Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Fox News"
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Yes, she's certainly in on it. She's central to it. The Fed and the Treasury are now one thing, having effectively merged a couple of years ago. Together, with the approval or at the behest of two presidents, they decided to deflate the debt—indeed all debts, public, commercial and private—through inflation. It has been deliberate, and when Yellen called the prospect of it transitory, she was, uh, not being candid. You can't trigger inflation and then admit you're doing it.
Anyway I think it's probably the right thing for the country, given the alternatives, which would lead to worse impoverishment. It addresses the critical problem of the holes blown in balance sheets either by Covid and its effects, or greatly exacerbated by it.
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Don't mistake the party names, Democratic and Republican , for the generic words democracy and republic , which are essentially synonyms.
Check your dictionary and get back to me if you find a really significant difference. The only one I can find is that republic , rather than democracy , is usually the word used as an antonym of monarchy.
But, yes, Clinton made huge mistakes concerning China. Absolutely.
So did GW Bush and Obama. So did US companies, universities, media, other institutions of every sort, and of course consumers. So did the whole West. It's been a real dumbass team effort.
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@stevantammy6779 That makes sense. There's an old aphorism, probably British and some centuries old, that runs "Charity is for the succour of the recipient and the moral improvement of him who gives it." Quite true.
And when you realize that handing them cash is not succour at all, since even without a penny from panning the person need never go hungry for more than a couple of hours (in a typical big city, anyway), it no longer counts as morally improving to do it. It's actually closer to the opposite.
Instead I source the cheapest cigarettes possible and hand out a few packs a week. I know there's zero chance of them quitting anyway, and this prevents them picking butts up off the sidewalk, which is damaging to their self-respect. They cannot afford to lose any more.
Also, I never respond to a direct request, for I don't want to reward that practice. I walk up to people just quietly standing or sitting there, ask them in a cheerful and respectful way if they smoke—it's a yes nearly every last time—and politely offer them a pack. The lift to their mood from the nice treatment is salutary even if the cigarettes aren't.
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@davecitizen1107 Sure, maybe. But don't forget that there's a lot of failed ambition out there, possibly including hers. There's a real chance she's struggling energetically, though fecklessly.
Not that you exactly said it, but it's simply not true that everyone can succeed. "Nature introduces inequalities against which there is no remedy," someone once wrote, pointing out that the luck of the precise genes inherited and not inherited from one's parents is a big part of destiny in life.
Other factors in life, along with moral agency, make up the rest, but the important thing is that for some to succeed, others must fail. I cannot get further than this, unless I propose not just social reform but some monstrous reshaping of humanity by force.
Some who realize this have accurately called it 'The Loser Problem'. There it is, verbally pared down to its essence, the one that will matter eternally: There will always be losers, and it's a problem.
It has to be faced honestly and courageously. Intelligently and kindly, too.
No matter who we are, when we talk about these things we are all trying to draw social lines sufficiently far from the two extremes of jungle and nursery.
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Now in Canada on the CBC (i.e. government news) they are no longer expectant mothers or pregnant women. They're not mothers, not women at all. They are 'pregnant individuals'. Ovaries, Fallopian tubes, wombs, lactating breasts, wide hips, a baby inside them, the works—yet none of them are any longer women giving birth. No, because motherhood—indeed femaleness itself, just like maleness—is now "transphobic" and a hate crime, punishable by law.
The CBC has comments sections appended to its 'news' stories. If you write a comment objecting to this nonsense, it is deleted by a censor, called by them a "moderator". This is done with taxpayer dollars, the CBC budget being well over a billion a year.
Horrifying, I'm sure you find it. (I'm taking you for an American.) But up here we find stuff down there stupefying, trust me. It's a tough call to judge on which side it's worse. I defy anyone to say for sure.
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@gregbors8364 Not that I think you necessarily care (I bet the whole subject bores you) but your reply got my curiosity going. So here are the basic facts (if I may give them that lofty label) for my own sake and that of other readers, if not you yourself.
According to the Commerce Department (Oct. 28, 2020): "In 2019, U.S. manufacturing accounted for $2,359.9 billion in value added or 11.0 % of GDP, according to BEA data. Direct and indirect (i.e., purchases from other industries) manufacturing accounts for 24.1 % of GDP."
And: "China was the largest manufacturing nation, producing 28.6 % of global manufacturing value added while the U.S. was the second largest, producing 16.6 %, according to the United Nations Statistics Division data."
Finding out the value of weaponry production isn't easy for some reason, but it looks like the Pentagon spends around $150b a year on gadgetry and US companies export another $175b, so call that $325b. Add a generous $25b for sales to individuals and other security forces (police, private security).
Thus weapons industry sales appear to be roughly $350b out of $2.4t, or 15%, of US manufacturing. Huge, to be sure, but leaving lots of room for other stuff.
I'm not a professional researcher, so someone else might arrive at different figures. (I'm also not an American, by the way. So congrats on knocking 90% off your rate of Covid infections. Cheers, DP)
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Our national broadcaster in Canada, the CBC (taxpayer-funded counterpart of the BBC, NPR, etc.), also goes for 'pregnant people', 'pregnant individuals', etc. Whenever they do, many people reading the story on their website leave comments below it, objecting in strong and often hilarious terms. All such comments, if they manage to make it past the censor in the first place, are soon scrubbed, despite the many upvotes they earn.
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@jrgzmn3692 Breathe, Mr. Guzman, just breathe. Maybe sit down. Maybe playing too much Call of Duty isn't helping.
I didn't spice up anything, I stated facts.
As for that Ringling Bros. complaints board, yes of course the woke brigade is abusing it to try to take Jordan Peterson down. Yes, they've submitted fake and trumped-up woke complaints. They're a disgrace and so is the kangaroo-kourt panel itself.
Concerning religion, it's clear from his lectures that he considers religion profoundly important to humanity; vital for a healthy society, and perhaps for a healthy mind; a font of meaning, culture and intellectual riches; and far more than mere superstition.
After calming down, perhaps acquaint yourself with actuality. Then embrace it for dear life. Perhaps finding a better pastime than playing Call of Duty would be an aid to that.
And so, with that, I end our little colloquy. I had fun, but maybe too much fun, and now must go. I like my foes worthy.
Here's wishing you a nice life.
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The thing I like most about Lindsey Graham is that that he hates to lie so much that if you're sharp you can tell when he's doing it. (Other things I like include his extreme quickness and the fact that his family, like mine for a part of my boyhood, prospered as tavern-keepers.)
Late in the interview when he addresses the subject of the impeachment inquiry, he expresses support for Trump's conduct during the phone call with Zelenski. It's sham support. He is lying. And he's lying for a pretty bad reason (namely, ambition), so you have to sort of like him or at least sort of dislike Trump in order to forgive it. But here it is: He thinks Trump's goose might be cooked over Ukraine. If impeachment, however far it goes, comes to appear as though it is tanking the party's chances in 2020, there will be moves to open up the nomination to others.
Lindsey Graham wants to be president very badly (good! I say) but he realizes, I say, that if Republicans end up looking for a new nominee, they will not choose him from among those who have participated in and supported Trump's ouster. Graham, therefore, out of ambition, is playing to Trump's base because it's tantamount to the Republican base. He knows, to spell it out, that he can't appeal to the party as a replacement candidate sporting a Judas hat. He will take his chances with a 150m-strong Republican base six or so months from now, rather than mere millions of centrist swing voters 55 weeks from now. And he probably has the confidence to think he can get the centrists anyway.
Partisan Democrats and some Republicans never tire of labelling Graham as a Trump enabler or Never-Trump quisling. They actually know better, surely? Obviously (to me) he has the real, serious, dyed-in-the-wool-democrat respect for voters and decided to honour both the country and himself by offering his services to the duly-elected president---whilst holding to his principles (e.g. on NATO since 2017 and the Kurds this week) and placing a side bet on himself. Why distance yourself from a president from your own party and his 150m supporters when you can get close to him and at least have your say? For a guy with brainpower to burn like Graham, I daresay the choice was inevitable if stomach-churning. (Trump took the support for reasons fairly alike.)
If I'm not mistaken, nobody but a weirdo really wants to be president anyway. But in my view, Graham is the weirdo with political and personal virtues salutary for the future of the country. Not only is he a good guy, he'll bring the real chess-playing skills to the job we variously call American president, leader of the West, and the leading role on Earth.
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I'm not saying Canada deserves a gold star or anything, maybe we were just lucky, but she's wrong saying that we're doing worse than the States, economically or health-wise. Cases per million 3,325 vs. 17,856; deaths per million 240 vs. 547; July unemployment compared with February, up 5.3 percentage points vs. 6.7; second-quarter GDP -12% (estimate) vs. -33% (actual).
Federal government Covid spending is very tricky to compare. The year's not over, plus Canada has approved all its measures but the US still hasn't approved Phase Two stimulus. The bill in both places should be between 10 and 20% of GDP but that's a huge range. It'll probably be about 15% in both, not counting state/provincial spending. At this point it's murky, to me anyway.
Our stock market is down close to 8%, though, while yours came all the way back.
Otherwise Laura delivered a good commentary.
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@JMack1053 "Read this one book that I totally believed." That's your answer?
I've read thousands of books and read more all the time. One suggested by you is not going turn my view of the world upside down, certainly not one containing a single person's alleged confessions. Something so intellectually undignified is for uneducated people.
I've no doubt the US has always pulled a certain number of dirty tricks. Every country has. Every person, or nearly every person, has too, on a scale petty or not so petty. I bet you yourself have. The odds, simply at random, are very high.
So reading your little book won't introduce me to the world of government misdeeds.
If it's really true (as is sounds you might have it) that it proves US actions around the world are on the whole malign, not benign, and that this has been true not only during the time of the author's involvement with them, but also during previous and subsequent eras, then it must be one of the finest and most enlightening books of non-fiction written anywhere by anyone in history.
Oh, and such a super-fine book would also cogently show that quite a few other major countries are saintly, and not just by comparison. It would force us to conclude that the US isn't better in this regard than the vast majority of countries to have achieved Great Power status.
How many volumes is it? How much does the whole set weigh?
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@anonymousperson6119 Thanks for your cordial reply. I must admit I was careless for tossing the useful word pirate around without some needed qualification, because its associations are somewhat complex.
We love it when an upright navy rids the sea lanes of them, yet there's something about them we respond to and inwardly relish, too --- the idea, at least, that their cavalier unruliness and lawlessness doesn't preclude an enviable and healthy cheerfulness nor absolutely a certain gentlemanliness (e.g. Walter Raleigh). Myth for the most part, to be sure, but we value our myths.
It takes a thoroughgoing socialist or Marxist --- meaning, to me, someone with personality problems --- to work up feelings of ressentiment and unreserved hatred for all billionaires, I think. Everyone else just agrees they should be judiciously taxed and regulated, lest they enslave us all.
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@marktheo1563 I really wish no ill on ordinary Russians. I think that they are a great people in many ways and that Russia one day could be the last good country on Earth. But it is also unfortunately true that they remain born to be ruled.
Someone close to Putin needs to "do him a favor," as the macabre saying goes.
Concerning Trump, I confess that shortly after his inauguration I did suspect him as an authoritarian at heart. I still (foolishly and to my present embarrassment) had a little trust in the corporate media. I later realized that he wasn't at all, and that the real anti-democrats were those who had made the accusation. It is they who inwardly long for a one-party system, while supporters of the former president shrink in horror at the very idea.
I believe in the so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome as a widespread and destructive malady in the US. As I say, I once had a mild case of it myself, but thankfully now carry the antibodies. Beware the American left. George Orwell, an exceedingly clever man, foresaw clearly that it was the left, not the right, who threatened democracy in the West, and he was a socialist himself. In the end they disgusted him. There is poison in the left and they will never get it out.
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Well, we vaccinate ourselves, many of us, for influenza, yet the typical wintertime flu is survivable by ~99.9%. That's not controversial, it's agreed-upon fact.
For about the middle ten months of the pandemic, the survival rate for Covid-19 was generally thought to be 99.7 to 99.85%, in the West at least. Multiple indirect measures (it is not possible to measure the mortality rate of a virus directly in the usual sense) suggest, however, that it has been rising. 99.7 is starting to look pretty outdated as an estimate, I'm glad to say.
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@dbochner Good comment as far as it goes. But, yeah, well, that's your country. For 55 years you set the dial on Do As You Like, and this is where you ended up. Not to mention Parent to Child: "Yay! You're special! You can go anywhere in life! You're amazing!" for the last 30 or 40 years.
But while you're on such a roll don't mess things up and fail to notice that Democrat supporters are not much less clueless if at all. In some ways, of course, they're stupider. I recommend strongly against thinking for an instant that there is an enlightened segment of American society. They're spread around pretty freely, for it's less about than money, class, education, and political affiliation and more about personality than most people suppose (character is of course another word for it). I don't think many of them at all inhabit the political polar quartiles. That's territory for people with poor personalities.
It gives me no pleasure to add that it ('enlightenment') does have quite a bit to do with intelligence, and unfortunately as time goes by the link between intelligence and money grows stronger, because of semi-meritocratic policies and practices throughout the institutions and in people's choice of marriage partners (i.e. few people now marry much up or down in economic status).
In some ways all the other trends pale beside the concentration of intelligence and wealth in the ruling class of the US because when the middle class is really gone, the country is gone. At that point the what used to be a strikingly original country is just the Hamptons----1% mansion-dwellers; 90% staff, other poor service people, and casual labour;.with Other, meaning the middle and upper middle classes, thus totalling a mere 9% (down from perhaps close to 50% in 1980). And right now the middle class is on its last legs.
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Carlson is right about nearly all of this but I think he's wrong that they'll try to prolong the lockdown far, far past all bounds of sanity. Yes they're evil up to a point, but they've also just made themselves slow and dumb with their ideology, just like otherwise pretty bright people who're far too religious. They'll get around to wising up when stark reality sinks in through those thick skulls. To me a clear advance signal is Tom Friedman in the NY Times insisting we take a close look at the Swedish pandemic response. In a couple of weeks, once they know they've had us in obedience training long enough, they'll start talking about how important the economy is and how urgent saving it is. When someone like Carlson points out that they were calling others monsters for the same thoughts just days earlier, they'll smugly reply that "When you say it, it's dumb, crazy, evil, ignorant, callous, and dangerous. When we say it it's intelligent, educated, humane and wise."
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Coming soon: A special quasi-martial law, hastily passed to deal with a normal situation that's labelled an "emergency." Just like Trudeau did in Canada to quash a loud but entirely peaceful protest specifically against him. And just as in Canada, the illiberal liberal media will go to the ends of the earth to back it, to praise it, and to sell it to the public. Presto! People silenced, people jailed, people held without bail, their bank accounts seized even though there are no charges, no accusations, not a whisper, of any financial wrongdoing in the least.
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The US is circling the drain. Sensible people---and you know who you are---you can't remain silent any longer. All you have is your voice and you have to use it by phoning, writing, or emailing your elected representatives. All of them. Your mayor, your councillors, state rep, governor, congressman/woman, senator, the president. It'll take some time but do it. It's something, as opposed to nothing. Then get others to do it, too. Politicians take it seriously when they receive piles of emails, letters, or phone messages.
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@claytonjean6385 Autopsies would be needed to find out if they were abused. Based solely on what I gather at this point, the evidence as yet shows only that children are buried there, and that they were not granted the dignity of grave markers (unless, in theory, they were placed there and later removed, but I have no reason to hypothesize that).
(Did any or all of the various aboriginal nations consider a marked grave an important dignity, or one of any significance at all? Did that depend on certain things, like whether or not they had been brought into one of the Christian faiths? I don't know any of these things. Do you, by any chance?)
Why do you presume these particular children to have been abused? And are you saying that abuse caused their deaths? It certainly seems a possibility, but are there sufficient grounds to assert that it is a fact? Were not outbreaks of fatal contagious disease common in past times, claiming many children's lives? My mother lost two school-age brothers to childhood illness, one in the 1930s, one in the 1940s. Were the children in question healthy or not healthy when they arrived at the schools?
Along with other important questions such as what were conditions like at these specific schools and how good or poor was the public oversight of them (if this has not already been established by previous investigations or inquiries), these questions must all be duly answered and the proper forensic work completed. And it must be done with all reasonable speed and thoroughness.
In the meantime, it seems wrong to jump to any conclusions as you have done, and it is most egregiously wrong to condone a campaign of arson. To name just one reason, many First Nations people are now deprived of their place of worship. But there are numerous other reasons as well, many of them each sufficient in their own right.
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Me Actually it's not that at all. I was being quite silly as a matter of fact, and surely risked offending people. (Not totally considerate, I admit.)
It's a shout-out to Norm Macdonald fans based on one of his jokes. On a Late Show appearance he said the same thing to David Letterman, except he named someone else, that mid-20th century German guy, you know the one I mean? First initial 'A'? I don't want to write his name or the YT computer will take a horrible disliking to me.
Anyway, Letterman totally cracked up, and now to fans it's classic Norm. They (I mean we) recycle it over and over, on the least pretext, in an attempt to amuse each other.
No offence meant except against your professional output, Ms. Lorenz, if you're reading this!
Thanks for cheerfully not thinking the worst and hating me. :)
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Dump Big Tech. Get it out of your life. Instead of using you-know-who, start using a search engine that doesn't track you. I mostly use DuckDuckGo: Stupid name, good service, no tracking. Dump Facebook and Instagram. Instead, use nothing. Text, e-mail or phone people you know instead. When you want or need real privacy, simply use the mail. Dump Amazon. Instead visit stores. It's better for your health and better for the city or town where you live. It's better for your country. Consider a flip phone so Google and Apple aren't looking over your shoulder constantly. Delete Chrome. Dump them all and get Big Tech out of your life now. Convince your family and friends to do the same.
Sorry YouTube, at some point we'll have to part ways, unless your parent company cleans up its act. The other options, like Dailymotion, aren't very appetizing, I'll admit, so right now I'm hanging on to YouTube as my last and only significant connection to Big Tech.
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@blessingjohnchelliah4317 Hungary ranks well above the median in all the various freedom indexes. For example in The Economist's Democracy Index it is 55th out of 167 countries. The US is 25th. Being 55th, it can obviously stand a good deal of improvement, but there are 112 other countries that need it more.
I don't see how not visiting most countries, or condemning them, is the way to move forward, or is a sign of a true democrat, let alone a moral person.
Hungary's freedom scores are too high to flatly qualify as authoritarian. In ordinal ratings it's in the second-highest categories out of a possible three to five, e.g. 'Partly free', or 'Flawed democracy', and gets scores just above or just below those of Poland and Israel.
Lastly I would point out that there's nothing wrong with vehemently insisting one's own country should score 9.9 while understanding that another country isn't evil just because it scores 6.6, as Hungary does. (Actually, btw, the US scores 7.9.)
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@direwolf6234 Dude, the OP is simply a foreign troll talking point. Below all videos concerning one of the ongoing wars or just about any world issue, over 50% of the comments are really from hostile foreign governments.
They have ways of mass posting them with millions of accounts, polishing them up to native-English-speaker proficiency with AI, etc. etc. They also mass-downvote and falsely report the better pro-US, pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, pro-Taiwan, pro-West posts, clearing them out as though with bulldozers. They've totally gamed YouTube and probably all Western social media. It makes me sick.
FWIW, I completely agree with your reply. The OP is a total false dichotomy. The US can walk and chew gum at the same time, having the wealth to do what's really necessary.
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So, like, I can't personally fire Trump. So, that's like literally unjust. So, like, we have to become more militant. Abstract debate and like logical arguments and politeness are not going to achieve our goals. Trying to make a debate just shows that you already have, like, total power. Total power is not right unless you have, like, good morals.
(This is what happens when people born after about 1960 have children, bringing them up to be Peter Pan. Just wait 25 or 30 years till people his age have kids who go on news shows. They'll make this one look like Thomas Jefferson.)
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TL;DR version of this comment: America needs a third party, one to split the left, like Canada has long enjoyed.
Canada is supposed to be a pretty left-wing country, and it sort of is, but this kind of DNC convention stuff doesn't fly so well in our major liberal party. The imaginatively-named Liberal Party of Canada is the counterpart, not to say the equivalent, of the Democrats, and they usually govern the country. And luckily something helpful happened here to keep them from really, really going off the rails.
Decades ago the farther left in Canada went off on their own to form a third party, the New Democratic Party. At one time the NDP were bookish or faux-bookish, sentimental, nerdy, earnest, democratic socialists. They still, are, but this being 2020 they're a much worse grade of democratic socialist than formerly, for reasons I need not specify to readers here. In 2020 the far left everywhere is a crazed menace.
Perennially in distant third place, they were concerned about class and things like keeping the wealth distribution and income distribution curves flat. They actually were pretty flat in those days, perhaps in part thanks to the NDP. Unions practically owned them, hairy-faced and -legged university professors held a minority stake.
They're far-leftier now, somewhat like the people in this video, but they're much easier to ignore than them because no one thinks they will ever run the country, That is, they can never win by placing first and, unlike the radicals in the Democratic party, neither can they ever take over a party which can place first, because they're not in it. They have their own playpen, if you will, and they are stuck in it. Who knows, maybe they're the real reason Canada is not nearly so divided as the US.
Over the years they sometimes won 20% of the vote but usually took around 10% of the parliamentary seats, and now and then they won a provincial government election. But mostly they helped the Conservatives win more elections than they otherwise would have done, and spared the Liberals of the need to accommodate them in their platform, their nominees, and their cabinet..
Warming to my vision? Go ahead. It's a vision in which the people in this video are effectively absent at election time because they're electorally irrelevant.
My suggested action is, if you reside in the center or the right (or even if you're left of center but despise dangerous far-left nonsense anyway) give money to any left splinter party there is that will run candidates in federal elections. Give money to Kanye West, perhaps, if he'll take away Democratic votes.
But foster the emergence of a party at the Left Pole, from which --- as from the North Pole all points are south --- all points are Right. You'll thank me when the Democratic Party improves greatly and stops presenting the grave threat it does today.
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There's a lot to what Carlson is saying here. I gave the clip an upvote for its overall merit. But has it occurred to him yet that Biden and the WH might be putting his incipient senescence to work by letting it introduce doubt and fear into the Kremlin's deliberations? If you've heard of words for paradoxical human signalling such as 'frenemies' and 'humble-bragging,' you can probably get how Biden's utterances might amount to 'official messaging with plausible deniability and instant walkbackablilty, but they'll get the drift, trust me'? In other words: Scare them, make yourself clear (although perhaps not in so many words, or do it glancingly), but do it incompetently enough that you can later disclaim it and thereby move it safely down from the status of escalatory Provocation, yet Putin will be stuck not knowing for sure.
If you find it hard to accept this possibility, you may be thinking that anyone in the Oval Office is surely enough of a man and possessed of enough class that he'd never operate like that. It's high-risk, dangerous. It seems weak, sneaky, indirect. It seems 'street'. Simple and vague expressions of determination, strength and commitment to principle, repeated over and over, should do the job better, surely?
You'd think so. But maybe you're not thinking about how much more unmanly and low-class the political class and the whole country have become in this century. (Hell, most of the world in many ways.) In that light, the introduction into presidential brink-of-war messaging of tactics a little feminized, a little street-sourced, a little reality-TV, wouldn't be so surprising. What would be surprising is if they never made an appearance at all in this decade, so young but already so loathsome.
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I got to know a guy who described the work his father did in the City of London. After a while, I said "He sounds like the Mitt Romney of Britain" (recall what Romney did at Bain Capital---homing in on companies like the Cabela of this segment, pulling them apart to "unlock shareholder value", wrecking them in the process, and making immense personal profit). "Very much so," he replied.
I never met the man. In fact he died before I became good friends with his son. But it will perhaps surprise no one that this selfish man married a selfish woman, and that together they had two children whom they went on to selfishly ignore throughout their childhoods. My friend as a result of this isolation and neglect (in a posh but empty house or away at school) has ended up with rather poor mental and emotional health. He is not ok. I wonder if he'll ever get much better.
I also wonder how many of the people making the most money in the financial sector similarly put money above everything else to the point they ruin everything they touch. After all, from a selfish and greedy point of view, an unwillingness to ruin things is a scruple that merely stands in the way; conversely, a willingness to inflict damage actually opens the door to success (defined, to adapt someone else's phrase, as making a pile of money and leading a life untroubled by conscience). It would therefore be an imperative. The fellow would have enjoyed golfing with Singer, I bet.
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Socialism, the guest tells us, is great because it spells dignity for all. This is a conclusion, not an argument; an assertion, not a case. As such it is an evasion which no intellectual worth his salt will try to get away with and borders on question-beggaring. It also looks very bad on Harvard. Carlson saw through it at once, asking him repeatedly for "details, details" but to no avail. (Full professors at Harvard, by the way, average over $220,000 in salary, with benefits on top of that. Pretty dignified.)
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Yes, but where the US balked was at giving its official and most explicit imprimatur: delivery from a US base.
In other words, for the US "NATO—ok; Ramstein—not ok." And for Poland it was "Ramstein—ok; Polish base—not ok."
In my view Poland did what it had to do: One, make the offer in front of the world. Two, protect Poland. Three, put all the onus on the US, which is calling the shots anyway, and with the power comes the responsibility.
From the US point of view I'm afraid they did the right thing, too. In time they might well take part in the handover of planes, but not until Putin raises the stakes with (I'm sorry to say this) an even greater river of Ukrainian blood. In the meantime I trust Biden is quietly ramping up every other sort of assistance to Ukraine. The analogy is stark, but the US is 'going all Iran' on Putin, feeding his opponent everything it can without sending a single soldier. It does work up to a point.
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I have a huge amount of experience in this area. First of all, they're all in genuine need, so don't cloud the issue. But if you have in mind people living decent lives responsibly and with ok mental health who end up on the streets, they are very uncommon. I'd say it's maybe two per cent of them but probably one.
It's unlikely, by the way, that they will "receive more hatred". Unless you happen to see one emerging from a tent on the sidewalk, you'd never know they are homeless. They simply don't "look homeless" in practically every case. At any rate, they will continue to get help, so you're wrong there too.
People like you, who know nothing but think you do, and want to "show you care," and be seen in the act of criticizing others for not caring, might actually be the group most responsible for the problems in the system. If not, you're at least way up there. You would do well to read this man's book, for he actually knows something and you don't.
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@thenewwavejoeshow [The following is the best I can do to restore my reply following its garbling and clipping by YouTube. There was no foul language, of course, no vitriol or slurs against any groups except ones that people joined by deciding to, which are supposed to be fair game. Their computer just did its best to understand what I wrote and decided, in agreement with you, that it just didn't qualify as their/your 'truth'. I'm going to copy it and keep posting it until it looks like it made it through in unexpurgated form. It may or may not.]
"My fiction"? Let's figure out what that refers to.
I never disagreed that he's not a "real reporter". He's of course not a reporter at all, and that goes without saying, just as it goes without saying for Michelle Goldberg, Charles Blow, David Brooks and all others of the sort. They're all opinion columnists, or news commentators if you like, and thus, yes, journalists whether we care for them or not.
What I said was that I doubted you've been around for much real journalism, not that there's a universally accepted definition for it. And it turns out you've actually got some grey hairs. (Good!) So was that "my fiction"?
[Here I can't remember what I originally wrote, if anything. Google left a blank space, though, so it appears likely they removed something.]
I also directly implied I think you're wrong about Carlson.
(Not that he's right every time on every detail. Often he's not, but more often he is, and he's certainly right about the Times. And by being so much the lesser of two evils, he actually does qualify as a 'real journalist' in relative terms, now that the currency has been debased in a real team effort across the entire industry --- the NYT, PBS Newshour, and Fox News included. What started out as a pity became a disgrace and is now a tragedy.)
And that's about it. That's the second and the only other thing I put across. Is that what you call my "fiction" then? Countering your opinionated generalization about Carlson with my own is "my fiction"?
("My fiction". Oh, I really get a kick out of that. It would follow then, that whatever you say is, Oprah-like, 'your truth'. Just like Meghan Markle!)
So it turns out my "fiction" is daring to say I consider any of your opinions incorrect. That's how you people are. Anyone who deviates from the Times or PBS or NPR or WAPO orthodoxy spouts "fiction" --- and is far-right, ill-educated, racist, treats women terribly, loves guns, voted for Trump twice, and all the rest.
You set up straw men and then do battle with them, afterwards awarding yourselves hero badges. I bet you gave yourself one for your last reply to me.
So what good are your grey hairs? You might as well be a youngster. Why didn't you learn much if anything from Jim Lehrer?
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