My favourite part of that final fight is that this dude breaks a guys neck for no reason after comprehensively beating him, gets booed, and is then shocked that he’s getting booed.

My second favorite thing about the movie is that it’s actually shot in Kowloon walled city.

It’s fun and games until Kash asks you to put your name down on known falsehoods and implicates you in fraud.

It’s worth remembering the hype cycle when it comes to these things.

Notes for anyone else: when someone speaks on complicated topics with 100 percent confidence in exclusively absolutes, they’re usually not a good source of information.

NAFTA did not in any holistic way “destroy Canada’s economy”. It resulted in a mostly free trade zone and the specific upsides of that are very well studied. To be clear, all parties (yes even Mexico) benefitted from this arrangement, even the US.

The interdependencies created however, result in asymmetric strategic dependence. There is no credible case for why Canada-US trade prior or even after 2016 was bad for the US, but their current admin wants to blow it up anyways. In that environment, Canada just by virtue of being smaller bears a much larger disadvantage.

It’s easy in retrospect to say that we should never have done this and there’s a fair case that a more measured approach should have been taken, but the few percentage points of less economic growth this would have caused compounded over the last 3-4 decades would have resulted in all parties being significantly less wealthy than they are today.

Who do you think is going to do the ass kicking? American isn’t Nazi Germany - they didn’t come to facism through calamity and poverty. The US got there through wealth concentration, scapegoating, and cumulative cultural rot. But the US is also coming to facism from a position of immense wealth and power. Nobody is coming to save the US from themselves, because no one else can.

Isreal has de-facto veto power over any deal since they can just fly over and blow up something if a deal gets signed that they don’t like and most of the US political establishment will not only not criticize them but they’ll defend them.

Who is we? Plenty of people support this.

Context: US political polarization is too severe to be contained. It’s too severe for non-partisan organizations and institutions to truly exist. These aren’t political differences competing in the marketplace of ideas. It’s opposing cultures that are more invested in their side winning than in the system that keeps all of this mostly non-violent (democracy).

In this case: Populations shift, maps have to be periodically redrawn by people. Those people will wield political power whether they want to or not, so controlling who gets that power and what they do with it is a natural incentive.

Many countries do these maps in a mostly non-partisan way, but that is only possible when the majority of people believe the system of democracy to be more important than any one (potentially bad) outcome. That is simply not the case in the US. The power to redraw maps must exist and at the level of political polarization that exists in the US, that power will ultimately be corrupted for partisan ends.

One that he just announced on fake Twitter without even consulting any of the required allies apparently lol. Not sure you can call that a plan.

Rubio is hoping to stay alive next to Trump long enough to be crowned Governor of Cuba. The fact is that despite Rubio himself being useless, this could actually work.

Uh oh. Somebody’s going to get a call from Bibi and immediately back down from this stance.

It’s worth understanding the causation here. Was Joe Biden a staunch Zionist because of AIPAC funding? Or did AIPAC fund Biden knowing he was a staunch Zionist in order to ensure he would win?

To me, especially post Oct-7th, Biden seemed like a true believer. He seemed to believe in the Zionist project in the form of unconditional support of the Israeli government (no matter who was in power there) as part of his personal sense of morality. As in, don’t steal , don’t lie, support isreal. It’s why he wasn’t able to even try to reign in Israel no matter how much Bibi humiliated him or openly colluded with Trump or whatever.

Having a geopolitical stance as a part of your basic personal morality (as opposed to a reasoned stance based on available information) is of course incredibly stupid and dangerous. But that’s my read on Biden.

Meanwhile a guy like Cory Booker seems to have just knowingly sold out to AIPAC and is now committed to that position. AIPAC is designed to create an easy path for American politicians in terms of a certain degree if good PR in the press and campaign funding. Many politicians simply took that deal. Biden never struck me as one of these, especially not at the end.

Too many of them are true believers. For example Joe Biden wasn’t a Zionist because of AIPAC. He did it for the love of the game.

You say that and yet the nightmare scenario of Tucker Carlson winning the GOP nomination on an anti-isreal platform (sincere or not) inches closer and closer. The DNC is going to prove to be more rigidly Zionist than the Republicans .

Even if that weren’t true, the idea that this type of open corruption is grounds for firing in a Trump admin is laughable. Trump himself is far more corrupt, and hegseth being corrupt just goes further to ensure his loyalty. He can always have Bondi do a selective prosecution of this should he step out of line.

It’s basically kompromat that only Trump (through control of the DOJ through Bondi) can use.

We all said rightly that the president doesn’t control gas prices, at least those of us who had half a clue how economics worked did.

The logic is mostly sound because president’s don’t have a magic dial to control oil prices. But the logic also has sane decision making baked into it - president’s consider the effects that their actions will have on the price of oil and don’t do shit like this that will definitely increase it. Since that sanity no longer holds , the logic no longer holds .

That doesn’t matter if he’s been failing upwards ever since.

I visited friends near Bath last year and they decided to take me canal boating. They signed one form to rent the boat and then a guy came on board and taught us how to drive it. I didn’t sign anything. They didn’t check my license or sort out any insurance or anything. I drove it for over 3 hrs lol. I was thinking how much paperwork such a thing would take of this was in the US or Canada.

You like many Americans are trying to solve cultural rot by putting in more rules. “If only we had a rule that ___” this wouldn’t have happened. That’s not going to solve this. Being a congress-person is a skill. It requires actual skill, and it takes time to get to know how to be most effective. You can put in this rule if you want, and it might solve the problem you’re targeting, but it will create many more. You can’t solve problems caused by cultural rot (literally tens of millions of voters being okay with this) by putting in more administrative rules. Ultimately , democracies grant the people the power to destroy democracy. That is what the US is choosing.

Presumably the US would allow any other tankers to pass. They don’t want to block other countries. The remarkable thing is that they’re allowing Iranian tankers to pass, and the reason is that blocking them is basically an act of was against China.

I am not sure how abstinence only being the only acceptable option is any better than it being the best option.

The distinction is important because perpetuating their only acceptable option despite it being demonstrably ineffective indicates that child welfare is not the primacy concern in play.

Again being Pro-life does not necessarily mean that they will vote for dismantling social services.

And yet, despite it not being necessarily true it is absolutely true in every practical sense in reality.

I simply don’t understand why you insist on assuming that they are lying.

I simply don’t understand why you insist on taking political talking points as 100 percent sincere instead of looking at the tangible actions being taken in this space.

Is that not what you are doing? You are blaming them for voting how they do.

You don’t even know what to do with this definition after quoting it. If course I “blame” them for voting how they do. Is assigning someone responsibility for their actions “demonizing” them? Lol. You’re lost in the sauce bruh.

Ultimately I think we have reached that 3rd situation. I have decided that nothing I say is going to change your mind on this and am choosing to walk away.

Other countries are able to have this discussion in far more healthy and productive ways. Instead of being content with your one insight that prolife and pro-choice are talking past each other, I suggest you ask yourself why that is, and why this positioning of the discussion is basically unique to the US. There’s a whole wide world out there.