Comments by "TaichiStraightlife" (@TaichiStraightlife) on "GZERO Media"
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@kshen7485 - Not true; Lee Kuan Yew was often lauded (although, it's true, sometimes criticized for his heavy-handed ways) for his ability to make Singapore work, even with it's mix of races and cultures, as opposed to China, whose solution to Uyghur upset (Tibetan, too) has been: concentration camps, re-education camps and slave labor prisons where textiles are manufactured for a pittance by slave labor, exported on the cheap and then denied & lied about by China... I'd prefer Lee Kuan Yew a 1000 times over (and I had the pleasure of visiting Singapore on several occasions when he was in charge ) next to your endlessly brutal dictator Xi. As far as your charges about 350K dead citizens, it's even worse than that; while China is a dictatorship, and the Chinese have no role in choosing their leaders, the USA is a democracy and thus FREELY CHOSE (with Russian internet "help") to be ruled by a malignant narcissist, a mental illness. GOD help us; the American voter has a lot to answer for, perhaps democracy too.
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Hey Ian, here's another thought: individual Afghani soldiers were reported to be selling their American-supplied rifles to the Taliban for $80. apiece... and then in the middle of the night their president fled (probably with half the money in the treasury). The South Vietnamese soldiers were taking off their uniforms while in battle & were running away in their underwear. The Kurds stood their ground and fought... and then were betrayed by fat orange trump. But now we see the Ukrainian PEOPLE, men and women both, fighting bravely for their land, their country, for their very freedom to make their own decisions about their own destiny.
You have putin OUTRAGED that the Ukrainians want the freedom to run their own lives, associate with whom they want, read the books they want to read, debate the issues of the day and demonstrate in the public plazas of their cities and towns about their concerns.
And putin is OUTRAGED that the Ukrainians don't want to obey his every command, that they don't want him to jail and kill their patriots, or dismember their precious country, or nod dumbly at his outrageous and endless lies, the way republicans do with trump's lies in the USA.
So people see and remember these individual facts and we're frankly all of us very moved by all of these disparate facts... because we've seen time and again, ever since this dark century began, the crumbling of one democracy after another and Ukrainian courage is SUCH an invigorating breath of fresh air, such that we haven't seen in DECADES, that we're moved to tears by the very sight and sounds of it.
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I wanted Susan Rice but yeah, Kamala is probably the better pick, I'm now psyched, but my question is: why has this comment section been overrun by drones and other professional haters spouting trump talking points? How can there be a question about thought processes when trump is the man who spouts things like:
"If Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” He would “abolish” “our great,” “beautiful suburbs,” not to mention “the American way of life.” There would be “no windows, no nothing” in buildings."
I mean, I would vote for an ashtray for president before I would vote for trump. If a rabid dog was running... actually a rabid dog IS running. An orange one, & no; I'd never vote for him.
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JD Vance is never correct, because he always lies. He has no standing to talk about Free Speech because Free Speech is penalized the very same day in the White House, where the AP (Associate Press) was penalized for not using "Gulf of America", trump's bizarre and abrupt re-invention of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead continuing to use the common name that has stood the test of time for 400 years, From the Washington Post: "According to a letter from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday warned of access restrictions if the wire service “did not immediately align its editorial standards” with the gulf-name mandate. The AP held firm, and the White House then blocked a reporter from an Oval Office event and later blocked another reporter from an event in the Diplomatic Room, according to the letter.
The blocking of AP access continued throughout the week, including events at the White House on Thursday and a presidential trip on Friday. A White House official on Friday tweeted that the wire service’s “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” would go to “the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” The AP has been a member of the 13-person presidential press pool for more than a century.
How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter — CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.
With that, the president’s spokesperson in Orwellian fashion recategorized an editorial judgment as an assertion of fact. And yet Vance has the temerity to suggest that he (without sin) can lecture Europeans about Free Speech. What a hypocrite.
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@derek3266 No, not case closed at all. You've been simplistic this whole time under the guise of "knowing history" or whatever, which, of course, you don't. History is all-encompassing, it's not 2+2 =4. For example, in 1918 most of the world (and the citizens thereof) was owned by other parts of the world: world-wide colonialism, which didn't even start to end until after WWII, although there were liberation movements ongoing since the 1920s and before.
In fact WWI was a fight between cousins, as the Russian Czars and the German Kaiser were both related to Queen Victoria so it was a different world altogether, especially socially, because women and blacks were chattel and China was also partly owned by the west as well, with Spheres of Influence, Gunboat Diplomacy and every other kind of horror. For the preceding 1,500 years or so, China was the most or one of the most sophisticated & powerful nations on earth but from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s they were in thrall to the West through the forced use of opium or don't you know about the Opium Wars? That's how the British got Hong Kong.
Well, I don't have the time or desire to school you, so I'll just make a quick point. This is 2020, not 1918. As a result of history, China is VERY attuned to slights, as are Asians in general: Japan doesn't own Korea anymore, the British no longer own Malaysia and Singapore, the Dutch no longer control Indonesia, & the French no longer own Annam (Vietnam), for example.
Also sensitive are Women, Blacks, Catalans, the Irish, Armenians, Native Americans, First Nation, Jews, Aboriginal Australians; you name it; people are tired of being disrespected, they see the harm that is caused by the type of Tribalism claimed by trump under the bogus term Nationalist but really it's blood & soil tribalism, which is racist & divisive and responsible for the enslavement, lynching, & wholesale slaughter of uncounted millions from time immemorial, BECAUSE when you don't think or act as if you think that other peoples can possibly be as intrinsically good or smart or anything else as you, then you can do to them whatever you wish, even turn them into lampshades and collect their gold teeth, because they're not fully human, they're unclean, Untermensch; so you don't think it really matters to your GOD or any of your neighbors what you do to them. Ask the Puerto Ricans how they felt about trump throwing paper towel rolls at them after their recent devastating hurricane.
It's a dog whistle that's always in trump's mouth and, especially during a fraught time when millions will take sick with a deadly disease, he should TAKE HIS DAMN "sh*thole countries" DOG WHISTLE OUT OF HIS MOUTH FOR A MOMENT and try to at least PRETEND that he has some respect for them, and then we might well find that GLOBAL co-operation will save lives.
Now IS NOT the time for any of his 2-bit retrograde crap.
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@johnnewsom2059 "John" - Can we agree that China is a dictatorship that practices slave labor and holds large sections of the population (Uighurs in Xinjiang are only one example) against their will in labor camps where they must manufacture clothing at slave labor wages while simultaneously the Chinese state is relentlessly trying to stamp out their cultural identity, and that, along with the treatment the Tibetans suffer, it's obvious that the Han people see themselves as the only acceptable role model for the nation?
And can we not also agree that "communism" as practiced in China is merely a cover for what is actually state-owned and run Capitalism? And can we further agree that China's belligerent attitudes towards its neighbors in the South China Sea (erecting islands where none existed before and then threatening to cut off the free right to transit this area) should speak volumes about the growing imperialism of the Chinese state?
Not to mention the Chinese covid outrages, including the recent laughable WHO scientific mission to China that was little more than a dumb show that fooled no one, completely lacking in any serious unfettered data collection by unbiased scientists? China investigates itself, finds itself completely blameless (quel surprise!) & then hands the untrustworthy and frankly laughable results over to the credulous WHO shills? Surely we can agree on that, n'est-ce pas?
Would YOU swear allegiance to such an aggressive entity at war with any basic concept of Human Rights?
Like Free Speech, the Right to practice one's own religion, and the Right to privacy, to pick three at random?
Well... I guess you already have, "John".
Too bad... China's past, especially its glorious artistic history, might have augured for another fate for its coming out party; one that would've, and should've, been the envy of the world. But now I fear a very dark time is drawing nigh for the entire world, and China will be one of the causes of that darkness, though not, of course, the only one.
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@kshen7485 Of course that's a lie, like the election returns numbers were lies as well. They make up numbers and answer to no one... except maybe Putin. In Belarus (as in Myanmar) the 26 year dictator seems to have the absolute loyalty of the army and police who in turn have no problem, evidently, in utterly jailing, torturing, in short crushing the common people and even (in Myanmar) shooting them down in the streets wholesale like dogs... and I'm sure you're one of them, K., even if you're only some guy at a desk writing propaganda lies for YouTube.
And as far as "safer society" is concerned, The Moscow Times said this:
"Two of Russia's post-Soviet neighbors, Belarus and Turkmenistan, have drawn criticism over their response to the coronavirus, with the two countries' leaders largely denying the severity of the pandemic.
Here’s a brief look at how these two countries in Russia’s backyard have been faring since the start of the outbreak:
Belarus (17,489 cases, 103 deaths):
— President Alexander Lukashenko, 65, has continued to hold public events and resisted enacting a lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus, dismissing fears of the pandemic as a global “psychosis.” Lukashenko has not been tested for coronavirus himself because, according to his spokesperson, “there’s no need for that.”
— He has vehemently opposed closing parts of the economy to slow coronavirus, citing a potentially painful recovery for the nation of more than 9 million. Still, the country’s schools and businesses have started to voluntarily close without waiting for Lukashenko’s orders.
— Lukashenko has maintained that none of Belarus’ Covid-19 deaths had been from the disease itself but from other accompanying ailments, including cancer and obesity. In mid-April, the leader who has touted vodka, the sauna and tractors as anti-Covid therapies asserted that “no one will die of coronavirus in our country. I publicly declare this.”
— Lukashenko vowed to hold a military parade in Minsk marking 75 years since the Soviet victory in World War II, and on Tuesday invited fellow heads of post-Soviet states to attend it. Russia postponed its May 9 parade on Red Square to later in 2020 due to the outbreak.
— During Orthodox Easter in April, Lukashenko defiantly attended church service and criticized other countries for trying to enforce stay-home measures. The leaders of other countries with large Orthodox Christian populations did not attend Easter services, with many churches moving them online."
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Jhr- It must be comforting to see everything in black and white but the truth is far more complex. For perhaps 1,700 of the past 2,000 years, China was the most powerful and sophisticated nation on Earth, coming up with everything from inventing gun powder to the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, (written in part during the same period that the people of Britain were painting themselves blue, according to the writings of Julius Caesar) to their sublime arts; Ming vases and the heights of T'ang Dynasty poetry, for example. Because the Qing dynasty (Manchu) were on their last legs & had descended into political decadence at the same time (unfortunately for the Chinese) as the nations of the West were in the midst of throwing off their myopic Medieval religiosity and were expanding & conquering, it didn't go well for China. Britain turned the Chinese into opium addicts, wresting Hong Kong from them during the Opium Wars putting them in a world of pain, along with the other "great powers", especially The US (google Yangtze River Patrol) & Japan (see the Rape of Nanking) which didn't end until after the conclusion of WW ll. All these events should be remembered when considering the rising China of today, a China which has never` forgotten the humiliation and torture they were put through by the West for over a century.
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@zackwang9314 You have no idea what you're on about; there was no US involvement in the 1978 coup. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan to support their aligned communist allies and against the will of the people controlled it in a very bloody manner for a period of time.
"The soldiers' knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside of Kabul. Taraki's coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets."
— Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
They were finally forced to leave by the Mujaheddin, and yes at that time the US did give some clandestine aid to the Mujaheddin to help throw the Soviets out.
Prior to that, the Saur Revolution or coup started the process by which internecine communists fought each other for years, which finally brought in the Soviets WHICH FIRST CAUSED THE RISE OF THE MUJAHEDDIN OR JIHADIS... and who are once again in control of that bloody nation.
My memories of Afghanistan date back to 1974 when I was last there, which was after King Zahir Shah had already been deposed while in Italy by his cousin Daoud Khan. The Saur Revolution and alternatively called the April Revolution or April Coup, was the process by which the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan on 27–28 April 1978, who had himself taken power in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état. Daoud Khan and most of his family were killed at the presidential palace by military officers in support of the PDPA. The revolution resulted in the creation of a Soviet-aligned government with Nur Muhammad Taraki as President (General Secretary of the Revolutionary Council). Saur or Sowr is the Dari (Persian) name of the second month of the Solar Hijri calendar, the month in which the uprising took place
The revolution was ordered by PDPA member Hafizullah Amin, who would become a significant figure in the revolutionary government; at a press conference in New York in June 1978, Amin claimed that the event was not a coup but a revolution by the "will of the people". The coup involved heavy fighting and resulted in many deaths. The Saur Revolution was a significant event in Afghanistan's history, marking the onset of 43 years of conflict in the country.
In short, communist terror: People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Look to the Soviets of that time if you want to apportion blame.
Of course, since China is a country ruled by a communist party dictatorship, I imagine you won't do that at all, so again I waste my time in trying to school you.
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And how did you divine this, Viking? Did something in the flimsy air speak only to you?
Oh, and PS- Somehow, like something = one word. And also, while I'm on the subject; from your original posting: it's you're, not your, as in: "you're way off on this, Ian" (which he wasn't, unless you'd care to posit an alternate theory of the case).
While I'm not the grammar police, these unedited mistakes tend to be signs of lazy thinking, is my assumption here. You just can't be bothered? Too many pressing matters elsewhere?
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@shazmosushi You know, it bugs me the way some big yahoo like Kronenberg will come up with some sweeping generalization that's awesome in its sheer vacuity (it's especially irksome because it's almost short enough to be a slogan for a kind of lazy & thoughtless stupidity) and then poor shazmosushi has to trundle up and in a much more fulsome way, dripping with politesse, he has to say: "no, no; that's not actually true, because..." etc....
When I read those notes, 2 images came to my mind: 1. a big 5 year old lout smashes a tower of blocks with a single blow of his hammy fist, & then his nurse scuttles up and with a "no, no, we shouldn't let our temper get the best of us..." rebuilds the tower and also 2. the old adage: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. (Winston Churchill).
Good going, shaz...
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@sh230968 - Yeah, yeah and once you succeed in electing trump again you can safely oppose him once more and go "tut, tut' and wag your little finger at him like Susan Collins as he continues to take America apart at the seams, with his alienating bigotry, his corruptions, his attacks on the environment as he releases more poisons into the air and water and attacks, not Putin, his buddy, but our allies, while the Turks waste our friends, the Kurds, and he effectively wastes healthcare, and takes aim at Medicare & Social Security, offering hydroxychloroquine & other witches' brews; and all that while he's busy assigning more henchman, more billionaires as Cabinet Officers & diplomats, and regulators who will be asleep at the wheel as he looses his dogs on the economy and the people. And you think that I hate this? Yes I do; and I think deep in your hibernating SOUL you either know about none of this or simply don't care ENOUGH.
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@sh230968 Kamala Harris is a United States Senator and former prosecutor and two term Attorney General of the state of California, a state of 40 million persons which, were it a country, would be the 7th largest economy in the world. While it is not up to me to school you on the facts, your bigotry is showing loud and clear; EVERYBODY'S RELATIVES COME FROM SOMEWHERE. It means NOTHING. My own relatives came from Russia, whose government I dislike intensely. I've been to India and in fact I worked my way around the world & while there's a lot to like & respect about India, their government is not one of them, as they're racists who attack the Muslims in their midst with a religious passion that belongs back in the late Middle Ages. I would never confuse the Indian government and Kamala Harris, nor should you, but you've already hoisted your "irreversibly" flag so I'll waste no more of my precious time responding to you. I'll leave you with this last thought: you won't vote for Kamala because of where her mother was born, but you will vote for trump who HIMSELF, as a youth, was caught by a mother who found him throwing rocks at her baby who was in a playpen at the time. Think about that for awhile, if you're at all capable of sustained reflection on a single image.
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@tekannon7803 - I really don't agree, because this USA (& maybe the world, I don't know) is one angry place; people shoot each other for every reason, from road rage to a dirty look. You're positing a scenario where shooter goes into a market with his rifle, customers own a hand gun ("and preferably wear it at all times") pull out their always-ready guns, everybody blasts away... & even in that situation wild shots are going everywhere, is what's going to happen... but outside of that, you got to pull back the camera, see the big picture: absent that 10 minutes, those armed people ("...wearing it at all times") are going to be toting death machines 24/7, which means those guns are not locked up, they're on the table, under the pillow, kid or baby picks one up & BLAM, mommy or little sister is dead. Just to cap it off, I live in NYC; THIS WEEK ALONE an 11 month old baby is dead & an 11 year old girl too; gangbangers are trying to shoot each other, they're MISSING again & again & hitting a little girl going to school, a baby in a car etc. These are not trained combat-hardened soldiers, these are crazy kids totting much less accurate handguns, not rifles & they're triggered by trigger-happy hopped-up youth. No & NO!
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JD Vance is never correct, because he always lies. He has no standing to talk about Free Speech because Free Speech is penalized that very same day in the White House, where the AP (Associate Press) was penalized for not using "Gulf of America", trump's bizarre and abrupt re-invention of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead continuing to use the common name that has stood the test of time for 400 years.
From the Washington Post: "According to a letter from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday warned of access restrictions if the wire service “did not immediately align its editorial standards” with the gulf-name mandate. The AP held firm, and the White House then blocked a reporter from an Oval Office event and later blocked another reporter from an event in the Diplomatic Room, according to the letter.
The blocking of AP access continued throughout the week, including events at the White House on Thursday and a presidential trip on Friday. A White House official on Friday tweeted that the wire service’s “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” would go to “the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” The AP has been a member of the 13-person presidential press pool for more than a century.
How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter — CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.
With that, the president’s spokesperson in Orwellian fashion recategorized an editorial judgment as an assertion of fact."
And yet Vance has the temerity to suggest that he (without sin) can lecture Europeans about Free Speech. What a hypocrite.
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Of course you can live in a debt-based society. Debt, the ability to create and package debt, is great; the same is true for stocks, which are also a kind of currency, the price of which is adjusted moment by moment, and anything else on that asset spectrum, like convertible debentures; they all serve a particular purpose.
Otherwise the economy would be tiny; only old people, who had saved their entire lives would be afford to buy homes with their savings, accumulated over decades... same with any high ticket item, like cars. Young people starting out would have to live with their parents virtually FOREVER. Instead, they forward sell the value of their FUTURE EARNINGS; that's called taking out a mortgage, and it's secured by the value of the home itself. Pay what you promised to pay and nobody will ever be able to take it away.
You're throwing a lot of hazy and unconnected statements against the wall and hoping a few of them stick... but it's doubtful they will, because you simply don't understand capitalism.
On the other hand, nothing is good when taken to extremes, and extreme debt IS bad. Indentured servitude, by the way, is not slavery. Slavery is slavery; it's endless. Indentured Servitude is indentured servitude over a particular period of time agreed upon by both parties, which is not the same thing as having a job. A job you can quit, indentured servitude is for the period contracted for, for example pay off a debt, like passage to the New World. So, in essence, the worker said: pay my fare to the New World & I will work for you for a period of 7 years to pay off that debt: he was forward-selling the value of his labor. Now, what if he died during the voyage from a giant wave or smallpox or whatever? The other side of the contract, the guy who paid the fare, was out of luck. There's always a risk; capitalism is about quantifying risk in hopes of making a profit... but, like the man said: "there's many a slip between the cup and the lip" Or, as Robert Burns said: the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley...
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