Strategist says

Are we ready to classify all Islamic shit holes that practice sharia laws as Human Rights Abusers, or do look the other way as usual?

The Onion was spot-on with a point and counterpoint on this issue years ago: https://politics.theonion.com/no-blood-for-oil-vs-exactly-how-much-oil-are-we-talkin-1819594284

No Blood For Oil
Susan Winger

Contrary to what he would have you believe, President Bush's plans to invade Iraq have nothing to do with such high-minded goals as liberating the Iraqi people or saving the world from terrorism. His "principled" stand is actually just a thinly veiled attempt to gain control of the oil-rich Middle East at the cost of human lives. It is time for the people of the United States to rise up and say, "No blood for oil!

Exactly How Much Oil Are We Talking About?
Kenneth W. Parton

I keep hearing the anti-war protesters chant, "No blood for oil! No blood for oil!" But what they never seem to say is exactly how much oil we're talking about. Don't you think that's pertinent information? Are we talking a gallon of oil for every 10 gallons of blood? Or is it more like 30 gallons of oil for every pint of blood? Because if it's the latter, maybe a blood-oil exchange would be a good idea.

TwoScoopsOfSpaceForce says

Again, isn't the 180 turn by the "Deep State" Think Tankers and the Media very suspicious after decades of only the briefest, softest criticism of Saudi Arabia and that seldom expressed?

Maybe this is a case where blind irrational hatred for Trump, the core policy position of the left and the Democratic Party, could possibly be a good thing.

If we get at least a little bit of objective criticism about Saudi Arabia, that's infinitely better than what we had, which was absolute zero criticism of Saudi Arabia in the media and the government.

Goran_K says

I believe the going rate is 5,000 GOP votes in November for each instance.

Lol, yes it is! Pretty expensive, but Democrats don't seem to care.

bob2356 says

The koch bros like all rich republicans want cheap immigrant labor which makes them liberals.

Yes, the Koch brothers agree with the liberal "open border" policy to make poor American citizens even poorer by driving down their wages. So that does put the Koch brothers on the liberal side of this issue.

The irony is funny, except that it's also sad.

TwoScoopsOfSpaceForce says

Patrick says

... If we get at least a little bit of objective criticism about Saudi Arabia, that's infinitely better than what we had...

I don't think we're getting that. I think Saudi Arabia is now seen as a Trump Ally and now must be destroyed.

You're right. We're not getting objective criticism, we're getting more blind hate from the anti-Trump crowd. But in this case, it does align with my own opinion. Saudi Arabia is not a country we should even have diplomatic relations with, much less massive weapons contracts.

tatupu70 says

Posting--"He's totally full of it" about another poster is not a personal attack?

Yes, that is personal if it's about Bob. I marked it as personal myself now.

CBOEtrader says

Lol, so they are estimating that one of her relatives 8 generations ago was american indian, Haha Haha. What is that, .3%?

I myself came up as 0.3% "East Asian or Native American" on 23andme.

Damn, could have gotten into Harvard with that.

MockingbirdKiller says

Asian-Americans are waking up to how they get fucked up the ass by the Dems -- especially racial discrimination against them in college entrance exams -- as well as taken for granted of by the Dems

The unspeakable reality is that average IQ varies considerably by race, with Asians at the top, and whites a close second. Remember that these measurements are all just bell curves, and that there is also a lot of overlap. Race does not determine IQ, but race is a strong contributing factor. And there is plenty of hard science to prove it.

Democrats like to complain that Republicans deny science, but clearly Democrats are at least as bad when science points out facts that conflict with The Narrative.

cmdrdataleak says

Most importantly, they've infiltrated the "FAANGs" companies, (a.k.a. Facebook, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Netflix,...), and those companies not only have influence on, but fiat control over what we can find, see, hear, show, and say. Mission objective #1 of the 92% should be oversight, regulation, and maybe even trust-busting of these juggernauts.

Start by making them decide between becoming media companies, and losing all their CDA section 230 protections, or reaffirming their status as common carriers, and being treated as the "public square" and thus enjoined from any sort of content censorship.

This is an interesting problem. Perhaps the 92% would be in favor of better regulation of the FAANG companies, but is it even possible to get the message out there when the media is effectively monopolized by them, and they have an effectively infinite amount of money to bribe Congressmen with donate to Congressional campaigns.

Maybe it's just as important to try to infiltrate a more diverse range of opinions into the FAANG companies themselves, though even mild questioning is typically punished with firing.

@tatupu70 can you point me to a flagged post or comment?

The "It's OK to be white" meme is brilliant.

It's a moderate and reasonable statement showing acceptance regardless of race. Is it not OK to be white? It would be racist to say so.

Strategist says

most of the planets pollution in the last 100 years has been caused by us Americans

I dunno. China has got to be pretty high on the list given their spectacular levels of pollution recently.

I think it is healthy thing for the populace to get more familiar with its laws and rulings:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5002740-Clifford-v-Trump-Order-Granting-Anti-SLAPP-Motion.html

Even better that there is at least some cost to making false allegations. "Believe the woman" is not a system of law worth having.

Strategist says

It's the Saudis. It's not their brains that made them famous.

The Saudis are in fact just about the most inbred people in the world, and it is affecting their average IQ.

Patrick says

I myself came up as 0.3% "East Asian or Native American" on 23andme.

Damn, could have gotten into Harvard with that.

Wait, lol, now that I think about it, it could have either helped or hurt my chances with Harvard:

1. East Asian = bad, too many of those already
2. Native American = good, because some reason

Overly restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem in the bay area.

One possible solution is to let everyone buy in to Medicare, at any age.

The market in California does indeed seem to be cooling, going by the big increase in number of houses listed.

doik says

People meet and fuck. They don't date. Dating is so 20th century.

And it's not coming back in our hyper-feminine, metoo society. Feminists killed romance and turned women into sex objects. I don't see that changing any time soon.

You can't have a dating scene in a culture that says all masculinity is toxic.

This may well be fatal to our country.

Lack of reproduction is death just as much as death is death.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-16/pat-buchanan-asks-should-us-saudi-alliance-be-saved

Trump said he was “immediately” sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh to meet with the king on the crisis. The confrontation is escalating. Crown Prince Mohammed and King Salman have both now put their nation’s honor and credibility on the line.

Both are saying that what the Turks claim they can prove — Khashoggi was tortured and murdered in the consulate, cut up, and his body parts flown to Saudi Arabia — is a lie.

For Trump and the U.S., this appears a classic case of the claims of international morality clashing with the claims of national interest.

The archetype occurred in the mid-1870s when Ottoman Turks perpetrated a slaughter of Bulgarian Christians under their rule.

Former Prime Minister William Gladstone set Britain ablaze with a pamphlet titled, “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East,” calling for the expulsion of the Turks from Europe.

Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria were apoplectic. For they were relying on the Turks to block the encroachment of Czarist Russia into the Eastern Balkans and down to the Turkish Straits.

Disraeli prevailed. The Brits put morality on the shelf.

For the U.S., morality and interests collided when FDR recognized the Bolshevik regime of Joseph Stalin in 1933, even as Stalin’s agents were starving to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and landowners. ...

During World War II, when the Germans uncovered in the Katyn Forest a vast gravesite containing the remains of thousands from Poland’s officer corps, dating to Stalin’s occupation, Poles in Britain came to Prime Minister Churchill to ask for an investigation.

Churchill, for whom Stalin was by now an indispensable ally, replied dismissively: “There is no use prowling round the three-year-old graves of Smolensk.”

My prediction: absolutely nothing will happen. The Saudis can murder whomever they like, including thousands of Americans on 9/11, because our government has no integrity when it comes to that much money.

To see the English subtitles, click the gear icon -> Subtitles -> English

I have to say this meme's brilliance is astonishing as well, maybe even better than "It's OK to be white".

1. the standard SJW response to anything is so predictable as to be robotic
2. no one wants to be a robot

The NPC meme makes it painfully apparent to every SJW that they really aren't thinking for themselves. At all.

Strategist says

Solution #3:
Bring back slavery.

That's what illegals are. They work for less and can be deported, which means they don't complain the way uppity citizens might, about rights and laws and shit.

Win for employers, win for consumers who get cheaper services, win for illegals (who have it even worse back home).

Drives down wages for poor US citizens, so they lose, but who cares about them, right? Well, we all lose because the poor spend most of their income, which isn't much individually, but when multiplied by millions is actually a lot.

Give a dollar to a rich man and he just throws it on his pile. Can't even find a place to invest it these days.
Give a dollar to a poor man and he spends it right away because he has to, with positive knock-on effects throughout the economy.

dr6B says

Whites - 0.2% Native American ancestry.
Latinos - 18% Native American ancestry (20% of population)
Blacks - 0.8% Native American ancestry

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685/

Thanks @dr6B that's a really interesting article.

Strategist says

Also, if a hard working illegal is supporting 10 family members back home, humanity comes into play. I do not have the heart to see him get deported. I could not support his deportation regardless of what the law says.

How about 20 million illegals?

30 million?

And where is your sympathy for the poor Americans who have to compete with illegally low wages?

zzyzzx says

Patrick should make the default avatar here a NPC.

Lol, would not be hard.

MegaForce says

You can always set people to ignore and they will stay that way even if they change their username, I believe.

Yes, ignore is by user_id, the primary key in the users table. So ignoring someone will keep ignoring them even if they change their user name.

You can see all the source code here: https://github.com/killelea/node.patrick.net/tree/master/node

WookieMan says

either make it completely anonymous or stop allowing people to change usernames

I don't see the harm in allowing user name changes.

Completely anonymous was no fun. I tried that for a while, and it's really hard to carry on a conversation that way.

So think of allowing name changes as being "somewhat anonymous". The upside is that when someone changes their user name, you have to consider their arguments a bit more before responding. I think that's a good thing. Once you are familiar with a user, there is a subconscious judgement about their points that gets in the way of really listening.

And of course this is only one of many such murders:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-16/uae-hired-its-own-us-death-squad-yemen-assassination-spree

Green Beret, Navy SEAL, and CIA paramilitary veterans were hired under the aegis of Spear Operations Group to become what BuzzFeed describes as the private "murder squad" for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ).

Starting in 2015 the UAE sent a group of about a dozen mostly American private contractors to Yemen to conduct targeted killings of prominent clerics and political figures who had run afoul crown prince MBZ in the war-torn country, where the Emirati military has played a lead role in the ongoing Saudi coalition bombing campaign.

Abraham Golan, the leader of the group and founder of the small American private contractor firm Spear Operations Group, first offered his services to key advisers of the crown prince, including former head of security for the Palestinian Authority turned UAE security chief Mohammed Dahlan.

HeadSet says

And Patrick, would you stop buying dope if you knew it came through Mexican drug lords?

My weed is all Made in USA. So it says on the label, anyway.

The violence of the cartels is a fantastic argument for legalization. Maybe the best one.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6288131/Jamal-Khashoggis-apparent-murder-follows-disappearance-THREE-exiled-royal-princes.html

The official Saudi line is that Mr Khashoggi left of the consulate through a back door where, alas, CCTV security cameras had ceased to work. Indeed, they appear to have stopped working all over the building. Then, for reasons unknown, he disappeared.

There is a caveat to all this. Much of the information about Mr Khashoggi’s disappearance has come from leaks from President Erdogan’s authoritarian regime, which has a strained relationship with Saudi Arabia thanks to Mr Erdogan’s closeness to Saudi’s enemies Qatar and Iran.

But the circumstantial evidence so far is compelling. More than that, Mr Khashoggi’s apparent murder is but one example – albeit an extreme one – of the House of Saud pursuing its dissidents on foreign soil. Since 2015 three exiled royal princes have ‘disappeared’, having spoken out against corruption and other abuses.

On February 1, 2016, in Paris the dissident Prince Sultan bin Turki and his 20-strong entourage boarded a jet owned by the House of Saud. They were expecting to fly to Cairo, home of the prince’s father, the Saudi king’s elder brother. Reservations had been booked for them at the five-star Kempinski hotel next to the Nile.

With hindsight, it was foolish for Prince Sultan to have boarded. Having criticised Saudi Arabia’s corruption and human rights abuses he had fallen out with powerful family members.

Prince Sultan was given money and assurances of safe conduct. He told a friend: ‘I am supposed to come to Cairo by royal aircraft. If you didn’t find me they have taken me to Riyadh. Try to do something.’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/17/ann-coulter-believes-the-left-has-lost-its-mind-should-we-listen

In June 2015 Coulter published Adios America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. The book argued that unchecked immigration, both legal and illegal, was increasing crime, straining the welfare state, and depressing blue-collar wages, and that the media, because of political correctness, and big business, for cheap labor, were preventing honest debate.

Sounds quite factual to me.

clambo says

Of course, this will be blamed on Trump somehow for attempting better relations with the Saudis.

Yes it will, but in this case I think the left's insane hatred for Trump may actually have some utility.

We don't need better relations with the Saudis. We need zero relations with the Saudis.

And we should make sure they cannot get at their money in the US to fund more terrorism. I don't care how it's done, but they should be completely excluded from the US financial system.

Rin says

All it took was for Islam to show up and destroy what was left of civilization and as a result, we have the middle east of today.

Arabs do not bring peace, all they bring is turmoil and strife.

From what I read, the Persians and the Byzantines were so busy fighting each other and taxing their people to death to fund it, that when the Arabs shows up promising a lower tax rate, the masses went for it and the Persian empire was too weakened to fight.

Most of the Greek-speaking areas were also assimilated into Islam: Turkey, the Levant, Egypt.

That was Bush, a great friend of Hillary (who also has deep ties to the Saudi ruling mafia).

There is no monetization. But that's OK, it's still fun.