US Politics Mega-thread - Page 217

On May 23 2018 02:23 Plansix wrote:
Trump's plan to bail out ZTE seems to be angering all the wrong people

On May 23 2018 05:58 PhoenixVoid wrote:

I put in CNN that way because we are all very well aware of the Trump administration's feelings about them. But the AP? They're the least offensive, most milquetoast reporting agency ever with like Reuters and AFP. Only reason I could see them getting banned was over their recent reveal of Trump's Middle East ties, because they rarely, if ever, get into partisanship or opinions.

“And at one point he started to attack the press, and it’s just me and my boss and him … he’s attacking the press and there were no cameras, there was nothing going on,” Stahl said.

“And I said, 'You know that is getting tired, why are you doing this? You are doing it over and over, it’s boring, it’s time to end that. You won the nomination, why do you keep hammering at this?' ”

“And he said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to demean you all and discredit you all, so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you,’ ” Stahl said.

On May 23 2018 08:37 Tachion wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/nyregion/michael-cohen-trump-taxi-cooperation.html

Remember when Cohen was raided and part of the justification for it was concerning his taxi medallion? This guy here was facing a maximum of 125 years in jail and he got a deal to cooperate for just 5 years probation and 0 jail time. Imagine the dirt he has on Cohen to get such a deal. If Cohen doesn't flip, he has got to be going down hard.

On May 23 2018 09:40 Velr wrote:
I just today visited auswitsch and birkenau... ... If you want a stomache crawl, do it. I right now, 10 hours later can't sleep.

Punching Nazis is A ok. If you disagree (as i did)... Visit. Especially Birkenau. 30 minutes of walking whiteout stopping from one end to the other...

Punching Nazis should be mandatory.

On May 23 2018 10:02 Danglars wrote:

Commies killed and starved more. They didn't have the more instantly abhorrent selection of Jews. But nevertheless, the kulaks and the various victims of the gulags and of Mao's great leap forward scream just as loud. The body count from the extermination camp genocide is a rounding error by comparison.

Simply being human should instinctively make you want to punch a Nazi, or a Commie. I think society is nonetheless wiser for thinking twice about condoning the use of violence.

Not that it matters, but I've toured the Washington DC holocaust museum and spoken with survivors there. Some of the exhibits, such as the pile of shoes that includes children's shoes, simply floor you.

On May 23 2018 10:02 Danglars wrote:

Commies killed and starved more. They didn't have the more instantly abhorrent selection of Jews. But nevertheless, the kulaks and the various victims of the gulags and of Mao's great leap forward scream just as loud. The body count from the extermination camp genocide is a rounding error by comparison.

Simply being human should instinctively make you want to punch a Nazi, or a Commie. I think society is nonetheless wiser for thinking twice about condoning the use of violence.

Not that it matters, but I've toured the Washington DC holocaust museum and spoken with survivors there. Some of the exhibits, such as the pile of shoes that includes children's shoes, simply floor you.

On May 23 2018 10:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Modern day communists do not support Stalin, Gulags, Mao's leap forward, Pol Pot, or well, any of the abhorrent policies practiced by regimes claiming to be communist. They consider these regimes as communist as we consider North Korea 'Democratic'.

Modern day nazis support Hitler. Some will argue that the holocaust was exaggerated. But they celebrate Hitler and the idea of segregating people according to ethnicity.

I still don't condone punching nazis though, I don't really think that's a productive way of dealing with people who harbor idiotic and dangerous ideas. But the equivalence between people who describe themselves as communist and the people who describe themselves as nazis is entirely false, because only one of these groups today distances themselves from the atrocious actions of regimes self-describing as communist or national-socialist. If you find a guy who describes himself as a Stalinist or Maoist, the equivalence has merit to it, but I know many self-described communists - none are even remotely positively inclined towards any of these regimes.

On May 23 2018 11:19 Danglars wrote:...recognize that murderous dictatorships are an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of that system gaining power...

On May 23 2018 12:55 Aquanim wrote:

If you were going to punch people in the face, you'd be doing it essentially becaue they disagree with your opinion on this point... which seems pretty petty.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it is launching a partnership with the Atlantic Council to boost its global election security efforts.

Experts from the international think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab will help provide Facebook “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

Facebook said it will also use the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions during elections and other “highly sensitive moments,” according to a post written by Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director, Katie Harbath.

A week ago, Twitter announced it would become more aggressive in pursuing trolls on its service, a move which seems to have had some unforeseen consequences, judging by the present upheaval in the Bulgarian Twitter community. An increasingly large and unhappy number of people have had their Twitter accounts suspended and messages filtered out of conversations, apparently for the offense of merely tweeting in Cyrillic.

On May 23 2018 10:40 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Modern day communists do not support Stalin, Gulags, Mao's leap forward, Pol Pot, or well, any of the abhorrent policies practiced by regimes claiming to be communist. They consider these regimes as communist as we consider North Korea 'Democratic'.

Modern day nazis support Hitler. Some will argue that the holocaust was exaggerated. But they celebrate Hitler and the idea of segregating people according to ethnicity.

I still don't condone punching nazis though, I don't really think that's a productive way of dealing with people who harbor idiotic and dangerous ideas. But the equivalence between people who describe themselves as communist and the people who describe themselves as nazis is entirely false, because only one of these groups today distances themselves from the atrocious actions of regimes self-describing as communist or national-socialist. If you find a guy who describes himself as a Stalinist or Maoist, the equivalence has merit to it, but I know many self-described communists - none are even remotely positively inclined towards any of these regimes.

On May 23 2018 15:59 Biff The Understudy wrote:

The thing that Danglar pretends to ignore there is that nazism was a success while communism was a failure. Nazis wanted extermination, Auschwitz, totalitarianism and war all along. That’s what they were here to do, that was the program. And they still do.

Communism is a completely different story, one of an ideology that failed. Gulags, Stalin, soviet oppression, Pol Pot and the endless list of horrors are not the program of Das Kapital. They are a consequence of utterly failing to put it in practice, because of the internal contradictions it contains. The fact that communists wanted the abolition of the state, while the communist experience have resulted in the greatest state power abuses of the XXth century speaks volume.

So yep, the moral equivalence between communism as such and nazism is as dumb as ever and saying that being a nazi or believing in the communist ideals is equivalent is, well, I would say to avoid ad hominem, typical.