BAM! You nailed it Dude!

Trump has always believed that money BOUGHT him love. His father raised him that way. He loved his father so he followed his father's teachings.

Trump would lie, cheat and steal for money as long as it BROUGHT him love.

Now, many years later, Trump has gotten angrier and angrier. He wants something else but he doesn't know what it is. Over the course of his life, little by little, he has attracted many people that kissed his feet and his ass.

This pacified him for a while making him feel special, great, "loved."

But something was missing. Could it be people really loved his money and not him? If that's true then he has fallen into his own trap. He can't trust anyone other than himself. They will always walk past him to get his money.

Now he finds himself having to sell himself as a great, great man. The best! The one and only. Top shelf saviour!

Best used car salesman EVER!

But what about his followers? They love him. Not for his money but for his anger. His anger against those pussy dems and anyone else that doesn't know how to change brakes on a car or plow a field or throw sod or repair a roof or work real hard.

Trump might not make them richer but he can punish them there weak snowflakes. Make this country tough again! Make the world submit again! Make 'em all fear us again.

Make us destroy each other again until he gets the love and happiness everyone else talks and sings about. How can those peasants be so happy without money?

"V'ger is a child" -Spock

To be fair, I can't think of any actual 'heads' that even own guns. Marijuana has a way of pacifying you.

Sounds like an exercising in rearranging the furniture on the Titanic to me.

In a world where discrimination and separatism is qualitatively and quantitatively on the rise, people in charge must be ecstatic that they can appease people without having to do anything meaningful that might piss off the extremists on the right, or "shareholders". And people are so used to being told that change is only possible through incremental adjustments that they'll eat it up like candy and think this is progress.

"People people people, if you're going to call someone a filthy tranny and throw fast food at xem on public transport, at least use the proper pronoun when you verbally abuse xem."

When there's a hole in the boat and you're taking on water, the least of your concerns should be about what language you use to describe the in-rushing water or shape of the hole, nor arguing over the colour of the material you use to repair it.

I'm sure some people will see this as a victory. Until next time they apply for a job and not get hired due to transphobia. And the manager of the company, with a gleam in their eye, begins the rejection letter with 'Dear bun/bunself', then sniggers to themselves and says "fucking trannies."

What I'm trying to say was summed nicely in a tweet i saw the other day:
ALTRIGHT/NEO NAZI: your all going to the gas chambers!!!
NEOLIBERAL: you're*

If this is the extent of what activism is able to achieve, i should say that the establishment/elite have won by pacifying and declawing the protesters. It's no longer about breaking the shackles of oppression. We can't go around breaking shackles everywhere - think of the effect on the economy? And what about people getting hit by shrapnel? No, instead the LGBTQ community will be given multi coloured chains, the black community will be given slightly longer chains, and we'll pad the shackles with silk so that everyone is much more comfortable. Don't complain about the concept of being chained, instead complain that your chain is not as nice as the next guy's chain.

It's as though the great struggle of protest and civil disobedience has been taken over by the liberal intelligentsia, and the worst kind of discrimination faced by a 20 year old middle-class university student with rainbow coloured dreadlocks and a nose piercing is the letter they receive about their student loan that begins "dear sir/madam". So they go out and march about it and think they've made progress when they get their own pronoun. In their life, in their experiences, they are treated equally in other respects, so they think they ARE fighting inequality.

But for the working class male or female transsexual who gets filthy looks and a seat isolated by themselves on public transport, to travel to their entry level job where they've been skipped over for promotion for not looking the part, or getting the right level of respect from the trans-phobic staff, getting snide whispered comments from customers about the size of their hands, getting abuse yelled at them as they travel to have a night out at the ONLY trans-friendly bar within a 20 mile radius....... I get the feeling that receiving a letter with the correct pronoun isn't exactly going to change their fucking lives.

To remove a weed, you go for the roots. Some wanker calling you him/her when you prefer bun/bunself is not the root of this problem. The problem is that they are trans-phobic, not the language - which is just the tool they use to discriminate against you. To change the language and think that you've won is a bit like redefining room temperature and claiming you've warmed everybody by a few degrees.

If you march for equal rights, fair pay, fair treatment then people are going to see that and join your protest because they also want those things. Those things will solve the problems faced by the trans community, feminists, masculinists, minorities alike! And through common goals and by supporting each other en masse for simple, unified goals like EQUALITY, progress will be made, change will happen. It is a concept called solidarity and seems to be going out of fashion, but our grandparents knew.

The objective for the establishment is to drive a wedge between groups of people so that their demands are more manageable, and they can be turned on each other. Feminists, masculinists, LGBT, everyone... can't you see how better off you'd be marching together for common values that lie at the core of what every human wants?

Wall of text, sorry... and I know it looks like i'm being insensitive. So congratulations, genuinely, for getting someone to use your preferred pronoun if that makes you feel better. But whilst people have been fighting tooth and nail to get their own pronoun (in civilised settings only), we've suffered huge leaps backwards in freedom and tolerance behind their backs whilst they were bent over intently concentrating on the finer detail of what their ideal equality looks like.

Boo! That had nothing to do with Ayn Rand or Objectivism. This was anti-pacifier, whereas John Galt & Co had their cigarettes stamped with the sign of the dollar.

But, Horray for the Great Escape homage. It just had no teeth for a smackdown against the GOP/Right Wingnuts. I expected more...

There aren't even words.

Saddam was a bad guy is absolutely the most ignorant remark you can make. Were Stalin, Hitler and Mao simply 'bad' guys? Saddam committed multiple genocides against his own people. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed not as collateral damage, but systematically. The remaining widows were systematically raped to impregnate the Kurdish women with half-Arab children and breed the Kurds out of existence. If that's not enough, Saddam invaded and seized Kuwait and declared a part of Iraq. In the Iran-Iraq war, he made extensive use of banned chemical and biological weapons against Iranian forces, before turning them on Kurdish Iraqi's as well. Anybody content to just call that 'bad' behaviour is morally bankrupt.

Oh, but along the way Saddam brutally murdered anybody that spoke out against him, or had their daughters raped or their families otherwise held hostage or also killed. More over, because Saddam classed these people as 'terrorists', clearly we should take him at his word. In that one sense, yes, Saddam was effective at killing and pacifying the people he counted as 'terrorists'. That of course is missing the fact that Saddam was the singularly most terrifying monster in the entire Middle East at the time.

When you veer into talking about changing the Geneva Conventions I think your argument loses logic. Without getting into whether military action is actually justified in the first place, maybe it's worth admitting that there are some thing the US military simply can't do and therefore shouldn't try to?

To suggest that the US should forego international norms to achieve its goals feels like it's channeling the neo-conservative myth of the US as this omnipotent superpower that it never was, and certainly isn't now. What evidence is there that acting like the terrorists (which once you give up international norms you will eventually get to) would actually help achieve its objectives in the first place?

The Bush administration basically took that approach with torture (the "well they did it to us!" approach). When the news of secret rendition, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo broke (as it inevitably would), we know that almost certainly recruited a whole bunch of new terrorists. Meanwhile torture confessions led to a whole bunch of wild goose hunts.

Civilian resistance has been around since the dawn of armies invading foreign lands. International norms geared around state v. state warfare don't really address them, not because they didn't envisage them but because occupying and pacifying foreigners was never a good idea in the first place. Drone strikes, surgical strikes on the likes of Bin Laden should be a rare exception but once you start 'normalizing' them, and giving occupying soldiers wider latitude with civilians that's when you start getting into serious trouble.

Here's an old ass song by The Offspring, a local socal band, with their not-so hit song titled "LAPD":

When cops are taking care of business I can understand
But the L.A. story's gone way out of hand
Their acts of aggression, they say they're justified
But it seems an obsession has started from the inside
They're shooting anyone who even tries to run
They're shooting little kids with toy guns
Take it to a jury but they don't give a damn
Because the one who tells the truth is always the policeman

Beat all the niggers
Beat whoever you see
Don't need a reason
(We're) L.A.P.D.

The city of L.A. feels like a prison
With helicopters overhead and bullets whizzing by
Martial law ain't no solution
Police brutality's just social pollution

Beat all the white trash
Beat whoever you see
Don't need a reason
(We're) L.A.P.D.

They say they're keeping the peace
But I'm not buying it because a billy club ain't much of a pacifier
"Protecting your freedom"
Now that's just a lie
It's an excuse for power that's more like an alibi
Law and order doesn't really matter
When you're the one getting bruisedand battered
You take it to a jury, they'll throw it in your face
Because justice in L.A. comes in a can of mace

Explain ABC stores in Honolulu now. Teddy was cloned and an army of Teddy was pacified through the promise of retail sales.

*quality Chomsky, as always

The question at 44:03 is just as relevant today as it was a quarter of a century ago.

I would argue that a precarious situation with regards to your income is just as effective a pacifier as the usual bread & games are. A zero-hour contract, or a wage that requires you to get a second/third job, effectively prevents you from participating in civil society. You don't have the time nor the energy to become informed, and you sure as hell are not going to become involved, either. And everything's left for the good old boys club to decide...

Maybe they've overcooked it in Greece and Spain, maybe not. But it works like a charm in Germany, where a great number of people are struggling enough to prevent them from getting any funky ideas, yet not enough to have them pick up their pitchforks and torches.

Jews have the old testament.
Christians have the old testament and new testament.
Muslims have the old testament, new testament, and yet a newer testament.

All 3 share the old testament.
The 'violence promoting' scriptures are found in the old testament - which all 3 have in common.

Reza is right.
If people want peace, the religious of them simply ignore the violent edicts of their religions.
If they want to be violent, the religious of them legitimize it with excuses from their religions.

He's also right about the national hypocrisy. Al-Qaeda at the time of 9/11 was a pet organization of members of the Saudi royal family.
But instead of going after the Saudis (who also today finance ISIS), we go after 2 countries that are unrelated to the attack.

Look at today's irony. Assad in Syria (who we wanted deposed because he was friendlier to Russia than the U.S., and allowed Russian bases on Syrian soil [in the middle east]) is now fighting ISIS, while we ally with the Saudis who are supporting ISIS.

We also didn't mind supporting the Mujahedin (Jihadi fighters) in Afghanistan when they were fighting our enemy. We had no problem throwing Afghanistan into the dark ages when it suited us.

Ultimately, extremist Islam is a foil, meant to rouse western people's emotions. As national policy, we don't _actually_ do anything to stop it, we just use it as an excuse to do whatever else is of national interest.
Who would be the boogey man if extremist Islam was gone? We need a boogey man if we want to keep excusing and paying for a large military. People simply don't have the foresight and patience to maintain a strong military without someone scaring them into support. Particularly now, when we don't have the manufacturing capacity to quickly build a large military.

However, Reza is ignoring Turkey's and the Pacific islander's Muslim problems. Indonesia and the Philippines have extremist Muslim organizations doing attacks home (Philippines also has Christian terrorists). Turkey is a large source of Muslim fighters pouring into Syria.



The various related religions also have historical developmental differences.

Jews were for a long time in such minorities that they did not have the political capability of waging any campaign of violence. They were either too small, or too busy being occupied by European powers (Rome, etc).

Christians did have a long period of majority, starting around 400ad when Rome decided that a good way to control/pacify any dissent within the empire was to make the empire 1 religion and make Rome the head of that religion. They elected Christianity as the state religion, forced everyone in the Roman empire to convert, and you had a continent's worth of Christians.
This included north Africa and Middle East - and is when Jews (by now called Palestinians) were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity (**and few hundred years later forced to convert from Christianity to Islam).

Although, Christians had the benefit of the Inquisition(s) to temper their enthusiasm for Christianity. A large part of the population was killed for consorting with the devil. Once it got so bad that everyone knew someone who had been convicted and killed - and everyone was sure that those killed were innocent, it cast a large doubt on Christianity as whole. People questioned if the devil even exists, or if it's all a sham. The distrust and resentment paved the way for the eventual birth of Deism and Empiricism. A time when the scientific method and physical observation started to take over.

Islam is still a young religion. They still have to experience their religion becoming all powerful, and the inquisitions that inevitably come from absolute power. The one good thing about Islamic extremism is that it makes the people living under those conditions more likely to suffer. Once the suffering becomes so pervasive that everyone is suffering, the people will start to dislike/distrust their religion, and the extremism will resolve itself from the inside out - like it did with Christianity.

The bigger problem would be if things are 'too tolerable', and the religion grows more extreme (no one is inclined to say 'no'). The biggest problem would be if the religious leaders 'solve' the balance issue, and manage to stabilize the oppression at a level that is as extreme as it can be while still being permanently sustainable. Then the religious leaders can live the life of power without the threat of deposition.

-scheherazade

@enoch,

I think were we differ is the context from which we are looking at the conflict. You state a desire to see a political solution. Virtually every human on the planet would share that desire. You state a fear and desire to avoid military conflict, once again virtually all of us are agreed with you.

The trouble is I look at Syria, and the political solution was approached the most honestly, and productively while the opposition was mounting peaceful protests across the country. That effort towards a political resolution was ended alas by Assad's soldiers with military action. Pretty much exactly like his Father had before him. This time though it didn't end with a quick massacre pacifying the opposition but instead has escalated and progressed into the ongoing civil war.

From that context, I hear your call for a political resolution, and I feel it is at best wishful thinking and at worst cynical front to prevent any foreign protection of Assad's citizens from his armed forces. I hear your fears of military actions and the consequences they bring, but I see an existing and ongoing civil war already, and one which has in all probability seen the deployment of chemical weapons on civilian targets.

I can understand the fear of making things worse by getting involved, but just how many war crimes are you comfortable watching occur with NO reaction by the global community but talk? If we want to consider the expected actions of any world leader, from Obama through Putin through Assad, we can rest assured they will act in their own and/or their nations self interests. In Obama's case, he has an empowered public that can make his life difficult if he ignores them. That is not the position Assad is in. If Assad believes that chemical weapons will help him gain the edge in his conflict it is guaranteed he will use them. I deem it highly probable this recent attack was a test of what the world is willing to do in response, and if he doesn't think anyone will step up I fully expect him to continue.

Cat got hit by a car and now we dress it up like a baby and stick a pacifier in its mouth. Walks a little funny and it drools. Little girl just thinks its a silly kitty. Cute story Russia.

LOL
"Mouth Corks" would be a great marketing gimmick for pacifiers.

>> ^bobknight33:

I believe in a government as small and limited as possible. The corruption over the years have lead us to what we have. I would gather that more that 90% of elected official receive gains from groups for policies that don't serve the public. AS such such we can't trust our politicians to be honest I just assume a small government to limit the corruption and damage to the American people.
>> ^jimnms:
>> ^bobknight33:
I have not problem with the supreme court. They call it a tax and as such is constitutional.

I do have a big disagreement with the bill being government control as such hope for complete repeal next election.

Are you in favor of repealing other taxes that force us to pay for service you don't want?


I think 90% is conservative, however, I think down-sizing a large corrupt government just leaves you with a small corrupt government. I'd rather fix the system (simplistic, but consider it more of an idealogical disagreement with your solution), which seems more and more impossible to do as the plutocracy gains more and more power through the senators, congressmen, and judges who serve them. If Citizens United hasn't triggered SHTF (yet), I don't know what will. It's as if BigMacs, American Idol, and Twitter render people daft, pacified, and indifferent to reality.