US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8577

On August 29 2017 02:07 Mohdoo wrote:


Do you even rebuild the city? For people who remember our conversation about housing prices in Phoenix: Fuck it, forget Houston, don't rebuild it. Just move everyone to Phoenix for half the cost.

On August 29 2017 02:09 Plansix wrote:

Well you still own the land in Houston. And your job might still be there too. If everyone does that, there will quickly be no jobs in Phoenix.

On August 29 2017 02:10 Mohdoo wrote:


Jobs in buildings that no longer exist though, right?

Amazon.com Inc. spent its first day as the owner of a brick-and-mortar grocery chain cutting prices at Whole Foods Market as much as 43 percent.

At the store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, organic fuji apples were marked down to $1.99 a pound from $3.49 a pound; organic avocados went to $1.99 each from $2.79; organic rotisserie chicken fell to $9.99 each from $13.99, and the price of some bananas was slashed to 49 cents per pound from 79 cents. The marked-down items had orange signs reading “Whole Foods + Amazon.” The signs listed the old price, the new price and “More to come...”.

On August 29 2017 02:14 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
An economics question, but would this give inflation just a little bit of jiggle? Especially since it is so sudden etc.



Source

On August 29 2017 02:14 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
An economics question, but would this give inflation just a little bit of jiggle? Especially since it is so sudden etc.



Source

On August 29 2017 01:57 KwarK wrote:
Here's the point of the Nazis vs BLM civil rights thing.

Suppose for a second that a hypothetical California called a state constitutional congress to amend the state constitution. And they added a line that said that the local electoral registrars had the right to disenfranchise anyone that they considered guilty of moral turpitude. And that the local electoral registrars, as a body, were comprised almost entirely by extreme left people who think that any Trump supporter is guilty of moral turpitude. And that the registrars are appointed by the system that they, and people who believe as they do, control.

xDaunt, Danglars etc would cry out that this is just asking for abuse. That the system is built to systematically disenfranchise conservatives. Now imagine that the president of that California constitutional congress actually said in his speech opening the constitutional congress that he was calling it to change the state constitution to deal with the threat of Nazis, racists, and conservatives, and forever ensure that liberal beliefs dominated in California. That in this case the naked abuse of the system is actually the stated intent for the use of the system.

Now imagine that they held a statewide referendum on the issue and that predominantly conservative parts of the state voted overwhelmingly for the new constitution, in even greater numbers than the number of registered votes in those districts. Can you imagine how they would react to that?

Well, you don't actually need to. Because that actually already happened. Only it was Alabama, not California. And it was blacks, not conservatives. And it's still being enforced. Black people are still being legally disenfranchised for life in Alabama by local electoral registrars without appeal or oversight in a system that was openly described by the author of it as a means to ensure white supremacy in the state. And Danglars already defended it as both constitutional and a state's rights issue and said that if the people of Alabama were unhappy with it then the people of Alabama who still had the franchise would surely vote against it.

This is why it's very suspicious when xDaunt, Danglars and so forth insist that nobody ever infringe upon any rights of white supremacists, not because they support white supremacists but because they'd never tolerate any kind of infringing of the rights of anyone for any reason. The status quo is not neutral, the status quo does not protect everyone's rights, the status quo is racist, and the status quo is built upon denying legal and constitutional rights to minorities.

That's what separates the right from the likes of the ACLU who will defend Nazis and the citizen children of illegal immigrants equally. When the ACLU defends Nazis people may be mad that they're doing it but nobody questions why they're doing it because it's been established by a very long track record that they defend everyone without prejudice. When the right show up to defend Nazis, not so much.

When the right stand behind their stated beliefs and support equal legal protections for every American then nobody will question why they're so eager to protect Americans who happen to be Nazis. But while they ignore millions of Americans but stand up for the rights of Nazis who happen to be Americans it's a little suspicious. If they want to be taken seriously as defenders of civil rights then they should broaden their defence to include non Nazis.

On August 29 2017 02:38 mozoku wrote:

The fact that you're asserting "the right" acts uniformly as you suppose is just a testament to how your bias blinds you to the the equally prevalent legitimate complaints of the "the right."

If you didn't notice, most of the right (including his own senior administration officials) was criticizing Trump for his handling of Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi was accusing a guy who is on public video yelling "F*** Neo-Nazis! F*** white supremacists!" of being a white supremacist (yeah, figure that one out) for planning a free speech rally--as if "free speech" necessarily implies "white supremacist" in the modern age. Link to previous post.

For every Sessions, Bannon, and Trump, there's a McCain, Cohn, and Tillerson that are disgusted by them. But as long as you're condoning (and willfully participating in) the broad stroking of the entire right as racists while ignoring the legitimate arguments of the non-racist right, there's never going to be a constructive discussion on either racism or free speech.

US intelligence officials are under pressure from the White House to produce a justification to declare Iran in violation of a 2015 nuclear agreement, in an echo of the politicisation of intelligence that led up to the Iraq invasion, according to former officials and analysts.

The collapse of the 2015 deal between Tehran, the US and five other countries – by which Iran has significantly curbed its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief – would trigger a new crisis over nuclear proliferation at a time when the US is in a tense standoff with North Korea.

Intelligence analysts, chastened by the experience of the 2003 Iraq war, launched by the Bush administration on the basis of phoney evidence of weapons of mass destruction, are said to be resisting the pressure to come up with evidence of Iranian violations.

“Anecdotally, I have heard this from members of the intelligence community – that they feel like they have come under pressure,” said Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who also served as a national security council spokesman and special assistant to Barack Obama. “They told me there was a sense of revulsion. There was a sense of déjà vu. There was a sense of ‘we’ve seen this movie before’.”

However, Donald Trump has said he expects to declare Iran non-compliant by mid-October, the next time he is required by Congress to sign a three-monthly certification of the nuclear deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action, or JCPOA). And the administration is pursuing another avenue that could trigger the collapse of the deal.

David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA, said it was “disconcerting” that Trump appeared to have come to a conclusion about Iran before finding the intelligence to back it up.

“It stands the intelligence process on its head,” Cohen told CNN. “If our intelligence is degraded because it is politicised in the way that it looks like the president wants to do here, that undermines the utility of that intelligence all across the board.”

In another move reminiscent of the Iraq debacle, the US administration is putting pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be more aggressive in its demands to investigate military sites in Iran, just as George W Bush’s team pushed for ever more intrusive inspections of Saddam Hussein’s military bases and palaces.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, visited IAEA headquarters in Vienna to press the agency to demand visits to Iran’s military sites. Haley described IAEA inspectors as “professionals and true experts in their field”.

“Having said that, as good as the IAEA is, it can only be as good as what they are permitted to see,” Haley told reporters on her return to New York. “Iran has publicly declared that it will not allow access to military sites but the JCPOA makes no distinction between military and non-military sites. There are also numerous undeclared sites that have not been inspected yet. That’s a problem.”

Unlike the case of Iraq and the Bush administration, where there were deep divisions in the US intelligence community over the evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, there is now a general consensus among US intelligence and foreign intelligence agencies, the state department, the IAEA and the other five countries that signed the JCPOA, as well as the European Union, that there is no significant evidence that Iran has violated its obligations under the deal. Tehran scaled down its nuclear infrastructure and its nuclear fuel stockpiles soon after the deal was signed in Vienna.

However, Trump, who denigrated the agreement throughout his election campaign, has appeared determined to torpedo it.

On 17 July, the latest deadline for presidential certification of the JCPOA deal required by Congress, the announcement was postponed for several hours, while Trump’s senior national security officials dissuaded the president from a last-minute threat not to sign.

“If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on 25 July. He hinted it was his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who had persuaded him to certify the agreement.

On August 29 2017 02:38 mozoku wrote:

The fact that you're asserting "the right" acts uniformly as you suppose is just a testament to how your bias blinds you to the the equally prevalent legitimate complaints of the "the right."

If you didn't notice, most of the right (including his own senior administration officials) was criticizing Trump for his handling of Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi was accusing a guy who is on public video yelling "F*** Neo-Nazis! F*** white supremacists!" of being a white supremacist (yeah, figure that one out) for planning a free speech rally--as if "free speech" necessarily implies "white supremacist" in the modern age. Link to previous post.

For every Sessions, Bannon, and Trump, there's a McCain, Cohn, and Tillerson that are disgusted by them. But as long as you're condoning (and willfully participating in) the broad stroking of the entire right as racists while ignoring the legitimate arguments of the non-racist right, there's never going to be a constructive discussion on either racism or free speech.