American politics

Again, past needn't be prelude. We hold out hope you've learned a thing or two.

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There was a reason at one point why the Americans would rather have the likes of Japan and Germany under their umbrella instead of allowing them to remilitarize themselves, but perhaps you can argue that we are no longer living in that world.

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A hopeful sign. Hopefully it represents a trend rather than a blip.

The Trump/Putin stuff this week has made my head spin. Absolute madness.

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I'm not saying that Trump is Putin's Manchurian candidate, but unless you perceive Mueller as a partisan hack without any morals (a man who was regarded as a life-long Republican prior to this moment) then what are his indictments about? Even if Trump is not personally involved, all U.S. intelligence agencies seem to agree that there was an active attempt made by Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Trump is opposed even by the Republican party--see John McCain as an example. Mueller's membership in the Republican party hardly makes him a friend of Trump. Rather, it pretty much makes him a party to the Deep State, which Trump is hellbent upon destroying.

As to whether or not the Rooskies attempted to influence the election, it makes no difference to me. All nations with vested interest in major elections try to influence them to one degree or another. Hell, the US put troops on Russian soil during the Russian Civil War in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from solidifying their control, so for us to whine about any penny-anty Russian interference is laughable, to put it charitably. The far graver concern is the existence of a partisan media establishment that doesn't even hide the fact that it is in the tank for the Leftist cause and will do everything in its colossal power to ensure that its agenda is put into place and that America becomes, effectively, a single-party state. This is the real threat to American democracy, not picayune Putin.

The GOP owns both houses and the White House, so I don't really see how the Leftist plan for total domination is working particularly well.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

As to whether or not the Rooskies attempted to influence the election, it makes no difference to me.

A lot of partisan hacks feel this way too, only because it meant keeping Hillary out of the office. Had the roles been reversed, I'm sure they'd feel just as apathetic about about Hillary winning with aide from another nation.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

As to whether or not the Rooskies attempted to influence the election, it makes no difference to me.

A lot of partisan hacks feel this way too, only because it meant keeping Hillary out of the office. Had the roles been reversed, I'm sure they'd feel just as apathetic about about Hillary winning with aide from another nation.

I wouldn't because I know this putative meddling was a drop in the bucket and had no influence on the outcome of the election. In the actual case of this past election, no media outlets, outside of Fox, even reported the leaks, or if they did, buried them deep in their publications where nobody would see them. Consequently, the reports of the Hilldebeest's indiscretions, which a competent and professional media would have dug up and reported on their own, had no effect.

Hate to blow my own horn again, but as a studious observer of American politics (albeit from afar), I called the election for Trump months before the DNC hacking and whatnot. I've no doubt that operatives of the Russian state did what they could to influence matters in Trump's favour (in a much less overt capacity than the US swung the 1996 election for Yeltsin - though I'm not seeking to engage in whataboutism), however I don't see a material effect on the outcome as a result. People who already didn't like Clinton - and there are understandably a lot of them - were hardly swayed merely as a result of finding out the DNC establishment favoured her over Sanders.

The main problem was that Clinton wasn't liked in key swing states. Her total number of votes was actually very respectable, but too many of them were in districts where it didn't really matter. And then they managed to not spend enough time and money changing that. Supposedly Slick Willie was one of the few people in the Clinton camp who saw this problem, but Hillary's campaign team ignored his advice.

So you had a relatively weak Dem candidate who ran a subpar campaign and lost (narrowly if you examine the differences in the key swing states which handed Trump the victory).

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Erica Ambler wrote:

Salomé wrote:

The main problem was that Clinton wasn't liked in key swing states. Her total number of votes was actually very respectable, but too many of them were in districts where it didn't really matter. And then they managed to not spend enough time and money changing that. Supposedly Slick Willie was one of the few people in the Clinton camp who saw this problem, but Hillary's campaign team ignored his advice.

So you had a relatively weak Dem candidate who ran a subpar campaign and lost (narrowly if you examine the differences in the key swing states which handed Trump the victory).

Hillary played identity politics and lost.

She calculated that she could insult America's white working-class men yet win because they were electorally insignificant compared to the combined black-latino-female vote. She really believed that good decent white women would abandon their husbands and families and vote on the basis of their genitalia.  

Educated idiots are the gift that keeps on giving.

To be fair, she lost the key swing states by a very small margin. But I agree that she was a very poor candidate whose value was almost entirely in the name recognition. Which was a curse in and of itself since clearly many people had strong negative feelings about the Clintons.

And--hosannas on highest--it looks quite likely that the Hildebeeste will again be the Dem nominee.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

And--hosannas on highest--it looks quite likely that the Hildebeeste will again be the Dem nominee.

Surely they could not be this stupid?

Salomé wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

And--hosannas on highest--it looks quite likely that the Hildebeeste will again be the Dem nominee.

Surely they could not be this stupid?

It's entirely possible. It's not as though the Dem field is exactly crowded with superb candidates.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Salomé wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

And--hosannas on highest--it looks quite likely that the Hildebeeste will again be the Dem nominee.

Surely they could not be this stupid?

It's entirely possible. It's not as though the Dem field is exactly crowded with superb candidates.

I'm backing Anne Hathaway. She's not the sort who'd use a black woman's murder to further her own flagging career.

I thought she had bounced back recently, first with that monster indie she did and now by how every reviewer called her the best thing about "Ocean's 8".

I wouldn't know, I haven't seen the film.

Trump would have been better off deleting his twitter account long ago, but I guess his ego can't handle the concept of quitting.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

This is what happens when you get your world view from Star Trek. Welcome to utopia...

Quote :

Millennial Couple Bikes Through ISIS Territory to Prove ‘Humans Are Kind’ and Gets Killed

"Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own... By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”

Austin and Geoghegan's dream trip came to a tragic and gruesome end when they got to Tajikistan, a country with a known terrorist presence. They were riding their bikes through the country on July 29 when a car rammed them, ​​according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed the couple to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.

Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the black ISIS flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill "disbelievers".

https://www.pluralist.com/posts/1824-millennial-couple-bikes-through-isis-territory-to-prove-humans-are-kind-and-gets-killed?view_source=zoomd&view_medium=zoomd&view_term=ISIS

Good god. Rare indeed is the time I have sympathy for catastrophically naive and idealistic Leftists, but that's a horrific fate even for such as they.

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