The right is far more concerned with the lefts reaction to confederate statues than they are about… confederate statues.
That works for anything.
They are “for” the rise of WS, so that’s a given.
The right is far more concerned with the lefts reaction to confederate statues than they are about… confederate statues.
That works for anything.
They are “for” the rise of WS, so that’s a given.
And here’s another fine example. This time it’s from Sam Stone, arguing essentially both sides of an issue because reasons.
As I’ve said, conservatives don’t argue in good faith. They just want to “win”. They just want power. They don’t give a god damn if they have facts or logic.
In my experience, the right is often more interested in defeating its enemies than in its own self interest. Given the choice between everyone benefitting equally, or everyone suffering, they’ll choose the latter - so long as their enemies suffer just a little bit more than they do.
With their rejection of traditional Western standards of reason and morality, it could be argued the American Right are the barbarians of our age.
Just as the sinner should be welcome in church, the modern bar-bars should be welcome at the SDMB.
You might wantbto go back and see what I’ve been saying for the past twenty years about Afghanistan if uou think I’m taking both sides.
I have always said it was a quagmire. In fact, my support for the Iraq war was precisely because the Afghanistan war was unwinnable. But I’ve also said that once you occupied it, you had a responsibility to not let it become a failed state.
You argue in bad faith
Well, if that isn’t the bestest reason to support a war I don’t know what is!
Hmm. Last November, for example, you seemed pretty convinced that it was fundamentally impossible to keep Afghanistan from becoming a failed state at any point in the foreseeable future.
That’s a good post and in a vacuum I’d agree with a lot of it. Not sure why morality is verboten though. All these discussions are ultimately a debate about the logical consequences of a set of moral axioms or an emotional appeal to advance a set of moral axioms.
Are conservatives evil? Perhaps they are. Subsets of conservatives are definitely behaving in a counterproductive manner. I do have my doubts we’d ever be free of this likely lab leaked virus because it spreads in other mammals such as deer, cats, dogs, obviously bats, pigs, minks, etc.
On a personal level, I wear a mask and I’m fully vaccinated and I encourage others to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I do what I can in my limited way to advocate reasonable mitigation strategies and if I were president I’d have been as draconian as the CCP to shut this shit down. And this is why I can’t put all the blame on the right. The left has been disingenuous and dangerous when it suits their politics and it’s maddening. Excusing and promoting civil unrest during a riot was pretty evil. Denouncing attempts to restrict travel as being racist is pretty evil. Denying the science with regards to origin of the initial infected people is pretty evil. Going after Osama Bin Laden with a fake vaccine campaign is pretty evil.
If you want science to be apolitical it must remain apolitical. But the left is willing to distort and destroy the foundations of so much in order to advance nonsensical and bigoted policy that they don’t see the collateral damage to the institutions that need to be trusted as neutral by all citizens.
Obviously, this doesn’t excuse the downright nuttery of the conspiracy minded portions of the right. But it does highlight that the monsters on maple street, so to speak, are across the spectrum. And that’s the real danger, even though we are now stuck with a virus that is likely to be endemic. This ridiculous ignore reality if it’s politically inconvenient or incongruent is a trait that is so easy to exploit by foreign adversaries that we are about to see what it’s like to be the target of divide and conquer tactics and we no longer have the ideological tools to resist.
We don’t have religion. We barely have nationalism. We are splintering into tribes much like Afghanistan and we don’t have the stomach to insist that certain moral axioms are to be universally accepted within our own nation. Why? Because factions have determined that short term power is worth destroying the foundations of society.
The good news is if strong AI is possible we won’t have these petty squabbles to occupy our time in a few decades.
Got cites for any of these claims? The bizarreness of your attempting to identify the CIA with “the left”, on the basis of the CIA’s 2011 stratagem to try to obtain bin Laden family DNA in Abbottabad (which the vast majority of Americans either left or right of course had zero knowledge of), inclines me to suspect that you’re pulling the rest of those accusations out of your ass as well.
While you’re digging up cites for your other unsupported claims, you can also provide one for your unsupported claim that it’s “likely” that COVID-19 originated in a “lab leak”.
It’s vastly more likely than the wet market nonsense.
Based on your vast knowledge and experience in infectious diseases no doubt!
That’s not a cite, that’s just a repetition of your previous unsupported claim. I mean, you’ve already made it very clear that that’s what you want to believe, but that’s not the same thing as providing factual evidence that the rest of us should believe it.
Oh you still believe it’s from some bat head soup in the wet market?
Ahh, I see, back to no content and vague insults.
Still not a cite. (And I notice that the requested cites for your other unsupported claims have likewise failed to materialize.)
He has no cites. Just assertions repeated from other evil shitheads who are in the process of lying thier asses off about Covid and helping to kill people.
In a nutshell… evil.
Facts aren’t evil dummy. Inconvenient perhaps. Anyways, I said most likely. Do you think it’s impossible it came from the Wuhan lab? If so your opinion is more and more the minority.
Furthermore, the origin is completely irrelevant about who will survive or not. How does discussing the origin help kill more people? That’s just hysteria.
I gotta say, though, octopus is sometimes unintentionally useful in the fight against ignorance. In kind of the same way that bacillary dysentery among German soldiers was unintentionally useful in the fight against Nazism, octopus’s embrace of ignorance tends to foreground its weak spots so it becomes easier to fight.
Namely, he posts an assertion that’s ignorant and inaccurate, I think it looks somewhat suss and ask for a cite, I wait around for a while but he doesn’t post a cite, and finally I get impatient and go looking for information on my own and I learn some stuff I didn’t know before, which incidentally refutes octopus’s ignorant and inaccurate half-assed anti-liberal propaganda.
For example, his bullshit about “denouncing attempts to restrict travel as being racist is pretty evil”. This is, as you might have guessed from the source, an irresponsible misrepresentation of some left-wing complaints about governmental failure to restrict travel in the early days of COVID in the US.
An example from this article in the Intercept, one of the leftyest serious political news sources, illustrates how inaccurate octopus’s claim was. The author is not in fact “denouncing” as “racist”, or in any way criticizing, the Trump administration’s enacting a ban on travel from China on February 1. What he’s denouncing is the administration’s failure to enact a ban on travel from Europe until mid-March, which enabled some two million passengers from known European coronavirus hotspots to enter the US, mostly through New York, which then became the epicenter for US incidence and diffusion of the virus.
It’s entirely reasonable and plausible to critique the Administration’s catastrophically casual attitude toward the European-vector threat as influenced by, and exploiting, American racism (the old “we should have more people from Norway” mindset). There’s nothing “evil” about making that point. The “left” critics aren’t saying that it was racist to impose a ban on travel from China, as octopus suggests; they’re saying that it was racist to delay imposing a ban on travel from Europe.
So, yeah, octopus didn’t really know what he was talking about when he made that unsupported assertion. Again.
But not so irrelevant that folks like you can’t not keep bringing it up.