You're reaching to suggest that lack of sales tax was a reason that customers used Amazon. Like the sibling comment mentions, every other e-commerce site or platform had the same advantage.
The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.
His point was that Westerners aren't necessarily going to be fooled, with the example of the AP (Western) viewing his declaration of martial law unsympathetically.
I agree, although it is a "real" enemy in the sense that their ascension is a threat to US hegemony or the idea of the USA as the preeminent world superpower.
I don't see it as rational, but there is definitely an argument that the USA ought to remain positioned as number one, having the ability to dictate global politics. I don't think we deserve it, but it's certainly 'better' for us in the sense that it gives us an advantage and thus might improve our quality of life (cheaper imports, blah blah blah). I view that argument as entitled and promoting the status quo.
The Chinese people have worked hard. Actually, people all over the world work hard, although the Chinese have gone past industrialization and have a massive and capable population. The idea that they wouldn't have more power and would need to somehow remain under the US's thumb, where we get to say how they treat Taiwan or what currency they can trade in with other countries, just seems absurd. People come up with bullshit reasons for why the US ought to retain some control over their politics or how the rest of the world engages with the Chinese (and we don't just get to do that anyway), e.g., the Chinese are mean to the Uyghurs, as if anyone ever gave a fuck about the Uyghurs or whoever twenty years ago.
In all that sense, China is certainly a real threat. But the level of entitlement behind that argument is so blatant that I can't take it seriously.
Well said. I don't mind that the US is doing what they're doing. It probably even make sense for the US to work against China. What I don't like is the massive "China bad" propaganda campaign when in reality, it's just jostling for power and economics.
> Well said. I don't mind that the US is doing what they're doing.
But with Trumpism again being the winner, how much of the world still view the US positively? Obama's Iran Deal was a USA-EU-Iran agreement, when Trump pulled it, it didn't just piss off "the enemy" (Iran) but also the allies (EU), and it destroyed US's credibility, even with a Democratic president, anyone going to do a deal with the USA will ask for guarantees in case the deal gets wrecked after the next presidential election...
> "If you don't believe the lab leak theory, you're the enemy," he said. "It really is viewed as a truism, that it has been definitively established that the lab leak is the source and if you believe otherwise you're just simply wrong."
(He is saying this in the voice of someone he disagrees with... 'this is what they think.') What an insane load of horseshit. It was hammered over and over again that the lab leak theory was racist and bad, and it was "definitively established" many times over that the lab leak theory was simply too racist and bad to possibly be true.
Further, statements like this...
> He says the lab leak theory is being used to create distrust in scientific institutions more broadly.
are pure narcissism. The lab leak theory is there because it's an obvious one, and people (on 'both sides') prefer to believe the truth is on their side. Distrust of scientific institutions is a secondary consequence. The primary fight is over who is 'correct' or what the 'truth' is. But Caulfield prefers to insist that the entire reason someone would promote the lab leak theory is because they just heckin hate him and people like him so much, rather than it's simply the conclusion they find most obvious.
how do you even draw conclusions about something that happened years ago halfway around the world?
i get why it's a possibility, but is there really any evidence besides "it's obvious"?
because if not, it's better to just have no conclusion than going with your gut obvious one here. it's not like it's actionable - it's okay to not have any conclusion at all.
But I think you hit the nail on the point that “it is actionable”.
You argue any such conclusion is not actionable. But it is, and to make example, one can imagine that senators will be more circumspect in sponsoring labs to do this kind of work. If no one held the opinion, they wouldn’t care a hoot.
Is it a certainty? For sure it’s not. But having opinions is worthwhile.
They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump.
The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about.
An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison.
> HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said.
> Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election?
> RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with.
Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
Of course, you can also dig around and find actual footage of the Madison square garden rally held by the Trump campaign... Which looked pretty Nazi-adjacent at least.
There was a time before the Nazi party was orchestrating a genocide. The party didn't start obviously evil. It found its way there through a series of circumstances and a need to maintain control in the face of global opposition and no policy within the party itself to actually address successfully the problems Germany was facing, leading to blind trust of a leader and his his inner circle over sense, reason, and morality.
There is a real and tangible risk that the modern American GOP is following the same path.
And hey, the German people who supported the Nazis didn't want to hear what they were turning into either. Their descendants got to live with that on their consciences.
... but back on topic: none of this explains why, if the accusation isn't true, nobody is suing CNN for defamation over these accusations.
I don't know that much about literacy rates and social competition in ancient Greece, but I suspect it may have been in Plato's personal interests that others remain illiterate.
The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.