osan
Member

Well, that didn't seem to settle much of anything. Uygur with his weak virtue signaling, apparently thinking that if he talks against Turks, he will be taken as honest and trustworthy. Oy. Dave Smith is nothing to write home about either. Prager has his moments, but isn't really that good at debate. The woman was mostly on the money, whoever she is. But there seems to have been some fundamentals missed. For one thing, we have no idea whether what we see in reports regarding either side of this giant bowl of liquid feces is reflective of truth. The Israelis have been up to all manner of chicanery for 75 years. One can debate whether circumstance drove them to it, or if they are just a raft of scummy people of whom perhaps the world would have benefitted had the Final Solution been successfully concluded. I'm unwilling to assume anything on that question. The same may be said of the Arabs of the region, however less clever and artful they may be. I don't trust any of them, taken statistically. Praeger made a fair point when he stated that the deaths of civilian Arabs lies squarely at Hamas' feet. They started it, operationally speaking, and hid among the people they are supposed to protect. There can be no question of their cowardice. The woman also made an important point about war, that it is and ought to be horrific. It is, after all, war. It is interesting to observe how few people hold a reasonable grasp of the most fundamental nature of warfare. These dummies, Smith and Uygur, are of that ilk (as are many in the military who should know better) wants warfare to be comparatively sanitary. This is patent idiocy. War should be out and out slaughter. It should be so atrocious, people are unable to wrap their heads around it; so horrifying that even the so-called "hawks" quit their moaning and scheming for it like covetous street whores they are. Much as is the case with freedom, the mean man wants all the benefits of war without those aspect of it that they find unappealing. "OOoooo... don't kill civilians... it's immoral...", as if two armies murdering each other en masse were somehow otherwise. I love how people rationalize the most absurd things, while condemning that which can actually be justified. This debate was pointless, IMO. The real questions were not treated in a way that addresses the fundamentals of the issue, which is the only way to get to the truth. They kept the discussion up in the haze of comparative irrelevancies and they largely ignored the fact that we're not privy to the whole truth.

This was a deceptively dense bit with a lot crammed into a few short minutes. The thing that strikes me most is, once again, the weak link. That would be us; our attitudes; our will to commit, and to what we would apply it. I disagree with the assertion that prior to Musk's acquisition of twitter, there was no way for people of common interests and goals to get together. Even Eville™ facebook provides ample opportunity for such congress. I would also point out that the dissemination of the brands of information that this guy is claiming to be so recent, has been largely available for over 30 years now. USENET was a fine resource with tens of thousands of newsgroups where people discussed and argued over anything from the manifold deceptions of "government" (e.g. Gulf of Tonkin) to how to rim your girlfriend. Saying that this is some new thing is clearly incorrect. To my eyes, the real difference here is one not of access, but of incentive - motivation. Prior to 9/11, Americans were mostly droning along from day to day in the cloud that lead them to take nearly everything in their lives for granted as they wrung their hands over which color ought be the new BMW. Then the towers were demolished in a cloud of vast lies and bullshit. It was interesting to observe how vast legions of Americans outright refused to consider that which was so obvious to we, the engineers, shrieking at us that we were looney conspiracy theorists, apparently oblivious to the fact that the official story describes a pretty grand and very dark conspiracy in itself. It seems to me that the odd bedfellows phenomenon is now arising not due to sudden availability to truth, but to the fact that Theye are squeezing us more severely than ever before, encroaching in a ceaseless expansion of trespass to the point that businessmen can barely conduct business without "government's" nose in their sphincters. So it's really not some great awakening born of the great and inherent, if heretofore latent, goodness of these people, but due almost solely to the desperation of rats with no place left to hide.

For Pete's sake man, READ WHAT I WROTE. Why does everything with you seem to have to be a fight? And your logic isn't. Tons of NYC detectives did plenty of cocaine, for example. It's as if you live on a different planet than the rest of us.

As I wrote previously, the timing cannot be dismissed. This is transparent bullshit. It will be amusing to see how it plays out. I'm thinking the time has come to get that $300K in silver coin... though I remain unconvinced that it will serve the purpose for which it will have been intended. Then there's bitcoin, in which my faith stands on similarly shaky ground. Theye have it in for us, American middle-class more than anyone else, and they by all means have the ability to crash the global economy in hours if it pleased them, which I think it does not. But if Theye begin to feel an existential threat, who know what will happen? Those fools are capable of anything.

Well sure. That's all part of the general strategy. Take the ground out from under people's feet so they can no longer tell one thing from another. Neutralize their cognitive reach by keeping them ignorant of all standards, save the one that says there are no standards. This destroys everything in a man; his faith, trust, innate intelligence because he has nothing solid against which to work it. Not unlike muscles, a mind rendered idle atrophies. We are in the hands of the devils that scared Satan from hell such that he's now at Heaven's gate, tearily begging asylum from an evil that left him paling. Certainly so of Biden. Trump, I'm not yet quite convinced on, though his failure to drain the swamp was indeed a spectacular fiasco.

OK, simmer down. Let's look at a recent fact. RFKJ suddenly changes to "independent" (how potentially ironic) shortly before a very important election (as elections go, anyhow). Recall the words of the filthy communist shill, FDR, who candidly quipped that in politics there was no such things as coincidences. I do not say that this closes the door on the man, but it certainly gives much upon which to keep one's eyes. Now consider the possibility that everything we see is theater... everything significant, that is. Imagine that the Democrats see they are going to lose in a big way and sense that maybe they won't be able to get away with yet another stolen election. What shall we do? Have one of our... <AHEM> trump cards come out to play. Out of nowhere, the great Kennedy name drops from the DNC sleeve, but knowing their credibility is slipping badly, the new candidate declares independence in the effort to enhance credibility of trustworthiness. After all, this is a Kennedy! We instruct him, perhaps years in advance (after all, these people are careful planners, IMO), to begin spewing a carefully architected litany of talking points that will get conservatives going "hmmm...", the goal there being to siphon off just enough votes to once again make credible a stolen election appear "clean". Clean enough to avoid consequences, that is. Wild, you say? Too wild? Sure, and FDR didn't taunt Japan into attacking us. Northwoods never happened. Tonkin. Weapons of mass destruction. Lusitania. Russia 1917. China 1940s-70s. Khmer Rouge. Amin. Gulf wars. 9/11. Covid. Shall we go on with the drearily long list of grand conspiracies in which nobody believed until after the rotten facts became what we now know them to have been?

Clearly you do not understand the first thing about me. Go in peace.

I maintain my insistence on https://freedomisobvious.blogspot.com/2021/07/amendment-xxix.html

I gave up there.

That is certainly so, but why not use Theire rotten system to make them have to work as tediously as possible in that sphere? It may not work out that way, but then it costs one very little to give it a swing.

And your grave error here lies in the assumption that damage control is never a solution. When a gunshot victime arrives at the ER, the first thing they do is get him stable and repair immediate and life-threatening damage. That is a very definite solution. They don't worry about infections, which comes after the patient has not died. I'm not sure how you fail to see this. You seem to get so narrowly focused on a tree, the forest disappears. And your bile is self-defeating. But as always, do as you wish. Nobody stops you.

You will have to forgive me now, but I must be direct: this is a complete bullshit response that addresses nothing, and tosses in a strawman just for evasive giggles. Let's just call it a push since you seem to view this exchange as some sort of competition. It's not. I am looking for soluitions and you have provided bupkis in spite of the seemingly big talk to the contrary. I have no idea what your purpose is here, but it is not on the same planet as mine. Feel free to prove otherwise at any time. I will always listen.

I now see you are not quite ready for a serious conversation. Rather than address my points, you resort to disingenuous humor and slights? By all appearances you are just full of bile and need to vent. Fine, please proceed, but I do note that thus far I've seen nothing of substance. This is beginning to take on the timbre of a rant. I don't mind, but I thought we were talking about real world approaches. if you don't want to address it, then just say it and I will beg off. Which concept would tht be?

To put my perspective in another way... It's great to get the house in order. Add this, paint that, rewire the other. But when you have a raging kitchen fire, that has to be priority one, or else all the rest counts for naught. This is the situation in which we find ourselves in America at this time. The positive reality is that the kitchen is burning, the fire is gaining, and we are failing to use the Ansul (fire suppression system). That is the hard, ugly, incomprehensible truth of our reality. When you blow the Ansul, the kitchen becomes a mess, but it is the lesser evil to having the house burn to the foundation blocks. That is why I give >>provisional<< support to Trump. To do otherwise is to give up all hope and go tits-up as a matter of choice. My expectation is that he will fail us. My hope is that he will not. But if he does, then we all of us need to decide on what we will DO in the wake of yet another yanking of our chain. This is prudent, circumspect consideration. Holding one's breath, stamping their feet in tantrum is not the way. If in desperation all you find before you is a single possible alternative in a process that is going to move forward regardless whether you participate, and that alternative is known to be a possible fake, you go with that, rather than the choice you already know will put you over the wood. Dropping out because you don't like the choices before you is the response of a spoiled toddler, I am sorry to say. Be a strategist. I consider what is before me coldly as the analyst that I am. I see feces displayed for my consumption and am displeased. But my analysis does reveal difference, and it is difference that drives truths we can use to best effect, which at this point is in fact and indeed the best for which we can hope AT THIS TIME. Unicorns are not going to appear suddenly, pooing out love and peace, prosperity, freedom, and respect for all human rights. The world is a statistical place. EVERYTHING numerically non-trivial has a statistical nature and the statistical reality before right here, right now as I write these words is that the cohesion necessary to toss the tyrant, his acolytes, and his minions into the dustbin does not exist. Tomorrow morning it will not exist, nor next week or next month, or in November. The American people will continue to walk the path of manifold corruptions and enough will go to the polls to make the process we all despise happen. That is to say, the fucking kitchen is ablaze and the rest of the house is about to go up with it. There is no affordable opportunity to goof around; the problem must be addressed, quickly and effectively. Time to turn off will come later, but for now we get to work with the process ON ITS TERMS. We do so because OUR TERMS don't count for shit at this moment. That will hopefully change, but at this point we must engage in triage, and it says get to the Ansul FAST. Nobody here wants freedom more than do I. I am an adept analyst, if I date flatter myself, and I see the statistical reality as it stands before us. It is grim, and taking gratuitously supercilious measures that will not effectively address the most immediate problem at hand is a fool's errand. Stop the fire, no matter how distasteful you may find the process. Save the house. Then clean and rebuild.

OK, then what are your strategy and tactics? Be specific and give reasonable operational detail. Where did I so much as hint at any of that? Do you mean to imply that our liberties are not at grave risk; that we have not already sustained huge losses while Theye cultivate their power and exercise ever more brazenly? Like it or not, wer are made war upon, or do you not believe this to be so?

I see here a fair amount of bile and outright hatred of Trump. I understand why and I have my own doubts, but riding around town on the "I Hate Trump" bandwagon is an unproductive tactic. If you need to vent, go to the back 40, set up targets, and break out the 50BMG. Ranting about the insufficiencies of Trump is a grade-A waste of time. We are in a fight for our lives, figuratively and possibly physically, depending on which of the paranoid conspiracy speculations to which you subscribe. Standing on principles in the way of a purist such that the perfect becomes the enemy of the "will have to do under the circumstances", is a highly self-defeating approach. Stand on uch if you absolutely must, but as your purity leads you to the gas chamber, remember what I wrote here on this day. There is principle and there is pragmatism. The sweet spot on any given day and under a given set of circumstances lies between the two. This is the essence of the art of living, and the art of war. My inner purist is with the others 100% regarding Trump. My inner pragmatist has taken a 2x4 and knocked the purist mostly stupid for the sake of not dying on the wrong hill. I provisionally support Trump because we the people are painted into a very tight corner, the alternative choices posing a far more remote chance of helping us out. It's trite and it is as sad as the devil bawling his eyes out a rock in Georgia, but Trump is by all appearances the lesser evil. And so we are left with the paltry choices of Biden, some ain't-gonna-win-no-matter-how-hard-we-vote third party candidate, Trump, giving up entirely and going home and blowing our brains out for despair, or going to hot warfare against Theire minions in the United States. None of these options are particularly appetizing, I think many here would agree. But Trump is, again to all appearances, by far the least of the evils presented to us for choice. And if the appearances are false in the ways and to the degrees we might call "worst case", then we are sore-fucked and reduced to the choices of capitulation or hot war and nothing we do otherwise will count for anything good. As a practical measure, and given the reality of the unenviable position into which we have allowed ourselves to be maneuvered by malevolent interests, and further given that we cannot know for certain the cloth from which the Donald is cut, he remains the current best hope for any return to a lesser state of servitude. Again, if he proves to be something very much other than what he advertises, then we are screwed to the barn door no worse than if we choose otherwise. We know Biden will continue to pile-drive us into the dust, and IMO war is the option of absolute last resort, to be chosen only if it becomes clear that Trump is leading us down the garden path.

The traitors who voted against the Biggs Amendment are: Aderholt Republican AL NO

Color me surprised. Or not. Mors tyrannis, and I mean mors. Is there a list of these traitors? Asking for a friend...

Let's see what it really says, to wit: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It opens by acknowledging (not granting) one's just claim to be secure in one's property†... imagine that, against "unreasonable" search and seizure. In this day we almost reflexively retort with "well, what does 'unreasonable' really mean?" Now if we recall the old quote by Jefferson that quipped to the effect that free men must perforce be devoid of ignorance, and of good moral fabric, it can be justifiably stated that "reasonable" in this case was abundantly clear to the Framers, as well as the typical dullard of the time. it was obvious, as it now is to anyone with a spark of intelligence. They were, after all, living in the Age of Reason. Asking so pedantic a question as to the meaning of "reasonable" serves not so much to indicate our diligence of habit (though it might), as our lack of smarts on a question concerning an issue so basic, that even the most sadly ill-educated among us should still know the answer, even if only able to sense it tacitly. I maintain that "reasonable" holds a meaning that is intuitively clear, obvious, and correct and that those who ask such questions are likely attempting to throw others off the scent of the truth. This isn't rocket surgery. Small children, if asked about such things, will show a clear and sufficient understanding of the notion that evidently escapes the grasp of far too many adults. It is clear to me what it means. It should be equally so to the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans, and dare I say the rest of the human world as well.

Point taken. Given that the Donald failed to keep his single most significant promise to drain the swamp, I understand how people might feel a smidge of mistrust. /sarc However, and this turns on the assumption that the relevant factors are what they appear and are not theater elements, it could be said that Trump's putative defeat in 2020 holds at least some potential as a backhanded victory. Consider all that has come to light in the wake of his losing his bid for a second term. Would the raving corruption that we all knew was present, but could never quite prove beyond doubt in open fashion before the world have come to the fore in the absence of the left's apparently wild and flailing efforts to ensure Trump could never again gain the office? The seemingly unhinged reaction of the left, largely made manifest by the Democrats, has exposed the raw rot and stench and extent of the running state of unbridled corruption. If this is "organic", then one can but wonder where it will all lead in terms of people red-pilling and perhaps deciding they've had enough - dare I even hope. If it just more theater, perhaps intended as a show or even a metric of just how utter now is Theire power, then never mind. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I can't tell which this all is... or perhaps it is a mix and Theye are once again finding themselves astonished at how fully corrupted we Americans have become. At this point I can dismiss nary a possibility out of hand.

Always remember and never forget that statutes always matter then Theye say they do, and don't matter only when Theye say they don't. This has been a public service announcement. You're welcome.

I'm not at all getting your point. Nowhere do I state nor do I imply anything even remotely as you put it here. Where's this coming from? I remain perplexed. I would not put them in charge of commerce, but the issue at hand is not of trade, but of responses in the face of external threats. I've not said anywhere that such measures are good for trade, but under a very narrowly defined set of circumstances, trade must yield to defense. Trade, for example, makes little difference when the enemy in question is landing troops in all up and down the eastern and western seaboards. I've made that distinction very clearly.

The fact that liberty has to be pitched should tell you something very significant about the state of the mean American. Hint: it's not very good.

A pipe dream, indeed... but you neglect to say why. WE are the reason. Our rank corruption as individuals who want all the joys and exhilarations of liberty but who have no interest in paying the costs and bearing the fatigues of getting and maintaining the state, make it so. We, the glorious people, are by and large full of shit. So please, let us at least be honest in a sufficiently complete manner with each other here on this site, the way friends should be with one another, and speak circumspectly on such matters. I agree with your assertion, but I add the reason why it is so, which reveals that we could change it. We just don't want to... enough. We want the knight in shining armor - Trump is a good contemporary example - to fix it all so we can go back to masturbating and filling our noses with snow and sticking our tongues up our girlfriends' asses as we shop for swag on our cell phones. Whoopdee flippin' doo... For the millionth time: WE are the root of all human problems. It ain't the climate; it ain't mass-coronal-ejections; it's not an asteroid about to slam into the earth, or little green men from Andromeda, or mountain lions. It's us. Just us, and nothing or nobody else. Until that changes, there's not that much point in going on about liberty, is there?

THis, of course, raises the same old question of at what point do people begin taking non-equivocating physical action against these agents of perdition. Disobedience is usually met by men with guns. Will mass disobedience produce results where dribs and drabs fail? We really have not tried it yet, so who can say? But reasonably assuming that the hornets' nest would be stirred and many people would be gravely violated by the armed petty-tyrants, pursuant to their masters' orders, what then? It then becomes a very clear choice: fight or capitulate. Fight must perforce mean the holding to account those who become the sources of tyrannical action, and if that means apprehending the boards of large network media outlets, for example, then that is what would have to be done. Apprehend CEOs and Chairmans of the Board and issue warrants for the arrests of all other board members, many of whom would likely attempt to flee the country or take sanctuary with police, which raises yet another interesting set of possibilities. But at some point, we the big-mouthed "free men of America" need to shit or get off the pot, and shitting means BECOMING the self-governing people who act within the metes of the principles of liberty, lest we become what we claim to loathe. And THAT raises some interesting questions as well, not the least of which would be the question of volumes and appeals and so forth. Under such conditions, SCOTUS would be absolutely unworthy of the least shred of trust because those justices would without question view the "people" as renegades. So how would it all be handled? Or would we declare war for real and simply execute prisoners on the spot? It could prove the only practical way to negotiate such a dolorous circumstance. Regardless of all these discomfiting uncertainties, the one certainty in my opinion is that we are going to have to wrest the powers of governance from the hands of these scurrilous criminals if we are to take our liberties in a serious and adult way. Otherwise, we're just bullshitting ourselves and each other in the good old echo chamber, and then why bother talking about it at all?

The perfect is the enemy of the good. I wrote normatively and it is a clearly valid perspective. That the positive reality reeks of numbskulls and douchepigs with malevolent or ineptly conceived agendas, screwing billions of people in their backholes through bad decisions of the sort under discussion here, it does not follow that the notion itself is mistaken. The magic is competence and good faith, which boils down to trustworthiness. That nearly nary a single living soul involving himself in such matters is worthy of the least shred of our trust, it still does not follow that the idea in itself is unworthy. It only means that either we have the wrong people in such positions of special trust, the issue itself is very difficult to navigate correctly or, most likely, both. And let us not evade the bigger issue and root of the problem under discussion: people, by and large, are fucking douches, ill-content to live and let live. Quite the contrary, they seek petty drama, the consequences of which tends to be misery heaped upon misery. At the end of the day, there is little to recommend us as a species. Our cleverness, coupled with our eminent corruptibility and our apparent lust for corruption, has far outflanked our wishes to live good lives amid our fellow human beings. Otherwise, we would be living far better lives than we currently enjoy.

Protectionist measures do indeed bring harm to economies, most particularly when all else is normal and cordial between trade partners. But when justified, such properly considered measures lead to lesser evils. Comparatively trivial issues of optimal economic health are secondary to the immediate survival of a people in the face of threats from an external enemy. The issue you address is not quite as simple as you seem to convey. These sorts of political considerations most often carry subtle difficulties and require wise men to undertake such measures in a manner loosely analogous to the amputation of a gangrenous limb for the sake of saving the life to which it is attached. AF's example of cutting all economic ties with China, our mortal enemy, is valid.