SpankyMcFarland

Things really settled down after their civil war. Relentless expansion didn’t seem such a great idea after that.

The thing is that ‘we were here first’ is constantly brought up by some supporters of Israel despite the fact that they live in places like Canada where many of them were certainly not the first. The DNA shows that both Palestinians and Jews are of mixed ancestry, partly Canaanite in origin.

What would you like to ask me?

But who is moving to so-called red states? They’re not all Republicans by any means. In addition, red state cities seem to have a growing problem with rising house prices and the dreaded nimbys.

We can manage life in ultra-large groups far better but the twentieth century was hardly a glowing example of resolving our differences in a non-violent way. Germany, in many ways the world’s most advanced country at the time, chose an ideology that consciously rejected peace and civilization.

The basic take home message is that humans are naturally disposed to tribal warfare. It’s been popular with us since we appeared as a species.

In the early 20th century, Russian Jews were desperate for a refuge from the pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881, an event that had nothing to do with them. Jews in other European countries also suffered from the scourge of antisemitism. Britain closed its own doors to them in 1905 but opened up Palestine in 1917, profoundly altering the ethnic balance of the population. Conflict was difficult to avoid after that.

There was a cost to that. He turned off Red Tories across the country and in his own constituency too. Throughout the campaign the divisions with PC politicians were openly aired.

Political allegiance fails to capture changes that are happening across the US and the Western world for that matter. For example, house prices and nimbyism are dramatically increasing in many Red state cities.

Trump should get Ghislaine Maxwell to confirm this while he’s at it.

The matter of expertise is important here, ie those guys who attended class, listened and actually understood what was going on. Trump’s nominee is not considered up to snuff even by the very right-wing journos at NRO. Many examples are given for such an opinion in the following piece. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trump-wants-a-bureau-of-maga-statistics/ Statistics matter. If they’re not trusted by the market all sorts of nasty things will happen in the economy - which should not be news to anybody.

I think you may mean compliment. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/complement-and-compliment-usage-difference

Do you live in Canada?

Are you coming up with these pensées in Canada? If so, I suggest you take a trip to your nearest wildfire.

One point is to clarify the margin of victory. FPTP elections usually exaggerate the margin of the winning party. Thus in our recent Canadian election no sensible person could say the contest wasn’t close given the popular vote numbers. Likewise Trump’s victory was close in popular vote terms. He didn’t win, like, 70% of votes cast or something.

No. It’s bad because it is objectively wrong like fixing a hockey game is wrong, like stealing is wrong. I genuinely can’t understand how you can’t see that. Politicians should not choose their voters. One of many malign consequences of such cheating is that seats become safe for a political party. A consequence of that is that the real competition happens in the primaries where the incumbent is under threat from even more extreme people in their own party if they are not ideologically pure enough. Thus over time the legislative body becomes answerable to a small cadre of fanatical party loyalists rather than the general population, further exacerbating cynicism and apathy among potential voters.

No. It is innately and obviously bad. Redistricting should NEVER be in the hands of somebody who can benefit from it. Firstly, it affects the voters in the districts that are changed. Secondly, it brings all politicians into disrepute. Saying the other side does it is utterly irrelevant if it is intrinsically wrong which it clearly is. Would fixing hockey games be OK with you if every team could do it? Democracy in America is being destroyed.

We live in a world where the American president has become Putin’s errand boy: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-trump-tells-zelensky-that-putin-demands-more-control-of-ukraine-urges/

What sort of amadán would believe such nonsense?

Man-made. Ask me a hard one.

Do you agree that gerrymandering is innately bad no matter who does it?

We’ve had nearly four years of an illegal war of aggression by an indicted war criminal who has kidnapped tens of thousands of children and killed hundreds of thousands of people, yet he is feted like a hero by America’s president.

What on earth did Trump think he was doing fawning over Putin? Bringing his economic team as well like he was negotiating with Switzerland. No answers for the journalists either. What a fiasco. Remember how he talked to Zelensky? As anybody who dealt with de Gaulle could attest, allies can be harder to like than adversaries - they make more demands - but one really shouldn’t reveal that. A certain froideur is expected when meeting the enemy. And then there was Putin with all that cosy talk of neighbours, shared history and Orthodox churches. He could have been singing this to Alaska: It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood A beautiful day for a neighbor Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

In more darkly comical news, Microsoft promises to find out what Microsoft is up to with Palestinian phone calls: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/15/microsoft-launches-inquiry-claims-israel-used-tech-mass-surveillance-palestinians

So the IDF won’t let foreign journalists into Gaza ONLY because it SO concerned about their welfare? Is this what you really believe? I think my work is done here. The horses have been led to water.