Hodad

Well, I guess if you ignore all the kids it killed, then sure. But back in reality, at the height of the pandemic (2021–2022), COVID-19 was the eighth leading cause of death overall for children and the first among infectious diseases.

Dude, that's an Op-Ed reprint from a pro-Israel advocacy group posing as a think tank. Their mission is to advance Israeli objectives in the media. Thanks for sharing, I guess, but that does not constitute an argument. I read it. It's a whole lot of words leading up to a wet fart of a conclusion that modern leftism and modern Islam are both derived from Marxism. Big eye roll on that one. At I said, it's politically convenient to demonize two "enemies" with the same broad brush, but it's a specious argument that simply can't stand up to scrutiny. You can find plenty of things that liberalism and Islam both oppose, but almost no values that they share in common. Try it out. Make yourself a venn diagram of values. See how that goes.

So what? So did 19% of Republicans and 20% of independents--in the same poll. That's just a 6 point delta for those playing along at home. What do you think that actually means? Let me fill in the blanks for you. The question was not "Do you support terrorism?" It asked which side you support more in the current conflict. It means that I'm the context of a brutal genocide 2/5 of Americans across the political spectrum think the side wantonly killing tens of thousands of innocent women and children is the one more in the wrong. Israel had the moral high ground after the October attacks, and near universal sympathy. Then they bombed the high ground into oblivion.

"Leftists" do not love Islam. Full stop. They especially don't love radical or fundamentalist Islam. There is nothing aligned in those value groups. Leftists simply believe in tolerance and freedom of and from religion. You know, good old fashioned values the country was founded on. Conservatives, who are rapidly being devoured by the Christian right that they once used for votes, want to claim some kind of affinity so that they can demonize two rival ideologies in one broad, ludicrous brush stroke. Personally, I think all religions are crap, doing far more harm than good. But whatever deluded fairy tales people want to use to cope with life are fine by me, as long as they don't try to impose their personal rules for living on others. That last part is the trick. Most of them aren't content with pluralism, and the fundies of most sects are eager to seize power on behalf of their imaginary gods and exact vengeance on the non-compliant. American Christians don't really hate Islam because it's so different, but rather web because they're too similar. They are rivals. And there's a subset of both groups that are comfortable with violence to achieve their ends. When "leftists" don't join the radical Christians in demonizing and attacking ordinary Muslims, it has nothing to do with liking Islam, and everything to do with repudiating religious bigotry. Tolerance is NOT alliance or alignment. Your enemy is not your enemy's friend.

One for you too.

I repeat (because I literally said it in the post to which you responded): "That's just a super shoddy bit of marketing spin, like calling objections to Israel's actions in Palestine antisemitism. Paper thin, and very dumb."

Will do. Enjoy your batshit-crazy personalized conception of reality. 👍

Oh, you're not fooling anyone. We all know damn well that you don't subscribe to the Atlantic, and that you didn't read the article. There's no room for new information in your tiny info bubble. Just copy and past some more of your standard debunked grievances and move on.

No, there is no alliance whatsoever between the left and radical Islam. That's absurd. The same people who want to be free of Christian theocracy certainly want to be free of Islamic theocracy. The same people who repudiate nonsense like conversion therapy also disapprove of murdering (rather than "converting") gay people. Liberalism and fundamentalism (religious or otherwise) are diametrically opposed. Islamaphobia is very real, particularly among Christian conservatives, but acknowledging that has nothing whatsoever to do with support for or alliance with Islamic terrorism. That's just a super shoddy bit of marketing spin, like calling objections to Israel's actions in Palestine antisemitism. Paper thin, and very dumb.

A. That's an entirely different report B. Not surprising that, though it's measuring something different, it shows the same general conclusion. C. For the record, Islamic violence IS far right violence. For the sake of more granular measurement you can certainly break our religious right vs secular right violence, but they are both far right. Doesn't get more conservative that the Taliban types, and the Christian Nationalists are just the American Taliban.

^^Dumbest comment in a dumb thread. CSIS

I imagine that since you've actually climbed inside Trump's ass, it's created a real echo chamber. A. Despite firing the labor statistics chief and appointing someone new--and asking them to stop reporting monthly numbers--the methodology is currently unchanged. He's explicitly trying to cook the books, but hasn't yet succeeded, so the jobs numbers are apples to apples. B. The economy is not the stock market. C. The idea that an economy that literally cannot bear price increases is somehow healthy is insane. D. Yes, prices absolutely have gone up as a result of the tariffs. Categories exposed to import sourcing are climbing rapidly. You're saying insane shit here, and your Chinese manufactured crazy pills are gonna get more expensive. Tax Foundation "To assess the impacts of the tariffs on retail prices of both domestic and imported goods, a team of Harvard economists has been tracking retail prices using real-time barcode data. The latest data through early October show that tariffs have raised retail prices on average by about 4.9 percentage points relative to the pre-tariff trend, 6.0 percentage points for imported goods and 4.3 percentage points for domestic goods. Several goods have experienced notably large price increases, including apparel (8.99 percentage points), coffee and tea (7.5 percentage points), cameras (7.5 percentage points), household textiles (6.2 percentage points), and furniture (6.5 percentage points)." E. Trump tariffs actually *reversed* falling price trends from 2024 F. Car prices are absolutely NOT down. They've also reduced a post-COVID falling trend to spike back up under Trump. FED CPI data F. Trump has as much control over the price of eggs and gas as Biden did, which is to say virtually none. Did he cure avian flu? Did he subsidize egg farmers? Did he somehow isolate US gas and oil from the global market? No? Then what's he doing to inspire all your fawning? You ought to poke your head out from time to time and ingest some real news.

Eh, is it stunning, or just par on the Trump course? This is a guy who started a scam university and stole from his own charity organization before he ever got into politics and took the grift national. Everyone knew, they just didn't care.

My god, you're boring. Same conspiracy shit, year after year, ad nauseum. You'll be 90 years old, writing the same lines on the walls of your padded room with your own feces. You can just assume that I'm never talking about Canada unless I specifically say Canada. We're in a US politics forum and I'm clearly in the US. I love Canada and Canadians (well, most of them) but what happens there isn't particularly consequential outside of Canada. However, you don't have to look far to see that you are, as usual, lying. Canadian doctors are free to talk about any evidence-based medical topic, including potential vaccine harm. They are not, however, allowed to advise patients based on conspiracy shit they read on the internet. It's the difference between practice and malpractice. And the idea that Fauci himself "funded" this specific research objective is like the crackpots who walk up to cops and say, "Hey, I pay your salary!" 🙄

Killing regular citizens to extract political and economic concessions from foreign governments. Hm, I think there's a name for that.

Ah, yes. A rebuttal that fully and completely demonstrates the depth and breadth of your capability.

A. That would be a *hugely* important detail to misstate. B. There's no evidence that Trump Tower was bugged either. It's just made up bullshit. Seriously, get off the internet before you stumble into Q-anon forum and end up waiting outside overnight for JFK to return. You just aren't equipped for a time when any other dummy can platform any absurd thing they want.

Another example of why you need to get off the internet. There is zero evidence that Trump's home was ever "bugged," and the surveillance of people with access to confidential material who are engaged in covert dealings with Russian agents is literally the only responsible course of action. You have no ability to sort through the bullshit, so you'll fall for anything, over and over again.

Yeah, actually that's what I, and your source, have been explaining to you. Poor critical thinking and media illiteracy have a huge amount to do with "why we lose." Trump loves the poorly educated, and you love him right back. Dumb people are allowed to vote, and if he can make them afraid enough of bogus threats to get them to the polls, it tips the balance. And here I though you'd never catch on. But before you try formulate that "universal theory of winning," maybe wait until the Trumpublicans figure out how to string together more than one election cycle. 🙄

Indeed, you pointed to a source exploring the crisis of poor critical thinking--and the election lie believers were a prime example. Their mission is literally to save/cure people like you. Good luck to them. And I'm not campaigning for your vote--you don't even have a voice here. I'm simply pointing out the facts. And yes, it's all debunked. Including the stupid ballot "bins" you keep talking about. Years ago debunked. There shouldn't even be a need to "debunk" unsupported and unsubstantiated conspiracy bullshit, but half of you aren't very bright, so the debunking becomes obligatory. And even then you still can't take in the new information.

No, it wasn't "debunked," regardless of what some internet rando's post the algorithm served you. I also gave you a peer-reviewed study from 2025. Your unsubstantiated conspiracy theory crap is just boring. The entire global medical and scientific community is not engaged in a conspiracy to undermine bloggers and Facebook posters.

But the source you cited with your media literacy and mighty critical thinking says the stolen election lie was debunked (and it was, over and over), and is only believed by those who lack critical thinking. Pick your poison. 🤣 And you still can't put the pieces together to understand why you're the punchline to your own joke. Go back to the bar. Nobody there will judge you. They're in no better shape.

We're gonna need a full replay to capture this in all its glory 1. He still believes the thoroughly debunked stolen election lie. 2. He defends this belief by linking to a report discussing how/why so many people people believe such obvious, debunked lies. The conclusion: a dearth of critical thinking and media literacy. 3. He comes back just a few posts later, touting his media literacy and pretending he knows how to vet a source. Yes, right after citing a source that identifies his deficiencies in both. 4. He's cooked himself any way you look at it, but is too dim to realize it. I don't think you're dumb because I'm a snob, you pitiable thing. I think you're dumb because you've left me no choice in the matter.

Oh, did I miss anything? Just unhinged ranting? Okay, whew. Oh look, the "vaccines are killing the kids" zombie argument is back. Let’s actually look at the scoreboard before we start spreading more FUD that will engender vaccine hesitancy and kill more kids. If you were genuinely worried about heart damage, you should have been rooting for the vaccine. The medical consensus is that you are roughly 7 times more likely to get myocarditis from the actual virus than from the shot. In the United States, myocarditis-related mortality rates declined from 1999 to 2019, but this progress was notably reversed with a significant rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. At the height of the pandemic, nearly three-quarters of the excess myocarditis deaths occurred in patients with COVID-19 infection listed on their death certificates. A certain number of people in any age group are going to die of myocarditis or other cardiac events--with or without a vaccine. Some died. Some died within short time, but was it coincidental or causal?If these vaccines were significantly risky, the rollout of a massive vaccine program would have resulted in measurable excess deaths, right? Suddenly more cardiac deaths among teens after the vaccines were rolled out--excess deaths by number, even without an assigned cause? Right? Where's the "mass die-off" of young people? It’s a ghost story. The CDC did a deep dive into death certificates for young adults (ages 16–30) to find these supposed vaccine-induced heart attacks. They found zero. Zero. The truth is that FUD-mongers are gonna spread FUD. You're emotionally invested in a conclusion you formed years ago by reading conspiracy crap and misleadingly vivid anecdotes posted by randos online. And you chose this path instead of science and data.

Yep, pretty dull. About half the population has a below average IQ. 💡 And on top of that many people don't know how to vet media sources. Especially you old bastards, who grew up in a time in which the barrier to entry in media was high, and so were the standards. Now that it's cheap and easy to "make content" you can access whatever opinions you seek in a format that's vaguely shaped like news you can't tell one from the other. You have no instinct or aptitude for vetting sources and stories. No natural immunity to bullshit, because you never needed it. You just accept whatever information conforms to your existing opinions. To the point that you literally buy into "alternative facts" as an acceptable concept. To the point that you will literally choose to believe YouTube pundits over credentialed scientists. It's pretty crazy. And it's why you think that Fox news is news. It's an organization that--explicitly and by design--is a propaganda play, does not hire journalists and has never once been recognized for journalism, yet you seek it out as a source of truth. It's sad really. Like people who think McDonalds has the best burgers in the world because it sells the most burgers. You simply don't know better.