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America quo vadis - torture, oppress sience that doesn´t fit in the worldview...

Trump on waterboarding: 'We have to fight fire with fire' - CNNPolitics.com

Donald Trump will Klimaseite der Umweltbehörde schließen - SPIEGEL ONLINE (sry, did not find the english section, it´s about oppressing the research on climate change)


Nobody afraid here where this journey might end?

I was rather unhappy about the candidate and shocked, when he won.

The climate thing doesn't worry me, though taking the site down the way it was done is a warning sign.

The torture discussion was never well enough debated and the term torture never really operationally defined for ethical use. Things that are and such that are definitely not torture were simply lumped under the heading and the mixed bag was forbidden for simplicity's sake as populism tends to do.
That Trump seems never to have given it much thought is not surprising. He seems to be stuck in the locker room level of language and thought. This is distasteful and harms the US, but in reality it is due to our shunning the job of consensus building earlier.
 
I was rather unhappy about the candidate and shocked, when he won.

The climate thing doesn't worry me, though taking the site down the way it was done is a warning sign.

The torture discussion was never well enough debated and the term torture never really operationally defined for ethical use. Things that are and such that are definitely not torture were simply lumped under the heading and the mixed bag was forbidden for simplicity's sake as populism tends to do.
That Trump seems never to have given it much thought is not surprising. He seems to be stuck in the locker room level of language and thought. This is distasteful and harms the US, but in reality it is due to our shunning the job of consensus building earlier.

Waterboarding is torture by every international legal definition and also by American legal precedence. Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US PoWs were charged and convicted of torture by the US.

I thought this whole 'should the US torture people' debate had ended when Bush left the White House.
 
Waterboarding is torture by every international legal definition and also by American legal precedence. Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US PoWs were charged and convicted of torture by the US.

I thought this whole 'should the US torture people' debate had ended when Bush left the White House.

My experience tells me that waterboarding can be torture. To consider it torture as prescribed in the training sessions is silly. That is how it was allowed in interrogation. The real problem is using the term torture for so different things. That is an insult to those that are really tortured.

Hopefully the discussion has not stopped. Bush had had an interesting attempt to define what torture is made. But that was first steps and was killed, when idiots that wanted to cry "torture" for their own political propaganda, for ignorance or because they couldn't handle the hard talk killed the debate.
 
Waterboarding is torture by every international legal definition and also by American legal precedence. Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US PoWs were charged and convicted of torture by the US.

I thought this whole 'should the US torture people' debate had ended when Bush left the White House.

Slightly misleading, they had also committed other acts of torture and thier version of "waterboarding" was vastly different that what was used on terrorists.
 
To state that the term torture was never really operationally defined for ethical use is about the daftest statement of the day, probably of the week.

Conflating ethics and torture in the very same breath makes for concern over anyone so spouting possessing any sense of logic.

Not to mention ethics altogether.
 
Donald Trump will Klimaseite der Umweltbehörde schließen - SPIEGEL ONLINE (sry, did not find the english section, it´s about oppressing the research on climate change)
more details (summarized) lying in reports by two members of EPA who (allegedly) told Reuters that the Prez is planning to shut down EPA's information sites on climate (linking to scientific expertises) either totally or at least partially.

The two EPA employees do not wish to be named on account of being forbidden to speak to the press (accordimg to Der Spiegel).


Here's the original feature from Reuters:

Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources | Reuters
 
Trump on waterboarding: 'We have to fight fire with fire' - CNNPolitics.com

Donald Trump will Klimaseite der Umweltbehörde schließen - SPIEGEL ONLINE (sry, did not find the english section, it´s about oppressing the research on climate change)


Nobody afraid here where this journey might end?

Yeah, the presence of an anti-science administration in Washington is only going to further damage America's reputation in the world. As if Bush didn't already do enough damage (and Obama didn't do enough to reverse it).
 
The problem in the US today is not only that a very large and angry portion of the electorate is uneducated and uninformed, but that it is proudly, willfully, and stubbornly so. They are under the illusion that the active MIS-informed by a longstanding diet of bad rightwing cable news pundits is the real information. So there is a lot of confusion and misinformation- from confusion on Obama's birth certificate to global warming. Simple ignorance would be easy to fix: reading a book, watching a documentary, taking a class, etc... but when every such source of information gets labeled as "liberal propaganda" and viewed with suspicion, from academia to scientific organizations and societies to most of the media, and people think the only reliable sources of information is Fox News and Breitbart, well then you have a serious problem on your hands. Stubborn, angry, willful, proud ignorance is a much tougher problem to fix. You can't pry open someone's eyes if they have it forcefully closed. It's impossible.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
-Thomas Jefferson

" A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-James Madison
 
The problem in the US today is not only that a very large and angry portion of the electorate is uneducated and uninformed, but that it is proudly, willfully, and stubbornly so. They are under the illusion that the active MIS-informed by a longstanding diet of bad rightwing cable news pundits is the real information.
I have been leftist for twenty years and all this time I have extensively read a very renowned center-left newspaper on a daily basis (Le Monde - I still read it but complement it with extremist medias).

And one day I did realize that I had been disinformed for decades by this renowned newspaper. While it is far above the league on many points (international relationships for one), it is nothing more than a vulgar propaganda organ when it comes to societal issues.


I came to this understanding over two years when I decided to investigate the issues around Islam by myself. I did so with a leftist-minded and pro-Muslim approach, despite an extensive first-hand negative experience of Muslim communities and of their problems decades ago. Problems that I once believed would disappear with time. What I learned shattered my views.

Let's take demography and the fears of a replacement of our population with Muslims. Liberal newspapers will mock this and tell you that there are only 8% of Muslims in France. True (partially: other methodologies give 11%). But here is another true fact that I had to find by myself in an official report about education: in Paris' region, 30% of high schoolers are Muslims! And another true fact: over the last ten years, they have grown by 2.2% a year, which means their population in France doubles every thirty years.

Both facts are true, but they give very different pictures. A demographer would immediately understand that one must look at the youth when investigating the long-term consequences of immigration, yet the renowned media constantly repeat the superficial data and deliberately omit the significant ones. All of that with a moralizing tone and biases to signal the reader what the "good" positions are.

And medias are not the only problem: when 90% of social scientists are liberals (!) and many openly claim they work for "social justice", it is a big problem that is not compatible with a healthy scientific investigation. And there is this culture of American liberals to enforce a strong social repression against those who do not share their views through constant accusations, protests, outcries, activism, etc. This is smothering the political debate (another information seizure) because the zealots always win, until they lose faith.


You think that because you read a bit and have a degree, you are informed. I am sorry but being informed is very hard, and even though most of people I debate with are strongly educated and avid readers (almost as much as I am), they are nevertheless ignorant. Albeit arrogant enough to think they are knowledgeable. This arrogance also explains why education is positively correlated with superstitious beliefs.

There are two ways to learn reality: to find a good information (very hard to do), or to have the society stick your nose to it. Our blue collars are the ones most exposed to the Islamic immigration: they live with/among them, work with/among them while white collars are mostly shielded and only see the most westernized families, and are reliant on their liberal and biased medias.

You think blue collars vote for people like Trump because they are idiots, uneducated, racist bastards who deserve to die and that you hate (I caricature hopefully). But it never came to your mind that they are far more knowledgeable about immigration than you are thanks to a direct experience, and that they mostly have different interests from yours. It never came to your mind that modern economic trends have been degrading for them and do not offer them any hope for the future. I suggest you stop looking at them with such haughtiness if you really want to improve the political debates. Like it or not, you will have to find a compromise between both of you.
 
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so everybody who does not share your view is misinformed or ignorant? :D :D :D
It depends on what they disagree with.

If they think that our countries are not being at least partially islamized, if they think that our population is nowhere replaced, if they think that problems with Muslims are minor or only concern a minority of them, then this person is strongly misinformed.

If they know all of this is happening but think that France belongs as much to Islamists than to Frenchmen in the name of multiculturalism, or if they support the islamization, then they are simply assholes.

If they know all of this is happening but think that time will eventually westernize Islam and revert those despicable changes, then they are simply daydreamers with little and shallow historical and geopolitical perspectives.

If they know all of this is happening but refuse to properly oppose it because they have been indoctrinated by a perverted pseudo-humanist and pseudo-liberal morale, then they are narcissistic cowards who destroy their countries to please their ego.
 
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Oh fine - you have a judgment for everybody! May I take two? Misinformed daydreamer sounds nice.
 
Waterboarding is torture by every international legal definition and also by American legal precedence. Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US PoWs were charged and convicted of torture by the US.

I thought this whole 'should the US torture people' debate had ended when Bush left the White House.

When Obama condoned the torture with his refusal to prosecute those who ordered it, a precedent was set. Moreover, this great Christian country supported the torture.

As Hartley Shawcross, a US prosecutor at Nuremberg commented years ago, "There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience." The US government and country have apparently lost their conscience many years ago.

Trump appeals to the most intolerant amongst us. He is the head of a rather large and somewhat organized lynch mob. Life in the end times?
 
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