I bet you are perfectly fine with America being dragged into another middle eastern war…that’s why you hate guys like Greenwald that put the best interests of Americans first.
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- Thread starter rillaman
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Explain how bad Trump policies were pre-covid/pre-mostly peaceful protests.
Yes. My vote was up for grabs in 2016 in multiple races, not just POTUS. I was shocked at how good Trump policies were until Covid hit. I didn’t care for the daily joust with dumb reporters like Acosta though. His idiotic tweets took the focus off of his good policies and achievements, much like today he focuses on all things Kamala/Walz, except for policy. There is no question whose policy is better. A Harris election would be 16 years out of 20 for the “fundamentally change America” crowd. Elections have consequences.
What to do with intersex athletes has been a hot debate for 20 years (actually since the inception of women's sports), particularly where they were "incorrectly" raised female. But of course this debate was thrown into the blender of culture war fights not just in the US but also several other Western countries, where it doesn't belong.
One of the experts in the field of sports and gender is a legal professor at Duke. Some of my good friends knew her pretty well (I didn't have her, but most of them did). She largely takes the position you take, and she wrote extensively on the recent controversy.
As far as I'm concerned, Khelif is a hero of the Games. Last I checked, the US ranked first in the IOC's unofficial medal count after "winning" the tiebreaker (most silvers) of two countries who equal one another in gold medals. Of course, Khelif defeated a steroid-addled Chinese female boxer in the final. If she loses ... we "lose" to China (which is a huge deal for their internal PR and not bad for their external claims of a "rising" country).
My basic position on this is that if a person was actually raised female (as Khelif certainly was), it's awfully complicated to tell them at age 25 that their entire life was a fraud (in large part because it wasn't). Which is why the responsible organizations have imposed a required of testosterone suppressants on such athletes, as discussed in my article. The IBA and the IOC are both not particularly responsible in addressing this situation.
XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
The historical, political, and medical context of the Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting cases.
quillette.com
Greenwald puts his own best interests first and last. He sold out to Putin for gain, he appears on Fox for gain. His views are paid for garbage.
What to do with intersex athletes has been a hot debate for 20 years (actually since the inception of women's sports), particularly where they were "incorrectly" raised female. But of course this debate was thrown into the blender of culture war fights not just in the US but also several other Western countries, where it doesn't belong.
One of the experts in the field of sports and gender is a legal professor at Duke. Some of my good friends knew her pretty well (I didn't have her, but most of them did). She largely takes the position you take, and she wrote extensively on the recent controversy.
As far as I'm concerned, Khelif is a hero of the Games. Last I checked, the US ranked first in the IOC's unofficial medal count after "winning" the tiebreaker (most silvers) of two countries who equal one another in gold medals. Of course, Khelif defeated a steroid-addled Chinese female boxer in the final. If she loses ... we "lose" to China (which is a huge deal for their internal PR and not bad for their external claims of a "rising" country).
My basic position on this is that if a person was actually raised female (as Khelif certainly was), it's awfully complicated to tell them at age 25 that their entire life was a fraud (in large part because it wasn't). Which is why the responsible organizations have imposed a required of testosterone suppressants on such athletes, as discussed in my article. The IBA and the IOC are both not particularly responsible in addressing this situation.
XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
The historical, political, and medical context of the Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting cases.
I certainly don’t think their life is a fraud. I think she should be able to live as a female, if that is what she chooses.
But sports are separate from politics, and we need common sense in sports. This person has advantages over female opponents. The officials in the sport knew that. The Olympic committee knew that too, they just didn’t know how to handle it. Hopefully this leads to more detailed rules in the future.
It's a great question. Let's stick to the FBI data for now. Also, I hope you get healthy.
First, crime rates published by the FBI are determined by reported crimes. So if you file a police report, it counts as a reported crime in the FBI data. There are some other crime surveys that sample the population in an attempted to obtain data on unreported crimes as well. I don't love this for various reasons, as IMHO most people will report serious crimes against them (but may not report more dubious situations in which they were arguably victimized).
Second, convictions have nothing to do with the "crime rate." They have a lot to do with getting dangerous people off the streets and potentially limiting future crimes. But they don't impact the "crime rate" data directly. If a crime is reported, then it goes into the "crime rate" you see.
Third, not sure where "hit and runs" go in the crime rate, but obviously it's not a leading metric as to the level of crime that criminologists study.
Fourth, I favor homicide as the leading indicator because you can't hide the bodies. If there's a dead person that appears to have been killed by another, the crime is reported 99% plus of the time. The data is as clean as it possibly can be. Also, homicides are well correlated with other violent crime (shootings, aggravated assaults, armed robbery, etc.). They tend to rise and fall together. When I posted the New Orleans data, homicides and shootings were down almost exactly the same percentage this year (about 40% each). Homicide is much less correlated with property crimes. Pretty sure homicide was dropping like a rock in 2023 while auto thefts were generally rising for some reasons that were probably related specifically to the ease with which certain autos were being stolen and demand for the stolen product itself (factors highly unrelated to the likelihood of other crimes being committed).
The IOC knows how to handle it, but they have political problems. Which is why they outsource to the governing bodies, which is working out just fine in every sport except boxing, because the IBA is run by a bunch of Russian stooges and the IOC no longer recognizes the IBA as being the legit governing body.
Any which way, Khelif was qualified under the rules of her sport as applied to the Games. For me, this isn't much of a controversy. Everyone knew she and the Taiwanese "dude/chick" would be fighting, it just because a convenient place to impose Western culture wars on the Olympics.
If the IOC gets it together, hopefully they just adopt the World Athletics standard for any sport that falls under the IOC's governance going forward. It's not that hard to do that, and it's reasonable fair.
But again, I will point out that this fighter would have wrestled as a female in Texas, which has spent a lot of time working to protect the integrity of girls'/women's sports.
Btw, one of the most fascinating thing on here is the age breakdown. The right-leaning males over 50 (with possibly one exception) tend to passionately defend Trump, while the ones under 50 detest him. Interesting dichotomy that I think has a lot to do with brain psychology.
Vivek is really the only one selling me on voting Trump, despite massive character concerns.
Vance did a pretty good job with his media interviews yesterday. He took a lot of difficult questions and didn’t look terrible answering them.
I will add to this. The way our brains actually work ... they suppress the bad from the distant past and elevate the good (this doesn't apply to the "recent past"). This is why many older folks think things were so much better when they were young. It seems a tradition that is time immemorial.
For me, my brain doesn't work like this. I don't see the past as better than the present (or future), I try and remember it as it was. I know, for example, that crime was really bad in the 1980s and 1990s, and is much better today. I also know that some civic institutions have decayed in this same period, but generally we've only seen an enhancement in our own individual freedoms. And I definitely know that Reagan's GOP of the 1980s into the 1990s was a better than the shit we see today ... hahaha ... so I'm not entirely against the past.
But in reality, I don't see the decaying America or "late stage Republic" or whatever other BS terms are used to denigrate the USA. I see an economically vibrant place that probably could use a little more rationality on both sides of cultural arguments, and I see divides that are often a function of the major economic and geographic diversity across a massive, huge country made up of people from very diverse backgrounds in the "old worlds."
Vance is really smart and he's probably had some recent shock therapy on how his weird "common good Catholicism" views are being received in a country founded on a Protestant worldview, which may be leading to some adjustment.
I do think Kamala has now flipped many of her 2019/20 positions away from the theatre of the absurd. As Jonah Goldberg says, the other side shelving its bad ideas is a win for your side.
I have no idea why Vivek didn't end up on the short list of VP candidates.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association has released their Midyear Violent Crime survey, and Axios reports on the results:
Not everyone who disagrees with your geopolitics is a Russian hack. For example, I am not a terrorist sympathizer because I don’t want Americans dying in the Middle East in the middle of a holy war…
We use the US Navy to compel compliance from hostile regimes literally every day of every week. There's obviously some danger in this, but it's not a lot different than the typical danger to which American servicemen are exposed.
Have I called you a terrorist sympathizer ever?
Oh ... imagine that.
Greenwald and Taibbi have long histories of arguing positions maximally favorable to the current Russian regime, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. I don't know Greenwald's history with Russia, but I do know Taibbi reported there for quite some time in his life (maybe he fell in love with Russia, maybe he's a useful idiot for Russian operatives, maybe they pay him, but his opinions on Russia are mostly devoid of a connection to reality).
There are certainly arguments against, say, supporting the Ukrainian war effort. I personally find them extremely non-compelling, but I don't find them problematic in terms of being argued. But those who make these arguments all have strange ties to Russia and/or a long history of being pro-Kremlin. (It's why I don't find the fact that Seymour Hersh thinks America blew up the pipeline compelling, he thinks America was behind every bad act of the 20th and 21st century at this point).
From my end, when every person arguing for a position has red flags around them, you have to start to why normal brains aren't taking the position.
What goalposts?
I obviously support the US sending naval vessels to dissaude or oppose a major Iranian attack on Israel, likely in response to recent assassinations.
Also, let's be real. When we debate this to the American public, we are talking about combat troops on the ground. Not the navy or peacekeeping forces. It's largely settled among Americans - perhaps not you - that the country is OK with these troop commitments. Ground combat forces are a different story.
HOMICIDE UPDATE
Here's Jeff Asher's dashboard on the murders in the biggest 277 American cities (or at least all of the big ones plus a good sample of the smaller areas in the country). If we maintain the current pace through end of the year, we will end up with a 2024 homicide rate in the lowest 5 years of the past 60. Tracking for about a 4.6-4.7 homicides per 100K Americans, the low of the past 60 years is 4.4/100K.
www.ahdatalytics.com
Here's Jeff Asher's dashboard on the murders in the biggest 277 American cities (or at least all of the big ones plus a good sample of the smaller areas in the country). If we maintain the current pace through end of the year, we will end up with a 2024 homicide rate in the lowest 5 years of the past 60. Tracking for about a 4.6-4.7 homicides per 100K Americans, the low of the past 60 years is 4.4/100K.
YTD Murder Comparison - Dashboards - AH Datalytics
www.ahdatalytics.com
Israel has for never been the country or terrorist group that started a war in that region.
They just Win them.
I'm better off financially than 4 years ago ! ( He asked !)
But primarily because I did things that I had posted to help you guys about 6 or 7 years AGO !
1. Paid off all credit debt . Use CC's that award points for use, but pay the CC's every month !
2. Did not go green.
3. Changed out my 2 cars, for new SUV's with warranty and better MPG.
4. Changed out zero interest accounts to higher yield accounts.
5. Use the points, like GM Reward's points for minor services, like oil or other changes.
DJT will lower my car gas bill about $ 1,000 a year, Than oil heat over that $ and elec rates as well.
That's $ 3,000 a year into my pockets.
Back when I was pre-teen. the volunteer Fire Depts used to activate their respective fire sirens at Noon, all along the Jersey Shore !
Now nobody does it, because some idiots complained of the noise.
Now nobody knows if they work !
I still own zero shares or options.
I did note that the shares are up slightly lately.
So again DJT can put the Dems in his night-time prayers ! (They have made him BILLION$ in paper gains !)
They have been there is not the same as entering a potential conflict.
US Navy has been there for YEARS.
John and his planeload of 25+ Officers and Enlisted conducted 12 hour ELIC gathering !
Hold up, the Houthis were firing on our ships just months ago (almost hit one too). Separately, US missiles were deployed against the last major Iranian attack, as were Jordanian and Saudi missiles I believe.
So yes, the US is already "engaged" in this conflict from a naval perspective. But that is much lower risk than ground forces.
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