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This week on The Big Show®, we converse about the Kurds, talk about the limits of woke corporatism with David French, and get the low down on Kim Strassel’s new book Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America (buy it!). Also, Ricochet member @doctorrobert wins this week’s coveted Lileks Post of The Week for his two (!) posts Why We Need People Who Have ‘Too Much Money’ and Memories of the Cleveland Orchestra, 10/4/19. Well done, Doc! Finally, can Ellen Degeneres and George W. Bush be friends? Some folks insist that they cannot. Weird. Hey, speaking of friends, don’t forget to weigh in on this week’s Long Poll as it asks a similar question.
Music from this week’s show: Why Can’t We Be Friends? by War
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DING. DING. DING.
I’m in the same situation with my brother-in-law. PhD and all of that. He’s a clinical neuropsychologist, so since he’s helping people directly he isn’t completely out of it. Also due to some unique circumstances I’ve been able to explain to him what a menace Central bank discretion, Keynesianism, and the financial system generally is. So he knows I have good intent. He knows not all centralized government is good. Plus he’s actually aware he makes more money than he should due to some oligopolistic issues.
Having said that, this is the problem. They want to believe in experts, “non-public goods” and just generally pushing things around with government. Which is voted on by people that basically just want to steal from each other and don’t know anything else valuable for voting on so much power. Since he believes in nonpublic goods adding value—they do not—it fries his brain when I talk to him. He just wants to push things around with government because he thinks there is no other answer. The voters better vote to be lab rats pushed around with government. The fact is they want to steal from each other.
I made the big mistake of asking him to define “assault weapon” one day. Lol The social stuff like this is sort of separate. I think it’s better to think of it into parts like that.
CONTINUED
Things are messed up because we push so many things around with government, so they think we need more. We just need to better and get better experts running things.
That’s the way I analyze it.
This is also why I don’t have any patience fo Never Trumper’s that don’t have any genuine libertarian sensibilities.
Also (there are different versions of this), but progressive taxation is only a nice theory, it’s stupid in reality. There is absolutely no value added in politicians guessing at tax brackets and deductions and shoving it down our throats. It’s idiotic. The Soviets tried this already. Flat tax is the only way to go. Now try explaining that to a Democrat.
So stupid things done in the past make Trump’s stupid things in the present fine and dandy … because he is Trump?
He doesn’t have a foreign policy, let alone a coherent one. He doesn’t have a clue about anything except he knows what his base wants. And he will do that no matter what. Some times it will work out and some times it will be a disaster.
The Celtics are the only team that had 2 or more white guys on their roster in the last 40 years. Deductive reasoning would lead to that conclusion. Man McHale’s arms were freakishly long.
You have to admit it’s been really bad for decades.
Good thing we are the hegemon because we’ve never been any good at it on net. Everything is about brute force in the end.
It’s really unfortunate that we have screwed up war so much.
This is Claire Berlinski’s latest
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-alternative-to-hegemony-isnt
Where is the Long Poll? Doesn’t show up on my mobile app and there’s no link embedded in the show notes “Long Poll” text.
Found it. As Emily Latella said, “Never mind.”
So you still believe that Having A Plan – or A Policy – is automatically good even though history shows that Having A Plan doesn’t seem to work out any better on average than Not Having A Plan?
That sounds like an ideal Elizabeth Warren voter. She has all kinds of silly, crazy, ridiculous, nonsensical, historically disproven, unaffordable, illegal/unconstitutional, cockamamie Plans. Just ask her!
But, hey, she’s got Plans!
How did the Korean War start? The State Department.
Why did Vietnam start? Why did we abandon them?
Why did the Shaw of Iran fall? Jimmy Carter.
How did Gulf War I start? The State Department.
What’s a better idea: invading Iraq, or simply building a freeway from Tehran to southern Lebanon?
On and on.
We are a really stupid hegemon just like they all were.
The jihad attack by Turkey against Christians and Kurds is not “a hypothetical or prediction”. It has already begun. The bombs are falling. The body count (including civilians) is rising.
Yet, it is still possible for Trump to reverse course and turn a disastrous decision into a win. I hope he quickly heeds this article. Please check it out.
How President Trump Can Win Big in Syria Now
By JOHANNES DE JONG
October 12, 2019
Pence might not win, but unless Trump changes course (e.g. making this change), he could easily do much worse than Pence if he persists in this disastrous loose canon decision, which is recognized across the spectrum as wrong. The attack ads would be easy. “What next? Do you want this man’s “gut impulses” calling the shots from the most powerful chair on the planet?” Even if we would not vote Democrat, others would switch and some share of his past support would just abstain from attaching their vote to him.
p.s. And, if he doesn’t change course to turn the situation around quickly to avoid disaster, a candidate Trump would not likely have the humility to say, “I see I was terribly wrong.” He would probably double down and defend his bad judgement as a “great” decision, thereby doing the work of the Democrats for them by confirming their warnings: “This man doesn’t know the difference between a good decision and a terrible decision. Do you want him controlling all this power?” He would play right into their hands.
Trump needs to make it right quickly, or else he will have become his own worst foe for reelection.
Well, maybe, or maybe not. Given the choice of President Trump with (arguably) disastrous foreign policy but a great economy at home etc, or President Warren or President Biden etc al, with disastrous foreign policy AND disastrous economy etc at home… why vote Democrat?
Even if neither of us would vote Democrat, that is just two votes. The problem is with the number of former Trump voters …
(a) who don’t see all the downsides of the Democrat that you do or weigh them as heavily, and would be far more concerned about moving “loose cannon Trump” away from the trigger of our military, plus
(b) those who are sufficiently disillusioned by his heedless bad judgement that they just abstain and become unwilling to go on record as supporting him again (even if they don’t vote for a Democrat either).
Barry Goldwater faced the “Daisy” atomic bomb attack ad, which was only a hypothetical threat. Trump will face photos and testimonies of actual outcomes, unless he turns it around.
Well I’ve long accepted that sometimes the voters need a Democrat president again just to remind them how bad things can really get. But I don’t have to like it. And I didn’t think they would forget again so quickly!
Fox makes it sound like Erdogan lied to Trump about his intentions. Since he’s a NATO member he deserves to be kicked out or something, right? Supposedly you can’t kick anybody out of NATO, they can only leave unilaterally.
Joking about drag queen story hour is not funny. Good luck to David at the Bulwark…I mean Dispatch….or whatever. NR’s readership will go up without him.
What does Lileks want more 5 Stars or 5 dollars a month pick one :-)
Easy: $5 a month.
Good article with useful ideas. (But can a no-fly zone be enforced against a fellow NATO member?)
Here’s another good one. The URL gives the bottom line:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/11/no-were-not-selling-out-the-syrian-kurds-but-we-should-mediate-their-conflict-with-turkey/
5 stars doesn’t cost extra, so why not both?
OK, listening to Rob’s soliloquy in the first ten minutes of the podcast on my drive in to work this AM, and without reviewing all 80-plus comments to see if this was already discussed, I have a question.
If an independent Kurdistan will lead to the breakup of Turkey, what do we care? What’s our strategic interest a unified Turkey? It’s not like they’re a solidly Pro-Western ally anymore.
I am not the final word on this but here is the deal, I think.
The PKK is a terrorist organization and we recognize them as such. They are communists. We have also used them to further our interests.
Turkey shouldn’t be in NATO anymore, but they can only leave on their own, you can’t kick them out.
I think they also told Trump they were going to do this no matter what, the problem is they lied about the extent of it.
I’m sure there’s something wrong with some of that.
The Kurds are politically non-homogenous and they are spread all over the place. IMO, “Kurds” is too much of an umbrella term that usually just retards understanding.
Doesn’t address my main question – what do we care if Turkey breaks up?
The PKK refers to the originally Marxist influenced Kurdish organization that is concerned with the status of Kurds within Turkey and Iraq.
Our ally in Syria for the fight against ISIS was the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of northern Syria, which is not the PKK (but Ankara = Turkey tries to claim they are all the same thing).
Well said! Quite true! The SDF isn’t even all Kurdish. It has been the military of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. It includes Kurds, Arabs, Assyrian Christians, and Yazidis.
The Federation they created is not communist/marxist. It has affirmed and protected rights such as of religion, free expression, religious conversion, and the participation of women. The SDF and the DFNS are not in Turkey, they are not trying to change Turkey, and they have not posed any threat to Turkey.
Yet Turkey is viciously crushing them nevertheless, including civilians, Christians, and other non-Kurds. They have called it a jihad.
“Loose cannon Trump” decided, against all wise counsel, to give Turkey the clear access to do so. That decision and the easily predictable ensuing carnage is on him.
There is strong bipartisan objection to this disastrous Syria withdrawal decision by Trump.
It is time for bipartisan impeachment and removal of “loose cannon Trump”. Congress should clear its calendar and get it done without delay. This is not like earlier impeachment fishing expeditions.
Is this some kind of parody I’m not getting? Even the screwiest impeachment supporters try to base it on some kind of “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
By this standard, just about every President we’ve had should have been impeached. Obama’s mistake in pulling out of Iraq was one hundred times as serious; let’s not even mention JFK and LBJ.
Even in the worst case scenario, American interests are only peripherally involved in Syria.
Exactly. I was going to reply to the previous one with, “get back to me after you’ve gone back in time and impeached and removed Obama for the insane withdrawal from Iraq.”