Cameraimage cinematography festival in the bin

[Ilkka Nissila]

From a European point of view, I would say that on economic policies the US Democrats are center-right, but on social issues they tend to be more left. The US society itself continues to be very racially segregated, as the rich and poor live in distinct areas and the schools in the poorer districts are poorly funded while the wealthy areas have very good and well-funded schools. This maintains or increases the economic gap between the different communities. When I was working in the US for two years, I went to work in a building with approximately 1000 employees. All the cleaners and janitors were black and there was just one black scientist whom I knew in the whole building. There is no genetic reason the African-Americans only get  jobs that are poorly paid and they don't get educated, it's mostly due to the environment they're growing in. So an effort into reducing the racial divide and the difference in wealth between different groups in the US would make the society stronger (because more talented people would get the chance at developing to their full potential) and it also would make the society safer (because income and education inequalities lead to crime).

Because of global warming, there will be a whole lot more immigration in the future. I would expect there to be hundreds of millions of climate refugees trying to get to Europe and North America from hotter areas of the globe in the next 100 years or so. I think it's best to try to let them in to such a degree as possible (since we are mostly responsible for the warming, we ought to give shelter) and give them good education so that they contribute positively to society. A lot of populist leaders want to just shut down the borders but this becomes unviable when the numbers of immigrants increase by 100x from current figures. Since birth rates are declining rapidly in the Western countries, new blood is needed to keep the society active. How this is managed is a key question if we want to maintain some resemblance of an organized society. Since leaders have basically chosen not to curb carbon emissions and instead we are driving at accelerating speed towards a brick wall, the option of continuing as if nothing were happening does not really exist in the near future.

 

[Ilkka Nissila]

Honestly this shouldn't be too surprising when you look at how the Biden Administration behaved over the last four years, and when you consider the palace coup which took place to put in place Kamala Harris, and how the Democrat Machine just totally ignored the will of their own voters in mattering in the process. 

Biden was too old and so they switched to Harris as the candidate. No laws were broken, as the party is free to put whomever they want on the ballot. There should be some kind of age limit on political candidates as many of the most powerful politicians today are really old and of questionable mental fitness. Also a limit on how much a single person or company can donate to campaigns should be limited to make the donating more egalitarian rather than the rich people controlling everything.

USA has gravely depleted its weapon stocks. USA needs to immediately stop sending hundreds of billions of arms to Ukraine, as all it is accomplishing at the moment is: 1) needlessly perpetuating yet more deaths of Ukrainian men (they truly are trying to take literally the saying "until the last Ukrainian", this is going to be a demographic disaster for post war Ukraine) & 2) running dry USA's own stocks which is putting at risk USA's own security should they need it for themselves.

USA has only been spending only a few percent of their defense budget on Ukraine, and a lot of it has been used to give  old weapons that have expired and needed to be replenished anyway (so most of the money was spent didn't actually go to Ukraine directly but to defense contractors in the USA, boosting domestic employment). Ukrainians know what it is like to live under Russian oppression and they'd rather die than experience that again. America has never been occupied, lucky for them. I think the West needs to stop giving Ukraine restrictions on arms use and let them fight as deep into Russia as Russia has attacked in Ukraine. Otherwise a fair border can never return as the fighting always continues only on Ukrainian territory, gradually demolishing what was.

How much of that was due to "outsourcing security to the USA" vs being due to: 1) having a collective living memory of the recent horrors of WW1 & WW2, with zero desire whatsoever to repeat that under any circumstance 2) having ever close economic ties with each other now within Europe than ever before (the more you're trading with a country, the less likely you wish to go to war and ruin all that prosperity)

The memory of war in Europe has faded and new generations do not remember it, and this can lead to selfish and indecent behavior towards other people. Those close economic ties can be severed. Populist leaders already lead the UK to leave the EU single market with a hard Brexit lying before the election that of course they wouldn't leave the single market. Similar things can happen in other European countries, e.g., France was close to being lead by a populist far-right Le Pen. Eventually the economic co-operation can end and result in a hot war among European countries. Right now it is only Russia who is trying to return to the 17th century of nation states fighting wars over land and looting property, but this kind of thinking could spread. Russia is supporting rightwing populist movements across Europe because they know that a divided Europe is a weak Europe.

Unfortunately true, because no matter who the people elect to represet them in Washington DC, its "the establishment" (the unelected bureaucrats) who hold all the cards. 

The bureaucrats were nominated by elected representatives, and as some of them serve longer than one electoral cycle, they can have the positive effect of stabilizing the society against too rapid changes (the US government is always by one party and so there can be a zigzagging effect of one direction and then reversing the direction repeatedly, which is not productive over the long term). In foreign policy, consistency is very important to build trust with other countries. However, now there is the world's richest man who apparently is taking the role of a shadow president. He owns the most popular media platform and effectively can control a large part of how people think with changes to algorithms behind the scenes. In the US, if you have money, you can be untouchable, as Trump has shown, he is still a free man after 4000+ law suits.

 

The terribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan happened under the Biden Presidency.

True, Biden did handle it badly, but before he took office, Trump threw the Afghan government under the bus by making a deal with the Taliban and releasing 5000 prisoners. The Afghan government never had a chance after that.

NATO primarily existed to oppose the USSR, and the moment The Cold War ended then NATO itself should also have been wound down and abolished. 

Russia is allied with Iran and North Korea today and to some degree also with China, and combined those countries can be very powerful economically and they're spending a lot of money on military build-up. Russia is trying to re-occupy the previous parts of the Soviet Union including Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, and they're making threats that they will have a new world order from Vladivostok to Lisbon. I think NATO is needed today more than ever especially as Europe has cut its defense spending so much in the years since the cold war ended, people in many countries in Europe assumed that there would be peace and prosperity after the Soviet Union collapsed, but here they are again. Russia is testing where they can just take foreign land and resources. Now they're using threats about nuclear weapons use to prevent a fair defense.

 

[eatstoomuchjam]

8 hours ago, IronFilm said:

The data does indeed show there has been a clear swing to the extreme left (but it happened even earlier than 2016), thus why I said that.

 

No, the data you provided shows that the Democrats shifted left on two issues, and in neither case to the "far left."  In particular, many of the Democrats who lost their races this year were immigration centrists/hardliners on border security.  One place where they did move a bit left is on a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are currently in the country, many of them doing jobs that current citizens won't take (such as working for low wages in slaughterhouses or picking crops).  Others might call that "living in reality" that mass deportation of those immigrants would be economic disaster for this country - but a path to citizenship can protect them from some of the abuses heaped on them by employers.

9 hours ago, IronFilm said:

t's now the Republicans who are closer to Democrats of the past (such as the era of Bill Clinton) than modern Democrats of 2024 are, who have abandoned what the Democrat Party used to be, leaving that ground instead to only Republicans to claim. 

That's a really stupid statement.  The shift of Republicans to the far right is well-understood and documented.  If you think of the Trump/Vance ticket as closer to the center than the Harris/Walz ticket was, you were either paying no attention to the last election or your head is far enough up your ass that there's no point in discussing politics with you.

[Andrew Reid]

11 hours ago, IronFilm said:

"The data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade. This has distanced them from the median voter. Notably, the shift began in 2016. This suggests that Trump’s election radicalised the left, not the right."

https://www.ft.com/content/73a1836d-0faa-4c84-b973-554e2ca3a227

The data does indeed show there has been a clear swing to the extreme left (but it happened even earlier than 2016), thus why I said that.

It's now the Republicans who are closer to Democrats of the past (such as the era of Bill Clinton) than modern Democrats of 2024 are, who have abandoned what the Democrat Party used to be, leaving that ground instead to only Republicans to claim. 

If Democrats want to win elections again, they should look to reclaim this lost ground they've given away to the Republicans. But it might be a multiyear process to regain the trust of voters (as it's been a decade plus long swing away from the median voters the Democrat Party has been doing, you can't change that overnight), otherwise voters will just suspect politicians are doing what they usually do to voters: lying to them. (take for instance Kamala Harris suddenly trying to be "tough on the border" in the final weeks of the campaign, come on man, nobody is taking her seriously over that! It's just pure political spin, and not what she truly believes, in fact her doing that out of desperation just made her look even less authentic)

 

Monumentally stupid.

(And the source of all this is Elon Musk on X, you just happen to parrot it).

It is simply insane to suggest that the current Republican party is now closer to the Clinton era democrats.

They are not even remotely similar and not even close to the Bush era Republican party or even 1980s Reagan. The Republican party of the past is dead.

If you think the likes of Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, Laura Loomer and Tom Homan are the spiritual successor to Bill Clinton you want your fucking head examining.

It just goes to show how little you know about politics outside of social media BS.

By the way, the values you are labelling far-left are nothing of the sort... They are centre-left neoliberal policies, not socialism or communism. They are not even really that unusual, and come from people's well meaning intentions in lieu of being less racist. That's not to say everyone has to agree with them and that there aren't major practical issues in terms of the implementation of it.

You are free to want less immigration, not more.

You are free to want less affirmative action and wokeness.

But for fucks sake get your facts right before making your mind up.

[Andrew Reid]

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

 

Let's not forget that many of these most prominent people who were on the other side to Kamala Harris and the Democrat Machine were people who had for most of their lives been Democrats (or at the very least liberal / Democrat leaning / voting), until that is the Democrats lurched to the extreme left, and left them behind: Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Elon Musk, Dave Rubin, etc

I watched the Joe Rogan / Musk podcast in its entirety and can see why they have the opinions they do on the progressive politics of the more extreme Democrats. But the extremists in that party are not a majority. You need to ask yourself also why the woke issues are being amplified and dominate the world's discourse and who is doing the amping and why.

It is a point of failure and division in western society and the Russia/China-compromised social media engine is amping up the discourse around it to make us all fall out and get angry at our media, institutions, judiciary and government.

Musk has his own valid personal reasons for switching side but it's mostly opportunistic... He sees an opportunity to get into government, pump up the value of Dogecoin and enact change which will favour his businesses.

Trump and Musk are not going to be best friends, there's no substance to it. It's just a circle jerk thing.

The trick is to fool the rest of us into thinking there's a genuine agreement and friendship that binds together all the people you mentioned prior.

In fact, as the last Trump government shows they all hate each other and will barely last 2 months together, it will be like the Apprentice with a new firing every week just like it was in 2016-2020.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

For all of these people to have called them "conservatives or right wingers" would have been flat out wrong for most of their lives. 

https://theconversation.com/the-intellectual-dark-web-just-won-the-election-meet-the-coalition-of-joe-rogan-rfk-jr-tulsi-gabbard-and-elon-musk-243380

Musk wants to wear many different hats at once... He is an environmentalist selling green cars. He is a MAGA guy and hangs out with the Murdochs and right wing mainstream media / press.

He is a space rocket engineer and world's most clever guy, at the same time as buying a website for 44 billion and proceeding to destroy it, not a smart move really.

He had an allegedly highly abusive upbringing and father, and has allegedly got some quite bad psychological issues because of it.

And he clearly is an able talent and has an ability to get a lot out of his employees in terms of technology and achievement... but only because of huge government subsidies from NASA and the green car venture capitalism industry.

He's a very complicated guy and so are his politics.

But it's possible to judge someone not by their achievements but instead by the company they keep.

And let's face it a mid-life crisis & divorce happens to the best of us.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

The Dow Jones is still up a massive two thousand points since the election (nearly five percent)

Wow really sticking it to the establishment there then.

Men of the people!

It will be right down once Trump and his team start to make material concrete decisions in government.

How is the removal by force (with military involvement) all the undocumented workers from agriculture for example going to impact food prices and inflation?

And a lot of these deportation victims will be well on their way to becoming valuable hard-working members of society with wives and husbands, families, jobs, paying tax... And Trump wants to end all those personal success stories before they've barely even got started.

Is that what American is about now?

Think about it.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Let's not forget that democracy was also an issue too, and on this point the exit polling showed that Trump was beating Harris as the better candidate for people who cared about democracy:

The threat to democracy was shared by both sides with both sides pointing the finger in the opposite direction.

Can we have that discussion about democracy in 4 years when Trump has stitched up the entire judicial system in America, made himself a king above law and is holding Russian style elections for show?

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Honestly this shouldn't be too surprising when you look at how the Biden Administration behaved over the last four years, and when you consider the palace coup which took place to put in place Kamala Harris, and how the Democrat Machine just totally ignored the will of their own voters in mattering in the process.

Pretty ironic you mention a "palace coup" when Trump had people literally storm the capital.

They can choose who they want, it's their own party... yes a proper primary and much earlier dropping out for Biden would have worked much better for them in the end. It was all mishandled very badly.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

People forget how unusual it was what Trump did! He was the first president since Jimmy Carter to not start a new war! Hopefully the next four years will in this particular matter, be the same as his first term of presidency.

It's not about STARTING WARS it's about preventing them, that's what NATO and nuclear deterrence is about and as others have pointed out that's why we have American-backed security for other countries like Taiwan and why the UK and US work so closely together on intelligence and security matters.

Trump is a trojan horse sent by Russia, North Korea and potentially other bad actors including allegedly China to weaken all of that security - for you in Australia included.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

USA has been so eager to jump into new wars for so long, hopefully this is another trend that Trump can break, and maybe even end.

No, America has a responsibility.

They don't have the right to shy away from it under the guise of being all doveish all of a sudden.

The impact on Afghanistan by withdrawing was horrific.

Would you like to live under the Taliban?

And why did we spend all those trillions of dollars and all those lost lives only to go and have that shitty outcome?

It was a disgraceful decision by Trump, and bafflingly followed-through upon by Biden.

The message we are sending to Taiwan at the moment is also very bad... That the security agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

NATO primarily existed to oppose the USSR, and the moment The Cold War ended then NATO itself should also have been wound down and abolished.

That is laughable man...

NATO exists for there to be peace in Europe and the West.

Are you suggesting that military collaboration between democratic countries is a BAD THING?

Who will come to help out Australia or Japan if you are attacked by communist China? Are you going to defend yourself on your own? I don't think so.

 

[Andrew Reid]

2025 going to be a bad time to be poor in the US

[majoraxis]

Thanks for the above video interview - I will check it out!

 

5 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Trump is a trojan horse sent by Russia, North Korea and potentially other bad actors including allegedly China to weaken all of that security - for you in Australia included.

I highly doubt that Trump is a trojan horse sent by Russia, North Korea, but I am open to any evidence.

While allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election are well-documented (e.g., U.S. intelligence reports),  Investigations such as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference found insufficient evidence to charge Trump or his campaign with criminal conspiracy.

Trump's action during his Presidency:

Russia: His administration enacted sanctions against Russia for election interference, the annexation of Crimea, and the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the UK.

China: Trump initiated a trade war with China, imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and restricting Chinese tech companies like Huawei and TikTok.

North Korea:  When negotiating with North Korea, Trump did not make significant concessions or changes in U.S. policy. Sanctions against North Korea remained in place throughout Trump presidency.

I was surprised to read that Biden also maintained the tariffs against China that Trump enacted in light of Hunter Biden's Business Activities:

CEFC China Energy: Hunter Biden was involved in business ventures with CEFC China Energy, a Chinese conglomerate. Reports indicate that he and his firm received approximately $3.8 million from CEFC between 2013 and 2018.

Payments to Biden Family Members: In 2017, accounts linked to Hunter Biden's associate, Rob Walker, received a $3 million wire transfer from a Chinese energy company. Subsequently, Hunter Biden, James Biden (Joe Biden's brother), Hallie Biden (widow of Joe Biden's son Beau), and an unknown fourth Biden received a total of $1.3 million from these accounts.

On that note, I would appreciate it, when people respond to this thread, if they would share if they have identified conformation bias as I did above - I thought Biden would have eased up on the tariffs on China, which appears not to be case - I'm guilty as charged ; )  That way we can identify how we have be "programmed" by the media we consume in the face of the actual facts of the situation we confirm along the way.

[Andrew Reid]

You do seem to care about the facts.

So why support Trump?