Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Forbes Breaking News"
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@Bat-Cat-Meow Thanks for your reply.
As a seasoned cynic from way back, I'm not impressed. A seasoned cynic is a reformed one, meaning no longer an extremist.
I freely grant that money has too much influence on American politics. Yet I will begin by pointing out that the rich do not have to feel assured that they can own politicians before deciding to throw money at political parties. They would do it even on the faintest hope of getting what they want, and would continue to do so despite turning up no results decade after decade. The fact that income taxes are at all north of 5% is proof enough of that.
And even then, who is to blame except the American people themselves, who worship money like almost no others on Earth? You think that in a democracy the leaders might ever be lacking in any of their countrymen's worst and most widespread faults? Not possible.
I grant also that the political deliberations held in public are of course deeply flawed, and I could go on all day about those flaws, yet the deliberations in the clip shown here are far better than most. Every point made is germane. The positions are well contrasted. The tone is civil. There is a certain amount of clear respect for the facts. (Just what the facts are is an important and separate matter.)
You need to understand that whatever degree of justice there is, whatever sound management, whatever order and peace, is entirely down to good debate (i.e. that which is open, sincere, practised, informed, and free) and respect for good debate. Without them, all is chaos, tyranny, and vicious rule by gangs and the mob with no recourse for people like you and me. Together they keep an enormous number of balls in the air, if you look at our civilization as a grand juggling act, which is what it is.
Your problem is that until you wise up your only way of appreciating how good you have it (assuming you're a Westerner and not a grossly unfortunate one) is to lose it all. You're judging it, I don't doubt, by utopian standards (i.e. a fantasy) rather than by realistic possibilities, which is why you think it's all garbage.
I respectfully suggest you get to know humankind and civilization better by looking at them around the world and across time.
Psychology and history would be good places to start, and at the outset you should rid your mind of cant, sanctimony, and the idea that conceptions of justice and morality have reached dizzying new heights in the American universities since 1970, after wallowing in blindness for an eternity beforehand. They haven't. They've actually deteriorated badly at the hands of bitterly deformed, usually not-very-bright, opportunistic, spoiled dupes, except for a few certain improvements. As valuable as they may in fact be, they have been purchased at a needlessly disastrous or even pyrrhic cost.
It could be a nicer society, I'll give you that. Income inequality is ballooning under the liberal order and that means misery is increasing. This is why I think we already hit all-time peak human niceness (prosperity and security as well). Real niceness (as well as the real prosperity and real security) is way down.
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@brandonf1260 Not that many years ago I would've agreed with you, eight or 10 maybe. It's a very common opinion, and I thought the reason was that it was simply true. But at last, a little while later, I realized than my view of conservatives was highly caricatured. And I realized I'd been had.
For opinions like the one you expressed are what one is taught by: most university faculty (especially younger ones and TAs of course), most of one's fellow students at almost all universities, most American movies, most American TV shows, most American news outlets, most American magazines, most American celebrities, most or perhaps nearly all American teachers, very nearly all American liberals, all American left-wingers and all American wokesters. And it's been that way since about 1980.
The demonization of conservatism has been so energetic, so thoroughgoing, that you actually owe it to yourself to consider how it is that they haven't gone away. If your answer to that is that "Uh, because they're evil and immortal like vampires" and you say it because you don't think the question even deserves a moment's thought, I understand. I was once like you. It's what I would've said.
But I suggest you take it seriously anyway, simply out of non-conformity — if your original liberal spirit of non-conformity still has a flicker of a pulse after however many years spent conforming to liberal ideology and prejudices.
Consider if you will what liberal Americans have shown themselves willing to do and willing to give up in the past ten years alone in order to spare themselves the horrors of conservatism. Consider how many of them are grimly (or cheerfully) determined to re-elect a less-honest-than-average president with a clearly shrunken and wizened brain. Consider that they have joined forces to revamp the language down to its very pronouns. Consider that they stand up for the right of men to walk into women's locker rooms and showers and expose their sex organs in front of the women. Consider that they supported unnecessarily depriving their children of a year or more of irreplaceable education and socialization in the classroom.
I could list another hundred irrational things they've done simply to thwart conservatism. And again, I understand. I understand that they think they have to do whatever it takes. They simply want to be good people. They want to oppose evil. They want to avert chaos, save democracy, ensure decency, save lives, rescue the planet and entrench everything else wholesome and desirable. Because conservatives are evil, ignorant, full of hate, they're a bunch of cartoon characters beyond redemption.
Only it's all a hoax. Conservatism is relentlessly straw-manned. What they are is simply people who believe that the oath of Hippocrates, First, you shall do no harm, is well suited to more walks of life than just medicine, and especially to politics and social engineering. They are profound disbelievers in utopian solutions, in the idea that we today really might be the most morally enlightened and wonderful people of all time (we're not), in the idea that after numberless millennia of humanity struggling with eternal problems, it's the people born after 1945, '55, '65, '75, '85 or '95 who've Finally Figured It All Out far, far more thoroughly and better than anyone ever has! Nay, perfectly! (Cf. Confucius: "The answers were all found long ago.") Actually we're just the latest cohort set to blunder childishly and spectacularly if we make the mistake of believing in ourselves like that.
That's what I finally realized after decades as a liberal. Not all at once, not right away. At first it was barely at all, in a painful haze of cognitive dissonance as what I believed and what I saw with my own eyes were in direct contradiction with each other. Then it was more and more, gradually, as I began to trust the rational and not the socialized part of myself. And at last I realized that my initial attraction to the 'truths' of liberalism was in fact an attraction to being in the 'right' community all along. I wanted to be "the sort of person who knows that [insert any of a thousand liberal tropes about how every liberal/left-wing tenet is by its very liberalness/left-ness inherently superior in morality]" and who is recognized for it.
And I realized that it had cost me very dearly. It had cost me access to the very truth I thought I was picking off the shelf as easily as consumer packaged goods. I'd been had by a bunch of really rather awful people whose sole merit was sometimes or usually meaning well — especially when other people were looking — and whose demerits would take forever to plumb.
I shouldn't have taken so long to realize all this. I actually stifled the budding of these realizations for a long time because I genuinely feared it meant no longer "being a good person." Oh, what an id io t I was! But late is better than never.
(I also shouldn't have waited so long to start writing all this out. Again, better late than never. At least I've started now. Your comment somehow made it seem like the right time. So thanks.)
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@samplumber8786 Please take a remedial reading class at a location near you, my Plumbum-brained friend. I made it clear I think it possible that the virus was engineered to prefer non-East-Asian hosts. As for South America, India, and "the rest of China", I am unable to discern your point and unwilling to make it for you. Spell it out, would you?
And what I'm saying, by the way, is hardly anything so grand as a theory. It's a potential hypothesis that begs for investigation. So let's have one. Oh, right, communist dictatorships don't much care for investigations of anything, let alone their own misdeeds.
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@samplumber8786 To address a few of your points summarily with brief reactions:
——
— Regarding cultural/behavioural differences, they certainly enter into it, as do many other factors, including demographics apart from race, household size, indoor ventilation rates, the nature of social contact churn, intercity travel, and many others. Lots of things matter and are difficult if not impossible to tease apart from one another, but some are surely more powerful than others.
—truly novel proteins, nor even special talents. It would just have a special target.
There's a UN document, btw, on biological warfare, published in 2011 (pre-Xi, notice). China, in its contribution, predicted the engineering of viruses to target a specific race or races, adding that it could be done so as to conceal its lab origins. I just learned of it yesterday and haven't looked at it yet. (Not that I'm sleuthing. Just keeping an eye open.)
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@NeoclassicYT What I said was correct. My point is that he quickly added, a few hours later, that the future of Crimea, too, should be up to the Crimeans. I think that was an improvement to his proposal, although I repeat once again that Ukraine should not pursue it. Conceivably, circumstances could make it more appropriate, but I sure hope not.
I think it's ok to admit the previously established Russian-ness of Crimea, because it does have some basis in history, although I still 100% condemn Putin for invading it instead of pursuing annexation by peaceful means of negotiation.
My personal view is that Ukraine must be supported in its aims to recapture all its territory if that's what it wants. If that means outspending Putin, I say we do it.
Thanks for your reply.
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@AbcDino843 You could if you like point to the cost of NORAD, but even that would lack sense. There's no way the US would ever trust any other nation to monitor the Arctic frontier vital to America's own security, so it would always pay for and maintain it. In any case, Canada and the US divide the cost of it, and always have done.
The fact is that the US need never dedicate spending to protect Canada from military threats. It is enough that the rest of the world knows that to attack Canada would result in instant and harsh retaliation from the US, and thus it's never happened. (Nor shall it, God willing.)
With Europe it's vastly different. Vast billions of dollars in cash outlays are committed by the US to its security every year. Likewise Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.
As for your vague reference to "support," I challenge you to provide evidence for it. It's absolute h og w a sh, and that's paying it a handsome compliment.
Go ahead, I'm waiting.
Thanks for your charming reply.
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People here need to realize, if they're capable of grasping such subtlety of meaning, that not having a book on the curriculum for a certain grade is not "banning" it. To ban a book, in a public school context, is to remove it from schools entirely, to prohibit its inclusion in classrooms and libraries. The present book was merely taken off the 2nd-grade curriculum. It may be found suitable for 3rd- or 4th-graders, and may still be put on library shelves.
Rep. Foxx was an unfortunate victim here of what appears to me disingenuous grandstanding and con artistry on the part of Rep. McGovern. He knows it wasn't banned. He knows that's the wrong word. He merely lacks the moral fortitude to withstand the temptation to use it for the purpose of deceiving voters in his district.
For my part, I do question what fraction of 7-year-olds would profit from a book written at that level, a marvellous book though it may in fact be. At age 7 they are still really little kids, and some are much slower than others. But that is a matter for unbiased educational specialists to look at — not people like us who only heard a short passage read from it. Indeed, it's likewise not something for members of the House of Representatives to pass judgment upon.
What a miasma of hollow sanctimony and even pearl-clutching down here in the viewer reactions.
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In 2021, Russian gas was 47% of EU consumption. Now it's down to about 12%.
Most of that is direct pipeline deliveries to former Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia. (Also non-NATO Austria.)
Throw in the UK (not an EU member) and 12% becomes 10%.
The story on oil is less clear, but Russia's exports are certainly down. It's clear many countries are buying less Russian oil, while the PRC is buying much more.
India is buying more too, and is re-exporting some as refined fuels, less than $20m a day or $6.7bn a year. This is around 250,000 bpd, with an estimated 120,000 bpd ending up in the US and other Western countries.
This is something like 1/300th of Western consumption, and only 1/50th of Russian exports.
In conclusion: Western consumption of Russian energy is now small potatoes. Most importantly, Russian oil and (especially) gas production and revenues are down substantially due to sanctions.
Although Russian oil is still vital to the global supply-demand balance and price stability, it's less important than it was.
Meanwhile production in the Western Hemisphere has risen steadily and continues to do so.😄
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