Sounds pretty dumb to me.

If I recall, I watched this lecture and found it powerful and emotionally resonant. It goes into some of the ideological underpinnings of the Nazi's need for territorial expansion.

If it's this one... there's another lecture that he did that coincided with his book Bloodlands... I can't remember which is which. Either way, it'll be a captivating lecture.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that ideology was a more important factor than economics (or vice versa).

Maybe good isn't the right word, something more like sensible might be more fitting.

Remember Charles Murray's book? The one which outlines a strategy for defeating regulations by convincing useful idiots to violate the law, then provide them with legal defense, playing the "restrucure law through the courts; chisel at inconvenient regulations" game?

So first y'all had those many.... many social ties between Trump and the Russian government.
Then y'all had a bombshell report that the Russian government funded the Brexit campaign.
Now y'all have a federal investigation of the NRA for taking money from a Russian oligarch and laundering it to the Trump campaign.



Criminal investigations of alt right ties to Putin are coming up almost as fast as American school shootings.

Police discretion is an historical pillar of the American criminal justice system and its antecedents. If police officers are going around enforcing business regulations on children, they aren't doing their jobs. So even if this is what's happening, it's the cops' fault for enabling an anti-regulation backlash, not Kraft's fault for taking a PR opportunity.

Police officers aren't supposed to be robots with guns.

It's almost as if.. being that kind of right wing is so bad for the country, foreign adversaries want to fund it.

I know I've posted about this before, but I'll post about it again.

We descendants of Great Britain use a legal system called common law. The underlying belief of a common law system is that no set of rules or laws can accommodate every situation; sometimes exceptions need to be made for the social good, sometimes ambiguities must be resolved. Everybody involved in the justice system is expected to exercise their own discretion: police officers are expected to issue warnings when they feel it is necessary; prosecutors are responsible for deciding who should face charges; judges are responsible for resolving errors and ambiguities; and jurors are empowered to nullify unjust laws.

Common law systems stand apart from civil law systems, which generally expect all laws to be interpreted as-written and worded unambiguously. It is a very different attitude about justice and it's not compatible with what we do.


So, yeah, for example, those literalist/originalist interpretations of the US constitution? Super un-American. Move back to France, ya loser.


But seriously though, conservatives in western countries have been doing a lot to undermine common law and individual discretion in our justice systems. Stuff like mandatory minimum sentencing, which disempowers judges from using their discretion about sentencing, and similar attacks on jury nullification and even the right to trial. I suspect that the US police brutality and militarization problem is because of similar attacks on police discretion, creating a mindset where there's no such thing as a person having a bad day, just criminals that you are required to punish.

aka being a selfish criminal

fixed.

Sorry Eversor.

ya ****in' yanks gave us Stephen Harper. So in my lived experience, there aren't any kinds of right-wing that foreigners don't want to fund.

I mean, he does seem to have a world view where it's utterly incomprehensible that a political party can just be a power-hungry, ideologically void group of savages.

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/06/11/southern-california-cheesecake-factories-cheated-559-janitors-out-of-wages-labor-commissioner-charges/

JoB cReAtOrS

Also:



Given my guilty pleasure of watching awful conservative movies, this ought to be ****ing amazing.

I wonder what kinda metaphor Dinesh "Dumbass" D'Souza wanted to make with the Birth of a Nation reference..

On the subject of US-Canada relations, I'd like to educate some of you guys about how these US-Canada trade negotiations are going.


Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum for (legally) national security reasons. He did this, by admission, to pressure the Canadian government to make major concessions in other areas during the NAFTA negotiations. That's the background.

One of the key concessions Trump is demanding from Canada is the end to our dairy supply chain management system. This system is explicitly designed to protect the Canadian dairy industry from both deeply subsidized international competition (the US) as well as oversupply crises (the US). The thing is, Canadians super hate dairy supply chain management. The Canadian dairy industry is very small, almost to the point that it's politically irrelevant, and Canadians have a big appetite for dairy products. Having to pay upwards of 6x as much for dairy products is a major source of irritation for most of us, so ending it is pretty popular. It's definitely something that Canada could have eventually given up in negotiations.

Not anymore, though.

Let's flip this situation on its head. Americans are basically uninformed about the world. I'm not saying this to attack you guys, I'm stating it as a fact. You are not told what is happening, your media doesn't think you'll care or it doesn't want to tell you, so you don't know what other countries are doing or why. Canadians are very different. We are, almost to a fault, voracious consumers of world news. Especially American news. It's just one of the ways our people are different.

So let's say a bigger foreign power imposed tariffs under a national security exception against the United States, in order to pressure American negotiators during a trade dispute. Some kind of alternate universe Canada that had an economy 9 times bigger than yours. It would probably work! American steel and aluminum manufacturers would be furious; they would be on the phones 24/7 to their representatives demanding concessions and progress in the negotiations. That's all it would be, though. Just a little bit of internal pressure from some important industries. Chances are, nobody else in the United States would even know that it had happened. The few people who read WSJ or Bloomberg would see some article about metal tariffs and probably be like, "huh, so that's why my beer's gotten more expensive" and moved on with their lives.

Canadians aren't Americans, though. There are some pretty important cultural differences here. When the President of the United States says "you guys are our enemies, so we're putting tariffs on you", or "your prime minister is a pushover", we know about it. We know what you guys are doing, we understand why and how it affects us, and yes, we even sometimes take it personally.

Gonna put this in italics so any Americans skimming this snap back to attention:

After Donald Trump's recent shenanigans, Canadian voters will not tolerate any concessions to the United States. None. Not a mile, not an inch. Not even getting rid of that dairy supply chain management thing that all of us mutually hate. It's not about fairness or cooperation now, it's personal and individual. It's a matter of national and personal pride.

I've seen an insider account that suggests Trump's people were caught totally flat-footed by the Canadian domestic response. Like, they honestly have no effin clue why Canadians are angry, why average Canadians would even know about it, why in the name of Christ would any sane person care about one crappy commodity industry that's worth less than 0.3% of national GDP unless they personally worked in it. It's just business! It's just a negotiating tactic! Americans would never react this way! -- I have no idea about the veracity of the account, but it seems plausible to me. The master businessmen and genius negotiators in the Trump administration negotiated their way out of even talking about getting a better deal, because they don't understand people or cultures. And one of the most important cultural differences between the US and Canada is that Canadians are already worried about how much stuff we buy from the US.

Earlier today, our house of commons ("congress") unanimously passed a motion condemning the US government and expressing solidarity with trade retaliation against the United States. Keep in mind, these political parties do not like each other. The people who vote for them do not like each other. They don't agree on anything, ever. Can you imagine the US congress unanimously supporting... well, anything about foreign policy? We're exactly the same way about most issues. That's how serious this issue has gotten.

So this is where we are today: The Canadian government may stay at the NAFTA table for the sake of diplomacy, but effectively the talks are dead. Canada cannot agree to even a fair compromise anymore (any political party that offered one would cease to be a party after the next election). Targeted retaliation against the US Midwest will kick in soon, and depending on what the US government does next, US service exports are probably going to get hit after that. All of this is overwhelmingly supported by a voting public that would literally rather suffer a prolonged depression than give Donald Trump a political win, a public that is increasingly supportive of boycotting American products and brands even without government policy guiding them to do so.

Effectively, Donald Trump has successfully negotiated away access to America's largest single foreign market.

oh boy, that movie poster is not going to age well.

Wait, wtf, I thought that poster was a joke. Is that a real movie??

P.S.: according to the US Department of Commerce, service and goods exports to Canada supported 1.6 million US jobs in 2015 (just Canada, not including other trading partners like Mexico or the EU). Whether Canada has to make up for the loss of US goods through domestic production or imports from other sources, it would still put 1.6 million Americans out of their current jobs.

People are too eager to demonize and dehumanize. I once heard Evan Osnos speak. He was talking about China or something. But he said one of the most terrifying lessons of World War II (his parents were Holocaust survivors, IIRC) is that not just "the masses" can become radicalized, but that even urbane, cosmopolitan, educated types such as ourselves can turn to violence and develop murderous hatred for others. I'm not criticizing either of you or even asking you to stop. I'm just telling you why I don't engage in this, to the extent that it's principled. That's actually a pretty small part of it. I also find it kind of boring and lazy to attribute ~evil~ to people as thing that's motivating them to do things that I don't like.

I recall you had a problem with people discussing the historical rationalizations the Nazis used for the holocaust though?


I don't really disagree with you, and the absolute last thing I want (no, really, the last thing I want) is a philosophical discussion about what evil means.

Maybe though,... a member of an international crime syndicate who runs for political office in order to use that office to commit treason that benefits himself and his foreign superiors? Maybe "evil" is a useful shorthand for someone like that? Can we agree that such a person is evil?

Or maybe when people say "conservatives are bad" can we agree that maybe they actually think "conservative policies are unconditionally harmful", so they aren't actually saying those people are evil or intentionally doing harm, but nonetheless believe all of their beliefs are wrong and their actions have bad consequences? Can we agree that someone can believe someone's entire world view is bad without considering that person to be evil or less than human?

Just want to be clear at the outset here, I'm not trying to convince you guys to change your behaviors and I'm not trying to reprimand you here. I've made my peace with this stuff.



That's not quite how I remember it. If I recall, the particular point that I disagreeing with what the comparison of the Trump administration in its opening months to the Nazi regime. My criticism was something along the lines of this: "there may be many similarities, but making the comparison also invokes some of the very worst things that the Nazis did; and there have been other regimes that have slid from democracy to dictatorship, so why can't we talk about those instead since talking about Nazis is also a implicitly moral condemnation of Trump that gets in the way of really understanding what's going on in a clear way?" I don't want to relitigate that argument, because I'm past it and it doesn't really exercise me anymore, and I don't want to have a new argument about what that old discussion was about. But that's how I remember my criticism.



Calling Trump evil is something different from calling conservatives/Republicans in general evil. But as far as your question goes: what you're talking about doesn't seem to me like it's what makes him evil. Separating families at the border and the complete lack of human decency and malevolence that it requires seems closer to evil. Everything with the Russia scandal seem to make him a duplicitous traitor more than anything else.



Reid just called Republicans "a power-hungry, ideologically void group of savages". That's only on this page. There's plenty of ad hominem attacks that make it clear that what's being attacked isn't only their ideas.

He was talking about the party.

You're okay calling a single person evil for specific reasons, based on what you said above. Why not the Republican party? There are only, what, 400 members who actually matter when you're talking about how the organization as a whole behaves. Do you need to name them all? How small does the group need to be before you can call them "evil" for the specific reason of supporting policies you believe are intentionally and demonstrably malicious?

This was added in in the edit, but it touches on the core of the issue.



Yes, obviously. Still, demonization is a slippery slope. You guys can engage in it if you want. But I don't, and that's how I lead by example, to go back to that other thread. I don't want to live in a world where people do that, so I don't do it myself. But I've never thought that I'd stop anyone from doing it.

I'm just trying to figure out where we're crossing your line, here.

Instead of saying "conservatives are *******s", do we need to explicitly say "the policies of conservative governments in practice are wholly and entirely destructive, socially, economically, and nationally, and represent the interests of an extreme minority of people who intentionally seek to harm the people of the country in order to unjustly enrich themselves, which is a real ******* thing to do and the voters must be really stupid for believing it but they are not themselves *******s just because they fell for it (although if they vote for it knowing what it is, they are also *******s)".

Or is that also crossing the line? Is this a "you can't say anything bad unless you say something nice first" situation?

It's not clear that the Republican party means Republican representatives in congress and party elites, and not also registered voters who declare their party affiliation as Republican, or even a broader understanding of the term.

That being said, I actually didn't call Trump evil, I said a certain thing this administration does appears to be closer to evil, which I think says more than anything else what I'm inclined to characterize as evil. It seems closer to evil since it comes from real malevolence and a real indifference to human suffering while actively interfering to make people's lives worse. This is a fairly psychological understanding of evil as a kind of asociality, but... whatever.

Anyway, is that what drives Republican congressmen? I'm inclined to think it isn't. I think many of them want to speak out against Trump more firmly, but they can't because it'd be political suicide. It's too bad Republicans in congress aren't speaking out against Trump more loudly, but they're constrained by numerous systemic forces: Trump's popular amongst their base, so they can't go against him because it'd be an end to their political careers come election day, they can't impeach the president, because then the Republican party would be out of the game for a generation, and they have to pass incredibly regressive legislation, because, thanks to the state of campaign fundraising, they're currently more beholden to their donor class than to the voters. Anyway, when it comes to Republican congressmen, I don't think you can blame them because they refuse to fall on their swords.

The thing that bothers me is treating the forum as if it were a live journal. As if someone is only writing because they want to express their frustrations for the sake of their own catharsis, and not because they're using the forum as a medium of communication, as if the fact that someone else might want to read what they're saying as an afterthought. As I said in the other thread, I don't want to be in a position to formulate rules about what's appropriate and what isn't, because I have no idea what the line is.

All it takes for evil to triumph...


but I wasn't kidding, I don't want to get into a philosophical argument about what evil is.

I'm fine with that. It doesn't seem like it's that central to what we're talking about anyway.

A rule could be: if you think you're writing is a ****post, don't post it.

I think something that's been misunderstood is what kind of content I'd rather not see here. Obviously we disagree on some stuff. I don't really care about the content as much as I care about the spirit with which things are posted. One of the insults that's been thrown around here is "that's a Facebook quality post" or "take that back to Reddit". Like, I'd actually like to think that we have discussions of a higher quality here than those social media sites. Treating the forum like a newsfeed would be a no-no if I were a rule maker. Obviously these are very subjective criteria, but it is one of those "I know it when I see it" sort of things.

Obviously.

Earlier in this thread we were talking about US infrastructure spending, and I cited an article from Strong Towns. (It was an expose about this consultant who applied GAAP to municipalities, showing that pretty much every US city is actually bankrupt, just not aware of it yet. Super cool article. You should look it up.) A certain more conservative learning poster basically replied with "ugh, I hate that Strong Towns crap". Boom. Discussion over.

(If you're reading this, sorry for using you as an example. I know you aren't all like that. It's just a pertinent exchange similar to many others I have had on this forum.)


In my experience anybody who would be strongly turned off by harsh anti-Republican invective is probably just going to waste my time trying to grapple with the substantive part, and I'm personally done trying to discuss such issues with those people. So you're totally wrong, I'm not writing posts for myself. I'm writing posts for an audience that just doesn't include certain people who you personally think should be included. They have exactly zero interest in anything I have to say, don't trust any references I would make, and the feeling is frankly mutual.

I've seen you ****post within the last 48 hours. So yeah, like, don't write it like it's a challenge dude.

Eh, if I've found the right discussion, I thought that interaction actually produced an interesting debate.

I'm also not really criticizing you on this point as much as I am other people here. I assumed that you'd recognize that, because for the most part you evidently don't treat the forum like a news feed or a livejournal.

Oh, I agree. The best discussions happen between people who disagree about stuff. I love talking through issues with people rightward from me, liberals, libertarians. When two peoples beliefs stem from a system of reasoning, even if you don't even agree on how to reason about things, you can at least learn a lot from each other, challenge each other, ask questions from each other. Even if you don't learn anything from the other person, you at least learn how to argue your own beliefs better.

But when someone's made up their mind based only on feelings, or one personal anecdote, or a prepackaged opinion that a trusted source gave them absent context, well,... I dunno. The discussion's pretty much over at that point. They're happy to tell you want they want and what policies they think will achieve those ends, but they can't connect the two. They can't answer questions about it because they've never asked any. They can't tolerate someone challenging their beliefs, because it's all too personal to them - any kind of challenge is an attack. There are a looooot of those kinds of people out there. Both on the left and on the right. Mostly on the right. None of them are worth the time to discuss politics.

That said, not all of those people are those people about every specific subject. Sometimes it's just some things. So you have to learn not to talk about those things with those people, and basically hope that you never get enough of them together to elect Donald Trump.


I'm also not innocent, and I can't answer for others.

re: Donald Trump, pretty cool* Reddit AMA about the negative impacts that people have personally experienced because of him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8qbnls/since_donald_trump_has_been_president_of_the/


(* you may think it's uncool. ymmv.)

Yeah... I guess I'm not as bothered by a lot of that stuff. I find it illuminating to hear conservative talking points coming out of the mouth of somone who isn't a talking head on TV. And, actually, the personal anecdotes are especially valuable, imo. They often provide the deepest insights into why people think how they do, and what their grievances are, and the emotions that are attached to their politics. It helps me appreciate why an issue that would never be a galvanizing issue for me are for them.

"For the entire first year I thought that I was part of an elaborate Twilight Zone production that was feeding me ridiculous news, etc and filming my reactions. I have schizophrenia."

If this is real then ****.

I don't doubt any of that thread. BTW, poverty is rapidly increasing in America right now.

I don't know, might be an image iconic of this era.



Yes, it's real.

Goddamn, my post was long, but this thread is ****ing endless. It just keeps going.

I'm surprised and glad to see evangelical pastors in their basically condemning their entire congregations for becoming anti-Christian bigots.