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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
also this sums up politics in 2017
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Sweden33719 Posts
On December 12 2017 10:19 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
That (and the letter he wrote in 2012), was pretty damn heart wrenching : [
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On December 12 2017 11:19 Liquid`Jinro wrote:That (and the letter he wrote in 2012), was pretty damn heart wrenching : [
One of the truest thing I've ever heard is that one of the great pains in this world is burying your own child.
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On December 12 2017 10:49 zlefin wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 10:12 ImFromPortugal wrote:On December 12 2017 09:00 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 08:34 ImFromPortugal wrote:On December 12 2017 01:28 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 01:21 Logo wrote:On December 12 2017 01:19 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 01:03 Logo wrote:On December 12 2017 01:00 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 00:57 Kickboxer wrote:
On the other hand Syria was quite ok before the US decided to "freedom (tm)" there. US had very little to do with the syrian mess; it's largely a local matter, plus a fair amount of regional players. that you decide to blame US without knowin the facts though says a lot. Is that true? Cursory research: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2011/0418/Cables-reveal-covert-US-support-for-Syria-s-opposition
Newly released WikiLeaks cables reveal that the US State Department has been secretly financing Syrian opposition groups and other opposition projects for at least five years [2006-2011], The Washington Post reports.
That aid continued going into the hands of the Syrian government opposition even after the US began its reengagement policy with Syria under President Barack Obama in 2009, the Post reports. In January, the US posted its first ambassador to the country since the Bush administration withdrew the US ambassador in 2005 over concerns about Syria's involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
it's true lsat I checked. there's a difference between some minor covert support and being a serious player and instigator of it. nothing I see in that link points to major US involvement. It comes down to what you consider very little. Funding opposition groups then having a revolution where opposition groups wage a civil war doesn't seem like a major instigator (from what we know), but it certainly doesn't seem like "very little" either. it depends whether the oppositions groups that formed the war relied much on your specific funding. from what I see it IS very little; most of their funding/effort came from other sources, and most of the impetus came from other sources. and most of the major successful opposition groups weren't that US aligned anyways. unless you consider this https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Train_and_Equip_Programhttps://medium.com/@badly_xeroxed/bmg-71-tow-atgm-syrian-opposition-groups-in-the-syrian-civil-war-2636c6d08d68https://www.occrp.org/en/makingakilling/the-pentagon-is-spending-2-billion-on-soviet-style-arms-for-syrian-rebelstaking into consideration that many of this weapons went on to be used in assistance to alqaeda \ al-nusra it becomes pretty ironic. I was already aware of those things; most of what you're citing proves my point; the actual effect of americans was fairly weak on the ground. they didn' t accomplish much with what they did do (which was often fairyl weak anyways). and they really didn' tdo that much. especially compared to the other actors involved. you're also citin some things without citing ANYTHING which would address the actual point: the RELATIVE importance of US actions in the context of the conflict. especially since it's well proven by now that the US sometimes throws money ineffectually at problems. well i have been following this conflict since its inception and i have to say that the Tow program was very effective in many ways, the US idea was to bring the conflict into a stalemate or to make Assad step down, they almost achieved this in 2013 and until the 2015 russian intervention things looked very bleak for the Syrian regime.. the US choose not to escalate things further amid of the possibility of direct conflict with the russians. The US has this modus operandi of using proxies, it worked in the past, now it almost did until the russian intervention , i wouldn't call it a small thing, it was just short of direct intervention. i've been following it too; and there's a lot of other actors in the area doing a lot of other stuff, all of which also had effects, which seemeed stronger on the whole to me, and mos timportantly, the effects of various local groups in syria doing their own stuff. I don't deny taht it's theoretically possible for the US to have a large influence, i'm just not seeing it in this case. just because what the US wanted to have happen nearly ahppened (setting aside whether it actually nearly happened), that doesn't mean it's because of the US actions; it could have been somethin that would have simply happened anyways. remember the point of the argument here: when I call it a "smll thing" i'm talking in comparison to the overall totality of the conflict, and in praticular to kickboxers nonsense claim.
the problem is that majority of things happened because the US allowed it's allies to continue with their policies of arming and helping some of the groups.
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what is up with his usage of "prevert?"
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On December 12 2017 11:40 IgnE wrote:
what is up with his usage of "prevert?"
Colloquialism for pervert.
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On December 12 2017 11:38 ImFromPortugal wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 10:49 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 10:12 ImFromPortugal wrote:On December 12 2017 09:00 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 08:34 ImFromPortugal wrote:On December 12 2017 01:28 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 01:21 Logo wrote:On December 12 2017 01:19 zlefin wrote:On December 12 2017 01:03 Logo wrote:On December 12 2017 01:00 zlefin wrote:
[quote]
US had very little to do with the syrian mess; it's largely a local matter, plus a fair amount of regional players. that you decide to blame US without knowin the facts though says a lot. Is that true? Cursory research: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2011/0418/Cables-reveal-covert-US-support-for-Syria-s-opposition
Newly released WikiLeaks cables reveal that the US State Department has been secretly financing Syrian opposition groups and other opposition projects for at least five years [2006-2011], The Washington Post reports.
That aid continued going into the hands of the Syrian government opposition even after the US began its reengagement policy with Syria under President Barack Obama in 2009, the Post reports. In January, the US posted its first ambassador to the country since the Bush administration withdrew the US ambassador in 2005 over concerns about Syria's involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
it's true lsat I checked. there's a difference between some minor covert support and being a serious player and instigator of it. nothing I see in that link points to major US involvement. It comes down to what you consider very little. Funding opposition groups then having a revolution where opposition groups wage a civil war doesn't seem like a major instigator (from what we know), but it certainly doesn't seem like "very little" either. it depends whether the oppositions groups that formed the war relied much on your specific funding. from what I see it IS very little; most of their funding/effort came from other sources, and most of the impetus came from other sources. and most of the major successful opposition groups weren't that US aligned anyways. unless you consider this https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Train_and_Equip_Programhttps://medium.com/@badly_xeroxed/bmg-71-tow-atgm-syrian-opposition-groups-in-the-syrian-civil-war-2636c6d08d68https://www.occrp.org/en/makingakilling/the-pentagon-is-spending-2-billion-on-soviet-style-arms-for-syrian-rebelstaking into consideration that many of this weapons went on to be used in assistance to alqaeda \ al-nusra it becomes pretty ironic. I was already aware of those things; most of what you're citing proves my point; the actual effect of americans was fairly weak on the ground. they didn' t accomplish much with what they did do (which was often fairyl weak anyways). and they really didn' tdo that much. especially compared to the other actors involved. you're also citin some things without citing ANYTHING which would address the actual point: the RELATIVE importance of US actions in the context of the conflict. especially since it's well proven by now that the US sometimes throws money ineffectually at problems. well i have been following this conflict since its inception and i have to say that the Tow program was very effective in many ways, the US idea was to bring the conflict into a stalemate or to make Assad step down, they almost achieved this in 2013 and until the 2015 russian intervention things looked very bleak for the Syrian regime.. the US choose not to escalate things further amid of the possibility of direct conflict with the russians. The US has this modus operandi of using proxies, it worked in the past, now it almost did until the russian intervention , i wouldn't call it a small thing, it was just short of direct intervention. i've been following it too; and there's a lot of other actors in the area doing a lot of other stuff, all of which also had effects, which seemeed stronger on the whole to me, and mos timportantly, the effects of various local groups in syria doing their own stuff. I don't deny taht it's theoretically possible for the US to have a large influence, i'm just not seeing it in this case. just because what the US wanted to have happen nearly ahppened (setting aside whether it actually nearly happened), that doesn't mean it's because of the US actions; it could have been somethin that would have simply happened anyways. remember the point of the argument here: when I call it a "smll thing" i'm talking in comparison to the overall totality of the conflict, and in praticular to kickboxers nonsense claim. the problem is that majority of things happened because the US allowed it's allies to continue with their policies of arming and helping some of the groups.
that assumes the US has a lot of control over its allies. from where I sit it looks more like the US has fairly limited control over its allies; the allies mostly do what's in their own interest, and will readily ignore US, especially if they have strong interests in the area, which they do in this case.
that puts those nations actions on those nations, and not on the US.
also, alot of stuff happened entirely due to internal issues in syria.
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On December 12 2017 11:42 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 11:40 IgnE wrote:
what is up with his usage of "prevert?" Colloquialism for pervert.
its pretty horrid.
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On December 12 2017 11:02 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 06:53 Plansix wrote:On December 12 2017 06:48 Chewbacca. wrote:On December 12 2017 06:36 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
While this may be shitty, and it could easily be argued that it was being done to suppress the black vote....The statement about every county that's over 75% black having their DMV shutdown, immediately after talking about 31 counties is a bit misleading. Doing a google search I'm seeing that only 2 of 67 counties are >75% black, seems like they're trying to make the problem appear bigger than it may be. If those two counties make up a reasonable amount of the state population and the race is close, it could be the exact big deal people are making it out to be. This is exactly how voter suppression works. Edit: Super delegates are a bad look. If a party is going to have open primaries that anyone can run under their banner, deal with the consequences. If they are not comfortable with that, make rules saying who can run under their ticket. Enough trying to have it both ways. If it's really only 2 states where the black population is > 75%, and they closed 31 DMVs overall, then using "every" instead of "both" seems pretty disingenous to me. That is completely unrelated to whether there's merit to the overall story, just that particular word choice is pretty weasely (if 2 is the correct number).
Honestly my experience and assumption is that this sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception when you're reading news from random Twitter journalists (or really unknown news sources in general). It's much more profitable to focus on and pander to one party's base than it is to do nuanced and reasonable journalism in the current media and political environment.
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Huh. I wonder if they ever told their attorney that he(assuming) is "one of the good ones".
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Reminder that Barkley is/was a Republican
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On December 12 2017 08:05 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 07:54 zlefin wrote:
I'm not seein gyour point gahlo, please clarify
as a possible preemptive counterpoint:
i've read some analyses on the topic and iirc they generally foundd he wasn' thurt by such.
and sure, people might stay home; they also might get pissed off and decided to countervote against the "elite" pick, especially since sanders' base is populists-leaning.
if they had no influence on how people voted, then they had no effect, clinton won just as she would've without them, as per my stated allegation: "sanders wasn' thurt" This is one of those things where I don't think it's possible to know after the fact without perfect knowledge. You can't ask people how/if they would have voted if superdelegates weren't a thing because a) they already are and b) people know how the presidential election turned out. The cat's already out of the bag on that. We see people say "fuck it, it's not worth it." and stay home year after year after year. If more people wanted to counter vote, we'd see more 3rd party votes in the presidential. My point of "if they had no effect" was to show that the margin of victory was had a very healthy serving of Super Delegate pie. If that was chopped out at the start, you're potentially looking at a much more competitive race.
I love how people rewrite history like people weren't using the superdelegate votes early in the race to tell Sanders supporters it was already over.
Also that the Superdelegates thought they represented anyone but themselves.
Democrats caved just enough to avoid being seen as completely incapable of improvement, but that's far from enough. Doug Jones is a great example of what the Democratic party is "Have you seen the other guy!?" There's no sign from the establishment that they actually plan on breaking ranks with their corporate owners, which is the core underlying issue.
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Had anyone even accused Roy Moore of being anti semitic? That's the weird part of that statement by his wife. There was the bernie bernstein thing, but it didn't seem directly done by the campaign and was kind of funny in how poorly done it was.
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More importantly, if he were widely acknowledged to be an anti-Semite, how much of his base would care about that? I wager almost none.
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On December 12 2017 12:19 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 11:02 Liquid`Jinro wrote:On December 12 2017 06:53 Plansix wrote:On December 12 2017 06:48 Chewbacca. wrote:While this may be shitty, and it could easily be argued that it was being done to suppress the black vote....The statement about every county that's over 75% black having their DMV shutdown, immediately after talking about 31 counties is a bit misleading. Doing a google search I'm seeing that only 2 of 67 counties are >75% black, seems like they're trying to make the problem appear bigger than it may be. If those two counties make up a reasonable amount of the state population and the race is close, it could be the exact big deal people are making it out to be. This is exactly how voter suppression works. Edit: Super delegates are a bad look. If a party is going to have open primaries that anyone can run under their banner, deal with the consequences. If they are not comfortable with that, make rules saying who can run under their ticket. Enough trying to have it both ways. If it's really only 2 states where the black population is > 75%, and they closed 31 DMVs overall, then using "every" instead of "both" seems pretty disingenous to me. That is completely unrelated to whether there's merit to the overall story, just that particular word choice is pretty weasely (if 2 is the correct number). Honestly my experience and assumption is that this sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception when you're reading news from random Twitter journalists (or really unknown news sources in general). It's much more profitable to focus on and pander to one party's base than it is to do nuanced and reasonable journalism in the current media and political environment.
He is an author that wrote a book about voting rights in the US and voter suppression. But I guess that is bias or something.
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On December 12 2017 13:23 LegalLord wrote:
More importantly, if he were widely acknowledged to be an anti-Semite, how much of his base would care about that? I wager almost none.
Considering the combination of unadulterated support for Israel and Nazi supporters that worked together to help get Trump elected I'm going to tend to agree with this.
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On December 12 2017 13:23 LegalLord wrote:
More importantly, if he were widely acknowledged to be an anti-Semite, how much of his base would care about that? I wager almost none.
I almost have to wonder if that was so poorly handled that it was almost a wink and nod to his base going "we are antisemitic like you we just cant say it". It was THAT badly handled.
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On December 12 2017 13:28 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2017 12:19 mozoku wrote:On December 12 2017 11:02 Liquid`Jinro wrote:On December 12 2017 06:53 Plansix wrote:On December 12 2017 06:48 Chewbacca. wrote:While this may be shitty, and it could easily be argued that it was being done to suppress the black vote....The statement about every county that's over 75% black having their DMV shutdown, immediately after talking about 31 counties is a bit misleading. Doing a google search I'm seeing that only 2 of 67 counties are >75% black, seems like they're trying to make the problem appear bigger than it may be. If those two counties make up a reasonable amount of the state population and the race is close, it could be the exact big deal people are making it out to be. This is exactly how voter suppression works. Edit: Super delegates are a bad look. If a party is going to have open primaries that anyone can run under their banner, deal with the consequences. If they are not comfortable with that, make rules saying who can run under their ticket. Enough trying to have it both ways. If it's really only 2 states where the black population is > 75%, and they closed 31 DMVs overall, then using "every" instead of "both" seems pretty disingenous to me. That is completely unrelated to whether there's merit to the overall story, just that particular word choice is pretty weasely (if 2 is the correct number). Honestly my experience and assumption is that this sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception when you're reading news from random Twitter journalists (or really unknown news sources in general). It's much more profitable to focus on and pander to one party's base than it is to do nuanced and reasonable journalism in the current media and political environment. He is an author that wrote a book about voting rights in the US and voter suppression. But I guess that is bias or something.
The point was less about the guy, and more about the current media environment and its economic model. That said, I'm a little bemused if you can't see how a someone who studies voter suppression (or any other topic, for that matter) for a living is incentivized to post click-baity and/or sensationalist statements about the topic, especially on Twitter.
Even if you're not selling the fruits of your day job aren't being sold to (internal or external) business clients, the fruits of most people's day jobs still need to be sold to someone to make it worth the laborer's time. Academics are selling to journals or funding agencies, journalists are selling to readers, politicians are selling to voters. Very few people aren't selling something, even if they aren't selling directly for a profit. It's the way the world works.
If you take off your partisan warfare glasses for a second, you'll see that it's equally true for right and left.
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EPT
