I think it's not quite hate, but a combination of fear and selfishness that is effectively similar.

I think we all are.

I don't agree. I think he hates being slighted by anyone, irrespective of color.

@microbet. Selfishness is a very big thing. I missed that one.

The context was that some have such a big prejudice against Muslims that they would still be uncomfortable. On the other hand I would definitely feel extremely uncomfortable cavorting with the Saudi Arabia government (or with trump).

Oh I wasn't suggesting that he didn't for a moment. I'm speculating that when it happens the racist/sexist attitude would manifest.

Yeah, well I don't think he's as racist as people make him out to be frankly.

Of course Israel was pissed at Obama. Who cares? I don't care if Trump pisses them off.

The issue is with intelligence. You think Israel is going to share anything they don't want shared with us? What about any other country? There's a reason intelligence officials were trying to do damage control on the issue.

So Trump's actions mean we might have less information. That's bad.

The best description is that he's a racial opportunist. In the same way that George Wallace was a civil rights moderate until he lost an election to a hard-line anti civil rights guy and said he wouldn't ever be "out-n*ggered" again, racism for Trump is an means to an end, whatever latent racism he has not withstanding.

I don't know how playable nukes are in such close quarters. I used to think like you do on that particular facet of Israel's vulnerability, like "yeah they just play the nuke card and that's game over". But as I have seen more wars unfold it is clear that you need boots on the ground to really win. Israel simply doesn't have the population to win a war against the region- not enough boots. It's one thing to nuke a civilian population. But, presumably, by the time it would take to create the need to use nukes they would be facing organized armies traveling towards them. That's not nearly so easy a nuclear target, and if the battlefield is nearby then you have to worry about the fallout onto your own population. Then I saw some extensive interviews with 5 previous Israeli Defense Ministers. Some of them also held the opinion that Israel could not win a war against the region and were worried that they came close to provoking the end of the state. If anyone on the planet knows whether or not Israel could win a war against the region it would be them.

But don't feel bad- that is your least dumb opinion on the larger topic.

It's interesting you point out that the weapons are pointed at their allies. Our security planners share that concern, and they view Israel as the biggest threat to security. The world population puts us first, with Israel in the top 5.

Well if they can just "nuke it and forget it" then why do they need our help all the time? During Protective Edge Israel actually ran out of bullets, so much fun they were having shooting fish in a barrel. Begging us for bullets for to shoot up a defenseless population doesn't seems unbecoming of the stature you project.

They do it all the time for political reasons. You see, all they have to do is start killing kids to provoke some sort of response from the Palestinian populations they hold captive. Then they use that response to mouth rhetoric about their political high ground as they kill even more innocent people and expand the settlements. It's all about the settlements. All the occupation, the torture, the indiscriminate bombing, the use of chemical weapons, threats of nuclear weapons, convincing us to attack Iraq, it's all about their colonial enterprise. Israel is taking land that doesn't belong to them and forcing out the native population with death and destruction.

They want land more than peace. And they don't want the sort of peace which is stable. They want peace through security, through threats, intimidation and executing those threats through human atrocities. They don't want peace through diplomacy because they know their fundamental mission, an ethnically pure state achieved through ethnic cleansing and maintained through violence, is fundamentally immoral. And they should know that, for obvious reasons.

Diplomacy and ethnic cleansing don't pair nicely. But by now Israel has organized their whole society around violence and suppression, becoming weapons and suppression technology suppliers to the world. And conflict. They supply a lot of conflict.

And why should support be slipping? The all powerful Palestinian propaganda machine? lol

Or the people who feel guilty about not being the highest contributors to society blame minorities and find some sense of self worth by recreating social orders in which they are at least above somebody. Therefore it is the guilt ridden failures who perpetuate racism in order to boost their self worth, not for penitence.

You see, when you jut pull things out of your ass you can just say anything. Another example I gave in response to this typical conservative refrain:

"If you give rich people tax breaks then they will reinvest that money to create jobs."

To which my rejoinder:

"You have to tax the rich in order to give them incentive to make more money by creating more jobs"

was not meant to be taken seriously but just to show that without an empirical basis almost any opinion can seem reasonable.

Sklansky, we should continue this. You say some more unsupported nonsense and I think I can produce reasoning on par with yours but which comes to the exact opposite conclusion.

No they didn't. They chose an entity we can refer to as not Hillary. Had they chose Hillary the consequences would have been similar, just with different words to go along. She intended to ramp up fossil fuel consumption in her own way through support for fracking.

You're misplacing your hate for Trump voters away from where it should really be- the democrat party.

lol

Hey P7 laureates, tell us more about Clinton "pay for play" with charity donations?


https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/...45700937179136

A selection of Trump news from alpha:

Cliffs, since I know Trumpkin eyes glaze over preventing them from reading long posts criticizing Daddy: Trump has, for a long time and in debates with Hillary, been like "taking money from the Saudis is bad". Ivanka is taking $100m from them, 4x the amount he reprimanded Hillary for in the debate.

Trump voters are getting nothing they wanted (lol "America first", Kushner intervened in the Saudi arms deal to slash $10b off Lockheed's price tag for the Saudis) and lots they thought they wouldn't get, i.e. Trump bowing both literally and figuratively to the Saudis like every American president ever.

Also, orbs.

I think the questions to ask ourselves are as follows.

What can a rich person do with his money if she is given a tax break that will not benefit the economy and therefore help the economy?

Has there ever been a study done that showed giving someone less incentive to do something will make them more likely to do that activity?

oy vey

Maybe he just really likes walls?

Is that where they think there's a stream of holy water and they bathe and drink from it but it's actually sewage?

LOL. You really are off the reservation.

They can use it on consumption.

To say that the money will benefit people doesn't say anything of the magnitude of the benefits.

No company is going to pay significantly more than they have to to hire people. They're going to pay basically whatever the market rate is. And if someone takes a job that they're almost indifferent to (in the sense that there're a lot of other jobs that they'd be equally happy to take), their benefit is marginal at best. Of course if they take that job it opens up a new seat at the old job, so that someone else has available to them a job they marginally prefer, and so on, and so forth.

The total benefit though comes nowhere close to the cost of labor. It's a small fraction of it. And the more competitive the labor markets are the closer these benefits approach zero.

Now people love to complain about how inefficient governments are, but there're very few social programs that you could spend it on that wouldn't serve society better than luxury consumption for a rich person. And when we talk about government inefficiencies, it's usually in the form of inflated wages for people who aren't themselves wealthy anyways - so it's not like the money is getting punted off as it would in the case of a rich guy buying a new lambo.

What % of our economy is consumer consumption based? Who has a higher marginal propensity to spend an extra dollar? Do you think the current low interest rates could be partially due to wealth inequality? Do you think there are currently a lack of investment dollars with bonds near all time highs and stocks near all time highs?

Consumption is of course good for the economy as the company receiving that money is now able to spend more money (invest in plant and equipment, hire more people, pay a dividend to grandma, etc).

I'm not sure what your point is in the second paragraph about people leaving their job and then being replaced. Can you explain please?

Why do you believe an extra dollar is better off in the hands of a poor person than a rich person? To date the avg. rich person has helped the economy more than the avg. poor person - why do you think that extra dollar will change this?