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Old 03-30-2018, 11:17 AM   #46
sebastian_dangerfield
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
If Sebby has more interest in criminal justice reform than I do, I don't say that he is "biased" towards criminal justice reform or criminal defendants, or biased against prosecutors. He might be, but that would be different.

If I am less sympathetic to Israel's current government on matters of policy than you or many Americans are, which I suspect is the case, that does not mean I am "anti-Israel", which carries more than a whiff of anti-Zionism. It may just mean that, like many Israelis, I take a different view of what is in Israel's interests than its current government does, and/or that I take a different view of what is in the United States' interests than the Israeli government does, which wouldn't be surprising inasmuch as the Israeli government was elected by Israelis to serve Israel, not by Americans to serve America. Nor do any of those views (necessarily) have anything to do with "bias" and Neville Chamberlain's anti-Semitism. Even so, some Americans find it useful to accuse people they disagree with on foreign policy of anti-Semitism, and perhaps some of them even believe it.

There are anti-Semites who are anti-Israel and disagree with Israel's government. There are jackasses who live in Michigan. None of that means that disagreement with Israel's government makes you biased against Jews, or that you are a jackass.

Since we weren't talking about any of this just now until you posted about my purported anti-Israel and philo-Chamberlain views, what you've said sounds a lot like trolling. Since you are a friend and I assume you don't want to lightly accuse me of anti-Semitism for no good reason, I will assume that wasn't what you meant and that you aren't a jackass.
There are no degrees or caveats anymore. You're all in on one side or all in for the other.

We've been in this imbecilic dilemma since Bush's edict that one was either with us, on the side of good, or an enemy, on the side of evil.

Thankfully, Cheney never got to see his planned genocide on the Swiss.
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Old 03-30-2018, 11:31 AM   #47
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski View Post
Great lecture. Normally I’d expect such an educated thing to come from someone in The New England.
My favorite superfluous "the" is "the gays." Nothing like an old, straight conservative man explaining hoe "the gays" think or act.

I could be totally daydreaming (as often is the case when old folks talk politics near me), but when I hear that, I'm paying full attention. Because what's going to follow is going to be spectacularly wrong, and cringe-worthy hysterical.

I look forward to relatives stopping by for Easter. I'll get at least one Gervaisian moment, where I'll get to say, through tears, "Bullshit. You're talking out your ass there. Out your ass. Stop it. I can't take it."
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Old 03-30-2018, 11:34 AM   #48
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by greatwhitenorthchick View Post
My boyfriend was born in the USSR (in the Ukraine) and grew up in post-Soviet Ukraine. As he told me, as soon as Ukraine was no longer a Soviet Socialist Republic, other countries dropped the article when referring to it. It never had the article in Russian/Ukrainian because those languages don't have articles.
If that's the broad age differential it could be, based on the info provided, I salute you.
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Old 03-30-2018, 11:48 AM   #49
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
Delong:
There is one good conservative idea out there which will never become liberal: Avoidance of the law of unintended consequences.

Liberals tinker, and with tinkering comes more tinkering. That's not a criticism. They seem to believe intervention is the best initial approach. If it doesn't work, or it causes a problem, it can be cured with further interventions.

Hence we have pages of rules, laws, regulations, etc. that could loop the world a dozen times.

Conservatives are greedy pricks a lot of the time, and they're too reactionary, allowing themselves to be defined not by what they stand for, but what they oppose (even if they originally wrote it). But they do inject a necessary wisdom... The intellectually honest of them question the ripple's effects before chucking the stone in the pond.

Of course, the intellectually honest wing of conservatism is maybe 20% of them, so this comment is even more academic than usual. (And the hypocrites comprising 80% of the party throw conservative caution out the window on matters like the Iraq intervention and conservative use of the environment.) But that 20% does serve a noble purpose. Somebody has to say, "'Embracing complexity' breeds endless complexity... and here's where endless complexity ends."
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Old 03-30-2018, 01:23 PM   #50
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
There is one good conservative idea out there which will never become liberal: Avoidance of the law of unintended consequences.

Liberals tinker, and with tinkering comes more tinkering. That's not a criticism. They seem to believe intervention is the best initial approach. If it doesn't work, or it causes a problem, it can be cured with further interventions.

Hence we have pages of rules, laws, regulations, etc. that could loop the world a dozen times.

Conservatives are greedy pricks a lot of the time, and they're too reactionary, allowing themselves to be defined not by what they stand for, but what they oppose (even if they originally wrote it). But they do inject a necessary wisdom... The intellectually honest of them question the ripple's effects before chucking the stone in the pond.

Of course, the intellectually honest wing of conservatism is maybe 20% of them, so this comment is even more academic than usual. (And the hypocrites comprising 80% of the party throw conservative caution out the window on matters like the Iraq intervention and conservative use of the environment.) But that 20% does serve a noble purpose. Somebody has to say, "'Embracing complexity' breeds endless complexity... and here's where endless complexity ends."
Your post makes a lot of sense if you apply a meaning to "conservative" that has nothing to do with what animates current conservatism, and pretend itself that it is a pragmatic, intellectual engaged, empirical approach to formulating optimal government policy, an approach that cannot be found in the wild. That, by the way, is the Mike Konczal piece to which Delong was reacting in my original post.

If conservatism was anything like what you described, conservatives would want to figure out how they got it so wrong with Iraq and the WMD, or the financial collapse in 2007-08, or the predictions of disaster around the 2009 stimulus and Dodd-Frank, or the Kansas tax cuts, etc. Or the predictions that Obama would seize everyone's guns and that acceptance of LGBT civil rights would be a existential threat to society. Being a conservative means you never look backwards (once you looked backwards to Reagan, but now that they have found an even Greater Communicator to the white working class, he can be forgotten). The only thing in your rearview mirror is the nostalgia that you keep exalting as you drive away from it.

Conservatives don't really care about policy. They care about reaction. When Kevin Williamson writes that women who have abortions should be executed as murderers, he's not really thinking that women who have abortions should be executed. It's a pose, but it's real in the sense that the expressive value of reaction in politics is what matters most to them, not the effects. (Except for the very rich, who want their tax cuts.)

This is what the left often does not understand: Conservatives are not alone in seeing an expressive value to politics, one that usually trumps discussions of policy and its effects.
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Old 03-30-2018, 02:28 PM   #51
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
There is one good conservative idea out there which will never become liberal: Avoidance of the law of unintended consequences.

Liberals tinker, and with tinkering comes more tinkering. That's not a criticism. They seem to believe intervention is the best initial approach. If it doesn't work, or it causes a problem, it can be cured with further interventions.

Hence we have pages of rules, laws, regulations, etc. that could loop the world a dozen times.

Conservatives are greedy pricks a lot of the time, and they're too reactionary, allowing themselves to be defined not by what they stand for, but what they oppose (even if they originally wrote it). But they do inject a necessary wisdom... The intellectually honest of them question the ripple's effects before chucking the stone in the pond.

Of course, the intellectually honest wing of conservatism is maybe 20% of them, so this comment is even more academic than usual. (And the hypocrites comprising 80% of the party throw conservative caution out the window on matters like the Iraq intervention and conservative use of the environment.) But that 20% does serve a noble purpose. Somebody has to say, "'Embracing complexity' breeds endless complexity... and here's where endless complexity ends."
Clearly, you haven't read any of the family planning regulations out there. Or the latest tax bill.
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Old 03-30-2018, 03:33 PM   #52
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
I look forward to relatives stopping by for Easter. I'll get at least one Gervaisian moment, where I'll get to say, through tears, "Bullshit. You're talking out your ass there. Out your ass. Stop it. I can't take it."
"It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself."

Richard Dawkins
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Old 03-30-2018, 03:39 PM   #53
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by LessinSF View Post
"It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself."

Richard Dawkins
Maybe he tried other stuff first. Like turning himself into a bull and raping teenagers. Or dropping in on people with an eyepatch and some ravens. But it didn't work, so he had to try something else.
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Old 03-30-2018, 03:59 PM   #54
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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"It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself."

Richard Dawkins
I will not be sacrificing the traditional iguana to the Moai this year.

No more agnostic hedging. I’m full atheist.
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Old 03-30-2018, 04:05 PM   #55
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy View Post
Clearly, you haven't read any of the family planning regulations out there. Or the latest tax bill.
I’d like to think the 20% I mentioned wasn’t in on that. But even the intellectually honest ones can be bought off for tax breaks.

Re family planning, conservatives are the most officious of liberals. They’ve never seen a sexual more on which they didn’t have an unwelcomed and unneeded view.
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Old 03-30-2018, 04:08 PM   #56
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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"It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself."

Richard Dawkins
Then he came back to life as the Zombie Jesus, but in a twist anticipated by few, it is the faithful who, in a weekly celebration of his gruesome torture and murder, cannibalize the Zombie Jesus and not vice versa.
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Old 03-30-2018, 04:24 PM   #57
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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"It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself."

Richard Dawkins
Last year I had dinner with some Jews. They were bragging about how, back a long time ago, Jews wanted to take some property from the Egyptians. but the Egyptians were like, "no way." So the Jews launched biological and chemical warfare on the Egyptians, but still the Egyptians held on to their stuff. THEN the Jews killed every Egyptian family's oldest son; not 1 or two kids with a bus bomb. EVERY FAMILY'S SON!. So the Egyptians had to give up their property.

Worst part? Know who told the Jews to do it? One of the Bushes.
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Old 03-30-2018, 05:35 PM   #58
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Then he came back to life as the Zombie Jesus, but in a twist anticipated by few, it is the faithful who, in a weekly celebration of his gruesome torture and murder, cannibalize the Zombie Jesus and not vice versa.
Speaking of, this is helpful for the observant - https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-is...-jews?ref=home
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Old 03-30-2018, 08:11 PM   #59
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
I’d like to think the 20% I mentioned wasn’t in on that. But even the intellectually honest ones can be bought off for tax breaks.

Re family planning, conservatives are the most officious of liberals. They’ve never seen a sexual more on which they didn’t have an unwelcomed and unneeded view.

The problem I see here is that many of you use the term conservative to refer to wings in the GOP coalition that are not conservative. I maintain that Trump is not conservative, though I admit that you’d have to be delusional to think that a GOP cleansed of all populist influences is larger than half a dozen white guys.
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Old 03-31-2018, 02:32 AM   #60
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Re: We are all Slave now.

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The problem I see here is that many of you use the term conservative to refer to wings in the GOP coalition that are not conservative. I maintain that Trump is not conservative, though I admit that you’d have to be delusional to think that a GOP cleansed of all populist influences is larger than half a dozen white guys.
Just a chance to share my new favorite Trump quote / evidence of ... something:

“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
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