US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8152

On July 22 2017 05:27 IgnE wrote:


this internet quote dredging from the past is so pointless. it has become part if the endless cycle of condemnation and deflection that is the foundation of contemporary media spectacle. its a serious and reprehensible ontological flattening of persons.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

that is the very basis of contemporary subjectivity. what do we want? entirely self-consistent inhuman automatons? not to mention that trump himself is no less contradictory in his praise and condemnation of hillary (and her competence). the man is in finance not a caricature

On July 22 2017 05:27 IgnE wrote:


this internet quote dredging from the past is so pointless. it has become part of the endless cycle of condemnation and deflection that is the foundation of contemporary media spectacle. its a serious and reprehensible ontological flattening of persons.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.

that is the very basis of contemporary subjectivity. what do we want? entirely self-consistent inhuman automatons? not to mention that trump himself is no less contradictory in his praise and condemnation of hillary (and her competence). the man is in finance not a caricature

On July 22 2017 05:35 Nyxisto wrote:


There is nuance and multitude and then there is "I am every ideology on the planet on every day of the week, as long as you like it". That is a hollowed out, irrational marketing scheme. I still think there is such a thing as a objective real world and reason where you can't put on beliefs like dresses and actually are supposed to hold some coherent set of ideas in your head.

This too means not supporting Clinton on one day and Trump on the other. That's just cynicism in purest form.

On July 22 2017 05:41 IgnE wrote:


if you think that tweet qualifies as "supporting clinton" (and all that seems to imply in the context of your post) you've strayed from the text

On July 22 2017 05:39 IgnE wrote:
no it functions by entirely destroying and recreating context. if anything it only serves to snuff out the possibility of communication. it depends on the concealed manufacture of aberrant context and an appeal to the "obvious" univocality of meaning. it's signifiance usually dissolves under any serious consideration.

On July 22 2017 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:

"I hope she runs, she is incredibly competent".

Now unless this is part of a sarcastic conversation, which cant be determined from this one tweet, I don't see how you construct that as anything other then support of Clinton.
Please, how is this straying from the text?

On July 22 2017 05:41 IgnE wrote:


if you think that tweet qualifies as "supporting clinton" (and all that seems to imply in the context of your post) you've strayed from the text

A Russian participant in the notorious meeting held by Donald Trump’s son at Trump Tower last year had a business partner who was linked by US authorities to former Soviet intelligence officials.

Irakly Kaveladze was identified this week as the eighth attendee of the June 2016 meeting, which has become central to questions over Russian interference in last year’s presidential election.

Trump’s son, Donald Jr, agreed to the meeting after being told by email that he would be given damaging information about Hillary Clinton, their Democratic opponent, as part of an effort by the Russian government to support Trump. Trump Jr has been called to testify about the meeting to senators in Washington next week.

Kaveladze, a 52-year-old executive at a Moscow-based property firm with ties to Trump, was found in 2000 to have created hundreds of shell companies for a $1.4bn scheme that US investigators suspected was used to launder Russian money through American banks.

According to US officials, Kaveladze’s partner in that operation was Boris Goldstein, a Soviet-born banker whose ties to former KGB officers attracted interest from US investigators after he moved to California in the early 1990s.

“We have obtained information that indicates that this individual has had a close relationship with companies associated with members of the former Soviet Union’s intelligence agency,” the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said of Goldstein in a little-noticed footnote to a report in 2000.

Goldstein was not identified by name in the 2000 report, but his biography matched that of the person described by investigators. His identity was confirmed at the time by the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a brief telephone interview this week, Goldstein, 53, denied having ties to intelligence agencies in Russia or the former Soviet Union. He said he now worked in venture capital funding technology companies. “So far away from political stuff, intelligence stuff,” he said.

Kaveladze visited Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney with ties to the Kremlin, who on Friday was revealed to have represented Russia’s FSB security agency in recent years. They were joined by Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian American political operative and former military officer. Akhmetshin is widely reported to be a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer.

The Russians met Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Kaveladze’s attorney, Scott Balber, did not respond to questions about the $1.4bn money transfer system involving Russian funds. He has previously said the setup was a legitimate business and that Kaveladze was not judged to have done anything wrong.

Before moving to the US in 1991, Goldstein had founded a bank in his native Latvia that merged with a bank run by Edmunds Johansons, the former chairman of the KGB in Latvia.

Among their biggest investors was Mabetex, a Swiss-based construction company that was later accused of bribing senior Russian officials including president Boris Yeltsin to win $1.5bn in contracts to refurbish the Kremlin. Charges relating to the scandal were brought in Russia and Switzerland but no one was convicted.

US intelligence sources cited in a 1999 investigation by the Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Knut Royce said that Goldstein employed “as many as five former Latvian KGB officers”.

After moving to the US in 1991, Goldstein bought a $1m stake in the Commercial Bank of San Francisco in 1994. According to the GAO investigators, Goldstein signed a contract with Kaveladze for Kaveladze to incorporate shell companies in Delaware for Russian clients and then open bank accounts for them at Commercial Bank, where Goldstein was director of private banking and international banking.

On July 22 2017 06:02 IgnE wrote:
ok great thats not part of THIS discussion though. if you want to defend dredging up racist tweets i wont fight you on it. im talking about something else.

On July 22 2017 06:08 Nyxisto wrote:


I think it's part of this discussion. The question at the core is "who is reponsible for what I say?" During the campaign Trump said something, people debated for days what it means, and then Trump went ahead and picked the best interpretation. It's almost like we're doing hermeneutics here. This often ended in pages of discussion about whether we should take him "seriously or literally"

How about we agree that the person making some statement is responsible for it, and it is their duty to express themselves clearly and unambiguously, and not my duty to decipher it or 'get him'. In the same spirit, if you endorse a political position you own it, you don't get to weasel yourself out of it. If this was the basis for policy making and debate we could spare ourselves a lot of trouble.

Negotiators in both parties are nearing final approval of a sweeping sanctions deal that does not include changes the White House sought to make it easier for President Donald Trump to ease penalties against Russia, congressional sources said Friday.

The imminent accord on a package of sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea could be released publicly as soon as Friday night, according to House and Senate aides. To resolve a partisan clash over giving House Democrats the power to force a vote blocking Trump from easing sanctions on Moscow, the deal allows any anti-Trump vote to receive privileged consideration in the House provided that it passes the Senate, a source told POLITICO.

The sanctions legislation could pass the House as soon as next week, and the Senate could clear it soon thereafter, giving the Republican-led Congress a major bipartisan achievement to tout amid struggles on health care and taxes — albeit an achievement that delivers a thumb in the eye to Trump.

The White House had pressed to dilute the bill's provisions empowering Congress to block Trump from easing or ending sanctions against Russia, but its request fell on deaf ears among Republican leaders.

The pending sanctions deal would make a technical change to the portion of the bill by ensuring that Congress would not review minor and routine licenses for businesses seeking to operate in partnership with Russian entities, according to one GOP source.

Wisconsin Republicans Have Found a Way to Get Around Roe v. Wade, and It’s Terrifying

It seems that the State of Wisconsin has developed a work-around for the abortion problem. That “problem,” being that abortion is a legal and sometimes medically-necessary procedure, and Wisconsin Republicans would prefer to just pretend that it just isn’t. The solution? The Wisconsin state legislature came up with a bill that would block faculty at University of Wisconsin-Madison from teaching OB-GYN residents how to perform abortions. Sure, just make the doctors learn less. That’ll bring everyone around to the pro-life side of things.

Complex as the whole topic of abortion can often be, this utter idiocy of this bill is actually quite simple. It irresponsibly stops doctors from learning to perform abortions without giving any actual thought to the practical consequences. AB206 (full text available here) provides the following:

“This bill prohibits an employee of the University of Wisconsin System or the

University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Authority from, while in the scope of

his or her employment, performing or assisting in the performance of an abortion;

performing services at a private entity, other than a hospital, where abortions are

performed; or training or receiving training in performing abortions, unless the

training occurs at a hospital.”

The bill is willfully blind on an important fact about abortions: all OB-GYN training programs must include abortions in their curriculum in order to be accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Wisconsin’s law prohibiting public funding of elective abortions is already a stressor for its medical community; medical students at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, Aurora Health Care and the Medical College of Wisconsin are currently forced to access their training through an agreement with Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. If AB206 becomes law, OB-GYN residents would then have to change schools entirely if they wanted to actually become certified physicians in their field. In other words, the Wisconsin legislature is totally fine with relegating its medical community to some two-bit backwater practice, as long as it means its politicians can win votes by pretending that Roe v. Wade never happened. Brain drain indeed.

Adopting laws that prevent doctors from learning to properly practice medicine is a bad idea in any area – but it’s especially bad in Wisconsin. There is already a shortage of OB-GYNs in the state, which is why the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology recently began a rural residency training track, in which it developed strategic partnerships with rural hospitals to better the medical care for rural women.

Not only would AB206 make healthcare worse for those rural women in a general way (after all, the best and brightest doctors aren’t about to start enrolling in unaccredited residency programs), but it specifically sacrifices health of those women who will require abortion as a life-saving measure. While politicians are always quick to qualify their anti-abortion positions, “except when abortion is necessary to protect the life of the mother,” those like Rep. Andre Jacque (R-De Pere), the author of AB206, are far from committed to their talking points. Abortions necessary to save a woman’s life are a real thing, even if they do amount to a small percentage of abortions overall, but the Wisconsin legislature is poised to sacrifice the lives of those patients by refusing to properly train its doctors.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued the following statement about AB206:

“Wisconsin women will suffer if this bill passes. Abortion training is required for safe patient care, management of complications of pregnancy and abortion, and to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality. Maternal mortality in the US is rising and is the worst in the developed world. Legislative interference will close the OB/GYN residency program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health reducing the number of practicing OB/GYNs in Wisconsin.”

If AB206 passes, we’ll have to wait and see what comes next. Perhaps Wisconsin will also stop teaching Roe v. Wade in its law schools so that its attorneys can no longer fight for their clients’ rights or demand legislation that comports with the constitution.

On July 22 2017 06:16 Simberto wrote:


I generally agree, however, it is often possible to take statements out of context to make them say something completely different from what was originally meant.

For example, if i said:
"Saying "punching babies and kicking puppies is so much fun" is probably evil and stupid", and you only quoted the middle part.

So I'd agree that generally, one is responsible for what they say, unless someone else deliberately and purposefully changes the context of what was said.