Subscribed with NYT with the Sunday home delivery.

awful post, banworthy

Where did I just read about people doing this post of normalizing or trying to make nonsense reasonable; it was informative. Bah, I'm not gonna find it but basically tl;dr stop.

I probably used to do this without realizing it.

Trump looks different without his goofy red tie.

Saw a pole somewhere that 72% want dems to work with trump and many are up for re election in 18.

Don't make compromises is the correct strat for the future but I do feel like eventually some D's are gonna start to crack realizing they can't both cater to the hardcore base and win re-election and I think republicans feel the same way. Maybe the infrastructure bill won't be awful but I expect most $ to trump cronies like everything else he wants to do.

I also don't trust that closed door republican intelligence trump investigation but at least there is one going on. Should be public/independent and trump/sessions nowhere near the damn thing. (and the fbi director minimum contact in there and never alone)

Lol @ that though.

No

This one did, a little over 100 days ago

He's made wildly inaccurate interpretations and assessments of Quranic scripture. Like, the sophomoric stuff you'd find on hate sites. It's always a way to bolster a weak argument. Saying something even as broad as 'the middle east is ****ed' or 'Wahhabism is ****ed' is still way too complex, especially when you can just say 'Islam is ****ed'. But the latter is never really supported.

The drawing of the prophet is the best example imo. People will point to this as an example of Islam being insane, but there's nothing in the Quran about it, and there's nothing in at least the 1st 600 years of Islam about it. Aside from the Abrahamic tradition concerning idolatry, nobody gave a ****. Also, the modern stance applies to all the prophets, like Jesus and Moses, not just Muhammad.

I don't recall Harris touching on the drawing specifically, but he's made similar 'mistakes'. It's just lazy and weak-ass thinking. If you want to make the claim, 'Islam is in bad shape, they've let the lunatics take over the asylum,' then fine, you'd have some fertile ground, but it seems easier for them to just say Islam is all lunatics from the 1st day. Geopolitics is hard, broadbrushing an entire major religion is easy.

I'm a 'hardcore' atheist myself and I believe that gives me the freedom to explore religions with a lack of bias, so it's especially disappointing to see Harris et al get infected with various biases. I guess that's where I split from the so-called new atheists. They take the idea that not all religions are created equal but make the mistake that this somehow means they can clarify and quantify the differences.

Some food for thought about making 'Islam is _____' statements:

Lestat,

Wtf are you talking about?

5ive,

I dunno about the first welfare state being 1058-1111. I don't think there's enough written material left to do more than speculate about it, but...

https://simianinthetemple.wordpress....elfare-system/

Kingdom of Israel 1050-930 BCE.

Lestat,

You're too late on the oligarchy business. We're trying to stop fascism now. I wish I could go back and tell everyone to wait a ****ing minute after the Secretary of Defense said "I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa" in 1953, but that ship has sailed.

"Trump’s baffling foreign policy is a central focus of the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend. Top officials from almost fifty countries—including Mattis and Vice-President Mike Pence—are attending the three-day event, which is the premier global forum on security policy. The preparatory report—written by an international team as the official “conversation starter”—uses stark language about the new American President. “The worries are that Trump will embark on a foreign policy based on superficial quick wins, zero-sum games, and mostly bilateral transactions—and that he may ignore the value of international order building, steady alliances, and strategic thinking,” it says. “Or, maybe worse, that he sees foreign and security policy as a game to be used whenever he needs distractions for domestic political purposes.” The report, “Post-Truth, Post-West, Post-Order?” adds candidly, “What is uncertain is how Trump’s core beliefs will translate into policy (and whether policies will be coherent).”"

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ders-the-world

https://www.securityconference.de/en...y-report-2017/

Unpredictable idiot has the world's most powerful military, has essentially no defensive need for it, and yet wants to expand it dramatically. Rest of world more than concerned.

I didn't have a problem with its content. It's just that its content could have been reduced to like five sentences without significant loss. And I thought it was funny how he started out all GAME THEORY YO and "Russia enters the Game with" blah blah blah, and that's basically it for the 'game theory' aspect of things.

https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/s...17967550447616

I posted that trump tweet about Obama campaigning for Hillary on facebook. Argument has now dissolved into someone telling me if I thought I could do better I should have ran for president. Had to inform them that I am not legally eligible for another 10 years. This guy knows how old I am.

It's unlikely he knows how old you have to be to run for president.

Brought up Russia to a trumper tonight.

He attempted to justify Russia's election hacking and influence by saying that they were just trying to avoid a war so they were morally in the right.

Can't make this **** up.

This seems like the right thing to do. The past few days feel like Trump and his Team got back on the offensive. It isn´t as effective as it could be since Trump still does have his Twitter account but it works, everbody is speaking about his press conference and his rally while the whole Flynn scandal already is fading away. As are those topics that should still be dominant in the news:

1. Trumps conflict of interest
2. The lack of real policies other the "deport them all"
3. The fast decline of the USA´s role in foreign politics
4. His cabinet picks, DeVos and Sessions especially
5. The striping of regulation that protects the people.

Iam not saying they are playing 4d Chess but having a circus in front helps quite a lot with doing all the shady stuff unnoticed. There should be less making fun of his idiocy and more reporting on the topics.


Many (not brainwashed) Trump supporters will turn quickly after explaining to them that trump is selling out the future of their kids education

fwiw Rabin was assassinated during a rally.

I literally just checked CNN to see if Yitzak (sp?) Rabin was just assassinated at a rally.

Let us all LOLOLOL @ me.

Wanted to come back to this. It seems I was right above. It was bull****. Apparently "No Go Zones" in Europe where Sharia law rules is a super popular right-wing meme. But as reported in the links below, there are no such zones in Sweden.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/no-go-zone-myth

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/p...o-go-zones-726

http://www.thelocal.se/20160923/emba...sweden-hungary

The guy in Carlson's video, Ami Horowitz, appears to be a fraud. He lied about the no-go zones and kept quoting the non-existent surge in crime that was shown in some non-existent statistics. Here are legitimate reports that show no such crime surge from 2014 to 2016.

https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentRe...aspx?cid=19681

http://www.thelocal.se/20170112/swed...stats-analyzed

He also has a history of making FoxNews meow chow documentaries EXPOSING liberal hypocrisy, by which I mean they present heavily edited encounters with randoms on the street, akin to Jay Leno's Jaywalking segments. There is also apparently a thread about him on TwoPlusTwo, but it was in Chezland, so I didn't read it.

Probably the veteran posters are LOL-ing at me for this, but I am stunned that this FoxNews alt-world exists. They feed viewers blatant distortions, straight up DGAF. And now their audience includes the President of the United States, who makes policy decisions based on their garbage reporting. I have no other response than despair.

Muslims ruining Sweden is such a well rehearsed talking point this has its own wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden
(Spoiler: it's BS)

Moshe Dayan is still alive and kicking though right?