Moonlight Graham

You need to clear your cookies to read the WaPo article. I'm not disagreeing with you that those sites are either leftwing or have bias issues. The problem these days is getting reliable data from reliable sources. You just crapped on my links and then posted a FOX News article. It's all slanted. Us plebes don't know what they heck is going on. There's all sorts of shade being flung from every direction. But I do know the Russians have bad intentions, as does China, and Trump and his henchmen have been up to no good, and there's all sorts of stuff we don't know about going on in backalleys.

There is no DIRECT evidence...yet. The investigating isn't at all complete. But something is very fishy, something is not right. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots. I used to think as you do. But something is not right. The Russian gov is cunning and ruthless. They weren't playing patti-cake with Trump campaign people throughout 2016. They weren't just selling real estate. At the same time they were hacking and publishing Clinton emails, and spreading misinformation on social media. The US Senate is controlled by the GOP, btw. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/18/donald-trump-us-senate-report-russia-campaign https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/26/adam-schiff-fbi-trump-foreign-financial-ties-402318 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report Americans need to elect Joe Biden. A corporate sheep is less distasteful than a Russian puppet.

Trump has been compromised by Russia. The Obama admin/FBI knew something was fishy, they began investigating.

What a great post, i think all of same things you mentioned. I think the best thing that we can do is be aware it, & of our own biases. If we're aware of it, we won't be easily fooled. A pundit pushing a view based on half the facts or lies is no different than a car salesman or banker trying to sell us a product but not telling us the whole truth. We need to read to read the fine print, & do our research. We can be passive lemmings, or engaged & aware of what's happening around us. Putting our head in the sand is much less effort. The cost/benefit analysis is for each of us to decide. I have some friends who are dumb but they're also really happy people, they don't care about politics. They believe in God, & angels, & that everything happens for a reason, & cynicism hasn't beaten them down. For them it's worth it. I wish I still had the romance of those things from my youth. We only have a certain amount of hours in the day. Worrying about these things & posting on forums can be a waste of time if we do it too much. When I was a child & didn't care about politics I was happy. Other people worried about that stuff for me, laws still got passed, I just lived my happy little life. But I also had my parents to fight for me. Now I have to fight for myself. I can defend myself against the banker trying to rip me off, but in politics I'm only 1 vote, and it won't be missed much if I stay home. The other "stupid" people I disagree with politically, I try to empathize with them, & to assume good intentions. Someone pro-life isn't trying to control women, they're trying to save the life of innocent babies. Someone pro-choice isn't trying to murder babies, they just want control over their life and bodies.

Society is in a total war over facts and spin. Virtually every aspect of society that has any influence is infected by it. Many (not all) want to push their own agenda, to control the narrative. We are bombarded by propoganda throughout much of our day. This has been the case for a long, long time, but it seems to keep intensifying. We live in an age where science has even become politicized over ie: climate change. None of us have been immune to it. Film, TV, news, message boards, twitter, academics, elementary/high school, religion, parental upbringing. You are brainwashed. We now get to choose more of the brainwashing we consume based on whatever confirms our biases. Do not tell me all the facts, just tell me what I want to hear. Most people are such selfish delusional a-holes that they will argue against the BS spewed by the side they dislike while drinking up and defending the BS of the side they prefer. You are a soldier in this war, whether you know it or not.

I think there's political calculus in this probably. Israel wants him re-elected. Middle east countries many probably do to, if he's not bombing them anymore or stealing oil. The timing of this is no coincidence, i think Israel (Netanyahu) is helping set up these announcements before the election to help him win brownie points.

Negotiating with terrorists is unacceptable I agree. So is negotiating with a government that is building settlements in the West Bank illegally. That's an act of war as much as firing rockets on civilians. So here were are, 100+ years later.

Yes. You also realize that Brits and France took aboriginal lands by force? Does that mean you'll pack your bags or transfer all political authority to aboriginals when they ask for their ancestral lands back? You're full of it.

Freudian slip.

They either get it coming in or get it coming out. WTF is the difference?

It's possible. Trump is a brilliant and ruthless negotiator.

I agree on most of this. The thing I would disagree is that tenure is actually good and vital because it means you can't fire a prof for saying things that the university or students find "offensive". The purpose of tenure is to protect the freedom of inquiry among academics from outside pressure. We can be 100% sure that many tenured profs would have been fired already for the non-PC things they've done. What we see instead is tenured profs being removed from committees and Dean positions etc, which are not protected and are the only punishment universities can levy on tenured profs. You make a great point about public funding. I wouldn't care as much if these were privately funded institutions, but as publicly funded institutions of academic learning it amounts to government-funded propaganda. You can be sure if universities pushed a largely rightwing agenda the uproar would be tremendous from the public and governments would do something about the funding. We saw what happened with Canada Summer Jobs grants.

Most Germans were not members of the Nazi Party, nor should be blamed for the Holocaust. However, if you were a Nazi supporter and/or voter and knew what they were doing to Jews, you should be. The same is true for those who vote for Hamas.

Muslim fundamentalists, now and then, are murdering savages. Most Arabs living in Jerusalem are not Islamic fundamentalist ISIS members. ISIS is the enemy, not your average Arab who just goes to work to feed their family like you and I.

Great. So you're a Crusader. As I said, you're not interested in peace. You're interesting in continuing a conflict that's millennia old. Good luck with that, your great-great-great-great-great grandkids will also be fighting the same war. This is why Osama Bin Laden & his followers wanted to murder you and your family. Ya let's keep that shitshow going. If China came and militarily invaded Canada and killed your family and sucked the oil out of the Alberta oilsands you'd grab a gun and grenades & try to murder the bastards too. So would I. The British and French also took land by military conquest and trickery from aboriginals. Should we give it all back to them? Should we all get up and go back to the UK and France or whatever else? Hell no.

Find me a quote where i've supported PLO or Hamas. Arafat was a sneaky lying a-hole. Back off with the strawmen and false accusations. Whether the Arabs living in the West Bank were Jordanian or "Palestinians" or Chinese I don't care. The fact is that the people who lived in Jerusalem were never a part of Jordan/Transjordan under the British Mandate, and the British had a "Mandate for Palestine", it wasn't called a "Mandate for Transjordan". The fact is also that Arabs have lived in Jerusalem for thousands of years. It doesn't belong to Jews alone, it is the ancient ancestral homeland and important historical religious site to both Jews and Arabs who have lived there spanning thousands of years. Christians also have deep historical and religious ties to the city. I'll ask you again: if aboriginals who long ago lived on the land your hometown sits on wanted to kick you out of your hometown, where your family may have been living for hundreds of years, or allow you to live there but take over full political control of it, would you oblige? No you wouldn't. I wouldn't either. So you're a hypocrite.

Why aren't more people suing for this type of nonsense? Why are we as a society allowing bullies to acquire this kind of power?

Would you give up control of your city to aboriginals because they lived there 500 years ago? Just saying.

Dude, you realize that Jews hadn't lived in Jerusalem for thousands of years right? That there are holy sites built and located in Jerusalem belong to both Jews and Arabs? Just share the damn city as other peace plans by Israel and Palestinians have already proposed, and make it belonging to neither, so both have access to their holy sites. Have you never heard of the Dome of the Rock, a mosque built 691 CE? The Temple Mount? You're saying "well, Jews lived in Jerusalem 2000 years ago so they own it exclusively", ignoring the fact that other people have lived there for 1500+ years. That's just a d!ck-move. Imagine aboriginals coming to your hometown and kicking you and everyone else out of the city because they used to live there 500 years ago, i'm sure you'd be very happy!

How am I giving anyone a pass? ALL I SAID was that Trump moved the US embassy to Israel, and that's a move that isn't peaceful, it has just created more tensions. Any peace plan over the many decades, going back to the 1946 UN Partition Plan, has included Jerusalem being a shared city between both factions. What you're saying is that if you aren't 100% pro-Israel on all issues then you support terrorists. Give me a break dude.

I would say National Post, SUN newspapers, i would argue all Postmedia papers. The Globe and Mail is probably the most centrist and objective english paper in the country. We need to support them. I don't subscribe but I turned off my ad-blocker for the site.

I think that CNN has become just as bad as FOX. We can blame both networks all we want, but the very sad part is that since they are corporate media, they very clearly are operating on a profit motive and little more. FOX News is #1 in cable news ratings, and CNN got a significant jump in ratings throughout 2016 because of their almost 24/7 Trump coverage, and they doubled-down on that post-election on the anti-Trump op-ed stuff for the sake of ratings. The point is, if CNN and FOX doing this results in higher ratings, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. If people were so disgusted by this type of journalism they wouldn't tune in and the news would be more professional and objective. People don't want all the facts, they only want the facts that confirm their biases. There used to be only a few channels on TV that had the news, and everyone in the country watched the same news programs. Now because of cable TV and the internet, there's so many choices that companies offer something for everyone, and we've retreated into our bubbles. That old shared culture is unifying, but it's mostly gone. Remember when everyone was on MLW? Now we have the right-leaning MLW, and the left-leaning JMT forum. We are self-segregating.

I don't favor either Israel nor Palestine in any way whatsoever. I literally don't give a crap. Since I favor peace and only peace, it means actions which hamper the prospects of peace i will criticize, regardless of who does it. So I criticize both ie: hamas terrorists and Israeli settlement builders. The people who make the conflict continue are people like you who choose a side other than peace. It's because you're filled anti-Muslim resentment and hatred. You and the anti-semetic Islamists you despise have more in common than you think.

I don't champion any groups, nor have I. What I champion is a peace settlement, and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is the opposite, and only encouraged more distrust and hatred between the different sides. You've chosen your side clearly. The only side is peace.

So you're a Netanyahu hardliner then. Don't you have some West Bank settlements to build?