I briefly caught some of the post debate discussion (I forget which network), and one of the commentators was singling out Walz's 2020 election question saying that (paraphrasing) "democracy was becoming a key issue for voters." Sounds pretty bleak when they put it like that!

Yuval Noah Harari, in an Atlantic interview, offers some more sensible takes on Palestinian history and Zionism than what we've seen from recent "setller-colonial" narratives.

Israel is at a crossroads. I don’t think its existence is at stake. I do think its identity is at stake. The soul of the country is now the battleground, and the outcome will decide not just the shape of Israel for many, many years to come, but also the shape of Judaism. I think that Judaism is at an intersection. Maybe we haven’t been in such a place for 2,000 years, since the end of the Second Temple era...

The Second Temple era ended after the Zealots took over with messianic visions and almost destroyed the Jewish people, almost destroyed the Jewish religion, which had to then reinvent itself. And we’ve come full circle. Judaism as we know it was born from the ashes of the Temple of Jerusalem in the failed rebellion against the Romans that the Zealots instigated....

What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn. They go to Egypt; they learn. They go to Brooklyn; they learn. And eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years?

Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades. When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact....

What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas. Some ideas were definitely racist and very violent. Some Zionists have denied the existence of a Palestinian people and the right to self-determination of Palestinians. But this is not a logical conclusion from the premises of Zionism. You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that. But basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

I'm tempted to paste the entire interview here, but the entire piece is worth reading.  I'll add two short extra points:

To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective. You can see, are people being killed or not? But people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace.

And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model. I mean, it denies the fact that there was continuous Jewish presence on the land, going back 3,000 years. For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European. They are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, from Yemen, from Iraq, who were brutally expelled from their ancestral homes after 1948 by Arab governments in revenge for the 1948 war.

Again, trying to equalize the guffaws and misstatements of the Harris/Walz team (which, obviously, is an imperative responsiblity of the press to note) with the Trump/Vance team's pure falsehoods is only a losing battle for one side, the side which lies less.  Epistemically, it's not an even playing field.

So the mainstream media may not be willing to do the prudent thing and say out loud that lying about a natural disaster should, under normal circumstances, be completely disqualifying.  It's not just that these lies put actual people's lives at risk, but put those reporting the facts at risk.  God forbid we fact check these things, as supposed "truth vigilantes", but maybe "objectivity" doesn't mean ignoring these lies.

And God forbid voters start to think that maybe the partisan side which is most prolific in spreading lies might be the less honorable and less eligible ticket to run the country.  As I've said before, the mission is not to convince Trump supporters of the facts.  They don't care.  And the biggest threat to democracy is a populace which does not care about reality.  "They" control the weather?  Proof?  Bah!  It feels right.  And any attempt to fact-check is proof of an elitist cover-up.  Again, isn't it weird how only one party is so opposed to fact-checking?  Like it's an existential threat to their bullshit?  We still see right-wing folks complaining that the ABC moderators dared to fact-check Vance's claims about the Haitians, shutting his mic off, as if there was a valid argument to be had on Vance's behalf.  Objectivity is not a synonym for 'deference'.  Vance's claims, just like both of Vance and Trump's claims regarding the hurricane relief, are objectively incorrect.  And what should be relevant to voters is whether or not this error is intentional disinformation.  Credulity becomes a dishonest mask at some point.
 

Vivian Kubrick has come out to defend Trump for using some wildly out of context clips from Full Metal Jacket to support a return to a more masculine military.  Thankfully, Vivian is not in control of her father's copyrights.  More alarmingly, Vivian added that Kubrick "would be a Trump supporter and would forgive using FMJ incongruously, if it helps the cause of freedom".  Freedom from what, exaclty?  "the entirely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of WOKE ideology into the USA military". 

"Demoralizing" is an interesting word in this context, since the boot camp scenes being used from Full Metal Jacket happen to portray the method of psychological demoralization necessary to turn a person into a dispassionate killer.  But Viviane is adamant: "I’m certain my father would have agreed".  Good for you.  How is your father, by the way?  You know, the guy you cut ties with and refused to talk to even after he wrote you a 40-page letter begging you to come home after you deserted your family when you joined the Church of Scientology?  Did you read that letter?  That he wrote shortly before dying of a broken heart?  Have you even talked to your mother in 25 years?  You certainly didn't at your father's funeral, thanks to your Scientology "minders".  Anyway, I'm so happy that you're "certain" about how your father feels about anything.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

I didn't know about that stuff about his daughter.

Christiane, Kubrick's wife, went public with the story around 2010.  This piece has the rundown:

It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn't. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. "They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I'm glad he didn't live to see what happened."

On the day of Stanley's funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognised. "She just sat in Vivian's room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don't know what."

"Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?" I ask.

"It's her new religion," Christiane shrugs. "It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise by the way. Absolutely not."

"Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father's death?"

"I think she must have been very upset," Christiane says, "but, again, I wouldn't know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can't reach her at all. I've had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn't want to talk to us any more and didn't see her dying sister, didn't come to her funeral. And these were children that had been joined at the hip."

Despite Jon Ronson suggesting that Vivian may have joined the Church after Kubrick's death, I've seen elsewhere that it was her joining which caused their fallout.

crumbsroom wrote:

What do you make out of the early voting turn out in Georgia? To me this seems like a good sign, but what do I know.

What I find to be an even better sign has been this week's series of victories from Georgia judges which have thrown out a number of recent election rules changes which have been made by MAGA-sympathetic members of the state's Election Board which 1) require the Board to certify the election results; 2) reversed a superfluous hand-count requirement which could have delayed the certification; and 3) blocked an additional seven rules that granted authority to "county officials" to conduct inquires and access "all election-related documentation", as well as new restrictions on signatures and ID verifications for absentee ballots.

The rule changes were challenged by a former Republican state legislator and a Republican board member in Chatham County. They represented increasing Republican opposition to the actions of the election board’s three MAGA-aligned members, who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in August.  

The court decisions blocking the board’s new rules are an emphatic setback for the election denial movement in one of the country’s most important battleground states. However, the elevation of 2020 skeptics to the board—and their subsequent actions—have gone a long way toward legitimizing conspiracy theories in the state.

So make no mistake, these efforts were for the service of prolonging the state's certification process to obstruct the later Congressional certification (which will be on Jan. 6, 2025).

That's good news for Georgia...at least.  John Oliver also had a piece on this increase of Trump-supporting election-deniers in positions of power in other states as well.



 

Rather than spend the empty calorie energy rolling out the "told you so"s over the 'Genocide Joe' voters who chose to sit out the election, as if there was an option to do so, in light of Trump now making genocide the official foreign policy of the US, in fact proposing to take over the burden of the illegal occupation and forced resettlement of the citizens of Gaza ourselves, I'd rather focus on the just straight-up bullshit coming out of the holes of members of our leftist media which continue to present some chilling potential reprecussions going forward.  Of course, pre-emptively, it's unfortunately necessary to point out the obvious, that we should not be in the business of conflating those "pro-Palestinian" protesters who are rightly outraged over Netanyahu's cruel and disproportionate slaughter of Gazan citizens, mostly women and children and vastly uninvolved in the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th.  Such false conflations should be the enemy of any responsible discourse.  So naturally, it's also unfortunately necessary to call out and condemn the false conflations being peddled in leftist media.  We should agree that collective piunishment is immoral and in violation of human rights.  So it's sad to see those on our purported left try to blame the victims of October 7th for "provoking" the terrorist attack, simply for being citizens of the occupying state (no questions asked whether any of these victims support the occupation, or are participants as settlers on occupied land).  Collective punishment runs on both sides of the street, and remains inexcusable either way, and those who try might just be awful people not worth your bandwidth.

Since the recent very public embarassment of The Young Turks' duplicity, arguably the leading and most influential internet media voice of the left has become The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder.  It's been quite insightful to see the show's evolution on their Oct. 7 coverage, initially condemning its violence while continuing to stand on the principle of ending the occupation.  I suspect that this reasonable position is shared by the majority of left/liberal protests.  As the months passed, however, we start to see the subtle shifts.  We got to hear some nonsense about how "from the river to the sea" only applies to Palestinian territory, and not an explicit call for Israel's destruction.  Then, after a few more months, these outlets are more explicitly calling for Israel's destruction.  Suddenly, sometime last spring, it became more fashionable to support the Oct. 7 violence as legitimate resistance, even though Hamas is not a legitimate governing entity, nor has it shown any indication that it has these Palestinian victims' best interests at heart, by leader Yahya Sinwar's own admission, more than willing to use these innocent civilians as fodder, as cover for their own terrorist operations.  The Palestinian population is as much a hostage of Hamas as the Oct. 7 prisoners, Hamas having seized control of the state in an undemocratic military coup in 2007, and resisting any popular referendum since.  There is no evidence of "consent of the governed" here, which is exactly why it is so immorally erroneous for the Israeli military to hold these Palestinian lives accountable for the crimes of Hamas.  Hamas is an organized criminal organization which does not represent or answer to the Palestinian people, but rather to their mullah masters in Iran who subsidizes their exploitation of the Palestinian people and their cause.

Eventually, after conferring legitimacy onto this terrorist outfit, it wasn't long before Majority Report began explicitly calling for the disestablishment of the state of Israel.  Sam Seder - who is Jewish - has been less explicit on this point, allowing "maybe this Zionist experiment hasn't worked out so well", and it is quite noticeable that the anti-Israel commentary becomes more amplified whenever Seder is absent.  The main purveyors of this idiotic dogma have been co-host Emma Vigeland - a bottom shelf Amy Goodman - and producer Matt Lech - a full-flowering fool who has over the past year somehow usurped a role as unofficial co-host, mumbling snottily in his own customized side-cam.  Lech is a perfect example of the more toxic form of leftist, the kind of neo-Marxist who conspicuously avoids Marx's name, the dirt-bag chapo house prick who also trafficks though the other poorly groomed leftist pod-sphere.  In addition, once-a-week guest Brandon Sutton (also when Seder is absent) openly flaunts a cheap cardboard placard supporting Within Our Lifetime, the pro-Hamas protest group known for openly celebrating the Oct. 7 atrocities, trolling a NYC event for that day's victims, and vandalizing the homes of prominent NY Jews with painted red triangles (which is the symbol Hamas uses to designate military targets).

There's been a lot of talk about how anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, and I agree.  However, I find it to be exceptionally naive to ignore certain overlaps, or to pretend not to understand how one can be used to launder the other.  Personally, I'm agnostic on the Zionist question.  Zionism, in its simplest form, is the belief that Jews deserve to have a homeland for themselves.  Some Jews disagree.  Many Jews have very different conceptions of what this Jewish homeland should look like.  But I don't believe that a Zionist state should preclude the persecution, oppression, occupation or otherwise disenfranchisement of another people, any more than Palestinian nationalism (which has also existed for decades prior to the end of the British Mandate) should require the oppression of regional Jews.  During that time of "Arab revolt" and "Jewish insurgency" atrocities were committed on both sides, and indeed on the occupying British forces as well.  The 1947 UN Partitian Plan for Palestine, a two-state solution which excluded Jerusalem as an international and independent enclave state, could have set the mold for a workable path to mutual cooperation, but it was never enacted as both sides collapsed into back-biting and betrayal, the 1948 Arab-Israel War.  Peace has been sisyphean ever since, and "blame" becomes so ubiquitous and well-earned as to be morally unintelligible.

"Liberal Zionism", by definition, is the continuing support of a workable two-state solution, autonomy and sovereignty for both sides, an end to occupation and apartheid.  I consider this to be my position, and I consider it to be the position that is truly pro-Palestinian, in the best interests of the people themselves.  Emma Vigeland, in her Brooklyn-baked wisdom, is on record stating the following, "Liberal Zionism is functionally equivalent as Nazism."  You think I'm not offended by such bullshit?

I'm not saying that there isn't room for reasonable debate and disagreement on the efficacy of a two-state solution versus other alternatives, but clearly such a debate and discussion is not being invited by comments such as those.  It's an unambiguous smear, intended to sway their knee-jerk audience away from even considering the possibility of a two-state solution.  But to be fair, let me describe Miss Vigeland's, and Matt Lech's, preferred proposal for their version of a one-state solution: 1) the disestablishment of the state of Israel; 2) a Palestinian state incorporating both Arab and Israeli populations; 3) to be an ostensibly democratic state with Israelis as the minority.  Again, as I said, I'm not writing off this plan prima facie, but it needs to be pointed out that it involves several contingencies worth addressing.  Using South African reconciliation as an appropriate model, there is a very obvious lack of consideration here for security guarantees against any future retaliatory violence, retaliatory oppressive measures which could be passed by a Palestinian-majority government fueled by these many decades of resentments.  (In fact, it is exactly this kind of "eye-for-an-eye" policy which we rightly condemn Israel for inflicting.)  What guarantees can we secure against the collapse of any democratic system itself?  Which is not an academic hypothetical, as we already saw a democratic plurality of elected Hamas members respond within a year with a full military takeover and expulsion of their political rivals in 2007.  Which brings me to the next idiocy from Majority Report.  Just this week, Matt Leech-Lick asserted that he was fully willing to accept a democratically-elected Hamas government in this future post-Israel one-state Palestine.  The obvious follow-up (which of coarse was not asked) is what to do if a similar military coup were to take place.  For Matt Lech, what does it matter as long as Israel is destroyed?  For Lech, a Hamas terrorist regime in the Levant is apparently far more acceptable than Netanyahu's preferred settler-terrorist regime.  But more importantly, preferable to a two-state solution apparently.  I present this example as a solid proof of antisemitism, Sam Seder be damned for his silence.

Hamas is an antisemitic organization.  This is not up for debate or opinion.  It is the objective historical fact.  Matt Lech, and presumably all of Majority Report, are more willing to accept an explicitly antisemitic regime in a one-state Palestine than a two-state solution.  Sometimes, these things just happen to rhyme.  Lech has pretended to be an atheist opposed to Christian nationalism, and yet here he is welcoming a theocracy in the Middle East.  Subsidized and funded by another theocracy in Iran.  In some impressively sophist jujitsu, maybe they can excuse this theocratic antisemitism by accusing its opponents of Islamophobia - as if the vast majority of Muslims were as hateful as Hamas.  But what do I know, I'm a functionally equivalent Nazi it seems.

I'm sure that these assholes will try their best to dissemble from the facts.  They will, no doubt, claim that Hamas is actually anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, even though Article 7 of their founding charter called for the global genocide of Jews.  Oh!  They updated that charter in 2017, where they didn't actually revoke or denounce any of this genocidal mandate, but rather just changed "Jew" to "Zionist" while maintaing the exact same ethnic slander and antisemitic tropes.  They are literally laundering their antisemitism, and leftists like Majority Report are aiding the effort.  And as recently as 2019, we have a former Hamas Interior Minister, Fathi Hamad, sayng "You have Jews everywhere and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, if God permits."  (I like how the Wiki for Hamad points out that "the deliberate killing of civilians is prohibited in Islamic law" - unless those civilians are attending a music festival!)  Of course, he and Hamas tried to walk that back, but it sounds more like the quiet part out loud.  You can find a number of "official" quotes from Hamas figures saying things like  "We don't really hate the filthy Jew so much", but it has the same 'both-sides-of-the-mouth' flavor as Netanyahu quotes where he declares his full commitment to a two-state solution, while lifting not a finger about it and instead tacitly endorsing illegal settlement expansions.  Or, you know, covertly funding Hamas, for example, almost like they're brothers-in-arms in the same game of fear, rage and exploitation.

But even with Netanyahu's approval and patronage, we're supposed to believe that this lefty media just can't keep up with the practical facts on the ground?  I'm sure some of it is due to poor education, perhaps, maybe they see what they want to see.  Emma Vigeland also recently excoriated a caller who was trying to talk some common sense about the perils of supporting the Houthis, because they are also an antisemitic organization, whose founding leader, Hussein al-Houthi, has said that Islam "will not be safe from Jews except through their eradication and the elimination of their entity".  Vigeland had a conniption and told the caller they were "a baby", and pointed out that "the number one enemy" was "Western imperialism".  Suffice it to say, I do not share that priority.  And, dare I say, I don't think this is a winning strategy for left/liberals going forward.  Not that they care.  After Oct.7, when Within Our Lifetime was in NYC openly celebrating the violence on innocent civilians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately condemned the protest group, as did many other elected members on the left side of the aisle.  Within a few months, the Democratic Socialists of America - a group which is frequently promoted on Majority Report - decided to kick AOC to the curb due exactly to her refusal to co-sign the antisemitism from groups like Within Our Lifetime.  I think it's safe to say that if you've lost AOC, you aren't winning any elections any time soon.  But, hey, good luck on that revolution, you useless pieces of shit.
 

Rock wrote:

Half the time online leftists whine about liberals, they’re describing liberals. The other half the time it’s people who agree with them but are lame. I don’t have to like how Biden handled Gaza to think sitting out the election is a bad idea or to realize that Trump will be worse on the issue (as has become quickly apparent).

Without even getting into the misrepresenting of liberal philosophy, I honestly have trouble understanding this infatuation that the left has for Islamic theocracy.  Is it just an over-educated guilt complex?  An overcompensation to the Islamophobia of the Bush years?  Whatever it is, like I pointed out, when it comes to these fundamentalist groups like Hamas and Houthis, the left is either are ignorant of their deeply embedded antisemitism or they're deliberately trying to (*ahem*) white-wash it.

Anyone less–than interested in sitting through the full video of Wednesday's 107–minute Senate Judiciary Sub–Committee on Crime and Terrorism hearing with Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn–Williams can read a full transcript courtesy of Tech Policy Press, and it looks horribly damning for the little Zucker.

Williams alleges, and the committee seems to have the evidence in–hand, that Zuckerberg and Meta have repeatedly lied right to Congress' faces under oath, have been secretly doing business in China since 2014, and have been colluding with the Chinese Communist Party for the past decade to undermine U.S. national security, to provide Facebook/Meta users' data to the CCP, to build a physical cable between China and the U.S. that would allow the CCP to intercept American citizens' personal data and private messages, to help China outcompete American companies in military artificial intelligence, and to have Facebook/Meta do the actual work of monitoring, censoring and silencing people on Beijing's behalf and under the CCP's direction, not just within mainland China, not just in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but in the United States. 

Zuck and Meta deny the allegations and are suing Williams to the tune of hundreds of millions in a forced arbitration, have secured a gag order and have threatened her with $50,000 in damages any time she mentions Facebook in public, including every statement she would nevertheless proceed to make during Wednesday's testimony before Congress, plus $50,000 in damages any time a senator on the committee repeats anything she would say about Facebook at the hearing, and $50,000 in damages any time one of the senators' staff repeats anything she would say about Facebook at the hearing.

The scorching details of her testimony go far beyond what is being reported in the mainstream press and are so plentiful I'd have to copy/paste the entire transcript to include them all. The transcript provided by Tech Policy Press is riddled with the kind of syntax and spelling errors one might see in voice–to–text or closed–captioning software, but the resulting inadvertent riddles are usually easy enough to solve, such as when Tiananmen Square is transcribed as "Town and Square." Just know that when Sen. Blackburn is quoted as saying "holes," she's really saying "holds."

Aside from saving time, I thought that reading the transcript would make it easier to swallow the fact that people like Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn are on the committee, but even those assholes come across as sober and professional in the video. Beyond national security, it seems clear that contempt for Mark Zuckerberg has become a unifying sentiment across the political divide that even the most treasonous of partisans can come together on.

Last edited by Rampop II (4/12/2025 4:56 am)

Of course, as with endlessly precipitous bullshit, we find the compulsive need to relitigate WWII, and up is down and black is white and maybe we elected President Schicklgruber after all.  These are all old jokes which won't make any sense to the children left behind in the post-Bush/Common Core/pandemic education disestablishment.  It's fun to treat our consequential history like so many mythical toys.  Who knows?  Maybe the Holocaust was the more compassionate alternative?  They had alll those people there (how'd they get there?), they might as well painlessly gas them than let them starve, right?  You see parallels in certain current deportation policy inclinations.  It's mercy, really when you think about it.  But don't.  It's...someone else's mess.

There's an emergence of the theory of "Winston Churchill was the true villain of WWII" recently platformed by the susceptible likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, both neither bothering or motivated to challenge such assertions on base grounding, by the likes of some such dude-specimen as Darryl Cooper, which evolved into an exacerbatic back and forth recently between two twats with whom I cannot sympathize in the least, the debate on Joe Rogan between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray - my dog hath no bone in thar beef.  But it is a really squirrilly example of tying dipshits from the respective edges of obstinate insanity to come to this point of moral morass.  I was actually a bit impressed with this fellow dipshit over at the Leftist Splinter publication for drawing some sunshine on this reciprical confusion.  I've poked Splinter, and in particular the writer Jacob Weindling, for the site's somewhat feckless stance of American fatalism (he suggested that the Dems should have impeached Joe Biden before the election), but it's obvious that the left/right concentrics demand a convex perspective, and here Mr. Weindling is appalled at the emergence of a theory in which America was actually on the Axis side during WWII until some last minute maneuver.  Yeah, it's kind of crazy how history can get so distorted out of shape, isn't it?  The half-truths I mentioned earlier - the Limberghs and Fords and other industrial corporate interests which supported, or at least facilitated the rise of the industrial Third Reich - have now been encompassed into all of American political will during this time, despite absolutely no evidence of such support from the Roosevelt government.  'All or Nothing' thinking diminishes any trace of contest or context.  I suppose in an intellectual environment where America is determined to be the default villain of world history, it might be easier to sell this kind of snake oil on the Left.  And that's what we need to protect from and shun out.
 

Rock wrote:

I get this thread is about the US, but I breathed a huge sigh of relief on Monday night over I learned the Conservatives did not win the Canadian election.

I mostly just couldn't stop laughing that Trump completely torched Poilievre's career. That weasel all but had the election locked up. The fact that the idiot presidents big stupid mouth basically caused an immediate 30 percent reversal of fortunes in the polling, in a country that absolutely had turned hostile towards the Liberals, is absolutely astonishing in what a perfect burn it was, and that Mr. PP will never be able to outrun. This loss will probably define the rest of his personal and political existence. And it looks good on him. Now he can go back to eating off of Trump's asscheeks without any worry that it could possibly harm him anymore than it already has.