Ive been thinking about state rights more lately...Give them everything they want and they wont want it type of thing. All blue states have to do is take in all the red state refugees looking for free healthcare and good jobs and watch the red states return to the wilderness then we can let the buffalo run free again.

Couldn't agree more with your last paragraph

Always annoys me when people dredge that one up. It's not really any different to when Christians drone on about how atheism is a murderous ideology because of Communist China and the Soviet Union. There's a distinction, and an important one, between a group of people with some shared set of beliefs being violent for some other reason, or being violent because of that shared set of beliefs. It would be absurd to argue, for instance, that the Iraq War was caused by the shared American belief that soccer sucks. The problem in Myanmar is pretty clearly nationalism and ethnic tribalism rather than the precepts of Buddhism. But it would also be absurd to head completely in the other direction and argue that things are always just in-group/out-group and that shared beliefs don't matter. That would be to argue, for instance, that everything that happened in WW2 was down to German nationalism and that the doctrines of fascism and Nazism were irrelevant.

It's almost like the best way to figure out whether shared beliefs might contribute to violence would be to examine those beliefs and see whether they could plausibly justify violence or exacerbate in-group/out-group dynamics, or maybe even to directly ask people what is motivating their actions. Disingenuous posts like the quoted are usually made so as to avoid having that conversation.

Yep. He is fantastic. Part of my YouTube rotation every night.

I get it now, you have some serious salt in you from some anti-Wall Street articles of his circa 2008.

The point the guy is making in the tweet thread (and it's a good one) is that...
- Greenwald rails against reports that cite anonymous government sources that claim this or that connection between Trump and Russia, or people trying to draw conclusions where no hard evidence exists, but
- Greenwald is also eager to believe in deep state subversion of the administration because of...reporting based on anonymous government sources, where no hard evidence exists.

That was a statement of opinion, not a logical argument. I extrapolated - you may say that 2 pages is too small a sample to do so, but that's, like, your opinion, man.

Joking aside, I was just drunk last night and trying to be incendiary. You have a point.

Perhaps some highly intelligent people who are capable of deep reflection and introspection are able to compartmentalise their irrational beliefs. To think that Joe Average is also able to do so is hubris.

While you tolerate, encourage or suborn some irrational beliefs while simultaneously discouraging others on the basis that they are irrational, you don't have much credibility.

Trump is watching FOXNews again.



Well...

lol,

It's not just the land though. Thoreau crashed with Emerson for years after leaving Walden while he struggled to pay off debts.

twitter.com/SamuelLJackson/status/838857880501641216

In a tortured attempt to drag this tangent back on topic, the Romanticism of the 19th century directly led to the millions of ex-urbanites living in economically wrecked towns today that Dvaut was ranting about before the election. Romanticism was also a major precursor to the rise of fascism. It should be viewed with a heavy dose of skepticism today, as the real world macro-social effects of "getting away from it all" have been pretty bad.

Cliffs: Thoreau is teh suck.

I will never be fully comfortable with the fact that Steve Doocy and Elizabeth Hasselbeck have a massive amount of pull on the President's World View.

Lol, sick article. Favorite paragraph:

What is he talking about on NATO expansion? What are the scare quotes doing around missile defense? Love it.

The "problem" in Myanmar is being stirred up in large part by Buddhist monks. It may well be that the Muslim Rohingya are subject to persecution for being a minority, while the Buddhist Rakhine minority are not subject to persecution just because, and the monks are doing all this stuff off the clock between nonthreatening rounds of meditation and soothing namastes, but another theory is that religions are always bad when taken seriously.

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/stat...87182354743296

Sam Jackson and others seem to think that the definition of immigrant is limited to only voluntary immigrants.

Not true, if it were true then the phrase "we are a nation of immigrants" would be a racist phrase and we would be using instead the phrase "we are a nation of immigrants and slaves"

Another phony issue. Carson spoke correctly, the liberals got it wrong. More phony SPIN.

Why is this such an important issue to you, hornbug? It's almost like Carson was speaking directly to racist whites such as yourself and not even worried about how intelligent black men like SLJ would take his statement.


https://twitter.com/SamuelLJackson/s...57880501641216

Its not important, its just another example of phony spin, like the phony perjury claim made by carving out a sentence fragment out of context.

You guys fall for the spin every time.

Slaves are technically immigrants in the same way that a woman you kidnap and keep locked in your basement is technically your houseguest.

Any common sense definition of the word immigrant does not include people taken by force to another country to work themselves until death for no payment.

I suppose it all turns on how much power and coherence you want to credit to the 'Deep State'. However, in general, isn't it just clear that there are interests in the US Intelligence community that are leaking in an anti-Trump manner? The existence of the leaks directly attests to that, and if their content is anonymous and unsourced it nonetheless doesn't mitigate their support of that.

I haven't read Greenwald's stuff for ages, and from that tweet thread it seems like he's claiming a quite a lot of power and coherence for the Deep State. That's from where, then, his hypocrisy stems. But the weaker claim that we don't know much about the interests or motives of the leakers, and that they come from a place that historically hasn't a great progressive record, still seems uncontroversial.

I think the above was a fair reason for scepticism at the start of the Trump-Russia leaks, especially in having them point to a more joined-up conspiracy, though it's not a sustainable position any more. At least that's what I hope, having been someone sceptical in the past.

No I think it's just like the Trayvon incident where when your side is clearly in the wrong you reach for the smallest, most trivial and unimportant details that "prove" your position to be correct. In this case it's a completely irrelevant dictionary definition.

Holy ****, hornbug is really close to breaking free from the matrix.