- jhp123 parentof course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors. The violence occurred at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, what other "side" could he possibly have been referring to?
- The articles you linked actually confirm my point, did you mean to link something else?
As Snopes and politifact confirms, Trump made the following statement about the "Unite the Right" protestors, a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis who had staged a violent rally followed by a vehicular murder: "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides".
- You don't seem to understand why the "very fine people" remark was unacceptable to many of us. Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.
On the topic of Sicknick, I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted. The timing alone is strong evidence that the two are related.
Even if it was "merely" an assault on a police officer, it's political violence and it's acceptable to every Republican voter. You opened this door.
- when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people". When they killed Brian Sicknick, he called them heroes and pardoned them. If even 10 percent of the right had drawn a line against political violence after Jan 6 then we wouldn't be here today. They all embraced it when it was their side. Charlie himself chartered the buses and obstructed the resulting investigation.
- if the debt ever causes actual problems, e.g. we can't sell our treasury bonds, then our politicians will suddenly remember how to tax rich people.
In the mean time the impossible, unsustainable, terrifying national debt will be used to justify benefit cuts (like the upcoming privatization/cut of social security when the trust fund runs out in 7 years)
- there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.
The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
- > I don’t even know what to call someone who thinks the government should give private parties discretionary grants and contracts, but shouldn’t be able to use those to influence private actors.
The idea that the sovereign should be limited to follow law, due process, and the advice of experts in the administration of grants goes back at least to the magna carta and is so widespread that you would use a more specific term — a "constitutional monarchist", "republican", "democrat", or "democratic socialist", etc., would all agree on this point. The opposite point of view however, has a name — authoritarian — so you could call such a person "anti-authoritarian".
- we should have talked about it back in 2001 before we sent these young men to risk their lives and health in a misbegotten crusade. The rise in costs for veterans care was predictable: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/terror-war-co...
- PEPFAR, discussed in the link I posted, is aimed at the HIV epidemic. The HIV epidemic is in fact being solved by the approach of international cooperation and aid: transmission rates are already down by 50% from their peak in the late 90s.
The supply of foreign aid is usually not determined by need but by willingness of the donor countries. So when foreign aid makes progress against one disease or crisis, the money is redirected to the next most pressing issue. This doesn't mean it is useless or is not solving problems.
It is true as a philosophical point that sometimes, an attempt to solve a problem backfires and even worsens the problem. But it is also true that an attempt to solve a problem sometimes solves the problem. You've offered no evidence that foreign aid is ineffective or backfires in any way, just a handwaving story, against the hard quantitative evidence I linked in my comment above.
- > Given the enormous amounts of resources the west has poured into the poorest places on earth, when do we see the positive results?
The impact of aid programs is well studied. Here is one of hundreds or thousands of studies showing a measurable positive impact in terms of lives saved: https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/assessi...
- > through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed
Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
- Asking candidates to put in disproportionate amounts of time and effort is abusive. The hiring manager here seems to have taken all of 5 minutes to reject the candidate's multiple hours of work.
edit: commenters here are also missing the forest for the trees. If the candidate had done X, Y, Z to make a more compelling entry then it would be some other poor guy staring at a two line rejection of tens of hours of work. The process is exploitative.
- How did manufacturing adjust to the rise of 3d printing and the new world where 90% of consumer goods were printed at home, replicator-style?
How did the finance world adjust to a world where financial transactions were automated on the blockchain using smart contracts?
How have cities adapted to the massive migration of in-person experiences to the metaverse — and so soon after they rebuilt all their physical infrastructure around the revolutionary personal transportation system known as the Segway[0]?
[0] none other than Steve Jobs predicted that cities would be designed around the Segway https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
- I'm not the first one to see parallels to the Cultural Revolution. Policies like purging the intelligentsia and sending educated urban people to go work in the fields weren't motivated by any thought out plan, but by an irrational sense of resentment against "elites" and a desire for "purity".