US Politics - A Society in Meltdown

According to @anon7035031 economic logic we should be in an economic depression as we are running trade surpluses funny how our unemployment rate has tumbled to 5.5% from a high of 15% in 2012 our economy has grown by on average 6% over the last 3-4 years and our debt/GDP ratio is down to 68% at the end of 2018 compared to a high of over 130% during the height of the recession🤔

That’s not what I’m saying at all, trade surpluses are obviously good, but trade deficits are not necessarily bad either. Ireland’s economy is doing very well since 2008 due to it’s business friendly environment. The only caution I’ve stated is over reliance on MNCs if there is a global slowdown (which there is a lot of evidence for already).

Oh dear, Democrats can’t agree anti-Semitism is a bad thing. This will not end well.

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This is what passes for discourse in America. Over here it would be satire. When you see stuff like this you begin to understand how @anon7035031 can be such a simpleton and yet be convinced he knows things.

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You don’t get it mate, there is no crisis on the US southern border.

Only one of us works for the civil service of a banana republic mate, and it’s not me.

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Don’t know too many banana republics with business friendly environments🤔

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On another thread people were saying that satire websites were struggling for relevance.

The reason this is indeed true is because the truth of Trump and Brexit and the far right and their brainwashed supporters is waaaaay more ridiculous and ludicrous than anything a satire website can come up with.

It’s also why Jeremy Hopkiss hasn’t made an appearance for two years - he’d be a bleeding heart liberal at this stage compared to the headbanger you reference in your post.

:joy:

Ouch

The concept of a banana Republic with a “business-friendly environment” (a euphemism for the destruction of democracy and the infliction of a decades long reign of torture, terror and genocide on the native population ) is actually the archetypal US colonial “regime change” project. Guatemala 1954.

Well, well, well.

Which party can’t agree anti-Semitism is a bad thing, again?

The rotten, racist Republicans, as if anybody living a reality-based existence needed to be told.

The only hate expressed by a US congressman or woman in recent times was that expressed by congresswoman Omar, who said Jewish American politicians held equal loyalty to Israel. That’s as anti-Semitic as it gets.

Deary me, your beloved Republicans are shown up as actual anti-Semites, and you’re still digging. :laughing:

And you’re deliberately confusing Jewish Americans with Israelis. You literally see no difference.

As you do when you’re a neo-Nazi - which you are, given that you debate entirely on neo-Nazi “talking points” on this forum.

Another excellent piece by Peter Beinart. Some key passages below.

The white supremacist neo-Nazi @anon7035031 would do well to read them, and begin to educate himself.

There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together. “Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other.

But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and antisemitism don’t always go together. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.

Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.

And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”.

In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go. You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”.

Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.

After being criticised by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us”, Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.

More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.

In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.

Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in antisemitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.


It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity.

For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.

Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two-state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.

Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.

Irelands debt to GDP is 68% as of 2017

Trump currently doesn’t have a Communications Director after the long serving Bill Shine (8 months), formerly of Fox News, left the job a few days ago.

I think the stand out candidate to replace him has been found. He ticks all the boxes. You’re hired, Tucker.

He was saying Booo-urns.

Is Tim Apple anything to Fiona Apple?