411–420 of 648 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there something about Pence's track record that suggests he'd be better for USA on foreign policy?
Pence is predictable. Diplomats can build plans around predictable. You can make deals, treaties and alliances with predictable. Your opponents know what to expect from you. If nothing else, it at least provides some stability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"and better access to technology for even the poorest folk" I hear this one a lot, I don't think it matters or is relevant. I've spent time in third world countries I met people sleeping, working and eating in rubish dumps, and they're not even considered the poorest! I didn't see them running around with technology, nor do I see how that would change there situation much.
> I hear this one a lot, do you have a source to prove this? What kinds of source would be most convincing for such a broad question such as this? How about the fact that as many people have escaped extreme poverty since 1990 as there are human beings alive in Europe [1]? Average global purchasing power more than doubling [2]? Or maybe global agricultural output growing more than twice as fast as the world population…
If the government is corrupt, and steal infact money from citizenss, is a cell phone going to put food on your table? It could actually be used against a population. Think mass surveillance, censorship or false news for example.
Also, the OP said the "poorest", from my own observations the "poorest" will not have money for cellphones, electricity or credit. You might be referring to less wealthy people than you, but the poorest?
Look at all the tech available in the US and 50 million still go hungry [1].
I believe amongst technologsits there is a false view that technology "just makes things better". The reality is technology is a tool and it has to be used for the right applications by those of us with good intentions. Modern technology offers potential, it's not always essential.
[1] http://indiafacts.org/americas-most-desperate-why-are-50-mil...
The most amazing thing to me is that the 0bama administration was very good at Orwellian manipulation, yet it was rarely remarked upon. I mean, the guy got a Nobel Peace Prize, then proceeded with eight years of undeclared war on many different countries. "Droning" became a verb...
....can't we just drone this guy?
That's strange, I just bought the book off Amazon yesterday. Coincidences, coincidences.
Kind of ironic given Bush and Obama were the ones to expand the surveillance state, Hillary demonised the shit out of Russia to try create an enemy/scapegoat, and here Trump is, only a few days in power, not having done anything particularly bad. Also, I should add - for Democrats out there who keep trying to compare Trump to Hitler, say he's fascist, etc... That weak rhetoric is what gave you guys your worst electio…
I'm down-voting you, here's why: This is a headline and an article about "alternative facts", relating them to a book about comprehensive "alternative fact" propaganda. Not about any of things that you listed. You didn't add any meaningful information to the discussion, but have added divisive and heavily argued opinions, in a way that only furthers their divisiveness. This is not a comment on your opinions. This is…
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
Meanwhile, those of us who have read it will remember that 1984 dwells on hard-left totalitarianism and its habit of doing things like censorship, the desire for unitary thinking, interfering with disagreement by controlling the language and so on.
Your comment doesn't actually rebut anything about what the OP said, but does try to lower the visibility of his views (suppressing speech) and does attack an entire class of speech on the grounds of "divisiveness" and "destructiveness" (unitary thinking).
Trump is many things but hard-left is not one of them. Stupid phrasing today by his press guy aside, Trump's path to victory was built on a repudiation of 1984 style tactics:
• Language control: political correctness, where words and phrases are redefined or suppressed through taboo
• The 5-minutes hate: the establishment against Russia
• Loyalty to the party: in our world the closest equivalent to a vast unaccountable power structure would be called "Washington" or "the elite".
The parallels aren't perfect by any means; Trump loves surveillance just like Democrats do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes; a couple of years after the Stasi was created, though it was called Kommissariat 5 back then, before the GDR was officially established and could have official agencies.
So, you are claiming that he looked into the future to see what happens with the Stasi? But even if you want to get technical: He started writing in 1946 and the final manuscript was presented in 1948. The "Volkskommissariat" may have been around, but you really can not compare their activity to the Stasi. If you were talking about them, then your quote makes no sense at all.
"In a time of deciet, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about that. Look into the 2010 price to Liu Xiaobo. Norway worked for 6 years to try to repair relations with China after that and trade has only recently been opened again.
The Liu Xiaobo case shows that (some) other countries see the Nobel committee as an unofficial extension of the Norwegian government. If China thought that the Nobel prize was handed out by 6 random dudes in some private club then the Nobel prize probably wouldn't have had such an impact on the relations between the Chinese and Norwegian governments.
The most amazing thing to me is that the 0bama administration was very good at Orwellian manipulation, yet it was rarely remarked upon. I mean, the guy got a Nobel Peace Prize, then proceeded with eight years of undeclared war on many different countries. "Droning" became a verb...
The whole phenomenon of political correctness and the flattening of unrelated things into hate words e.g. how dislike of Islam (not a race) is now routinely called "racism" is all very reminiscent of how Big Brother set about restricting the space of what citizens could think by changing the language. Of course the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has largely been discredited now, but the basic tendencies still exist. And lots of people have been expressing frustration with a PC culture for years, Trump simply realised that giving lip service to the concept of being anti-PC was far less effective than actually being anti-PC.
The way the administration manipulated the media through controlling access to press conferences, and then eventually abolishing media Q&A entirely, was remarked on at the time. But it was a subtle move that most people were not consciously aware of, they just felt at a subconscious level that the telescreens were more overtly propagandistic than in the past.