The US had a ton more Communist spies than is popularly known. A LOT of people back then believed that capitalism had met its end, socialism was the only way forward and it was just a matter of time, better help the system collapse and set up a Communist government in America before it was too late, etc. A lot of these people worked in Hollywood, the State Department, and other influential areas. Go ahead and try to find a Hollywood film from the 40s or 50s with a positive portrayal of business. They're all Mr. Potter, ugly capitalists with no redeeming features.
Liberals believe in free speech - we're talking about leftists here.
How about the vast swathes of land in Africa that are off-limits to human colonization due to endemic malaria? Without the ability to protect itself, these vulnerable wetlands will be slashed and burned by human locusts. You think global warming is bad now, just wait until humans drain and burn down the protected lands.
Europe also will never spawn tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and so on. The regulatory environment strangles them in their crib before they ever get started. Europeans' favorite pastime: bitching and complaining about American technology that is given to them for free. What's the European equivalent of Amazon? Of Google? Of Microsoft? I don't know and neither do you.
Following this logic, since Hillary is still walking around free, what's the problem with Trump (or anyone else) doing the same thing?
You're just advocating the same old double standard: when Hillary or one of your tribe does it it's OK, but when Trump or anyone from The Other does it it's automatically wrong.
You have a really weird, skewed view of the Left. They are bigoted classists who loathe the commoners for the crime of being common. The evidence is so overwhelming that I'm shocked that someone has the audacity to claim it's untrue.
Also written by mainstream Leftist Americans who hate their own people: "America is a sick country, always has been. From the good old days when we imported Africans as slaves and murdering Native Americans so we could steal their land; to our nefarious role in overthrowing democratic governments in South America and Iran and replacing them with horrible dictators; to our imperialist adventures in Korea and Vietnam to the unneeded and uncalled for invasion of Iraq, which has destabilized the entire Middle East - we've shown the world that we are indeed exceptional...we've actually accomplished what Napoleon and Hitler only dreamed of - setting up a nationalist empire that dominates much of the globe. "
"Again, and yet again, the United States is in a state of arrested development having never matured past the emotional maturity of a seven year-old. The shortsighted, religious based values of this country, starting with its inception, have created a rapidly devolving culture of ignorance and self-hating, self-destruction. Looking forward to its end and ultimate failure."
"America has always been a violent nation, from our founding genocide to the slave labor that built the country to the arsenal, unprecedented in human history, that maintains our empire. We spend $60 billion a year on pets but won't go to any inconvenience to keep second graders from getting slaughtered. Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo and trophy kids, we don't really give a damn about our children - by which I mean, about one another's. When a race stops caring for its young, its extinction is not only imminent but well deserved.
May we disappear like ice melting on a hot summer day."
Yeah, turning to the far left isn't the solution. I think that political Enlightenment is finding the Center. Today, it means realizing how society has shifted so far left that being in the Center means you've got to correct well towards the Right.
Think about what it took to get you called a Nazi 20 years ago vs. today. Then: Shaved head, swastika tattoo, white supremacist. Now: supports Freedom of Speech, supports strong borders, thinks we have a problem with Islamic extremists, and hates Sharia Law.
I don't think my political values have changed much. I've staid pretty much the same since high school, and society has shifted around me. Example: Back then I opposed electroshock therapy on children to "cure" them of being gay, and today I oppose hormone therapy on children to "cure" them of being the wrong gender.
pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.
So, since when is Silicon Valley patriotic? As in, they care about America and their fellow Americans? Huh? Silicon Valleyites are "citizens of the world". They care far more about distant peoples from backwards cultures than their own neighbors in places like Texas, Idaho, and West Virginia. They regard us with mingled scorn and apprehension. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.
Here is a great essay I have bookmarked that discusses the issue very eloquently and precisely.
Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.
"It's not that we're, like, against America per se. It's just that...well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we're just sitting here, can't even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what's wrong with a country that can't...sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They're okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That's sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!"
I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people's heartfelt emotions of patriotism.
Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.
When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today's elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, "Middle America" - a term that has both geographical and social implications - has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial.
These privileged young people acquire advanced degrees at the "best [universities] in the world," the superiority of which is proved by their ability to attract foreign students in great numbers. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere, they overcome the provincial folkways that impede creative thought, according to Reic
It is these elites who came up with ideas that devastated the working class in America. Whose idea was NAFTA? It was the Democrat elites who got that passed. Whose idea was the Iraq war? Neo-conservative elites. Whose idea was the TPP? Everybody's elites.
Long-term processes of income redistribution from working people to everyone else, non-working welfare recipients as well as the very rich, had been evident for at least two decades. Those who voted for Trump have legitimate grievances long ignored, quite cynically, by both parties. The only thing that really mattered to Americans: the urgent need to mobilize government policies to increase American jobs and wages, in firm opposition to all the competing international and planetary priorities continuously proffered by elite Americans and their core institutions, along with Pope Francis and other leading figures.
Everyday I get to hear ultra-wealthy, gated-community, coastal elite, cliquish, $9 per cup coffee, outsourcing types loudly wring their hands with each other over theoretical boutique issues like LGBT equality, illegal immigrant rights, or global warming in Africa or China, desperately hoping somebody notices how noble they are.
They seem completely ignorant (and if they aren't, are sneering, contemptuous and completely lacking in empathy) of the fact that their fellow citizens on the other side of the gate have resorted to opiates to escape hopelessness and economic despair. Most of the time, the talking points of these smug, circle jerks simply parrot Daily Kos or Huffington Post headlines, and demonstrate a significant lack of deep understanding of the issues. Their kids are at Yale and Berkeley, throwing tantrums like toddlers, because they heard something they don't agree with or challenges their beliefs.
They are the leftist versions of Donald Trump. Incredibly smug and condescending, supercilious, clinically suffering from late-stage Dunning-Kruger disease.
But part of the appeal of Red Bull is being seen with the can in your hand. Why do you think Red Bull spends so much money sponsoring stunt airplane races, extreme sports, and so on? It's because that gives you the image of identifying with those activities when you carry the can around.
Being seen with an off-brand knockoff just identifies you as a Grandpa who buys bulk no-name products and drives an old people car.
How did this get modded up? Just a bitter temper tantrum? The patents would have expired long ago. I swear, the Anonymous Coward comments these days are some kind of verbal diarrhea therapy for disturbed individuals. It's sad, I used to browse at Score:0 as a matter of pride.
For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people - certainly no political party or organized body of any kind - which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term 'Fascist'. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words 'Fascist in sympathy', or 'of Fascist tendency', or just plain 'Fascist', applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:
"More government" has been tried. It grows out of control and starts fulfilling its own goals instead of the people's goals. Eventually it regards the people as an enemy.
So you KNOW that the US government at the time was riddled with Communist spies, right? Because they were. People like Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, the list goes on. The Manhattan project was full of spies. The idea was that capitalism had reached its end, that socialism was the wave of the future, that we had all better get on board now before it all collapsed, stop me if any of this sounds familiar because they still say the same shit today. How was the US government supposed to resist the Soviets when so many people inside it wished to join the Communists?
It's always America's fault, isn't it? I mean, fuck peace, let's use our nuclear weapons. Because we got such good press for doing that when we did. I swear, warmongering assholes like you will be the death of us all.
You don't think it's wrong to use the fruit of slave labor that works 14 hours a day? If it's cheap, it must always be the right solution? Do you even hear yourself talk?
Tariffs absolutely will change the equation. Low tariffs are what created China in the first place. If tariffs are so bad, then why have Canada, Germany and China done so spectacularly well with them?
You've got users, likes, dislikes, tags, achievements, the ability to make friends and enemies...and people calling those with whom they disagree "trolls". Sounds like social media to me.
The entire point of these devices is not to be useful by speaking to them. The entire point is to get people to put a freaking microphone in their houses. They can listen to everything. How do you think the device knows how to respond to its name? But that's OK, they pinky swear they delete it all and it will never be used against you.
Down the road a few years people will get wigged out that they're in a home with no microphone. It will feel weird and unsafe. You'll get people refusing to allow their children to visit the houses of the microphone-less (a pejorative will be coined to describe these anti-progressive Luddites). When I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four I thought that the telescreen that watched and listened to everything you did was an incredibly stupid idea that nobody would ever agree to voluntarily. We're already halfway there. How did it come to this?
In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.
And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.
Our trade policies created China. Our trade policies can tear it apart, too.
Putting tariffs on goods and services abroad will increase prices in the short term, but over the long term it will allow for local businesses to compete. This will pull manufacturing power back into the U.S. and away from other countries. We will see higher US Employment, and as US Citizens, they will have rights and privileges as you'd expect.
Countries that were used previously to make things cheaper because their people were treated like cattle rather than human beings are no longer cheaper because of said tariffs. Now there is no incentive to produce goods over there which will also remove incentive to force people into slavery to make our goods. Now they can make things for themselves and focus their efforts on reforming their own governments and pursuing their own interests.
If tariffs are such a terrible idea, then why do Canada, Germany and China do so spectacularly well with them? All of them block US goods of one sort or another, and China outright prohibits US companies from setting up shop in a ton of industries.
Slashdot Mirror
The US had a ton more Communist spies than is popularly known. A LOT of people back then believed that capitalism had met its end, socialism was the only way forward and it was just a matter of time, better help the system collapse and set up a Communist government in America before it was too late, etc. A lot of these people worked in Hollywood, the State Department, and other influential areas. Go ahead and try to find a Hollywood film from the 40s or 50s with a positive portrayal of business. They're all Mr. Potter, ugly capitalists with no redeeming features.
Liberals believe in free speech - we're talking about leftists here.
How about the vast swathes of land in Africa that are off-limits to human colonization due to endemic malaria? Without the ability to protect itself, these vulnerable wetlands will be slashed and burned by human locusts. You think global warming is bad now, just wait until humans drain and burn down the protected lands.
Europe also will never spawn tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and so on. The regulatory environment strangles them in their crib before they ever get started. Europeans' favorite pastime: bitching and complaining about American technology that is given to them for free. What's the European equivalent of Amazon? Of Google? Of Microsoft? I don't know and neither do you.
Following this logic, since Hillary is still walking around free, what's the problem with Trump (or anyone else) doing the same thing?
You're just advocating the same old double standard: when Hillary or one of your tribe does it it's OK, but when Trump or anyone from The Other does it it's automatically wrong.
Also written by mainstream Leftist Americans who hate their own people: "America is a sick country, always has been. From the good old days when we imported Africans as slaves and murdering Native Americans so we could steal their land; to our nefarious role in overthrowing democratic governments in South America and Iran and replacing them with horrible dictators; to our imperialist adventures in Korea and Vietnam to the unneeded and uncalled for invasion of Iraq, which has destabilized the entire Middle East - we've shown the world that we are indeed exceptional...we've actually accomplished what Napoleon and Hitler only dreamed of - setting up a nationalist empire that dominates much of the globe. "
"Again, and yet again, the United States is in a state of arrested development having never matured past the emotional maturity of a seven year-old. The shortsighted, religious based values of this country, starting with its inception, have created a rapidly devolving culture of ignorance and self-hating, self-destruction. Looking forward to its end and ultimate failure."
"America has always been a violent nation, from our founding genocide to the slave labor that built the country to the arsenal, unprecedented in human history, that maintains our empire. We spend $60 billion a year on pets but won't go to any inconvenience to keep second graders from getting slaughtered. Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo and trophy kids, we don't really give a damn about our children - by which I mean, about one another's. When a race stops caring for its young, its extinction is not only imminent but well deserved.
May we disappear like ice melting on a hot summer day."
...when you're so far Left that anyone to the right of Mao Zedong looks like a Nazi to you.
Think about what it took to get you called a Nazi 20 years ago vs. today. Then: Shaved head, swastika tattoo, white supremacist. Now: supports Freedom of Speech, supports strong borders, thinks we have a problem with Islamic extremists, and hates Sharia Law.
I don't think my political values have changed much. I've staid pretty much the same since high school, and society has shifted around me. Example: Back then I opposed electroshock therapy on children to "cure" them of being gay, and today I oppose hormone therapy on children to "cure" them of being the wrong gender.
Please, throw more of your alt-left verbal diarrhea at me so everyone can get a good look at what someone with a decayed soul looks like.
pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.
So, since when is Silicon Valley patriotic? As in, they care about America and their fellow Americans? Huh? Silicon Valleyites are "citizens of the world". They care far more about distant peoples from backwards cultures than their own neighbors in places like Texas, Idaho, and West Virginia. They regard us with mingled scorn and apprehension. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk. Here is a great essay I have bookmarked that discusses the issue very eloquently and precisely.
Here's another great essay, "Revolt of the Elites" that also addresses this issue.
It is these elites who came up with ideas that devastated the working class in America. Whose idea was NAFTA? It was the Democrat elites who got that passed. Whose idea was the Iraq war? Neo-conservative elites. Whose idea was the TPP? Everybody's elites.
Long-term processes of income redistribution from working people to everyone else, non-working welfare recipients as well as the very rich, had been evident for at least two decades. Those who voted for Trump have legitimate grievances long ignored, quite cynically, by both parties. The only thing that really mattered to Americans: the urgent need to mobilize government policies to increase American jobs and wages, in firm opposition to all the competing international and planetary priorities continuously proffered by elite Americans and their core institutions, along with Pope Francis and other leading figures.
Everyday I get to hear ultra-wealthy, gated-community, coastal elite, cliquish, $9 per cup coffee, outsourcing types loudly wring their hands with each other over theoretical boutique issues like LGBT equality, illegal immigrant rights, or global warming in Africa or China, desperately hoping somebody notices how noble they are.
They seem completely ignorant (and if they aren't, are sneering, contemptuous and completely lacking in empathy) of the fact that their fellow citizens on the other side of the gate have resorted to opiates to escape hopelessness and economic despair. Most of the time, the talking points of these smug, circle jerks simply parrot Daily Kos or Huffington Post headlines, and demonstrate a significant lack of deep understanding of the issues. Their kids are at Yale and Berkeley, throwing tantrums like toddlers, because they heard something they don't agree with or challenges their beliefs.
They are the leftist versions of Donald Trump. Incredibly smug and condescending, supercilious, clinically suffering from late-stage Dunning-Kruger disease.
You neither addressed nor refuted anything I had to say. You just used the logical fallacy of ad hominem. You lose sir, good day, sir.
But part of the appeal of Red Bull is being seen with the can in your hand. Why do you think Red Bull spends so much money sponsoring stunt airplane races, extreme sports, and so on? It's because that gives you the image of identifying with those activities when you carry the can around.
Being seen with an off-brand knockoff just identifies you as a Grandpa who buys bulk no-name products and drives an old people car.
How did this get modded up? Just a bitter temper tantrum? The patents would have expired long ago. I swear, the Anonymous Coward comments these days are some kind of verbal diarrhea therapy for disturbed individuals. It's sad, I used to browse at Score:0 as a matter of pride.
For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people - certainly no political party or organized body of any kind - which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term 'Fascist'. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words 'Fascist in sympathy', or 'of Fascist tendency', or just plain 'Fascist', applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:
Click here to continue. Note the author. Calling people fascists was bullshit back then and it's just as bullshit today.
"More government" has been tried. It grows out of control and starts fulfilling its own goals instead of the people's goals. Eventually it regards the people as an enemy.
So you KNOW that the US government at the time was riddled with Communist spies, right? Because they were. People like Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, the list goes on. The Manhattan project was full of spies. The idea was that capitalism had reached its end, that socialism was the wave of the future, that we had all better get on board now before it all collapsed, stop me if any of this sounds familiar because they still say the same shit today. How was the US government supposed to resist the Soviets when so many people inside it wished to join the Communists?
It's always America's fault, isn't it? I mean, fuck peace, let's use our nuclear weapons. Because we got such good press for doing that when we did. I swear, warmongering assholes like you will be the death of us all.
It will eliminate hate speech from the internet as we can finally identify and permanently ban all of the perpetrators.
Absolutely. This essay is the best description of how The Other is treated in America. It explains so much of our political polarization and how one side regards its opposite as enemy instead of fellow Americans.
You don't think it's wrong to use the fruit of slave labor that works 14 hours a day? If it's cheap, it must always be the right solution? Do you even hear yourself talk?
Tariffs absolutely will change the equation. Low tariffs are what created China in the first place. If tariffs are so bad, then why have Canada, Germany and China done so spectacularly well with them?
You've got users, likes, dislikes, tags, achievements, the ability to make friends and enemies...and people calling those with whom they disagree "trolls". Sounds like social media to me.
...he says, while posting on social media.
The entire point of these devices is not to be useful by speaking to them. The entire point is to get people to put a freaking microphone in their houses. They can listen to everything. How do you think the device knows how to respond to its name? But that's OK, they pinky swear they delete it all and it will never be used against you.
Down the road a few years people will get wigged out that they're in a home with no microphone. It will feel weird and unsafe. You'll get people refusing to allow their children to visit the houses of the microphone-less (a pejorative will be coined to describe these anti-progressive Luddites). When I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four I thought that the telescreen that watched and listened to everything you did was an incredibly stupid idea that nobody would ever agree to voluntarily. We're already halfway there. How did it come to this?
In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.
And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.
Our trade policies created China. Our trade policies can tear it apart, too.
Putting tariffs on goods and services abroad will increase prices in the short term, but over the long term it will allow for local businesses to compete. This will pull manufacturing power back into the U.S. and away from other countries. We will see higher US Employment, and as US Citizens, they will have rights and privileges as you'd expect.
Countries that were used previously to make things cheaper because their people were treated like cattle rather than human beings are no longer cheaper because of said tariffs. Now there is no incentive to produce goods over there which will also remove incentive to force people into slavery to make our goods. Now they can make things for themselves and focus their efforts on reforming their own governments and pursuing their own interests.
If tariffs are such a terrible idea, then why do Canada, Germany and China do so spectacularly well with them? All of them block US goods of one sort or another, and China outright prohibits US companies from setting up shop in a ton of industries.