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hpslugga

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Posts posted by hpslugga

  1. 1 minute ago, Fico said:

    Lol some of y’all are so fucking clueless.

    You know who started this? Nate Boyer. Yes, that Nate Boyer. Anyone with their faux outrage needs to tell an army green beret why Americans shouldn’t be able to protest injustice.

    The athletes have a stage and they most definitely made the country discuss an issue more than it would have if they did not do what they did.

    /End Rant.
     

    Beat me to it. Colin started this by just flat out sitting down and it was Boyer's idea and recommendation to him to shift it to kneeling.

    • Like 6
  2. 39 minutes ago, Magus Ossis said:

    The guys behind firing him at Tech not only still talk like it was the right choice. They claim it was the only choice.

    That's what you'd expect from a gang of racketeers that staged a hoax of that magnitude. 

    Seriously, the fucking kid admitted in his deposition that he wasn't locked in the electrical room and went in on his own accord against the explicit directive of the athletic trainer, who confirmed the directive.

    So Leach is presented with this letter that has a guilty admission written between every single fucking line in it, refuses to sign the letter that basically forces him to admit to a fake incident that never took place, and Tech's "only choice" was to dismiss him rather than expelling the little bastard that staged that nonsense, firing, and possibly recommending to the AG's office in Austin to pursue perjury charges against the Chancellor who, by lying in his deposition about 1) the "locking incident" and 2) the grounds for terminating Leach, was complicit in the fakery of that incident. Yes, THAT was the "only choice." For fuck's sake, what are we talking about here?

    • Like 5
  3. On 2/11/2019 at 12:38 AM, HOOK'EMHOOAH said:

    For those against asylum seekers coming here, let me ask you this: how bad does something have to be before you would relent and be open to the idea of granting asylum to those in need?

    Dude, even the US was, for a time at least, refusing to let in Jewish refugees escaping fucking Hitler, and that was under FDR's watch. You really think that there's ANY level of depravity a group must face that would make these MAGA idiots re-think any of this? 

    Quote

    Let's run through a very real scenario that happens today and compare the positions. North Korean asylum seekers flee North Korea into China because of the extremely oppressive nature they face at the hands of the government as well as the fact that there is little if any food and no possible way to grow economically as an individual within North Korea. If someone is captured by the Chinese then return to North Korea, they face among the hardest conditions of anyone on the planet just for trying to find a better life.

    Again, to the MAGA crowd, this is Cry Me A River City. They don't care.

    Quote

    So the question is this, do the people that are coming here in the caravans from Central and South America need to be facing the same kind of scrutiny and oppression as that of the North Koreans before you would change your position? Or are we actually going to be better than that and recognize that these are human beings and we are supposed to be the world leaders of acceptance and diversity?

    Here's what they'd view as the difference:

    In North Korea, their leadership is "the bad guys."
    In Latin America, their leadership is "the good guys," and therefore no one should be leaving.

    I mean did you not watch Elliott Abrams kicking and screaming like a petulant child the other day when Ilhan Omar was grilling him? He was actually, among other things, defending the US' embrace of Duarte and insisting that he brought "democracy" to El Salvador in the 1980's...you know, the period where the closest parallel to a Nazi state was ever replicated. Well when you say things like that, people who take it at face value end up with the impression "geez, it's a democracy? THEY SHOULDN'T BE COMING HERE! THINGS ARE FINE FOR THEM AT HOME!!!"

  4. 2 minutes ago, NowThis said:

    The Arabs were 90% of the population, so it's no mystery why they rejected a Jewish state, not because they were Jews but because they were outsiders. They would have rejected a state of Italians as well, not that they just hate Italians just for being Italian. 

    Hell even Benny Morris has been admitting that much for years. 

  5. 11 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

    Can you link me something regarding this? 

    I'd be interested in finding out more. Seriously.

    Thanks.

    https://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/14/fmr_israeli_foreign_minister_if_i

    "this same diplomat still behaves in a way as a historian when he says in this book that Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well."

    https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/whatkilledarafat/2012/07/20127391736633341.html

    "if I were a Palestinian, I said many times, I would not have accepted the deal, whatever this deal might have been because as I’ve said before, there were different interpretations of what was put on the table in Camp David. But I admit that that was not sufficient for the Palestinians. That did not meet the minimal requirements of the Palestinians for a deal with Israel."

    I have to repeat, these are the words of Israel's Foreign Minister (aka their lead negotiator at Camp David).

    I've written on the Camp David topic numerous times, as have many other more qualified writers. If you're looking for a print source, I'd suggest reading Clayton Swisher's The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process. It's a great read that paints a very clear picture of both the Camp David as well as the Taba negotiations, and it's a much different picture than what the American press likes to paint.

    EDIT: I'd also suggest reading Ron Pundak and Shaul Arieli's analyses, specifically Pundak's map and what a joke it was compared to the fictitious map that Dennis Ross likes to show off whenever his usual gallery of all of 8 people will listen to him. 

  6. 20 minutes ago, NowThis said:

     In fact, Israel has plans to move in another 1 million Jews into the West Bank. 

    With Trump and Netanyahu in charge of their respective countries, I'm surprised the number is that low.

  7. 11 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

    Yeah, that could be.

    But does it mean that it is necessarily wrong?

    In this case, yes. It's absolutely wrong about absolutely every contention that it makes and/or implies. There's an ample documentary record to show it and it's beyond scandalous that anyone could believe a single syllable coming from the mouths of the Dennis Rosses of the world.

  8. 4 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

    As referenced above, Arafat should've taken the deal. But he didn't. Why? Who knows.

    Oh just about the entire international community, and again it starts for the reason that was admitted to by Israel's lead negotiator: it was a bullshit deal that no Palestinian could reasonably be expected to accept. You're just regurgitating things you've heard in the American media.

  9. 1 minute ago, Lagunamadre said:

    I guess the better question is, what could an unarmed one-legged man possibly do to warrant an assassination from a sniper? 

    Probably the same things that Kamal Zgheir could have done.

  10. 10 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

    They should have taken the deal Clinton brokered in 2000.

    Yes, they should have taken the deal that even the lead Israeli negotiator admitted on public airwaves was bullshit.

  11. 5 hours ago, workswithseed said:

    Doesn't look good then. So are we saying socialism and fascism can be in the same boat? Cause that's what it exactly looks like.

    What I'm saying is that, particularly in the United States, our level of understanding of politics is at a level of superficiality that's very hard to describe. We operate in a way that encourages people to assert inanities like "the reason Adolph Hitler was a socialist was that the Nazi flag was red." 

    I can't believe I'm going to quote this character of all people to prove a point here, but it really sums it up perfectly: "If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don't necessarily make it fucking so!" The same applies to political affairs. Just because some person says that they're a socialist, fascist, anarchist, conservative, liberal, et al don't necessarily make it fucking so. The same is true for when some government says some other government is one or another of those things, in fact even more so because there's a 100% degree of certainty that such proclamations are made with self-interest and only with self-interest.

     

    • Like 1
  12. 15 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

    Not really. 

    Do you realize that what I typed is exactly how Israel justifies defending its existence?

    It's a shit storm over there. Maybe you've got it figured out. If so, good for you. 

    And yeah, fuck 'em all. But at the end of the day, it won't be the Israelis dancing in the streets when the next 9/11 comes....

    I'll hold my nose and be with the Israelis. 

    Posts like these are why I always cringe when I see this thread has new posts in it.

    • Like 3
  13. 29 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    Everyone? Are you sure?

    Again it wouldn’t even matter if he could prove that stupid cartoon was 100% accurate as Venezuela isn’t a socialist state in the first place. Starting with the premise of “given that Venezuela is a socialist state” is like saying “given that the moon is made of green cheese.” I suppose that sentences like those provide a mechanism towards some sort of measure of physical and/or emotional gratification to the person uttering them, but they never end well in terms of actual discourse. 

  14. On 2/8/2019 at 11:52 AM, Iconoclast Texan said:

    So Chávez and Maduro didn’t expropriate the means of production from private hands for the benefit of the masses? 

    This is why I say that people such as yourself haven't the foggiest idea what socialism is: it's because you really do not know what it is.

    The definition you posted is curiously vague, and even with its simplicity, you still failed horribly to comprehend it. It clearly states "the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." From those last five words, you read that as "Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro," two individuals in a state of 31 million people. That's as irresponsible, not to mention rectally derived, as it is when right-wingers in the US say "Donald Trump speaks for all Americans."

    Yeah, so they undertook a few expropriations here and there. That doesn't change the fact that, as an AP article from 2010 pointed out, "the private sector still controls [over] two-thirds of Venezuela's economy— the same as when Chavez was elected in 1998, according to estimates by the Central Bank." The same types of studies conclude that around 87% of the US economy is in the private sector. More on that later.

    Back to the definition(s) of socialism. When looking at any term in search of its meaning, you do what any sensible person does and trace its origins. I'm about 95-99% sure that you're one of those people that associates its foundation with Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, neither of which are even remotely close to true.

    Socialism's foundation was best articulated in 1649 with the publishing of a pamphlet entitled The New Laws of Righteousness by Gerrard Winstanley, one of the founders of The Diggers, which was an anarchist movement in England during its First Civil War. The overarching principle of the Diggers' vision of society in New Laws was that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man." Here's where you need to start paying attention: "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself." 

    That's a call to anarchism.

    Taxonomically, the first published uses of the term "socialism" came with a flurry of literatures in the late 18th-early 19th centuries (Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and a host of others that Marx/Engels decried as "utopians"), but they were all based on the ideas that New Laws put forth. The point being, Engels and Marx are correctly viewed within the socialist community as being a couple of perverted johnny-come-latelys with outlandish ideas. In fact, Mikhail Bakunin once wrote of Marx "the instinct of liberty is lacking in him" and that "he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian." 

    So let's take Winstanley's concept, fuse it with the one you posted, and see if we can detect even the slightest hint of contradiction:

    "There shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole, there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself."

    I see no contradiction there...at all. In fact, I see repetition. Those two definitions are talking about the same thing, which was actually best articulated by Sylvain Maréchal when he longed for "the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth" and the elimination of "the revolting distinction of rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed," and so it goes right through the pre-Leninist period. In fact, even Marx' writings made it clear that the societal order he envisioned was one of statelessness at the very end of the revolution. Yet from that one definition you posted, let alone from the ones with which I've been familiar for quite a long time, you read the exact opposite. What's particularly comical is that you do it because you read into that definition things that it does not say, and then you didn't read what it did say. So you read in between the lines, but didn't bother to read the lines.

    Socialism and statism are like oil and water. That having been said, states have introduced ways to incorporate socialist elements in them, to be sure. But to call that "socialism" or even "pure socialism," as I've seen some right-wingers screaming about, is just partisan masturbation and you're beyond reason if you think it passes as a "coherent world view." 

    Furthermore, the US is one of those nation states that incorporates socialist elements. The USPS, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, Social Security, etc? Who do you think funds those? We do. 

    I'm going to close this with a trump card that I teased earlier: 

    Venezuela's economy is around 70% based on its private sector. You call that "socialism."
    The US economy is around 87% based on its private sector. You call that "capitalism."

    Quote

    That is a textbook definition of socialism as witnessed above. 

    Except it's not, you've been absolutely wrong about absolutely everything you've said about this issue in general, and what @hayden_horn said earlier is absolutely correct: what's happening in Venezuela is fascism, and it's getting uglier with each passing day.

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