I think it's amazing you could be so childishly desperate to fling out insults as to ignore much of the nuance and detail of the very article you posted. While I'm sure it was worth it for the temporary e-penis extension, you appear to have simply thrown out the link hoping to feel like you "proved someone wrong on the internet" and civility wasn't even an afterthought. Whatever you do, don't read the article all the way down.

Now, I have no problem with facts and figures. Indeed, this article makes a clear case for the possible misrepresentation I noted:



It would have been far more rational to, first, read the whole article, and second, rationally conclude that perhaps I carried the same misconception about mass killings that is perpetuated by media. Nothing like jumping to "self-hating whiteness", which I can only presume is considered a "sick burn" at the alt-right beta cuck sites where you spend the remainder of your time.

Offhand, when I (personally) think of mass killings, those perpetuated by white guys come to mind first. The guy in Vegas, the guy in the Colorado theater, the guy in Connecticut, and Columbine. All whiteys as I recall. I can think of a couple others that are probably totally random to some people. Andrew Cunanan, who killed Versace went on a several-day trek killing people, and I probably remember that because it started where I live. There's Eliot Rodger, but I remember that one because I found it rather fascinating. Rodger was mixed race. And some black guy, whose name I don't remember, who attacked a bunch of people on a New York subway, killing "white devils." I don't remember if he had a gun, but I do remember that he got in a fight in prison with serial killer Joel Rifkin. Or maybe it was Edmund Kemper. I think it was Rifkin.

The white killers simply rise to the surface, be it from being generally those with higher numbers and more public displays, or from media bias towards talking about white people over other races.

Oh, and I remember one from Wisconsin several years back where an Asian guy gunned down several white hunters, reportedly after they had harassed him. Not saying his action was right, just that there might have been a trigger. He also didn't use an AR-15, but, if I remember correctly, an SKS.

A valid conversation is here concerning demographics and media skew. I did my very best to address your point with civility on this, despite you starting out being a beta cuck dick or whatever else passes for insults in your corner of the internet. I learned something interesting in this exchange. Time will tell if you did.

Okay, for some reason, we've overlooked some of the latest nonsense from the White House and Trump regime in here.

And I do get to say regime here because of Trump's praise for China's abandoning of presidential term limits. The phrase "maybe we'll give that a shot" should be disconcerting across the board. We also shouldn't dismiss this as Trump being a fucking moron that is just throwing around jokes. He also "joked" about having the Russians hack the DNC and influence the election, which appears to have been a very horrifying reality.

Trump regularly celebrates dictators and tyrants across the planet--monsters like Rodirgo Duterte are well loved by him. If this is something the administration attempts to curry, the only possible upside I can see is Obama could run again, and utterly bury Trump. But no doubt, this is something we should be very wary of, and the people of the US need to continue to step up their game in revoking power from Republicans in general, and Trump specifically.

Cautiously optimistic, but the Trump regime may have brought peace to the Korean peninsula:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/worl ... v=top-news

I think the south corean president had a much larger benefic influence in the process than the Trump administration.

Sweet, yeah, Obama could run again! Perhaps this time he might fuck up Tunisia (I figure that's a middle east country that's due for an "intervention") instead of Libya like he did the first time round! Looking forward to America doing more drone strikes than ever! Can't wait for another massive dose of bailing out the banks! Ooh, I wonder how many people he's gunna deport this time??? Pretty excited at the idea of more endless neoliberal bullshit!!!!

Yeah, not to diminish any of the fuckery of Trump, but it's not like the US is this shining beacon of infallible, altruistic virtue. Celebrating dictators and tyrants, having overty aggressive foreign policy, and indiscriminantly bullying the rest of the world is nothing new, and, sadly the Democrats are not an exception to that rule. A lot of what Trump does is openly and irresponsibly admit and embrace things that those within the establishment would have preferred to keep an open secret, yet your state's foreign policy behaviour has been abhorrent no matter who is in power.

I agree. Let's give the Koreans some credit here, for starting to work things out themselves. The Kims are indeed an appalling dictatorial dynasty, but I believe they are shrewd enough to recognize the Trump team's belligerent bluster as precisely that. Kim knows that Trump will not risk initiating hostility as long as China remains deadset against that happening. He must also know that if he goes off the reservation amd attacks first, Chinese support will vanish and Kim Country gets its ass kicked. The nuclear arms most likely represent Kim's need to establish a position of strength from which to barter for his miserable life in power.

Your final sentence basically skews any rationality that you might have been able to apply to those preceding it. Obama certainly wasn't perfect, but he was handily one of the better presidents we've had in literal decades.

This goes back to the "can you change their minds" conversation from a while back, but it's a pretty interesting article.

A study from Yale was apparently able toconvert conservatives into liberals, simply by, in effect, making them feel safer.

As has been pretty evident by the way Trump campaigned and attempts to curry support, Conservatives are more concerned about fear and security. The more fearful conservatives feel, the more likely they are to be against things like social reform, immigrants, minorities, etc.

From the article:

How is that not rational? Obama was a neoliberal, and you'd think if nothing else, bailing out the banks would make that blindingly obvious. He did absolutely nothing genuinely useful for the working class. He continued the (neoliberal) trend of taking money from the middle/working class and sending it upstairs. He wrecked the middle east as hard as Bush did. Sure, he was one of the better modern presidents.. and? He still sucked!



Well that's not terribly difficult, considering that short of some minor symbolic issues, they by and large believe the same thing and act in a similar way.

TARP (the bank bailouts) were signed into law by Bush, not Obama.

Though Obama did indeed, in a sense, "wreck the middle east," with the exception of Libya it was neither immediate nor direct wrecking. His was nonetheless one of the worst three or four foreign/natsec policies of any American presidencies. By itself, his stubbornly naive defense posture towards Putin would have made it one of the worst 10.

as a european, I'm always amazed to see how important the POTUS seems to be to you US guys, and how much hope for change is apparently associated with him. like he's going to change anything, whoever he is in any given election cycle. there's much more to your (and most other, for that matter) political, social, military, financial etc. systems that prevents, or even openly fights change.

It's always interesting to me that people in other countries attempt to criticize leaders of others for things they have never experienced. I'm sure I've done it, too, say, noting the oppression that the Kim regime has held over North Korean citizens.

As noted, the bank bailout was something Dubya Bush did, and Obama was stuck in a spot to continue it. I was no Obama fan when he was elected, but warmed up to him over time. Imperfect, yes, drone strikes were a stupid and controversial endeavor, and the like. His damage to the Middle East is valid criticism, yet no where near the damage Bush caused--something so long lasting, it's literally still going on. Afghanistan is the longest military conflict in US history. It took less time to wretch this country away from the British and tear itself apart and repair from our own Civil War.

As for working class people, he gave 20-30 million more people health care. Again, imperfect, but he helped get that done. Something Trump is actively reversing. Trump would actually prefer people die from a lack of health care than to ever allow something Obama did to stand. Obama also largely came from a working class background, whereas Trump has only ever seen the working class when he's scraping them from the heels of his shoes.


I do concur with Into_the_Pit's comment on the US fascination with POTUS. This is not the first time I've seen this critique of the US. We put so much on the President, when the real power tends to come from elsewhere. For instance, Obama was largely overruled by a bitch-filled Republican congress that worked at every opportunity to usurp anything Obama did, quite literally, just because Obama or "democrats" were doing it. Hard to say how we got to the point where the President is so greatly revered over the actual lawmakers or governors, what have you.

We do have a unique situation here, though, where Trump behaves like a totalitarian and authoritarian, and the Republican party, through evidently some kind of intense intellectual cowardice, has simply sidled up with him. The Republican party is the party of Trump. He got what he wanted, in that regard, and they just follow in lock-step with nearly all of his horrors. The impending Trade War Trump is starting looks to finally be the straw breaking the camel's back for some of these rigid old codgers.

Racism? Sexism? Betraying the country to Russia? Inspiring no confidence in leadership? Shitting on his voters? Wasting a literal quarter of his time in office on golf courses? Clearly having no idea how to govern? Going fully against all of their religious-minded conservative beliefs? Starting fights with law enforcement agencies? Picking fights with others in the party? Warring with his Attorney General?

Republican turned a blind eye to all of this bullshit, which is the same as fucking supporting it. The Republican party is now the worst example of President-worship. A lot has been written that Trump is effectively killing the prestige and influence of the office of the presidency. What was, generally, treated as a noble position of honor, prestige, and influence. Trump is reversing that, and making the office an impotent joke. Indeed, it's Trump himself that is causing many to now look at the job of POTUS and wonder if we put too much stock in this for far too long.

We will likely never have another Lincoln or Roosevelt or Washington or Jefferson. The quality of our presidents has been dragging bad since Nixon punched the first major holes in the job. Trump has somehow managed to hover on a line dividing authoritarian dictatorship and impotent nothing.

It’s fairly evident that Trump and the GOP are NOT on the same page. Judging by the footage of the gun control debacle over the past few weeks, unless Trump is feigning ignorance, he was showing far more common ground with the Democrats than the GOP. “Taking guns without due process” etc, banning “semi-automatic” gun sales (basically most guns on the market). Obviously the bill is a complete meme and will never make it past congress, though, so I’d entertain the idea that Trump was goading the Democrats into throwing junk in the bill that would prevent it from ever passing.

Not going to go into a long diatribe on Obama, but based on his foreign policy record, Timber Sycamore, Fast and Furious, IRS targeting of political opponents, ZIRP/QE economic policies, and his overall lack of meaningful accomplishments, it’s disingenuous to rate him much higher than Bush 43 as president.

So, interesting related news: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/twitt ... -1.4567691

Humans, not bots, are more likely to spread false information/fake news on Twitter, and false information/fake news spreads "farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth."

What's disingenuous is pretending that all of this doesn't pale compare to the fucking clusterfuck that was/is Iraq...

Any criticism of Obama's near-east policy that doesn't address his Syria non-policy (and the single-minded pursuit of detente with Iran that gave birth to said Syria policy) is like a discussion of the Cuban missile crisis that ignores Moscow.

In other news: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/ ... ays-448478


1. I probably won't believe this is actually going to happen until after it already happens...probably. Counterpoint: Trump regularly praises and admires authoritarian strongmen; a photo-op with someone who runs concentration camps would be right up his alley.

2. Even if it is real and does happen, it's still a dumb idea. This has been the Kim family's game for decades. We know exactly what they are trying to do here. Promise some moderation in the nuclear arena, get diplomatic plaudits and additional monies, then surprise everyone with the knowledge they never moderated in the first place.


Side note: the reason Pyongyang signed on to the accord in 1994 isn't because they were suddenly interested in eliminating nukes or seeking rapprochement. They hit a hard research & development problem that they estimated would take 10+ years to solve, so why bother antagonizing everyone? Meanwhile they could look like reasonable people by signing a deal, maybe get some sanctions relief, and the whole time quietly enrich uranium while everyone else was focused on their plutonium production. North Korea's first nuclear test was a fizzle, so they talked to Bush and agreed to give up nukes---actually, they were just waiting until they thought they had corrected their design.

I would not be surprised if they have hit some other technical snag.

Frankly, I don't understand why the US or Trump need to be involved in this shit in the first place. Let North and South Korea work this shit out themselves. In any typical administration, the US President would act as a kind of mediator, which is something Trump couldn't pull off if you planted a robot brain in his skull and directly programmed him to do it. It's still Trump, it'd still be the wrong fit.

I think your history analysis of the Kim family is all too fitting. This isn't a family that did stirring changes with each change in leadership, so it makes sense that they are probably working this way again. Indeed, it may well appear beneficial to the Kim Jong Un to broker for peace in the short term, because he knows Trump is a temporary, though frighteningly unstable nuisance. Trump is more likely to launch nukes than Kim, and if he can get Trump to cool down and back off for a while, he can go back to business as usual.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/politics/donald-trump-video-games/index.html


Trump and other conservatives try to make a connection between videogame violence and real life violence, especially mass shootings. It's really ironic that they advocate it but at the same time they glorify the army and guns. How's that for role models? And they cast away all of the real life problems that can leed to violence such as racism, social inequities, bullying, toxic religious endoctrination, stressful lives, abuses from parents etc.

If someone is affected negatively by violent video games, it's because they have problems elsewhere in their lives and they try to bury it by playing to video games. I am pretty sure that a lot of violence had been prevented by video games. Instead of hurting real people when they face frustrations, they beat some virtual people to blow off steam.

There is also simply no empirical or scientific evidence that it's true. No correlating evidence, nothing. Suffice to say, in the same way vaccines don't cause autism, video games do not cause mass shootings. This is Trump and his Republican cronies looking for a scapegoat for violence so they can deflect away from guns, as Trump and the rest of them are completely in the pockets of the NRA. Big talk from Mr. Big Shot President who claimed he wasn't afraid of the NRA, then still went right back to wallowing in their control.

Now, what's frighteningly interesting is there is a single book actually has inspired real-life horrors, and it's the white supremacist yarn*, The Turner Diaries. The book offered a blueprint for the bombing that Timothy McVeigh left in Oklahoma City. You don't see people trying to ban or censor books, and aside from making it harder to get some fertilizers, not a whole lot was done in response--at least to media and the like. Nobody blamed the book for McVeigh's actions, even though this is a case where a fictional narrative literally did inspire reality. Yes, McVeigh was motivated by events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, but took inspiration for the attack from literature.

Trump talking to the game industry is nothing more than scapegoating and time wasting to the very core.


*I deliberately skipped religious texts in this, which are pretty much only used to inspire people to do horrible things to one another. For rules on how to have slaves, look no further than the "peaceful religious" texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The most hilarious things is that the Venn diagram of "omg feminists want to take away our video games!!" Gamergaters and Trump supporters make a perfect circle. Fucking idiots got exactly what they deserve.

What I assume happened is that he got word back from his cronies that he said the wrong thing about gun control and had to switch to another talking point and the only thing and the first thing that came to mind was video games. Maybe if someone in the room had had to sit in traffic next to a car blasting rap music that morning that would have been the pick for today's moral panic.

This is hardly the first time Trump has blamed video game violence for mass shootings.

Anyway, I just can't wait for when Trump points to Australia's violence censorship as a model for the US to follow

All while conveniently ignoring Australia's policies on actual guns.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/09/nix ... onaldland/

This quote though:

"...perhaps there is a darker reason. Maybe the staff are terrified. We’ve read stories that, on the Iran deal, the goal, among experts in the administration, was to distract the president. Maybe the staff is generally afraid that Trump is going to do something insane on North Korea and latched on to this opportunity to shift the president’s focus from fire and fury to cheeseburger summits."

From the article:



This put into words what I was struggling to say. I knew something about this stunk, and it's the aforementioned note that North Korea just wants to calm down a blithering, unpredictable man-child so they can continue to have their nuclear program. And when Trump figures out that he's been outsmarted by a man he regularly ridiculed on Twitter, he's not going to take it well.

I agree with the mentality that we just sit back and let North Korea feel like a big deal. Because that's all they've ever wanted. They know they're a small country with next to nothing to offer to the rest of the world. They aren't strong traders, they aren't creating new technology, products, or markets that become major parts of the world. For an example, see their neighbor's major impact on technology and electronics with a company like Samsung. North Korea doesn't have any of that, so they've clung to their nuclear program to feel like a big deal.

While this isn't exactly a great idea, Kim Jong Un is stuck with it, as a left-over from his father, Kim Jon Il. So he will continue to play with this mentality for now, and when pressed by bullies like Trump, he will double down to protect that one thing that is seen as protecting the country.

I can't fucking believe I live in an era where the President of the United States is the unstable, unpredictable, uneducated, unintelligent, dangerous integer in this equation. An era where the POTUS is less trusted than the North Korean dictator.

"all they've ever wanted" is a non aggression pact with the US, so they can drop a bit of military spending man. All up reading that paragraph gave me cancer, there's a thing called historical context that you should check out.

I don't think Kim would substantially downsize his armed forces under any circumstances, and him dropping the nuclear program would be the news of the century. He may want a more peaceful approach from other players, and to half-assedly concentrate on other business, but without the army he'd be nothing. Having an army the proportionate size of what North Korea fields is a very nice way to keep the populace under discipline. Not necessarily by shooting dissidents, but by utilizing it for propaganda purposes and "educating" the conscripts. You're being a bit too hopeful there, caspian. Their military and nuclear budgets have never made an iota of sense by any sane nation's standards, and there's no reason to believe that will change until the last member of the Kim dynasty is long gone.

What historical context do you mean in this case?

Well, what I mean is that there's this massive american historical blindness about the awful korean war, ie the "lets just carpet bomb everything until there's nothing left" war. It's completely wired into the NK psyche. Thus it really irritates me when people give uninformed opinions on NK without considering this.

They don't want to be a big player on the world scene- they want to get that non aggression pact in with the US (which they've tried about 50 fucken times) so they can worry about something else. They've clung to their nuclear program because they've understood what happened when Libya attempted to disarm, and because technically they're still living under a ceasefire. I find the whole "they've never produced anything" to be a fairly annoying comment too. Well, no shit they haven't, because they got bombed back to the stone age.

Anyway I don't mean to pick on R_H, I've seen it elsewhere and i tell people off elsewhere about it too. But yeah i find it fairly annoying. It's the equivalent of someone going "why do the arabs hate the west?"

Regarding Kim Jong disarming his army, well sure, he's still going to have a lot of troops, definitely, for show, for propaganda, for internal security, but it seems fairly logical to me that if you have a nuclear deterrent you can switch to a completely defensive sorta doctrine and save a bunch of cash. I read somewhere about how NK spends like 60% of their GDP on their army, which is an absurd amount. I'm inclined to believe Kim is fairly nuts and all, but I assume he'd still like to cut that down a bit and build a few new roads and whatnot.

I don't think you're picking on me, because I'm clearly not crying right now. I can see the monitor clearly. Though the mentality of "telling people off" may not be the best way to go about things.

I don't disagree that North Korea has left-over issues from the Korean War, nor do I disagree that history has not been kind to dictators dumping their nukes and ending up beat to shit in some conflict afterwards. Granted, dictators arguably have it coming for other reasons, but to be fair, when we went after Saddam, it was during a period where he really wasn't much of a threat to anyone, particularly in the West.

North Korea has one of the largest militaries in the world, the country is extremely militaristic. And an absurd amount of their history is based around the United States and protecting themselves against us. Hell, if Kim Jong Un was an American Republican, we're the dark-skinned foreigners the population is taught to fear for some kind of desperate unity.

It seems wrong to so brazenly dismiss a notion of North Korea wanting to feel like a big deal on the world stage, as this has to do with psychology and perception. To a small country with little global impact like North Korea, having nuclear weapons makes them a big deal. Again, not dismissing a want of some kind of non-aggression pact with the US, and trying to use nukes as a bargaining chip. At the same time, we're dealing with one of the planet's longest-running modern dictatorships, and they have used crooked and questionable methods to get what they wanted in the past. A large chunk of their nuclear program was funded by money/aid from the US under the Clinton administration, which was originally sent to be help for, as I recall, a crisis in the form of a famine at the time.

Will Kim Jong Un reduce his military or reduce his nuclear weapons or anything like that? Fuck no. Especially not just overnight or even over the next couple years. I think he sees Trump for what he is--an easily led buffoon. Trump "the deal maker" is nothing more than a petulant, useless, convenient idiot. Trump talks tough in one minute, and is swayed to something else the next. Kudos for him for being able to change his mind--it'd be nice if his supporters were more likely to change their minds on things. But at the same time, Trump flip-flops and walks back from big statements so constantly that the only thing reliable about him is his cowardice, weakness, and unreliability.

I don't think Kim is a moron. I think he realizes Trump can be easily played. And right now, he is playing Trump. He's not going to reduce his nuclear program, he wants Trump to think he's playing nice. This "peace talk" thing is entirely his doing. Him and South Korea, with Trump just invited for no good reason. Trump will be so out of this depth, it could be catastrophic. I agree with the article linked earlier that sparked my previous comment--it will be yet another Trump mess when he figures out that he's been played and that he's out of his league. Kim Jong Un has grown up, essentially, groomed to rule over a country. Trump has lived his life knowing and understanding nothing while lying through his teeth and simply being enabled by the greedy assholes who felt this useful idiot would line their pockets.

At this point, I also think Trump will look for a reason to back out of the meet. Because he is not going to be effective. Because why the fuck would he be?

So how long until the people that Trump fires start turning up dead in the Hudson?

HE WAS FIRED BY FUCKING TWEET.



Tillerson was, per my understanding, one or the more even-headed people in the cabinet, but notably inept in the position for a variety of reasons. But Trump, being a child, cannot handle anyone thinking differently from him, and that was clearly Tillerson's biggest "failing" in his eyes. Sounds like he was, overall, pretty inept. Which, of course, makes him a perfect fit for the rest of this administration.



In other resignation news, the spokesperson for ICE also resigns (apparently last week), because he "was tired of spreading falsehoods for the Trump administration."

Oh, there's... there's more. Lots of people out this week.

Trump's longtime aide John McEntee was canned for being under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.



I don't understand how anyone is stupid enough to think this administration is doing a good job at anything.

We're about a step away from R_H arguing with himself by way of essay-length rebuttals and religious-like sourcing of CNN articles.



Regularly-scheduled programming: I'm desperate to fast-forward to see how Trump does on the reelection trail, or how terrible it goes for him considering how much of a shitshow his tenure has been. I'm curious what actual conservative candidates come to the forefront to challenge him. I can't imagine Trump can do the whole, "who's going to pay for it? MEXICOOO" and not have it seem like stupid, lying crap the second time around.

Wait, isn't John McEntee the dude from Incantation? Amazing that he also has/had such an incredible political career.

Puddin murdered yet another Russian hero and patriot. How surprising. I think it's funny the world always points to NK as the scummiest, shittest political regime on the planet, while Puddin happily murders people in other countries for being associated with someone who knows someone who heard a rumor about someone saying something mean about him, somewhere. The worst part is, I really don't think Puddin is gonna be going anywhere without severe bloodshed. Ugh.

Putin has very much taken the world back to a Cold War mentality. Covert operations, spy work, assassinations, etc. It's actually quite unsettling. The more this kind of news occurs, the more it seems like Russia is the biggest threat to peace on this planet.