I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream

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We brought fact checkers to a culture war … and we lost.

I think you touch on the reason for the ungluing there, believe it or not.

Facts stopped mattering when the left pushed for years in the education system that truth was for the individual to decide for themselves. When critical thinking is no longer a priority, and each individual is not only told you cannot evaluate what others say, but is actively shamed and even attacked for doing so.

Couple that with a hostility towards presenting anything resembling reality in their everyday narrative, and liberals have raised a generation that is horribly confused as to the nature of truth, both in the left and the right. It’s untethered from reality, and that’s what’s so frightening.

If you want to hold onto the dream, work towards reinstilling a sense of truth: that truth matters, that it is real and exists outside of ourselves, and that we can and must make judgments of other people and challenge them when they try to chew away at it. Then - and only then - does our next generation stand even the slightest chance, much less the one we are part of now.

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According to me, this frame of mind explains a great deal why such a…hum “original” personage such as Trump got to be elected: people are fed up with SJWs and PC white knights shunning their opinion without debate, just because it goes against this new PC culture which undermines any challenge to what is socially constructed as “what is objectively right”.

This kind of space, allowing respectful discussions, is such a great and valuable aspect of our way of life! let’s talk, let’s listen to each others and let’s try to understand why so many deemed acceptable to appoint Trump as POTUS even though there is so much about him that shows he should not be where he is today.

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Should’ve paused here and rethought this post, because instead of sounding like the conclusion of soul searching, it sounds like self righteous virtue signalling. Sorry, it just doesn’t come out well.

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I’m curious Jeff, who did you vote for, or support in the Democratic primary race?

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Out of curiosity, does Discourse have a feature to collapse/hide a thread within a conversation? Asking for a friend.

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The thing that doesn’t make any sense about the recent travel ban is that Saudi Arabia isn’t on it. The majority of 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia.

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…and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things.

The problem is that the normal functioning of American government is broken. Government is so broken that it can’t merely be fixed it has to be transformed. That process won’t be easy or pretty but it has to be done and Trump as an outsider is the guy that has the best chance to do it. He is simply doing what he said he would do which may be confusing to some since that doesn’t normally happen under the “normal functioning of American government”. I say Bravo! and stay the course Mr. Trump.

The outrage over this ban and building a Mexican wall is outrageous. Of course this needs done and should have been done long ago. (Oh wait, Obama did it too.) The security of the citizenry is the primary duty of the Executive. I’m all for a temporary ban from hostile countries to review polices. Immigration needs fixed and illegal immigration needs to be reduced and eliminated. Unfortunately the Left keep scare mongering and promoting the lie that Trump and his supporters are anti-Muslim and anti-immigration. The hypocrisy is sad.

We absolutely need immigration and we need a growing population. Let’s welcome those that want to contribute and make America great. Let’s keep out the criminal element, the free loaders and those that seek to destroy us. Or put another way, let’s just enforce the laws we already have!

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It’s important to understand who the Syrian refugees are, and why they are leaving.

Our 9-11 was equivalent to 3 or 4 bombings. In this last year alone, obama dropped 23,144 bombs on Syrian cities. You can’t find a survivor who wasn’t closely related to someone who was killed by US military action. Do any of you remember what you felt after 9-11, and the consequences?

Try it on for a moment. Imagine you just pulled yourself from the rubble. The bottom half of your 5yo girl is missing and her favorite doll is still in her left hand. Your wife is dead in the kitchen where she was preparing your favorite dish. Time passes and you eventually learn that the US will accept you as a refugee. You get off the plane and see a world you only ever saw in movies. Everyone is safe and happy. There’s more wealth here than you ever imagined. Not a single person has any idea what you’ve seen and or what they’ve done. It’s as if they’re all in a little cocoon and are oblivious to what’s happening at this very moment in a different part of the word. Look at these ignorant slobs. They don’t deserve this. Your wife and daughter deserved this, but not these arrogant swine. Look at them, homosexual men with strange clothing congratulating you for being there. Middle aged white women singing a song about this being our land and we’ll share it together. The scene resembles a fanatical UFO convention. And this is your typical radical islamic terrorist.

Without an insider’s perspective it’s very difficult for some Americans to believe that the realization of islam in a state translates into a genocide. This is mostly because they don’t know any real history and they don’t think much about anything other than their own tiny little lives. muslims hate you and will kill you when it’s convenient. Your values repulse them at a core level and are an insult to their god. I invite everyone here to ignore their discomfort and go do a quick image search on muslims beheading gays, Christians, children, gang raping little girls, etc. It’s important for you to actually see the images, since you can’t or wont be there. Look closely at each image. Notice how it’s glorified on their national networks?

If you truly believe in American values, you absolutely must hate islam. There is no way around it as the two are completely irreconcilable. islam is not a religion, it’s a complete political ideology and lifestyle. 325,000 people fly in from other countries every day, 112 people from places we’re bombing were temporarily detained so they could be carefully vetted, and this is an outrage to you?

Where was your big rant when obama blocked Christian refugees from Syria for 6 months? Or when he refused to release his college records? Where was your rant when Hillary left Americans to die in Benghazi, or when she was caught going to satanic rituals, or over her husband’s giant kill-list? Where was your rant about 9/11 being nothing more than a pretext for the personal gains of the Bush dynasty? Do you have any idea at all what’s actually happening down at the border and in Mexico? Of course you don’t because you only know what you read in the carefully selected stories presented to you in the Western mainstream media.

You are a liberal, Jeff.

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[quote=“Justin_Tyme, post:50, topic:4882, full:true”] islam is not a religion, it’s a complete political ideology and lifestyle.
[/quote]

I believe you are thinking about Salafi movement.

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Obvious BS is obvious.

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Fixed. I questioned it years ago when I heard it, but when I double checked I only found confirmations everywhere. The whole Jeremiah Wright thing should have been enough to clue me.

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This isn’t the hypocrisy you’re looking for, move along:

C3bTJTPWEAAPg7h.jpg1074×646 77.7 KB

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Hi Jeff,

Long time reader, first time commenter.

I’m from Canada and while, like every nation, we have tons of issues, we do also have some pretty cool stuff.

This, for one: https://openparliament.ca/

The other thing I advocate for every time I get a parliamentarian’s ear is a git style revision system for legislation. It sucks to read “Bill 44” which repeals “section 32 of Bill 23” which modified “paragraph 7 of section 34 in Bill 2”. The tools are there but the culture isn’t.

Isn’t passing legislation the same as making a pull request? Why not just do that?

Wouldn’t even have to go to Ottawa to vote or make comments on the proposed amendments. Legislators are then merely people with commit privs to create branches.

Our elections are also awesomely old-school: you enter a “booth” which is a cardboard fold-over reminiscent of D&D campaign screens and then use a pencil (never seen a pen) make an X next to your candidate on a black and white ballot. You then fold up the piece of paper and walk to a cardboard box and several people watch you put it in the box. The box is then watched by lots of people until the “polls close” and then the votes are spilled out on specific tables and a bunch of “scrutineers” watch as they are counted a few times.

Seems like voting is one of those places where old school is the best school. It’s a social institution for a social problem - mind as well be one of the few endeavours left that uses actual people.

We generally register to vote on our income tax form when we file, though that’s not the only way to register. I think many of us are genuinely confused by the problems of “registering to vote”. Like “organ donor”, our tax software defaults to “register to vote”.

Also, our political parties are funded by our tax dollars. Personal limits are pretty low and corporations (until just recently) were banned from supporting.

Finally, our Elections Canada institution draws the ridings which contains the polls which is how we administer “first past the post”. Not quite sure how gerrymandering works ( I know what it is, just not how it actually gets implemented ), but I don’t think our system is as vulnerable. Nobody has figured out a system that is as simple as FPTP.

Keep up the great work!

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And he signed an executive order that literally, not figuratively, banned Muslims from entering the US — even if they held valid green cards.

He “literally” did not ban Muslims from entering the United States. He banned citizens of seven countries for a total of three months. There is no ban based on religion, and over forty muslim-majority countries with hundreds of millions of people are unaffected by the ban.

Do you really think this story is an honest report on the situation? My opinion of you is lowered.

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Note that in a lot of US states, it hardly matter whether you vote. If you’re a Democrat in a solid red state, or a Republican in a solid red state, your vote will be lost. Even if you would be voting for the winner in a solid blue or red state, there isn’t much incentive to vote – your candidate is going to win anyway (of course, if every one says that, it won’t work). This is due to the winner-takes-all system the USA uses for most of their elections.

That’s also why Clinton having won the popular vote is just an interesting statistic – it doesn’t mean anything. Would the US use an election where all votes would be tallied, with the presidency going to the winner of the popular vote, there would not be swing states, candidates would campaign differently, and in a lot more places, and voter behaviour would be different.

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I applaud you Jeff. It is no longer time to discuss and defend “your” candidate. That was before. With the current state of affairs, it is time to act. It’s non-nonsensical trying to explain to some people what it’s obvious. Yours is not the only blog/article/tweet or post that I’ve read about it, they are multiplying. The current situation is not business as usual, what happens right now will have a great impact ion the future of America and the rest of the world.

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I 100% agree with you Jeff. Thank you for writing this. Too many of us (me) were not involved enough beyond voting and now we have a very serious situation. We need to put in the work to somehow get out of this without long lasting consequences and an intact democracy.

I encourage you to write more on this subject.

-Jon

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Wow. What you said, Phil_GA!! You saved me a LOT of typing! I’m a flaming anarcho-capitalist libertarian myself. It’s hard to imagine such a completely free society happening, but it’s the base line and the one that indicts all the alternatives.

I will say the hypocrisy meter is broken on this. There are the Inner Party insider types calling the shots for power and wealth, then there are the sycophants who think the god of human government with the right demagogue (gotta be a fascist of the left though) will solve their problems. The program of the anti-Trump LEADERS is the same as Chavez’.

Also, every country south of the border has worse immigration policies than Trump’s! And if it’s racism (get a brain) then so are the Latinos who diss each other’s nationality ALL THE TIME! (My wife and ex-wife are Latins and Latinos, my children are shaded brownish, so I KNOW this).

Mexico constantly deported people caught on the “Beast” train, Honduras blocks Nicaraguans (a leftover from the aggressive Sandinista push into Honduras), Mexico just ordered those standed Cubans deported, on and on. Gaddafi blocked invaders from the south, now they just go through into Europe, like he warned about.

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Richard Stallman concentrated his bully pulpit on matters of intellectual freedom, and didn’t let his leanings distract from the subject.

Mozilla lost a great tech pioneer to this Soviet style political thought police syndrome. It’s time to think outside the box of Oligarch-approved thought crime laws.

I really LOVE your technical conversations about coding and programming. They are fantastic and entertaining insights that “even I myself” often hadn’t thought of, and often find myself saying “That’s the way to say it!”

Economic freedom and intellectual freedom are brothers, but it is good to understand economics so as to not get caught by platitudes and get stuck in populism.

Nowhere better than http://mises.org or http://www.mises.org for materials that teach basic economics, as opposed to the government-loving Keynesian thinking that is dulling the brain today.

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This is not a new situation. Maybe you just woke up, but the problems did not appear out of thin air when Trump took the oval office:

Nor did they appear when Obama took office. It’s a systemic problem. Politicians give zero shits about ‘the people’ and that’s why Trump won.

All politicians care about is campaign contributions (anywhere else on earth it’s known as bribery.) Focus on getting the corporate money out of politics and maybe there’s a way out of this before we elect President Camacho and drink Brawndo all day long.

Trump is a symptom, not the problem.