I read it the same way the parent did - can you clarify?
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.
Readit NewsDead Comment
Because you are lowering the discourse here.
Eight replies to my post and no one has mentioned China yet.
Has China been accepted as a "real" enemy? To me, China is the main virtual enemy that politicians trout out to create fear and distraction.
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.
> "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.
What is happening?
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.
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment...
> 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?
He didn't lose his entire business for being wrong. He lost his entire business for being wrong, doubling down on being wrong in light of contradictory evidence, tripling down on the doubling down, being sued, ignoring the lawsuit, having a default judgment rendered against him, getting to a trial-based penalties phase, and performing so badly on the stand (along with a major error on the part of his lawyer, but one the law accounts for and has a process to ameliorate, which the lawyer did not follow) that a jury of his peers awarded a $1.5 billion dollar finding against him.
If anything, the takeaway from this story is that the United States Court System is still a system of law and when they demand your attention, you ignore that demand at your peril.
> Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence?
Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. And to corroborate your point: perhaps whether or not they lie, the public opinion already holds them accountable so no legal action is needed. But to properly answer the hypothetical: they retain a legal department in preparation for such lawsuits. Perhaps Jones should have done that, since he had quite a bit of spare money to spend on engaging with the law of the land he lives in. Instead, he chose to flout the authority of that legal system, to his loss.
> Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them.
Lol, you know that isn't what's happening.
From TFA:
There is no doubt that shaking a child can cause injuries, including those that comprise the shaken baby syndrome triad. Newer research, however, has shown that shaking is not the only way to cause those injuries: They can also result from an accidental “short fall” (e.g., falling off a bed) as well as from other medical causes (e.g., pneumonia, improper medication)—all of which were true of Roberson’s daughter. In fact, a 2024 study found that the injuries historically used to diagnose shaking are actually more likely to result from accidents than from shaking.
So I think we all understand that the headline is inaccurate, that the only thing that has been discredited is its diagnosis or use as evidence of child abuse.
It should bother people to read crappy arguments like the one contained directly in the first sentence of an article like this. As a staunch advocate against the death penalty, that sort of intentional deception weakens the case.
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.