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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Speaking purely for myself, I don't believe in "holy" sites, but I do have respect for sites of cultural significance, which it clearly is, and which we clearly violated so we could put a bunch of faces on a mountain.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Looks like the first crisis is already looming for whomever wins the election.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesSome points about mountain:
1. I fully support sand blasting off the Confederates of Stone Mountain. The bass relief is a symbol of hate and like an enormous statue of Hilter.
2. The Lakota have been building a mountain top statue of Crazy Horse directly across from Mount Rushmore (albeit about 17 miles away) for 75 years. Its controversial but I occasionally donate to it.
It'll be twenty times the size of Mount Rushmore
Note the cover of Der Spiegel where Trump holds a lit match in the White House while the country burns behind him, and the nickname "Der Feuerteufel", the fire devil (or firestarter, really). The reference seems to be to the burning of the Reichstag, and the Germans are clearly very concerned about the rise of another fascist dictator.
Here is the English version of the Spiegel article
.
Edited by Redmess on Aug 11th 2020 at 6:07:48 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesThere's no way the Republicans can win a democratic election now.
My problem is that they know this and are willing to destroy the Post Office and engage in other mass fraud.
What happened in Georgia could happen in every state.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.If Republicans cause a shutdown, it will not affect their election chances one way or another. One thing that's been consistent about the Trump Presidency is that for an overwhelming majority of Americans, there is nothing, absolutely nothing that will sway their opinion for or against Trump. The amount of voters who haven't been entrenched in ironclad positions since around the start of 2018 is a fairly inconsequential 3%.
And Republican congresscritters getting voted in or out will be heavily influenced by downticket votes from the Presidential election. For a Republican in Congress, it must be simultaneously liberating and disheartening to know that it is nearly impossible to gain or lose support during this Presidency provided they bend the knee and offer their fealty.
In many ways, the Trump Administration gave the U.S. a small taste of what life under an authoritarian dictator is like. Not a full dose, but a sample.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 11th 2020 at 9:24:56 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Beware the Guns of August—in Asia: How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Tensions From Sparking a War
The article is paywalled so I can't read it, but this is what Fareed Zakaria writes about it in his newsletter:
An accident could set things off. Mirroring political tensions, American and Chinese boats and planes have grown more aggressive in conducting maneuvers in Western Pacific waters, and it “is far from certain” that protocols for avoiding collisions “will be effective with the rapid increase in air, naval, and other military assets in the area, where there is already a history of near misses between U.S. and Chinese military ships and planes,” Rudd writes. “The South China Sea has thus become a tense, volatile, and potentially explosive theater at a time when accumulated grievances have driven the underlying bilateral political relationship to its lowest point in half a century. … The general pattern of near misses in the past has shown U.S. aircraft or naval vessels swerving and changing course at the last minute in order to avoid collision. It is not clear, however, whether these procedures, or those of the Chinese navy and air force, have now been adjusted to a more offensive posture.”
Rudd suggests we keep in mind the lesson of World War I: that “a relatively minor incident (the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in late June 1914) can escalate into a war between great powers in a matter of weeks,” even if the entire world finds actual fighting impossible, up until the moment it begins.
Here's a CNN article about increases US-China tensions:
increases military drills as tensions with US heat up
So how worried should we be about a war between the US and China?
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesI brought this up previously in the China thread: Mom and I had a discussion about this the last time I visited them (background: my parents immigrated from Taiwan to the US in the mid-70's). She believed the chance of a shooting war was over 50%; I thought it was closer to 10% (and the general feeling I got when I asked about it there was that even 10% was an overestimation).
The damned queen and the relentless knight.We survived Reagan and the Soviet Union. I think we can take this President without a war.
Having said that, be more concerned if Trump openly starts stirring jingoism and calling for immediate regime change. Which he hasn't, yet, but he's unpredictable enough that...who knows?
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerThe previous shutdown was also one of the few things to move the needle on Trump’s approval.
Though even the biggest events of his presidency have only moved things by about 5%. A shutdown combined with COVID and recent race issues could get Trump into the 30s, but I doubt anything short of actually shooting someone on 5th Avenue could get him to the low thirties.
Other regimes know to ignore Trump’s ramblings and the military know how to loose the paperwork if Trump tries to start a war without Congress’s approval.
Edited by Silasw on Aug 11th 2020 at 4:43:04 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWell, Trump's approval ratings dropped noticeably after the last shutdown and rebounded once it ended, so it's not necessarily a given that his base won't erode in such a context. But I think that Congressional Republicans will rather fold than drive Trump's approval ratings farther down.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanTrump's ratings are on a bit of an upswing, actually.
Trump's Approval Rating Is Getting Better as Election Draws Closer: Polls
And yeah, the situation seems rather perilous at the moment. The way US and Chinese ships and planes are constantly near-missing each other is unnerving. It is a disaster waiting to happen. Wars have started before over such incidents.
Edited by Redmess on Aug 11th 2020 at 6:50:46 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
x3 He literally couldn't, constitutional amendment.
My comment on Reagan was more him being the Most Likely President to Cause A Nuclear War, and us managing to avoid WW3 under him. My point being that though things are tense, and they can always get worse, we aren't at Defcon 1.
Ambar used to talk about how planes were shot down multiple times during the Cold War without major war. Trust me, we are not in the danger zone yet.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Aug 11th 2020 at 12:51:25 PM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer

That mountain's also a holy site. Just because some asshole has already desecrated it, doesn't mean we should let another asshole desecrate it any further.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Aug 11th 2020 at 4:54:48 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from history