Nov 8, 2016 - The lesser of two evils?

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I was in a small, middle of nowhere town in Missouri a few years back and an arab terrorist owned a local motel there. People feel it everywhere. What you see in small towns though that you won't see in big cities is a bunch of locals got out their guns and surrounded the motel. Fortunately or unfortunately the guy had already fled.
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Interesting anecdote and accurately indicative IMO of what will evolve in "flyover country." People there will be very "proactive" in combatting threats, perceived or otherwise. It's why the left constantly hammers away at the 2nd amendment but ignores gun violence among the "disposable" citizenry in urban areas.
 
A lot of dumb asses on social media applauding the slaughter of innocent children in yesterday's UK bombing and some of them are actually holding their children in their avatars. SICK!
 
The point of terrorism is not that no one is safe anywhere, the point is to make you believe that no one is safe anywhere.
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True.

The point of counter-terrorism is to disable terrorists at every point - indoctrination, radicalization, planning, bringing to justice, and if necessary, destroy them. Fortunately, apologizing is no longer part of our strategy to compat terrorism, nor is releasing them from Gitmo.
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Or perhaps another point of view. I think Khalid Sheik Mohammed (the butcherer of Daniel Pearl) laid out their terrorist strategy in the best, most evil way possible when he said that “We” will win because Americans don’t realize . . . we do not need to defeat "you" militarily; we only need to keep the fight up long enough for you to defeat yourself … because you have softened and you will quit.

Where I think little or no attention is paid, as in the case of the UK and Europe, and particularly the US, is on how the idea of multiculturalism (or identity politics) project has played an integral role in the continued rise of terrorism.

Allow me to elaborate. On the one side it has promoted all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech - through indoctrination of children, students, teachers, academia, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct speech and thought, e.g., you can’t say there are radical Muslims out there and be critical of race, faith, and so on …

On the other side, rather than working as a response to diversity it has become the very means of constraining it. As a result of multiculturalism policies, and we increasingly see this in people in the US. UK and Europe, they define social solidarity not in political or economic terms (conservative or working class) anymore, but rather in terms of ethnicity, culture, or faith. And, also as a result, they are concerned less with determining the kind of society (at the national level or higher) they want to create than with defining the community to which they belong. That is why I put the quotes up for “We” and “you” … what do those identities signify … for the terrorists it is an appeal to faith although their ambitions are purely political, and for Americans, a national identity to me is pretty much lost for say the 1980s.

How identity politics did this for me is attributable to the state, at both the national and the local levels, as they pioneered a strategy of drawing minority communities into the mainstream political process. At its heart, the approach redefined the concepts of racism and equality. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but also the denial of the right to be “different”. And equality no longer entailed possessing rights that were over and above race, ethnicity, culture, and faith; it meant asserting “different rights” because of them (as Dr. Fun points out a muslim taxi driver need not take a seeing-eye dog of a blind man because he is muslims rights to refuse). These are huge distinctions in dividing people.

Again what is happening is that the intrusive state apparatus (and let's not kid ourselves) diversity has become institutionalized by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim or Black community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. For example, that my identity is drawn on religious lines and so specific policies are drawn to cater to my Muslim needs, while emphasizing such homogeneous identities as a key to my entitlements. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to overcome, and so a major reason why we stand so divided, and you have to look no further than yesterday in the UK.
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My first job was in the shoe business (1960), working as a stock boy for the firm that sold Japanese footwear in the US. I met many Japanese who had fought against us in WWII, particularly in Burma. The consensus among them was that there is no lower life form than a US Marine. It was meant as a respectful comment as jungle-war hardened Japanese troops would discover their officers dead and their supply lines cut by troops that had gone through the unendurable to get behind Japanese lines, kill silently, and then pick off the disorganized remainder. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of those Americans (and Brits) are all around us and those genes have not disappeared from American DNA. We are on the verge of being able to tell the rich punks in the extraction economies (Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Russia, Venezuela, et al) that not only don't we need their energy but we have the technology to help put China and India in a position to tell them "Never Mind". If they want to fight we know how to do that but we are a lot happier getting good prices from people who make sure that they do not fund terrorism or political mischief.
 
[We are on the verge of being able to tell the rich punks in the extraction economies (Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Russia, Venezuela, et al) that not only don't we need their energy but we have the technology to help put China and India in a position to tell them "Never Mind". If they want to fight we know how to do that but we are a lot happier getting good prices from people who make sure that they do not fund terrorism or political mischief.
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The problem with that argument is - leaving aside that tacitly ascribes rational motives to atrocities committed by barbarians - is that it's western governments that provide support and succor for "rich punks" who commit "political mischief" like that which occurred yesterday in Manchester. In the UK two third of Muslims are on the dole; a quarter are on disability; and there are approximately 20,000 polygamous sharia households that receive stipends based upon the number of wives a lucky Imam man has. Transfer payments to Muslims in the UK comprise about 13 billion USD a year. In Germany its about 25 billion USD a year. Please explain how a move away from fossil fuels is going to rectify that.
 
there are approximately 20,000 polygamous sharia households that receive stipends based upon the number of wives a lucky Imam man has.
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That part I can sympathize with. You could not pay me enough to have more than one wife. :whistle:
 
The point of terrorism is not that no one is safe anywhere, the point is to make you believe that no one is safe anywhere.
Click to expand...

True.

The point of counter-terrorism is to disable terrorists at every point - indoctrination, radicalization, planning, bringing to justice, and if necessary, destroy them. Fortunately, apologizing is no longer part of our strategy to compat terrorism, nor is releasing them from Gitmo.
Click to expand...

Or perhaps another point of view. I think Khalid Sheik Mohammed (the butcherer of Daniel Pearl) laid out their terrorist strategy in the best, most evil way possible when he said that “We” will win because Americans don’t realize . . . we do not need to defeat "you" militarily; we only need to keep the fight up long enough for you to defeat yourself … because you have softened and you will quit.

Where I think little or no attention is paid, as in the case of the UK and Europe, and particularly the US, is on how the idea of multiculturalism (or identity politics) project has played an integral role in the continued rise of terrorism.

Allow me to elaborate. On the one side it has promoted all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech - through indoctrination of children, students, teachers, academia, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct speech and thought, e.g., you can’t say there are radical Muslims out there and be critical of race, faith, and so on …

On the other side, rather than working as a response to diversity it has become the very means of constraining it. As a result of multiculturalism policies, and we increasingly see this in people in the US. UK and Europe, they define social solidarity not in political or economic terms (conservative or working class) anymore, but rather in terms of ethnicity, culture, or faith. And, also as a result, they are concerned less with determining the kind of society (at the national level or higher) they want to create than with defining the community to which they belong. That is why I put the quotes up for “We” and “you” … what do those identities signify … for the terrorists it is an appeal to faith although their ambitions are purely political, and for Americans, a national identity to me is pretty much lost for say the 1980s.

How identity politics did this for me is attributable to the state, at both the national and the local levels, as they pioneered a strategy of drawing minority communities into the mainstream political process. At its heart, the approach redefined the concepts of racism and equality. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but also the denial of the right to be “different”. And equality no longer entailed possessing rights that were over and above race, ethnicity, culture, and faith; it meant asserting “different rights” because of them (as Dr. Fun points out a muslim taxi driver need not take a seeing-eye dog of a blind man because he is muslims rights to refuse). These are huge distinctions in dividing people.

Again what is happening is that the intrusive state apparatus (and let's not kid ourselves) diversity has become institutionalized by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim or Black community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. For example, that my identity is drawn on religious lines and so specific policies are drawn to cater to my Muslim needs, while emphasizing such homogeneous identities as a key to my entitlements. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to overcome, and so a major reason why we stand so divided, and you have to look no further than yesterday in the UK.
Click to expand...

My first job was in the shoe business (1960), working as a stock boy for the firm that sold Japanese footwear in the US. I met many Japanese who had fought against us in WWII, particularly in Burma. The consensus among them was that there is no lower life form than a US Marine. It was meant as a respectful comment as jungle-war hardened Japanese troops would discover their officers dead and their supply lines cut by troops that had gone through the unendurable to get behind Japanese lines, kill silently, and then pick off the disorganized remainder. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of those Americans (and Brits) are all around us and those genes have not disappeared from American DNA. We are on the verge of being able to tell the rich punks in the extraction economies (Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Russia, Venezuela, et al) that not only don't we need their energy but we have the technology to help put China and India in a position to tell them "Never Mind". If they want to fight we know how to do that but we are a lot happier getting good prices from people who make sure that they do not fund terrorism or political mischief.
Click to expand...
The LNG deal with China is going to hurt opec even if we end up not shipping a lot to china because opec is going to have to lower prices. Something like that helps china dramatically and me thinks it's going to help us in other areas like North Korea
 
Just came home from a cruise, forced to watch CNN news. News is hate for Donald Trump all day long.. It is like the boy who cried wolf for the 40% of us. who still support the President.. Will we believe it if he is really a traitor? There was not one positive statement about the POTUS on CNN.
 
Just came home from a cruise, forced to watch CNN news. News is hate for Donald Trump all day long.. It is like the boy who cried wolf for the 40% of us. who still support the President.. Will we believe it if he is really a traitor? There was not one positive statement about the POTUS on CNN.
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They are nothing more than the propaganda arm of the DNC. I have Fox business on all day and occasionally put on MSNBC and CNN just to see what verbal puke the enemy from within is spewing. While our President was giving his speeches in Israel rather than show it CNN had a panel of the usual suspects hammering away at Trump on the latest anonymously leaked Washington post story. They couldn't take a 15 minute break from that to show the speech.
 
68% of Democrats believe the highest priority item is to impeach Trump.

It is such an offense that Trump won that they cannot contain themselves. On election nigh Tom Brokaw whined that Trumpcould not be President after saying "the most horrific things about women" that Brokaw " had ever heard. This is coming from media who still worship President Clinton despite actually having done some horrific things to women, some in the Oval Office. The hypocrisy is insane.

The US and Russia have played spy vs. spy since the iron curtain went up. Germany tried to sink our economy in WWII by flooding it with counterfeit dollars. Anything the Russians actually hacked and published from DNC servers no one is denying as true from the Democratic party - not Debbie Wasserman Schultz trying to tilt the nomination towards Clinton (and then when caught getting hired by the Clinton campaign), not Podesta's rants conspiring to destroy the Catholic Church, not Houma's attempts to coverup Hillary's careless treatment of classified documents.

The Democratic party's campaign strategy included supporting the BLM movement, the OWS movement, advocating for open borders, voter registration with no ID or proof of citizenship, paranoia over offending Muslims by calling radical islamic terrorism what it is, covering up Benghazi in an election year, and other offenses against the American people. Russia meddling with the sovereignty of American elections to destroy America? (don't forget Obama registering an endorsement ad in the recent french elections). I don't know. The Democratic Party did a pretty good job of destroying their chances in 2016 all by themselves.
 
The Democratic Party is running on empty and the Republican Party is at war with itself. Let's start a new one, the Center Radical American Policy Project. We can call it CRAPP for short and our slogan can be "CRAPP is a whole lot better than what we are getting from the dingbat left and the wingnut right."
 
The Democratic Party is running on empty and the Republican Party is at war with itself. Let's start a new one, the Center Radical American Policy Project. We can call it CRAPP for short and our slogan can be "CRAPP is a whole lot better than what we are getting from the dingbat left and the wingnut right."
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I really like you despite our political orientation because I believe our hearts are in the same place.

The Democrats I believe have lost touch with Americans by tilting far left, and forgetting that although Obama was far left, only a black candidate could win as a far left liberal and only if the black vote turned out en masse and nearly 100% for a black candidate. Hillary runs to the left of Obama, the Dems circle the wagons with the same exact sound bites and mantras, but the black vote didn't take to Hillary with the same intensity (of course) as Obama. At least Democrats are organized.

Republicans are still wrestling for a common platform. Far right conservatives want orthodoxy and not compromise. Moderates may have it the right message to reach independent voters, and left leaning Republicans are an anomally. They really need to fight their battles within closed doors and come up with a consistent, agreed upon platform where everyone gives a little.
 
68% of Democrats believe the highest priority item is to impeach Trump.
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Beast, you are a treasure. I just wanted to point out that the poll doesn't say what you claim it says. The Morning Consult/Politico poll indicates 68% of Dems approve of initiating impeachment proceedings, nothing is mentioned of it being the highest priority, that's just you going Pants on Fire all by yourself.
 
68% of Democrats believe the highest priority item is to impeach Trump.
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75 percent of people in my household think Trump taking a bullet right between the eyes is the highest priority item. Still hoping the fourth person comes around but she's a pacifist.
 
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