Politics Episode 7: Remake of Episode 4

[213374U]

Edit: How moronic is our society, that girls now have to compete against boys in athletics? http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/06/06/transgender-freshman-sprinter-born-a-male-wins-two-girls-state-championships/?utm_content=buffer0d16d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

Not the first instance I've seen, either. I wonder why the rest of the competitors would go along with that -- it's the same as running against someone that is an open PED user. Is there some sort of obligation on HS athletes that forces them to compete? Do they forfeit sponsor pay or something if they withdraw in protest?

 

Regardless, beyond the race itself, I thought the father's comments were disturbing. Basically "IDGAF about anyone else, all I care about is my son/daughter's happiness". I wonder if he realizes that if everyone operated on that premise, it would be back to the law of the jungle overnight.

 

 

 

Cultural difference... between people with culture and the ones without:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/london-bridge-terror-attack-saudi-arabia-football-team-criticism-minutes-silence-a7778976.html

 

Saudi being **** again? I'm shocked. Again, walk out. Refuse to participate in a competition with these ****heads. That would have made headlines.

 

Of course, that does mean forfeiting possible performance bonuses, so we'll just feign righteous outrage and go on with our day, business as usual. Heh.

Edited June 8, 2017 by 213374U

[Maedhros]

Charming: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/06/08/saudi-arabia-football-team-fail-line-minutes-silence-honour/

 

Edit: Ah nvm was posted above.

Edited June 8, 2017 by Thingolfin

[Malcador]

Not sure Australia can afford a 3-0 defeat in qualifying. Though if they only beat SA 3-2 maybe they shouldn't go, heh.

 

Well not that bad, apparently they just formed up on their side but were quiet?

Edited June 8, 2017 by Malcador

[Agiel]

Re: Trump and "loyalty":

 

[Gfted1]

Hawaii Becomes First State to Enact Law to Align Goals With Paris Climate Accord.

 

We're saved! HUZZAH!

 

Now if they could only remove their heads from their rectums long enough to allow the building of the largest optical telescope in the Northern hemisphere, then everything would be cool.

[Gfted1]

Trump’s Climate Withdrawal Is An Impeachable Offense.

 

[Zoraptor]

Charming: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/06/08/saudi-arabia-football-team-fail-line-minutes-silence-honour/

 

Edit: Ah nvm was posted above.

 

Vaguely related.

 

Cultural sensitivity definitely works both ways. UK rugby writers are all precious manbabies crap, but there's certainly a point to be made about having a minutes silence for victims of a knife attack then having a haka with throat slitting gestures immediately after, and somebody should have thought about it.

[Gromnir]

biggest loser from public comey hearing today were mccain. honest, and am not joking, we were concerned for mccain.  he did not seem well.  anything but sentorian, his voice were weak and strained. his line of questioning were confused, repetitive and often nonsensical.  had us genuine worried for his health/condition.

[Blarghagh]

That's a charitable way to describe it. The man's clearly senile.

[Malcador]

 

Charming: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/06/08/saudi-arabia-football-team-fail-line-minutes-silence-honour/

 

Edit: Ah nvm was posted above.

Vaguely related.

 

Cultural sensitivity definitely works both ways. UK rugby writers are all precious manbabies crap, but there's certainly a point to be made about having a minutes silence for victims of a knife attack then having a haka with throat slitting gestures immediately after, and somebody should have thought about it.

Wasn't that gesture banned long ago?

 

As for the Saudis, shame this video ignores them other than one walking

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=26&v=fNUo8Khfxsk

[Bartimaeus]

That's a charitable way to describe it. The man's clearly senile.

From the concerned looks of his colleagues, I think I have to agree with Gromnir: that didn't seem like his usual self. Hopefully he wasn't having a mini-stroke or something, but it would explain his behavior.

[redneckdevil]

As much as I disagree with their choice, I see no wrong in chosing not to participate. They went to where they were told to go if they didn't want to participate. May seem rude, but they have that right. It goes both ways.

[Zoraptor]

 

 

Charming: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/06/08/saudi-arabia-football-team-fail-line-minutes-silence-honour/

 

Edit: Ah nvm was posted above.

Vaguely related.

 

Cultural sensitivity definitely works both ways. UK rugby writers are all precious manbabies crap, but there's certainly a point to be made about having a minutes silence for victims of a knife attack then having a haka with throat slitting gestures immediately after, and somebody should have thought about it.

Wasn't that gesture banned long ago?

 

 

The All Blacks took it out of their new haka soon after it was launched, but it wasn't 'banned' in the normal sense. Haka are mostly used for marketing nowadays, so having a throat slit gesture was counter productive to Brand All Blacks®. Their more famous (Ka Mate/ Te Rauparaha) haka never had it in.

 

The one done by the Blues was a bespoke haka for the match occasion. There are a load of different haka used by different groups- most schools including my albinoesque whitey white mcwhite one have them for example- but the only ones I've seen with the throat slitting gesture were the Blues one from Saturday and Kapa o Pango (the secondary AB's one). Pretty tone deaf choice in the circumsatnces, though the haka would have been designed months ago.

[Bartimaeus]

In other news, it looks like the conservatives in the UK may be in for a big loss tonight after calling for a snap election. Originally projected to win somewhere around 40-50 seats, they're now projected to lose about 20-15, which would cost them their majority, likely leading to another election. Will have to see how that turns out...

Edited June 8, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[Agiel]

Emphases mine.

 

Trump’s Budget Is American Caesarism

On militarism, exhaustion, and decadence.

By Robert D. Kaplan

 

President Donald Trump’s new budget has been faulted for craven cuts to a raft of health care and civil society programs that taken together literally help provide for the general welfare of the citizenry. But it also seeks to raise the Defense Department’s budget by 10 percent, and that of the Department of Homeland Security by almost 7 percent, while cutting the State Department by 29 percent and eliminating funding for such estimable institutions as the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. These proposals in and of themselves signify cultural and political decline by any historical measure.

 

The rise of the military, if coupled with the undermining of civilian aspects of national power, demonstrates a spiritual exhaustion and a descent into Caesarism. Named after Julius Caesar — who replaced the Roman Republic with a dictatorship — Caesarism is roughly characterized by a charismatic strongman, popular with the masses, whose rule culminates in an exaggerated role for the military. America is moving in this direction.

 

It isn’t that some civilian agencies don’t deserve paring down or even elimination, nor is it that the military and other security forces don’t deserve a boost to their financial resources. Rather, it is in the very logic, ideology, and lack of proportionality of Trump’s budget that American decline, decadence, and Caesarism are so apparent.

 

The United States, while not a formal empire, has been in an imperial-like situation since the end of World War II, when America began to construct a liberal world order in Europe and Asia. That world order has been characterized — like Rome, Venice, Britain, and France at their zeniths — by a dynamic combination of military, intellectual, economic, and cultural power. Each element is as important as the others.

 

Cold War America boasted the United States Information Agency and the U.S. Agency of International Development to project its liberal and economic values, just as Rome spread Latin, built roads, and granted citizenship to the elites of distant lands to promote its values. Venice had its explorers and merchants augment its navy; Britain sponsored a whole class of linguists and area experts to extend its colonial ambitions; and France emphasized the teaching of the French language among peoples in the developing world. Rome began to decline when the empire gradually became top-heavy with a military armature at the expense of a civilizing mission. The balance between diplomatic and military elements allowed these empires to survive as long as they did, until exhaustion, often brought about by war and their own misrule, set in.

 

In the modern era of the U.S. quasi-imperial experiment, the State Department, USIP, and the Wilson Center have been vital foundations of national power designed to project our values for generations. This is now ending. For example, Trump wants to increase the size of the Navy to more than 350 ships from its current total of about 275 ships. But a principal role of the Navy, by virtue of its deployment patterns, is to enhance the influence of American diplomacy. That’s why a weaker State Department works to undermine the effect of a stronger Navy. As for USIP, it took on its bureaucratic personality during the Ronald Reagan administration, when it was forged into an engine of area expertise and conflict resolution built on sturdily realist internationalist principles. The Wilson Center does for America something vaguely similar to what the granting of citizenship to foreign elites did for Rome — it brings some of the finest minds from all over the country and parts of the world together to study American foreign policy, thus familiarizing themselves with Washington and thereby improving relationships among countries. It is a subtle and indirect process. But put that all together with our diplomatic and military reach, and you start to have the basis of a benign form of American influence worldwide.

 

No one of these pillars can stand on its own, obviously. The military, absent these other elements, acquires a different, bleaker personality. A domineering American military, shorn of an equally effective diplomatic service and lacking cultural outreach, is itself undermined as a moral force. And without that, alliances — built on a shared liberal vision — become harder to maintain. The difference between alliance building and outright hegemony can be a fine one. All this affects the morale of the armed services for the worse. By drastically cutting or eliminating some of the main civilian elements of American power, Trump is redefining the military in a way that should make the Pentagon brass uncomfortable.

 

Decadence is cultural and moral decline joined with materialistic indulgence. A president who doesn’t really read, who engages regularly in flagrant untruths, who rules through his family — which, in turn, engages in conflicts of interest that no one in the bureaucracy would be allowed to get away with — and who favors the glitz and gold trappings of Manhattan and Palm Beach to the exclusion of the spare and subdued environment of Camp David is a decadent leader. When such a leader raises the military to cult status, rather than preserving it as a prime tool of American power — in conjunction with other vital components — he simulates the values of an autocrat, not those of a democrat.

 

The Republicans have gone from being the party of Reagan to the party of Trump. The former was a conservative internationalist; the latter is a populist nationalist. The former represented national revival, the latter national decline. For rise and decline hinge on universal moral factors even more than they do on political and economic ones. And the president’s budget proposal could be a pivot point in this tragic process.

Edited June 9, 2017 by Agiel

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

In other news, it looks like the conservatives in the UK may be in for a big loss tonight after calling for a snap election. Originally projected to win somewhere around 40-50 seats, they're now projected to lose about 20-15, which would cost them their majority, likely leading to another election. Will have to see how that turns out...

Right now it looks like Labor will form a coalition with the SNP and Corbyn will be PM. At the very least Labor picked up more seats than they had previously, and this is with the media ****ting on Corbyn for the past two years and his own party stabbing him in the back. Tories truly dun goofed.

[Bartimaeus]

One of the most interesting things Comey said today, I think, was why he didn't want to announce to the public that Trump was not personally under investigation by the FBI. It was twofold: one, because he felt it would create a duty to correct, or retract, that statement later further down the line if it changed, which he must've considered at least a possibility for it to give him that much pause. Two, it ties back to the Clinton email case: after the appearance of impropriety reached such a high and ridiculous level in the Clinton case, and specifically after Clinton met privately in suspicious circumstances with Obama's attorney general, he felt a duty to set the record straight for the public, as it were, regarding the investigation. Days before the election, he was given new evidence for the Clinton case that required the reopening of the Clinton case, which, after telling the public that the investigation was over, he felt the need to correct when that status changed. That little mistake quite possibly tipped the scales in Trump's favor just enough that he won the election, though it's impossible to say for certain. He was loath to make the same kind of mistake with Trump, it appears, and for good reason, I think. And to think, all Clinton and her campaign had to do was keep their noses clean and stay clear of the investigation, and he probably would've never felt the need to make that announcement to begin with, and we might've never had a Trump presidency at all. Gosh dang all of you: Hillary Clinton, your garbage campaign, and the idiotic and corrupt Democrat party and election committee.

Edited June 9, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

 

In other news, it looks like the conservatives in the UK may be in for a big loss tonight after calling for a snap election. Originally projected to win somewhere around 40-50 seats, they're now projected to lose about 20-15, which would cost them their majority, likely leading to another election. Will have to see how that turns out...

Right now it looks like Labor will form a coalition with the SNP and Corbyn will be PM. At the very least Labor picked up more seats than they had previously, and this is with the media ****ting on Corbyn for the past two years and his own party stabbing him in the back. Tories truly dun goofed.

 

I don't know if it means anything, but the Sky News news anchors seem to think the Conservatives making a coalition is more likely (although everyone seems to think Theresa May will resign regardless...which will mean an unelected PM, unless another election is immediately called for?), but you know, I don't know much about UK politics or if they're right. Edited June 9, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

 

In other news, it looks like the conservatives in the UK may be in for a big loss tonight after calling for a snap election. Originally projected to win somewhere around 40-50 seats, they're now projected to lose about 20-15, which would cost them their majority, likely leading to another election. Will have to see how that turns out...

Right now it looks like Labor will form a coalition with the SNP and Corbyn will be PM. At the very least Labor picked up more seats than they had previously, and this is with the media ****ting on Corbyn for the past two years and his own party stabbing him in the back. Tories truly dun goofed.

I don't know if it means anything, but the Sky News news anchors seem to think the Conservatives making a coalition is more likely (although everyone seems to think Theresa May will resign regardless...which will mean an unelected PM, unless another election is immediately called for?), but you know, I don't know much about UK politics or if they're right.

Yeah when I wrote that over 150 seats weren't decided. Right now Conservatives will probably coalition with DUP putting them above the required 322 for majority. Still looks like a net loss of 13 seats for Tories and 30 gain for labor last I looked and did math.

[HoonDing]

muh Brexit

[Bartimaeus]

Officially hung.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

Hung Parliment indeed.

[HoonDing]

What's Marion Le Pen doin in England

[Sarex]

Didn't Comey say that the Russian involvement in the election had 0 impact on the votes? Doesn't that invalidate all that the people have been saying so far?

[Chilloutman]

yeah can someone confirm what is in this video?

 

 

I didn't watched closely on that hearing but from what is in that video Trump is actually pretty clean?