Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BulletMagnet]

I typically don't like to excuse people for their ignorance and stupid decisions, but Trump won a lot of people over with "America first"/non-interventionist rhetoric, and it was an immediate switch after the election. The Syria episode has been the one instance where his diehards started to show signs of waking up.

I'd like to know why they didn't "wake up" back when Trump was spouting all his tough talk about "bombing the shit out of" everyplace ages before he took office, or at least put it on the long, long list of issues he overtly took both sides of in hopes that enough folks wouldn't notice, but that's a whole other subject. Short version: I find it difficult to believe that the vast, vast majority of Trump's voters (most of whom, I'd wager, went all-in for Dubya and Iraq not too terribly long ago) actually cared a whole lot about non-interventionism except as a more intellectual-sounding mask for priorities worn less proudly, and the lack of any political price he's paid for pulling the rug out from under them bears this out.

When the majority doesn't want interventionism and the corporation-owned government continues against our wishes... This is where things get into conspiracy nut territory I choose not to explore.

The thing is, it really isn't a particularly "hidden" state of affairs, it's pretty obvious who profits from this sort of venture (at least until Trump or some other conservative allows corporations to keep their financial affairs completely hidden from public scrutiny) and who's enabling them, especially if the latter wears the "pro-business" model (which, unfortunately, is most candidates these days).

We have a situation where Muslims (by and large) have a low view of westerners and Europeans (by and large) don't want Muslims. Yet there they go.

That's fine, but again, if you really want to address the underlying causes of this problem, which you don't seem to have much hesitance to acknowledge, I'm unconvinced that a travel ban is the way to go; changing the way we treat the rest of the world doesn't allow for quick and dirty "look at how awesome and decisive I am" headlines (which means we'll never see them under this administration), but anyone who's genuinely serious about national security issues should be very skeptical of any measure which doesn't prioritize improving the conditions these "risky" groups live under, which both greatly reduces the amount of people who want to leave for greener pastures to begin with and ensures that the vast, vast majority of those who do aren't doing so in the interests of some ill-conceived jihad.

[Rob]

[Mischief Maker]

Yes, but let's remember that all people are equal and all cultures are equal and we have to be fair.

Equal protection under the law is not the same thing as saying everyone is identical. Stop being intellectually lazy.

[BulletMagnet]

I just got the impression (from places like AskTrumpSupporters - shudder) that they thought he was for non-interventionism.

If they were truly as worried about WW3 as they say they are they'd be abandoning him (and would have abandoned Bush) in droves; in reality, of course, they've only dug their heels in harder.

It's not the way to go because the ban is basically nothing.

As I'm pretty sure you surmised from the beginning, I'm convinced that any matter of ban, no matter how thorough, would be not only ineffective but counterproductive, since it not only leaves the root causes of Islamic terrorism intact but actively contributes to them.

[Rob]

[BryanM]

Starting to buy a little bit into the plausibility of the more apocalyptic scenarios for the next recession, or the one to come after it.

It's not just another large bubble exploding, but also hitting the stress of having hit peak oil at the same time.

Obama-endorsed politician, Macron, says Africa's problems are "civilizational" and blames women with "7 or 8" kids.

Very progressive. Shining beacon of hope, this man.

No plausible future where he can get the approval rating of his party down to 10% like Blair and Hollande did to theirs.

[antron]

The root cause of Islamic terrorism is Islam. It's the culture.

Ok. Then the root cause of the Nazism was Christianity. And European culture. "God with Us "on their belts. Tried to exterminate another religion.

Tens of millions dead. These Islamic slackers have some serious catching up to do.

[o.pwuaioc]

The root cause of Islamic terrorism is Islam. It's the culture.

Ok. Then the root cause of the Nazism was Christianity. And European culture. "God with Us "on their belts. Tried to exterminate another religion.

Tens of millions dead. These Islamic slackers have some serious catching up to do.

It doesn't count because it's not 2017 and Rob can't fathom the past.

[Mischief Maker]

Vietnamese-Americans have retaliated by having an abnormally high poverty rate.

Your analogy sucks. Is there currently a civil war in Vietnam? No. Are we currently aiding one side of the civil war with bombings and "advisors?" No. When there was a Vietnamese civil war and we were sending bombs and advisors, were there terror attacks against civilians in South Vietnam? Even though the Viet Cong consisted mainly of Buddhists and Atheists, who Sam Harris says are far less violent than Muslims? Yes.

[antron]

It doesn't count because it's not 2017 and Rob can't fathom the past.

Good theory but my guess is that his heart has been sufficiently filled with hate by people who wanted to specifically do that. It's been filled by extremists on both sides. He just doesn't realize that is exactly what the Muslim extremists (ISIS) want, and that the American ones (like coulter) are unwittingly helping them.

I want to say Trump is hate,...but Trump is grift. But he uses hate in grift and hate is so much worse.

[Rob]

[BryanM]

Imagine the possibility that Africa's problems have something to do with the Africans that live there.

Ok.

"Does a subordinate slave country have any free will?"
"No, it doesn't. The banks that control it determines how it's run and how resources are developed and allocated."

Turns out it doesn't.

Here's a weekly reminder of how power structures work. On the very rare occasion an African version of Clinton/Bush gets deposed, such as during Thomas Sankara's revolution, the regime is immediately shot in the head within a couple years. And another puppet eager to fuck over the plebs for a little money and boobies is put into place.

A freakish place like Cuba is so infuriating for the capitalists because that's like 3 cents they can't have. Then again, Cuba only has some autonomy thanks to the protection of Mother Russia. Freedom costs a risk of mutual nuclear annihilation.

He who feeds you, controls you

[Mortificator]

I like our history

We raped and killed

[Rob]

[BulletMagnet]

Understand that I'm not remotely justifying any of these pointless wars, but eventually you have to see that we aren't always 100% to blame for everything.

I'm not sure where you see folks attempting to completely absolve Islam, or any religion/race/culture, of the atrocities committed by its fringe (or the Opus-esque notion that doing anything else when it comes to white Westerners equates to self-flagellation) - heaven knows it isn't me - but the thing is, again, if you're actually serious about the issue, placing blame in either direction isn't your priority. The question one needs to ask is "am I interested in actually solving this problem, or in putting on a morality play?" While we're on that note...

No one is making a second generation Muslim-American shoot people.

Nobody's making tenth-generation Protestants shoot up department stores or destroy their communities with meth either, but whenever that subject comes up - and it comes up often enough to be called an "epidemic", so this isn't an occasional outlier - the response is (almost) always "what terrible conditions led them to this point and what can we do to alleviate them?" And these are folks who, by and large, lived for quite a few years under much better conditions than most Muslim nations (and in many cases Muslim-Americans) can claim, but when faced with their own dose of cultural and economic adversity suddenly took a dramatic demographic nosedive (not to mention elected Donald Trump, which everyone has been working even harder to justify on cultural grounds); why, in their case, do outside forces take priority in the discussion, while others get the "personal responsibility" finger-wag?

[Mischief Maker]

And setting aside for the moment the question of whether every man woman and child who practices Islam is evil, if you want to protect liberal values the top priority right now is to oppose the orange fascist whose administration is actively chipping away at constitutional protections, in part to enable his muslim ban.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

If there's a lesson to be learned from the history, it's that they aren't going to satisfied with just muslims, dude. Have you seen what Kris Kobach's been up to lately? That's why historians say the move is to "resist early!"

[Rob]

[Mischief Maker]

Well I guess if we're looking to "The Camp of the Saints" for justification to take an axe to the constitution we can at least take heart that Trump's Muslim ban makes us all safe from another 9/11, right?

I wonder what the nationalities of all the 9/11 hijackers were?

15 from Saudi Arabia. But for some reason not at all related to Trump business holdings, Saudi Arabia isn't included in the ban.

2 from the UAE. But for some reason not at all related to Trump business holdings, the UAE isn't included in the ban.

1 from Egypt. But for some reason not at all related to Trump business holdings, Egypt isn't included in the ban.

Finally 1 from Lebanon and BINGO! For some reason not at all related to a lack of Trump business holdings, Lebanon is included in the ban!

Man, who wouldn't want to give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety under the wise leadership of Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka?

[Zen]

The unhelpful use of the prism of identity politics (which we are all guilty of, to varying degrees), through which any opposing and perhaps uncomfortable points, are filtered and responded to in some kind of nightmarish pavlovinan/Patellar Reflex fashion in this thread, is truly discouraging.
There are obvious cultural relativism, race is a construct, et al. malodorous fumes wafting though the admonishment-like posts. I say this, not to cause offence or to cause argument but to simply mark how disingenuous and unhelpful the whole farce is.
It seems basic objectivism has become the whipping boy for whatever the convoluted bastardisation of reason "the current year" has to offer our radicals.

For example, is it seriously being proposed, that all races, if starting from a point of equal opportunity, with equal resources and being allowed to progress unhindered, will arrive at an equal outcome? Is this what is being proffered here as fact? My God!
Anyone familiar with animal husbandry would laugh themselves silly at this absurd level of relativism. Evolution has a rude awakening in store for this "progress".

The cultural relativism apologists range and indeed rage, from those with needless but understandable (but non the less unnecessary) cultural/racial inferiority shoulder chips, to the comically disingenuous "enlightened" virtue signallers, pontificating from their ivory towers and then, all the way down to the depths, we have the emotional masturbators, in their self-loathing communes of martyrdom.

Moraly speaking, I would suggest that conscious, feeling entities, are all equal in their very "being". Forget race, culture, sex, intelligence etc. But to build an anti objectivist, anti evolutionary feel-good castle of sand, dedicated to the happy-happy delusion, a philosophers stone of a progressive racial/cultural/moral human composite, well . . . . . . its an old tale of man's subjective constructs defying tides of the real. Believing that the sea can be beaten back with sheer arrogance.

[antron]

Whatever, Neanderthal fucker.

[Rob]

[Rob]

[BryanM]

It's also lulzy when people call a loan "foreign aid". Yeah, Greece sure is being helped with all that debt and austerity. I'm sure the other subordinate states in a similar boat can crawl out from under the boot by having more of their wealth extracted. Lots of "help", there.

I guess empires are easier to see when they're built at the end of a sword instead of the end of a pen. The modern shadow empire of capital puts to shame anything the Persians or Mongols ever managed to build.

For example, is it seriously being proposed, that all races, if starting from a point of equal opportunity, with equal resources and being allowed to progress unhindered, will arrive at an equal outcome?

Are some cows special snowflakes? Maybe on an individual basis, there exist super cows. But in the aggregate, they're just goddamn cows dude.

All cows are equal but some of them get bigger pens to shit on themselves in.



All must kneel to the cow king. Give unto him your flesh and blood, don't not be a good little moo cow.

[Rob]

[Zen]

Are some cows special snowflakes? Maybe on an individual basis, there exist super cows. But in the aggregate, they're just goddamn cows dude.

Countered, with an argument of Bovine relativism? What kind of Pythonesque thread are you running here, sir?

Individuals, "special" or not, of any race/culture, should be judged on the content of their character. Everyone is equal in this regard. All honest and intelligent persons know this.
But correct personal behaviour/interaction does not correlate to cultural/racial aggregate. I'm sure the perfectly decent individuals who flee from their own, not so relatively progressive cultures, understand this difference quite well. None are perhaps more horrified than they, by our "betters" plans for a new Europe and indeed a new improved United States, as they remember what they fled from.

The rest of your post, not least the gentleman pictured, i'm not touching with a ten foot pole

[antron]

Nice try to change your post's meaning, Zen. Race now equals race/culture? Your "husbandry" line makes that very dubious.

[Mischief Maker]

So [liberals] believe in human evolution, but only 'from the neck down'.

Seriously, you and Zen need to stop. Neither of you understand the process of evolution if you're saying things like that.

Evolution is the combination of random genetic mutation PLUS environmental adaptation. Skin pigment levels are a balancing act between blocking UV rays from causing gene damage, and capturing enough UV radiation to synthesize vitamin D and prevent rickets. The drier and more equatorial the environment, the heavier the UV radiation so humans in those climates developed more skin pigment to prevent damage. Conversely the more polar and moist the environment, the less UV radiation to form vitamin D so humans developing in those climates developed less skin pigment to maximize diminished vitamin D production.

Was there an environmental pressure that required greater cognitive capacity when hunting and gathering in dimmer, wetter climes than brighter, drier ones? I'm all ears!

[BryanM]

I'm interested in hearing this cow's theories on why black people aren't taking home the gold in swimming, polo, and hockey in droves. Since they're clearly vastly athletically superior ala NFL, NBA, etc. Are they weak against water? Have a poor sense of balance? Allergic to the cold?

I always assumed it was because such sports required capital and affluence to play. But, what do ya know, human races are Pokémon with special digivolutions and elemental affinities. The farm doesn't matter, it's the cows man. The cows are running da farm!

Wow. You really do believe this.

It's pretty easy to believe humans are animals when they do nothing to dissuade such a thesis.

American citizens had scant little more power to stop Billary J Trump from becoming president than the North Koreans have any power of magically liberating themselves, either. You're a powerless cow, just like the rest of us. Sorry if it hurts your feelings.

[Zen]

Seriously, you and Zen need to stop.

Neither of you understand the process of evolution if you're saying things like that.

I can assure you, that is not the case. More to the point; "saying things like" what? What "things"? You do not say, so I can not respond.

Evolution is the combination of random genetic mutation PLUS environmental adaptation. Skin pigment levels are a balancing act between blocking UV rays from causing gene damage, and capturing enough UV radiation to synthesize vitamin D and prevent rickets. The drier and more equatorial the environment, the heavier the UV radiation so humans in those climates developed more skin pigment to prevent damage. Conversely the more polar and moist the environment, the less UV radiation to form vitamin D so humans developing in those climates developed less skin pigment to maximize diminished vitamin D production.

What is this? I have no argument with any of this. Evolution is the opportunistic success of genes best compatible with the environment as it is at any given time. I do not like to use the term "adaptation" in this context as it vaguely suggests intention. That comes later .
To "evolve", is to "get lucky". By and large, evolution is pure chance.

Was there an environmental pressure that required greater cognitive capacity when hunting and gathering in dimmer, wetter climes than brighter, drier ones? I'm all ears!

I make no pretence to know the answer, my friend. All that are interested in such matters, have considered such environmental pressures, be they a more unforgiving environment, exposure to the availability of certain foods (we have all heard the fable of the salmon of knowledge I take it?)
Some interesting and for some reason controversial (not to mention, bizarrely considered insulting), theories on Neanderthal genes. I have no doubt you are read on such matters. As it stands, who the fuck really knows?
And yet . . . here we are, in an industrious "Western" culture, engineered, driven, and governed by the unmentionable race (some say that this awful state of affairs is an illusion perpetrated by the "white devil" and petulantly shout "you didn't build that", thereby bringing balance back to the force ). Perhaps just a lucky roll of the genetic dice? Perhaps a little to do with the "intention" that I allude to above? When there is intelligence enough to recognise and capitalise on genetic good fortune, evolution's random lottery comes face to face with conscious will.
Like all questions, the answer is seated in the question itself. The fact that this question exists at all is perhaps, your answer.

But what do I know. I casually and in good faith, posted in this thread to discuss and perhaps learn something new (and I hope others are equally open). Maybe it really is just evil whitey stealing all the apples.

I'm interested in hearing this cow's theories on why black people aren't taking home the gold in swimming, polo, and hockey in droves. Since they're clearly vastly athletically superior ala NFL, NBA, etc. Are they weak against water? Have a poor sense of balance? Allergic to the cold?

I always assumed it was because such sports required capital and affluence to play. But, what do ya know, human races are Pokémon with special digivolutions and elemental affinities. The farm doesn't matter, it's the cows man. The cows are running da farm!

Again with the fallacy of equal opportunity = equal outcome? I know you are more intelligent than this. Certainly, lack of capital and affluence can limit access. Of course this also raises the question of "why" this lack of capital and affluence exists to begin with, no?
Also, do you not disprove your own hypothesis of "bovine" relativism, when you point out that:

Since they're clearly vastly athletically superior ala NFL, NBA, etc.

Sure looks like you gave an example of, what you see, as big racial difference right there. You certainly do like to stir up your thread like a demented cackling witch stirring her brew, don't you? I guess I cant blame you.
Also, the continued use of "cows" rather than the other plural, is a nicely loaded taunt. My compliments. But again, I am not touching it.

[EmperorIng]

I sometimes think about what happened to that great engine of this thread, quash. I worry that once his financiers got everything they needed out of him for spreading propaganda, they just let him go. Either that or he's getting ready to nuke North Korea. Hope he's ok!

Of course this also raises the question of "why" this lack of capital and affluence exists to begin with, no?

I can think of a few reasons why this lack of capital and affluence exist, and none of them have to do with genetics.

Also, do you not disprove your own hypothesis of "bovine" relativism, when you point out that:

Since they're clearly vastly athletically superior ala NFL, NBA, etc.

Sure looks like you gave an example of, what you see, as big racial difference right there.

It is also funny that you blind yourself with your line of thought to the point that you can't see sarcasm, nor can you see how BryanM underlines the contradictions in "black people are naturally better at these sports." I remember in a documentary it was pointed out that in the 1920s and 1930s people thought Jews were genetically predisposed to basketball, because all of the basketball stars were Jewish.

On an unrelated note: Why does it seem like "I'm a race realist!" is the new way of saying "I'm a racial supremacist!"