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Topic: Everything Trump… (Read 53920 times)

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #175 –
Quote from: Belfrager on
The only thing that solves your problem would be the United States of Europe...
It would be quite fine if EU were more of a trade association and a humanitarian organisation. Such entities do not need to be United States or federal governments with their own armies.

But instead the EU is a politico-administrative customs union. No matter how thin it claims to be, it has the core ingredients of a federal government with its own monetary policy and fiscal directives. It is a very big deal when member states cannot use budget deficits and tariffs to balance trade deficits and other local economic imbalances ad crises, while also own currency has been taken away from them. The EU is taking away too much on this point. At the same time, the missing characteristics in EU government, such as missing own army, judicial branch, a parliament with a power to ratify laws and treaties (for the govt to follow, not the other way round), and proper economic policies (other than statistical, such that would respond to current economic forces that need responding to), are also painfully felt. EU is both too thin and too fat at the same time, because it is the wrong type of organisation.

This problem cannot be solved except by annihilation and a whole new start. And it will not be a better start. European political elite is only able to agree on things that touch everyone least, resulting in pointless "principles" that do not solve any of the issues that pressed people to seek the union.
 

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #176 –
Quote from: ersi on
... own currency has been taken away from them.
Sorry, but the above is false. Nobody has taken anybody's currency away!
It was given up voluntary for short-term interests. It was tempting and convenient to make debts with interest rates nearly zero and to win elections by doing so. In their greed for the new currency many countries even gave manipulated figures regarding their economic status.

Put it simply - for weak economies in competition with healthy ones, a strong common currency is deadly on the long run.
To affirm now that their currency was taken away is ludicrous to say the least.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #178 –
There is still 1 out of 6 who have confidence in Trump doing the right thing, according to this poll. Wonder where they have been the last four years.



Oh, right.


Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #179 –
I am glad I still live in a democracy and feel sorry for armies of unfortunates in the ex-colonies stuck with what they have. Conned as much as the 3rd Reich and USSR unfortunates! :lol:
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #181 –
Quote
Some commentators noted that it was a grim reminder of a virus that does not distinguish between rich and poor, weak and powerful.

[…]

Wang Huiyao, the founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, an influential research group in Beijing, said, “When the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, can catch this, the virus has no boundaries.”
A most peculiar way of phrasing that. One imagines the virus distinguishes between, say, Merkel and Trump, even if the virus doesn't distinguish between me and Merkel.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #182 –
Well, you could reasonably say that being poor is a comorbidity with Covid-19, or at least a risk factor.  Being rich and powerful is an advantage here too.

Question is if this will change the administration policy on the disease, and their current wilful high-risk strategy.


Trump admin. overrules CDC director on extending ban on cruises

Assuming a mild or asymptomatic disease, this would be a reasonable course correction. Maximise the sympathy, improving their reelection chances, and minimise the death toll at the same time. 

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #184 –
A fancy series of animated graphs of Trump's tax returns, finally https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes-timeline.html

A lightning summary:
 - Trump only paid taxes for a moment when making a profit from The Apprentice tv show and licensing his name all over the place, but soon got a $72.9m tax refund from IRS instead, and IRS is now auditing itself because of this.
 - As the prez, he has been paying $750 in income tax.
 - Instead of in USA, he has been paying tens and hundreds of thousands of USD in taxes in Panama, India, and Philippines.
 - Trump has not paid "millions of dollars in income tax" as most recently claimed in his "debate". Not by a long shot, not even considering the income taxes he has paid all around the world.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #185 –
Listening to the second debate with Trump now. Less interjection and yelling, but thus far he has not uttered a single sentence without falsehood or false boasting. I'll get back to this thread if he gets one full sentence right.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #186 –
Still does not matter a jot which of the two is elected President because it makes no dashed difference to tens of millions of Americans in bother for decades.

Indeed the election process in nutjobland is a typical farce and often looks immature and not too bright.Conferences full of attendees who wave placards on poles and very little definitive stuff given by speakers no matter whether Democrat or Republican. The tens of millions who are food-stamp holders and vast number homeless and so on will still be there as a damn routine tradition. It has once strong continuance - farce.
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #187 –
Trump's last-ditch effort to recruit LGBTQ voters continues in Minnesota
Quote from: https://www.businessinsider.com/lgbtq-trump-supporters-rally-in-minnesota-2020-11
Republican National Committee adviser and former cabinet member Richard Grenell on Saturday in Minneapolis praised President Donald Trump as the "first pro-gay president" — a baseless claim he has been pushing in recent weeks.

In October, Trump and his campaign sent Grenell — the country's first openly gay cabinet member who served as the acting director of national intelligence from February to May — to a dozen "Trump Pride" events in battleground states including Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina....

Addressing a sparsely populated room of about 60 attendees, Grenell emphasized the Republican party as being the "pro-gay" party and claimed that Democrats now shut down the diversity of political viewpoints within the party and among LGBTQ people....

Many in the predominantly white male audience were attending with the Minnesota chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national group that says it aims to advocate for LGBTQ conservatives and allies. The group has not donated to any federal candidates or PACs per The Center for Responsive Politics, but has raised close to $13,000 and has spent about $5,000 in the 2020 election cycle. In 2018, it donated around $5,000 to Republican candidates.
Meanwhile, evangelicals and Catholics still think they must urgently vote for Trump to save the country, to keep family and pro-life  values and "freedom of religion". Naturally, because they don't follow "fake news media", but their own FB and Twitter echochambers.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #188 –
it basically for tens of millions of Americans mean sod all who wins. I have described on the forum tens millions on food stamps legions who are widely homeless, jail people numbers and so on. Even at a Presidential the place is daft enough to have an electoral college. So these national mass failings continue under both Republicans and Democrats. Must also remind even under the groans on Trump it has been armies of Democrats who went massively bananas on the streets with violence, raiding shops and so on. US party conference routinely are juvenile to put it bluntly with lots standing around the even with long poles and boards on the top and speeches are juvenile. Party conferences are childish and head shaking. So basically the terrible state of prisoner numbers people on death row, nowhere to live and food stamp numbers exist under both Democrats and Republicans.

Many of people might not be too keen on Trump but there will be no great improvement under Biden. Sad that the rel idea of democracy in the ex-colonies is just a word and means little in practice for an army of people.
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #189 –
Quote from: ersi on
because they don't follow "fake news media", but their own FB and Twitter echochambers
Myopic rubbish, ersi: Where do you get "your" news from?

Quote from: rjhowie on
Even at a Presidential the place is daft enough to have an electoral college.
In Great Britain, the locally elected representatives go behind closed doors to select their leaders, who then go behind closed doors to select the Prime Minister... Much more "democratic," you see!
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #190 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Myopic rubbish, ersi: Where do you get "your" news from?
Doesn't the link give you a hint?

I get paid to follow news. This means I find the (journalistic) sources. I don't do Twitter at all. And FB is for me just a messenger app + calendar of friends' birthdays.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #191 –
Well Oakdale we ARE more democratic than you.
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #192 –
Yup, RJ, y'all sure are! 'Cept when you ain't... :) Listening to the play-by-play on the radio, which cut to network coverage at 6pm. The last I heard was an ABC reporter/analyst saying "the Biden landslide" predictions were, ahem, "overly optimistic."
It'll take a few days to settle in, I suspect. But I doubt it'll be anything like the 2000 fiasco! And -on a bright note- worries of rioting seem to have been unfounded.
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #193 –
I think musing back on the disharmony between the two contestants back in 2000 I recall well this one will be worse.  Sadly it is very much closer and if Trump out then the replacement will have a senate giving problems. Whatever faults Trump has and he was not a routine politician, I suspect that Biden will be a groan. Good that we have a wider political basis but it's what you get for dumping tea.............. :)
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #194 –
LOCK HIM UP on January 21, 2021!

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #195 –
Trump: So predictable, so tragic.

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #196 –
He is not a routine politician so not a help?
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #197 –
By the "logic" you used in another thread, jax, Xi's handling of the Wuhan outbreak (forbidding travel to other parts of China, but not international outbound travel...) is responsible for over a million deaths...
Oh well: We choose our "tyrants" accordingly. Predictably sad, no? :)

We obviously have different definitions of tragedy.
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #198 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
By the "logic" you used in another thread, jax, Xi's handling of the Wuhan outbreak (forbidding travel to other parts of China, but not international outbound travel...) is responsible for over a million deaths...

That claim is widespread in Trump circles, but that does not make it any more true. Policies in China were and are on a provincial and county level, much like the rest of the world. So when the Wuhan airport closed, January 23 according to memory, the other airports stayed open, and they closed piecemeal, depending on the province they were in. But when they closed, they closed domestic and international flights.

Those of us who actually paid attention in December, January, February (ahem) could follow the obstacle course of foreigners trying to return home to their respective countries before the plague arrived. Flights cancelled, prices soaring, and how to get from the city you were in to the airport in time, which (provincial borders were closed and which were open at a given time. The big problem, and panic, was how to get out of China, to third country if need be. In a few weeks, with all airports closed, special evacuation flights were all that were left. Those who didn't get on them were stuck (but a few weeks after that the tide turned, and China was safer than the outside world). 

Was the Chinese response good? Absolutely not. Trying to control the narrative and contain the epidemic on the hush for about two weeks at exactly the wrong place (Wuhan is the land transportation nexus of China) at exactly the wrong time (just before Spring Festival) was a horrible and deadly blunder. The system is partially to blame, local government is partially to blame, but Xi personally is definitely to blame. 

But keep in mind what we are talking about, a weeks-long delay for an unknown pneumonic disease that could be SARS-like. Now, nearly a year after, when this is no longer a "novel" disease, Trump is still spreading misinformation and sabotaging efficient response. Mind you, this is no MAGA invention. We see the exact same behaviour in earlier pandemics, e.g. the Spanish flu, or in some other countries. 

As it happen, the failing initial Chinese response might have been fortuitous for the rest of the world. If the Chinese had followed the proper "gold standard" script we might ironically have been worse off. Instead they went almost overnight from "wut, me worry?" to full lockdown in Wuhan and successively most of the country. A typical underreact-overreact pattern. But the overreaction, apart from mostly stopping the pandemic in China, gave another early warning to take this seriously. Most importantly, we didn't know until March that asymptomatic and presymptomatic people could spread this disease. The disease would probably have spread by stealth for weeks or months if they had gone by the book. Which seems to be how it spread in Europe and North America. Eyes on the border, we didn't really notice that it was spreading within, until it was too late. 

So, which Xi is responsible for thousands, likely tens of thousands of Chinese deaths, primarily in Wuhan/Hubei, he might have on the whole saved hundreds of thousands of lives world-wide. I am not going to credit him for that. It wasn't intentional. They really wanted to stop the disease, and they certainly didn't want it outside their borders, and overreacting happened to be the right medicine. But other places, like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, showed that you could suppress the disease without overreaction. 



Re: Everything Trump…

Reply #199 –
You talked nonsense OakdaleFTL hen I mentioned we were more democratic than you and you came up with nonsense of course! Our parties elect leaders in their parties by " nonsense. In 2010 we had a joint government between the Conservative and the Liberal Democrats. Your upper house includes a 60% rate of millionaires. We have a welfare state and national health service and tens of millions of Yanks left groundless. Neither candidates in the Presidential show are to my mind the right person to be in the White House so I have two groans - Trump and Biden.

On a broader level the tens of millions o food stamps, millions in jail massive numbers homeless and so on does not make a damn who is in power,
"Quit you like men:be strong"