More bad news for Fascism
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Tidewater News and Opinion Forum
A place for civil discussion of the events of the day for Tidewater residents without the limitations imposed by media forums.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum
A place for civil discussion of the events of the day for Tidewater residents without the limitations imposed by media forums.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Not everyone you disagree with is a fascist. If you call everyone a fascist, the word loses all meaning, as does any message you associate with it.
Putin is lots of things, most bad, but he is not a fascist.
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Putin IS a Fascist. There is not a box he does not tick.
That you people admire him and are pulling for his success is a tell.
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Fascism is a way of organizing a society in support of the State. Russia is not fascist.
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“Fascism is a way of organizing a society in support of the State. Russia is not fascist.”
Laughable. You have been given definitive definitions of the word “fascism.” The definitions fit Putin and Putin’s Russia to a tee but you simply ignore the meaning of the word in your lust to put some sort of lipstick on the fascist pig Putin. What is wrong with you? Or do I risk being banned by asking?
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I have no objection to civil disagreement.
Fascism has a specific structure, and the “definitions” do not address that. They list characteristics common to fascist regimes, but not what makes them fascist. It’s like saying the flu is headache, fever and cough when what flu is is a virus. The symptoms are not the disease. you cannot address the cure by listing symptoms, you have to attack the disease that causes them.
Listing the evils of fascism does not tell you how to prevent or defeat it. You have to address what makes it evil. That is the subjugation of individual rights to the demands ot the State.
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Fascism has a specific structure, and the “definitions” do not address that.
What “specific structure” does the dictionary definition of fascism omit? It must be something that Russia does not have and is therefore not fascist according to you?
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Fascism definition:
A far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Personally, I think that’s a spot-on description of Putin’s Russia.
But semantics aside —
It’s bad news for Russia. And it’s bad news for Putin. And IMHO, it’s good news for democracy everywhere.
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Really? Start by defining “far right”
Those attributes likely would be applicable to a fascist regime but they would also apply to a monarchy, or a direct democracy, as in the tyranny of the majority. They are not a definition of fascism.
Fascism has an actual meaning.
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Start by defining “far right”
SNARK ALERT: look in a mirror
Hey, don’t blame me for the definition. I just copied and pasted it from Wikipedia, which had multiple reference sources. Take it up with the guys who write dictionaries.
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Wikipedia is edited by people with no special expertise. Some do a good job, some don’t.
Whoever wrote that definition doesn’t know what fascism is.
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Well then, for the sake of society, it’s your duty to write Wikipedia and correct their errors. They accept corrections.
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I tried. The page is protected and comments are disabled.
Their explanation for the right wing label amounts to “because we say so” and they do not define right wing”
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In your eagerness to run interference for Putin you have gotten yourself in a muddle. And you pretend to have a better definition of Fascism than the actual definition. I could not have made this stuff up.
You object to Wikipedia. How about Merriam-Webster?
“Fascism : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
You seem to have based some your objection on the idea that “far right” used by Wikipedia is an undefined term. It isn’t. Look to the historical origins of the political terms “left” and “right” and increase your understanding. They come from how the French Parliament seated themselves after the revolution. Supporters of the king sat to the right of the President. Supporters of the people sat to the left. Therefore, rule by and for One or a few is “right.” Rule by and for the many is “left.”
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Paul, yesterday was the anniversary of kristallnacht and I went to a presentation on anti-semitism. There were speakers there who were relatives of holocaust victims. I can guarantee you, they can define fascism. And it is exactly what Websters and Wikipedia say it is. There is nothing “woke” about it. It’s an evil word that represents an evil philosophy that has been twisted to present itself as good. It is not.
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Webster comes closer. But the key to fascism is how society is organized.
The symbolism of the Fascis, is key. It is basically a club made of a bundle of sticks around a central handle. Individually the sticks are weak but bound together they are formidable.
The individual sticks represent the ‘corporati'(NOT corporations) Each corporati organizes one part of society. The railroad corporati would include all of the railroads and their unions. and non-union employees. The same for other industries and trades.
The leadership of the corporati is responsible to the State for the operation of his sector and has great power to mediate and arbitrate disputes within his corporati.
It is not unlike the organization of the Mafia.
French seating arrangements notwithstanding, right wing has nothing to do with fascism. Fascism is a form of collectivism the polar opposite of individual rights.
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“Fascism is a form of collectivism the polar opposite of individual rights.”
You want to say, it seems, that the Left-Right spectrum is about the place of individual rights. You are just plain wrong. Individual rights are not respected at either extreme. As is clear from the origin of the usage, the spectrum is about who should rule – the few (e.g., the aristocracy) or the many (the people).
You would like to think that you are on the Right because you respect individual liberty and Leftists don’t. Uh, no. You are on the right because you favor the rule of the strong few over the weak many and you oppose democracy.
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I have written many times that left/right is inadequate to describe a political view.
Libertarains often say we want to keep Democrats out of your wallet and Republicans out of your personal life.
You can have authoritarian collectives of both the right and left, as we know them.
You just can’t have authoritarian libertarians.
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“You just can’t have authoritarian libertarians”
Yeah, sure. But none of that patting yourself on the back explains why you would work so hard to deny the utterly and obviously fascist nature of Putin’s Russia?
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Yeah, I learned that “sticks tied together” definition of fascism in high school too. Only I learned it a little differently. Those sticks are bound together by nationalism, by “us” vs “them,” by racism and sexism and xenophobia. It is a form of collectivism, not unlike the mafia, but it is nothing like socialism. Once those “sticks” are bound together, they are ruled by one “handle,” aka a dictator. None of those sticks gets to say anything that disagrees with Dear Leader. And, if you were a Jewish stick in Germany at the wrong time, you got tossed into the fire.
Whatever else you may try to say about Democrats, you can not say they are “sticks bound together.” Even Democrats admit that trying to organize Democrats is like trying to herd cats.
Nazis are fascists. Russia is fascist. North Korea is fascist. MAGATs are fascists, hence their love for tiki torch parades and blood & soil chants, Putin & Russia, and love letters from Kim.
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Naziism is just a Nationalist variant of socialism. From the horse’s mouth:
“After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.”
Adolf Hitler
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“In the months after Hitler took power, SA and Gestapo View This Term in the Glossary agents went from door to door looking for Hitler’s enemies. They arrested Socialists, Communists, trade union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi Party; some were murdered. By the summer of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only legal political party in Germany. Nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated.”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-terror-begins
I know you would love to pull off a Dinsesh D’Souza labeling Democrats Nazis, but it won’t fly, I am afraid. Rabid nationalism, anti-immigrant, anti-Semetic, police state, fervent anti-Socialist and anti-Communist, anti-trade unionist, with oligarchs controlling production is hardly a socialist state. Germans were encouraged to both own guns and procreate for large families, birth control and abortion would be an anathema.
Not to mention the anti-communist fervor in battling Anti-fascists in the early days and Stalin during the war.
And yet, what I described sound awfully familiar.
Qanon spouts “where we go one, we go all”, a definitely collective aspiration, and yet they are the darling of the MAGA movement.
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At the time Hitler was coming to power, the communists were ‘one worlders’ and the fascists were nationalists.
That was the difference between them. The communists thought socialism was a stage on the way to a stateless world harmonious workers with no need for national borders. The Fascists wanted a permanent state ruled by the superior races.
But their economics were in every case, socialsim.
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Hitler can call his group Fairy Princesses for all I care. He wasn’t known for his honesty. Nazis were NOT socialists. “Nationalist” is the key word here. Nation/race above all. “Deutschland Über Alles”
Yeah, you can be a National Socialist — if you’re not a Jew, or a gypsy, or have a disability, or speak ill of Dear Leader. If you are any of those things, you can be a Socialist. You just can’t be a National Socialist – aka Nazi.
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History doesn’t change just because it doesn’t fit your politics
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Nor does it change to fit your politics. I suspect there’s a reason Wikipedia ignores your requests to change the definition of fascist. I’m guessing you wouldn’t have any luck at Webster’s either. Nazis were, and still are, fascists. Their ways are evil and their ways are still admired by a growing number of Republicans today.
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“But their economics were in every case, socialism.”
The claim that Nazi Germany had a socialist economy is ahistorical nonsense. You obviously have been getting your history from some very dubious sources. Lois sets you right and you just double down on your cocksure ignorance.
If you think quoting Hitler’s political rhetoric is a substitute for how the economy was actually organized you would make a very poor historian. Donald Trump promised everybody better healthcare at lower costs. Does that mean he actually took even a single step in that direction? Obviously not. Same with Hitler’s blather about socialism. The means of production in Nazi Germany remained firmly in the hands of the oligarch capitalists who sold to the state for profit. That is NOT socialism.
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Really? You think any of those “capitalists” had the option of making refrigerators instead of machine guns or tanks?
Hitler also said it was his task to perfect socialism. Remember that in fascist regimes, industries are vertically integrated and controlled. So, of course, Hitler chose successful industrialists as the ‘Capos’ of his corporati, but always in service of the collective, personified by the State.
You would probably do well to read Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM for an understanding of facism. he was there to watch it play out from an economist’s point of view.
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“History doesn’t change just because it doesn’t fit your politics”
Oh my, the laughable irony of someone offering this condescending advice while throwing out completely nonsensical economic history!
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“You think any of those “capitalists” had the option of making refrigerators instead of machine guns or tanks?”
The exigencies of war do not turn a capitalist system into a socialist system. In the United States our for-profit corporations sold to the government as well. And, they had no choice. But, they were still capitalists and the profits they made did not belong to the workers, they belonged to the capitalists. That is NOT socialism.
You can shuck and jive all you want. Fascism is at the RIGHT end of the political spectrum. Socialism is at the LEFT end. They are very different. And, as you are someone who believes in social Darwinism and who hates democracy you are at the Right end of the spectrum as well. The Fascist end.
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Those Nazi industrialists not only had to make what the regime required, they had to deliver at the price set by the regime, and pay the wages the regime required. The profits were what the regime allowed. That sounds pretty socialist to me.
I reject your definition of right and left as meaningless.
Fascism is inherently collectivist, Libertarains, and on most issues, conservatives, are individualists, You say so yourself quite often,
Right and left don’t really apply, The spectrum that matters is collectivist vs individualist.
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Fascism, communism, Nazism do have a common trait.
The are all dictatorships that favor the wealthy and well connected. The ultra nationalism is a probable difference.
A difference between capitalism and Putin is that oligarchs have to please Putin to prevail. In capitalism, oligarchs have to please customers as well as obey antitrust laws to keep them in check and competition somewhat real.
Putin has clamped down on gay rights, media, non-Christians and immigrants (except for cannon fodder). Those are the hallmarks of the extreme right.
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“Those are the hallmarks of the extreme right.”
No, they are the hallmarks of collectivism.
All forms of collectivism, including democracy, lead to authoritarian regimes, poverty for the masses, and oppression.
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“The spectrum that matters is collectivist vs individualist.”
Your “individualist” ideal of government is a smokescreen for Fascism – the rule by the few and powerful. By denying government its legitimate role in moderating the extremes of “individualist” behavior and greed you set have set society on a path of exploitation and abuse.
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That makes no sense.
Individualism requires mutual non-aggression.
Government has a role in preventing aggression, but it must not be a tool of aggression, which is the heart of collectivism.
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“That makes no sense.”
To you. Which is why you are in a marginalized extremist political party.
Your failure to see the sense is because you do not understand that people can be abused economically and not just by violence. It is how most great fortunes have been made.
Look at the behavior of your paragon individualist, Elon Musk. On a whim he buys Twitter for a foolish price. His first action is to fire without warning or reason about half of the people who made Twitter what it is. That is just as much “aggression” as sticking gun in someone’s face and demanding their money. His behavior should be criminal, but in our “individualist” system it isn’t.
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Musk is not a paragon, much of his fortunes comes from climate mandates and subsidy. But he is doing the right thing by bringing free speech to twitter.
Are you postulating that the Twitter employees own their jobs? Because that would be outright socialism.
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Musk is not “bringing free speech to Twitter.” Musk thought he could turn Twitter into a megaphone for his own demented ideas. He was wrong on many levels.
He fired the people who made Twitter work, the fact checkers. His $20… no $8… verification checkmarks that don’t verify anything are a laughing stock. As a result he is about one Scaramucci away from bankrupting Twitter.
The big CEOs he fired had golden parachutes and laughed all the way to the bank. It’s the worker bees down the line who took the hit… as always.
Musk is like Trump, a spoiled brat, born on third base who thinks he hit a home run. When either of them talk of “free speech” what they really mean is freedom to lie. That kind of free speech is fine for your daddy’s board room or with your bar pals at the country club. But when lies reach millions of people at once, with no fact check, you get things like Pizzagate. People die.
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So, when private companies were ruthlessly suppressing contrary opinion, that was Ok because they are private companies, but now that Musk is allowing free speech he is evil. I guess it matters whose ox is being gored.
The remedy for bad speech is better speech. Censorship for adults has never led to a good end.
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It’s not just “bad speech.”
When QAnon-type speech is given to millions of people unchecked, really bad things happen. You have guys showing up at pizza parlors with guns demanding access to the pedophile ring in the basement.
When you have the CEO of Twitter suggesting that perhaps the husband of the Speaker of the House was having a gay lover’s quarrel with they guy who attacked him, you have dropped to QAnon levels of speech.
Stopping that sort of thing is not “ruthlessly suppressing contrary opinion.” People who do that are yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. It is dangerous. It is illegal. And advertisers won’t want their company’s name next to it online.
Fact checking is the only way to stop it. And Musk fired all the fact checkers.
I’m sorry if the fact checkers were blocking your point of view. They’re probably the same guys who work at Wikipedia and Websters who won’t publish your definition of fascism.
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Always pizza gate. Probably less than a thousand people nationwide took that seriously.
Even so, the claim of Trump watching prostitutes pee on a bed was just as ridiculous, but that was OK on social media.
But on the other hand, the laptop story was suppressed, and has proven true.
The Great Barrington Resolution was suppressed, and would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and the economy.
Questioning the CMIP-5 climate models was suppressed, and we have made decades of bad policy on those disproven models
It’s not just pizza and dangerous threats that are suppressed, valid scientific opinion was suppressed in favor a political narrative.
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Okay, you want another example of “free speech.” Here’s one hot off of Twitter:
With Musk’s current freedumb policies, anybody can buy a verified account, with any name they choose, for $8 per month. Someone bought a verified account named “Eli Lilly and Company.” Then they tweeted, “We are excited to announce that insulin is now free.”
It was a sick joke to every person who needs insulin, but Eli Lilly isn’t laughing either. Their stock just crashed… big time!
But yeah, go ahead and let everybody say anything that comes to mind. Don’t fact check anything.
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Elly Lilly has legal remedies against the fraudster.
If Twitter was careless about issuing a verified tag, that would invite legal action too.
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Does Twitter have to verify information? Not by your rules. By your rules fact checking is censorship. All a Twitter checkmark verifies under the new free speech management is, the owner of the account paid Elon $8.
If your house gets washed away by sea level rise because somebody published false climate information, too bad. If your grandma dies because somebody says injecting bleach will cure COVID, too bad. If your company’s stock takes a hit because somebody published false information, too bad.
MAYBE, if you repeat the same lies over and over and over, like Alex Jones did, somebody, someday, might win a lawsuit against you. But all of the people who were repeating the same things Alex Jones said didn’t get sued, so don’t count on lawsuits to be your fact checkers.
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Again, the remedy for bad speech is better speech.
No one said injecting bleach would cure COVID, but if they had, it should not be that hard an argument to counter.
But climate change is more difficult, There is real controversy there. And the costs of being wrong are quite large. If we crush our economy trying to control the climate, we put Americans into poverty and people die in the third world in numbers that dwarf war and genocide.
So, what good was done by suppressing one side of that argument for decades? Is it not better that both sides be heard so our policies can be made fully informed?
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“… And the costs of being wrong…”
Where are you getting these conclusions? “Crush our economy”? Millions die? Historically, we have managed to crush our economy and millions died for a lot of reasons, mostly attributable to power struggles and financial chicanery.
What are the costs of “being right” but ignoring the problem?
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Agreed there are costs both ways.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is almost empty, and investment in new wells has been stifled so there will be a gap before new production can come on line, so we are about to see a glimpse of what is coming if we continue to pursue Net Zero CO2.
There are, BTW, benefits to consider.
But again, in making our decisions on policy, should we not be fully informed, or should we only hear from one side with a huge vested interest in which policy we follow?
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The remedy for bad speech is to keep it off of platforms that blast it to millions of people at once.
And I beg to differ about “no one saying injecting bleach would cure COVID.” It started when Dear Leader was on TV, standing among health experts, but couldn’t resist pretending he was one of them and possibly knew more than they did. He suggested they investigate injecting bleach as a means of curing COVID. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/23/trump-bleach-one-year-484399 That got picked up on social media and we’ll never know how many feeble-minded cult members actually tried it.
I agree that every side of an argument should be heard in communities that have expertise in discerning the truth. And so it is in real scientific communities.
However, until the experts reach a consensus, it is beyond dangerous to broadcast every fruit-loopy idea that comes along to the general public. And that especially goes for fruit-loopy ideas that get politicized for the benefit of big bucks donors. e.g. the tobacco industry — “cigarettes don’t cause cancer.” I lost two parents and a hellva lot of friends to that lie. If they hadn’t been hearing “both sides,” some of them might be alive today.
As for the climate change argument, I agree, the costs of being wrong are quite large.
On one hand, you may risk the economy… especially the profits of oil and coal companies. There’s also the possibility you may improve the economy by creating jobs in green energy.
On the other hand, if you let the pollution go unchecked, you risk global warming and climate change, which will destabilize the entire planet and has the possibility of ending all life on Earth.
So the bottom line is, do you risk the economy or do you risk all life on earth?
Do you let the experts from the oil and coal companies tell people there’s no danger, like you allowed the experts from the tobacco companies to do?
Because death is what you get when you allow free speech from both sides with no fact checks.
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There is a climate problem but there is not a climate crisis.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/11/02/the-climate-crisis-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/
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So, measures to reduce carbon emissions are working. Good.
And the fact some people are finally admitting, maybe, perhaps, there might be a “climate problem,” even better.
And, if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to deal with a climate problem before it becomes a climate crisis.
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It will never be a crisis. The next climate crisis will be the coming glaciation. In 40 or 50,000 years.
CO2 just doesn’t have the remaining power to create a crisis. And it’s a good thing, any efforts we have made in reducing CO2 have been canceled 10 times over by the increases in China and India. Neither have any intentions of getting off of coal as long as there is a lump left to burn.
All we are doing is sending industrial production to China, where it will be done with far more pollution of all kinds. Our efforts have only hurt our workers and made the world dirtier.
Nothing but expensive virtue signaling.
Did you read the Curry article?
There are costs and there are also benefits.
Yes, sea level will rise about 3 feet in Norfolk over the next 100 years, With a maximum effort from everyone, including the Chinese, we might hold that to 2.5 feet.
But plants are starved for CO2, Already, the planet is greening, CO2 is plant food
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
So, no crisis, just change. Longer crowing seasons are a benefit too, especially further north.
In every measurable way, adapting to the change is less costly than futile attempts to restrain it.
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A few years ago, I visited Tangier Island for the first time. It was a warm, sunny day, and it hadn’t rained in weeks. Yet every street I walked down had at least 1/4 inch of water across it. There was water in the people’s yards. I asked them if they were having a problem with sea level rise. They told me, “Definitely not! It’s not a rising sea level, it’s an erosion problem.” And they weren’t worried about it because Trump promised to build them a seawall to stop the erosion. So, there will never be a crisis.
Wanna buy some land on Tangier Island?
I agree, a lot of our industrial production is being sent to China. But it’s not because they burn coal and we don’t. It’s because they have near-slave labor and we don’t. Also, companies who do business there don’t have to provide health care benefits to workers because the state provides healthcare… but that’s another argument altogether. Bottom line: American companies send jobs to China because they put profits ahead of everything else.
A warmer northern climate means more than a longer growing season in the north. It means droughts and wildfires and desertification in the south. It means melting tundra. It means melting glaciers. It means rising sea levels.
At least you admit, the climate is changing. Finding alternative energy sources is adapting to that change. Going along with coal and oil as usual is not adapting to change; it’s being swept away by change.
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Have you read Michner’s CHESAPEAKE?
Aside from well researched history, it’s a great explanation of the geology of the area.
The Indians abandoned Tangier 400 years ago. They understood subsidence, or at least recognized it. Tangier is basically a sandbar left from the floods of the Susquehanna as the Ice Sheet from the last glaciation melted. It was always a temporary structure.
I flew in there to meet some pilot friends of mine from up and down the East Coast. There is a hump in the runaway about a third of the way from the north end. Makes for exciting landings. It is caused by uneven subsidence.
Labor is part of the cause for industry moving to China, but the near total lack of environmental restrictions is a big part too.
Adapting to climate change here means doing what New Orleans did 100 years ago.
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I can assure you, the people who were born and raised on Tangier Island, and whose families have lived there for generations, don’t think of it as a “temporary structure.” But if you want to use that excuse, Florida is also a temporary structure. Sanibel Island just disappeared a few weeks ago and, according to friends who just returned from there, a good part of Ft Myers went with it.
Yeah, industry loves places with no environmental restrictions. So long as they don’t have to live there. Ever live near a paper mill? Or a tannery? The first time I drove across the Mississippi River there were no environmental restrictions. There was, however, a sign on the bridge that said, “Do not throw lit cigarettes off bridge. Water is flammable.” The Clean Water Act has improved that problem and I doubt residents along the river give a flip if those industries moved to China.
And that New Orleans thing worked fine… until Cat 5 hurricanes became a regular problem. Remember the old Leon Everett song, “Hurricane,” released in the early 80s? The lyrics went, “High black water, she’s the devil’s daughter. She’s hard and she’s cold and she’s mean.” They went on to brag about not being afraid of hurricanes and ended with, “We finally taught her, that it takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans.” Then, in 2005, Mama Nature said, “You want a lot of water? Meet Katrina.”
Remember the Bhopal disaster in 1984? Union Carbide moved to India in the 60s to avoid US regulations on its production of pesticides. Long story short, lax safety regulations resulted in the release of a toxic gas that killed at least 3,787 people and injured over 500,000 more. The effects are still being felt today.
IMHO, the United States is not the villain for requiring environmental protections. Other countries are villains for not requiring them.
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It doesn’t really matter what the people on Tangier think, the island is subsiding and will disappear whether sea level rises or not.
My wife was 30 miles from NOLA, caring for her dying mother, when Katrina struck. A lot of things came together to cause the flooding of New Orleans. Mostly corruption. The city has the largest low lift pumps in the world. Originally steam powered, converted to diesel, and finally to electric motors. But when the power went out the backup generators were inadequate. The levees on the Lake side which failed were not up to design. Sheet piles specified to be 15 ft in the ground were only 5 ft in. The piles were supposed to have a concrete apron on the dry side and didn’t where they were out of sight of the roads. “Clean” fill in the levees turned out to have tree trunks in them, which had rotted out leaving holes in the levee.
It’s possible Katrina would have been too much for the levees even if they had been right, but in New Orleans spectacular corruption, they didn’t have a chance.
Our environmental restrictions when REAL pollution is involved are a good thing, but we can’t force China to follow them. They won’t. CO2 doesn’t respect borders, so when industry goes there instead of here, we just get more CO2 than if we had done it ourselves.
Making sacrifices if it really helps the environment would be one thing, but useless virtue signaling is just foolish.
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The Katrina/New Orleans thing was a sad story all around. Brownie really do a “hellva job,” but not the way George W. meant it. The Bush administration never took climate disasters seriously. Otherwise, why put a horse show judge in charge of FEMA?
The bottom line is, the world is changing. Everything changes. All the time. The only things that don’t change are dead… and I’m not too sure about them either.
We can’t go on with the old ways. We have to develop alternative energy sources. Even if you don’t care that coal and oil are polluting the planet, coal and oil are finite resources. They may or may not run out in our lifetimes but they will run out. And when they do, if we haven’t been working on alternative energy sources, it will be too late to begin when the wells run dry.
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FEMA wasn’t the problem. it was Kathleen Blanco, the Governor, who prevented a prompt response. She refused to sign the paperwork to allow the National Guard to act with the Feds. Even blocked a convoy from WalMart bringing water and supplies.
Conservation is a good thing, but we need natural gas as a bridge to nuclear
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I don’t know if FEMA was “the” problem, but it certainly was “a” problem. I seem to remember Brownie saying he didn’t know there were people stuck inside the convention center, even though it had been being broadcast on every major news network for a day or two. He seemed to be clueless about everything that was going on. If he couldn’t get any information from the state, he could at least have turned on the TV.
I don’t see natural gas or nuclear as being solutions to the energy problem. Natural gas has the same lack of infinite supply as coal and oil. Nuclear has disaster potential beyond pollution… e.g. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric all have problems too, but as far as I can tell, they have less problems than any of the alternatives.
Maybe, if the human race doesn’t blow itself off the face of the earth, some day we’ll be able to harness the energy from the movement of the tides or maybe even the movement of the planets. The only thing for certain is, things will change.
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Legal remedies are fine when the legal system is equitable.
Alex Jones’ cases took 10 years to resolve. Connections and most of all money determine the outcomes in too many. Trump used that anomaly to his benefit for decades. Sue and countersue to run out the clock and bankrupt the other parties.
Regulatory actions whether government or private provide quicker resolution. Not perfect, but neither is the current reliance on courts that are overwhelmed by cases and dependent upon relative wealths of the contestants.
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If Twitter maintains that Blue Check accounts are really who they claim to be, then they should be liable for harm done by impersonators.
It should not be difficult case to decide.
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Well, we are now back to where we were. If a media site is to be responsible for postings, verified or not, then they have the right to protect themselves by removing or blocking.
In MSM media, a retraction or correction is often printed or posted afterwards. The complaint is that they are next to the obits and not above the fold.
The same with social media that is supposed to self correct by the “marketplace”. The lie or intentional misinformation is out and reposted ad infinitum. The contradictory corrections…who cares? The reason no one cares is because outrage sells better than considered debate. And “sell” is the point. More eyeballs, more income. That is what got FB in hot water.
It may be that debate is the ideal. But if the debaters are dependent upon sales to make their point broadly available, then there is little debate.
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“… the laptop story was suppressed, and has proven true.”
NY Post published it. Trump’s DOJ had possession. I believe even WSJ mentioned it. But it was all over the most popular media, FOX and right wing radio. Every echo chamber from Breitbart to Redstate ran with it.
So, what’s your beef? Because a few left leaning media did not spotlight it daily you complain?
And here is the part you will love. Kevin McCarthy said the laptop investigation will get a priority status when (or is it “if” now…?) he is Speaker.
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“Because that would be outright socialism.”
Your definition of socialism seems to be any idea you do not like. In several European CAPITALIST countries it is illegal to fire employees. If they are no longer needed, the terms of their separation have to be negotiated and not just decreed by an all-powerful boss.
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California also has laws regarding severance, which Musk followed, and exceeded.
But that is creeping socialism as well.
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Your concept of creeping socialism is curious. Labor laws are designed to protect workers both physically and economically from excesses of management.
That is, force or fraud against the workers. If management decides to upend, sell, go bankrupt or suffer a hostile takeover by a company that will strip assets and move on, then workers are at least nominally protected from ruin until they can get other employment.
That can be fraud, especially in takeovers designed to strip assets and lay the company to waste. Note that many bankruptcies damage employees pension funds, healthcare access and pay while the directors often make millions to “bring the company back”. All nice and somewhat legal in our freewheeling capitalist society.
Likewise, management cannot force workers to be unsafe, work extra without out compensation or other pressures. That is force.
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Unless there are contractual arrangements overriding, an employer owes and employee his wage, and no more.
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Of course. Working classes always take it the ear as companies play financial roulette.
Let the risk takers reap their profits, but just like they can’t pour effluent into the drinking water, they can’t dump workers without some safety nets.
So we have laws for both.
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“But that is creeping socialism as well.”
So, I was right. ANY law or regulation that you do not like is “socialism.”
And, I see in another post that democracy is collectivism that inevitably leads to “authoritarian regimes, poverty for the masses, and oppression.” Oh, really?
Your brushes are too broad for any kind of meaningful discussion.
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To be clear, a democratic republic need not lead to an authoritarian regime if its citizens are sufficiently careful in keeping within the bounds of its Constitution.
But any law that confers property interests in a business to anyone other than its owners, that is creeping socialism. It is literally communal ownership of the means of production.
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“Great Barrington Resolution was suppressed, and would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and the economy.”
You really think your fantasies are factual? The policies advocated by GBR might have been better for the economy but they would not have saved lives. They would have cost lives. A large number of lives. And we now know that the central “fact” these policies were predicated on – herd immunity – never developed.
Sweden from the outset followed the GBR. To date their Covid deaths per 100K is 197.9. Their close neighbors Norway (77.37), Denmark(123.5), and Finland (112.97) did not. The numbers tell us that GBR is NOT a life saver. The opposite.
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In the US alone, how many elders died during the period when the vaccines were being given first to “essential workers” in an attempt to stop the spread(which it didn’t do) while elders waited months?
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“Here’s one hot off of Twitter:”
A dollar against a donut says that these “jokers” were big time short sellers of Eli Lilly stock.
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“In the US alone, how many elders died during the period when the vaccines were being. . .”
Probably very few. Certainly NOT in the hudreds of thousands per your hair-on-fire claims.
The elderly infirm were always in the highest priority group and the period of time when vaccines were being rationed was only a few weeks.
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The vaccines became available in late Dec 2020 but were held from general availability to seniors until May 2021. Over 200,000 Americans died during that period. The vaccines were very effective at preventing death but it is true not all of those would have been saved, Still, prioritizing elders first would certainly have saved 100K
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“Still, prioritizing elders first would certainly have saved 100K”
I don’t believe that for a second. For starters, I got my first vaccination without difficulty in early March. Not late May. They were there for elders who sought them.
You are trying to defend the Great Barrington Declaration with grossly exaggerated claims without any evidence but your own suppositions. There is no need for that approach. Sweden from the very beginning followed their recommendations. Its neighbors in Scandanavia did not. The result could not be more definitive – Sweden has suffered significantly higher death rates.
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We could quibble over results, but we’re getting distracted from the point.
The CDC knew from the beginning that the vaccines, as valuable as they were for preventing death, did not prevent transmission.
Yet the whole “essential workers first” policy was based on suppressing spread.
Did we benefit from suppressing that information?
If the cost of being fully informed is that some pizza/pedo kook also gets to speak, can’t we just get more sophisticated in our consumption of information and better at countering misinformation?
I really don’t understand the drive to allow only those with power to speak, Social media has provided us with the opportunity for the little guy to be heard if he has something worthwhile to say, but that is lost if we demand censorship
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Quibble?
There might be less quibbling if you did not habitually buttress your opinions with astounding “facts.” In this case that hundreds of thousands of people died because the CDC did not adopt an outlier opinion at a time of great uncertainty. Or that people who advocate greener energy policies are mass murders with the blood of hundreds of millions on their hands.
Then there is your reliance on questionable facts . . .
They did NOT know that “from the beginning” and it is not exactly true. Even if a vaccinated person can spread the virus, he will not get sick and therefore spread less of it for a shorter amount of time. Vaccination might not prevent transmission, but it definitely reduces it.
That, maybe, and the fact that it was important that essential work get done and those asked to risk themselves needed the reassurance of being vaccinated.
“I really don’t understand the drive to allow only those with power to speak”
Try harder. The drive is to suppress those who spread lies. Lies are dangerous.
Since the policies advocated by the Great Barrington group proved to be deadly when actually implemented by Sweden, it is not clear that whatever suppression (if any) their ideas suffered was unwarranted.
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Strange, many of these attributes perfectly describe left wing extremists and the woke. Isn’t that a hoot?
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“Isn’t that a hoot?”
Nice try but that is a swing and a miss.
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Forcible suppression of opposition, belief in natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race and a strong regimentation of society and the economy are hallmarks of woke left wing extremist socialists. Who are you trying to kid?
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Assuming you really believe what you are saying about the Democratic Party, you have drunk too much of the Kool-Aid.
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Or…just drunk too much 😇
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Ukraine’s Kherson offensive has been bogged down for more than a month. Suddenly Russia decides to withdraw to the south side of the Dnipier River and American propaganda outlets proclaim a major Ukrainian victory.
I have no idea what Russia’s strategic plans are in Ukraine, but it is clear that Ukraine is suffering huge personnel and equipment casualties every day along the entirety of the line of contact. It is far from clear that Ukraine is defeating Russia in Kherson.
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It’s not just “American propaganda outlets” that are noticing blood on the water. Putin’s enemies are circling like vultures.
https://news.yahoo.com/russian-enemies-kremlin-meet-plot-170358474.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb&tsrc=fb
You and Putin need to be paying more attention to “American propaganda outlets” before Dear Leader accidentally falls from a window.
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RE: “You and Putin need to be paying more attention to ‘American propaganda outlets’ before Dear Leader accidentally falls from a window.”
No thanks. I prefer to deal with current information over future information, since future information is almost always wrong.
The current information is that Russia apparently has ordered a retreat from the battleground north of the Dnipeir River in Kherson Region. The order happened today, but the retreat hasn’t happened yet.
It remains to be seen how things will play out in Kherson.
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You may prefer to “deal with current information over future information,” but Dear Leader is smarter than that. He just cancelled plans to attend the G20 Summit.
Maybe he cancelled for fear of embarrassment. There wouldn’t be a lot of people knocking on his door to meet with him.
Maybe he did it because he’s so busy directing Russia’s successful non-war “military action.”
Or Maybe he cancelled because he wasn’t convinced his security teams could protect him from assassination. Maybe he didn’t want to leave home for fear he wouldn’t be in charge of home when he got back.
Whatever his reasons for backing out of the G20, you can be sure they were based on information that gave him concern for the future.
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