[Winstonm]

This sounds like Ghandi. Truthfully, I'm not there yet.

[mikeh]

 kenberg, on 2017-February-13, 11:33, said:

All this death talk brings me to "A Man Called Ove" . If there is an academy award for single best line I nominate

Spoiler

"You are amazingly bad at dying".

I recommend this movie.

As to the right to die, I very much believe in it. There can always be situations where family or society goes to court to insist that a person is no longer mentally competent to make his/her own decisions, and sometimes I would agree with that. But I think the default position is that if a mentally competent person chooses to end his/her life, nobody gets to say s/he can't do so.
As to who should pay, I doubt the expense has to be great. I'm fine with the government supporting this. I am also fine with an individual doctor declining to provide this assistance. I don't think we should have it so that a person has to jump off a bridge.

I have no idea what the Constitution has to say about all of this. Probably nothing.

We have assisted dying in Canada now, and it is becoming less rare than it was, even tho few doctors have taken the trouble to become certified as able to help. Unfortunately, the government wimped out by requiring that the person be mentally competent. Lest that provoke howls of outrage, what may believe is that if someone, while competent, certifies that at some defined point, in dementia, they want to die, then that should be respected. My mother, before she reached the stage where she has no idea at all what is going on, very much wanted to die, but she can't and we can't help her. So she lives a nightmare existence, oscillating between rage, fear, drugged silence and occasional seemingly happy, but usually false memories. Breaking my father's heart daily. And costing society and family money, which is the least of the problems, but still, over millions of people, a big deal. I am not advocating for euthanasia, btw...it must be the result of a decision made when competent. My wife and I would both opt for that.

[Winstonm]

This, I believe, is the most cogent explanation of what happened during the election cycle, and it gives a little hope going forward. Oddly, Orange is the New Black would be deliciously ironic (read the article to get that one)

Quote

The biggest lesson Trump learned from all this was that grabbing attention was paramount and that it didn’t make a whit of difference how you grabbed it: blasting angry, idiotic tweets; leering over women; mocking the handicapped; insulting opponents; threatening to put Hillary Clinton in jail; and just plain inventing “facts” — lots and lots and lots of invented “facts.”

In the brave new America in which we now live, Trump knew that attention was value- and content-neutral. No one, least of all the media, which has lived on high concept, was going to call you out. Instead, you dominated the cocktail conversation so that no one else could get a word in edgewise. Volume was all. What you said was irrelevant.

[nige1]

 Winstonm, on 2017-February-13, 16:44, said:

This sounds like Ghandi. Truthfully, I'm not there yet.

Thank you for the reference, WinstonM.

Daryl Davis said:

• "Gather your information. Get an astute knowledge of the other person's side before meeting them. Review it in your head. Be as familiar with their position as you are with your own. That way you know what to expect and how to react. You might hear things that frighten you. You might hear things that make you angry or make you sad or hurt you. But these are words. And you go in there because that person has an opposing point of view. That's what you're looking for. To find out why they think that way, why they want to do these things."
• "Invite them to have a conversation, not to debate. A debate is I want to make my point, you want to make your point, and we're going to fight it out. That tends to get their guard up. You say, hey, I want to have a conversation with you. I want to understand why you feel the way you feel. I want you to convince me that I need to change my way of thinking. And I appreciate your sharing your views. I'm interested in how you feel. And that's what a lot of people want. They want to be heard. They want to be able to speak their mind freely without fear of retaliation or somebody beating them over the head for their views or ramming their own views down the person's throat. So give them that."
• "Look for commonalities. You can find something in five minutes—even with your worst enemy. And build on those. Say I don't like you because you're white and I'm black. You disgust me … And so our contention is based upon our races. But you're like, 'how do you feel about all these drugs on the street, and all these meth labs that are popping up?' And I say, I think the law needs to crack down on things that people can get addicted to very easily and it's destroying our society. So you say, 'Well yeah, I agree 100 percent.' You might even tell me your son started dabbling in drugs. They don't discriminate. So now I see that you want what I want, that drugs are affecting your family the same way they affect my family, so now we're in agreement. So let's focus on that. As we focus more and more and find more things in common, things we have in contrast, such as skin color, matter less and less."
• "When two enemies are talking they're not fighting. They might be yelling and screaming or disagreeing or beating their fists on the table to drive home a point but at least they're talking. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. So you want to keep the conversation going. And the more you keep the conversation going, even though you might be disagreeing, the more commonalities you will eventually find. When you can't talk to one another you're laying the ground work for trouble."
• "Patience is a virtue. My method worked for me, because I've taken the time and had the patience to learn about the other side. I've read tons of material on the Klan, on the neo-Nazis, on white supremacy, on black supremacy. So I know how the mentality works. And when I go in there I tend to be a little more disarming than someone who does not have that knowledge."
• "I know there comes a point in time when you say, okay, enough time, now things have got to change ... if you need to legislate something or force something, then fine, you have those tools available. That's why we have lawmakers. But the day the law changed to when black people could ride in the front of the bus, or not have to give up their seat, the day that law changed did not necessarily change the minds of the white riders. You can legislate behavior but you cannot legislate belief. Patience is what it takes. But patience doesn't mean sitting around on your butt waiting for something to happen. Be proactive. And don't just sit around and talk with your friends who believe the way you do. Invite other people who have differences of opinion.".

We should also try to avoid obvious logical fallacies, (Straw-men, Bulverism, and so on).

Davis gives good advice for a discussion forum. Perhaps for International diplomacy too. But it assumes that we're engaged in a struggle for hearts and minds. Hence, we might adopt different tactics when

• In a court of law or
• Preaching to the converted or
• Trying to alienate the rest.

[nige1]

 awm, on 2017-February-11, 23:24, said:

This post is so insane that it's hard for me to know where to start. Russia has invaded Ukraine, has supported revolutionaries there, and is the cause of the current issues in that country. Our European allies are very unhappy with Russia's actions and are generally supportive of the sanctions.

Previously, did the US invest billions of dollars in the removal of the democratically elected president of the Ukraine in a violent coup?
Is it just propaganda that the US has backed rebels all over the world? South America, the Middle East, and so on?

 awm, on 2017-February-11, 23:24, said:

We are specifically not supporting Al Qaeda in Syria; we are primarily running air strikes against Isis, while also running operations against Al Qaeda (which is not even a significant player in Syria) in various other middle eastern countries. The sending of suspects for rendition (a horrifying betrayal of American laws and values) was based on which countries were most lawless with respect to their treatment of prisoners, and while Syria might qualify this would hardly make them an "ally." We are not at war with Russia. The question is whether we allow them to prop up dictators (like in Syria), invade independent nations (like Ukraine), and manipulate elections (like in US and Western Europe)... or whether we use sanctions to condemn these actions. Capitulating to a bully is not the "path to peace" -- this has basically never worked in any situation.

Wikipedia said:

Groups such as the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS; sometimes ISIL) have recruited many foreign Mujahideen to train and fight in what has gradually become a highly sectarian war.[212][213] Ideologically, the Syrian Civil War has served the interests of al-Qaeda as it pits a mainly Sunni opposition against a Shia backed government. Viewing Shia Islam as heretical, al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Sunni militant groups have invested heavily in the civil conflict, actively backing and supporting the Syrian Opposition despite its clashes with moderate opposition groups such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

 awm, on 2017-February-11, 23:24, said:

In any case, the most troubling part of the situation with our election is not so much that Russia would try to influence the results -- we have every right to be unhappy about that, but Russia is not bound by US law and they are known to be a "bad actor" in any case. The troubling part is that we had a presidential candidate who was openly accepting and encouraging Russian interference (which is a clear violation of US election law) and was acting as their proxy in a host of ways... and somehow both our intelligence services (who had evidence that this was the case) and our news media (who also had access to part of the evidence) and the members of his party (who knew about this and claim to put "country first") did not see fit to make a big deal out of it, and our populace elected him anyway.
By the way, Hillary did not do any of the things you've accused her of, and she is not the candidate who openly advocated discarding a peace agreement with Iran and instead using nuclear weapons.

Did US intelligence services accuse Russia of leaking Hilary's emails? Are the emails a hoax? Did the DNC publicly apologise to Bernie for their contents?

As Secretary of State, did Hilary advocate a "no-fly zone" over Syria?

Top US general warns Syrian "no-fly" zone means war with Russia

I admit my ignorance of Politics, Geography, and History. I've never been to the Ukraine, Syria, or the US. Is all my second-hand "news" fake?

[y66]

From Europe’s responsibility to stand firm on Ukraine by the Financial Times:

Quote

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 The perils of US president Donald Trump’s chummy approach to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have been laid bare. Thankfully, Mr Trump did not unilaterally lift sanctions on Moscow during his first presidential phone call to Mr Putin last Saturday, after aides suggested he might. Yet within hours, fighting flared in parts of separatist east Ukraine to the worst levels in two years. Avdiivka, near Donetsk, where thousands of citizens are cowering without heating or power under a hail of missiles, may need to be evacuated.

Each side, as ever, blames the other for the upsurge. Moscow may be stirring up the fighting to press Mr Trump to follow through and lift sanctions. It may be probing whether Ukraine matters to him at all. It is possible that, despite the risks, Ukrainian forces provoked the fighting to ensure it does not slip out of global attention. If so, the response of Russian-supported separatists has been ferocious.

But the proximate cause of the renewed conflict is surely the sudden vacuum of US leadership on Ukraine. Washington’s muted response to the violence, which did not even mention Russia, will alarm not just Kiev but capitals across Europe. Equally worrying, the nearly two-year-old Minsk II agreement, supposed to bring peace to east Ukraine, is on life-support.

Kiev has been unable to persuade its parliament to deliver the special status it committed to grant to the two separatist regions. That may be understandable given Russia’s failure to withdraw its forces from the regions and hand back control of the international border to Kiev — even if the flawed Minsk deal required Ukraine to move first. Russian commentators now openly question why Moscow should feel bound by Minsk, with an ostensibly Russia-friendly US president in power, and French president François Hollande, one of the deal’s original sponsors, on his way out.

So the Minsk process urgently needs reinvigorating through some creative diplomacy. Into the void left by the Trump administration must step Europe. That means, above all, German chancellor Angela Merkel, the key western negotiator of Minsk, despite the many other demands she faces.

Confronting Moscow will be much harder without the implicit backing she previously enjoyed from Washington, even if President Barack Obama was not personally involved in the talks. So the chancellor’s diplomacy should engage not only Mr Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. She must also impress upon Mr Trump how vital Ukraine is to Europe’s security, which for seven decades the US has seen as indivisible from its own. People familiar with her phone call with the US president last weekend say she has made a start at this.

Ms Merkel, and other European and international leaders, should also prevail on Mr Trump not to engage in any “deal” with Mr Putin that would trade away Ukrainian interests. Senior US Republicans, such as Senator John McCain, also have a vital role to play.

If Mr Trump does drop US sanctions on Russia without securing meaningful concessions on restoring and respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty, Ms Merkel should also prepare to stiffen European leaders’ spines to keep EU measures in place. That may seem a forlorn hope. But, depending on the outcome of various European elections this year, it is not impossible that Ms Merkel could coax fellow EU leaders into standing firm. Since the EU is a larger trading partner than the US for Russia, this could persuade Moscow that progress towards a Ukraine settlement is in Russia’s national economic interest.

[y66]

From The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie By The Editorial Board of the NY Times Feb. 13, 2017:

Quote

“It is a fact and you will not deny it.”

That unnerving remark — made on Sunday by Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump — sums up the new administration’s attitude toward the truth: We Decide, You Report.

Mr. Miller made the comment at the end of a heated back-and-forth with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who had asked him to defend Mr. Trump’s latest claim of voter fraud — that his narrow loss in New Hampshire was due to voters who had been bused in illegally from Massachusetts. When Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him for even a single example of fraud, Mr. Miller responded: “George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time.”

O.K., why don’t we?

Start with New Hampshire’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who has been in office for four decades. “We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” Mr. Gardner told The Boston Globe.

Or how about Tom Rath, the state’s former attorney general and a Republican, who tweeted on Sunday that “allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without any merit — it’s shameful to spread these fantasies.” Even New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, who shortly before the election floated his own evidence-free claim about buses of illegal Democratic voters, has backed off.

But Mr. Miller had plenty more to say about the “serious problem” of voter fraud, which includes, as he put it, “millions of people who are registered in two states or who are dead who are registered to vote.” Being registered in two states is not voter fraud; it’s an innocent record-keeping error that happens when people move and forget to notify election offices to take their names off the rolls — people like Stephen Bannon, Mr. Trump’s top White House adviser (Florida and New York); Sean Spicer, his press secretary (Virginia and Rhode Island); Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser (New York and New Jersey); and Steven Mnuchin, his Treasury secretary (New York and California). (States purge their rolls regularly, but they don’t catch everyone who moves, and there’s no evidence of any multistate-registration conspiracy.)

Mr. Miller also trotted out what he called the “astonishing statistic” that 14 percent of noncitizens are registered to vote — but that statistic is drawn from a single study that has since been debunked.

In a reality-based world, people bringing wild claims of widespread lawbreaking should carry the burden of proof. With voter fraud, it’s the opposite — fact-averse Republicans have for years been hawking the idea of large-scale voter fraud and then daring others to do the real work of proving them wrong. Meanwhile, the baseless claims continue to get converted into policy in the form of stricter voting laws, like requiring prospective voters to show a photo ID — which, by the way, New Hampshire does, despite the lack of any evidence that people go to the polls pretending to be someone else. The real effect of the laws is to make voting harder for students, the poor and people of color, all groups that lean Democratic.

Baseless claims about “widespread” voter fraud have become so frequent, and so shameless, that it’s tempting to succumb to the fatigue of fighting them and laugh them off. Under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who became famous by prosecuting bogus voter-fraud cases in Alabama, that would be a big mistake.

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2017-February-14, 06:14, said:

From The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie By The Editorial Board of the NY Times Feb. 13, 2017:

During Prohibition, there were speakeasies. We know this because there were raids that found rooms filled with people drinking whiskey. Many raids with many bars with many whiskey drinkers. Surely if there were buses and buses filled with massive numbers of people committing voter fraud there would be a substantial number of successful arrests. Trump. Miller, or whoever needs to cite these successful efforts.

But the whole idea is crazy. I have previously said that I have some regret over not volunteering to help in efforts to get out the vote in Pennsylvania.I am a bit shy about going into another state to do such a thing, but at least it would have been legal. Maybe, as an outsider, I could have just helped with some logistics. More to the point, by helping out I might have created several more votes for Clinton, all done legally. In contrast I do not regret in the least that I did not go into Pennsylvania and cast an illegal ballot. First, it is illegal. Second, I would have no idea how to do it so I would probably get caught. Third, even if it were successful, this would be one more vote for Clinton, with much less effect than helping out in a get out the vote drive. In short, going up to Pennsylvania to cast an illegal ballot strikes me as stupid beyond belief. I don't know anyone who would do such a dumb thing, I cannot imagine how these buses would get filled.

Trump and his group do a lot of damage with these antics. On most issues, I can accept being outvoted. Often people think differently than I do. That's life. But having to listen to this BS of voter fraud? Trump's ardent supporters will believe this. The rest of us, and I believe that includes many Republicans, see it as certainly tiresome, and very possibly an indication of inability to deal with the world realistically.

[y66]

From The Struggle Inside The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14, 2017) by David Leonhardt:

Quote

The most successful modern publisher of ideological journalism is Rupert Murdoch. He buys media properties, or starts new ones, and turns them into conservative megaphones.

In England, he carefully nudged the venerable Times to the right, while his tabloids mocked Labour Party politicians as weaklings or Stalinists. In the United States, he transformed the once-liberal New York Post into a peppery conservative tabloid and then built Fox News from scratch.

Clearly, he enjoys both populist and elite media. And in 2007, he bought a journalistic jewel, The Wall Street Journal.

Now The Journal’s newsroom is embroiled in a fight over the paper’s direction.

Many staff members believe that the paper’s top editor, Gerard Baker, previously a feisty conservative commentator, is trying to Murdoch-ize the paper. “There is a systemic issue,” one reporter told me. The dissatisfaction went public last week, with stories in Politico and the Huffington Post. At a staff meeting on Monday, Baker dismissed the criticism as “fake news,” Joe Pompeo of Politico reported.

As a longtime reader, admirer and competitor of The Journal, I think the internal critics are right. You can see the news pages becoming more politicized. You can also see The Journal’s staff pushing back, through both great journalism (including exposes on the Trump administration) and quiet insubordination.

Consider The Journal’s coverage of Trump’s false voter-fraud allegations. The stories are mostly solid, noting Trump has no evidence. The headlines often tend toward stenography:

Trump Seeks Election Fraud Probe

Trump Takes Aim at ‘Millions’ of Votes

Top Adviser Repeats Vote-Fraud Claims

Reporters and editors have become accustomed to the “shaving off the edges” of Trump-related stories, one said, especially in headlines and initial paragraphs. The insubordination shows up in later paragraphs, where reporters include harder-hitting information.

There is no shortage of troubling anecdotes: A revealing story about Trump’s white-supremacist support that never ran in print. A dearth of stories about climate change and frightened immigrants. An email from Baker encouraging the staff not to mention the Muslim makeup of the countries when describing Trump’s immigration ban (partly rescinded after BuzzFeed disclosed the email). Glowing stories about Trump — “astonishing,” one longtime editor said — by a reporter who once tweeted a photo of herself smiling with Trump on his jet.

More generally, staffers are worried about Trump-Journal chumminess. Ivanka Trump was until recently a trustee of the Murdoch estate. In The Journal’s Washington bureau, eyebrows rose when Baker’s assistant called to ask how to send Trump a memento: a printing-press plate from an edition reporting his ascendance. (A spokeswoman said no plate was sent.)

The Journal’s opinion pages, of course, have long been conservative. And they have their own tensions: An editor critical of Trump was recently fired, The Atlantic reported. But The Journal’s news pages, like those of The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere, have aspired to objectivity.

One way to understand the fight is through the lens of Fox News. Its former leader, Roger Ailes, knew that the country had become more polarized and that many viewers didn’t want sober objectivity. He also knew that most reporters leaned left, and their beliefs sometimes seeped into coverage.

So Ailes came up with a brilliantly cynical strategy. He created a conservative news channel that dispensed with objectivity, and sometimes with facts, while claiming it was more objective — “Fair and Balanced” — than the competition.

The Wall Street Journal is no Fox News, and Baker, who’s publicly acknowledged Trump’s untruths and celebrated some hard-hitting stories, is no Ailes. Yet it’s easy to see how The Journal could continue down the Murdoch path.

Baker believes that most media is hopelessly biased, Journal staffers say. He views his critics as liberal whiners, and his approach as the fair and balanced one.

I happen to agree that liberal bias can be a media problem. On important issues — abortion, education, parenting and religion, to name a few — left-leaning beliefs too often distort coverage. The Journal, and every newspaper, should indeed fight that problem.

But that’s very different from saying reporters protect any political party. They don’t. Journalists’ incentives and instincts all point the other way. Which is why the media reported so aggressively on Hillary Clinton’s emails, damaging her badly.

Observers of Murdoch’s company believe that his sons, rising in power, don’t care as much about conservative causes as their father. If that’s right, it’s possible to imagine many more years of The Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s best newspapers, enlightening readers and, yes, making life difficult for competitors.

After all, has there ever been a more important time for sophisticated and fearless financial journalism?

[hrothgar]

Goodbye General Flynn...

26 days. Quite the accomplishment.

[kenberg]

 hrothgar, on 2017-February-14, 08:05, said:

Goodbye General Flynn...

26 days. Quite the accomplishment.

We will see how this goes, but I think it does not end with the resignation. In his resignation letter Flynn apologizes for misleading Spence. Yes, but that is only part of it.. As I understand the sequence of events, Obama imposed sanctions expecting a Russian response, Flynn talked with Kislyak, Putin said he would hold off on the response, Trump praised Putin. A person does not have to be a conspiracy theorist, and I don't think that I am, to see some probable connections here. An honest letter from Flynn would have acknowledged the conversations about sanctions and expressed regret for that error of judgment. Misleading Spence about what occurred is small stuff compared to the fact that the conversation with Kislyak on the sanctions occurred at all. And, I gather, the fact that it occurred is no longer in dispute even by the Trumpites. Whether the discussion of sanctions was an inadvertent error or a planned act on behalf of Trump can still be disputed, but really an inadvertent error of this magnitude by a highly experienced individual seems hard to believe.

[barmar]

 y66, on 2017-February-14, 06:14, said:

From The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie By The Editorial Board of the NY Times Feb. 13, 2017:

John Oliver spent the bulk of this week's show (his return after a 3-month hiatus, during which he was sorely missed) discussing the Trump administration's total disregard for the truth: how they use it, why it's a serious problem (is there any doubt?), and what the rest of the media can do to try to deal with it.

This was after showing a montage of Trump's inability to shake hands like a normal human being, which they also showed a part of on last night's At Midnight. How can a man who has been in business not know how to shake hands, it's something they do all the time? Apparently it's a kind of power play:

https://qz.com/90818...anguage-expert/

[mikeh]

I have just ordered, and begun reading, 'The Coming of the Third Reich' by Richard Evans, a highly regarded historian. Written more than 10 years ago, the foreword is remarkably apposite to our times. He stresses that this first book, of a trilogy, is focused on exploring how it was that the Nazis came to power in a nation that was highly educated and very invested in politics. While the Reichstag, before WWI, was not very powerful compared to most democratically elected national legislatures, Germans were very politically involved: one election shortly before WWI saw an 85% voter turnout.

There were many Germans who were appalled at the Nazi platform, but once Hitler got enough votes to become a plausible candidate for the Chancellorship, he was able to implement an authoritarian regime despite the existence of significant institutional obstacles, such as the constitution and the courts.

I am only beginning the book, so my understanding of how he did this is based on other books I have read about this time in Germany, and my understanding will probably evolve over the next week or so. However, it seems that he used, as one major tool, the device of labeling a minority group both as part of a global enemy and as an internal threat, while magnifying a sense of national calamity. He used Jews.

Does this strike you as familiar?

He also relied on the tendency of the bureaucracy to 'do their job', with their job being defined by the rules that he promulgated. Does this sound familiar in the context of how the border security people enforced the travel ban even after the AG of the US said it was unconstitutional, and even after (at some airports) the Courts had granted injunctive relief?

He used widespread and incessant lying, using the then-relatively new and powerful medium of popular radio: see Fox and Breitbart, Alex Jones, et al. See Conway and Miller.

Based on the foreword, I expect to learn how an educated, industrious and (for many) well-intentioned citizenry became compliant with or even complicit in the abolition of democracy and the imposition of a single-party dictatorship in a handful of years.

Bannon has said, publicly, that he wants to recreate the 'excitement' of the 1930s. He also wants, as with Lenin, not to change the system (here, democracy) but to abolish it...to destroy it entirely. Bannon is completely open about his goals, yet few, if any, seem to take him seriously. I don't see Trump as Hitler. For one thing, I don't think Trump has the ability of Hitler to maintain focus on any issue for any length of time. For another, I don't see him as the charismatic speaker that Hitler was. But Hitler was his own evil genius: Trump has Bannon, and Bannon is a very intelligent, if evil, manipulator, who benefits from Trump's apparent incoherence.

I have seen articles online deploring the tendency of some leftwing pundits to warn of an impending dictatorship, arguing that Trmup is a bumbling buffoon, with no deep plan. I agree with the first part, and even with the notion that Trump lacks a vision, beyond self-gratification. But the plan here is not Trump's...it is Bannon's.

[helene_t]

 mikeh, on 2017-February-14, 11:56, said:

well-intentioned citizenry became compliant with or even complicit in the abolition of democracy and the imposition of a single-party dictatorship in a handful of years.

At least the US has, for now, a credible opposition, and some critical media still survive. This is more than we can say in the UK.

[Cyberyeti]

 helene_t, on 2017-February-14, 13:58, said:

At least the US has, for now, a credible opposition, and some critical media still survive. This is more than we can say in the UK.

Credible opposition - yes a problem
Critical media - Grauniad and Mirror still survive

[Winstonm]

 nige1, on 2017-February-14, 01:42, said:

Thank you for the reference, WinstonM.


Good advice in a discussion forum. Perhaps in International diplomacy too.

We should also try to avoid obvious logical fallacies, (Straw-men, Bulverism, and so on).

The advice assumes that we're engaged in a struggle for hearts and minds. We might adopt different tactics in a court of law or when preaching to the converted or when trying to alienate the rest.

It is impossible to argue with his success verses mine. He, an African-American, has caused 12 KKK members to abandon their ideas; I, a Caucasian, have convinced zero.

Perhaps I should rethink my methods.

[Winstonm]

double post

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2017-February-14, 06:14, said:

From The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie By The Editorial Board of the NY Times Feb. 13, 2017:

There are two groups who facilitate the myth of voter fraud: one group knows it is a lie but use it to hinder minority voters and make their actions appear legitimate; the other group is comprised of the ignorant who are duped by the first group.

The tragedy of the election is that we have a truckload from group II in the WH, the main dupee being non other than Trump himself, but most of his aides come from the same group - high-school mentalities that are easily convinced of the latest conspiracy theory.

This group used to be the oddballs we laughed about - now they are in charge - and they are pissed off at everyone who used to laugh at them.

[Winstonm]

 hrothgar, on 2017-February-14, 08:05, said:

Goodbye General Flynn...

26 days. Quite the accomplishment.

Goodbye to General Flynn
(Sung to the tune of Yellow Brick Road)

When will you tell the truth?
When will you stop the lies?
You should never have got drunk on vodka
and said that Putin had really cute eyes

Maybe Tump'll find a replacement
There's plenty like you around
Generals, too old to keep serving
pretending expertise with a frown

Ah-ah-ah. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. Ah-ah-ah.

So goodbye to General Flynn
May the Kremlin give you a toast
You can no longer waive Old Glory
You're a punchline instead of a boast

Go back to the spies that took you in
when Obama gave you the heave
We've finally decided our futures lie
Without General Flynn

[nige1]

The writing might be on the wall for Trump's presidency -- not because of his prejudices, gaffes, and manifest shortcomings -- but because he enrages weapons-makers and the military -- with his reluctance to back Al Qaeda and Isis against Syria -- and his peaceful overtures to Putin.