Quoting this so it doesn't get missed.
Global Events & Politics Überthread
- Thread starter Hawk
- Start date
Quoting this so it doesn't get missed.
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
I don't know if this was just a drunk post on your part because it's kind of atypical, but news reports from WAPO and NYT state that the vast majority of the deaths are people attempting to breach the border fence and shot by Israeli snipers. If you think that's indiscriminate firing then you need the dictionary.com twitter guy to tweet at you.
Just take a step back and think about your position for a moment. Do you believe that if Palestinians were peacefully protesting without any attempt to breach the border fence that Israel would be firing on them?
Look, if you don't think Israel should be firing on young men attempting to breach the border fence then fine. I disagree but there is no real reason to mislead people into thinking that these are all just peaceful protestors with no ill intent.
Two things can be true at once. Many of them can be peaceful protestors while many of them are Hamas or Hamas supporting actors with intent to breach the security fence and cause harm to Israel soldiers and citizens. The propaganda is that Hamas wants you to think these are all protestors peacefully assembling. It's just not true.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
I honestly think that the most of these questions are red herrings. I'm willing to concede some points, but mostly because I think they're largely irrelevant.
The situation in Gaza means that this kind of thing is unavoidable. Ignoring that context is avoiding the big-picture dynamics.
sturg33
I
Lol
He’s a class act.
57Brave
Well-known member
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea abruptly postponed high-level talks with South Korea on Wednesday to protest a joint South Korean-United States Air Force drill, and warned that the historic summit meeting between North Korea’s leader and President Trump next month could be jeopardized.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/...tion=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/...tion=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
goldfly
<B>if my thought dreams could be seen</B>
you're disputing that?
hell, the person that gave the prayer (not sure why it was needed) at the embassy said jews are going to hell in his past.
sturg33
I
On a scale a 1-10, how hopeful are you that peace talks fall apart?
goldfly
<B>if my thought dreams could be seen</B>
we have a regime desperate for a deal/win and is bad at making deals
up against a regime that has been doing this type of **** for decades
what could go wrong here?
it really does seem we are just taking the iran deal and writing north korea at the top now and they hope no one notices if it even happens
up against a regime that has been doing this type of **** for decades
what could go wrong here?
it really does seem we are just taking the iran deal and writing north korea at the top now and they hope no one notices if it even happens
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cajunrevenge
Well-known member
You are getting a one sided story in our media. Kim is a dictator but we have no problem with dictators, just ones that aren't our puppet. Rocket man just wants some respect from the international community. He has a legit reason to be scared we will invade and if NK wasn't capable of killing a **** load of people we would already gave me invaded and occupied it. **** like sending Bill Clinton to NK with specific instructions not to smile when all they wanted was a photo op is and was ridiculous. Refusing to meet with NK until they meetbsome our demands was bull**** too. Our foreign policy in no way was geared towards peace with NK. If they had oil we would already be there.
I love this idea that NK is giving us everything we demanded and you think it's just so they can back out later to score some kind of meaningless political victory. NK is 100 right to be pissed we are conducting war games when NK are taking historic steps towards peace.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
Not sure where to put this but I thought it was interesting.
https://medium.com/s/story/the-surp...-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437
The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
We don’t buy houses in the floodplain if we can help it, because we are risk averse, even though the chance of it flooding in any given year is only 1%. Why? We will live in the house longer than one year. Over the 30-year life of a mortgage, the chance of the house flooding at least once vastly exceeds 1%, because every year is another roll of the dice. It’s not cumulative, though. The mathematics for back-calculating the odds is called a Bernoulli Process.
...
Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.
This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home flooding during your mortgage.
It’s noticeably bigger.
Following the same procedure, we can see that even over an 18-year span we have a 10% chance of violent revolution, which is an interesting thought experiment to entertain before you have kids. It’s also important to note that a violent nation-state transition doesn’t just affect people who live in a floodplain. It affects everyone stuck in the middle. Especially the poor and defenseless.
But You’re Cheating
Am I? Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a seven-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, that Napoleon thing, and a couple of world wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. With Africa, it’s hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.
...
If we look at raw dialectic alone, we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will still probably scare you.
...
Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.
...
And it’s not just tin foil hat equipped right wingers thinking about this stuff. There’s a widely reported trend of Silicon Valley billionaires building apocalypse bunkers, as many as 50% according to Steve Huffman, the guy who founded Reddit. Yishan Wong, another former Reddit CEO, goes through a conceptual ROI analysis with The New Yorker.
Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee, was the C.E.O. of Reddit from 2012 to 2014. He, too, had eye surgery for survival purposes, eliminating his dependence, as he put it, “on a nonsustainable external aid for perfect vision.” In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
And it’s not just the techies. A lot of folks in Hollywood are thinking the same thing. It’s big business out there.
Gary Lynch, GM at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based company that specializes in underground bunkers and services scores of Los Angeles residences, says that sales at the most upscale end of the market — mainly to actors, pro athletes and politicians (who require signed NDAs) — have increased 700 percent this year compared with 2015, and overall sales have risen 150 percent.
So that’s another canary in the coal mine for the tin foil hat right winger — you have a class of people who are vehemently demanding confiscation of rifles in the public sphere, while some of them are secretly building underground fortresses in the private sphere.
Buy another box of ammo. Clearly.
https://medium.com/s/story/the-surp...-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437
The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
We don’t buy houses in the floodplain if we can help it, because we are risk averse, even though the chance of it flooding in any given year is only 1%. Why? We will live in the house longer than one year. Over the 30-year life of a mortgage, the chance of the house flooding at least once vastly exceeds 1%, because every year is another roll of the dice. It’s not cumulative, though. The mathematics for back-calculating the odds is called a Bernoulli Process.
...
Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.
This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home flooding during your mortgage.
It’s noticeably bigger.
Following the same procedure, we can see that even over an 18-year span we have a 10% chance of violent revolution, which is an interesting thought experiment to entertain before you have kids. It’s also important to note that a violent nation-state transition doesn’t just affect people who live in a floodplain. It affects everyone stuck in the middle. Especially the poor and defenseless.
But You’re Cheating
Am I? Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a seven-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, that Napoleon thing, and a couple of world wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. With Africa, it’s hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.
...
If we look at raw dialectic alone, we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will still probably scare you.
...
Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.
...
And it’s not just tin foil hat equipped right wingers thinking about this stuff. There’s a widely reported trend of Silicon Valley billionaires building apocalypse bunkers, as many as 50% according to Steve Huffman, the guy who founded Reddit. Yishan Wong, another former Reddit CEO, goes through a conceptual ROI analysis with The New Yorker.
Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee, was the C.E.O. of Reddit from 2012 to 2014. He, too, had eye surgery for survival purposes, eliminating his dependence, as he put it, “on a nonsustainable external aid for perfect vision.” In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
And it’s not just the techies. A lot of folks in Hollywood are thinking the same thing. It’s big business out there.
Gary Lynch, GM at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based company that specializes in underground bunkers and services scores of Los Angeles residences, says that sales at the most upscale end of the market — mainly to actors, pro athletes and politicians (who require signed NDAs) — have increased 700 percent this year compared with 2015, and overall sales have risen 150 percent.
So that’s another canary in the coal mine for the tin foil hat right winger — you have a class of people who are vehemently demanding confiscation of rifles in the public sphere, while some of them are secretly building underground fortresses in the private sphere.
Buy another box of ammo. Clearly.
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Follow the bread crumbs, dear peanut gallery:
1)
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=3048127
Kim must send his nukes to U.S.: Bolton
2)
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3048212
Squawking from Pyongyang
The North’s actions seem to be aimed at putting pressure on Washington to gain the upper hand in Kim’s summit with Trump. That is typical psychological warfare. But Seoul and Washington coped with it calmly and firmly. Our Ministry of Unification issued a statement that the North’s act of postponing the high-level talks citing the annual Air Force drill does not match the principle of the third inter-Korean summit. Defense Minister Song Young-moo met Vincent Brooks, commander of the U.S. Forces Korea, and agreed to continue their joint drill.
1)
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=3048127
Kim must send his nukes to U.S.: Bolton
2)
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3048212
Squawking from Pyongyang
The North’s actions seem to be aimed at putting pressure on Washington to gain the upper hand in Kim’s summit with Trump. That is typical psychological warfare. But Seoul and Washington coped with it calmly and firmly. Our Ministry of Unification issued a statement that the North’s act of postponing the high-level talks citing the annual Air Force drill does not match the principle of the third inter-Korean summit. Defense Minister Song Young-moo met Vincent Brooks, commander of the U.S. Forces Korea, and agreed to continue their joint drill.
Why am I not surprised there was no additional comment on this?
cajunrevenge
Well-known member
what is that supposed to be?