I thought "this one is easy, and a long-term relationship with a woman who'd sleep with ME first (or second) night out." It's not conscious, but we ALL know in our GUT that the woman in those situations has MUCH more at stake. Contraception and abortion don't really change that eons-old equation. Every one-night stand makes a woman less and less viable as a life partner. They're looking for Mr. Goodbar, even if they just THINK they're just having fun.
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@penstemona9933 : That's definitely true in magazines, movies and art. But in the flesh? It's more about not being butt-ugly and having some personality or charisma. For me, personally, I'm attracted to all kinds of women, 1-on-1, whom I would look right past in a magazine or movie as "unattractive." If she's reasonably fit and has a good personality, the attraction is there. I suspect women are much the same.
Inasmuch as online hook-ups are based on e-interactions and images, there are a lot of men who'll be rejected online whom women would be attracted to in person, if they display confidence, exude competence, and are seen to have status amongst their male peers in a public setting. On the flip side, all a '6' has to do to seem "hot" to a man is to surround herself with 3's and 4's!
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Dems have been using every trick in the book to find a game changer to regain total control over all political narratives. Parts of their machine still work very well. They have their cronies controlling education, career-government positions, and indirectly controlling LEGACY media. It's worked for them for DECADES, but their control - and abuse - of these institutions is resulting in the increasing inefficacy and irrelevance of those institutions.
What I get a kick out of is their conflicting manipulations. Pushing COVID hysteria to cripple the economy is back-firing, especially with regard to their education monopoly, which 40 years of pushing for school choice by Republicans failed to weaken, but months of online-only classes, with PARENTS witnessing what's going on in classrooms, generally, is really hurting the monopoly. If students MUST engage in online learning, then WHY must they attend - even remotely - the classes offered by the school down the block, when they have access, online, to the BEST online learning products from anywhere on the PLANET?
And I know a LOT of local businessmen and businesswomen who were rock-solid Democrats their whole lives, who are waking up to the fact that Democrats DESPISE small business owners. And I see a LOT of lifelong Democrats who are being red-pilled every day by obstinate refusal of Democrats to respond appropriately to the destruction of the cities and states they (mis)govern, in the face of far-left violence and blatant racism that Democrat "leaders" encourage or ignore. People's property and livelihoods are being destroyed and nobody with a "D" after their name appears to give a damn, because they HOPE the chaos will give Republicans a black eye.
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@noonenothing422 There's a "God hole" in everybody's brain that probably (speculating) comes from a combination of existential angst and the psychological/emotional comfort one obtains by believing in something bigger that lends purpose to life - a reason for getting up and doing good deeds - that is not found in atheism. Christianity has the added hook of guaranteeing an immortal life. You don't lose your "you" if you will believe THEIR way, according to them.
Me, I'm a superstitious atheist, who sees through the dogma, but still tries to model himself or strive for an idealized self, embodied in the "Christ construct." I also thank the Lord for getting up in the morning, a good meal, and a safe, warm place to lay my head at night. Sure, I've done my part to obtain those things through my own works, but the work I do wouldn't exist if it were all just up to me. There's something outside myself that makes it all possible, and I'm grateful. It still doesn't fix my existential angst, but I try to make the best of the time I have, in the hopes that even if it is ALL for naught, maybe I'm getting the next generation a little closer to something BETTER.
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Tim is young and green. He doesn't see that there is no functional difference between the state owning the means of production and the state regulating every aspect of production. What good is owning your own stuff if the government tells you what you can and can't do with it? Functionally, the regulatory state DOES own the means of production. People understand this in their gut, which is why they conflate socialism and the fascist precursors that permeate the American system.
What Tim doesn't understand about free markets in a free society is that REPUTATION in a true free market is a MUCH stronger incentive for doing things the right way. Government regulations erode that NATURAL process that brought us up from abject poverty to a level of prosperity where HIGHER values can take root and grow. It's a system of incentives wherein it is PROFITABLE to set HIGH standards of your OWN. In the regulatory state, you observe the LETTER of the law, and hide behind the government when it comes to all the shady stuff you want. It's why houses built now are total crap. They meet every regulation and the first rain storm floods the damn basement!
And the construction company that built that house? They can fold up at a moment's notice, file new papers of incorporation and go on building shoddy homes. Before government regulators, you were very CAREful about who built that house, and you'd choose companies that have been successful over the long term, with a track record of building solid homes that LAST. NOWadays, a real-estate developer hires the low-bid contractor, and the development looks WONderful, and hey, the government makes sure all homes are well-built, right? So you aren't as cautious about the home you buy, because you trust that government regulations will protect you. And your outrage at the water in the basement falls on deaf ears, and the contractor that built the home has already disincorporated and reincorporated under another name. Very hard to get restitution. You maybe get on the news, so the local t.v. station can make a plea for more government regulation!
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It will never end. But it will decrease over time, as those who do this kind of shit will steadily become less and less relevant, over time, as people catch on to their bullshit. The only way for them to "win" in the end, is to destroy broadband Internet. As long as there are Tim Pools, Styxhexenhammers, Jordan Petersons and Thomas Sowells with access to the Internet, and people can find them, these anti-intellectual power-game players will be exposed, and that's 99% of marginalizing their sorry asses. They'll keep doing what they're doing, but it will weigh less and less in the public square.
They're the peanut gallery trying to run the opera house. They're the tail trying to wag the dog. Communication is too good, nowadays, and alternatives to the channels and platforms they target are too easily created and joined, for this small number of deluded rabble rousers to dominate the public square the way Saul Alinsky taught them to do. Network society is too fast, too self-correcting for that kind of shit to go unnoticed and unremarked.
Those who wish to control behavior and thought are inevitably losing. As they come to realize this, the big danger is they'll try to tear the whole thing - society, civilization, Internet, people - and actually succeed. But it may be too late for them, already. I hope so, because most folks are mostly good, and require less controlling and more autonomy. And they're getting it. This brief period might just be the peak of their lunatic influence, as most folks are wising up. Yeah, a lotta the bastards are in high positions in government and media, but the will of the people can not be thwarted by using process to defy their wishes, forever. The best they can do is stall.
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And believe me. These "incels" are mostly pretty smart, and what they see is a system that wants them to become worker drones in a system that's going to take every nickel they sweat to earn in order to serve some stranger's vision of utopia, with the same policies that put that kid under a mountain of debt even before he lands his first job. They see the futility in it and it's depressing as hell. It's hard to break free of that, and it almost never happens while they're still young enough to be trapped in the public-school system, which preaches the very madness that is breaking the young boys' hearts, every day and in virtually every way.
Lucky for us, virtually free, high-quality education opportunities are proliferating like mad. The knowledge is out there, and more and more are finding it and teaching themSELVES, outside of the establishment-education framework. I see all kinds of skills in my male cohorts in college, mostly skills that are NOT taught in the schools, but any curious, geeky young boy or young man can quietly obtain for the price of an internet connection and some curiosity.
Wait and see. Permaculture. 3-D printing. Homes that heat, cool and light themSELVES for free, with just small tweaks in conventional home-building practices.... These young SOBs are slurping up new knowledge and coupling them with some age-old insights about the REAL march of human progress. As for the now-dominant culture? It's actually breeding itself out of existence, and - surprise surprise - the evangelicals and Catholics keep having big families! LOL! Traditional protestant sects? Pretty much full-blown SJW and "liberation theology" nonsense that is emptying-out their pews faster than an actual pogrom could do.
Secular liberals might see - and might even be correct - that traditional religion is faith-based and essentially irrational in some ways. But they're totally blind to the fact that they're basically making the same mistake in their OWN world view, without even the excuse of belief in some invisible god. THEIR god is right there in front of them, even though they'll never call them that: government bureaucrats who are all-wise and all-caring. Who's crazier? Does it matter, if the one world view is absolutely incapable of replicating itself, due to its own beliefs? The "There's something greater than imperfect humans" crowd is the crowd that's growing.
Depending on how "successful" the secular liberals are in imposing their oversimplified and mechanistic (treat-the-symptom-with-government-force) view of society, they're creating a society in which fewer and fewer people with that secular, mechanical view of reality even exist! If they're right, they're going extinct. If they're wrong, they're going extinct.
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Tim: You will NEVER keep "such people" out of power, because they SEEK power with a single-mindedness that you or I will NEVER muster. All you can do is LIMIT the power you give to ANYbody. This is the problem with your mixed-economy way of looking at the world, or rather, how far on the side of government action (i.e.. use of force) you are. Beyond laws guaranteeing persons and their property (and by extension, national defense), the government's job is to STFU.
When you invite government action, you give "such people" more power, and they WILL abuse it for their own purposes, whatever those purposes are. This is why LIMITED GOVERNMENT is the imperfect but BEST "solution." We will never (as far as I can see) solve the human condition, which entails pain and eventual death. All we can do is take joy in the moments we are NOT hurting, and cooperate to make the situation less bad for each other, as we can (and as we may). That's not a government thing. It's a HUMAN thing, and institutions are not human. They're abstractions.
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@jhd1531 : Democrats ARE The Man, now, and they still want to act like they're being "edgy" when they push the status-quo establishment. If you think of "left" as speaking truth to power at great risk to yourself, then it's conservatives who are the left. If you think of "left" as standing up against oppressive exercise of power by the state at the expense of the individual, then conservatives are on the left.
The original left wing were the people who spoke out against the power and privilege of the ruling elites. Now that socialist-leaning-and-thinking individuals dominate our major institutions, THEY are the ruling elites, and they think NOTHING of weaponizing the government against their foes. How far will it go before people wake up? Will it stop at Obama weaponizing the IRS against conservative political action groups? Will it stop at using FISA courts to justify NSA surveillance of citizens?
After 9/11, when they passed the Patriot Act, I told everybody that the terrorists had won. To fight the War on Drugs, prosecutors have used NSA intercepts against domestic drug cartels. They can't use the evidence in court, so they spend all their time doing what is known as "parallel construction." They KNOW, through illegally obtained evidence, where a "bad guy" is and what he's up to, so they spend most of their resources in their "investigation" trying to build a case around evidence they could plausibly have obtained legally. Mueller's an old hand at this and even defended the practice in sworn testimony, years ago.
It's OK because hey, they're bad guys, right?
VERY dangerous stuff. Just single your opponent out for the take-down, use the full powers of the National Security Agency to find any and all possible dirt on them or anybody within 2 degrees of separation FROM them, and go after them. Maybe there is no way to dig up evidence that's not fruit of the poisoned tree. No matter. Just find something irregular on the tax return of a friend of one of your friends or a family member, threaten them with tax evasion and stiff fines and jail time, and get them to testify - even to the point of perjury - against you or one of your friends, and then get you to plead guilty to whatever they want, because they're going to destroy your friends or family with harassment prosecutions. They don't even have to have a real case against you or your friends in order to bankrupt you just defending yourself against false allegations.
NONE of it needs to be something they can win in court. They can bleed you to death just by forcing you to defend against their allegations. This was the dangerous bit for Trump during the Mueller investigation. Yeah, Manafort was one of MANY slimeballs who cashed in on the chaos and corruption in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. I thought SURE he'd testify to ANYthing Mueller wanted, just to stay out of jail or get a reduced sentence. He's one of many whom I think Putin would LOVE to extradite to Russia for taking out billions of rubles without even paying taxes.
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AOC was actually right in a way. Amazon wanted a totally fascistic, treat us better than everybody else deal. NYC doesn't give SMALL businesses any kinds of special tax breaks. That's the thing about the left. You guys are fine with fascism (government picking winners and losers) as long as it serves you.
The REAL answer, of course, is low taxes on EVERYbody. But somehow libtards only provide breaks for big business. Libtardism/progressivism is basically thinly veiled fascism, and people then blame the ills of those policies on capitalism. And they can get away with it, because so many, including Tim Pool, are so poorly educated on liberty, property rights and limited government as the keys to prosperity and REAL social justice. Using force all the time, when the only thing force should be used against is the inappropriate use of force!
This is why mankind goes round and round in circles on basic questions answered quite a while ago, but which nobody seems to like the answer, because it isn't utopia. It's just imperfect humans setting up a rule set that minimizes exploitation and rewards merit. Things then get better on their own, until libtards see the prosperity as a reason to rob everybody, and drag our asses back under serfdom. In recent history, the serfdom is under technocrats. But it's no different than warlords extorting taxes to "protect people," from long ago.
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@DEVIN POHL : Are you kidding me? Obama created the "fad" of outrage mobs with a nod and a wink from the Oval Office all the way down to the streets. A GOOD president would say "Maybe you've got a legitimate beef, but we're gonna arrest your ass when you mob up and intimidate and do violence." His nod and a wink gave the green light to like-minded mayors across the country to "stand down" and let the bullshit continue.
Trump was a definite lightning rod for those types, but their madness was already being cldondoned by the establishment. Independent media were the only ones who shed any light on this, because the establishment media did their usual brand of selective reporting.
Think about what would've happened 20 or 30 years ago with the Covington Kids, if there weren't a ton of people just standing around with smartphones, recording entire events. Events in Berkeley, Portland, and all over the country would've been spun the one way, and nobody with a camera could've disputed their version. It's an ingrained habit by big networks who USED to have a monopoly on the images on t.v. Now they don't have that monopoly, but they still act as if it's the same world as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but it ISN'T. The old tactics and strategy no longer work, but they know no other way.
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To all MAGA people who're worried about Trump not being aggressive enough, just think how he's played these fish. They're SO used to getting their own way... They're SO used to having the legacy media in their back pocket... Their brazen malfeasance and incompetence does more to discredit them than going after them, directly, ever could. I think it was Shakespeare (I'm no scholar) who said "The guilty flee when no one pursues." They're so paranoid and desperate, that they NEED these unlawful machinations to stay ahead of the headsman's axe.
And, as with Nixon, it's not the original crimes that put their heads in the noose; rather, it's the abuse of power they can't resist engaging in to cover their asses that shows their perfidy. The legacy-media blackouts they can engineer with one or two phone calls no longer work. Instead, they just HIGHLIGHT the cover-up (Thanks be to new and independent media!). But they can't help themselves. "We pull THIS lever and it all goes away! Beautiful, isn't it? We're unstoppable!" Only the lever doesn't work, and they're getting caught in the act of pulling it, over and over and over and over again, until even I get it.
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@1Samuel 17 The only way for Trump to stop it, himself, was for him to be exactly the kind of dictator that the media accused him of being. This is all about Demokkkrat mayors and governors who are LETTING their cities burn. it's the governor's responsibility to call out the Guard and show zero tolerance for rioting and looting. Joe Biden, the DARLING of the Democrat-run media, could get away with something truly oppressive, and maybe that's the goal. I couldn't tell you.
The one thing I'd do is sort of what the protestors want, which is "re-imagine policing." But it's not re-imagining so much as it is reforming our criminal law, by "re-imagining" drug addiction as a medical problem, rather than a law-enforcement problem. The War on Drugs makes drug cartels strong, sets the police against the community, and sets the community against the police. We put cops in a bad situation, with laws that are virtually unenforceable. To "win" a battle in the War, we green-light the surveillance state, and see an endless escalation of violence between drug lords and law enforcement. It's a pyrrhic war, with no winners, and it makes poor people, especially, less safe.
"Re-imagine" a police force whose only job is fighting crimes against persons and property. No more sneaking around and surveilling people because they might light up a joint or shoot up. Our 'amazing' Robert Mueller is the poster child for using NSA and other intercepts to nail drug dealers. Just label them "terrorists" and monitor EVERYTHING. Then back-fill a chain of evidence leading to a conviction. That used to be called "fruit of the poisoned tree," but now it's called "parallel construction," and it's justified because those drug dealers are so "bad."
Yeah, they're bad. But it's the war against drugs that funds them! And fighting them brings us closer and closer to total chaos, with a public that has a deep and abiding distrust of law enforcement.
I don't know exactly how we'd manage it, but we could see how Portugal manages it. They finally "surrendered" in the war on drugs, and finally got a handle on an epidemic of heroin addiction, and the violence that always attaches to the smugglers and drug dealers that ALWAYS accompany prohibition.
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@ZZ-du4ef : The original. Did they spell it with an 'i?' Makes sense. Sellars spelling his job description incorrectly, accidentally making a proper noun out of it on the written form. Inasmuch as there's nothing really new under the sun, when it comes to stories, it's not that you tell the same basic story, but what layers you can add to it. Everybody knows the story. There's so much that can be done with accidentally working miracles. And we've been doing it in film, since Buster Keaton, and probably before.
And film reflects culture. It's not that film-makers are doing wokeness wrong or anything. It's that wokeness doesn't hold up to common-sense scrutiny. Regular people can tell it's fake from a mile away, and don't like the SJW the same way they didn't like "You're gonna go to Hell for drinking" people, a century ago, or for being gay, or for marrying across racial lines, or just for not believing in Jesus.
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@dekardkain5469 : Assholes like JC Denton and you make WAY too much sense! Close to my take on things, especially with your "niche market" point. The problem for the major networks is they're NOT just some guy in his basement making YouTube videos. That tiny niche of which you speak is a great income for a middle-class vlogger. But it's not enough for a nation-wide news organization with local and regional reporters. They SORT of have that, with local affiliates, but they're going to have to cut deep into the meat of their organizations in order to survive with their income streams attenuating like they are (and have been for some years).
Unfortunately for the legacy networks, there is no diversity of opinion in their ranks, so the only niche they see is the left, and as the "good people" on the left - their moneymakers - abandon their networks, they're fighting over a smaller and smaller, more and more woke segment of the viewing public, and it's a death spiral. "You're losing viewers and public trust because of your demented wokeness!" "Yes, but everything ELSE just made everything WORSE! Our only hope is for low-information viewers who LIKE this nonsense, and besides, it's what WE believe, and WE STAND ON PRINCIPLE!" LOL!
Interesting interplay of forces at work. 90% of the YouTubers cranking out content wouldn't HAVE any content, if the legacy networks didn't create it. The paradigm is shifting, but to WHAT, we just don't know, yet. I'm HOPING that some kind of coop amongst independent reporters and commentators will take place, but the Tim Pool's and Mark Dice's wouldn't have anything to talk about if they didn't have CNN or MSNBC (or ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, etc.) cranking out original stories. I would LOVE to see a network of independents reporting on the news in THEIR neck of the woods, and sharing that news service.
The issue is the funding. For decades, the legacy-network formula of 3 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of actual content dominated. But it's clearly an inferior product, and unable to provide the in-depth conversations and nuance of a 3-hour Joe Rogan interview with Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. You know why there's no cussing on legacy networks? Because 60 years ago, advertisers didn't want to offend all the Christians that bought their stuff! Even now, they seek to sanitize YouTube, which is why, even though competing platforms SUCK for look and feel, they will eventually destroy YouTube. YouTube is STILL trying to figure out a viable monetization scheme, and the more they chase after the money, the more vapid their offerings become.
My hope is that people with disposable income will pay for their Internet, but NOT be conned into buying "bundles of channels" and throw 2s and fews at the channels they like, and support them directly. I know I support channels I want to encourage. Not in any big way. I just spread it around. Tim Pool's the only one I haven't, but mainly because he wants to get married, when I just wanted to drop a few bucks in the collection plate, the one time, and want to make that decision every month, based on how much I use or don't use his channel. He wants me to subscribe for life or some shit like that.
I think there's a lotta bad shit going on, now, but also a paradigm shift that no authorities ANYwhere can control. No matter how the power-hungry bastards fuck with us, human progress marches on. Graduates of failed public education institutions are teaching themselves all KINDs of stuff online, and talking like PhD economists, arguing the finer points of the Austrian School versus Keynes. Cool shit!
People are getting smarter, all the time! It's just hard to see, because of all the dumb things people say, depending on where they're at on the learning curve. But in MY humble opinion, the dumbest dumb-asses on YouTube are the kinds of people who couldn't even read or write, 30 years ago. The DUMBESt of us are a helluva lot smarter, and I'm not sure there's anything that can stop it, short of destroying the Internet, entirely. To you or I, trapped (because we're also dumb-asses) by the 24-hour news cycle, it just doesn't seem like things are changing in any kind of good way, Infringements on our rights are CELEBRATED by arrogant white-man's-burden types. It's always been like this. But individuals, as always, since before the Greeks, slowly keep getting smarter and keep getting more real power.
Forget politics. Think 'automobile.' Forget religion. Think 'smart phone.' Forget EPA. Think 'rocket stove mass heater.' And small-plot farming. And 'locally grown' and...
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@Pepe Meme : Depends on the man, the woman, and the terms of the relationship. Feeding one or two more mouths isn't a huge deal if you're economically well-off enough to support a family at all. And if you ARE the man of the house and raise those adopted kids as your own, they will see you as their real Dad. And it pays HUGE dividends in love and respect later in life. But yeah, if you're a weak, pussy-whipped man who has to be "hands-off" in his own household, it's nothing but grief and cuckoldry. To see what I mean, you should research the "Horse Whisperer" story. Dude applied his compassion and understanding to his CHILDREN, and ended up adopting a score or more "troubled kids" and put them to work on his ranch, meaning gave them normal everyday chores. Those kids learned self-respect and saw by his example how to treat those weaker than you.
Not that he set out to create his own private welfare state, but if he chose to retire, there were 30 people in the next generation more than happy to help and take care of him. But it's more about just feeling and seeing the love from the next generation that humans seek in their heart of hearts. Moms know this. Women without children know this, even if they can't explain the hole in their hearts.
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@pietersteenkamp5241 : You're all upside-down on this one, pal. Libtards want to throw money at everything and then blame someone else when the problem just gets worse. Libtards want to use force, when the only real answer for a healthy society is a responsible citizenry. You deliberately cripple people's sense of responsibility and self-reliance, and then you bitch because people who ARE responsible get sick of seeing you waste their money on programs that on balance, DESTROY, rather than build up.
You know who pays the biggest chunk of their income on taxes, and then on top of that, gives the most to charity? CONSERVATIVES. You know where Democrats get most of their money? Fat Cats! Big-money donors. You know where Conservatives get their money? $5, $10 and $20 contributions from people just getting by who want to see change for the better, rather than virtue-signaling money-down-a-rathole programs that end up hurting the very groups they pretend to target for HELP. You are arguing on the side of professional race-baiters, the poverty INDUSTRY, and people who want to use abortion to keep the rabble from breeding too fast. You're on the side of the people who tricked the black man back onto the plantation by promising "Free Stuff."
You're either in it for your own selfish gain, or your just an ignorant shill. Yours are the easiest, lowest-common-denominator arguments to make. You either fear nuance or are incapable of it.
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I work in education. NObody at work talked to a single person who voted for Trump. When they discovered after the fact that someone had, they basically accused them of being evil, and ended their friendships. They were SURE Trump cheated, because they were SURE that nobody voted for him. Echo-chamber realities.
This sort of thing also goes on in peer review in Grievance Studies journals and other critical-race and intersectional journals. They think they're doing something real, because the literature itself was all written by people who think and say the exact same things, so they have plenty of references to cite, which makes them so easy to hoax.
This was how RussiaGate got its traction, too. Buzzfeed and WaPo citing each other, when both used the same single source, so there was zero independent confirmation of the story. They just really liked what each other said, plus the one source they both used and they created this circular confirmation going on. Same thing has happened in climate science. Even if you agree that the Earth is warming, their "solutions" are all the same tired old authoritarian solutions that keep everybody in business solving a problem that will never be solved.
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@charliedilltarde9881 : I'm more eclectic. I see MANY features of Christianity that are fundamental to a healthy person and healthy society, even though I don't buy into the whole hook that's been used for millennia for the purposes of creating religious institutions that have their OWN hierarchies and OWN best interests that have little or nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.
Lots of Daoist principles ring true for me, too: BALANCE. Wicca: Seek and share knowledge (science!). And so on. I don't buy 100% into any one dogma, even though I can clearly see how a principled application of the teachings of Jesus, especially, made the American Experiment possible, by re-defining the power relationship between people and (LIMITED) government. And as long as I'm not so arrogant as to deny the Creator the right to speak to early Bronze-Age herdsmen in METAPHORS, I can still keep open the idea that there MIGHT BE some Divine Inspiration to be found in the Bible. But at root, it's all about treating people right and not imposing your (or anyone else's) will on anybody else, by force, and looking to GET good things by GIVING good things. Golden Rule, Sermon-on-the-Mount stuff that I apply to my everyday life and my view of reality.
Humans always yearn for meaning in life. God gives that meaning to many. A few - like me - accept that God isn't a provable (or disprovable) proposition, what happens when we die - whether or not we have an immortal soul - is uncertain (I only have earnest reports from people who probably know less than I do, which makes it possible for them to be CERTAIN, when I cannot), and try to do what's best for me and mine, and by extension, the world in which we all find ourselves. History teaches that government is a protection racket that is necessary, but also must be kept to a minimum: Protect my unalienable rights and the national borders and by behaving responsibly, the medium of exchange (the currency), but otherwise butt out and leave things up to families and communities to sort out, which makes it unlikely I will ever be what now passes for a liberal. Liberals - especially Progressives - basically unconsciously have replaced the god they reject out of hand with an IMPLICIT god known as The State. It's a gray, grim existence, with nothing but anger, resentment, violence, and corruption as its unintentional goal, with as many or more faith-based lunacies built in and utterly impossible to uproot, because not only is it just as faith-based as Christianity, there is no redemption. Only outrage, as going down their path only multiplies the amount of inequity and oppression.
It's an imperfect world. Get over it. Help your family and your neighbor. Oppose those who want to use force to "fix everything." They only cause more problems that need MORE force to solve, down the road, if you know your history, and can separate the flaws of the people who nudged us forward from the nudges forward they gave us, which libtards are utterly incapable of doing. Thomas Jefferson was flawed as a human; therefore, every Enlightenment principle he supported and wrote about is just a pack of lies. Amirite? Libtards reject the good, because it always comes with a little bad. Because reality and imperfection of humans. Unversed in history, they are blind to the forms of tyranny that they SUPPORT, because our best guess at something better isn't Heaven on Earth, and so they march us steadily towards Hell on Earth on a road paved with Good Intentions and very little wisdom.
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@bill gates : Things've NEVER been perfect. I interpret his comment as "Twitter didn't help make things better."
As I'm incapable of coherent self-expression in anything less than 2 or 3 paragraphs, and generally not coherent even in free-form, I never became a TWIT in the first place, much as I love a good one-liner. The ideas of the day require nuanced conversations, and Twitter's just made for short, sweet ZINGERS that don't do much to improve the level of discourse.
There's been a lot of "tail wagging the dog" situations, due to Twitter's restrictions on Tweet length, and later, due to cry-bully/cancel-culture censorship. But as stupid as we are, we're evolving very rapidly. Ignorant and partisan hate mobs had the run of the place - still do - but with every smear campaign, more people get red-pilled.
You see a similar phenomenon in the streets of blue cities, where a small group of highly motivated, soy terrorists rule downtowns across the country. As they gleefully - and mean-spiritedly - bully the local population, all they see is the daily "win." But they miscalculated the impact of citizen video. They also thought they would gaslight the public on "white supremacy" and provoke violent reactions, in a self-fulfilling prophecy situation.
And it almost worked. There were conservatives and others who wanted to fight fire with fire, which would've played into Antifa's hands. But it didn't quite work out as planned. The Patriot Prayer types generally handled themselves, well, with some conspicuous exceptions, like "Tiny," who wanted to knock heads and defend free speech through confrontation. But amongst the groups were also a lot of ex-military and current and former law enforcement, who understood crowd control tactics and unarmed self-defense.
But I think the leadership on the conservative/free-speech side were smart enough to realize that winning on the streets by direct action was self-defeating. I personally like Joey Gibson and some of the other leaders, but the REAL victory lies in the hands, sources, and hidden cameras of people like Andy Ngo. They kicked his ass and made a MARTYR of him, and his message is getting out. LOSING in the streets is the ultimate WIN, because you just can't un-see viral video. And Andy's victimization gave free speech a stronger platform than use of force ever could.
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They've been practicing the cry-bully strategy for years. They're masters. They can torment you all day for days on end, and when you finally snap, it's your fault. This a feature of much domestic violence, where the man is ALWAYS at fault, even when the woman is much stronger, mentally, than the man, and knows EXACTLY how to push his buttons until he loses control. This isn't MOST cases, but an appalling number, nonetheless. I know LOTS of couples where the woman is the one with verbal judo skills, and the man is pretty good-natured, but not very sophisticated. In those relationships, when they turn sour, it's more often the woman's fault than anyone will admit.
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When you say "influencers," I automatically assume brain-dead followers. I haven't seen "Plandemic," although I do think there is an ideological divide between open-ended lock-down side and let-me-earn-my-daily-bread side that's mostly left-right, respectively. I'm skeptical of 5G, because I don't feel like I have to have high-def role-playing games on my damn telephone, and I've read reports that China-led 5G installs around the world appear to come with all kinds of strings and signal intercepts built in. And while I think Jonas Salk was a freaking genius, I don't trust the people making vaccines, nowadays. There're some scary stories coming out of Africa and Asia with regard to vaccines produced under the Gates-Foundation umbrella.
And now you can see where they likely will want to make 'Rona vaccinations mandatory, which MIGHT be good, but the people who are pushing it the hardest are scary people, whom I do not trust. DPT was pretty standard when I was a kid. It still is, but more and more people (it's all anecdotal, so far) are saying their kid got a really bad fever right after they were vaccinated and have never been the same since.
In a nation of 350 million (give or take), you can fill 24 hours a day with anecdotes. That doesn't mean it's statistically significant or comparable to the harm from a resurgence of polio.
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Tulsi was the best candidate the Dems had. She's still a god-awful, big-government leftist, but she's anti-establishment on foreign policy, except for immigration, where she's just as insane as the rest of the Democrats, who'd rather rule a 3rd-world nation than serve the USA.
When Tim says "boorish," I see him dressed in a Victorian-era frock, clutching his pearls. Americans are supposed to be unvarnished and brash. We're supposed to speak truth, even when it hurts people's feelings. We're not supposed to know which fork to use at a formal dinner. The trappings of aristocracy are for the aristocracy. We are a country ruled by the Common Folk, who have more sense about real life than 10,000 wealthy politicians.
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Laissez-faire capitalism has NEVER been the problem and has NEVER run amuck! It's been the cornucopia of prosperity and freedom from Day 1. EVERY "run amuck" instance has involved GOVERNMENT working with corrupt business persons for special favors. When there are no special favors (or punishments) from government, free people making free trades will always tend towards what's best for all. You're perpetuating a myth.
What the U.S. government has done is wait until there's a critical mass of free people who are fed up with some form of bullshit, and RACED to the front of the parade with some new government program to "fix" the problem, when the critical mass of people was already MAKING things change. Those government agencies NEVER protected us! They just concentrated the decision-making into the hands of a handful of bureaucrats, who immediately were bribed or blackmailed into using Government Force to benefit the most corrupt businessmen in the land!
Thinking that government is the reason why capitalism doesn't run amuck is exactly upside-down and ass-backwards thinking. Monsanto wouldn't pull the shit with GMO like they do without the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We wouldn't be clearcutting old growth forests without the help (and subsidies) coming from the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
You can go right down the line and see that big business and big government are thick as thieves, and they're bringing us fascism through the back door while all pretend that they're looking out for us. You want to go green in your own way in your own space? Gonna have to fight the EPA and numerous other government agencies, because they "don't approve" of anything that's not in their spreadsheet or in their regulations.
This country was founded on the principle that people can do right well for and by themselves, without a bunch of greedy aristocrats lording it over us. Progressives and so-called liberals are doing their UTMOST to subject us to rule by small groups of elites (aristocracies!) in the name of "protecting us." Now it's the tyranny of the elites, and we wonder why, for instance, a vote by the people for BREXIT doesn't immediately result in, you know, BREXIT! It's because the government in the UK (and the US) considers itself to be OVER the people and NOT subject to the will of the people. That's why the USA can't protect its own borders, even though 70% of the people are sick and tired of illegal immigration and putting citizens at the back of the line. That's why 80% of the people despise political correctness, but all our institutions are still pushing it harder than ever!
When 70-80% of the people are against something that the elites are for, the elites MUST GIVE WAY. They can stall. They are stalling. But the super-majority of the people will not be thwarted indefinitely.
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You reveal your youth in your criticism of the generation following your own. You don't remember when long hair transitioned from an edgy, anti-establishment statement of principle, to a sort of uniform for adolescents. Look at yearbook pictures from the '70s. The previous generation ALWAYS sees the one that follows as soft, herd-like, and ineffectual. This scorn has probably always been there, because we always forget how soft WE were, coming up, and how we toughened up and broadened out in new and interesting ways. And some of the old ways. Just take a look at that 20something who comes and does your next drywall job, if you're a homeowner, or that 20-something mechanic at the dealership, or the 20-something construction worker or roofer for the old-school.
Then there are the new-school types. The soy boy who sees the sun on the way to and from school, and spends the rest of his time in the basement building a freaking 3-D printer and playing around with it in his copious spare time. The 14-year-old building computers in his bedroom.
Real life is far more vast and far less visible than the small number who engage in politics before cleaning their rooms.
Fact is, people with useful skills are always in demand, and Nature has a way of filling all available niches. People doing full-on politics are either good enough at something to afford such a hobby, or operating on someone else's dime. Without someone else's dime, pffffffft.
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We'll see. I think they're systematically making themselves irrelevant, by abusing the process and the legacy institutions that they've owned for so long. But what I see happening is people just #walkingaway from those legacy institutions. Nobody's down-sizing the government, but the legacy networks and the public education institutions are going the way of the dodo bird. The movers and shakers and raisers of families are mostly traditional values people who go to charter schools, private schools and are home schooled. The "major networks" still make a lot of noise, but they're relevant to a small and shrinking audience. Only the establishment types think that CNN or MSNBC are opinion-makers on any kind of major scale.
The left SEEM to be winning all the battles, but it's more like the Nazis at Stalingrad or in the Battle of the Bulge. Lots of noise. Lots of damage, locally. But the big picture? An evil empire fighting brilliant rearguard actions in a long, grinding retreat. It's easy to get depressed, because they make so much noise and can single out individuals for destruction, but really, they're fighting a tidal wave with spoons.
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I had $21,000 to pay off, and I took the job in the mountains on a 1-yr full-time temp contract, for $30,000/yr. Lived close to the bone, but still had enough for one steak dinner and night out on Fridays, and paid off almost all of it in about 7 years. Then I got injured, and wasn't gonna be wading the Gunnison, any more, fishing for cutthroat, so took a full-time position in a LESS good place to live, with an instant $10,000/yr raise. Now I'm at $80,000 and own my own home. But it was a long time coming.
All those 7 years, day-to-day life was good. Just at the end of each year, the only progress I'd made was on my student debt. I wasn't anywhere close to buying a house. But I got to live in alpine paradise, with world-class fishing and skiing 20 minutes away. Plus, the 2nd-hand stores in that place were AWESOME, because of all the rich people who buy gear brand-new for one trip and dump it all off at the 2nd-hand store on consignment on their way out of town.
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They're trying to manufacture followership, when all they're doing is appealing to a small Twitter-guided niche.
Independents can make out very well with a small niche, be it left, right, or foot-fetish crowd. The big networks need BROAD appeal, and they've lost the knack.
I think there've been structural changes in how people access entertainment, and the cable/broadcast, commercial-interrupted product is inferior. Going woke is an attempt to reverse trends that has the opposite of its intended effect. They're at wit's end, and they're ANGRY about it. It's the end of the world as they know it, and they've objectified Trump as the emblem of real existential threats to their lazy, condescending modus operandi.
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We need to outlaw corporate contributions to all things political. If their shareholders or board members want to contribute, let them do so out of their own pockets and let all those donations be a matter of public record. Politicians will always pander to big-money interests the way things are set up, now. It's one-stop shopping for all their campaign-funding needs. They only have to please a handful of rich and powerful people and work with them to manufacture and disseminate the required narratives to make it seem like that is NOT what is happening. And also to suppress any competing narratives.
The courts and legislatures have failed us when it comes to big-money funding of political speech. After Citizens United case, there was a case called "SpeechNow."
"One significant result of the SpeechNOW decision was the emergence of large ideologically driven “Super PACs” to which wealthy individuals could contribute without limit. The amount of spending by such groups during elections between 2010 and 2016 increased from $62 million to more than $1.1 billion."
This is why everybody's up in arms about George Soros buying so many local elections for prosecutors around the USA. That should not be possible, but that's how it is, now, and that's why news, media and entertainment are all so out-of-touch with the people. They're nakedly serving the interests of a bunch of pencil necks who think they're smarter than everybody else and have a RIGHT to impose their will on everybody else, "for the greater good." Those "greater good" types are just your everyday "end justifies the means" types, with a (bad) facelift. These are the types that drag millions into poverty, misery and death, "because it's the right thing to do."
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End their special protections. Hold individuals strictly accountable for what they say on those platforms. If it's defamatory, go after 'em! If it's inciting violence, go after them! Don't report them to the FaceBook authorities. If they're breaking the law, report them to the police! We're in the VERY early stages of a societal transformation created by social media. What Google and the other Big Tech firms are doing now will be considered the fits and starts of a new culture that will look back at what they're doing now as quaint and misguided. As long as the Internet backbone exists for people to use, people will find ways around those who wish to control everything.
Rather than being horrified at the manipulations we can all see, I'm happy that so many of us see through the propaganda. So few did, 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. History is always a race between the innovations of the people and the innovations of the state. I think it's 3 steps forward and 2 steps back, but still progress is made, in spite of all the forces deployed against liberty and prosperity, towards centralized solutions formulated by a few for the many, I think the many are slowly winning over time.
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Basic U.S. History and Civics. See "federalism." We've gone FAR too far in the central-control direction. But even when the country was 13 independent colonies, the Framers understood that the nation was - wait for it - too DIVERSE for centralized control of everything; rather, the mostly-independent states were to Run Their Own Affairs on most matters. We like to have the feds do everything, since the 20th Century, because it can just print money that you couldn't extract (peacefully) from the people. But when the feds take on programs, they can steal it from them invisibly by never-ending devaluation of the currency behind our backs. Every penny you put in the bank is still there. It's just not worth as much. You ALWAYS pay. And you pay with INTEREST when the feds print funny money to pay for our selfish wants. It's TOXIC. And it's a big "fuck you" to all of our children, who will end up paying off that debt the feds can run up (which the state and local can't).
Trump is right. He can leave it to the governors or, due to the crisis situation, he can take that authority to himself. The feds are there for crises that the states can't or won't handle. The Framers would prefer that the local and state governments handle it. This is an ancient tradition dating back to Alfred the Great ("The Last Kingdom") of autonomous, self-defending boroughs (fortified towns) to defend what was to become England from Danish raiders. Before they fortified the boroughs, the Danes raided as they pleased, and Alfred's armies couldn't muster quickly enough to oppose the Danes in time to do any good (Kind of like waiting for the police, while the criminal kills you.).
Dude: Let the Alexa go. It's creepy. You don't need it.
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Enough people in outlying cities and towns have seen Portland, and when the 'mostly peaceful protests' were headed THEIR way, local armed militia were in the streets. Nothing very organized. Just regular citizens who didn't want their town to look like downtown Portland. Up in my old neck of the woods, smaller cities, like Couer D'Alene and Lewiston put an end to the destruction and violencd before it even started.
They stood by for the peaceful stuff, but defended businesses and squelched any attempt at turning the protests into rioting and looting orgies. They received a lot of criticism, 'proving' white supremacy in the outlying areas, even though there were armed BLACKS in amongst the militias, standing shoulder to shoulder with the whites, because they ALSO had homes and businesses to protect, and weren't about to let the peaceful protests turn 'mostly peaceful.' You wouldn't know this if you weren't a local, because legacy/national media wouldn't touch those stories, other than to complain about 'white supremacists' in the towns that resisted the violence with a show of force.
And lots of word-of-mouth stories about vans and cars full of Antifa types and/or opportunistic looter types, with out-of-state plates coming into town, acting unruly and being shepherded back out of town by crowds of locals of ALL races, telling them "Go home!"
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Laissez-faire doesn't mean it's OK to commit fraud. But in 99.9% of voluntary transactions, the seller is treating the buyer well, in order to sell to that buyer, again. Long-term survival depends on repeat customers, or you quickly run out of customers. Word gets around fast when you're a fraudster or a cheat. There is a culture of fair-mindedness that you violate at your peril, "laissez-faire" or not. The reason we have laws against bad actions isn't to control the bad actors, but to keep the ordinary citizens from taking matters into their own hands! The law is basically there in order to place limits on the punishments that the common folk would dish out if there weren't already laws and authorities in place to administer them. Harsh punishments aren't there to deter criminals, but to deter lynch mobs. The law is there mainly to set a CEILING on punishments, to LESSEN punishments. Shorter sentences mean there's more money for year-end bonuses in the Corrections Dept! Heh.
Adam Smith didn't operate in a Scottish village without laws. It was the free marketplace, where it wasn't rules or regulations that "regulated" the market place, but a culture of fair play, under conditions that made good behavior very rewarding. Same family with the best apples, every fall. Reputation. Standing behind your product. Nothing in the law about that, but basic laws against outright theft and outright fraud. It just rarely came to that. The regulator wasn't poking his nose into your business unless there were complaints. Does a health inspector really improve the food-handling, or do bad actors just learn how to get certified by fooling or bribing inspectors? It becomes all about the inspector.
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I like your news sweep. I don't much care for the hyperbolic commentary. We have a "movement" by a small number of stupid and violent people. The only traction they have is with fellow-traveling Democrat politicians, who are proving that they don't know how to govern. Once you get past these artificial "safe spaces," there's zero momentum. As soon as the power or water are shut off, you will see COMPETENT people going in, evicting the LARPers, violently if need be, and the guys who can get the power and water back on will go in and fix it. What I see is a lot of opportunism made possible only by the "system" that feeds them. Break the system, locally, and either starve or try to take over another locality. But each new locality sees what happened to the one before, and steels itself against the chaos. We saw this in Couer D'Alene, Idaho, and many other towns.
These are protected children playing make-believe. Their fantasies will be demolished as soon as the going gets a little bit tough. After you're done looting all the stores, and no more trucks are coming in, what do you do? Rage against the machine? Then eat each other? And what do you do with the people who've kept their heads down, but HAVE to come out, because water, power and food are gone? Do you think they will rise up in solidarity with the idiots who caused things to break down, or do you think they'll turn on the idiots and crush them?
This is a movement that dies more quickly the more successful it is. It's CHOP writ large.
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These people need a place to stay and a job. But Dems make no provision for that other than more Free Stuff. It's simply unsustainable, and puts pressure on OUR poorest and weakest. The left have largely figured this out in Europe, as their promises out-stripped their social safety net, especially with regard to housing, but also with regard to JOBS. And many of their liberal economic policies and regulatory framework, the entry-level jobs are scarce for native-born and immigrant, alike. So many contradictions, when you try to run everything on command. Better to LET self-sustaining systems arise on their own, without impediment, than to order everything by statute and regulation. Keep those to a minimum and beef up your tort system, instead. Make it easy for small to sue big and eliminate 90% of the bureaucracy, right there. Have a lot more civil courts and judges, but I'd rather see it done that way, than by careerist bureaucrats eager to make friends with wealthy individuals, and leverage their own positions for wealth and status.
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In Inglorious Basterds, there was a bar scene where an American spy held up the American sign for "3 beers," which is thumb-and-pinky together, with three fingers held up, like you're taking the Boy Scout Pledge. Germans' sign for "3" was thumb-and-index finger together, in an "OK" sign, with middle finger, ring finger and pinky held up. Oddly, that's the sign for going for a 3-pointer in basketball, but to this day it's the "Boy Scout Pledge" in 99% of settings, when you're indicating "3."
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Is this widespread left-wing outrage, or did you just look until you found somebody with a stupid angle?
Trump IS a serious, suit-wearing president. Dark blue suit, red tie is his UNIFORM. He's dressed for work, every day, all day. He's ON every day, all day. He means business. He's NOT royalty, and that's kind of the point that escapes pearl-clutching establishment snobs. They see themselves as the aristocracy, and Trump as a hopeless, stupid barbarian. Bottom line:
"I'm president, and you're not." -Donald Trump
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While I think the "Defund the police!" people are acting juvenile, I think we're overdue for some serious conversations about how we police and especially what we police.
And while we're at it, let's look at poverty programs that break up families just as effectively as slave-owners in the 1830s. Now the chains are of the mind, because the mothers and fathers appear to want it that way! Strange how, in such an atheistic time, we have so many Baby Jesus's around with no Joseph.
And I'm not just talking about black families. The dysfunction is fairly universal, although in more and more families, I see mom's and dad's working things out down the middle. My nephew's a 2-weeks-on, 2-weeks-off worker, who works 12-hour shifts. He gets 2 weeks off, and spends every day with his kids. Sometimes he takes them to his place near the job site. The parents aren't together, but both have found new mates. My nephew spends a lot more quality time with his kids than my dad ever did. It's almost a throw-back to pre-history, when men would go off on long hunts.
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I have read that the infection rates and severity of the cases is pretty low among children. I don't think I'd limit normal interactions, including sports, between kids, but as far as herding them into classrooms and making everybody sit inside a closed room, together, and be lectured to by one teacher/baby-sitter, is probably a bad idea, in general, because there are lots of viruses out there that can cut a wide swath through brick-and-mortar schools that pack all the kids together into classrooms. That's kind of stupid, even if the 'Rona isn't exactly the Andromeda Strain. But I think the schools are a mechanism by which a LOT of different viruses get passed from children to the elderly.
"It ain't the old folks who're spreadin' it! It's our own damn kids! They're wipin' snot with their hands and it gets on the football! And the GIRLS are passing it around on romance novels! AND THEY'RE DOIN' IT ON PURPOSE, BECAUSE OF UNFUNDED PENSION LIABILITIES!" Heh.
"Naw, that ain't right! It was their FOLKS who put 'em UP TO IT! They ALL hate Grandma! She used to wash their mouths out with soap and pinch their ears. You see Jimmy over there? Yeah. Well, he ain't a boxer."
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Don't wreck what works for the vast majority of people, to prop up a small segment. If you're liberal and you want to make a change, don't look to government force to solve it. YOU help somebody. As a conservative, that's what I do. And I figure if everybody who likes to virtue-signal and take my money for their compassion got off their ass and helped just one person, we'd solve the homeless problem - for example - one person at a time, without any force. I took in a vision-impaired person, who just needed a safe, quiet place to take classes on Internet skills, as a vision-impairment assistant to website developers (a growth industry).
This isn't a hard case, but it did help a guy who fell through the cracks. Just one. And that's how it works. If you haven't taken anybody in, yourself, then shut your mouth about "living wage." It's going straight from idealism to unintended destruction, which is the calling card of the left. In the cities where the homeless problem is out of control, I see a ton of virtue-signalers and a bunch of mansions occupied by virtue signalers with NO homeless being taken in. No INDIVIDUAL help.
Liberals don't understand human nature and how the world works. How compassion works. They think that career unelected bureaucrats know better than people how to help people. But you make a career out of administering programs that take money from one person to give to another. Bureaucrats don't care if they're efficient, nor do they really care about the people they're helping. They end up screwing both taxpayer and beneficiary. all unintended. But after many years of watching how things actually work, I'm more and more convinced that leftists are either stupid, willfully ignorant or liars.
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It's a toxic mix of ignorance, stupidity, malice, and partisan bias. They have zero intellectual honesty and many lack rudimentary reasoning skills.
One of the reasons Trump is so brash and confrontational is because being reasonable with unreasonable people is a formula for defeat, and he has no intention of losing. He gains NOTHING by being nice to people who hate him. And his "meanness" is really not all that mean.
I just spoke to a guy who is offended because Trump is a bully. He has NO sense of how Trump has been bullied, 24/7/365 ever since he threw his hat into the ring by Washington insiders, legacy media, and the Democrats pulling their strings. Virtually the entire establishment despises him, and his holding the top spot in government is like a declaration of war. That's why they're at war, and there's no Geneva Convention in this war. There's no standard of truth.
You have to patronize channels like this and other independents, plus a handful of existing news organizations.
I think the thing that is MOST maddening is that Trump fights fire with fire. Democrats OWNED the black vote, the latino vote and the low-information-tv-viewer vote. Trump has a way of appealing to a big chunk of the low-information types. He's got the libertarians and conservatives, already, because we despise the overgrown, arrogant, and power-abusing establishment. We understand regulatory capture. We understand that "runaway capitalism" has never existed. Behind every robber baron is a government official manipulating the system for the robber baron's benefit. It's been like this since the days of the transcontinental railroad, where the greediest and most unscrupulous confidence men got free land and juicy contracts.
Everything the government touches is ALWAYS hijacked by the most powerful and corrupt people. When you manage to learn this, you abhor the Democrats and most establishment Republicans. Both groups HATE Trump. That's (almost) enough for me. What tipped the scales for Trump in MY book is what he's DONE as president. And except for the (debatable) COVID-19 giveaways, he's been pretty much on the right side of the issues. School choice, strong borders, banning critical race theory, making every new regulation contingent on the doing-away with 2 existing regulations...
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Kids spend all their time with kids, under the supervision of an adult. In the past, kids spent time with Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa and other adults, and much of their time spent with other kids was without adult supervision, and kids organized their OWN games and settled their OWN differences. But now, if there's any dispute, somebody always runs to the teacher. We bring them up expecting everything to be settled by a person in authority over them. See it all the time.
The "speak truth to power" liberals have all become "appeal to authority" liberals. It's no wonder that all their proposals are authoritarian in nature. Any problem they see can only be solved by some government official riding to their rescue. From health care to climate change. Anything that's not foam-padded and comfy related to human existence, which for 99% of human history and prehistory was filthy, brutal and SHORT, MUST be solved by some unelected technocrat, who, truth be told, is just as flawed and imperfect a human as those humans they are paid to help, with money taken FROM those same people (or better yet, OTHER people), spending money that isn't theirs, to solve someone ELSE's problem. No wonder government is bloated and services are starting to deteriorate.
It's like watching Greek Theater, when things get really bad and there's no way for the characters to save themselves, until some Greek God is lowered from the rafters on a rope to magically save the day for poor, helpless humans. The fact is that capitalism and general prosperity made it so that the AVERAGE person can solve more of their OWN problems, and there are those who just HATE the idea of us common peasants being able to stand on our own feet.
This was why Otto Von Bismarck invented state-run health care (setting the stage for Hitler, btw), using - surprise, surprise! - the company towns maintained by a weapons manufacturer (Krupp Steel) as a glowing example of how society ought to run. Of course, Bismarck knew - although the general public didn't - that the free health care operated by the cannon-maker Krupp came with a loyalty-to-Krupp pledge by all employees, and Krupp had 100% loyalty from its workers. Before state-run health care, the German people were getting downright UPPITY, turning their noses up at the ruling aristocracy, which was HORRIFYING to the oligarchs.
Trick people into believing they just can't live without government programs that they themselves pay for through taxes, and get less than 50 cents on the dollar back on, and they will pretty much follow whatever that government says, including turning on ethnic/political/religious minorities that the government targets for destruction, or just go on a killing spree (WAR) in other countries that the government targets and dehumanizes with government-controlled media, which was also a major feature of Hitler's Germany and which we mostly have, today, if you still rely on the lamestream media, instead of independent journalists, like Tim Pool for your news.
We have mixed/hybrid forms of ALL of that in our country, today, with the left wanting us to go all the way. Med4All, free education, etc. And it works almost as well as the blatantly socialist/fascist forms found in Communist China, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany. Ironically, the people taking to the streets like brownshirted (or blackshirted) thugs in the current era actually believe they're opposing fascism, when in actuality they're attacking the ONLY people on campus who recognize how far down the fascist/socialist path we have already gone and speak out AGAINST it!
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There's a glut of content being created, as streaming services that used to license existing movies and tv shows to round out their offerings found that well drying up, because Hollywood studios decided "Why license, when we can host our own streaming service and generate revenue from our productions, directly?" This got pushed farther during COVID, when theater receipts went to near zero, and movies increasingly went to proprietary streaming services, like Disney+, Paramount+, etc.
So Netflix, Amazon and others took their piles of cash that weren't growing, any more, and invested in their own content. There are more people making tv shows and movies, now, than ever. And the writing talent pool (the actual talent part) has shrunk while at the same time demand for writers. producers and directors has grown. The result? A bunch of SJWs fresh out of college are now writing, producing and directing high-dollar shows they never would've come close to making, due to lack of experience and/or talent.
I also see a convergence between what independents with passion can put on film and what big studios can put on film. I'd love to see more of that. Maybe the rise of co-ops where individuals collaborate on productions, without the pressures that the studio "factories" experience. With the right production model, more relaxed production schedules, and a revenue-sharing setup, you could see a lot of independent studios springing up and competing head-to-head with big, moribund studios.
Wishful thinking? Probably. But I think more and more companies are going to be created, because there's huge demand for good movies and tv that is not being met by legacy studios.
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Meanwhile, Clay Travis' Outkick channel is growing by leaps and bounds, because he calls out BLM and the "Corona Bro's."
NBA decided to weigh in on one side of the political divide: the side that endorses violence, theft and destruction. After all the struggles THIS white boy went through to get some economic security through hard work and overcoming hardship, the LAST thing I need from ANYone is to be told I stole what I earned and that I'm a white supremacist.
What's cool about this so-called "racial divide" is that I'm liking blacks who are saying what I'M saying MUCH more than misguided or blatantly pandering white liberals who support the mayhem, explicitly or implicitly. More than ever before in my life, I can say I judge people on the content of their character more than the color of their skin. Anthony Brian Logan? Brandon Tatum? Conservative guy? Jericho Green? These are MY friends and neighbors more than Biden-voting and race-baiting white (so-called) liberals. And to hold their positions in SPITE of all the peer pressure and MSM lies, and decades of loyalty to lying Democrats, the intelligence and sheer courage on display from these cats is phenomenal.
I've been this way since I educated myself after high school, first by becoming a CSPAN junkie in the early '80s, and then by reading a shit ton without any fool teacher handing me a worthless damn reading list, but by digging for the facts for myself. And these young black conservatives, thanks to the Internet, are giving themselves the same kind of 2- or 3-year crash course after wasting 13 years in K-12, much the same way I did, damn near 40 years ago. Knowledge is power, and we're seeing more and more people break the shackles of organized ignorance and half-truths the government-run public schools and Democrat-run media.
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Learning materials and classroom activities favor girls and turn off boys. Girls are more like dogs and boys are more like cats, when it comes to the social stuff that the female-dominated establishment pushes so hard. Boys tend to just need a system of rewards to motivate them, and start geeking-out on the material, solo, with a nittle nudge here and there from a teacher/competent guide. But add the group aspect to girls' studies, and the social aspects of the group motivate the girls to do the solo work needed to contribute and gain status in the girl group. Plus they'll organize out-of-class get-togethers, and end up structuring hours of out-of-class engagement with the material.
It's two different ways of learning and motivating, which GENERALLY work better one way for the one gender and better the other way for the other gender.
With boys, you stimulate better work with competition, generally. With girls, it's more about cooperation. As a group, the girls might come out on top, but the boys will have more geniuses and more duds. If I have an all-male class, I might do a lot of board work where we stick a boy up on the whiteboard and force him to defend his work against a roomful of critics. In the girls', more boardwork where they ALL get a marker and they work the problem out, together.
Trouble is - as any transgen will tell you - some boys are wired differently and some girls are wired differently. The geeky girls that you see scattered about in the hacker community are very boy-like when it comes to how they break things down and look at things. And some BOYS are going to struggle in that boy-centric Whiteboard Challenge setting, because they get nervous, or get marginalized because they're not very competitive.
In education, we tend to organize activities to avoid any kind of such embarrassments, and you get a very blah kind of classroom. What needs to happen - and probably won't within the institutional settings - is custom-tailored education PRODUCTS that allow for introverts and extroverts, but MORE importantly, can deliver content at EXACTLY the level and pace of the individual student. Self-paced work, video and realtime on-demand question-answering tools ("Help Me Solve This" and "Show Me An Example" tools).
We're going to migrate away from one-size-fits-all classroom learning. Instead of 6 hours a day doing whatever your dimwit teacher decides to do, as one group, is just dumb, because everybody's in a different place, and needs different kinds of assistance. And we have the technology to accommodate 90% of learning situations at about 1/10 the cost of what we're paying for institutions that are doing a worse and worse job preparing students for competent, self-supporting adult life.
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It's only natural for a thinking person, with a strong sense of self worth, the belief that they can put in more than they take out, to be more on the Republican side of things. I'd actually rather see a new majority coalesce around a party that's more libertarian/constitutionalist, because both our major parties justify far too much use of force at home and abroad to solve problems.
The Republicans are wrong on the drugs thing, I think. A lot of Dems are the same. Same with prostitution, to be honest. But that gives law enforcement an excuse to fight a never-ending war that cannot be won and brings out all the worst features of the thing they're fighting. They're not dealing with a heroin addict who just committed vehicular homicide. They're fighting well-armed and well-organized gangs that use under-age children as foot soldiers.
Got a heroin addict asleep on the street? That's vagrancy. Arrest them and put them in a prison for vagrants. While under arrest, no drugs allowed. No law against the drug needed. No enormous paramilitary apparatus, using state-of-the-art surveillance tech - especially if they can get the drug dealer classified as a terrorist, and bring in the big guns from the NSA - all to stop some guy ruining his life by sticking a needle in his arm. With the laws, people still ruin their lives by sticking needles in their arm.
I'd rather the gov't build up its reserves by taxing the legal sale of the hard drugs. That's a lot of help for addicts if you do that. I prefer that over massive property seizures that I'm pretty sure make a lot of departments and agencies and officers very very rich. Driving a confiscated Maserati is part of a guy's cover. He's livin' life pretty big as a hot-shot DEA agent or local narco cop.
We learned our lesson from alcohol. We refuse to learn our lesson from the hard drugs.
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The only racism in STEM is when they tell poor kids that they actually learned something, when they didn't. When they condescend to minorities by telling them they "succeeded," when they didn't. It's terrible to be told you are good at something when you're not.
Every minority student I've had who was prepared, THRIVED. Every student of any color, creed or ethnicity that was NOT prepared, really struggled. 'Social promotion' just stores up trouble for kids down the road. If I don't give them the bad news, somebody will, later. Or people just die when you graduate your engineering program but don't know how to build a bridge.
If you don't promote students beyond their actual level of training, they do fine. But k-12 (and now college) define "student success" as "passing." I can pass everybody with a A-super-plus. This is how the game is now played in academia. Administrators pressure you to pass more students. Must be YOUR fault when a kid who can't add 1/332 + 5/26 without a calculator fails in college algebra.
Another big part of the problem with STEM is that the people who can't earn an advanced degree in math/chem/physics go into "math/chem/physics education." They can't do the math, so they get an education degree and go into ADMINISTRATION. The least competent in STEM are the people RUNNING STEM education! And they HATE the teachers who are under them, because the actual teachers are COMPETENT IN THE CONTENT AREA.
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Sight unseen, I'm biased against seeing the movie, because of Brie Larsen, and her public statements and general attitude. I used to like Affleck, Deniro, Perlman, and others, but when they made their dumb-ass left-wing opinions such a big deal, I just choose not to patronize their art, any more. I can't watch Batman, without thinking what an ignorant, arrogant asshole Ben Affleck is. I think entertainers have every right to voice their opinions, and I have every right to stop watching them because they're such knuckleheads. The dumbest, most bigoted ones are the loudest.
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The NorthWest is known haven for far-right radicals. But they're very few, and every time they've held events, it's been maybe a hundred skinheads and thousands of normie counter-protesters, in peaceable confrontations that were mainly an embarrassment to the skinheads. Then a handful of far-left radicals started hyper-ventilating about a small group of cultists, in order to create a LARGE group of left-wing cultists.
That's my over-simplified take. Priest Lake, in Northern Idaho contained an enclave of skinhead types. Probably pockets of them in different places. They were small and shrinking over time, because the NorthWest is also a haven for fringe communities.
When it was just a small number of far-right cultists, the laws on the books and local law enforcement were plenty enough to handle them. Every little incident became an excuse for far-left cultists to act stupid, inflating a small number of far-right cultists into a HUGE CONSPIRACY OF NAZIS that require - and justify - destruction, intimidation and violence by far-left cultists just looking for an excuse to behave as they have all this summer. They just need targets. MAGA hats are a good target. Just label them alt-right and anything done to them is OK. Anybody carrying or displaying an American flag is also alt-right, justifying violence and intimidation by mobs.
These far-left cultists under governance by idiots who embrace all the critical-theory/grievance-studies/white-privilege and now white-fragility ideology, have a green light to act stupid, and this is what you get. The model is Evergreen College's leadership. It only takes one or two indoctrinated leaders for things to rapidly spin out of control, because "normies" just want to do their jobs, treat people right and be treated right by other people. A highly motivated asshole, unchecked by people who are too busy to CHECK them, from the start, or too AFRAID to create conflict or "offend" anyone, and this is what you get. The insanity metastasizes to all the weakest-minded and resentful-of-the-world-for-their-own-inadequacies types, and the only way to stop them is FORCE, unfortunately, because you can't reason with people who are unreasonable, stupid, and malign.
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@Alondro77 : We should still have environmental quality as one of our values. The only trouble is that government is utterly incapable of keeping up with the improvements that the free market comes up with without being told. For instance, the EPA still won't let you build a rocket-stove mass heater in a new home, even though it uses 1/10 the fuel and puts out 1/10 the amount of emissions, because the bureaucratic rules don't account for these kinds of innovations, and the setup doesn't abide by the red tape they live for and live by. So when your PERFECTLY SAFE heating system that uses refractory temperatures to burn wood down to NOTHING, with ZERO creosote, and then runs the chimney pipe through the ground to heat up a dirt bench you build into your home, the EPA is all bent out of shape because by the time the "smoke" leaves your chimney, it's only about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, but their RULES say the temperature MUST be 300 degrees at the roofline, in order to prevent creosote buildup. Creosote comes from incomplete combustion.
Rocket stoves burn every molecule. All that comes out are CO, CO2, H20. But the bureaucracy just can't keep up with the innovations of motivated citizens trying to come up with a better way. The people are and will always be ahead of the bureaucrats and it drives the power elites CRAZY, because they can't control everything and everybody on everything, any more. And now with the Internet in place, as soon as somebody comes up with something better, EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT. But government has to have a "committee" hold a hearing, and 10s of thousands of workers need to change the comfortable forms they were having everybody fill out in predictable and controllable ways, and there isn't a box on the form for the new idea.
If you want a rocket stove mass heater, you basically have to build it yourself and bury your stovepipe in your own homemade heat sink. Run the thing for 45 minutes in the morning and the living space stays warm all day. Can't have that. Not if you're a bureaucrat and you don't understand it.
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Trump's going to become more and more toxic, as more and more facts come out about The Jab. Unable to admit a mistake, the Democrats will hang The Jab around his neck like an albatross, and try to blame the INSANE response by Democrat authorities, destroying the economy and coercing people to get jabbed. It will be very difficult for Trump to sell the American public that it was Democrat authoritarians who corrupted the COVID response.
The ONE thing that's gotten Trump BOOOED at rallies is when he's bragged about Warp Speed. At best, he went along with partisan-Democrat public-health agencies and officials, when he SHOULD have used his bully pulpit to say "You have a right to TRY, but nobody can FORCE you to take The Jab." He didn't. He pushed Warp Speed and left it up to the states. Leaving it up to the states, but he should've spoken out for SANITY, and he didn't.
Trump's most ardent supporters DESPISED the lockdowns and mandates, and it's REALLY hard for Trump to distance himself from them. More than a few Republicans and independents would much rather see DeSantis run. Trump's 'power' is much greater from OUTside government, than INside. As president, he tiptoed around major issues, and deferred to career bureaucrats and didn't do ANYthing to end Critical Race Theory trainings in the federal government and military until he was a lame duck. MAJOR omission. He also let the Deep State mislead him on strategic and intelligence matters.
To many staunch conservatives and libertarians, Trump was very much a mixed bag.
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Alex Jones is no friend to the corporate establishment, who don't want their stuff advertised around Alex Jones content. Then there's the fact that lefties are more likely to flag opinions they don't like as hate speech or fake news. I don't think the right has that tendency to nearly the same degree. A rightie might think you're an asshole and might tell you so, but is less likely to REPORT you to AUTHORITIES. I think the leftward-leaning Big Tech 'authorities' make it worse, but I can see why conservatives would be flagged a lot more for the slightest thing and lefties wouldn't be flagged for much worse, by the nature of the two competing philosophies.
The left want to be taken care of by vested authorities, and the right want to be left alone by vested authorities; rather, those are the two poles, with some people closer to one than the other, and some entirely in the orbit of one pole or the other. I personally think we're too close to the 'be-taken-care-of-and-do-what-you're-told' pole, which makes me alt-right, according to 90% of the pundits in media.
By the time a video goes viral enough to hit a million, I think the big tech 'authorities' are aware of it, but also enough lefties for them to point to hundreds or thousands of flags. Trying to be "responsive" and offend NO one (who'll complain), they don't have to be biased in order to selectively suppress the likes of Alex Jones.
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I come from a generation where your big brother would jolly you out of your bruised knee, rub some dirt on it, and you were PROUD because you were handling it like a man. You weren't REALLY hurt. So you weren't upset.
PTSD is for soldiers, cops, and anyone who's actually been in harm's way. Not for people who don't like how the presidential election turned out.
I can't recall a single election that came out the way I wanted. But I started reading history in my teens and I've been pretty much libertarian since my first vote in 1980. And the only way for politicians to get elected in this country is to promise a bunch of stuff they have no business promising. The "modern" bureaucratic ideas of top-down management principles are obsolete. That makes 2/3 of what the federal government something the federal government shouldn't be doing.
The national seat of government is not where 99% of the decisions need to be made. There's no need to set yourself up for making mistakes that hurt 2/3 of your country. Leave things up to the states, defend the national soil, defend the U.S. Constitution, regulate INTERNATIONAL trade, including assessing import duties, as appropriate. Otherwise? Butt the hell out of our lives! We're really much smarter than you about running our own lives under the conditions WE face and which NObody writing the laws faces.
A country as big as ours needs to let its 50 states run their own affairs and learn from each other what works and what doesn't work. And for that matter, the states need to let the LOCALS run their OWN schools. Sure, give 'm all national tests. SATs, ACTs and the like. We've always done that. But we don't have to herd our kids into gun-free zones like cattle and provide inferior education products as a sop to the parents and taxpayers. Kids learn at different rates. Average-and-above kids can get through all of K-12 curriculum in about 8 years, if they want to and apply themselves. Everything else is filler, distractions, and negative peer pressure.
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They're gonna draft someone who isn't running, now, or maybe latecomer Bloomberg. They'll all sing kum-Bay-yah and return to attacking Trump.
Why not vote for socialism? We've slid into fascism, virtually unawares. Our system has most of the features of a fascist setup, from government-run education and health care, to laws that make half of us criminals, but aren't enforced, but are handy any time you want to single somebody out for punishment. Sweetheart deals between government and industry, corporate welfare, suppression of free speech, ... And the supposed "anti-fascists" attack the vestiges of our Bill of Rights-guaranteed freedoms, and are silent on all the actual fascistic features of our political economy. They want us to go MORE fascist.
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It's gonna be like this, 'til November, and I think the Trump side has way more ammo. EVERYthing that's gone on behind closed doors under seal of secrecy has turned out not to be national-security related. It's all been embarrassing to the Obama Administration and Obama Appointees serving the Trump Administration. There were even a few Trump appointees who showed neolib colors. More than a few in his orbit spend taxpayer money like Democrats.
Trump HAS instituted a "You gotta find 2 bad regulations for every new 'good' regulation you want to create, because 2 old are coming off the books for every new." It's a good rule, when you look at the sheer SIZE of the federal code, nowadays. These regs/laws get passed, in great detail, and the Congress has to re-visit and assess each and every one. There've been a bunch of really smart guys dreaming up all manner of ingenious fixes to chronic problems that require oversight. They come and they go, but they stay on the books, forever, until they are removed. Too many things for the members of Congress to possibly process. Most of the law goes into the books un-read by most members, and imperfectly understood or of no interest whatsoever for the sitting members of the relevant committees. The agenda's what they say it is, and meanwhile, there's that rule that everybody forgot about, until 20 years later, the surveillance state just has to dig deep enough into the law to make a criminal of anyone they single out. Heh.
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It's a strong argument for the illiberal, statist left. You're not as ready for the instant response to the bad guys, if your country is based on living free and living prosperously. Democracies are NOTORIOUS for not wanting to spend money on the war machine, while the "bad guys" use forced redistribution of income into the war machine. This is their advantage over us.
But what the bad guys don't understand is how fast - and how effectively - people with REAL power will absolutely CRUSH them, eventually.
So then the goalposts shift to "What if the bad guys just nuke us?"
See? Very strong. At some point, you have to give over to the government the responsibility of national defense, and that is provided for by the U.S. Constitution. Me, personally, I don't think it'd take more international trade than we can handle, in order for government to have enough in tariffs and excise taxes to pay for our country's national defense. The more you trade, abroad, the more you have for defense, so it grows as you and the world economy grow.
I think it totally makes sense to bring the 3rd World into the 1st World through international trade. But it needs to happen - and would, if we'd LET it happen - organically, from the ground up. There's this woman in Africa who's an ace at hand-weaving baskets, and now she's selling that basket, made through HER skills (NOT working in a factory where she does one highly-specialized skill on a huge assembly line - that's coming, later). For someone with a factory job, the amount made isn't great, but it's making that one woman more dollars in one day than she used to make in a week or a month or even a year. And she can go in with other basket-weavers (This is the "coming later" part) in her neighborhood and pool their resources. Next thing you know, THEY have a little factory!
I think of Haiti, and I think of the once-thriving, hand-crafted shoe industry they had before the catastrophe. What did we Americans do? We flooded Haiti with free shoes, and so all the shoe-makers, who by many accounts had thriving businesses, were forever put out of business. We always see the big things we can accomplish, working together, so we tend to overlook the many little things that we crush by our single-mindedness.
I can see an American individual looking at a detailed basket or moccasin, made by hand by an absolute genius at making baskets or moccasins, and placing a very high dollar value on the item, especially since it's helping out this woman, who's turning her time into wealth, maybe for the first time in her life. I think if we looked for those opportunities for PEOPLE, and less on extracting big resources in a big way for the absolutely least amount of money, that we'd all progress more rapidly and those resources would be there for that woman's country when THEY were ready to build their OWN cars.
I think the West is consciously trying to evolve away from big petroleum, but it's hard to argue that it isn't a helpful phase for countries coming up, and probably not a good idea to do without until you evolve to it, naturally. I think it's a natural 'higher value' for people at a certain rung on the economic ladder, because we all want to get what we need without ever doing any wrong. But we'll do wrong, if we need it bad enough and there's no other way.
The advances we're making in home construction... The low-impact, off-grid ways you can go about your life that vastly reduce your impact, even while you partake of all the best and latest technology. Yeah, you've got a big gas-guzzler in the garage, but you're more worried about the fuel going bad, because you hardly ever use it, than you are about keeping the tank filled. More people are looking to arrange their lives in a way that doesn't require them to be driving their cars every day. More people working at home or very close to home. I think we're evolving more and more in that direction.
Push comes to shove, a guy can run a truck off of wood gas, if need be, and if he doesn't run that truck 100 miles a day like the Prius owner, he's probably 1/1000 the impact on the environment than that snooty Prius owner.
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Sic Semper Tyrannis : Google's taking over big institutions with "free G-Mail" and other services, just like Microsoft did 20 or 30 years ago with operating systems. Back in the '90s, most education institutions were running crappy Windows NT. And just like today, they'd give you all these lies about how good they were and application x, y or z was impossible for "network security," which was true, but only because Windows NT was crap.
And every time they come up with another "Oops! Can't do that 'for your own safety and security,'" it's another time suck for every production-oriented person forced to use their products. I can't even use a student's name in internal reports to admissions, the registrar or the advising corps. They insist on more and more reports and make it harder and harder to file those reports, because they suck. And they tell us how wonderful they are. And how wonderful their IT people are.
I remember in 2000, at a big organizational meeting how our Windows NT staff were such 'hard workers,' putting in overtime every night and every weekend to make sure we have all the services we require. Well, the service was crap, and if they'd've switched to LINUX, all functionality and more security in one swoop. Our servers would be down about 1 week out of 4, back in those days, while the LINUX servers used commercially NEVER WENT DOWN. NEVER GOT HACKED.
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@Eirik_Bloodaxe People want to believe the "good guys" are going to win. Usually the good guys lose until the bad guys are in power long enough to mess everything up for everyone. I think things are going to get worse before they get better.
What breaks my heart is that so many whom I consider on "my side" base their opinions on mystical interpretations of ancient myths and legends. It's a paradox of the human condition that Jordan Peterson examines in depth. Religion is what unifies us - good. Religion was the original "Imagine a better world and work towards it, for your children's sake." Religion also convinces people to be unselfish enough to raise children in healthy ways and create patterns that persist over the generations.
The rational choice for human progress is, paradoxically, the belief in something greater than yourself. And idealized vision of the perfect person and eventual utopia, i.e., God's kingdom on Earth. Without belief in God, people have a "God hole" in their brains that they must fill with something else, like ideology, personality cults, etc.
Sadly, we live in a time when people are JUST smart enough to recognize organized religion as a giant scam,w but NOT smart enough to recognize the rise of ideologies and personality cults that are just as bad. The French Revolution took on a religious-zealot form. The Bolshevik Revolution took on a religious-zealot form. When you destroy people's gods, they will ALWAYS find something or someone else to worship, trusting the judgement of those who want POWER more than they trust themselves.
So I find myself shaking my head at people who try to win arguments with the unassailable "because God said." But now, with most people rejecting God, they now say things like "because that's what the (government-paid) science says." The CERTAINTY of both kinds of people is a bit alarming, but I don't see any way around it. The U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, in my opinion, are humankind's best attempt to create something lasting that doesn't rely on everybody believing the same thing.
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The guy has a history of committing crimes, and it does look suspicious, but knowing myself, I can see being curious about a house under construction, and checking its progress as I go by the place, just to kind of see how it's done. I'm still missing a lot of context, though. For instance, has the neighborhood been experiencing a lot of burglaries and gotten no justice? The main reason we have laws, police and courts is to keep people from turning vigilante, which they WILL, if they don't think the system is providing any real justice. And I know from my own experience what it feels like when the cops take your report and then forget all about you.
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Luis Alejandro : He still doesn't understand that taxing others to care for the downtrodden is not the same as caring for the downtrodden, yourSELF. like the free place to stay that I gave someone and then cut them a check for $800 that I'll probably never get back, to help set them up in new digs in a new job that they used the time in my home to train and qualify for.
Liberal politics isn't about human compassion. It's about shaming everybody else into donating to liberal's favorite charity (otherwise known as "flavor of the month," on whatever cause has captured their (all-too-brief) attention span. Nay, it's about FORCING everybody else to donate to the liberal's favorite charity, out of the pockets of the taxpayer. And it should come as ZERO surprise that conservatives (especially Christian conservatives) contribute far more to charity than their virtue-signaling liberal counterparts.
And that doesn't even count the MILLIONS who are net RECIPIENTS of government largesse, who will vote along with all the champagne socialists. There's a reason we're called the "middle class," because we get squeezed from the top AND the bottom! The harder we work and the more prudently we plan and prepare for our OWN futures, the more these bastards TAKE from us. Incentives are all upside-down.
The solution to poverty is CULTURAL not POLITICAL. Community leaders shouldn't campaign for government programs to solve problems. They should LEAD. That means conspicuous giving and the PRESTIGE and SOCiAL STATUS that comes from that giving. Why do you think warriors in Native American society were so generous? Because giving 10 horses to the poor widow means HUGE STATUS for the brave who made the gift.
In today's society, so-called liberals gain prestige by being generous with OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. This is what liberal means in the modern setting. AND THEY ENRICH THEMSELVES DOING SO! Obama was a "community organizer," which didn't mean that he gave of his OWN money to help people. It meant he got to play around with $150 million in taxpayer money, MUCH of which disappeared, and he didn't even move the needle on conditions he was supposedly improving. No. Chicago is and was corrupt as hell. Equity is a RACKET. How many Senators and Representatives have to make themselves millionaires at the public trough before we wake the hell up?
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Lots of NFL fans think Brady's the most privileged player in the NFL. If he needs a call, he gets it. If he throws a tantrum on the field, they flag the other guy for unsportsmanlike. Ask Raiders fans about the "tuck rule." And the way they called that first half, last night, it was like a replay of the 2020 election, where you could see Democrats bullying observers at the polls, and the only people who got in any trouble were the observers who complained.
It's too bad, because the way the 2nd half went, the Bucs didn't need much/any help from the refs. They dominated the Chiefs on both sides of the ball. The KC defense did much better, except for the refs handing the Bucs the whole first half. I counted 4 drives that should've ended in punts, but the referees handed them undeserved 1st downs. That looked crooked as hell. But Mahomes was under constant pressure the entire game, and the Chiefs couldn't find an answer.
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In Base 2, you count to 10, Base 2, as follows: 0, 1, 10. In Base 2, 2 is the 10.
To reach 10, base 10, using Base 2: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010.
Same in Base 5: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20.
To this day, computers are based on a switch being on or off. 0 is off, 1 is on, and that's all the digits you have. Computers do arithmetic in Base 2, then the software translates it to Base 10 for us. For ease of use, programmers at the ground level, assembly language, simplify this to Base 16, i.e., hexadecimal. I got far enough in assembler to do long division to 6 decimal places, which was beyond the scope of the division exercise. I got an A+ on that assignment and dropped Assembler, because it was just difficult and not at all fun or particularly empowering. Low-level languages take freakin' geniuses. I did, however, embrace symbolic algebra programming, which allows me to think mathematically, using commands that correspond to the mathematical objects themselves, for instance, to invert a matrix "A," the command is MatrixInvert(A), so that if you understand the math, you can program it just by knowing your math terms.
The original software developers were gods. What we do now is all built on top of what was done, originally. We owe them a great debt, and possibly a few curses.
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Economic inequality is a red herring. Economic helplessness is a problem. If $50,000/year were what people close to the bottom were making, would it really matter that there were billionaires? No. Read up on the Pareto principle. No matter HOW you structure things, there will always be a small number of individuals who are wildly successful. That's not the issue. The issue is how the people at the bottom are faring and whether or not they are equipped to rise to a level of relative economic security.
You lefties always want to use government programs to slap a band-aid on the problems at the bottom, and all it does is cause more bleeding, infection, and putrefaction of the people you're trying to "help," but only make more helpless. Everything you do to prop them up makes it harder for them to help themselves, and this is the whole fallacy behind brainless welfare-state thinking. You end up promising everything but delivering nothing, as you systematically cripple natural, self-sustaining mechanisms that make your band-aids unnecessary. You always want to use government force and compulsion to solve human problems, without understanding the damage you're doing to the humans you think you're helping. It's a vast circle-jerk, with never-ending problems requiring never-ending growth in government, which, if I didn't know better, was your PLAN all along. But no. It's just a toxice mixture of ignorance, wishful thinking, and good intentions.
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I don't think any of us has all the answers, and it's by voicing our opinions that we get the feedback that allows us to grow in our understanding. Shutting down a racist's speech only cements that person in their racist view, with the unfair silencing reinforcing their misconceptions. It's much better to have to hear and preferably respond to the critiques offered by people who disagree with us.
I've always been that way. Half the time the "opinions" I express are just ideas I'm working out in my own mind, and the act of speaking them and writing them improves my understanding, and most of all, getting shot down by a critic FORCES me to amend my ideas or at the least change the way I express them, when somebody points out the holes. Learning is a constant process of taking in new knowledge, reformulating and re-expressing that knowledge, and refining our understanding. Wisdom isn't a measure-twice cut once carpentry job, where perfection is part of the predetermined design. It's a messy 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-draft refine-that-term-paper kind of process, where the 1st draft might SUCK, but every succeeding draft gets a little bit better, until you have something actually good, and you haven't wasted any lumber other than a few sheets of paper or the time you spent pounding on the keyboard.
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The point that is missed about fracking is that when the price of energy goes up, the weakest and most vulnerable among us always suffer the most. It'll be the grandma on a fixed income who dies from the heat in the summer. It'll be the down-on-their-luck people who WOULD work if there were a job, but who can't find one, because profitability for a prospective employer is destroyed due to the cost of electricity.
Fracking sets a ceiling on the price of oil and gas that is a tremendous protection for our most vulnerable citizens. Democrats have more connection to the latest manufactured crisis and extreme measures to "fix" the one thing than they do to the vast number of complex and voluntary interactions that make up an economy on which ALL of us depend for our daily existence. If your rights and well-being come between a Democrat and the latest manufactured "crisis," then your living and even your LIFE come in a distant 2nd.
I personally believe that people will get to a greener world much more quickly than ANY proposal by authorities to solve everything by force. Every day people are making green choices, because that's where the CULTURE is at, and NOT because some bureaucrat wants to punish them for eating beans, due to the risk of farts. The Green New Deal, the Paris Accords... You name it. The ONLY reason such nonsense gets any traction at ALL is because the culture is way ahead of the leaders on the environment.
As always, the so-called leaders rush to the head of the parade that started without them, waving a baton and pretending they were in front of the culture the whole time. They're not. They're just trying to cash in on public sentiment. It's disgusting. And the proposals are invariably expensive and authoritarian. "Let US solve your problem FOR you, and all it will cost is a tiny bit of your freedom." I think COVID-19 showed a LOT of people the authoritarian/totalitarian underbelly of the liberal project. I always knew it was there, but for many decades, the average American has thought that it was possible to get Free Stuff in a free society, without any threats to free-dom.
It is now as it ever was and ever shall be: You take the King's shilling? You bend the knee.
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The thing about USAID is that, compared to the federal budget, it's pretty tiny, so it doesn't seem like they're making fundamental changes in the way the U.S. Government operates, but that tiny percentage of the budget is HUGE compared to the operating cost of any t.v. or radio station or website. So they can hijack huge swaths of foreign nations' media landscape, and, indirectly (sometimes directly - See "USAID is funding Politico." It turns out that Politico was just an arm of U.S. Government insiders' propaganda arm!), the media landscape of the USA!
These guys have been making an end run around the 1st Amendment since the Reagan Admin. Before that, they were doing it other ways. The Church Committee in the 1970s put an end to those dirty tricks, and a few years later, they were bigger and "better" than before with USAID and NED, with such friendly-sounding names, but nefarious motives.
USAID was the money behind the Maidan coup. USAID runs Ukraine media. Zelensky obligingly OUTLAWED all the independent media. Ukraine is a CIA operation and has been since Joe Biden was Vice President, using his position in office to overthrow Ukraine and make a lot of money for himself and his cronies.
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Brie Larson is one of those people who doesn't do banter very well. Semi socially retarded. Not especially witty. And that Avengers cast is FULL of witty people, spearheaded by Robert Downey, Jr. Ryan Reynolds is similar. You can see the irreverent wit in his movies. Hemsworth, Cheadle, Downey, Ruffalo, Pratt, Saldana, Johanssen, Evans, Gillian, ... They get it. Evans kept a lid on it, because of how straight-laced Captain America is, but they worked in some jabs at him for BEING straight-laced, and he TOOK it ("Language..."). Don't see Brie Larson swimming in those waters as an equal.
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The instant you come out against "hate speech," you're on a slippery slope of malleable definitions. Any conservative/classical-liberal push-back against woke intersectional BS is defined by woke intersectional BSers as "hate speech." They found a wedge to destroy the 1st Amendment, and they will not stop until the super-majority REJECTS postmodernism in totality.
To the extent possible, Americans need to educate themselves about the poison that is critical theory. Critical theory is where you don't study glaciers. You study the social and cultural implications of glaciers and how they relate to power relationships in society. In other words, 100% junk science that Humanities Departments LOVE to publish in peer-reviewed journals.
Research the "Sokal Hoax," where a physicist published total nonsense and got it published and praised. Research Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose, especially Helen Pluckrose, who comes from a humanities background and knows what's happening from the inside. Boghossian is a sociologist, who documents the politicization of sociology. Lindsay is a trained physicist, who comes at it from STEM direction. As a math teacher, I can tell you that the powers that be are trying to politicize math!
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When you see all downtown businesses with Antifa signs in the window, and you ask the owners, in private, why, it is OBVIOUS that Antifa are terrorists. If they don't, their windows are broken, their businesses are picketed, and vandalism and petty theft run rampant. It's low-level terrorism, but terrorism, nonetheless. It's just like organized crime, except the mafia just extorted money. When it's political, it's terror, by definition.
Qanon has provided a service that draws attention to public-domain facts that are suppressed in legacy and left-wing media. Of course, there are the conspiracy-theory types who get clicks from the gullible by pushing conspiracy theories that are more or less speculation, and legacy media paints the whole thing with a conspiracy-theory brush.
Tucker's right on quite a few things, but he's a lot too "authority of God" for my taste, and more 'establishment' than I am on some issues like public education, where 30-plus years 'in the system' have made me a very severe critic of the whole property-tax setup and declining student achievement (and attitudes toward learning) in the last 3-plus decades. So when he cherry-picks the evidence to push "Kids need to go back to school," I'm thinking "Maybe this WuFlu has a silver lining!" because millions of parents across the country are achieving amazing learning outcomes, with relatively little effort. And with the public schools pushing for online learning so hard, parents are thinking "If I'm gonna go online, and I know my kid's math/social-studies teacher SUCKS, why must I make my kid attend HIS classes, when for $100 a semester, she can have something much BETTER?"
But my main point is Tucker's desire to return to something more normal has him coming out as though he's a big fan of rotten schools and rotten teachers, which I am not.
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Health insurance executives are trapped. The government tells them what they have to cover, and it can change overnight. So they cozy up to the government to stay in business.
Nobody remembers, because it happened so long ago, but health insurance was invented by big corporations as an incentive for prospective employees after Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted wage freezes during the Great Depression (which FDR capitalized on, to consolidate and perpetuate his power). Big corporations offered health and pension benefits.
Before this watershed moment in American history, local charities and benefactors gave to hospitals and built hospitals. The government only makes it SEEM like they're doing a better job than people with actual compassion and charitable instincts. Health care should be a personal and local-community thing, not a slush fund for bureaucrats.
Once the government stepped in, the system because essentially socialist/fascist, with a veneer of private enterprise, but CORRUPT private enterprise, because health care providers had to get in good with the government to stay in business. Inevitably, this led to heavy lobbying of Congress to pass laws that protected insurers and health care providers. The end result? Overpriced, low-quality care.
This is just how government works, or rather, doesn't work. When you make charity compulsory, you destroy the charitable instinct, and nobody feels any responsibility for their neighbor, because they already pay taxes for that sort of thing, and if anybody's falling through the cracks, that's someone else's fault.
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My last visit to a hospital, last spring, was the scariest one yet. Not because of why I was there, but because hospitals have gone full-on bureaucrat, and saving money the way bureaucrats always do: Hire more staff to help the administrators and cut everything else to the bone. Teach nurses NOT to be compassionate. Put doctors into mass production, that is, when they're not filling out reams of paperwork that all the bureaucrats insist is CRUCIAL INFORMATION, until they decide a month later that the don't like the data, so they flush all the work done by everybody under them right down the toilet, while they dream up NEW forms to fill out, in a desperate attempt to feel relevant in an industry to which their only contribution is finding new forms of red tape to cover their own asses with.
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Jordan Peterson understand the tension between the individual good and the collective good. He clearly sees we're way too far on the collective-good side of things, institutionally, rhetorically, and philosophically. It all goes back to the well-worn saying "Those who give up their liberty for security, end up with neither." The collective good is not served by trammeling the rights of the individual. And it all starts with taking from Paul by force to help Peter, because it's a "good cause." It's not virtue. It's use of force. Maybe Paul is quite virtuous, but all he is, now, is pissed off. And we leave out the middle person, Mary, who decides how and how much of Peter's stuff to give Paul. It's the Marty who's scary, and nobody talks about it.
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humandxp : In my field, there's TIAA-CREF, which is basically your own private retirement fund that is matched in contributions by the employer, and state-run PERA, that guarantees a fixed return, regardless of what you put in. I prefer the former, because it's MY money, and I have some control over what it gets invested in. But yeah. You do NOT want a pension that rests on the promises of state bureaucrats, because it's only as good as the state that backs it up. And we see one state after another on the verge of bankruptcy, largely due to making very popular but very unsupportable promises to state workers. All it takes is one downturn and you're screwed.
But if you slowly build a diverse portfolio, you basically position yourself like a rich person would, with some green-tech stocks, some social-responsibility stocks, some blue-chip stocks, and so forth (Just stay away from municipal bonds, which are rapidly becoming the new "real-estate hedge funds, with high returns until they tank on you, as the big-spending-and-borrowing cities and states go broke). If you want to diversify into commodities, that takes a little extra investment on your part, but is a WONDERFUL hedge against inflation. If times are good, most of your stuff grows. If times get BAD, some of your stuff will do poorly, but you'll always have a chunk of your "pension plan" that's going to do really, REALLY well. That's why rich people stay rich forever (unless they're dumb-asses), and how regular, hardworking people can slowly position themselves as well as any rich person.
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@felinespirits : Ugh. I think compulsory registration for the draft is NOT what good governments do. Forced conscription is one way (the time-honored way) for idiot governments to compel the younger generation to die because a bunch of old farts are in a pissing match. When there are REAL existential threats to a nation, there's no shortage of volunteers. Without conscription, it's a LOT HARDER to find people willing to die because of the delusions and oversized egos of a handful of so-called leaders. And the delusional, sociopathic, big-ego types GRAVITATE towards the top positions. That'd be OK, if politics were actually a performance-based meritocracy. But politics isn't that. Politics is a popularity contest that is won by the most unprincipled asshole who does the best job telling lies and making impossible-to-fulfill promises, just so they can get into power.
"What do you mean, you don't think everyone should get a big bag of gold every year? What are you? A racist?" Once in power, reality sets in, there's NO bag of gold for ANYone, and the biggest liar is there to "lead" us through the "crisis" that he and people like him created in the first place.
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They will become a national laughingstock or object of pity. Word's out. Opportunist smash-and-grabbers will head to the crime Mecca. We'll see. Maybe submitting and then apprehending, later, makes sense. More like, a scared person won't testify against the thugs who know who they are and where they live. This business of blaming and prosecuting the victim is getting old. You are, in fact, in fear for your life, when a thug tries to strong-arm your stuff. If you defend yourself with deadly force, well that thug just chose the wrong victim, and those are the chances a thug takes.
You decided to live by the sword, so don't be surprised or complain when you find one sticking out of your belly.
I think we're setting things up for Sharia police to come to the rescue, myself. Minnesota? Ilhan Omar? Sharia patrols seem likely.
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As you embark on this new "Van-down-by-the-river" thing, be mindful that there's a HUGE niche for grassroots REPORTING. You could be the focal point of a "news co-op" consisting of a loose, self-correcting alliance of local and regional INDEPENDENT reporters.
As for the bias of FOX or any other network, that's how it SHOULD be, and what the Founding Fathers INTENDED. It's better to know what axe your sources are grinding, than to kid yourself about unbiased news, and be all butt-hurt when you unearth misinformation, lies or spin. Even networks that ARE as unbiased as possible should be checked against other sources, at least occasionally. Keep your Jimmy Dore's around, if you're conservative. See what OAN's saying if you're a liberal. You won't like it, but you will unearth alternate perspectives that bear checking out.
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Yes. Evergreen College (They changed the name to "University" like a lot of failing colleges around the country.) was the experiment, and you see that experiment replicated in blue cities, blue states, and even in the corporate world, which caught the infection from college-educated nincompoops. The fact that NOBODY GOT FIRED at Evergreen must have them thinking this will go over big, everywhere, but what actually happens is every institution that follows the Evergreen Model ends up failing. Nobody to blame, except all the white-supremacists who oppose them (to hear them tell it).
They've infected where I work. I don't know how long I'm going to last. Community colleges mostly resisted the intersectional bullshit in the past. But it's pretty much taken over on our campus. I'm supposed to be extra nice to people of color, and find ways to get students through classes for which they are insufficiently prepared. That's not how it works. You want to treat somebody right, you tell 'em right where their skill level is, and you show them how to improve. And you don't promote them beyond their current skill level.
Promoting a person beyond their skill level turns a minor remediation into a political issue, when you have poorly trained (not stupid) minority students thrust into situations for which they are not prepared. They see the "privileged white kids" who are more advance than they are, succeeding with apparent ease, while the minority students are all in over their heads. It's not because they're dumb. They're hanging on with their fingernails because their schools, teachers, and administrators of their schools all SUCK. The biggest reason blacks, in particular, aren't up to standards, academically, is because Democrats resist giving them any choices as to where to send their kids to school. You live in this neighborhood, then your kid goes to PS 219. The only way NOT to send your kid to that school is to have enough money to pay for a private school. Or move out of the neighborhood.
if you took the money that state and local city governments put into public schools on a per-student basis, and spent it on the school of your choice, chances are that your kid would be ready for college by or before age 16. Nowadays, most students (black, white or otherwise) aren't ready for college at age 18!
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I think most jobs can be re-tooled pretty easily for social distance. I can see all kinds of new jobs opening up, like professional shopping, where one person does multiple orders at once, cutting the contagion by factors of 2, 3 or 4. And I think it's actually more efficient, because it's one person in an efficient vehicle making one slightly extended trip, while everybody else's car stays home. Also niches in education are going to open up, left and right, and teachers across the country are getting crash courses in distance learning. People are going to start WANTING the online experience for education, and there will be teaching jobs left and right. And education will get a TON CHEAPER. The teachers used to BE the school, and NOW it's the ADMINISTRATORS. You can make a teacher pretty rich by hiring them, directly. They don't have to charge much to out-compete what legacy institutions are doing.
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@killcat1971 : Neo-Luddism r'ars its ugly head in yet ANOTHER generation! Automation doesn't eliminate good jobs. It opens up NEW jobs. Every time automation saves a little bit of money for someone, the whole society gets a little richer. More people can afford to hire an artist for that basement mural they always wanted. I think that as the complexities of this world mount, there will be niches opening up for full-time jobs where all you do is handle the grocery shopping and organize the bills. Someone who knows how to play the credit-card game can save a household thousands of dollars, by shifting debt to the new credit card, using it's 1st-year-no-interest for one year, and open up another card in a year or two.
There're all kinds of services like that. And who knows what's to come? Maybe they come up with anti-grav back packs and everybody wants a nice landing pad built out in their back yard. Landing-pad builders would then be a thing, employing the same people who used to do wood-frame house construction, before IT went kaput! Thing is, the steady march of progress continues despite all our efforts to mess things up and meddle in 10-variable questions with 1-variable understanding.
We don't need to artificially ACCELERATE automation by artificially propping up minimum wage. Minimum wage - like ALL libtard feel-good policies - is an ATTACK on people trying to work their way out of poverty. Libtards always hurt the ones they love, buying their devotion with crumbs. For votes.
Libtards see one person in trouble and it's nothing to them to punish all those who are on the ragged edge of being in trouble in order to help that one person who randomly came to their attention and became their focus and sole purpose in life, entitling them to the hard-earned money in your pocket. Your business is BARELY profitable? Well, here are a bunch of extra costs some libtard decided you would have to pay, so the libtard could point to the person he helped. Too bad if your business goes under. We helped the guy we set out to help, and DAMN THE TORPEDOS! FULL SPEED AHEAD! Because we're righter than rightie.
The guy who's BARELY paying her (SWIDT?) bills gets destroyed by a 20% increase in energy prices. Everything costs more, especially heating and cooling her home. That "green legislation" that everybody cheered just pushed another 20 million, barely-gettin'-by working poor below the poverty line. Didn't think about THAT added cost. And from the progressive's point of view, if they never hear about or see that person they hurt, then life goes on and they can still feel proud of themselves, because they can go straight to the government for proof that they're doing something for the people they say they care about.
The consequences of progressivism are diffuse and the benefits obvious. You can put that guy's face on t.v. that you helped. But nobody's talking about the accumulating weight of small hardships visited on everyone by helping just the one with everybody's money.
Most of the time, the average citizen just tightens their belt and soldiers on. Especially the BEST people who are just on hard times. Those are the people that libtards despise and seek to destroy at every opportunity, usually in the name of helping them, but it can also be to "save the planet" or "kill evil Iraqis," and "it's a cost we will gladly pay!" when they've got all THEIR bills on auto-pay and their checking account just grows every month until they have enough to buy another expensive toy. They'll sacrifice the delivery date on their Ferrari, but they don't think about the guy who's postponing new shoes for her kid, who's outgrown the pair he's wearing, now.
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Neocons and neolibs are all the same. They KNOW they have the solution, and it MUST be implemented by FORCE, across the board, and damn the consequences. Of course, the consequences are a NEW crisis for us, a year or 5 years or however many years down the road, when, because it's a crisis, they KNOW they must solve the crisis by FORCE. It's just a fuckin' death spiral of use of force and then dealing with unintended consequences. World War I - The krauts are so BAD we MUST go to war. 20 years later? World War II. Unintended consequences.
Not just in foreign policy, either. We declare war on poverty and then wonder why people act so entitled, irresponsible and helpless, burnin' shit down and demanding MORE (forcible government) interventions, that are NEVER very well thought out, but to oppose their solution means you want bad things and you're a bad person. Death spiral shit, from public schools to food stamps to regime change abroad. All the same shit. People who're sure they're so right, they're entitled to push everybody else around.
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The trouble with liberals like you, Tim Pool, is you support policies that lead inevitably to this craziness you do NOT support. You feed the dragon and then complain about the dragon burning the town down. You ASKED for this sort of madness by thinking government - especially the federal government - is there to cure society's ills. Federal programs are the worst, because whenever they get something wrong, they impose it on all 50 states. Leave these matters up to local and state governments or - GASP - the PEOPLE, and some will get it right, some will get it wrong, and all other 49 states or thousands of localities, can learn by their example. It's called "diversity."
It's society's/culture's job to remediate social ills, not the government's. Everything the feds do to "help" us only got started after the culture shift had already occurred, or politicians wouldn't race to the front of the parade and offer their ridiculous "solutions." People want something done, and government tells them it's doing something, but the people don't realize that by the time the culture has shifted, the changes are already inevitable, in a natural and organic way. Government HIJACKS these healthy movements, and makes the people complacent and dependent on bureaucrats to solve all their problems, while not really solving the problems. If it actually solved those problems, the bureaucrats would lose their jobs, and politicians wouldn't be able to virtue-signal.
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I think being "woke" in some ways is very good for business. Taking pains not to use products produced by slave labor is good. Being responsible about waste produced by your company is good. Being "green" in any of a large number of ways is a great selling point. People will buy "albacore" because it's a more humane way to fish for tuna, because it doesn't kill dolphins, etc.
"Woke" doesn't have to mean "I embrace identity politics and outrage culture." It could mean "I make choices that are better for society and the planet." Culture and free markets will get us to a better place.
Even though I just found out that "cage-free eggs" still come from factory farms, I was more than happy to buy the "cage-free" for a little more, because I believed this meant the chickens were out in the field, scratching for food, like in nature. Turns out not to be the case, so I have more research to do. But the average consumer will make the responsible choice when it's possible for them to do so, subject to their family budget. So for a more responsible society, you should support PROSPERITY. Prosperous people are higher on Maslow's ladder, and can make choices consistent with higher-value sets.
And no, $15/hr minimum wage doesn't equate with prosperity. You're not starving at $30,000/yr, but you're not spending extra on necessities just to feel better about yourself, either.
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Feds stretching a point to make this a federal crime, it sounds like.
Nationalism as opposition to globalism is good. Nationalism, in general, is how big countries get built in the first place and use their size to bully smaller, more sensible principalities. Nationalism is how we get huge armies to fight other huge armies.
I have very mixed feelings about this. More and more, the APPARENT battle between left and right looks more and more like war by left and right against the middle. Left gets crazy, so the feds get more oppressive. Feds get more oppressive, so lefties get more militant.
To me, the real war is against the increasing role and scope of centralized authority. This left-vs-right dichotomy looks like the Soros effect. Hungary finally kicked Soros out, embracing, instead, authoritarian nationalism.
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What they did was what all authoritarians do:
They redefined the phrase "gain-of-function," itself, so they could say "We're not doing gain-of-function research" with a straight face, and not technically be lying under the law.
Another thing they did was adopt a protocol/policy within NIH that gave NIH employees the right to not disclose their contractual agreements or royalty arrangements for their own research. Fauci was proud of that one. "Under policy x, we are not required to disclose." That's not a law. That's a "protocol" that should be overturned by the Chevron Decision.
There are a LOT of "protocols" adopted by federal agencies that functionally act as laws, but are NOT laws. For instance, there's a protocol that says you don't go after presidents, current or former, for their crimes in criminal court. The so-called "immunity" that presidents enjoy, and "everyone agrees" we need, or the president couldn't function as CEO of the government.
This is some real bull$hit. The president should be foremost respecter of the law and be seen as such. One of the things I'm very ambivalent about, as a Trump supporter. I think we should be able to charge any sitting or former president for crimes, if there's probable cause to do so. Trump supporters are blind to this, because they know Trump got lawfared by the Democrats.
But those were trumped-up charges (hence the name), based on false filings with FISA, and later, a twisting of the law that was never done before and never will be done in the future, to get him for false statements about his assets, when he was applying for a loan.
Valuation of properties is subjective. I think my place is worth a million bucks, but when I go to the bank, they tell me it's less than half that amount. I don't go to jail for claiming it's worth a million. The banker just does his due diligence and says "Naw. It's only worth $350,000, and you only have $150,000 in equity, nitwit." These are negotiations, not sworn testimony in a court of law.
Anyway, I think presidents should be held accountable for their actions while in office, or before or after their terms of office. Democrats went too far, and I think in no small part because they don't want anybody going after Clinton, Bush, Obama or Biden.
If I were president, and I felt like I had to break the law to save the country, I probably would break the law. But THEN I would turn myself in for arrest. The president is supposed to be hemmed-in by checks and balances, but the permanent state doesn't want that, because it limits their law-breaking!
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Your rejection of the Intersectionality Cult makes you far right. I think you're moderate, Tim. You'll have to live more years and deal with stuffed-shirt bureaucrats, more (for instance, be rejected for assistance because of the fine print or because the bureaucrat just doesn't like you, and you're in HIS KINGDOM, now, so you must SUFFER!), and learn "the type," before you become a true limited-government libertarian. Your desire to help the weak does you credit. Your belief that government - especially the federal government - is going to protect the weak in any meaningful way is something you have to grow out of. You have to learn how "government programs" are basically employment programs for stuffed shirts, and an IMPEDIMENT to the actual WORK that goes into helping the weakest members in our society.
We did more for our poor with much less BEFORE the government hopped on the bandwagon for votes.
The evidence is staring you in the face. The WORST places are where "compassionate government" is at its strongest. Government is not compassionate. Government is power and government is populated by people who love power. When it says it wants to help you get ahead, what it's really saying is "If I can fool them into believing I'm their friend then I can get ahead."
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@strategery101 : A LOT of Democrats felt betrayed by "friends" who voted for Trump, and ended those friendships. Once that false equivalence is made in the deluded mind, it's really hard to break them out of it. Millions HAVE broken out of it, because the left are an equal-opportunity smear machine. You can march in a Gay Pride Parade one day and the next be labeled as a homophobe because you question the wisdom of allowing a man to declare himself to be a woman and then set records in women's track and field events. That's HERESY.
So even people who are lock step on 90% of liberal orthodoxy find themselves on the receiving end of hate and smear campaigns and they wake up and #walkaway. That's the silver lining (if there be one) in the left wing divide-and-conquer tactics. It's so ingrained in their world view that it's a loose cannon on the decks of their own battleships! It's atomizing the LEFT.
The RIGHT, on the other hand, are quick to condemn the far-right crazies in their own ranks. The LEFT simply continue to kow-tow to the far-left crazies in theirs, and it's tearing them apart. There's no place for ANY moderate views on ANY hot-button far-left talking point.
If you think post-birth "abortions" are horrific, then you're obviously a white supremacist. If you think a high school kid should be just as free to wear a MAGA t-shirt as they are to wear a Bernie 2020! t-shirt, then you're obviously a supporter of Hate Speech and a white supremacist.
There will always be a small number of people eager to attack you for an opinion that diverges in any way from their own. The issue with the left is that they just blindly pile on when ANY one is offended; whereas, in the broad right, center-right, center and center-left, people generally are OK with agreeing to disagree. It's just that you can't be on the left, any more, if you're the one who offended someone. And if you're hysterically offended at everything not liberal-orthodox, nobody on the left is willing to call you out.
And the minute someone on the left or center-left DOES say that the far left is too extreme, then they're kicked out of their own tribe. Because of this, the current "liberal orthodoxy" is a very grim, joyless and judgemental far left caricature of itself.
Tim Pool, himself, is caught up in this phenomenon. He calls out far-left lunacy and the only people who are saying "See? You're one of US!" are on the right! The right (most of it, anyway) is still willing to see Tim as a reasonable person with a difference of of opinion that they can agree with on some things and debate with on others. This idea of conversation between opposing viewpoints has been ABANDONED by the left, and it gives guys like Tim nowhere to turn.
I hope - but I'm not too optimistic - that the NEW middle will be a coalition of those who hate imperialism abroad OR at home. I applaud progressives for clearly seeing the imperialism abroad, but I disagree with them on allowing elites to control every aspect of our lives at HOME. To me, nanny government at home is just the flip side of the same coin as imperialism abroad. Then there are conservatives who totally get how toxic big government is to society, but still hate and fear foreigners so much that they think it's a good idea to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments at the drop of a hat.
Libertarians are closer to where we SHOULD be, opposing BOTH aspects of big government run amuck. And there's HUGE room for compromise on BOTH, that would get us a little closer to a workable balance. Maybe we shouldn't fly off the handle and beat the war drums every time somebody has a problem with a foreign leader. Maybe the social safety net should be administered closer to home rather than Washington, DC.
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@erwinnijs1 : Very similar to Obama in a way. Obama spoke AGAINST the excessive powers vested in the office of the president, but the INSTANT he was elected, he used every bit of that power and even pushed the envelope MORE in the "executive-order" direction. This is typical. Standard stuff.
That's why the best - albeit imperfect - way to vote is to simply vote OUT whoever's in power at the moment. It's very difficult to do, because those IN power have stacked the deck against any outsider breaking in. The power of incumbency is very great.
But I think if all you do is vote against the incumbent every election, this country would be a better place. It's very difficult to build an empire within the empire if you're only in office for one term. That being said, I can't IMAGINE voting for a Democrat for the foreseeable future, and the Republicans are still the only alternative with a big enough following to effectively un-seat the Democrats. The Democrats are SO fascist in their policies (Everything UNDER government. Nothing AGAINST government. Nothing OUTSIDE of government) and so BLIND to that fact, that I just can't support a Democrat.
I just wish people would vote in large numbers for the Libertarians, and let THEM whittle down the power and scope of government at home and abroad for a few years. Because big government at home DRIVES the imperialism abroad. Hitler got away with what he got away with BECAUSE German government had control of education, health and media. We keep voting for the same kind of system, and then wonder why we're bombing villages in Syria. But we all can plainly see how the public schools crank out exactly the kinds of people who are ripe to be manipulated.
How is it that "liberals" are so quick to freak out and SUPPORT wars in the Middle East? How is it that they are blind to the same exact kind of cultural Marxism that galvanized most of Germany against Jews? Propaganda all in one direction and all in the interests of entrenched elites in industry, government and media. Very few seem to recognize the Regulatory State as just a euphemism for (fascist) government control of the means of production. What's the functional difference between Hitler telling businesses what and how much to produce and the FCC telling media what can and can't be put on the air?
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@accam6734 : At root, I think it all comes down to collectivist thinking. Once you're on the collectivist (common good) side on most things, there's no real philosophical red line between that and the insane identity politics now being practiced on the far left. The trouble is that such thinking is buried DEEP in the assumptions people like Tim make about the world, and so Tim can see the lunacy (absurdity) quite clearly, but he just can't put his finger on why. This makes it impossible for him to ever see to the root of the problem.
Public schools, Medicare for all, regulation of media... These are all very attractive things on the SURFACE, but they set us up to be led by the nose in the long run, and not even realize that's what's happening because everything we hear and see is carefully aligned with establishment preferences of the day. What's so frightening about it is that the worst sort of power-hungry people are attracted to those top spots in ANY institution, and they'll promise ANYthing to get in those spots, making it almost impossible for reasonable and honest people to be in those spots. The only (imperfect) solution is to not give those top spots so much power in the first place AND to watch them like hawks.
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I love the way that control of education is destroying the Democrat Party. They indoctrinate the kids far left and then wring their hands when the young people vote for Bernie! LOL! But you see how stubborn the indoctrination is. Tim gets red-pilled on a daily basis and still resists changing his world view and the FACT that government is the DEFINITION of a protection racket. And the more protecting it does, the less liberty and prosperity the people have.
Get government out of the way even a LITTLE bit, and your biggest problem is income inequality in an economy where the weakest and poorest live better than anywhere else in the world and definitely better than any other time in history. Even now, as government seeks to extend its tentacles into everything good we do for others and ourselves, the vestiges of economic freedom and property rights STILL keeps the economic prosperity going.
Liberals won't be satisfied with their "mixed" economy until the economy crashes and can't be revived. Fortunately there are still just enough people who understand this to keep the economy going and give the lefties a fight. People look at the industrial revolution as an evil thing, and things WERE tough in those days, by today's standard. And YET, more people climbed the ladder to being an educated and prosperous middle class than ever in history. MOST of history has zero middle class, an elite class, and 90% lower class. Liberals despise progress, because there are so many RICH people, but they totally miss how much better off AVERAGE people are, when government takes a back seat and LETS us prosper.
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I think it's natural for Reddit and YouTube to be biased against the right, because conservatives aren't as big of whiners or tattletales as liberals. We're not going to complain to Mommy because Tommy said a bad word or said something mean to us. We're used to it. And we figure the other guy has a right to spout nonsense. If we tire of it or the signal attenuates because of the noise, we'll just leave.
This is how lefties 'take over.' A relatively small number of people can toxify any channel and bombard it with what seems like a large number of complaints. A few or a few hundred take on the power of a multitude, because YouTube gets inundated by complaints, which they really can't handle very many of, when it comes down to it. You can have the most rabid left-wing, over-the-top, mob-inciting rhetoric from the left, but nobody complains, because lefties are fine with it and righties just move on.
THEN what happens is the space is taken over by lefties. Advertisers are playing it smart, because they ALSO don't know how to deal with a small number of toxic lefties, and they don't want to be smeared. And they're not going to gain or lose conservative customers because of a left-wing blog. The trouble is that when these spaces succumb to leftism, they lose much of their creativity and interest. In other words, they "win" the space, and then the space goes intellectually and financially bankrupt.
One thing that would fix MUCH of this is if independent creators worried about their OWN support, rather than taking what YouTube's monetization scheme provides, and bending the knee to the corporate advertisers, who are ESSENTIAL to YouTube's monetization model for clients and YouTube, itself. Maybe content creators should give YouTube a percentage of the independent advertising they receive.
Tim Pool occupies a kind of between ground, where he whines about censorship while bending the knee to the censors. I think his product/channel(s) might be better if he weren't so focused on winning against the algorithm, which means he HAS to crank out 4 or 5 videos a day or lose his place in line to big outfits that are running 24/7 cable channels. Tim's prolific output is part of how he keeps his foot in the door of the "Recommended" content. If he doesn't, he risks losing a fairly enviable position for an independent. But cranking out 4 or 5 videos a day, no matter how gifted you are at improvised commentary. He's weak in the post-production/editing side of things.
Matt Christiansen takes a different approach, where he clearly edits his work down to nothing but the good stuff. Any hemming and hawing (or stuttering) gets edited out. He also puts more work into it PRE-production, by writing a pretty tight script for himself, and he doesn't over-extend himself trying to do too much.
I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to my MATH content. At the beginning, I had x number of classes that ALL needed coverage, and I went into MASS production, cranking out 20 or even 30 videos per day, until I had coverage. I'm above-average at being able to speak to the material without much hemming or hawing, but I think my theoretical discussions are a little bit light, because the quickest way to crank out material is to simply work an exercise. It has a clear beginning and end. And I do a lot of just-in-time theory, when the theory's needed for those first few exercises of a specific type.
So in kind of an ad hoc fashion, all the theory and a plethora of examples are given - more than a traditional lecture has time for - and I deliver the theory piecemeal, as needed for a given exercise. In other words, they get the theory, but it's delivered heuristically, that is, I don't do the theory, standalone, but always in the context of solving a problem. Anyway, the rush to get coverage means my post-production was pretty weak. My production values are a bit weak.
Works great if you're a motivated student, working through the content on your own and get stuck. BOOM, there's a video that explains that exercise (or one almost just like it), on demand, so you're not having to wait until the next class for the High Priest of Mathematics to answer, if he has time and if he feels like it. And you're not staying up until 3 a.m. trying to figure it out for yourself, because it's due, tomorrow and there's nobody around to help you at 9 or 10 p.m., when you're trying to wrap things up.
I'm not sure Tim is set up to do that, short of hiring an editor and maybe putting more into writing, pre-production. But he's on a treadmill that requires multiple videos, every single day. He's like a shark, who'll suffocate if he stops swimming. He's struck a balance that works for him, but if he doesn't evolve, he'll be stuck in this in-between spot, forever.
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Tim: "Trump makes me clutch my pearls. He's such a PEASANT!"
You don't even realize how you sound like a Victorian-era aristocrat, which is where the saying "pearl clutching" comes from. And Trump's a salesman. Hyperbole is a stock in trade. You need to get over that.
BUT you should listen to his speeches at rallies. There were a couple things he said at the last rally excerpt I watched, which makes me want to force myself to sit through an entire rally, and double-check some of the things he's saying, which maybe do sound authoritarian.
But even if so, it wouldn't surprise me if part of his strategy is to get Congress all hot and bothered about the powers of the president, with his rhetoric. But when you drill beneath the rhetoric, he's actually a lot more restrained than Obama was. Rather than implement something and lose in court 2 or 3 years later, after the guy he illegally appointed had 2 or 3 years messing up an agency, Trump faces an immediate injunction, and it takes 2 or 3 years for the change to actually take place after he WINS in court. He doesn't win 'em all. But I think at least part of the reason his rhetoric is so strong is so that the public and congress and the courts will pump the brakes on runaway presidential powers of the last 30 years.
And to get movement on issues he knows he's right about, he'll push far too hard, just so that the eventual compromise nudges things in a better direction. It's totally art of the deal, but Dems have the subtlety of Drax the Destroyer, who, you may recall, can't grasp the idea of a metaphor.
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"Diversity and Equity" programs are little more than Soviet Commissars taking root in the land of the free. With every activity must go a commissar, ensuring that ideological purity is maintained. Institutions embrace it because it sounds good, but they're basically adding another whole layer of bureaucracy consisting of people whose purpose at work (and in life) is to stir shit, find something to be offended about. Recruiting and fostering grievances. They have no productive role in the enterprise. Basically, it's Stalinist.
Because of this and other fake-corporate "best practices," bigger companies are becoming less and less competitive. Smaller is better. Big companies have their benefits and pension plans. Small businesses are trending towards 'independent contractors,' where you 'hire' someone as a private contractor and all that pension and health benefit stuff is up to the contractor to handle for themselves. No red tape. No "human resources" department full of drones who produce little or nothing, and run interference for management against workers.
The biggest advantage to going small is that the mistakes of the "top officials" affect at most a handful of people. When you go big, one mistake at the top can hurt thousands. We've been going bigger for the economies of scale and the influence bigger outfits can wield in the political sphere for many years. Now, the bigger outfits are strangling on their own overhead. We're reaching "peak bureaucracy" and it's not pretty. Ask just about anyone who works for a big institution. Almost without exception they'll tell you how upper and middle management have political agendas, but really no expertise in the actual business. No connection to the trenches, where everything gets done.
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@jaylenharris343 Soros would be a start, but he's only the most well-known of the dark-money society-destroyers. Then again, if he had stayed out of it, maybe we would have drifted, unaware, into socialist tyranny, instead of broadly rejecting it, as the people have. It had to get a lot worse before it could get better, maybe.
As a poor student of history, a lot of the right things happen by seeming accident, for all the wrong reasons.
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Yes, they were willfully blind to every indication that their sources were wrong and unethically passing on (leaking) unvetted misinformation, with no shortage of would-be "Deep Throats" supplying more confirmation from highly placed insiders than Woodward and Bernstein had, with the ONE Deep Throat during Watergate. But when Nunes, John Solomon and Sarah Carter unearthed the REAL chain of so-called "evidence," and traced it to the Steele Dossier and then traced the Steele Dossier to some lame-ass comment section in a "fan-fiction" kind of blog, and CNN and others REFUSED to investigate, they became complicit for their absolute lack of curiosity about ANYthing that wasn't in line with their chosen narrative.
STILL, they have "plausible deniability" in that there were current and former officials coming out of the woodwork selling the same bullshit. When the former Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, and the former Director of National Intelligence are singing EXACTLY the same tune, and have "privileged information" they constantly refer to, with the "national security" card to play, any time they're asked to back up their outrageous and outlandish claims, then the "reporters" using those insider sources can claim they were lied to, and, as long as NObody can FORCE the likes of Brennan and Clapper to put up or shut up, then their "reporting" is seemingly as "solid" as anything Woodward and Bernstein put out, during Watergate.
It keeps the waters muddy enough they can skate, as long as their (shrinking) viewership prefers to believe them (and Brennan and Clapper and the rest), and they appeal to their confirmation bias at every turn. They can EVEN continue doubling-down, as long as they suspend their disbelief with regard to those assholes, and hold their heads up, at least in front of their indoctrinated NPC audiences.
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Government suppression of news reports involving a particular religious or ethnic group is nothing new. In fact, you could even say that the leaders of the day had the best interests of the public in mind. I'm pretty sure this happened in the U..K. in the 19th Century, to keep race wars from erupting in and around Jewish ghettoes. Like maybe a Jewish slasher was on the loose, but they didn't know he was Jewish until they caught the bastard and killed him, and quashed the story in the press, to prevent a riot, when ethnic tensions were high.
It's a logical thing for government to do to keep the peace, until the word starts trickling out. In the Jewish case, there was not a major increase in crime associated with it, and their neighborhoods always improved over time, because they're hard-working and moral people, generally. And they don't evangelize. Christians and Muslims, both offshoots of Judaism, have evangelizing written into their doctrine. Islam started out political. I think Christianity started out neutral, and then over time, the offshoots that were the most political were the ones that ended up dominating. The Gnostics, who just wanted to get together and talk about Jesus soon died out.
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Uh. 10 bucks an hour is 400 a week times 4.333333333..... weeks per month is about $1730 per month, which is closer to $2,000 than $1,000. Other than piss-poor arithmetic, you make some decent points. $1000 a month for everybody means 3 or 4 people can share a house and play all day. Or just sell arts and crafts or something else that's not sustainable without an infusion of cash from taxpayers.
Most people want more than that, but many of those people will find it difficult to get off their asses and do much about it, because vague discontent doesn't generally rise to the threshold of the kind of desperation it takes to work your way out of your situation. Not all people are like that, but my brother is. He's generally bummed at what he can't have, but it never rose to the level of his having to bite the bullet and CHANGE his situation. Full belly, lots of sci-fi to read and watch on DVD, warm place, warm bed, roof over his head. He's pretty content, most of the time. I had more strikes against me, and he's probably smarter than I am, but in my stupidity, I worked a LOT of 60-80-hour weeks, supporting myself and earning math and geology degrees.
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Millennials are trending left because they were trained that way in the public schools and all the messaging on network t.v. and movies. The schools teach them to be "woke" but do a generally poor job at teaching root academic skills or put them on trajectories to GOOD jobs in the REAL world. Raised to be helpless and FEEL helpless, of COURSE they want Nanny Government to round off all the corners and sharp edges. Couple that with their natural idealism and desire to help the helpless, with zero historical context or real understanding of "Bread and Circuses!" and, more recently, the inextricable connection between the Nazi welfare state and the conformity and "Fatherland uber alles!" that made them all too ready to invade, kill and torture because it's "For the Fatherland!" that you can only get from state-run government and media in the modern era, and it's understandable, but it's sad.
Even Tim Pool doesn't quite see the slippery slope that the kind of nanny government HE wants puts us on. The difference between Tim and AntiFA is simply a matter of degree, with no real philosophical/ideological difference. But while I tend to be a purist libertarian, just this side of anarcho-capitalism, I recognize that we need a social safety net, and maybe that, in itself, isn't wrong, but the WAY we administer it is wrong. The middle ground may be just a coordinated effort to DE-centralize all these programs, getting the CENTRAL government out of it, so that 10 people on a congressional committee don't spread their mistakes across every square inch of a continent-spanning nation, and let the local communities, counties and states administer assistance from the ground up, and learn from each other what seems to do the best job within the community's means to do so.
If the communities can't stand on their own, what hope has the nation that's the union of those communities hope to stand? And when the government is the instrument of all compassion, what responsibility falls on the individual to do anything more than pay super-high taxes? Where's the human compassion there? And how much can or will an individual pitch in for that hospital fundraiser or that barn-raising or that homeless-shelter construction, if every penny of extra money they might have is eaten up in taxes for inefficient and corrupt government programs run by inefficient and corrupt bureaucrats and politicians spending Peter's money to take care of Paul? When it's somebody else's money for yet somebody else's benefit, there is no incentive to be budget-conscious or quality-conscious, which goes a long way towards explaining why our public schools are so expensive and turn out so many helpless and entitled graduates (and dropouts).
But the left doesn't even want to have these conversations. It doesn't even want to consider how giving parents CHOICE in where their kids go to school would improve outcomes. Why? Mainly to prop up the teacher's unions and all the administrators that sit on top of the teachers . Same deal with all government programs. The technocrat class that fills all those government jobs has no interest in actually solving problems. Their meal ticket is never-ending problems to perpetuate their jobs and growing their kingdoms at taxpayers' expense. It just wants everybody's money and for everybody to go to the piece-of-shit school that results.
Heck, maybe the answer is just eliminating welfare, entirely, and making it all WORKfare. Alabama did that and I think that something like 70-80% of the Food Stamp recipients left the rolls.
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Most of the seats that flipped in 2018 were to Democrats who ran on Trumpian platforms. Then they got in office, and they instantly were assimilated by the DNC/BORG. Lock-step with Nancy from Day 1. All that stuff about 1st and 2nd Amendment that they ran on? Out the window as soon as the polls closed. I think a lot of these 1st-time congress members will not be re-elected, because they all went full-on WOKE.
The thing about Trump tweets is that he's spending very little energy, jabbing at the opposition.
Who are these "conservatives" who are clutching their pearls at Trump's tweets? Let me guess: "The Lincoln Project?" Bill Kristol? Career Republican politicians (i.e. RINOs)?
Trump's not playing to the intelligentsia. He's playing to regular people, who LOVE seeing someone in Washington who isn't a tight-ass politician. Just a common-sense guy, who happens to be a salesman. A salesman working for regular people. I think he's going to set new records when it comes to blacks voting Republican. Democrat 'solutions' to the problems we see in the inner cities have done nothing but make things WORSE for people in the inner city. Trump's message: The best thing government can do "for" black people is to get the heck out of their way.
All the "help" comes at great cost and erects barriers to upward mobility. Rents, taxes, regulations... Everyone starting at the bottom and doing things the right way, who enjoys any success is despised by the system, and told by everyone what horrible, selfish people they are.
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Life is tradeoffs.
If she had gotten married straight out of high school or college, she'd probably still be dissatisfied, but for different reasons. "Is this it? Cooking and cleaning, day after day, for kids who just take, take, take, and an unloving husband with a beer belly, who hasn't excited me for 10 years? I feel so trapped!"
This video looks pretty performative to me. What's she doing in a very unflattering evening gown, with a very unflattering hairdo, unflattering (Marilyn Manson) makeup, and wearing her mother's jewelry? That particular get-up and styling is for a 1940s movie star, and she ain't no movie star. She's an average-looking woman.
She should have no problem finding a man at 33, if she's willing to let her hair down, put on some jeans, and head out to the dirt races, or a baseball game. Maybe volunteer at a local charity or two. Good men show up in those places, too. They're where the best singles of marriageable age would be most likely to go.
You want to signal to the other sex that you have your shit together and can meet someone else more than half way? Volunteer at the food drive! Pitch in at habitat for humanity! Don't keep putting yourself in meat-market settings in pick-me mode.
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Aristocracy takes many forms. It's basically a mechanism by which the successful ensure the success of subsequent generations that may or may not be (but usually aren't) as talented as their parents. The old "It's not what you know, but whom you know" thing. You don't need a religion behind it, like "The Anointed King! God's Chosen!" In the modern era, IDEOLOGY has taken the place of religion, so it's no surprise that all these entitled assholes are conspicuously "woke."
These structures arise in any system. It's the nature of success to want to perpetuate it down your line's generations. Not all successful people are like that, but there are always some, and they always breed more!
I think Henry Ford was a conspicuous exception to this, if I remember my readings from 30 or 40 years ago. His kids didn't live in privilege. They had their daily chores and he paid them according to the value of those chores. They never experience privation, to be sure, but they didn't experience much privilege, growing up. Henry Ford II followed in his footsteps as much for his merit as for his birthright. This is relatively rare, although MOST privileged individuals make an effort to toughen up their kids in some way. That's where the top schools come in. That's why an Oxford accent meant so much to so many for so long. It implied rank, of course, but it also implied a very, very good education.
But then (as late as the 20th Century) as now, there were always an alarming fraction of privileged scions who just bought their way to graduation and high positions. Such nonsense always crops up, even in a "people's system" or "republican system" such as we have. In a true meritocracy, those types don't last long. But the bigger and more powerful the government is (whatever form of government it is), the more niches there are for such drones, and the easier it is to use your connections for personal advancement. The people at the top always want to create a system that keeps them on top, and government regulation, selective law enforcement and the surveillance state are wonderful tools for the cementation of the same people (and their offspring) in the most powerful positions.
Such systems inevitably crumble from the weight of sheer incompetence at the top and general-public outrage at their absolute tone-deafness, lack of self-awareness, and ignorance of the real world. We see this when we see Nancy Antoinette's 2nd freezer full of ice cream, or Hunter Biden's or Chelsea Clinton's board memberships. They're not on those boards on their own merits. They're on those boards because they have a network of powerful fixers behind them, and family names that carry weight with "all the right people."
As recently as 19th-Century England, Army and Navy commissions were bought and sold. If you wanted to be a major, that'd cost you 1,000 guineas. They finally outlawed that, because it didn't work. Also because "noble-born" officers tended to be shot or bayoneted by their own soldiers! LOL! I think Napoleon kind of put the kibosh on it, ultimately, by instituting conscription (the draft) of young peasants. The invention of firearms was huge in this regard. You can train anybody to work a musket in a few days or weeks, so the tradition of nobility being trained from an early age in sword skills, tactics and strategy (and everything else) didn't mean much compared to a citizen army numbering in the hundreds of thousands, especially after RIFLES were invented, and soldiers started gunning for officers from long range! All of a sudden that fancy uniform that set you apart as 'superior' amounted to painting a target on your back.
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As a libertarian-minded individual, I think what deSantis is doing is possibly worse than what he's railing against, because he's "tricking" conservatives into thinking his authoritarian move is a good thing. This is tribalism. Government never should've stuck its nose in in the first place, to artificially CREATE these so-called "private" Big-Tech companies and platforms.
Who decides who's a candidate? Will platforms one day be required to carry total basket-cases, just because they declare their candidacy? This is none of government's business. They're making it all about what the monopolies can or can't do, when they should be getting out of the way and fostering open, free-market competition. Alt-tech is a thing. it's here to stay, and everything people do to "fix" Big Tech only slows down all of Big Tech's competitors.
That said, there is a "supply-side" attack on libertarian, progressive and conservative viewpoints directly through the financial system that DOES bear looking into. You shouldn't be able to deny a person banking services because of their political views, if they haven't broken any laws. When GoFundMe and PayPal start getting political, THAT is a bad thing and should be illegal, if it isn't, already. Jordan Peterson's the Poster Child for this unfair denial of services.
But I guess I'm falling for the same argument others are making for regulating Big Tech. They're SO big and SO ubiquitous, that one can make an argument that they are utilities. I just don't want the Internet to become the regulatory nightmare that throttles new ideas and the underdog in the name of protecting the underdog.
They've done it to education. "Everybody should have a free education" and all that's guaranteed is a bloated bureaucracy and a very expensive, very low-quality education product that 90% of parents are basically forced, due to being overwhelmed by the idea of educating their own kids, with education products they purchase, for their own kids. But if you price it out, you can get a kid through the equivalent of one full year of k-12 schooling for close to $1,000 a year, bare bones, without much 1-on-1 attention.
But I think people would be amazed at what their kids could learn and for how little, with just a TINY nudge in the culture, the early training of kids, and in the early stages, direct government subsidies that SHOULD be phased out, as parents figure out - the CULTURE figures out - that they want their kids to get the best-quality education for the lowest possible price. Serving those two competing goals is something government institutions are utterly unsuited to provide.
Maybe a transition period during which all that is done is SCHOOL CHOICE! Give parents a voucher that's worth what the district spends on each kid, and let the PARENTS decide where to spend that money. There would INSTANTLY be an almost total shutdown of most inner-city schools and a corresponding explosion in new schools. Better schools will grow. Worse schools will fail. Way more kids will get way better educations.
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I've been around long enough to know that the only way you get people to absolutely reject something foolish is when reality bites them in their delusions. NObody is going to read Foucault to de-construct the de-constructionists. But people can tell when a person is bat-shit crazy and imposing their will, by force, on others. I could lecture all day about the fake scholarship of critical theory. I can bring up Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, who have it pretty nailed down.
But it just takes an insane take-over of Evergreen, a man who thinks he's a woman beating the brains out of a born woman in the Octagon, or a Karen freaking out because a family is having a barbecue in the park. These excesses add up.
Sadly, you can't prevent ALL the harm. But if you follow human history and know something about human behavior, you can't MAKE people understand. You have to LET them understand. You can't recruit people to the sane side of things. You have to let the insanity DRIVE them to the sane side. You have to LET people get canceled. The more people get canceled, the sooner people will finally turn on the cancelers.
Before World War Ii, half our country saw Hitler and Hirohito for what they were. The other half didn't. If we'd done the "right thing" and gone to war in, say, 1939, there would have been a HUGE anti-war movement. I read many scholarly books on the run-up to WW II when I was a teenager. The thrust of the intelligentsia at the time was "We should've done more, sooner, because of all the bad things Hitler and Hirohito were doing. These same intellectuals were advising Bush about Iraq. Many Cold Warriors drew straight-line parallels between 1930s Germany and 2000s Iraq. The "What if we'd stopped Hitler BEFORE Munich?" idea was quite prevalent in the literature. Think of all the lives that would've been saved!
I've been mulling this since the '70s and it's just not entirely clear that Hitler would've been defeated if we'd been confrontational at the start. If Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler at Munich, Hitler may not have overplayed his hand. He may've waited, and possibly gained a huge advantage, technologically, from jet aircraft to ICBMs to possibly even nukes, and no telling what the Panzer VI might've looked like if they'd had more time for testing and development and begun their blitzkrieg in 1940 or 1941 instead of 1939.
We had to LET Germany kid itself, jump the gun, and enjoy HUGE success, early, even though by the winter of 1941, it was pretty clear which side was going to win. When the Nazis failed to either defeat the Soviets or secure oil wells in (and supply lines to) the Caucasus by 1942 at the latest, it was all over but for the shooting.
That's how I feel about identity politics. It's intellectually and philosophically bankrupt. It holds two logically conflicting 'truths": First: there is no absolute truth. Second: Everybody's absolutely racist and absolutely must be re-educated and/or silenced if they disagree. All their reasoning is fallacious.
As a mathematician, I know that the EASIEST way for a novice to prove something is true is to assume it is false and reason to an absurdity. The absurdity proves that you were reasoning from a false premise and therefore the thing you assumed was false must be true! (Law of the excluded middle)
So when I look at the nonsense, I know that rational argument, while assiduously pursued by idiots like me, is pointless. You're not going to argue a person out of what amounts to a religion. All you can do is allow the absurdities to accumulate to the point where nobody can deny it. Trying to MAKE people change their minds only stiffens their resolve. That's the mistake the left is making as we speak, and the best way to fight it is to focus on the absurdities as a practical matter.
History is 3 steps forward, 2 steps back. But since before the Romans, we've been inching ahead. And the older you get, the more you'll see things turn out for the better for all the wrong reasons and that the worst people to deal with are those with all the right reasons.
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They THINK YouTube is overwhelmingly right-wing, because they are absolutely un-used to EVER getting any push-back against left-wing ideology. So in the course of their cruisings, they run into a conservative video or commenter and they're shocked (triggered). When I open up YouTube as anonymous or with my work ID, which I don't use for playing, the offerings are 99% mainstream, with nothing but Kimmel, Colbert, John Oliver, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, etc.
To find anybody with a non-liberal-orthodox opinion, you have to actively pursue it. If you're a lazy thinker/browser, you'll see nothing but left-wing humor and left-wing ideology. The fact that there's ANYthing right of center, ANYwhere just shows how hard conservatives work at it.
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@dheibeljr : Libtards see the big pot of money that freedom created in zero-sum terms. If they want to balance the budget, they just simplistically see that pot of money and decide what tax rate it will require to pay for all their shit. of course, when they TAKE that much, the pot of money starts running out and no longer is replenished. Libtards (and war mongers) LOVE making FEDERAL programs, because THOSE programs aren't constrained by the funds available. They simply run up debts in perpetuity and it seems to THEM like everything's working marvelously! Meanwhile, every single child in America is about $50,000 in debt, at birth!
People said Reaganomics was voodoo economics. You do NOT raise revenue by cutting tax rates! That's insane! And yet, revenues took off and set the stage for a momentary (all too brief) balancing of the budget, 10 years later, with a Republican legislature and Demokkkrat Clinton in the White House. it's Econ 101. Maximum revenue is not simply a matter of raising prices.
Of course, the 1st rule of politics is to IGNORE the 1st law of economics. And that's why we're in the hole we're in.
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The civil suits that follow this will be rich fare, especially after her remarks when they came to HER neighborhood and threatened Her home.
The emperor (mayor) has no clothes. People are criticizing her hypocrisy, but I just think she's a really, really stupid champagne liberal (ivory-tower idiot), who's being confronted in real time by her Marie-Antoinette approach to the people's welfare. This is what can happen - and too often doesn't - when your world view doesn't conform with reality. Blue-city officials and voters have been lying to themselves for decades, and only the robustness of America propped the whole rotten edifice up for as long as it has.
And they're STILL going to make a play for your and my money, when these cities go bankrupt, which will preserve their illusions at your and my expense, like they've been doing almost invisibly with HUGE federal tax write-offs for their ridiculously high taxes. Now, thanks to Trump's tax reform, they can no longer steal from the heartland through big fat tax deductions for the rich people paying all their state and local taxes. But Democrats and RINO Republicans will be only too happy to run up our debt ANOTHER $3 trillion with a "stimulus" bailout of blue cities and blue states.
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@donpietruk1517 FOX is controlled opposition. It has the same 3rd rails that the other networks won't touch, and engages in the same distractions from what matters as all the OTHER cable networks.
CNN will have its token "conservative" that everyone interrupts and talks over, just as FOX has its token "liberal" on its panel discussions, and THEY get talked over the same way. FOX had no interest in election integrity issues, the mismanaged response to COVID, etc. They're making the same case for a broken establishment, but they use different rhetoric is all. Never a word against their big advertisers, like Pfizer. When war beckons, FOX beats the same drum as all the other networks.
FOX is worth watching for a little different take, but it's still highly sanitized content. The whole FOX vs the rest is mostly theater, just like Trump versus the Swamp is looking more and more like Swamp Creatures in a carefully scripted wrestling match. Nothing gets resolved. It's ALL just "Tune in tomorrow, because we're REALLY gonna beat 'em, TOMORROW!"
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This is the slippery slope I've been warning about since the '80s, and not because of the early signs, but from the HISTORY of state-run health care. Guess which European government was the first to implement state-run health care, based - I'm not kidding - on the benefit structure of an arms manufacturer? Yes. Germany. Bismarck did it, to keep the Junker aristocracy in power. "See? We're taking CARE of you! Love us! Obey us!"
Yup. Check out "The Arms of Krupp." Oh, and by the way, the corporate model included a loyalty oath from the worker to the arms manufacturer. Yup. Kruppstahl (Krupp Steel) was the armorer of the German military stretching back to at least the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which Germany won handily, thanks in large part to artillery made by Krupp.
NONE of this stuff is new. NObody knows their history or how socialism drags us down and pits us against each other, in an era where there should be nothing but gains in prosperity and environmental stewardship. Unfortunately, we gave up on free trade a long time ago, and so what we see and do is what a handful of people at the top want us to see and do. It's always the opinions of a few at the top, instead of people being free to try things and share what they learned, invent new products that are BETTER and that people aren't FORCED or CAJOLED into buying, but buy because they WANT to!
You don't MAKE the world a better place. You LET it become a better place.
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: He's trying maximize his audience and minimize his problems with corporate censorship. He knows his audience is mostly conservative, so he looks for things they want to know about. He works hard at it and he's good at it. Over time, he's getting exposed to a lot of economics and history he wouldn't otherwise be, but he's slow to question his fundamental beliefs about the proper role and scope of central government. If big government were supportable, local communities would handle all that welfare state stuff the way the feds do. But on the local level, you can't hide where the money's coming from, especially the money that just gets printed when the "real" money runs out. Only the feds could get away with running deficits year after year and run up as much debt as the entire output of the country for a year.
If the American people REALLY supported the kinds of programs they vote for the feds to implement, these programs would already be implemented in communities across the nation and the feds wouldn't be involved at all. Libs: Put your damn money where your mouths are. That homeless person on the street is not a failure of federal government. They're a failure of the community. If your community can't or won't handle it, what makes you think a bunch of clowns who don't even KNOW you, 1,000 or 2,000 miles away somehow can? They (are supposed to) get their money through taxes, just like the locals. But only the feds can get away with spending more than they take in, so people will continue to believe in Bernie Madoff types in government.
Try that shit on the local level, and people get thrown out of office or thrown in jail. The lavish spending ways of Washington are unsupportable, but they have the ability to literally print money. So they steal it from you in inflation and the occasional financial meltdown and subsequent bailout that the corner grocer will NEVER get from the city council. There's nothing but glory and promotion for big-spending federal politicians. People even DEMAND it. They think that ANY community and EVERY person can somehow extract more wealth from the system than they put in and it NEVER works that way. It's ALWAYS less, by the time the bureaucracy is done taking its cut.
They always want the money for something "good," and it rarely turns out the way it's supposed to. And the money always ends up in the hands of the same people, while most people just get robbed.
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Kaepernick's message is pretty misguided and self serving. It's just too bad that he made "police brutality" and critical-race-theory politics the focus and didn't just campaign against the war on drugs, which is the source of most of the antagonism between communities and law enforcement. We learned nothing from Al Capone and Prohibition. The War on Drugs is what perpetuates gangster culture, and that culture will never subside until they take the money out of the illegal drug business by legalizing, regulating and taxing all the currently outlawed drugs.
Alcohol does a LOT of damage to society, but we figured out that making it illegal caused more harm than the alcohol, itself. But Kaepernick's not making those kinds of arguments. He's making it all about race and how mistreated he is. And about making more money for Kaepernick.
As far as the National Anthem protests go, I remember during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom when the National Anthem ceremonies at football games were very pro-war. If you didn't "support the troops," and by extension, the POLICIES that had them fighting overseas, then you were unpatriotic. And our supposedly "liberal" media were 100% behind the wars in Iraq. To a libertarian/constitutionalist, those ceremonies were a little bit creepy, and the universal media support of what we're learning were pretty immoral wars was also pretty creepy. Tripped my contrarian alarm.
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Trump's strategy is multi-pronged. It's not that ONE thing is his "real" strategy. And just because Trump appoints a judge doesn't mean that judge works for Trump.
Let's quit jumping to conclusions and assigning probabilities based on the past, when what's happening, now, is unprecedented. It's not unforeseen, though. And that's where I think the Founding Fathers have Trump's back. But we'll see. The Dems have been shredding the law and the U.S. Constitution for a long time, without any immediate consequences to themselves. But there're long-term consequences that they're reaping, now, in the loss of their position as a majority party.
I'll be surprised if the PA legislature pulls this off. It will take a lot of unity and may be struck down, later, by the courts, anyway. I think their strongest argument is a 14th-Amendment argument, based on thousands of affidavits from poll watchers in the blue cities. Observers were denied the right to observe. Massive irregularities. Impossible vote drops in the middle of the night. Letting Dem-district mail-in voters "cure" their ballots, while no such "service" was afforded to voters in Republican districts, which ran things By The Rules. That's not enough to prove fraud, but it looks like PLENTY to de-certify the results in states where this went on.
If THAT happens, then either Republican legislatures in the states decide for whom the electors shall cast their votes OR it goes to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Republicans control most of the state delegations (31 to 19, or something like that). If either happens, it's a HUGE victory for the heartland over the city slickers!
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@nk_3332 : Static analysis. Exactly. Like Chavez down in Venezuela, they just see the revenue stream as money they could spend on their schemes, without realizing that to keep that stream coming, most of it needs to be reinvested in the FUTURE revenue stream. Liberals see profits as something they can just tax away for their schemes without realizing that those profits will dry up because of their high taxes. When you're going to lose 80% of your profits to the tax man, you're far less likely to invest in anything risky (or NEW).
Actions have consequences. That money's not just a magical, self-perpetuating cornucopia. Straight-line trend analysis doesn't tell you anything about giant shifts that will take place as soon as things reach a critical point. The straight-line trend just sees everything in the future proceeding exactly as in the past. There's no allowance for random innovations that improve everything that have always cropped up (and saved our asses over and over in SPITE of idiots in power), AND there's no understanding of the FACT that authoritarian analysis (static analysis, imo) when turned into policy, eliminate 90% of the natural innovation that would otherwise occur in a society unburdened by their pie-in-the-sky, mechanistic view of reality.
To me, that's what libtards basically are. They think they're so smart, because they can "see" how the machine operates. But they have no concept of how that machine is comprised of individual people making individual choices, multiplied by 300 million, and how the slightest shift in the rule set or tax structure affects every single choice and every single transaction. They just know that a little bug spray saved their tomato crop the one time, so DRENCHING the garden with bug spray must be a wonderful idea, amirite?
They abstract the machine and extract the impact of the individual's character, motivations and options on that machine. They take human nature and human compassion out of the equation and reduce everything and everybody to a NUMBER on a spreadsheet, and then prance around telling everyone how "smart" and "educated" and "virtuous" they are. See somebody struggling to get by in a shit job? Wave a wand and declare ALL jobs are worth $15 an hour. Problem solved to a half-smart liberal. Bigger problems CREATED to a thinking person with some understanding of economics and human nature.
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Young people SHOULD question the proper role of government, considering the hippie generation, in its socialist tendencies, has run the national debt up so high that ALL young people are on the hook for paying off a debt they had no role in creating. Something $70,000 in debt at birth in the richest country in the world. This, and spiraling taxes on every nickel they earn for the rest of their lives might do more to convince them to re-think things.
What I see are the "new rebels" are the ones who scoff at left-wing-dogmatist teachers much the same way the hippie generation scoffed at right-wing-dogmatist teachers 50 years ago. It's the new cool to defy the empty-headed identity-politics doctrines being rammed down their throats. The difference, now, is that 50 years later, 90% of ALL Americans already reject homophobic, racist and sexist norms of 50 years ago, and the teachers are all preaching against some mythical beast that no longer exists. Kids don't much care about black, brown, yellow or white, and the minute they're free of public schools, many of them are learning all the stuff they don't teach in the public schools, and becoming capitalists, the same way kids in the '60s had THEIR eyes opened when they went to college.
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The good news is that the fraction of the American public who actually pay attention to these one-party-ruled platforms and media outlets is very small and shrinking very rapidly. They're like the neighborhood bully who FINALLY crushes the last kid who defied him on the sand lot. The next day, the bully shows up at the sandlot, basking in his hegemony, only he's the ONLY kid who shows up. So he rules, but there's nobody there to see it or even care about it.
Tim's kind of seeing it. The fact is that the technology that comprises the surveillance state is in the hands of the general public. The elites can't use it to control us without giving us the means to go through, over and around their controls. While we should resent the intrusions into our privacy, transparency is becoming more and more a fact. The cracks in the control systems are becoming canyons.
I'm partial to the metaphor of trying to hold sand in your fingers. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers. I think/hope this is an inevitable - and largely unintended - consequence of human progress and technology's role in that. The elites see these WONDERFUL control levers, and in their eagerness to pull those levers, they're BREAKING them.
FWIW, I still use Amazon, but instead of making purchases THROUGH Amazon, I use their site to find the products and manufacturers I want to buy from, and then go straight to THEIR websites and buy direct from THEM. Turns the whole paradigm around on Amazon.
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There. You're starting to see it. "We can't incentivize homeless people." Then you remember your dogma and go right back to government solutions. The first government solution is to stop being so arrogant about thinking government should solve everything. Government shouldn't enact laws it can't enforce, or make promises it can't back up. Have all the safety net you can afford, and after that, there's no room at the inn. Government can't (or shouldn't) ever exceed its means in providing a safety net. Build your 3,000 cheap/free housing units. However much you can afford. And when that's full, everybody else living in the street is a vagrant, and there are laws against vagrancy. Enforce them. Very simple.
No visible means of support? No place of residence? Can't find a job? Well, then we have a job for you that won't pay much and you probably won't like, so you really don't want to try living on OUR streets. Keeping a city clean and safe isn't really that hard. Start by surrendering in the War on Drugs and plow that money into clinics, plus all the tax money you're going to bring in selling that heroin. Cut the drug cartels off the knees and have money to set up clinics right next to the dispensary. Relieve law enforcement of the decades-long siege of drug cartels assailing communities in a system that preserves none of them, individually, but ensures there's always plenty to take the last one's place. The most ruthless wins. Meh. Take the money out of it, and cut your crime in half. Get the dopers out of jail for dope, and arrest them only if they commit a REAL crime.
Eliminate all the expensive drug task forces and plow those resources into helping addicts kick, in a society where asking for help is admitting to a crime.
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Remember "300?" That's right. The Iranians have been messing with other countries since before Thermopylae. This isn't - Trump's foreign policy isn't - about first causes. It's about how we're going to operate in the future. His goal is the same goal that Obama pretended to achieve, by putting Teheran on a 10-year plan to nukes, instead of a 5-year plan. Trump is negotiating from strength on that. He has escalation dominance, but he's content to respond proportionately (or slightly disproportionately). He made a BIG show of calling back the planes, after a drone downing, making a big point about how no lives were lost, so a lethal response wasn't appropriate. I think that air strike was all just so he could be seen calling off an airstrike, to give the Iranians pause.
Liberal Democrats suck at foreign policy, because they always project their own thinking on everybody else, instead of putting themselves in the shoes of the foreign leader with whom they're dealing. I'm sorry. Khomeini is not a liberal Democrat!
I think the world community is finally getting used to the fact that Trump isn't going away, and U.S. foreign policy will be HIS foreign policy for another 5 years, and not the foreign policy of the previous 4 administrations. If he's doing it right, there won't even be a Granada. I think that Iran's in an economic vise of its own making. The WORLD has told them to stop meddling, and yet they continue. The WORLD told them Suleimani was not to leave Iran, yet there he was, traveling all over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, destabilizing governments and directing armed militias. When Iranian-backed "protesters" stormed the American embassy in Iraq, it cost Suleimani his life.
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes. I don't even know why everyone's insisting that Trump produce evidence of a future threat from this man. Isn't what he did in the past, enough and more than enough?
The U.S. is not without sin, but if the Iranians want us out of there, all they have to do is clean up their act. Trump's looking for any excuse to pull out our troops. All Iran would have to do would be to play nice for a few months.
But if you're pushy, Trump will push you back. And as POTUS, he can push harder than you can. He's not going to invade, but he's definitely gonna sit on you.
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@AngloSupreme : Health care is a PRODUCT. And you think government is the best rationer, rather than free people making free exchanges with doctors. We're lucky to get 30 cents on every dollar spent on healthy care. The rest goes to the Democrat bureaucrats, and yes, they all vote democrat. This isn't about poverty. This is about jobs for Democrats. Just wait 'til the money runs out. Then if you're prudent you're screwed. And if you're poor you're screwed. But the bureaucrats will all have gold-plated coverage, you can bet.
There is a place for medical assistance for the poor. But it's not a right. The minute you believe it's a right, you're setting yourself up to have it ALL snatched away by corrupt government officials.
Free checkups? Free preventive care? I'm for that. But no one has a right to something that could cost a million dollars. There isn't a million dollars for everybody. So someone will ration it. Will it be doctors working with patients or a faceless bureaucrat deciding you ain't worth it? Look into the Soviet health-care system. Look who gets left out in the UK. Look how long people wait for heart and cancer treatments. Look at the quality of care in those two big killers.
American system isn't great, but it's mostly messed-up because of politicians making promises they don't have the resources to keep, and extracting the difference from working people with a few dollars extra to may take care of themselves with.
My nephew went to a "no insurance or medicare/medicaid" health center. Had his shoulder operated on for about $2,000. If he'd gone to a 'regular' hospital, he'd get it for free OR, if he had ANY ability to pay, they would've charged him $20,000-$30,000.
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Let them post their clumsy, primitive, LYING totalitarian advertisements. People SEE how this is going down, and China can't prevent that. This all goes away if they withdraw the proposal for extradition. China loses all face if they won't honor the agreement they signed in 1984. I'm surprised they haven't behaved even more badly than they already have. I expected that once the British moved on, China would crush Hong Kong in a very few years' time.
I think that behind all these years of double-digit growth and expansion around the world is a system that's rotten at the core. They can hide it for a long time by cheating where they can't innovate, but corruption is hollowing-out their domestic production. Only their export sector is profitable - and Hong Kong. They can't impose their will by force without killing the golden goose, and Trump's ratcheting up the pressure on them for their cheatin' ways. They've been behaving illegally and in predatory fashion for a very long time. I don't think they can compete without cheating, and they're running out of money. I used to be scared of them because they bought so much of our debt, but it turns out they're in worse debt than we are AND they're not considered a very good risk, at present, in the bond market AND if they try to take down the U.S. economy, all that U.S. debt they purchased becomes worthless!
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Republicans wanted to call Hunter Biden in the House hearings, to drive home the point that corruption in Ukraine, in particular Burisma, was already a scandal, and it was totally appropriate for the president to want to get to the bottom of it. The only reason it's an issue is because a corrupt Demokkkrat running for president happens to be connected to an investigation they needed to do.
It's just nuts. "It's wrong for you to investigate these matters, because Joe Biden happens to be a crook." Funny how they put that in his way, right when he's trying to get to the bottom of how the amateurish, sub-tabloid-quality Dossier was taken as gospel by a sprinkling of very powerful people, and rammed down everybody's throats as iron clad, just like the "science-is-settled" thing on global warming. We don't KNOW the extent of humanity's effect on climate is, but by most indications, as best we can understand climate changes over millions of years, that we're a bit on the cold side of ideal. The Medieval warming period was by most accounts a much better time than the Little Ice Age that followed.
It wasn't the warming periods that caused harm in the mid-latitudes. But what KILLS people back-to-back years of crop failures from harsh winters and cold, rainy summers, like 1315-1317, which marked the end of the medieval warming period and pretty much kicked off the little ice age. And one Krakatoa eruption like the one in 1883 could have far-lasting effects on global ocean temperatures.
The weird thing, to me, about the climate-change hysteria is that I've contemplated worse things and concluded that governments are less well-equipped than more and more advanced societies to deal with them. The more prosperous folks are, the more things they can do to problem-solve, and the less babies they want to have. Win-win! LOL! So even if you ARE very very concerned about anthropogenic global warming, you should be a total free-market capitalist! That's the shortest path to the biggest danger: not getting a handle on population growth.
I think right now in the USA, Europe, and parts of Asia, there are a whole lot of minds working on how to live greener. Small-plot farming, victory gardens, and locally- and sustainably-grown produce. Wood gasification that turns yard waste (and just about anything organic) into clean gas. Building heat sinks into homes as a matter of course, so you just run the furnace 45 minutes and the place stays warm all day. Building homes intelligently so that they require almost no heating or cooling.
We can live a whole lot smarter, and government ain't gonna get us there as fast as we, ourselves. People should ask if the house is "Earth Sheltered," and how many passive heating and cooling features it has. There's so much we haven't done with architecture and home design, because it's cheaper and everybody knows how to build a wooden box on top of the dirt. But if you build the house a little bit smarter, it'll cost next to nothing to maintain, and the house pays you back every month just by not costing a nickel to heat or cool.
CULTURE is going to make that happen faster than anything else can. And I think American culture is naturally geared towards achieving such things, because it's what people want to do, and not because it's what people are made to do. There's just so much wasted energy on hate for the Orange Man. Good people who could create all kinds of things to make a better world, and they can't see past the car-salesman exterior.
Yes, I want cleaner environment. But rather than go ape-shit about what is almost certainly not a crisis, and may even be helping to stave off the anticipated ice age in our future, the short path to balance might be to bring Indians and Chinese, in particular, up to our level of affluence. And they're ever so much more clever about blending the esthetic with the functional.
And just think of all those office workers in skyscrapers. I bet 90% of them could do 90% of their work without ever leaving home! So why do we still put up these big office buildings? I'd say grab every square inch of window space and have skyscraper-height terraces, with green and growing things in every window. And now that the offices aren't needed for office stuff, any more, re-purpose those spaces! I'm not saying make them one giant apartment building, but sure, some living spaces. Some Mom 'n' Pop stores, maybe... My dunno. But so much is well within the reach of existing technology and skill sets of the people.
We just have to put our heads to how to make a profit by doing the right thing, and all will be well.
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I thought it was a good movie. A little formulaic in a topical political way, with the implication that of course blacks are better and smarter and a black woman was of course the toughest and another black woman was the smartest, and they all kinda looked down their noses. That's just Hollywood expressing the times in which we live. But I thought there were some really good themes.
My favorite was the bad-ass chief of that mountain tribe who fought him for REAL for the kingship, and later came to his aid at crunch time. That's good shit, right there.
And grow more of those damn flowers that supercharge your system. Don't keep it all for the one dude. Heck, give my mom some of that stuff. She just turned 84, and could use a pick-me-up! I get they wanted the plot point, but that bit was a little phony, I thought. Maybe it just wasn't explained well enough or I didn't pay enough attention. Just seemed contrived.
Heh. Talking about a comic-book movie's contrivances! How about starting with magic hammers and a teleportation device that can only be switched on by the one sword, blah blah blah.
Shame about KillMonger. In these self-made men stories, I'd like to see them bring out how honing his body and mind would've honed his CHARACTER, as well. The ultimate expression of the greatness that he made would be his own super-hero or semi-super-hero gig right where he was, in the States. Throw him in with actual Wakandans, maybe in the course of the hero bit, where they bump into each other, trying to stop the same bad guy.
Then kinda be stand-offish, because of how he came up, and thinks the Wakandans were snooty (which they WERE). Then grudging respect, and finally falls in love with the baddest, best-lookin' hard-to-get female in Wakanda, who likes HIM more than the king, himself. Then, because he's a bad-ass, and they're civilized, they figure that he doesn't have to go through T'Challa to continue back in the States as a REAL superhero, with some of that herb T'Challa's got. Maybe even take a start back with him, and show it in a window box in the end credits....
Anyway, the way KM bootstrapped his way so far up on his own merit, my Hollywood Radar (from Rooster Cogburn to Josey Wales) doesn't light up for a guy who's just that poisonous, especially after all the good things he had to do to get where he was. It made him a little one-dimensional. Too much thug. Should've been rough 'n' tumble, but basically good and with a sense of fair play. My dunno. I just wanted him to come to Jesus at the end, and become a USA version of T'Challa. Then again, them freakin' Wakandans... That knife wound probably/maybe wasn't actually fatal, and the last scenes we saw were just a dude who's badly hurt, but the sister's gonna patch him up. That plot element's already in place, with the wonders of medicine at their disposal.
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@Oppenheimer : If he weren't a threat to the entrenched corrupt money-chasers, like Pelosi and Schumer (and many others, both parties) would probably adore Trump. He's an equal-opportunity, non-political kind of beast. Welfare state? He doesn't have a problem with that. He just wants it administered with common business sense. Troops abroad? Simple. Bring them home. Illegals crossing our borders and depriving our poorest and most vulnerable workers? Secure the border.
There's a lot of stuff he'd probably end up siding with Democrats on, if they'd give him the opportunity. But people in the legislature and in our highest levels in major agencies, have become an entrenched aristocracy to who the rules do not apply. They use their positions to enrich themselves, their friends, and bend the rules (or just use their position of knowledge) for their own profit. They'll cheat to do one guy a favor for the favor they'll get back in return.
In Killary's case, I think there was an added DISincentive for crossing her. Rules be damned. I think creepazoid John Brennan was like that, too. He was a hack, but a ruthless hack.
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You throw around the term "mixed economy," but I don't think you know what it means. It means SOME socialism. That means the state owns SOME of the means of production. That means SOME socialism. That's how ALL socialist systems "work." They only nationalize what the government decides it wants to own. The state can't actually run all businesses.
Our economy is more along the lines of "fascist" socialism, where the state doesn't OWN the means of production, but just tells industries what to make, how much to make, and how to make it. Many consider this functionally identical to socialism, because control is the primary feature of ownership. If you don't control it, you don't really own it.
The Nazis never OWNED Krupp Steel. Krupp just made what the Nazis wanted, and in return, the Nazis gave the Krupp clan great wealth (and lots of slave laborers). In the Soviet Union, the state actually oWNED the military industrial complex, but the top guys at the factories were treated much the same as the Krupps in Germany. They just hid their wealth more carefully, and made sure their mansions (dachas) were out of sight of the population. But it's the same privileged few making all the big decisions for everyone else.
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The Devil's in the details of what constitutes "Fake News" and "hate speech." CNN/MSNBC can push conspiracy theories 'til the cows come home, and their blue check is sacrosanct. But you say something against the military-industrial complex or public-school indoctrination factories or pro-2nd-Amendment or pro-1st-Amendment, and you're done. De-Monetized. De-platformed unless you're big enough that your following raises enough of a stink. Black Pigeon Speaks is a prime example. Even after it was reinstated, you won't find BPS (or Mark Dice) in the Recommended or Trending areas.
They've TOTALLY throttled new users from ever finding conservative channels that garner a million views. But CBS, CNN and MSNBC are "trending" with 1,000 views. It's pretty glaring if you're not ignorant. Just look up something you know the answer to and see how far down you have to scroll to find a link with the correct answer. If you didn't know the facts, already, you'll be directed to a link that's establishment-left approved, and you'll never know any different.
To hear Google tell it, little Brian Stelter is the trendingest, sexiest man on the planet!
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Right and left don't mean anything, nowadays. "Left" used to mean "speak truth to power." Now the "left" is establishment, and true liberals are rebelling against the establishment as we always do. Now left means a return to all the old forms of serfdom under bureaucrat overlords, which they re-brand with the catchy new title "socialism." This is considered "left," when it's actually regressive right, when you consider they're the ones in power and they want to KEEP this monstrosity called "government" that they appear to worship and wish to see grow without end.
The so-called "right" is just a regular liberal saying "Government is too big and powerful." The corruption we see is always there. But never in U.S. history have so many wanted to give government such a far reach that the corruption touches everything. We need to de-centralize, and so-called liberals seem to want a neofascist/neocommunist totalitarian system, where all decisions are made FOR you, all power is taken FROM you, and God (who doesn't exist) help you if you dissent, you right-wing radical!
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@pietersteenkamp5241 : It's SO IRONIC hearing someone who champions tax-and-spend liberal policies, when those were the foundational building blocks of Nazism! You can't get people to act like the German people acted without first taking over education, media and health care with government. The hand that feeds is the hand that controls. Every single so-called "anti-fascist" actually supports virtually every tenet of fascism.
Abortion - pre- AND post-birth - used to only occur when a tribe faced an extinction-level event. Usually famine. And everybody was very sad and wished it were otherwise, when they left their babies out in the elements to die, because there wasn't another bite to eat to spare for them. And they'd never forget that one year that it happened, and they would do everything they could to see that it didn't happen again.
We went from legalizing abortion to using it as another form of birth control for irresponsible women who want to have sex but don't want to pay for the consequences. As a matter of principle, I think a woman's only hurting herself, in the main, although she's taking her male partner out of Darwin's game without asking, when she does. BUT when you see how many MILLIONS of abortions are performed every year and how we're basically to the point of outright infanticide, you HAVE to realize that something ain't quite right, and we need to re-think this.
Personally, I think it's one of the most heinous things we as a society do, and we mainly do it because we want to indulge ourselves, sexually, without paying any mind to the consequences. So of course, it's a big liberal rallying point, because you libtards want it to all be fun and games with NO responsibility and NO consequences. And where there ARE consequences, you want somebody ELSE to HAVE to pay for it! You're all fucked-up in your thinking, because you really haven't thought these things through to any kind of real depth. But that just makes you like about half the rest of the country, so you'll never lack for people telling you how "smart" you are for your "enlightened" point of view, even though everything you stand for is in opposition to the REAL Enlightenment that gave you the prosperity and along with it the RIGHT to speak your mind.
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She's kind of a useful idiot. She's simple enough to pick up on a lot of the hypocrisy of the establishment (fascist) left, under the likes of Schumer and Pelosi. And in spite of herself, she scored a win for libertarian principles by helping to thwart the Amazon deal in Long Island. Democrats and Republicans, alike, are APPALLED that she didn't support the Crony Capitalism deal that was going to give Amazon all KINDS of infrastructure and tax benefits not offered to everyday Long Islanders, just because Amazon is BIG. Of course, she LIKES the high taxes and heavy regulations, because she's an idiot Democrat, and the REAL answer for New York, in general, is to CUT TAXES FOR EVERYBODY, and companies like Amazon would locate to New York, because it was FRIENDLY to trade in GENERAL.
So AOC is wrong (and right) and the Demublicans wanting all the Amazon.com money are right (and wrong). The world is really a marvelous place when you figure out that very often, the right thing happens for the wrong reasons. '
And I LOVE the tax reform bill that cuts deductions to fat cats in big cities. For decades, the super-rich have paid super-high state and local taxes in places like Chicago and New York, but they got all (or most) of it back, by stealing it back from the rest of the country on their federal income taxes. Now the deduction on state and local taxes is capped at $10,000 (I wonder how Trump sneaked THAT past the fat cats!), and so the fat cats are leaving the big cities! WOO-HOO! And NOW the big cities have to actually start carrying their OWN damn weight, rather than stealing from the heartland they would enslave by ending the Electoral College. It's historic. And hell, I didn't even know that was how they were gaming me out in the West and Northwest, where we just PAY while those bastards PLAY.
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The underlying problem is the drug laws that are widely disobeyed and generate megabucks for crime syndicates. You can't crack down on drugs without creating a natural selection process within drug cartels, leading to more violence.
So the wokesters have it half right. But if you declare an end to the war on drugs, you better have a good plan for taxation and regulation of the sales of those drugs, like we do with liquor stores.
Don't have laws you don't enforce or can't enforce. Come at it from another angle.
But we could shift all the anti-drug resources to drug counseling and violent-crime investigation and arrest. "It's not the drugs you were on, Joe. It's what you did while you were abusing them that we're here to talk to you about."
I think things will change for the better when the real estate market adjusts to the FACT that commercial properties, especially office buildings, are not worth what landlords are demanding. There's a ton of empty space, but somebody's gonna have to bite the bullet and write off their investments in office space that is not and will not be used.
Since 2020 or even before, they've just been trying to ride out the storm. They'd rather let their spaces go empty than un-bend and offer leases at affordable rates. But they can't sit empty forever, without a lot of those owners going broke. Anyway, there's going to be a lot of space for sale at a major discount, eventually, because there IS a new normal for remote work. Almost anything you can do in an office you can do, remotely.
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Garrett was neither hero nor assailant. He was very unwise and very unlucky. I think we all heard the 5 shots followed by the 3 shots. The 3 shots are probably the "return fire" from the man in the jeep. The 5 shots were likely high-powered-rifle shots that the driver assumed were aimed at him. I don't know if his car was hit, but I read that the rifle in Garrett's possession was never fired. He was just dumb enough or unlucky enough to be pointing his AK at the driver when the 5 shots rang out, apparently fired by someone else, entirely.
A tragedy of errors.
As for the $100,000, it will help the quadruple-amputee who lost her partner and caregiver. But $100,000 is a pitiful substitute for losing the love of your life in a totally preventable tragedy. And I'm sure in minds, they were doing their bit to bring about a better world.
As far as I know, nobody forced anybody to chip in. I think the couple were either very stupid, very misguided, or both, because their actions were very provocative, and blocking the road is never a good idea, especially after events in Provo, UT.
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I respect the intentions of the vast majority of liberals. But if they FEEL that way, why must they resort to force, rather than just HELPING people? That's what I do as a conservative. I help people as they come, one by one. If all y'all helped two people and they, in turn helped two people, the exponential nature of such a chain of help would quickly grow to a very large number.
2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624. That's more than the Earth's population!
But ya gotta put YOUR money, space and time into ACTION, rather than wasting it pointing fingers to mobilize governmental bureaucracy to "fix" everything with one wave of the magic "liberal wand." Think about it. If you were as generous with YOUR stuff as you are with everybody else's, the world would be a much better place in very short order.
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While other kids are going to college and refining their neuroses, there are a lot of high-school graduates who go where the jobs are and do what the job calls for. They're not afraid to sweat. They're not afraid to get their hands dirty or break a fingernail. They're out there in the oil fields, fracking. They're blowing insulation into the loft, upstairs. They're drywallers, landscapers, tree trimmers. And they ALL say there've ALWAYS been jobs, if you look around and aren't afraid to work.
My nephews are of that sort. Sadly, they're young and spend their money like water, and I doubt they've got $100,000 sitting in the bank. Every time they've got a few dollars, they buy another toy or build themselves a house, or buy a Dodge MegaCab, with the 6-inch lift and giant wheels and custom off-road tires. In their shoes, knowing what I know, I'd probably work as they are for 4 or 5 years and retire. But in an economy based on debt, with inflation on the horizon, I'm not sure it's a bad idea to spend like water, before the money loses its value.
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J. Peter Grace of Reagan-era Grace Commission fame, proposed a "negative income tax" that was set up to give you JUST enough to buy groceries and split a place with 3 or 4 other people, at that basic level of income. Anything you earned for yourself, you pretty much kept and you didn't start paying any taxes until you were above a certain level. Set it up so you benefit by every single hour of work you do, and if you want your own place and to raise a family or something, you could do so by working more hours.
It's not a bad idea, if it's scaled so there's no perceived penalty for working. But under the current setup, the more helpless you act, the more support you get. The beauty of this (or the UBI) is we already spend hundreds of billions on programs that could all be eliminated, and everybody gets that base level income that no, you're not going to have a living wage if you expect your own place and a family. For that, you need to have your shit together, and there would be no program to help you extra from the government if you have children with no visible means of support, but for what the government gives you.
The cost savings compared to administering Food Stamps, WIC, AFDC, and an endless list of programs that encourage people to be helpless, there'd just be the basic "You can get by, but you'll have to share expenses with 2 or 3 other lazy asses, and if you neglect or can't feed your kids, you ain't gonna keep them. You're not gonna starve, but you're gonna be stuck with roommates all your life and no children, unless you get off your ass and WORK (or marry money).
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And in the meantime, there wouldn't be a full-time government-paid social worker looking over your shoulder to take away a nickel for every nickel you earned. You get that base income, and it's a pretty shitty base income, but it's something. And if you want more, you WORK, and nobody worried about whether or not you're earning anything by working. By all means work and you keep that. With that (relatively low) base income, ANY work you do at ANY rate is all good. And opportunities would abound, if there were no minimum wage forcing businesses to eliminate every entry-level job they possibly can, and losing money on jobs like sweeping off the sidewalk, which a young kid might be thrilled to earn 5 dollars doing, but you have to take a loss and pay an adult $15 an hour, for a few minutes with a broom. Heck with that. Install some sprayers and rinse of the storefront and sidewalk once a day by pushing a button.
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The 2nd Amendment is 100% federal. Local municipalities passed ordinances restricting open carry as far back as the 19th Century, and nobody (or not many) thought this had anything to do with the feds. When frontier towns wanted decent womenfolk to move in, gun ordinances, schools and churches went hand in hand. In local communities, it's always been a pragmatic matter. When drovers shooting up towns after weeks on the trail, with money in their pockets and a thirst for whiskey and whores, towns outlawed open carry. Side arms were TOOLS for those drovers on the open range. If you fell out of the saddle, with a foot stuck in a stirrup, shooting your horse was a life-saver.
In the same way that science is silent on the existence of a deity (can't be proven or disproven), the U.S. Constitution is silent on the matter of local ordinances restricting firearms. Restrictions were generally believed important for peace and safety in a frontier town that was halfway to being civilized.
What we're seeing, NOW, is the result of over a century of increasingly restrictive local ordinances and a rise in criminal activity by crime(drug) gangs that IGNORE the ordinances. As a pragmatic matter, municipalities are re-thinking those ordinances that empower criminals and make the law-abiding citizens powerless to stop it, when the local law enforcement can not.
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Ultimately, some form of "cancel culture" could be a better way to check bad behavior. Just because it's dominated by the left, today, doesn't mean that it always will be. Over time, people will figure out what whistle blowers they like or dislike, and be guided by them. We're still very new to this "citizen whistleblower" mechanism and it's being abused by all the worst people and one-note, leftist media. But the left media are losing traction.
There'll be equal and opposite "cancel culture" from the right, targeting the critical-race-theory pushers, and THOSE businesses will suffer.
Currently, a business gets called out and it's a dog whistle for leftist mobs to do violence and property destruction. I don't think the moderates or conservatives will do the torches and pitchforks thing like the left, and extortionist orgs like Antifa and BLM.
We're in the midst of a paradigm shift to decentralization. Barring destruction of the Internet, it will continue. Messy times, but I think the overall trend is positive.
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@Kyle Vernon : Sorry, but you're wrong. The reason for U.S. troops in Europe is to protect against Soviet invasion. The Cold War ended over 30 years ago - probably before you were BORN, and U.S. troops in Europe is a policy based on the 1945 geopolitical landscape, WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS. There's ALWAYS an excuse - usually a lame one - for the USA to project power beyond its borders. And every time we use FORCE for a short-term gain, we generate resentment and radicalize people around the entire world against us.
There is ALWAYS blow-back against the use of force, eventually un-doing the goals that 'justified' use of force. This is true abroad AND at home. It's essentially an authoritarian approach to governance, from the welfare state, public education, and public $$$ in health care to drone strikes and outright (undeclared) wars abroad.
"Entangling alliances" were warned against by George Washington. Such alliances are what drew us into World War I and our participation in World War I made our participation in World War II necessary. And World War II made us the world's police.
My solution to the whole thing is if a country wants to become our 51st state, then we should defend them for all we're worth. Otherwise, it's not our job.
NATO is a joke. People like you maybe like the idea of NATO, because in return for footing the bill for their defense, we get them to follow us into all our military adventurisms abroad. "It's OK. See? The French and the British are backing our Desert-Storm play. And our Iraqi-Freedom play. There are ALWAYS people on 'your side' who think they're smarter than everyone else and will use their 'cleverness' to treat the planet like a game of RISK. This is how fat old men in swanky offices send our young men to die in mud and blood.
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Hoc Est Pseudonym : Yes. That "bad character" thing is so much bullshit. Trump, a celebrity billionaire, has had affairs with beautiful women he treated like queens. Tim gives Dem abusers a free pass, while he clutches his pearls that a rich man had some affairs. It's not like he's Dem icon, JFK, whose mistresses continued on into his presidency, and whose most famous mistress was Arkancided! Trump is bad, but he's the ONLY one of the entitled elites who's actually gone after pedophiles and human traffickers.
Trump doesn't drink or smoke. But Dems clutch their pearls over some locker room talk. But he supported the wife who covered for sexual abuser Bill Clinton. Tim voted for the corrupt product of Chicago machine politics, Barack Obama, TWICE. Tim's moralizing is very distorted, very selective. He's horrified that Trump doesn't extend his pinkie when sipping tea, but speaks truths very bluntly.
Is Trump a salesman? Yes. Will he overstate his case or make ridiculously one-sided proposals? Yes. That's what salesmen DO! And if you look around the world, they ALL over-state their cases, and they always think it's funny how the USA has run its foreign policy for the last 50 years.
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@GregX1979 : Yeah. Tim plays both sides, to maximize his income from the YouTube algorithm. Conservatives look for truth wherever they can find it. And they can handle hearing things they don't necessarily like, without embarking on campaigns to de-platform people. But we're USED to hearing both sides of arguments. Dems are NOT used to hearing both sides, and when they DO pay attention to the "other side," they zero in on the crazy fucks, while ignoring a HUGE segment of smart, educated people, who are truly libertarian in their thinking.
Dems TALK about freedom and liberty, and do everything they can to restrict them, always in the name of some desired "Good" that - in their minds - transcends all the harm that results from dealing with all problems in a top-down, authoritarian manner. Nobody's FOR poverty, but that doesn't mean you have to be FOR federal bureaucrats running everything from education to health care.
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Mark Ruffalo is woke. Chris Evans is woke. Chris Pratt's conservative. I'm not sure about Robert Downey, Jr, although I think he's on the woke side. I think diversity is fine, but I'm not interested in it being the focal point, or a false impression given of how numerous LGBTQ are, and especially don't give a false impression that it matters much in 99.99% of what the movie is about. Is there room for a plot element where the bad guy is acting out because of an LGBTQ relationship gone bad? Sure. Maybe one movie out of 100 with that theme.
But the woke stuff can't be the focal point of everything, or it's no longer entertainment. It's the secular version of making movies with Christian-evangelical themes.
I think what Hollywood doesn't understand, yet, is that NetFlix and other content servers are making a far more sophisticated audience for ALL media. You can't shoe-horn your politics into the script any more, if the story, character development and messaging are clumsy, it's a big turn-off to a growing segment - the PAYING segment - of society. That's why GOT went off the rails as soon as they ran out of quality, researched, and tightly-constructed writing by a world-class novelist. Hollywood thinks in terms of original screenplays, but writing for the screen without first writing for READERS is basically 2nd-rate for today's audiences.
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The critics of Daily Caller accuse them of calling a Trump critic a "porn star," which Stormy Daniels definitely is. And they also throw around the "alt-right" label whenever anybody challenges left-wing orthodoxy (whose goalposts shift on a daily basis). If FB actually wants to become authoritative in any way, they should utilize a wide range of fact-checkers and - as a platform - not choose between them, but maybe include a sidebar or bottom bar that indicates which of their fact-checkers agree or disagree.
When I'm arguing with my progressive friends about politics, and we happen to AGREE on something, that something is usually ironclad principle, and we start building consensus on more and more topics, starting with simple stuff like "Discrimination is bad. War is bad." Then we branch out and find compromises like "Social safety net starts at home, then to village, then to county, then to state, and if they can't get it done, then the feds will probably fuck it up, also." OK. That last bit is my libertarian view taking over...
There's AMAZING consensus in this country and around the world. The main sticking point is MEANS. But left and right (but especially left, imo) are too tribal, too stuck on one or two things, to even have a conversation.
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That's the thing. We have all these self-styled social engineers, who want to run everything, but can't even meet a payroll. And a lot of supposed open-borders liberals have no problem hiring an illegal for below-market rates to be their servants (maid, butler, etc.) . Regular people know that paying fairly for such services is unaffordable, so they don't do it. But I bet there's a Consuela helping Liz Warren do her windows. A Julio doing the yard work...
I think that's why liberals want so many regulations, too. Because they know themSELVES, and that people can't be trusted. Meanwhile, 90% of the rest of the world is trustworthy, because regular folks are held accountable. Bureaucrats and politicians are rarely held accountable. When they're incompetent, that just means they get more money from the endless government supply.
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LOL! YouTube's dropped its "AP declares Biden the winner!" propaganda banner!
What they're presenting is only the stuff that people came forward to report. Multiply this one "counting room" by hundreds, maybe thousands, because it's pretty much the same story from blue-city precincts across the country. It's a tough job to prove fraud against individuals, who can plead ignorance, but the number of 'irregularities' and procedures that weren't followed SHOULD make it impossible to certify the "results" with a straight face.
We know the fix was in. What's happening, now, is discovering just how deep it goes. Big Tech and legacy media have shown whose side they're on. Numerous judges are voting their party line rather than principle and precedent.
And everybody who's bent the knee to avoid being targeted by the left for violence, intimidation and career destruction have alienated the vast majority of people who actually pay their bills. It's like a farmer who doesn't plant his fields, for fear of what the crows might do to his crops. Yeah, you sure out-smarted those crows, but now you're farm's in foreclosure! These media outlets have cut their own throats, kissing the asses of lunatics, and losing the faith of their actual paying customers.
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We're undergoing a paradigm shift away from globalism. Nationalism is the short-term beneficiary, but LOCALism is the ultimate beneficiary. People are figuring out (again) that the "anointed nobility" aren't in touch with everyday life, let alone competent to direct all its activities
Remote learning got a huge boost. Smart institutions will foster that shift. Moribund institutions will resist that shift. Brick-and-mortar ain't goin' away, but it's clearly declining. I've been saying for years that it's really dumb to make your kid go to school and sit in a classroom with everybody their chronological age, getting a one-size-fits-all lesson, live, from a teacher who's aiming at the stupidest kid in the room, to get that kid a 'C' while the gifted kids are held back by the slowest student.
There's a lot of resistance to the shift in education, because the institutions AND the students 'brought up' in that institutional framework think that the way they've always done it is the best way. And teachers' egos drive a lot of it. They're SURE their students can't learn without their WONDERFUL teacher watering everything down and holding their hand on everything. But in my opinion, institutional definition of "Student Success" is to ensure that more students pass, whether they actually have mastered the content or not.
They'll never admit that, but it's exactly what they're pushing for, and it just leads to need for MORE hand-holding, and - of course - more MONEY, because "We need to remediate these learning deficits, and allow for 'differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and economic background.'" Bullshit. We need to put students in the classes they NEED, and require mastery before promoting them to the NEXT class they need.
USA's public-education 'learning products' are inferior. Run by accountants with spreadsheets and SJWs with oppression hierarchies tattooed on their foreheads, instead of the teachers and students.
You want boys to start excelling in STEM, like they used to? Give them an online learning management system (LMS, like Pearson MyLab and Mastering or Cengage WebAssign), and cut off their video games until they get their homework done! The cool thing is that it would motivate those boys to get it done, AND it would present the knowledge they NEED, exactly when they need it, i.e., instant, on-demand help. Instead, they're trying to perfect an outmoded content-delivery system, devised for a time where there might be only ONE person in the WHOLE TOWN who actually owns a book! Now, EVERYbody has the INTERNET!
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Here's one thing about appeasement: It encourages more - and more extreme - misbehavior. This is known.
Here's another thing about appeasement: By encouraging the misbehavior, the misbehavior gets SO BAD that it galvanizes opposition to those who are acting out.
Many (most?) people see the Munich Agreement as a bad thing. Neville Chamberlain convinced Adolf Hitler that he was weak and there would be no repercussions. The Nazis acted out more and more violently, annexing Czechoslovakia, and proceeding to conquer all of Western Europe. That was terrible. BUT it wasn't until that happened that the USA and UK were finally, without question, allied AGAINST the Nazis.
Something very similar could be happening, here. There will come a tipping point - and we may already be past it - where a mega-majority just says "ENOUGH!" and the lines will be CLEARLY drawn, which they were NOT in the USA in the 1930s with regard to Hitler and Hirohito, and even right up to Pearl Harbor. AFTER Pearl Harbor, the lines were clearly drawn, and Americans lined up around the block at EVERY U.S. Army recruiting station in the country.
I hate to say it, but sometimes things just have to get bad enough before the pendulum swings and things can get better. These idiots, in the end, are their own worst enemies.
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What most of the left - except the ones who want to be in the driver's seat - don't know is that the freedoms and liberty they trumpet about are all inconsistent with the level of conformity necessary to manage a centrally-planned economy and bloated welfare state. This is the point they miss when they parade the European "Democratic Socialist" countries and especially the Scandinavian versions. There's a duty to community and a certain grim, gray conformity built into those smallish countries and their essentially homogeneous cultures that date back to times when sacrificing yourself for the community was the highest-status behavior.
Mass immigration is destroying that homogeneity, with people who have NONE of that sense of responsibility to the whole, and it's choking their welfare state programs. They were losing that homogeneity, anyway, after generations of those entitlements and a loss of that general sense of responsibility to the whole that pressured people off those programs in the past. It still wasn't a huge problem, though, until the mass immigration stretched their social services to the breaking point, with Somali men elbowing their way to the front of the food and housing assistance lines past the more traditionally helpless types who were queued up and waiting their turn.
For a country such as the USA, stretching over a continent, with a melting-pot of cultures and beliefs, is probably foolish to have national-scale social programs of most kinds and maybe ANY kind. But that will never deter status-seeking (re-election-seeking) politicians from trying. It's just too good a vote-getter, even when decades of the practice prove that the negatives outweigh the positives over time, creating PERMANENT dependence and blighted communities, and a permanent underclass, the guilt class, and most of all the providers-of-those-programs class who will never vote to eliminate or curtail those programs, joined in an unbreakable alliance of perpetual victimhood and the self-styled white-knight saviors of the permanent underclass KEEPING that underclass permanent. In the USA, if there's a virtuous trait OR a negative trait, it's going to be overrepresented in the society, compared to the more homogeneous societies and especially compared to the authoritarian and totalitarian societies.
So the idea is to construct as close to a pure meritocracy as possible that still manages to take care of its weakest members. There are two approaches to this: limit the government (and its programs) or grow the government (and control everybody). Liberals like Tim fail to understand this tension, properly, or to understand that the Founding Fathers made the conscious choice to limit the government, and rather than IMPOSE the safety net from one power center, to leave the individual states, counties and communities to work those things out for themselves.
Liberals give diversity lip service and turn right around and insist on absolute conformity, decided from one power center, riding roughshod over any DIFFERENT model offered by one of THOUSANDS of diverse communities, either by blatant use of force or just by supplanting any and all natural and voluntary (and self-sustaining) systems thought up in any of the thousands of communities whose diverse ideas should be fostered, CELEBRATED and maybe LEARNED from. Maybe a farm community in Iowa comes up with something that works for them and will work for a similar community in Oregon. Maybe a city in New York comes up with a way of doing things that will work sustainably for a similar city in California. Wouldn't that be better than a handful of elites in one city deciding how everybody must do things?
Centralized backbone for communications is good. Transportation backbone is good. But beyond that? Why not let people run their own community experiments and broadcast their successes and failures for other communities to adopt (or NOT adopt) as they see fit? The cognitive dissonance comes in when you on the one hand want absolute freedom to do this and to do that, while at the same time only offering one-size-fits-all solutions to the human condition, which NObody has and likely nobody WILL ever solve, given that the human condition for ALL of us ends 6 feet underground, a tragic circumstance that we all deal with in our own unique way.
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Just because people are sick of Woke advertising doesn't mean that social responsibility by private companies isn't a selling point. Being more moral than the next company will boost your business. It's the FAKE, WOKE nonsense that is giving social responsibility a bad name. Cage-free eggs. Open-range beef. Albacore instead of tuna (to save the porpoises). Coffee that's responsibly sourced. The majority of consumers will pay extra for more moral products.
Look how everybody hopped on BLM to signal virtue. Not a single law passed. Just a cultural thing.
Related to this, my retirement plan from working up in Idaho and my first 7 or 8 years in Colorado gave us choices as to which general categories of investments we wanted. Commodities, blue-chip stocks, etc. One category was "social responsibility" funds, where things like green tech and so forth were in the portfolio. Well, those have been my best performers.
I mean, how do you think we got to the point where people started demanding change? Runaway capitalism! It got us above the bare survival level, where we started demanding higher standards. Those higher standards were inevitable, due to SOCIAL pressure, and the FACT that a company's bottom line is HELPED by being perceived as socially responsible. Progressives have it all backwards when they see history as "Gee. Good thing we got the government to act!" In actuality, the gov't has always been BEHIND the culture, and usually did just the OPPOSITE of what it SAID it was doing.
"We really stuck it to the robber barons, THIS time!" No, you didn't. You gave them regulations to hide behind, when a moral company would set (and DOES set) MUCH higher quality and sourcing standards, if left to their own devices. But the gov't steps in and only the biggest companies can satisfy the fine print, and they REJOICE at having minimum gov't standards to meet, rather than having to compete with smaller outfits with HIGHER standards. Progressives don't understand social evolution, at ALL. They want to force things to be the way they want, instead of using market incentives and natural, organic incentives. In the business world, morality is transactional. You behave better, to set yourself apart from the competition, and you include it in all your advertising! You want customers to come back, so you give them a GOOD deal, and a clean conscience.
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A lot of those top execs are getting the big bucks because they're really good at what they do, and there's big-time compensation for their services. Not all, but many. People bitch about a guy making $20 million a year or $100 million a year, but if their decisions make the company an extra $1 billion that year, then they're worth it to the company.
It's the execs who got big bonuses during the '08 financial crisis, when their companies were failing and were gifted a huge federal bailout that looks like, smells like and sounds like fascism. Without the bailout, they're out on their asses. WITH the bailout, the taxpayer gets screwed and these SOBs get bonuses?!
As far as workers not getting enough, I kind of like the idea of a leveraged buyout, so the workers, themselves own the company. Then they can't bitch. And they may even come to find out that they have to pay big bucks to get somebody who knows how to run the enterprise for maximum benefit to the company and its workers.
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@mumblez7712 : Where do YOU draw the line? 1st trimester? 2nd? The 0th birthday? The day after the 0th birthday? Are you an abortion-rights purist? I think that medical science is pushing the date of survival of the unborn closer and closer to the moment of conception. Rowe v Wade was based on 1973 science. This is 2020. In another century, who knows?
What gripes me is the pro-abortion crowd do nothing to provide non-lethal alternatives to abortion. Planned Parenthood doesn't want pro-lifers to even SPEAK to one of their cash cows, lest they learn that there are people who would be more than happy to adopt the aborted child, rather than see Planned Parenthood monetize a poor girl's plight.
There's been a lot of irony on both sides. Against death penalty, but unconditional support for abortion. Or the flip side. Pro death penalty but unconditional opposition to abortion. But there are a lot of pro-lifers who are also against the death penalty who are 100% consistent in their views.
As for myself, I think women have been using abortifacts for millennia, when times were tough or their situation plus baby was just too much for them for social reasons. Lost dowries... Cuckolding your future husband is NEVER a good look. People finding out you had a totally consensual affair with that black boy from across the tracks just won't do! It was rape!
All kinds of reasons for women throughout history to kill their own offspring. It's nasty stuff. Throughout the ages, it was generally considered a bad thing to HAVE to do, like a year or two in a row of drought, and there just isn't enough to go around. And children are CELEBRATED that first good year you have. The more civilized we become, over time, the more barbaric the whole abortion thing is going to look. For abortion alone, we will be seen as pretty horrible civilization in time. Men are just as nasty, and many have treated women as baby factories owned by men. Humans kinda suck. But slowly, over time, we swirl closer to something better. Self-awareness is hard-won and a harsh critic.
I just don't think our civilization is so close to disaster that choosing to abort the pre-born can be seen as a civilized practice. Even if you want to be all scientific about it and make the argument that before such-and-such a developmental stage, the pre-born feel nothing and are just a mass of tissue with the POTENTIAL of becoming a human, but not yet a human, because there is no person there, yet, to have any rights of which they could be deprived. So let science tell us where that "can feel" line is, pull back from that line a couple hundred yards, and make your line, THERE.
And medical science is making it possible to save babies born more and more premature. For one family, it's a grandson, fighting for his life. For another, it's a lump of "tissue" with lots of cash-money parts that rich folks want. The later the harvest, the richer the haul. Pre-birth abortion has to be a high-dollar item in the eyes of many. All those stem cells! Fully-formed kidneys. Boy, if they could just grow THEM from that stage, THINK of all the "lives they can save!" And it wouldn't surprise me to find that each of those pre-birth abortions are worth thousands of dollars to somebody.
One day, we'll be able to save fertilized embryos at any stage. In the meantime, I think Roe v Wade, with a first-trimester line in the sand, is the right kind of compromise. If, for whatever reason, it's past that line, then I think it should be illegal. I think science may one day see that our conception of what life is starts a lot closer to the moment of conception than is currently believed. I just know I don't want to be on the wrong side of that line, or create situations that require seeing where that line is. Hell, I apologized to the horde of moths I drowned in soapy water, the other day.
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Amazon was one of the few things she got right. Right up there with "Why is my House Orientation taken up by all these fuckin' lobbyists?"
Why should Amazon get a tax break they're not giving to the hot dog vendor in the street? The bodega owner? Any other small business owner? Giving tax breaks to big outfits is PRACTICAL, but it begs the question "Why the hell are taxes so high on everybody else, and what makes Amazon so special - in PRINCIPLE - that they deserve special treatment? That's essentially fascist behavior, essentially crony capitalism. And it's wrong. But you HAVE to make those kinds of special deals to keep enough revenue coming in to pay for all your bullshit taxes and regulations. The REAL problem - and AOC is unequipped to see THIS - is the high taxes that REQUIRE special breaks to bring in a business that actually has a CHOICE whether or not to come to NYC, and is big enough to actually affect their bottom line.
And it IS corrupt to have your "House-of-Representatives Orientation" trainings be taken up by lobbyists. But what she doesn't understand about THAT is that, due to assholes like HER, Congress passes laws on shit they know absolutely nothing about and have no business legislating on, which makes them DEPENDENT on industry representatives (the biggest and richest companies, only, mind you) who UNDERSTAND the industry, even though we know full well that those "representative" (i.e. lobbyists) have only the interests of their employers, and screw the average Joe.
In her own way, Tim, she's a lot like you. She sees the hypocrisy, but doesn't really understand its underlying cause, which is too many fucking people wanting to use government force - government POWER - to tilt the playing field in the direction THEY believe is proper, without considering the consequences. I used to say "unintended consequences," but after over a century of how this bullshit plays out, time after time, you're either willfully ignorant or a liar when you say "But we meant well. We didn't INTEND for the wheels to come off for those other reasons. We're all shocked and surprised by how things turned out."
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The most woke person in our department at work was literally named 'Karen.' She's not as rabid as some, but most dept meetings, she would come to me, later, and list all my politically-incorrect utterances, and warn me that I need to watch what I say. There was an implied threat in it, which was creepy as hell. But I was 'offending people.' What about how offended I am, when the dean comes in and tells us to make persons of color "extra welcome?" How do they think I feel when they expect college algebra to include the Intermediate-Algebra curriculum on which it's SUPPOSEDLY built?
The problem isn't with how we're teaching the college algebra, dammit! The problem is the FACT that they're promoting students into college algebra without the prerequisite skills to START college algebra. MY job is to teach the college algebra, NOT to remediate all the failures of the previous 12 years in K-12! Place that kid in the class for which they're PREPARED. I know they want that 2-year degree in 2 years or that 4-year degree in 4 years, but if they're not ready to start at the appropriate level, the it's going to take them longer, and that's just the way it is. Don't take it out on ME! Teaching the college algebra is already PLENTY of work, WITHOUT cramming high-school stuff into my college course.
All of this is politically incorrect, by the way. I'm supposed to embrace this 'new way' of watering down standards and adding to my workload every single semester (every time a libtard dreams up some NEW way to 'improve student success.'). As if I weren't already working hard enough! I try not to use the 'offensive' term, 'libtard,' because it's triggering, but in this case, I think it's entirely the correct term. An idiot looking for top-down solutions to bottom-up problems.
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Don't get too righteous, man. You've found a decent niche, calling out the left from the left. If you just wanted to do pop culture, you'd be one of a million of others doing the same thing, with higher production values. You do a good news crawl, but you don't really do any writing. You just talk off the top of your head and read snippets of articles to people.
Maybe one day you'll realize that the "liberal programs" you support are a big part of the insanity you see around you. And if you drill down to the effectiveness of your wonderful programs, you see the recipients - kids in schools, people on assistance - get about 30 cents out of every dollar, if that. The rest is eaten by the bureaucrats who vote 100% for more money for more programs. Teachers' unions, government-worker unions, recipients of the programs, and anybody else who can be guilted with the right propaganda (like you) support these grossly inefficient, family-destroying, and knowledge-destroying programs.
You don't like the zombies, but you support the programs that created them.
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Giuliani got it half right.
I don't know how other people grew up, but in MY neighborhood, breaking somebody's window was the 8th Deadly Sin. You'd get a tongue lashing, the first time, and have to make full restitution.
If you look at how rioting and looting situations develop, there's always that first window that goes. The mob kind of looks around and nobody's trying to arrest the window-breaker, and that emboldens the next one to break a window or go inside the building. It happens at warp speed in a mob situation, but in a neglect situation, that first broken window that doesn't get addressed leads to the next, until a tidy little lot turns into a glass-and-trash-covered obstacle course.
Nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. It's pure rot, and it's a reflection of a rotten culture with rotten leadership, that makes us think people are rotten. The only really rotten people I see are the town politicians, who could get things cleaned up, pretty easily, with some pretty easy changes.
It's what you see from any abandoned building out where kids can find it and adults never visit, only in the city situation, things move at warp speed. Out in the boondocks, that first window breaks, then maybe the 2nd, or maybe they go in right away. But it can take weeks or months after that first window doesn't get fixed, before the first kid has the courage to go inside.
Anyway, if you don't tolerate the small stuff, it doesn't escalate to big stuff. Huge crime-prevention tool.
Giuliani was half wrong with stop-and-frisk. That was the bit I didn't like. Really all he did was teach the smarter hoodlums to pull up their britches. Yes, you can catch bad guys by profiling, but that's a horrific precedent to set in a country where we pride ourselves on not going by appearances. You shouldn't be able to single people out because you think you're Bruce Willis in "Unbreakable."
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Economic theory is as much about the fishes and the loaves and about Stone Soup (PERCEPTION) as it is whatever the ivory-tower elites say. They have zero handle on innovation. They do economics with linear regressions, so all their models are based on a static, zero-sum reality that does not exist. All bets are off when people make smarter choices and take advantage of new tech that the statisticians couldn't possibly imagine when they made their projections.
Sociology and economics are only good at "predicting" the past. They really have no clue about the future. All economic models are based on "smoothness" assumptions and linear trend analysis that do not exist in nature. You have the one thing, 'til the system reaches a tipping point, and then you have something entirely different take its place, and nobody saw it coming.
Millions of years of trilobites. They DOMINATED. Then they were just GONE, and entirely different species emerged. And the paleontologists have no explanation. No smooth transition by variation of species. Just the one thing for a long, long time. Then the NEW thing for a long, long time.
I'm not arguing against variation of species, here. Just that the evidence of it is relatively sparse. Until the new - which started out as a very rare mutation - takes over and we start seeing its fossils, the trilobite with fins is invisible to science. Science just sees the one thing and then the other unrelated (seemingly) thing.
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I won't say I was a "player" in my 20s, but it was well known in the club scene that maybe 1 in 10 women would respond positively to your advances, and so you just got used to the 9 rejections per night, because you could hook up with the 10th one. Some guys would only go for the super-hot chicks. But a little-known fact is that it doesn't matter. If you go into a place with a '5' on your arm, ALL the other women in the joint will wonder and be interested in you, speculating amongst themselves what is it about you that garners her devotion, and why you would choose to be with a '5', when there's all these 7's and 8's shaking their ass on the dance floor, and THEY will flirt with you and try to "steal" you from the '5,' for some strange female reason. Women are ultra-competitive with other women, but the competition takes place entirely outside of a man's perceptions, unless those men choose to make a study of it. Most men see those kinds of 'politics' as absolutely zero interest.
Jordan Peterson is great medicine for incels. If you start by cleaning your room, and extend your control over your situation, whatever it is, and work towards improving your situation, you will incrementally - almost invisibly - improve your woman-interest factor. We call women "gold-diggers," but that comes from a very strong instinctive drive to ensure that the man they partner up with has the wherewithal to support offspring, even when they're only looking for a good time, in their conscious brains. Men don't care, because they're not programmed, genetically, to rely on a woman to provide food, clothing and shelter. They're looking for someone they're going to want to wake up with in the morning, after the beer goggles wear off. And good looks are a good indicator of viable and successful offspring.
The thing about men learning to be independent is they traditionally strive for as early an independence as possible, because it SUCKS living under another man's roof. Many of the baby-boomer parents I know made "home" a very comfortable place, with few responsibilities and 24-hour (gaming) entertainment. If I were a parent, I wouldn't buy my kids video games or other toys. I'd let them EARN those toys, and I would restrict their time with those toys. "Get outside! Mow the lawn!" I would let them borrow the lawnmower to mow the neighbor's lawn, and "take a cut" from the proceeds as rent on the mower (and set that money aside for the kid to later buy his OWN mower). Stuff like that.
As a policy-maker (which I'll never be), I'd eliminate the minimum wage. A kid with his room, board and clothing all paid for? Every nickel he earns goes right in his pocket. And he learns how to work and EARN his spending - and eventually his living - money. My first "job" was pulling weeds around the next-door neighbor's shrubbery for 5 bucks. That 5 bucks was enough for a floating Rapala Minnow that was a ridiculous $1.35, but worth every penny, because it never got snagged and when you learned how to work it like a wounded minnow on the surface, it was irresistible to bass, pickerel and pike. In the name of "fairness," liberals do everything they can to eliminate those experiences for young boys.
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@Fonz128 : Some of it is the morph-ability of the language. "Liberals" used to occupy spaces where now only "conservatives" are found. Tim's OK with his intentions. He just needs weaned off the idea that the federal tit isn't full of PCBs. Yes, help your fellow man. No, don't let self-styled "experts" run everything from the national capital. Instead, you fuckin' hypocrite progressives, get off your dead ass, quit worrying about the good that others aren't doing, and do some damn good, yourSELF. Compassion and real charity start on the ground in the local communities.
Want to do something for health care? Donate and run fund-raisers for the local hospital or a local clinic that provides free services. Chip in on the local homeless shelter. Take somebody in, if you've got room. That's what I do. If all the libtards were like me, we wouldn't need federal programs.
On the "social issues," I think pretty much all but a handful of people are tolerant and accepting of all kinds of lifestyle choices and sexual persuasions (between consenting adults), etc. Racism isn't cool, etc.
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I'm fine with Trump doing what he's doing and I'm fine with his being sued for it. I've heard of politicians putting their family fortunes into a blind trust, and maybe that's what they should do. This looks win-win to me. I'm glad the courts are sorting this out, because it looks like a big hole in the law. It's always good when lots of people think the president's a bit of an ogre. Things usually go awry when people LOVE the president too much! "He needs this special power or prerogative for the good of the country!" Meh. The more fangs they yank out of Orange Man's maw, the more toothless the next sonofabitch will be, and I kind of like that!
But I'm old-school. I feel like it should take a Declaration of War, passed by Congress, in the full light of day, before we drop one single bomb or send one single soldier. If the people, through their elected representatives, can't get behind it, the president shouldn't be able to DO it! War Powers Act is some scary shit. In the '80s, when Reagan was taking flak for Grenada, I, as a partisan Reaganite LOVE citing the War Powers Act as proof he was within his rights. Now, older and wiser, I question the legitimacy of the act, itself! Yeah, the presidents were all within the law with their war-mongering over the last 50 or 60 years, but that's because Congress was too eager to take power unto itself and give power to the president at the same time. It's been non-stop WIN for power elites for a long time, now, and it's all come at the expense of people who live right, work hard, and pay their taxes.
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Nice anecdote about the guy getting a job because Trump brought the factory back, BUT beware of any kind of story like this, because the WORST policies ALSO have "winners" you can point to. I happen to think Trump's policies are mostly good, except for when he seems to be neocon abroad (like you), but the BAD policies cause real harm, almost invisibly, in the form of jobs that just don't materialize, or investments that are never made, because high taxes skew the risk:benefit ratio to the side of risk, or all that free education that turns out hopelessly indoctrinated, America-hating and helpless incompetent graduates. Liberal policies always have winners they can parade around for feel-good stories, but the harm that is done is more diffuse and more widespread and more damaging, ultimately, but can be defended by simpleminded arguments like "How can you be against education?" or "How can you be against health care?" when I'm for both, but just disagree with relying on government to provide them!
The hand that feeds is the hand that controls, my friend.
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You can make a case for a lot of federal programs that aren't a bad idea, but just need to be administered properly, with a few tweaks. Like the welfare state. If you made producing the father and making him part of getting the family to self-supporting status. Like Section-3 housing, for entire families, rather than Section-8 which requires the mother show up without a man.
I'm not one who really buys that case, knowing the natural of government and how corruption creeps in whenever Person A is spending Person B's money on Person C. There's no incentive to save money or provide high quality service by Person A. In fact, the worse Person A does, the more money they get for their program and the bigger kingdom they rule.
I also think that FEDERAL programs are not and by their nature can not reflect the local culture. One program for New York City and Possum Creek, Alabama? Really? So even though I believe in a social safety net, it needs to be locally funded and administered. My town, for instance, is a major beef-processing center. Steaks and burgers for the poor! Woo-Hoo! Diffeent localities will be better at some things, worse than others, and that's the nature of Nature.
The original case I made at the top occurred to me when a study of Ireland in the '90s was done. They went from broke to solvent just by small tweaks to programs, to run them more efficiently. The USA got on-path to balanced budget (assisted by revenues from dot-com bubble) by tweaking the requirements, adding work requirements and building a sunset clause into benefits.
I think the state of Alabama cleared half their welfare and foodstamp rolls by simply adding a work requirement. Able-bodied recipients disappeared from the rolls overnight.
Probably the biggest and most corrupt federal program is the military. Because of secrecy requirements, I'm not sure we will EVER get away from big weapon-platform programs, like a super-lift helicopter or a multi-million-dollar tank that can be taken out by a molotov attack the same as any other tank. You can crank out a nice ATV for $10,000 or $15,000, if you don't want frills. You can arm those vehicles with tank-buster weapons, and we have a population of millions who ride those things (and dirt bikes) like centaurs.
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UBI is much like the "negative income tax" proposed by J. Peter Grace's "Grace Commission," which took a look at all the federal entitlements and concluded it would be much cheaper just to cut everybody a check. Begs the question of why there're so many federal entitlements, but once the entitlements Rubicon is crossed - which it was DECADES ago - then a negative income tax or universal base income, with no strings attached and, most of all, no million-person work force extracting 3 times as much from the appropriated monies than the actual recipients, almost makes sense. And nobody WITH UBI can come back and beg for more.
It's enough for you to - as Tim says - get 4 or 5 people together on an "intentional family" plan, rent a fairly nice place, and do pretty much as they please. It's not enough to buy many toys with. It's basic frat-house living, which - unlike the movies - is essentially bunk-house living for students on tight budgets. Forget the big parties, of which there are admittedly many, or the networking, of which there is quite a bit. But NObody sets out to live that way their whole life. You get very little space or time to yourself in those situations. They're considered times of rapid personal growth, while you build the skill sets and connections to NOT have to live that way.
My first semester at college, I signed up for the dorms, because it was all mapped out, and the cafeteria handled the cooking and the dishes. I had one fun semester that way, before my acting up left me with more bills than money. Anyway, the frats all came through the dorms that fall trying to recruit members, and I saw all the nice things they had, but I didn't want to have to sleep with 10 other guys every night, or put up with the loudest one on weeknights. Refrigerator politics. 5 guys in one house. There's always at least one guy who just thinks food appears magically in refrigerators, for their gastronomic pleasure.
And what kind of serious relationship can you have, with a woman whose physical enjoyment of you and vice versa come with possible kids attached, when you're sharing a 5-bedroom with 4 guys? No woman worth being with is going to think that you're at a developmental level to handle an adult life, with her as your partner, if that's all you've got going on, unless you have hundreds of thousands sitting in the bank and are just shackin' up with your skate-boarder/snow-boarder buddies, because it's convenient. But that ain't the kind of guy who comes home after work, fixes the outlet, hangs a door, and paints the kitchen with the colors the two of you picked out. THAT'S what life is. Lookin' out for one another and making the day-to-day incrementally better for each other.
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Our so-called 'experts' got this wrong, and DO seem to be regurgitating Chinese propaganda. The Chinese did their best to misinform the rest of the world, early on. I don't see how this helps them, so my thinking, now, is they're using all the propaganda tools at their disposal to cover their asses and save face.
If Fauci was all he was cracked-up to be, we'd've known more, sooner. Chinese stonewalled fact-finding, but we had cases, here, and the whole weight of the federal government behind figuring out what was what. But what we got was CCP propaganda.
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Greece and Turkey have been bickering for millennia. Very twisted story, with both being NATO members. This highlights the fact that NATO is based on a postwar reality that no longer exists. This is a big part of why Donald Trump was elected. He was the only guy saying "smaller footprint" who ran.
Of course, our original mistake was turning the continuation of the Franco-Prussian War(s) into World War I. The Saar Basin and Alsace-Lorraine were disputed territories for a very long time. The Germans had the edge after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. But they had a fool of a kaiser, and France and England were spoiling for a fight. Just because they wanna be stupid doesn't mean we gotta be stupid. Big effect of the USA joining the war was Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar went back to France, despite the Saar being mostly ethnic Germans. The Saar was coal and iron. The loss of those two territories took a huge bite out of German economic self-sufficiency, and it was a major selling point for Hitler. The goal was "autarky." Self-sufficiency.
But of course, once Hitler started thinking that way, he saw the oil fields in the Caucasus as a needful thing, so he of course had to invade the Soviet Union, in order to be self-sufficient. Once you start thinking that way, there's no end of needful targets.
If not for World War I, I don't think there would've been a World War II. One of the main reasons we won World War II was that it was black-and-white who the aggressors were. But I just don't think Germany would've been as aggressive if not for World War I.
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@DranzeeD : Career politicians are pretty much the same, regardless of party. But at least Republicans are rooted in limited government and individual rights and responsibilities. The Demokkkrats are rooted in "Government to the rescue!" and creating the perception of crisis so that people feel like they need rescuing, instead of standing on their rights and shouldering their responsibilities.
That being said, establishment Republicans, in order to compete with the siren call of "Free Stuff" from the left, are very little different from Demokkkrats.
There is ALWAYS a tension between individual and collective good. Jordan Peterson discusses this at great length and far greater understanding than I. You do want to help the poorest and weakest. The question is how you do it, and whether it's something CULTURAL that members of society participate in, voluntarily, or something GOVERNMENTAL that sucks all the oxygen out of individual responsibility and charity. It's the gaping hole in the Progressive agenda, which is based on getting government to do what they are unwilling to roll up their sleeves and do, themselves.
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The dumber people are, left or right, the more they feel compelled to shout it to the world! That's why I comment on everything, although I've started laying off the caps-lock key.
But seriously, a lot of the time, I'm using the comments as much to practice articulating my thoughts through the written word, especially when I'm researching and learning about new things. I catch a lot more of the holes in my thinking when I see my thoughts in print than just about any other way. As a math major, I learned that the key to nailing a proof was to cover a page with writing and then poking holes in that writing, until I couldn't poke any more holes in it, and then I could proceed to making a cogent argument.
But I can also find holes in my arguments just by being eviscerated when another commenter takes a blow-torch to what I said. If you learn by writing, as I do, then your biggest critics are your best teachers! It is NOT better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. It's better to put your ignorance on full display and listen to your detractors with an open mind. If you can get over yourself (like getting over rejection in the dating game), you learn a lot more, in less time. Yes, it's at the expense of others, but on balance, the satisfaction people get from "putting me in my place" seems ample compensation.
Jon Stewart and I disagree on a LOT of stuff, but his show was always smart, always funny, even though he has the tendency of leftists everywhere to think that because you don't care for federal-government solutions to poverty and other problems, that you somehow are FOR poverty and LOVE problems to fester. No, I start at home with my charity and my help emanates from that center to the larger community. And I think federal agencies are engines of oppression just waiting to crush people. Like the USDA living in Monsanto's hip pocket. Or the EPA ignoring big polluters and destroying small polluters. If you know your history, then you know that the Interstate Commerce Commission was in the rail barons' hip pockets from Day 1, even though it was supposedly created to crack down on the robber barons. Agency capture by the worst abusers dates back thousands of years, and is nothing new. "Laws and regulations are the protectors of thieves and scoundrels."
Even Colbert was pretty good, sometimes. I don't know if Colbert bent the knee or what, but since he's been on his own, he's been a totally disingenuous partisan dumb-ass, in my opinion.
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I can see how it looks bad on video and how the cops would frown on it, but out there in the street, with a large crowd that's only going to grow, with you standing there and 3 insane women who just got knocked on their asses... Hanging around can get you killed. I totally don't blame him for scootin'. I know how those situations can get out of hand and end VERY badly for a big, strong guy, who knows he's within his rights, and does the right thing, only to be pummeled by the crowd that's just gonna grow, and likely be very hostile to the man in the situation.
And he turned himself in, right away, pretty much, didn't he? It's news because we're starting to see more and more of these toxic women, who think they can talk shit, get up in your face, and hit you or spit on you, without consequences, because they have a Woman Card. People need to be reminded that it's a LADY'S Card, and you only see gentlemen when there are Ladies about. Then the power of the feminine is absolute. But when you go masculine, you're sayin' Tits Don't Matter, and you take what you get AFAIC.
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Pregnant man? Travel to 1847 India and critique imperialism? All seems legit Dr. Who to me. Still if it's real preachy, and real far left, it'll turn some people away. When I saw the next/new Dr. Who was a woman, I was a bit tribulatious about it, expecting PC, for sure. But Capaldi was a different kind of Doctor, too. Took some getting used to after the young guys were flirting with their attractive female companions - a Dr. Who tradition, from when mini-skirts were still new.
Capaldi's character deepened, I thought. If it's the same crew writing their stuff, the woman will hold up. I just always wait 'til later to watch them, and then binge. So I couldn't tell you about this latest regeneration.
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@LETSCUTSOMEBULL2024 : As the left increases the number of gender-studies drones at the expense of real people doing real things like welding, the need for unions will all but vanish, because real people with real skills will be writing their own ticket. As a home-owner, my respect for plumbers, carpenters, dry-wallers, electricians and welders (don't need much welding around the house, but out of respect to your trade) is through the roof, and I have NO problem paying top dollar.
A skilled tradesman, charging top dollar, can STILL get the job done, better, faster and cheaper than I could on my own, and you know what? ALL those bastard leftards need you guys DESPERATELY, because they're only good at shit like looking for something to be upset about. They hold you guys in contempt, but they wouldn't last a day without you! How long do you think they can persist in their lunacy? Not for long. They're drones who live in artificial environments with no connection to the Earth or actual reality. All they know is pushing paper and people around, but their actual LIFE skills are near zero. Plus they're too "virtuous" to have kids, so they're breeding themselves out of existence as we speak. The only real problem is all the mischief they get up to in the meantime.
Could I put in an electrical outlet? Sure. And it'd look like shit and be an eyesore in my wall for years. But my electrician, who doesn't mess around or offer a discount, is part carpenter, mason and dry-waller rolled up into one, and when he's done (in very short order), I have a PRO-GRADE install that looks like it came with the house.
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@chadparsons9954 : I worked in a union factory as a summer-hire (We'd fill in for workers on vacation) as a college student. It was 1980 and after a host of minimum-wage and sub-minimum-wage jobs in restaurants, landscaping, lawn-mowing and the like, the $10/hour I was getting paid was astronomical! I was thrilled! And because I'd always done hard physical labor before the paper mill job, I couldn't work hard enough or fast enough to feel like I was worth what I was getting paid, although all the union-shop workers around me would count up all the money for each case of product being loaded on the train and whine about how underpaid they were (Easy to do, when you're not the one keeping the lights on, buying the raw materials and building the assembly lines).
I can't TELL you how many times I was told to "Cool your jets!" because I'd be given a big cleanup job or a manual assorting job, and work as hard and fast as I could 'til it was DONE and then go looking for something ELSE productive to do. Well, I was screwing everything up, because that giant stack of cases to be assorted or that big cleanup job was SUPPOSED to last until shift change, and I was making people go find something else to do, instead of just lollygagging around on the first job. It was very eye-opening.
Unions are good AND bad. Collective bargaining in some cases is the ONLY way the worker's going to get an even break from an asshole company. But they also lead to inefficiency and higher-than-needed costs, and, in the case of Teachers' Unions, MAN. The "company" never goes broke due to ridiculous demands. They just pass higher taxes and the teachers get their cushy benefits, or WORSE, they get PROMISED those cushy benefits, and the state that pays their salary and benefits slips deeper and deeper into debt, and it all comes out of everybody else's pockets.
In many states government-worker unions are driving the states into bankruptcy. In the case of teachers (I'm a college prof), MOST of the money is going towards never-ending growth of administration, administration offices (and remodels every time a new one comes in) and staff positions. The actual full-time teachers are an ever-shrinking part of the overall budget, with absolutely no end in sight, in a day and age when the transmission of knowledge electronically comes at ZERO marginal cost. So why is school getting more and more expensive and the quality going down every year? Because it's an entrenched MONOPOLY with NOBODY holding it accountable. For what they pay per pupil today in the public schools, I could take on a class of 15 or 20 kids, teach 'em everything they need in about 4 hours a day, and walk away with $100,000 or $200,000 in my pocket, every year!
As it is, with my PhD and 30 years' experience, teaching a community-college load (which is about double a university professor's load), I make just North of $70,000 a year. And yes, I paid my own way to my Math degrees, out of my own pocket, with no help.
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They lost a lot of business when they gave Kaepernick that big endorsement deal, I think, especially after Kaep nixed the kid's shoes that had American flags on them. A lot of people got turned off when they found out that NIKE products were made with slave labor in China, too.
Critical race theory and intersectionality are permeating large public and private organizations as we speak, and it's crippling them. The trainings they're giving do nothing to promote the product, service, or company unity. It drives people apart, and the people who are IMMUNE to the New Religion are generally their best and brightest. Those all get chased away. In the private sector, this means that the business goes broke and goes away.
In the PUBLIC sector, this means public services start breaking down, while costs go up. But being taxpayer-paid, they can limp along, dysfunctionally for a long time, as they already have, for decades. But this could even be a back-breaker for government institutions, as well. Certainly the public schools are taking a big hit and are on the decline.
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I'm torn on AOC, because her ignorance is something of a shield against the Swamp. She was OFFENDED by the fact that "Freshman Congress Orientation" was wall-to-wall lobbyists. She doesn't know how that game is played, which is ignorant, but the game, itself, is crooked as hell, and she was right to call them out.
Ilhan Omar got it all wrong on the facts as to when CAIR was created (She said after 9/11, when it was created in 1994). But she NAILED it when she called out the Patriot Act for its police-state features, which you just don't hear "old hands" in Congress talking about.
As more or less of a crusty old bastard, who believes in old-fashioned tolerance and basic individual rights, I'm pretty eclectic about things. When these clowns get something right, I try to see past my apparent tribe and not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes it's the Republicans acting all tribal and regressive. More often, of late, it's been the Democrats, and the degree to which they've regressed is far beyond anything the Republicans appear to be doing.
Most of the things I disagree with are the things there's bipartisan support for. The Republicans LOVE Free Stuff just as much as Democrats, these days. The Democrats like the arms industry as much as any war-hawk Republican.
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Antifa's been doing this shit for years. Current events upped the ante, and Antifa had mobs of peaceful protesters in which to swim. Throw in a few goons with the greenlight, and you get 90 days of chaos. Antifa's had downtown areas quietly cowed for YEARS. Show me an Antifa sign and I'll show you a business owner who's bent the knee to keep his windows unbroken. This is ALL with the cooperation of activist mayors, prosecutors and police chiefs.
Now that things have escalated, MSM and Democrats have been spinning the news like crazy, trying to extricate themselves from the chaos they created. And if President of Evergreen College, George Bridges, is any indication, Ted Wheeler, et. al., will get away with it. Evergreen was taken over by "peaceful protesters" with baseball bats, and now lies in tatters, and Bridges is STILL peddling his grievance-politics/critical-race-theory BS. All I see is self-righteous violence and opportunistic thuggery in the name of "diversity and equity." And the state of Washington LETS him keep his job!
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At any company or institution of significant size, you're going to have that one-in-a-thousand asshole man who can't keep his words or maybe his hands to himself, and creeps out the women at work. Or that one-in-a-thousand asshole woman who sees how a lie can take down a man who pissed her off. Then there are the girls through time who've done what so many teenagers do and that's start a pregnancy. Better to accuse someone of rape than to suffer Father's (or the whole village's) scorn and wrath.
To an unwed, pregnant, 14- or 15- or 16-year-old, "You're no daughter of MINE!" was almost like a death sentence. It's an old, old story, and it's gotten quite a number of men killed or ruined, depending on the social status of the girl or woman relative to that of the accused. Al Sharpton made himself a household name with just such a case. Girl had been steppin' out with her teen-age boyfriend, and they started a baby.
Anyway, I think most companies and institutions pretty much handle things just fine, except for the relatively rare, pathological abuser or accuser.
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You can't say you're on the libertarian side, Tim, when you support confiscation by taxation to support programs with which a person disagrees. It's bad enough we pool our resources to defend the national soil, and we're all well aware of how THAT shit takes on a life of its own. But you libtards are blind to the same mechanisms operating on the domestic front. They run domestic programs as badly as they (until Trump) run their foreign policy. This is what happens when it's government, where your FAILURES often will get you a bigger staff and a nice, fat promotion, and everybody's excited about the new problem you identified and gee, how can you be against throwing money at such a good cause?
You know how I can tell when an administrator is worthless? When they spend 10s of thousands of dollars to get their taxpayer-paid, brand-new offices remodeled, redecorated and refurnished. The bureaucracy is a multitude of little fiefdoms, ruled by petty kings and queens, who get their pictures taken while everybody else does the damn work!
Meanwhile, 20 or 30 years down the road, you see the EPA hand in glove with the biggest polluters. You see the USDA doing more to help big, corporate agriculture than family farmers. The FAA comes in and we go from hundreds of airlines competing everywhere to the Big 3, and then when one of the Big 3 looks about to fail, they give 'em a big bailout, on the "too big to fail" principle rather than letting the SOBs die on the "so big you toppled of your own weight," and let some competition come in.
You mean well, but you're ignorant as fuck. You'll eventually come around, but how much damage will you do in the meantime? That's what libertarian-minded conservatives want to know.
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I think you can read stories about men unfairly accused and railroaded and miss the fact that it is a pretty infrequent occurrence. It's almost as bad as rape, if you look at what the guy goes through. You can never get your good name back. You can never get back the time you could've been building a good life for yourself. Or the money thrown away on lawyers, because some woman decided she needed to take you down.
Think about if men were women and women were men, how many MEN would take advantage of the situation. We try and convict people far too much in the media, because people will click on sensational click-bait headlines, which means money. That's the problem. Tired of men being railroaded. We can be respectful of women coming forward without torches and pitchforks.
Even though most women are deeply ashamed and hesitant to come forward, there will be a handful who use the presumption of guilt like She-Thor's Hammer, and ruin a man's life. The risk is pretty low, but it's like wearing a seatbelt to work, every day, even though only one in 100,000 cars you go by is any danger to you.
"She seems really earnest and eminently qualified. She's also attractive and will make a good impression for the department."
"I see you forgot to buckle up."
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There are some broken communities where Dems have been in charge for a long time. No doubt. Looks nasty. But just because Democrats' model for self-rule is unsustainable doesn't mean that rioters would last very long in MY neighborhood, whether I could defend myself with firearms (I can) or not. Every house on the block would be a fort. Every window would have a shooter behind it. Word would go out on the grapevine, instantly, and there'd be a lot of dead rioters in the streets, afterward.
They can damage a lot of property in gun-controlled cities patrolled by ineffective law enforcement. But that's highly artificial, and only works under certain conditions, with abjectly incompetent, feckless and corrupt Democrat political establishments. The welfare state, as conceived by Democrats, is failing. Poverty programs should ELIMINATE poverty, not perpetuate it. Poverty programs should incorporate BOTH parents, as a TEAM, to provide for their OWN children, not separate fathers from their children.
The public education system is failing. People are finally starting to see that they can do much BETTER for themselves with that tax money in their pockets and education PRODUCTS of their own choice for their own children. While the brick-and-mortar schools have been dropping the ball, an almost-free education has become available on the Internet for all. And totally free for the determined. Education has never been more affordable. Tailor-made, on-demand education for individual talents and individual disabilities has never been better or cheaper in all of human history. So why does it cost $10,000 a year to give Tyrone a shitty education?
Long as we're at it, if women have the right to an abortion, then why don't fathers have the right to say "I'm not ready for this?" Dave Chapelle wants to know.
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It's not complicated. It's simple. Dictating a minimum wage is an inappropriate use of government force. It only becomes complicated because of all the unintended consequences of using government compulsion in what should be a free market. All you do is jack up the cost of everything, which, of course, means that the minimum you just got done setting is no longer a living wage. You also cut out all the job opportunities for young people and adults at the entry level. Boy, they'd sure get that $15/hour, all right, only there aren't any jobs available that are worth it to an employer, so the job disappears, as does the employer.
I'm no neo-Luddite, but as much as I believe in automation as an enricher of society, I don't believe in artificially pushing automation. The minimum wage subsidizes faster and faster rates of automation and more rapid elimination of those jobs at the lower end in favor of a machine.
Entry-level jobs should be seen as short-term jobs for people who are trying to generate some income in between jobs, or young people who are looking for that 1st job, or semi-retired people who just want to keep busy and earn a little extra money. $15/hr minimum wage is for people intending to make a career in a dead-end no-skill job, and of course, $15/hr is nothing to base your retirement on, let alone have the kind of life that can support a family and kids.
Fact is there is always a shortage of skilled labor. Now, what to do about people who can not or will not improve their skill set is a separate matter, but trying to make entry-level jobs into some sort of life-long career for anybody with an IQ over 100 is just kind of stupid. Wishful thinking by libtards out of touch with reality. They see the world they WANT to see, rather than drilling deeper and seeing what IS.
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I think the reason it's taken this long is two-fold: political climate (manipulated public opinion), media and half of the government were dead set against Trump at the start, and the need to accumulate evidence, with all the covering-up that took place.
If you really want a Logan-Act prosecution that's legit, go after Obama and Kerry, desperate to salvage their brand of neo-con foreign policy (neo-liberal?) by flying all over the world (often in the wake of or even ahead of Trump Admin officials), apparently to 'reassure' our 'allies' that Obama was still in charge, or some such. Kerry's meetings with the Ayatollahs in Iran sure didn't seem to do us any good!
We're coming to find out how much our Intel Community utilized foreign governments' intel to do an end run around the U.S. Constitution. This is coming out in defamation suits in the UK, but the UK, Australia and Italy, in particular, are scrambling to mend fences with the Trump Administration after being pressured by the Obama Admin to run intelligence operations on U.S. citizens abroad.
When the FBI was "alarmed" by the Kislyak phone call with Flynn is SO disingenuous. It was totally in his job description.
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The reason YouTube has such a big draw is because it carries content the corporate media don't/can't. As YouTube corporatizes to try to make money, they're going to have to sanitize their offerings. Independent creators who drop 'F' bombs and are otherwise vulgar will be pushed off the platform.
What will happen is the same thing that's happening to legacy networks. People who think for themselves will migrate off the platform. Your minds.com site will grow at the expense of YT.
I think it's much better to create high-quality content and get subscribers to buy into your stuff.
There are some shows on FOX that I like, for instance Greg Gutfeld show. And I often enjoy Gutfeld's opening remarks on The 5. I rarely sit through everybody's take. The ladies at either end, plus Gutfeld, but I can do without Jess Waters and Juan Williams, who are partisan Right and Left, respectively, and they're more about winning than about truth. But it's hard to find Gutfeld that's not basically pirated by some nobody in YouTube land, basically violating their copyright, playing the entire show, with YouTube commercials in place of FOX commercials. That's robbing from FOX. I don't have to like FOX to think they deserve a piece of the pie from my views.
I think the smarter and more responsible we, the audience, are, the more we'll like the content that's out there. Never has the public had more power to fine tune what's on the "airwaves," with direct support of the best stuff and avoiding the worst stuff. The internet is just another manifestation of society, and it's not the rules in society that matter. It's the CULTURE that matters, and if you have a self-reliant, responsible culture, everything else just kind of takes care of itself, which Adam Smith noticed and put into his Wealth of Nations. He called it the "invisible hand." When you leave people free to interact and trade, the invisible hand lifts everybody (INVISIBLY). This is the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea. When government tries to run everything from the top down, there's an invisible hand that drags everybody down by dis-incentivizing responsible (and charitable) behavior by individuals.
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I think the lamestream media will skate, because they DID have confirming sources placed high in the government who were lying. And those highly placed officials, in the unlikely event that the media reveal their sources - will skate, because they'll claim they really believed the stuff. But I doubt they'll be exposed by their partners in media. And I doubt Trump will pull an Obama and imprison reporters for not revealing their sources.
Just like the identity-politics journals that got spoofed by Sokal in the '90s with fake "critical-race theory" articles and by Bogossian and his 2 partners a year or two ago, with articles claiming dogs humping dogs in dog parks was due to toxic patriarchy, these clowns all back each other up, so they can print anything that supports their narrative and call it "peer-reviewed science," when it's just a bunch of lunatic partisan Democrats giving each other cover and back each other up. A guy leaks "the dossier" to Buzzfeed and then they use the Buzzfeed article to support the leaked document. So if I want to spread a lie, I just call up CNN, tell them the lie, and then get up in front of a judge and say "See? Buzzfeed is also reporting this, so it's true!"
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